‘Why,’ she screamed laughing though it sounded angry, she was, ‘I’d given you up, you know! It’s long after five-twenty!’
As she pushed fiercely towards him, past the cinerarias, snapping one or two of those which were most heavily loaded, she realized he couldn’t have known that she set her watch, her life, by his constant behaviour. He wouldn’t have dawdled so.
‘What is it?’ she called at last, in exasperation at the distance which continued separating them.
He was far too slow, treading the slippery moss of her too shaded path. While she floundered on. She couldn’t reach the expression of his eyes.
He said, and she could hardly recognize the faded voice, ‘There’s something – I been feeling off colour most of the day.’ His mis-shapen head was certainly lolling as he advanced.
‘Tell me!’ She heard her voice commanding, like that of a man, or a mother, when she had practised to be a lover; she could still smell the smell of rouge. ‘Won’t you tell me – dearest?’ It was thin and unconvincing now. (As a girl she had once got a letter from her cousin Kath Salter, who she hardly knew: Dearest Ella …)
Oh dear. She had reached him. And was given all strength – that of the lover she had aimed at being.
Straddling the path, unequally matched – he couldn’t compete against her strength – she spoke with an acquired, a deafening softness, as the inclining cinerarias snapped.
‘You will tell me what is wrong – dear, dear.’ She breathed with trumpets.
He hung his head. ‘It’s all right. It’s the pain – here – in my arm – no, the shoulder.’
‘Ohhhhh!’ She ground her face into his shoulder forgetting it wasn’t her pain.
Then she remembered, and looked into his eyes and said, ‘We’ll save you. You’ll see.’
It was she who needed saving. She knew she was trying to enter by his eyes. To drown in them rather than be left.
Because, in spite of her will to hold him, he was slipping from her, down amongst the cinerarias, which were snapping off one by one around them.
A cat shot out. At one time she had been so poor in spirit she had wished she was a cat.
‘It’s all right,’ either voice was saying.
Lying amongst the smashed plants, he was smiling at her dreadfully, not his mouth, she no longer bothered about that lip, but with his eyes.
‘More air!’ she cried. ‘What you need is air!’ hacking at one or two cinerarias which remained erect.
Their sap was stifling, their bristling columns callous.
‘Oh! Oh!’ she panted. ‘Oh God! Dear love!’ comforting with hands and hair and words.
Words.
While all he could say was, ‘It’s all right.’
Or not that at last. He folded his lips into a white seam. His eyes were swimming out of reach.
‘Eh? Dear – dearest – darl – darlig – darling love – love – LOVE?’ All the new words still stiff in her mouth, that she had heard so far only from the mouths of actors.
The words were too strong she could see. She was losing him. The traffic was hanging together only by charred silences.
She flung herself and covered his body, trying to force kisses – no, breath, into his mouth, she had heard about it.
She had seen turkeys, feathers sawing against each other’s feathers, rising afterwards like new noisy silk.
She knelt up, and the wing-tips of her hair still dabbled limply in his cheeks. ‘Eh? Ohh luff!’ She could hardly breathe it.
She hadn’t had time to ask his name, before she must have killed him by loving too deep, and too adulterously.
Sicilian Vespers
TOO CONSTRICTED FROM the beginning, their room could have been further reduced by the throbbing in his jaw. If he had stretched out an arm, he might have touched any of the four walls, the lurching wardrobe, or the air conditioner which did not cool. But he could not bring himself to carry out the experiment. He lay and sweated, or turned in the loosely jointed bed, and the tooth which possessed his body and mind seemed to probe deeper than ever with its fluorescent roots.
‘Oh, God!’ Some comfort to hear it sound no more than a formality. And Ivy down in the lounge. He had advised her to stay there after finishing her coffee. In the lounge the air conditioning worked, provided the management had turned it on and there wasn’t an influx of hot bodies.
‘God, God!’ he repeated with a vehemence he would not have liked his wife to interpret.
