The Cockatoos Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Patrick White

  Dedication

  Title Page

  A Woman’s Hand

  The Full Belly

  The Night the Prowler

  Five-Twenty

  Sicilian Vespers

  The Cockatoos

  Copyright

  by the same author

  Novels

  RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT

  VOSS

  THE TREE OF MAN

  THE AUNT’S STORY

  THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

  THE SOLID MANDALA

  THE VIVISECTOR

  THE EYE OF THE STORM

  Short Stories

  THE BURNT ONES

  Plays

  FOUR PLAYS

  To Ronald Waters for having survived forty-eight years of friendship

  A Woman’s Hand

  THE WIND WAS tearing into the rock-plants, slashing reflections out of the leaves of the mirror-bush, torturing those professional martyrs the native trees. What must originally have appeared an austere landscape, one long rush of rock and scrub towards the sea, was prevented from wearing its natural expression by the parasite houses clinging to it as obstinately as wax on diseased orange branches. Not that the houses weren’t, nearly all of them, technically desirable, some of them even Lovely Homes worth breaking into. Although the owners of the latter were surely aware of this, they had almost completely exposed their possessions behind unbroken plate-glass. To view the view might have been their confessable intention, but they had ended, seemingly, overwhelmed by it. Or bored. The owners of the lovely seaside homes sat in their worldly cells playing bridge, licking the chocolate off their fingers, in one case copulating, on pink chenille, on the master bed.

  Evelyn Fazackerley looked away. It was, in any case, what she would have called a heavenly day. She was breathless with it, from the pace at which Harold was walking, as much as from the biting air.

  ‘You should walk more slowly,’ she suggested, because it was time she asserted herself. ‘That is what retirement is for.’

  It was the kind of remark Harold ignored. Their marriage was strewn with such. It was not unagreeable that way.

  Perhaps because he had been thrown into retirement so unexpectedly, so abruptly, he had difficulty in believing in it, and had taken refuge in perpetual motion, though they kept the flat as a pied-à-terre.

  Evelyn was squinting back at the glass faces of the huddled houses. In the general dazzlement of the landscape and the physical exhaustion of an unnecessary but virtuous walk, she felt that warm surge of desire which only material things can provoke.

  ‘How vulgar they all are!’ she said.

  And was automatically absolved.

  ‘Nothing wrong in being well lined.’

  If he sounded tired, it was not from their walk – he had remained a physically active man – but from remembering the ganglion of plumbing on the neo-Tudor wall across from their neo-Tudor flat.

  ‘Oh, come!’ Evelyn said. ‘There are certain standards the ones who know can’t afford to drop.’

  Evelyn was one who knew. Harold knew too. Only he didn’t care enough.

  Harold was again involved with the mystical problem of his own retirement. Before it had happened he used to say: Retirement will be the time of life when I read the books I have bought and never read, when I shall re-read War and Peace, and perhaps understand Dostoevski. Probably write something myself, something solid and factual about cotton in Egypt, or a travel book. Perhaps one or two articles for Blackwood’s. Whereas retirement had, in fact, meant nothing of this. If anything, it was more than ever a prolonged waiting for some moment of revelation or fulfilment, independent of books, of other minds, while depending only partly on himself.

  He was lucky to have Evelyn.

  ‘Do you think this road is going to lead anywhere?’ she asked, and smiled at space.

  Although she could have been mistaken for a delicate woman, and liked to think of herself as threatened, she was less fragile than wiry, or stringy. Certainly she experienced the odd headache on occasions when her sensibility was taxed, but she almost never suffered from physical fatigue. Her weakness, she claimed, was in never being able to find enough on which to exercise her over-active mind. Nor was she capable of simply sitting. She would really have to see about taking up a charity, like Meals on Wheels. She was good at talking to the aged, and it was so gratifying to see in their old faces the appreciation of advice.

  ‘Why shouldn’t it lead somewhere?’ Harold asked.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The road. This is a day’s outing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That was the intention.’

