The Cockatoos Read online

  ‘Fancy your remembering about those poems,’ Harold said, and laughed. ‘I had forgotten.’

  He hadn’t.

  Harold Fazackerley, the little leggy boy with protruding ears and blue, chilblained hands, used to write poems and things in his peculiar screwed-up writing on scraps of paper he was always terrified might blow about and have to be explained to someone. When he couldn’t have explained half of what came out. But the poems were necessary to him at that stage. At a later date, when his reason had sorted things out, he related those creative skirmishes of his boyhood to a hot shower on a cold afternoon or a smooth stool on a warm morning. Often as a boy he had suffered from constipation for stretches of several days. The poems seemed to ease his fears.

  All winter the school buildings had been victimized by the winds. But in summer, when the Virginia creeper was again in residence, and the dust thickened amongst tired laurels, and the smell of disinfectant rose piercingly from over-sodden urinals, small boys were fairly trampled by the possibilities of living.

  There were the scandals. Harold Fazackerley had not understood them quite. And was frightened by all that. He would not have liked to hear it explained, so he avoided those who were on the point of telling.

  Clem Dowson was that silent, slightly older, much sturdier boy: thick ankles in heather-mixture stockings, knees outgrown from knickerbockers. Clem would probably have started shaving early on. He did not go with anybody much, yet survived his isolation. He was not averse to anyone or anything, though it was hard to know whom or what he liked, beyond birds’ eggs and grass-chewing and fried bread. He was probably, in fact he was, a funny sort of fish you would have been ashamed of meeting in the holidays.

  Then Harold Fazackerley went up to Clem Dowson on an afternoon smelling of smoke and showed him two of those poems he had written. And Clem had read and handed them back. He smiled. He had broad teeth with grooves down them.

  He said, ‘They won’t ever understand. Your writing’s too hard to read.’

  And at once Harold Fazackerley was reassured. They had a secret between them, besides, which was perhaps what he had wanted.

  There was nothing between Clem and Harold, nothing you could be ashamed of. Harold had never done anything like that, or not that you could count. Nothing reprehensible, as he might have expressed it later, in his report-writing days. Not with Clem, anyway.

  Sometimes they mucked around the paddocks looking for nests. How Clem shone, blowing a maggie’s egg for Harold on a clear morning of spring, ankle-deep in dead grass, against the huge stringy bark. Held to his more-than-friend’s lips the speckled eggshell increased in transparency, and reddish, palpitating light.

  ‘My intellectual husband has kept the secrets you apparently share.’

  Pleating her mouth, lowering her eyelids, Evelyn Fazackerley made an exquisite irony of it.

  In abeyance for a short space out of respect for memory, the wind had begun again to torment the little room in which they were sitting. The tenure of the house perched above the sea was more than ever insecure.

  Evelyn looked at Harold and forgave him any hurt he might have caused her. Forgiveness had always come easily to her.

  She even turned to Dowson and asked, ‘Shall we see you again?’

  Though here she only half forgave. She was putting the man in an awkward position. She knew. She wanted to. It was the best way of cutting a knot. And he shuffled slightly, his rubber soles, and gave a congested smile, not even to Harold, but the room.

  Harold said, ‘I don’t expect we could ever tempt Clem inside our horrible flat.’

  Although feeling it was unnecessarily sincere, Evelyn played up to it.

  ‘With my cooking! No suffragis now, you know!’

  She could enjoy the faint bitterness of it.

  ‘I’ll look in. Some time. Perhaps,’ Dowson suggested, mastering each word except the last.

  Nobody seemed to think of offering or receiving an address.

  Harold Fazackerley could have been muddling again over some problem the elusiveness of which had become a worry. He was greyer than Evelyn knew him, as though bleached by the blazing ocean, shrunken and brittle in the presence of Dowson’s resilient stillness. Could it be that Harold’s manhood would desert him before the end?

  Though the possibility did not bear investigating to any depth because of the terror in it, Evelyn often dared wish she might outlive her husband, whose virility still attracted other women. She could not complain really, herself contributing to this in choosing his more exciting clothes, and in many little, more intimate ways, such as taking her own nail-scissors to clip back an independent hair of his moustache, or those which were sprouting beyond his nostrils.