He so shocked himself he switched the light on. The bed groaned once or twice before the springs surrendered him and he began the long-short trek to the bathroom. He was wearing his underpants. Though he had reached the scraggy stage in life, and the corrugations in his scalp exposed by a disarrangement of hair suggested he was playing the part of a withered loon in some cruel farce, his right cheek bloomed with a feverish jollity of risen flesh as he stood between the strip-lighting and swallowed an unwilling Veganin.
He coughed dry, and swallowed a mouthful of probably infected tap-water instead of the acqua minerale recommended by Ivy.
Prudence was a virtue normally present in both of them. What had made their marriage such an exceptionally happy one was its balance. Each respected the other’s right to an opinion (actually, there were few they didn’t share). Though she hadn’t taken up golf, Ivy could follow a game with interest; she enjoyed a mild flutter at the races; while he had made a point of not allowing a busy practice to prevent his putting in an appearance on nights when her discussion group met. His retirement had made it easier for them to indulge a passion for history and to air their knowledge of the French language: they travelled ‘extensively’, as the papers say, ‘extravagantly and too frequently’, according to some of their friends, who waited for news of a coronary or stroke. If Ivy had started Italian on her own, it was perhaps because he could not hear himself, a mature Australian male, producing some of those Italian sounds.
So Italian became Ivy’s individual accomplishment. He was proud of it. Standing at the wash-basin, he visualized the somewhat tremulous motion of her upper lip as she sat by herself downstairs in the lounge: vorrei un caffè – solo – per favore. She had always managed it very nicely.
He was sixty-six, he was reminded by his tooth, and by the hairs hatching the division of his chest. Ivy was fifty-eight, though some, he knew, or perhaps he didn’t – he sensed when somebody suspected Ivy of cheating on her age. He personally didn’t like to think they looked anything but equal.
Laughter sounded farther down the corridor. He trudged back to the glaring room the management must have reserved for them out of spite (foreigners do, you know, discriminate against Australians). He stood at the glass door he had forced open earlier that evening against the waves of dust-clogged carpet. Lights along the waterfront flickered blue in time with his fluorescent tooth. A Sicilian stench of rotting mussels, excrement, and sweat (his own, alas) made him clamp his nostrils down, to unclamp almost immediately, to breathe in, to swell with putrid air; he did not mind if he died of it.
A face in the street took fright at something happening on a balcony, and Dr Charles Simpson, 27 Wongaburra Road, Bellevue Hill, Sydney (there it was on the labels at least, in Ivy’s large, innocent hand) withdrew out of sight. He began not lying down again but doing a belly-flop on this yellow modernistic bed. No trampoline, it tossed him only feebly as he groaned for the pain in his possessive tooth and for what he alone knew of himself. What if all the patients who had brought him their forebodings as well as their actual cancers – what if Ivy were to realize that inside the responsible man there had always lurked this diffident, whimpering boy?
He must concentrate on Ivy the immaculate. A plain woman, she had given him the courage to propose. Infinite trustworthiness as a wife had even inspired in him what passed for faith in himself. It was a fake, however. While he was parading this impersonation of what she and others expected of him, Ivy had never cheated. Or would he recognize it if she were to cheat, when
she had never been aware of his true self inside the man she took for granted?
It was all very morbid and part of this Sicilian nightmare. The tooth flamed up in him, and died, and flamed. Incidentally, he must not hate Sicilians when Ivy and he had loved each other not passionately irreproachably always and for ever ah dear amen.
She must have come in while he was dozing. Proof against the traffic, its teeth gnashing and snarling past his ear, a still centre had formed in the surrounding dark.
‘Who is it?’ Certainty made him sound irritated.
He switched on. Standing beneath an inverted acryllic turban from which the light swayed and splintered, she was too noticeably upright, too deliberately controlled. Sympathy gave her powdered skin a more than usually crumpled look.
‘Oh, darling,’ her upper lip was venturing out, ‘is it still hurting?’
‘You would have done better to stay down there as I suggested.’ Self-sacrifice softened his voice.
‘How could I – in the circumstances – and amongst all those tourists!’