  They had eaten a rather nasty lunch – charred chops and fried banana lumped together on a lettuce leaf – in a cemented rockery beside the highway. There was nothing after that but to follow one of the side roads.

  Evelyn picked a bunch of shivery-grass, and breathed deep, too deep, on returning momentarily to the years before she knew the answers.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’re lucky to have enough to eat. And the climate. The Australian climate. Fancy if we’d been the Burds. Running that awful service station. Quite apart from anything else, the Thames Valley is so damp.’

  Harold continued crunching springily ahead. She could smell the acceptable smell of his pipe. Evelyn preferred the company of men for the simple reason that she enjoyed being liked back. Women did not like her honesty.

  ‘In the long run,’ she said, ‘Australian nationality paid.’

  But again Evelyn experienced a little twinge of guilt. She plunged her chin into the bunch of pale-silver shivery-grass.

  ‘Do you think Win Burd really works in their service station?’ she asked, but only casually. ‘Sticking a petrol hose into strangers’ cars?’

  ‘If that’s what she wrote you.’

  ‘Some women are not strictly truthful,’ Evelyn said. ‘And you know Win,’ she gave the laugh she kept for those whose faults she had to accept, ‘she always loved to dramatize.’

  It did not seem to bother Harold.

  ‘Anyway, whether she works the hose or not, it’s too dreadful to think about,’ Evelyn continued, ‘Win and Dudley reduced to a service station!’

  Her mouth grew thin and appalled, as though the disaster had been her own.

  ‘Most of them in the same boat – most of the English,’ Harold said, ‘after Suez.’

  ‘But the Burds’, Evelyn protested, ‘could have bought and sold the lot. That staircase they brought from Italy must have cost more than most of the others had.’

  She was careful not to include themselves.

  ‘Wasn’t it lovely!’ She sighed. ‘Rose marble.’

  The guests resumed mounting the rosy stairs to be received, those the Burds had invited, with professional affection, the others, with irony disguised as tact. Evelyn – she was an intelligent woman – had seen through it all, and had always felt glad she was on the right side of Win and Dudley’s irony. Harold’s managing the business for them in a country of the wrong colour made her almost one of the family.

  Win Burd had delighted in parties. She could not resist fancy dress. Her long lovely thighs and legs were made for display, and she always took advantage of them. That gold lamé Knave of Hearts the year the Fat Boy showed too warm an interest. Scandal notwithstanding, Win must have derived enormous satisfaction from snubbing a king. The summer the Fazackerleys spent an extended leave in Australia, Win had insisted on Evelyn’s packing the Knave of Hearts: so useful on the ship, throw it overboard afterwards. Evelyn had only accepted because she couldn’t very well refuse. Though of course she hadn’t worn anything so daring, not to say disgrac
eful, as Win’s tinkling tunic. Both during the voyage, and after, Evelyn had brooded over their employer’s generosity, while trying not to relate it to the image of her own, always rather skinny, thighs. She had sold the costume soon after landing.

  ‘Perhaps Win can put up with the service station,’ she said to Harold. ‘She had a streak of something. Not exactly vulgarity. Toughness. It was probably true what people said.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, you know. About the chorus.’

  ‘Can’t remember,’ said Harold, when she was sure he did.

  ‘Poor Win, she had a heart of gold. But, my God, wasn’t she plain!’

  ‘The face of a goat and the body of a statue. Not all women are as lucky as that.’

  ‘Oh, Harold, you shouldn’t!’

  ‘What’s wrong? There are men who are partial to goats – even to statues, I’m told.’

  ‘Oh, Harold! How dreadful! How sick!’

  But she loved it. She loved an opportunity for using the in word.

  The houses of success strung along the ridge seemed to leap in approval of her knowing mirth. But the houses were thinning out, she observed. The thinning process, together with the wind down her cleavage, turned her cold. Her laughter flickered and was extinguished.

  Evelyn said, ‘I do hope there won’t be a war.’

