The Cockatoos

by Patrick White

  Whether this were high or not, Clark Shacklock devoured a drumstick, then another, spitting out the gristle on the dead grass, and afterwards unashamedly licking his glossier, seemingly fuller lips, while he told them the history of the temple – which the Simpsons already knew.

  ‘During the Sixth Century,’ he finished, ‘they turned this perfectly respectable temple into a Christian church.’

  ‘As so often happened!’ To express her disapproval Ivy made it extra dry.

  Tact prevented the Simpsons from developing the theme. Apart from his references to Christian Science and a crack at Our Lady, their host had given them no clue to Shacklock beliefs or lack of them. The Simpsons were inclined to hope for the best, not that they hadn’t met with some nasty surprises: American ‘enthusiasm’ will out fairly soon, but the popish spectre sometimes lurks indefinitely behind the most deceptive façade.

  After Imelda Shacklock had gathered up the scraps from their feast with rather ostentatious gestures – ‘so as not to contribute to this earth’s pollution’ – they began to ascend the steps of the temple. Imelda led the way, very light for one so large. Her white, stockingless calves bulged and shone in motion. Climbing several steps behind, Ivy was reminded, not without guilt, of the chicken they had eaten at lunch: she saw again the fragments of unctuous flesh lying on the rosy cushion of Clark Shacklock’s lower lip.

  So she increased her efforts to concentrate on the Temple of Concord rising around them out of the dust and heat, its golden-pink columns supporting the beaten gold of the sky. The glare made her half close her eyes, and for a moment the columns shuddered – like flesh: dry and pocked, of course, which did take some of the fleshiness out of them. But not enough. And of all flesh, she had to remember that of her father on the occasions when she had massaged his shoulder. There is nothing wrong with rubbing embrocation into your father’s rheumatic shoulder. Then why had she hated him most of all while kneading him? It must have been the rank smell of overheated male, and of the white goo welling up from between her fingers.

  She realized, with not as much surprise as she would have expected, that Clark Shacklock had taken her by the hand, and was leading her out upon the southern podium. Was Charles throbbing somewhere behind them? In any case, short of pulling out the tooth, nothing can be done for a man with toothache.

  Clark was pointing into the vast golden haze beyond which the sea lay, according to the maps. She was almost cracking with a situation she must prepare herself for managing shortly. Because in spite of being youthful and supple, she was also old and brittle. Her smile, she could tell, was becoming a visible tic in her face.

  Till her guide decided it was time for her to share his secret ‘Down there,’ he was still pointing, ‘is the house where Pirandello was born.’

  ‘Ohhh!’ she moaned spontaneously. ‘He does terrify me! Somebody lent him to me,’ she confided, ‘while I was at university.’ She paused for him to appreciate the significance, then realized this was a secret they had shared already on the drive. ‘At first I could only read him in English.’ She was babbling now, her tic leaping. ‘Till recently – during a course I took – I started on him in Italian. I read – well, after a fashion-The Rules of the Game.’

  ‘So you’re studying Italian.’ Clark smiled.

  ‘Oh, I’m only a lame linguist,’ Ivy Simpson protested.

  He had a brown, quizzical, or was it a Roman Catholic, eye?

  Turning away at that moment Ivy Simpson might have asked, ‘Where is Charles?’ if the shadow of a pocked column hadn’t become Imelda Shacklock.

  ‘I’d like to remind everybody,’ Imelda said in her differently inflected American voice, ‘we’ve got three more temples and a long drive back.’ She was so composed, or apathetic.

  Perhaps only Mrs Shacklock appreciated the three remaining temples. The sun was battering everybody else, though only Mr Shacklock admitted.

  Clark groaned. ‘Find me a big, moist-leaved plane-tree and a kilo of figs, and let me drink a couple of gallons – of ice-cold water straight from the spring.’ In spite of his size, he suggested a dehydrated schoolboy; the heavy gold bracelet dangling from his wrist could do nothing for him.

  Ivy Simpson had noticed the bracelet in the beginning; she had seen the medallion, with the name CLARK deeply engraved; she supposed this was a habit peculiar to Americans, and decided she must get used to it.