For a moment they were so perfectly agreed they might have been dove-tailed; his tooth was still; his swelling smiled. To celebrate their empathy, she sat beside him on the edge of the bed, and took his hand, and gently laid it against her cheek of crumpled kid.
‘Those Dutch!’ She didn’t snicker, because Ivy wasn’t malicious.
‘The French are better.’
‘Some of the French. An American couple’, Ivy did giggle a little, ‘insisted, à l’Américaine, in coming to my table and having coffee with me.’
‘What sort of Americans?’
‘Big and juicy. Not bad. Getting on. No, about our age, I should think. We’d probably find the man noisy in the long run. She’s his female counterpart, but quiet. She has a smile.’
‘What sort of smile?’
‘I don’t know. I think she’s probably sat around all their life together smiling to disguise her feelings. Or perhaps she hasn’t anything to say.’
Though normally he trusted his wife’s judgment, Charles Simpson’s tooth would not allow him to accept Ivy’s Americans. The roots of the monstrous tooth had started flaming again. Any time now, the bulb swathed by the acryllic turban was going to give up, or so its flickering warned.
When she had got into her nightie – whether she was ready for bed or not, this was the coolest proposition – Ivy Simpson stood at the door which the rucked-up carpet was holding open. She might have sat awhile on the small triangular balcony, but looked down her front and decided against it. Ribbons of oily light, or just perceptible motion, suggested sea where darkness lay. Palms were shivering. Now and then a plastic bag amongst the litter strewing the dead grass between sea and roadway half inflated, but flopped back into inertia. Ivy might almost have taken pleasure in the languid squalor of night if the furious activities of man roaring down the Foro Italico had allowed her. And Charles’s tooth: she caught herself whimpering, raising a drooped shoulder to ward off renewed pain.
The toothache seemed, like nothing ever had, an affront to their relationship; which was ridiculous in two mature individuals who had survived the tests of time, who had agreed from the beginning to depend on their faith in each other rather than the man-concocted fallacies believers bunch together and label Faith.
There had been moments in their married life when she might have proposed a trial of this personal faith, if she had been less rational, and ashamed of the shocked expression she would have brought to his physician’s eyes. Just as now she would not have confessed to her own spasmodic attempts to will into her body the physical pain he was suffering. Other people, including Charles, she suspected, believe only theoretically in the efficacy of love. And she did not want to damage his affection for her: it was too precious.
Standing on the verge of the horrid little modernistic balcony and the baroque nightscape beyond, Ivy Simpson nursed the perfect lifetime relationship. None of the minor stresses had hitherto threatened it. What should have been the major tragedy of childlessness had only increased the kindness with which they treated each other. As far back as their youth they had been considerate rather than sensual lovers. As Father’s daughter she was grateful for it.
Ivy could never dismiss completely the humiliations of her childhood. There were wounds so deep, even Charles had not succeeded in healing them. She was glad the old corsair her father had died before she met her husband; Aubrey wouldn’t have approved of Charles.
‘What are you doing, Ivy?’
‘Nothing.’ Her throat had dried; her voice sounded unlike itself. ‘Is there anything you want, darling?’
There wasn’t, it seemed, unless to keep in touch. He didn’t answer.
She stood a while longer, frowning now, not at the past, but at the red sports car, at the young Sicilians luxuriating in their brilliantine and open shirts. Normally broadminded, scarcely prudish, she realized how she loathed body hair.
‘I was only looking,’ she said. ‘And thinking.’
He was lying, eyes closed, immersed in pain, or the first waves of sleep. She risked kissing him on the forehead. He didn’t respond. There was no need.
She continued moving about their room, in search of an occupation, when Charles asked, ‘Those Americans of yours – what does he do?’
‘I don’t know. I think he’s rich.’
‘They can’t have told you much – not for Americans.’
‘Oh, they did! They told me lots. He did, that is. He’s the one who does the talking.’
Behind closed eyelids, Charles was looking peevish for Charles. It was his tooth, of course.
‘Their name is Shacklock – Clark and Imelda.’ She laughed.
‘Did you tell them ours?’