  ‘What put that into your head?’

  ‘My few investments, naturally. Where should we be without them?’

  ‘In the soup like anybody else.’

  Evelyn wasn’t prepared to argue. She wasn’t just anybody, whatever Harold decided for himself.

  The road had faded to a faint sandstone scar below the persisting razorback.

  ‘There,’ she said, ‘I told you it would peter out. Nobody would be mad enough to build in such a barren spot as this, nobody but a suicide.’

  Then the little, attenuated, clinging weatherboard offered itself at the last flick of the vanishing road.

  Harold said, ‘It suited somebody to build.’

  ‘What? That! That hutch!’

  Certainly the wooden house couldn’t pretend to be much more. Clamped to what was practically a cliff, there was nothing to suggest ease or skill in its execution. It was the defenceless amateurishness of the house which roused Evelyn’s dark-red scorn. It was a kind of honesty in its painfully achieved proportions, in its out-of-plumb match-stick stairway and exposed seaward balcony which moved Harold and filled him with a longing for something he could never accomplish. Perhaps it was just as well to see the house as a hutch, to imagine large soft animals turning on straw, or enormous satiny birds contemplating the ocean from behind wooden bars. Although he would never have confessed it to Evelyn, his imagination had often helped him out.

  But just then Harold Fazackerley was confounded by reality.

  The head, the face, the solid shoulders of a man appeared on the out-of-plumb outside stairway, rising above the level of the roof, the road, to look inside the letter-box for one of those letters, Harold could see, the man did not expect to find.

  In the same manner, the expression on the anonymous face was directed towards the strangers on the road: doubting, but hopeful.

  Then Evelyn Fazackerley heard her husband, not exactly call, bleat, rather, from unpreparedness. It was disconcerting, coming from such a man.

  ‘Clem! Clem, isn’t it? Dowson?’

  From beneath his stubbly hair, the man’s red, coarse-skinned face very diffidently admitted to the name. It infuriated Evelyn. She knew too much about him in advance. Slow people drew from her an irritation almost as visible as blood. Oh yes, she knew!

  Excitement was making Harold’s mouth lose control.

  ‘You remember Clem, Evelyn!’

  He turned.

  Harold, she saw with a shock, had been rejuvenated. She would take her time.

  ‘Clem Dowson?’

  She might have been proud of her inability to remember.

  ‘The Simla. The Nepal.’ Harold helped.

  Then she did begin, faintly, sighingly, allowing herself to recall a heavy engineer, in one liner, and in a second. Since then, she noticed, sun and wind had made him more transparent. In those days the steam and sweat of the engine-room had kept him the colour and texture of a suet crust. Opaque. Afterwards, on land, when she had been given the opportunity of getting to know him better, she hadn’t succeeded.

  ‘Ah yes why of course yes!’

  Whatever your feelings, there were always the social obligations, so Evelyn was turning on what she knew to be her charm. But she had never cared for engineers. Pursers, now, were almost always jolly, first officers sometimes capable of fascinating, but engineers, even when shouting you a white lady, seemed to remain below with their engines, or whatever the things were called.

  ‘And this is where you’ve hidden yourself away!’ She would make it sound a charming joke.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dowson.

  He did not attempt to excuse himself, though his solid body attached to the frail railings for support, trembled slightly. It might have been the wind buffeting him, if he had not been protected from it by his comic house. He had stood, she allowed herself to realize, on another still occasion, in an almost identical position, holding on to a mango tree.

  So now, as she looked at him, she said, ‘I wonder exactly how long it is since we took you with us to the Delta?’

  ‘Long enough,’ Dowson mumbled, getting a fresh grip of the rail with his thick, bristly fingers.

  He had made himself look even cruder by wearing his hair shorn to a stubble, no doubt attempting to disguise his baldness. It made his eyes look bluer, his face more enormous and open to attack.

  For that matter all three of them were temporarily somewhat exposed, unable to rely on the disguise of words, as they stood amongst the stones and silence, arrested in their moment of statuary.