  The room was unchanged, except that the bulb in the acryllic turban no longer functioned. They had to rely on the bed lamps. At once fluff seemed to flower in the feeble gasps fluttering out of the air conditioner.

  ‘Oh, dearest, that drive must have been ghastly for you!’ She was making little whimpering sounds into the fiery gristle of his neck.

  Charles reacted not unlike a shaken deck-chair. ‘I’d have called it a memorable day, Ivy.’ As he righted himself he could have been rejecting a sympathetic wife.

  ‘I’m not saying it wasn’t interesting – the landscape – the archaeological sites. But could you, darling, suffer the Shacklocks?’

  ‘They’re not bad. In fact, I liked them.’ His Adam’s apple supported him.

  ‘Did you? I shouldn’t have thought you’d care for them at all. How wrong one can be! She’s definitely dull. He’s – well, cultivated in a sense. Yes. They both are to some degree. No, I suppose they’re not bad.’

  Remembering the chicken, Ivy Simpson went into the bathroom and cleaned her teeth; she took an Entero-Vioform. Charles grimaced at his reflection in the dressing-table glass. To hide what he saw, he took off his shirt and tested the armpits, to decide whether it would last another day.

  ‘That cameriera,’ Ivy called, savouring the rich word on her tongue, ‘I wonder whether she’s going to produce our washing – domani? I think she looked too much a Sicilian.’

  Charles did not answer, and presently his wife returned, and they lay on their separate beds, their familiar limbs in their familiar underclothes, as though at last in possession of something which had been eluding them.

  They dozed.

  The following morning Charles Simpson had a relapse, if you could say that of a toothache which, in Ivy’s opinion, had never really let up, only it was in Charles’s nature to play it down. Now as he lay in the citron light, in the moist Sicilian heat, on the brutal tide of traffic noise, he had a greyer, patient look.

  ‘What is it, Ivy?’

  ‘But what? You’re the one who should be able to tell!’ Considering the circumstances, she answered sharply.

  On occasions when there hadn’t been the remotest possibility she had imagined herself a widow. She mustn’t think about it now. But grey, but patient: he hadn’t shaved yet, of course; it was only the stubble showing.

  Ivy Simpson sat down too emphatically on the edge of the yellow modernistic bed and the springs whinged. ‘Darling, I’m going down to Alitalia – to book. Better a Roman than a Sicilian dentist. Wouldn’t you agree?’

  But Charles visibly recoiled, as though pain had sapped the natural desire for deliverance. ‘Give it another day, Ivy. There’s still so much to see. San Fabrizio alone.’

  ‘How can we see San Fabrizio or anywhere else while you’re lying in this ghastly room?’ Her hand made the fluff fly upward.

  ‘You’ve got the Shacklocks, haven’t you?’

  ‘The Shacklocks!’ She couldn’t bear the thought of them this morning: those white, straining calves; the engraved medallion on a heavily dangling, gold bracelet.

  Ivy Simpson picked up her bag. In spite of the heat, she felt energetic: her mission demanded it. She took a taxi. The driver robbed her, as she should have expected of any Sicilian bandit. She did not care, though pride in her Italian vocabulary was momentarily hurt.

  They were charming at Alitalia. She booked the two seats for the following day. Hadn’t he said give it another day Ivy? Her own instincts might have persuaded her to hasten their departure, make it that evening at least, if Charles hadn’t wanted to defer, and the man at
Alitalia hadn’t been so charming. At any rate, she had reserved the seats: her conscience could feel at rest.

  She walked through the streets. The bag she was carrying under her arm had become a cherished object. (That old thing of Imelda Shacklock’s: almost a Gladstone.) She took a bus for some distance. (My darling Charles to nourish him with love when pasta fails if you could masticate it first without causing revulsion in the patient.) She walked some more.

  In these back streets of crumbling palazzi and cloacal smells, the cold blast from a church doorway might be the greatest danger of all. She must hurry past the churches, the trails of stale incense, the saints seduced by their own torments. Toenails can be torture enough. Would Imelda neglect her toenails while coping with his toothache? Marriages, like teeth, are deceptive.