‘No.’
‘You should have played their American game.’
‘It wouldn’t have come naturally,’ she said.
In spite of his closed eyelids she could tell Charles approved of that.
Even so, his drowsy lips took the trouble to remind her, ‘There’s nothing wrong with our name – though after Shacklock – you can’t say it – swashbuckles.’
‘There is something piratical about him. That, I think, is why I couldn’t altogether take to Mr Shacklock. You’ll understand what I mean when you meet him.’
Charles remembered his tooth. He turned away, on to his side. One shoulder was protecting him. She would have liked to demonstrate her love if she could have thought of some modest way of doing so.
She was tired by now. She could think of nothing. Not the merest duty. She had made out the laundry list before lunch and given their bundle to the cameriera.
‘Due camicii,’ she murmured as the second yellow bed started creaking around her, ‘or is it -ie?’ She couldn’t remember: she was too tired; and Charles didn’t answer, who hadn’t taken lessons in Italian.
But Charles often didn’t bother to answer. Nor did she resent what she interpreted as trust rather than apathy; and wasn’t it a privilege of their kind of marriage to be able to ask the questions for which you neither expect nor require an answer? The better you knew each other the thicker these questions piled up, agreeably, acceptably, passionlessly. And would, she imagined, thicker and thicker, till the end.
About to switch off the light, she realized Charles had turned again, and was not exactly looking at her, but his eyes so intent she could not ignore them. He jumped her into telling what she had planned to keep at least till morning.
‘Those Shacklocks’, she said, ‘have a car. They suggested they take us tomorrow on an expedition to Agrigento. I told them we’d see. I didn’t expect your tooth.’
He closed his eyes. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t go.’ He sounded so relaxed she wondered whether the pain had left him.
‘Oh no, darling, you know I wouldn’t!’ It was she who experienced a twinge: that he should have suspected her of it.
She couldn’t. She couldn’t sleep. Sand on the sheets. Her breast
s itching. Nobody could find fault with her figure. ‘Svelte’ is the secret word she has never dared use. Kind people apply all the milder words to your face; only Father ever called it ugly. Ugly Ivy mingy as her name. Father himself was handsome and drunken. Mother had wanted ‘Ivy’ simple and yet pretty and for once stuck to her guns. You wished she hadn’t. Because you hated your father, you wished you could have loved Mother: her squashed smile. Mother was made unhappy by penury, and adulteries, and the time he exposed himself at Manly. Oh yes, Mother deserved her full share of sympathy. You hadn’t been able to make it up to her before she died. After that, Father too, a shabby-skinned, once gorgeous male, or god. If you withheld love, it was because a parent’s behaviour encourages miserliness in children. Even Mother was greedy. Everything was left unsaid and undone, there was all the more reason for pouring it into Charles. To love my husband: his honest, un-Sicilian eyes. Might never have known reason for nursing disgust, shame, despair. All all dissolved in love. Or the sober affection which is better than.
What is too precious is more breakable she sighed when you dropped the Lalique bowl a wedding present. For Father that middle-class monstrosity. Aubrey was the artist. He had panache said one of the ladies who bought him hoping to experience in the flesh a vitalist bravura absent from his turgid nudes. His daughter is it one would never.
To be something special superba donna work of art better a whippet than nothing. He caressed his whippet. Then Charles waiting for the ferry made none of it any longer necessary.
No abrasions beyond the sand of non-sleep.
The plastic lilies raise their heads from out of it flop back loll and recover slightly. Contrary to opinion sand isn’t sterile. Fertilized by putrid shells rotting mussels black mesh of mattresses the mounds of sea lettuce and excrement of various kinds the human splurges best between ugh the naked toes my poor lavata camicia da nightie still doing its duty in spite of
will the red car plough the plastic lilies the biggest the acryllic already crushed you next unless you can uproot the whippet legs are pale mauve onyx nails enmeshed in a Sicilian plot the red glove will burst its buttons if Dr Wongaburra Simpson can’t prevent its evil spilling
The Cockatoos Page 19