  Till Harold broke away with that candour which Evelyn had deplored before putting it down to innocence and his sex.

  ‘Anyway, Clem,’ he said, ‘isn’t it about time you showed us over your hide-out? I take it you built the house yourself.’

  Dowson laughed. He turned. He was hanging his head and still heaving slightly as he went down the wooden stairs. If he did not reply to Harold, it was clearly because he was giving him the answers to his questions.

  The Fazackerleys followed, as it was intended.

  ‘But how clever!’

  Even before crossing the threshold Evelyn knew which line to take. It was so easy. She was so expert. With shy, boring men.

  ‘You don’t mean to tell me you made this? This cunning little cupboard with revolving shelves!’

  Dowson reached out with his hand and held her for a moment, firmly, even hurtfully, through her glove.

  ‘Only with a finger,’ he warned. ‘The slightest touch is all it needs.’

  Evelyn might have felt offended if the incident hadn’t been so insignificant. In the circumstances, she simply passed on.

  ‘And what is this?’ she asked. ‘This surrealistic contraption in wire?’

  ‘That is one of my own inventions. That’s to turn the egg out – automatically – as soon as it’s boiled.’

  ‘But how amusing!’

  Or how pathetic.

  ‘If Harold had half your talent. Now that we’re retired, he only threatens to read books, and never gets around to that.’

  She looked at her husband as though asking forgiveness for the slight wound she had been moved to inflict. But he did not seem aware of it. There was so much men failed to notice.

  The kitchen was all very well. The living-room – she could not hope to see the bedroom – ought to be more rewarding, because more personal, revealing. But it was, in fact, a disappointment. Too bare, too glary. The two armchairs, their covers too tight. The desk: on it one or two instruments, in which she could not take an interest, bottles of coloured inks, what was probably a dictionary. Not even a photograph. Evelyn loved to be able to relate photog
raphs to the owners of them, or better still, she loved the photographs which could not be explained.

  But, on a little, ugly, yellow table, there was a basket of wools. And a sock stretched on a darning egg. It put the moisture back into Evelyn’s drying lips.

  In time they were sitting over Dowson’s tea, the kind of dark-red brew you might have expected, in thick white common cups, which showed a rime of tannin as the tide receded. Harold was leaning forward very seriously above his tilted cup, his grey eyes – she had always been proud of their honesty – for the moment rather irritatingly abstracted, as his mouth struggled to convey an awkward preoccupation.

  ‘And what do you do with yourself?’ he asked when finally he dared.

  It was almost as though he were embarrassed to discuss anything so personal in front of his wife.

  Dowson sat pulling at the tufts of hair on the backs of his fingers. Then he drew in his mouth, and focused his shockingly blue eyes.

  ‘I sit and watch the ocean,’ he answered Harold straight.

  Harold appeared to find it a perfectly normal reply, and a gust of breath rose in Evelyn’s throat as though to protest against an immoral act.

  ‘But it’s so empty. Most of the time, anyway. Except for some uninteresting ship. Ships are only interesting when you’re in them,’ she managed to gasp.

  Neither of the men noticed her.

  ‘You’re lucky to know how,’ Harold continued.

  Evelyn mightn’t have been in the room.

  Dowson laughed – for Harold. It sounded unexpectedly gentle.

  ‘I won’t say you don’t need to practise. In the beginning.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harold. ‘But the beginning – that’s the difficulty.’

  Then Dowson leaned forward and asked, ‘What about those poems you used to write?’

  Evelyn raised her head.

  ‘Poems?’ Harold could have been afraid.

  ‘At school.’

  ‘Oh, yes. That was at school.’

  Evelyn was swaying slightly.

  ‘That was a beginning,’ Dowson suggested.

  Evelyn had a headache. Of course she knew, she had heard, but long ago, Clem Dowson and Harold had been together at that preparatory school. It was the wind giving her a head, or the atmosphere of boredom their host created just by his physical presence.