  From luxuriating in her own thoughts, Ivy Simpson’s attention was diverted by something attached to this rusty nail, dripping brown, like honeycomb. She was so intent on investigating, she went up, and almost had her nose on the wall, on the bunch of tripe, the knots of intestines, no bees, but flies, sipping at the brown juices as they dripped.

  She was not running, tottering. Perhaps she would vomit in the gutter. She didn’t; and as she retreated, her mind returned and hovered over the bouquet of brown tripe suspended from its brittle, rusty nail: she was so disgusted.

  Naturally she said nothing about the suppurating tripe to her invalid husband. What is more, she decided not to mention the tickets she had in her bag; at this stage the step she had taken might worry or over-excite Charles.

  He was looking at her, smiling the smile she knew.

  She smiled back. ‘Shall we ask them, darling, to send you up some pasta in brodo? That will be soft at least.’

  ‘Not yet. It’s too hot. Tonight perhaps.’ He made the sheet rustle. ‘I’ll give it a go tonight.’

  They exchanged one of the light, token kisses of a relationship founded on mutual understanding.

  Then the husband remembered a duty. ‘Go down, Ivy,’ he advised; ‘you don’t want to miss your lunch.’

  And she did as she was told.

  She sat in the dining-room amongst the Dutch, the French, even a few Italians. She stirred a fork furred with cheese in the lasagne she couldn’t persuade herself to swallow. (Perhaps she should have ordered agnolotti.)

  From staring at the door through which she must escape, she finally did. Her relief was probably groundless, because anyone as inveterate as the Shacklocks would have set forth on an expedition today too – a conjecture refuted as she crossed the lounge and saw them squeezed out of the lift: their size and the narrow door made simple emergence an elaborate operation. Apart from a nervous and irrational wish not to become involved with them, the thought of missing the ascending lift assumed for Ivy tragic proportions.

  Perhaps sensing distress, the Shacklocks looked embarrassed; though large and confidently American, they might have wanted to tiptoe past; their opening words nudged each other.

  ‘Not seeing you anywhere around,’ Mrs Shacklock felt her way, ‘we guessed you were taking a group tour.’

  ‘It’s Selinunte today.’ Balanced on the balls of his feet, a subdued Clark ever so slightly toppled as he spoke, with the result that Ivy was admitted to the invisible envelope of warmth with which he was surrounded.

  Each Shacklock was smiling a condolent smile, though neither seemed inclined to mention Charles’s indisposition, which Ivy supposed natural in anyone as independent, rich, and apparently healthy as Clark and Imelda.

  ‘Hardly up to an excursion today.’ Ivy laughed and left it at that.

  ‘We spent the morning doing San Fabrizio.’ Mrs Shacklock appeared even less moved than usual.

  ‘That’, her husband admitted, ‘is something!’

  As when he had stood pointing from the Temple of Concord in the direction of Porto Empedocle, he might have been preparing to share a secret with Ivy Simpson, this time a deeper one.

  ‘Though everything is against it, I’m determined to see San Fabrizio!’ Mrs Simpson petered out in hoarseness, from meaning what she said, and the flight tickets in the bag beneath her arm.

  For an instant, an almost tangible longing flickered out of her towards the wall these non-friends presented, and her knees trembled as they had on her discovering it was flies, not bees, swarming on the combs of oozing tripe.

  Then she was gathered together again, and did not really care whether she saw San Fabrizio or not. Hadn’t she and Charles read about it, and looked at the photographs, and discussed it rationally in their own home in Wongaburra Road? That was what mattered.

  ‘I hope you enjoy your lunch,’ she said, more specifically to Mrs Shacklock, who lowered her thick, creamy eyelids.

  ‘At least we know what we can expect,’ Mr Shacklock confided.

  As they trod away from a delicate situation – it was obvious they were only too aware of Charles’s suffering, but were determined, out of respect for their own well-being, not to inquire – Clark Shacklock looked back smiling at Ivy Simpson. Noticing the tartar staining his otherwise excellent teeth, she knew exactly how they would smell.

  Curiously enough the lift was still waiting, when it had seemed inevitable that she would be left behind.

  Charles Simpson was immobilized in his siesta dream if it was that and not an extension of his waking fever. Whichever it might be, and however threatening, he tried to prolong his vision, piece it together at the widening cracks. Of course he must lose in the end. The cracks continued widening, whitening like bone. His jaw-bone. His suppurating tooth, in the shape of a bulbous, bursting fig, was the root of the matter. When it was all over, Ivy gave up sitting astride him. There was no longer any necessity. Their only need was to sort out the wreckage littering this long beach: the driftwood, ribs of whales, brine-pickled apples; to select, and construct. Well, no, the structure is of its own choosing, of never-ending white arches.

  Actually it is Ivy sitting on this yellow stool looking ahead of her into the mirror, which is also the room they share, permanently. She has put on her dress. She has finished combing her hair. Her cervical vertebrae are unusually salient above the collar of the white dress. She strips the comb of hair, and throws the combings where normally the wastepaper basket would have been standing.

  At a time of day into which neither of them fitted perfectly, long past its zenith and far too close to night for a broken dream to amount to more than an immoral luxury, their relationship had never seemed reduced to such heart-freezing fragility.

  Ivy said, looking away from him into the dressing-table glass, which meant that she was also looking at him, as he lay in the distance in their small room, ‘You must have had a jolly good sleep, darling. Nothing would wake you. Not even my hairbrush when I dropped it.’

  ‘I suppose I must have slept. It’s later than usual.’ He heard his stubble grate against the pillow; perfection, aesthetic or moral, made him shy, because it was such a chancy affair, whereas he had only ever arrived at the perfect medical solution by comparatively straight, established paths.

  Though she had worn it often enough, perhaps it was the white dress making her look so elusive and timeless. She hadn’t looked more a girl the day of their meeting on the jetty at Cremorne, her thin mouth traced in what was intended as a firm line. Now, as then, the coral wavered. Only the hair had altered, not so much in style as in tone: the mouse had gone dusty, though that could have been Sicily.

  He hoped his love for her never embarrassed Ivy. Possibly it did. She had turned round, still seated on the dressing-table stool, holding the ivory comb in her hand. She was looking noticeably grave, her stare liquid, but that was usual after sleep.

  ‘I’m going out for a little,’ she said. ‘A breeze has come.’

  Yes, the light had changed; its yellow might have seemed congealed, like throat lozenges, if it hadn’t moved constantly: he was reminded of the flapping of Moreton Bay fig leaves.

  ‘If it’s all the same to you, I’l
l let you go on your own,’ he told her. ‘I’ll probably get up later, and dress. I think I could face some food tonight.’

  ‘Yes, we’ll slip in before the mob.’

  Ivy made a habit of sifting words from out of the expressions men use, perhaps thinking it would put her on an equal footing with him. He had often considered how to tell her it introduced what almost amounted to a false note in their relationship, but he had never brought himself to the point; he was afraid of hurting her feelings.

  ‘Something soft, but nourishing.’ She was all thoughtfulness. ‘And I’ve heard the Sicilians make exceptionally good ices;’ as though there were anything she had heard or read which they hadn’t heard or read together. (But marriage is forgetful, from whichever side you look at it.)

  Charles is asking, ‘Where do you think of going?’

  ‘To the Villa Giulia.’ Gravely and without the least hesitation.

  ‘The where?’

  ‘The Villa Giulia,’ she repeated more carefully than before, with an accent she hoped would not sound pretentious.

  ‘Isn’t that Rome?’

  She knew they had both been thinking of the Etruscan Spouses, so called, when they were more truthfully Charles and Ivy.

  ‘No, darling.’ Her voice had grown fretful now. ‘You remember the gardens along the street? We looked through the railings the first night. I’m sure they’re horribly Sicilian, but they’re the only breathing space I can think of.’

  It was as reasonable as he would have expected. Then she came, she stooped over him, she kissed him, but on the mouth, and that too, he would have expected, though she had never done it before, anyway not at six o’clock.

  Ivy Simpson, in her white dress, might have hurried to reach the Villa Giulia if she had not remembered that the farther south the later the gates are closed, and that her legs, for all their apparent youthfulness, might have gone prop prop past the iron railings. So she strolled through the adamantine dust, and this more indigenous manner got her there just as inevitably.