  ‘I mean,’ Harold was saying, or harping, ‘Clem has come out of it with so much more than most of us. I mean, he has learnt to sit still. He has learnt to think.’

  Not a thought in his head. You only had to look. Or did men, especially men together, experience something women couldn’t?

  She examined Dowson particularly closely, and disliked more than ever what she saw. If she had prodded him hard she imagined he would have felt of hard rubber.

  ‘Certainly Mr Dowson has made himself very comfortable. Charming. This cosy little house. All the inventions. That egg-boiling thing alone. But a bit lonely at times, I should have thought.’

  There, she knew, she had put her finger on it.

  Then Dowson looked at her; it was for the first time, she realized, for the first time, at least, since they had stood beneath the mango tree in the steaming Delta. ‘A spell of loneliness never did anybody any harm.’

  ‘If you are convinced,’ she said.

  Evelyn got up, sweeping out of her lap the non-existent crumbs, because there hadn’t been even a bought biscuit.

  Everybody had, in fact, got up.

  ‘It’s been fine seeing you, Clem,’ Harold Fazackerley was saying. ‘We must write. We must keep in touch.’

  Although, to emphasize it, Harold had taken him by the elbow, Dowson hung his head, not believing it possible. Dowson, the elder, more stomachy, congested, preparing for a lonely stroke, had been transformed into the younger, Evelyn saw. She did not know whether she was pleased. The sight of Harold’s youthful back often inclined her to invent youth for herself. Now his back was the wrong side.

  As they clung to the rickety outside stairway, above the supine rockplants and the unfortunate, spinning fuchsias, she was battered into charity.

  ‘How shall we find,’ she began to ask through the veered wind, ‘how can we get in touch with you?’

  ‘Just put “Dowson”,’ Dowson answered incredibly. ‘“Dowson”,’ he repeated, ‘“Bandana Beach”.’

  Standing on the friable road, the wind spiralling round his legs inside the stuff of his trousers, Harold Fazackerley again visualized those large primeval animals and enormous satiny birds gravely observing the ocean from behind wooden bars. It was not possible to communicate with such removed creatures, except through silences, of which there were never enough.

  Yet he had communicated a little, he thought, or hoped, with Dowson.

  All the way, and especially in the bus, Evelyn kept repeating they had had a lovely day.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed, at one stage, because it was expected of him, ‘and what luck to come across old Clem.’

  ‘I like him,’ she said, firmly, holding up her chin.

  He ignored it. Perhaps he thought nobody else capable of appreciating Dowson.

  ‘I envy Clem,’ Harold said.

  ‘How?’ she asked, drawing in her breath.

  ‘He’s happy.’

  ‘Oh, come!’ said Evelyn. ‘You can’t say we aren’t happy.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Is the window too much for you?’

  She shook her head, giving him her dreamy look, one of those relics of her girlhood.

  ‘The air is so lovely,’ she said; she would not let it be otherwise.

  They were being
jolted past the litter of matchbox houses waiting on that sweep of the coast for the tidal wave which hadn’t yet materialized.

  ‘I would have said,’ she said, ‘he wasn’t all that happy. In his do-it-yourself house. With those unnecessary gadgets.’

  ‘Why?’

  Though he did not move, except as thrown by their onward motion, she could sense him rearing inside his constraining body beside her on the lumpy public-transport seat.

  ‘Because,’ she said, ‘well – it lacks a woman’s hand.’

  She looked down at her own formally gloved ones. Whatever her other shortcomings she could afford to be proud of her hands. During the almost endless stretch between Colombo and Fremantle an artist had once asked to paint them, and she had been persuaded – with Harold’s knowledge.

  But now Harold was invisibly rearing, finally actually heaving and altering position, rather too uncomfortably, aggressively, on the bus seat.

  ‘But you don’t understand’, he blurted, ‘a man like Clem Dowson.’

  ‘Then I don’t,’ she decided to agree.

  Because to submit in a crisis was to subscribe to her own reasonableness.

  Harold appeared convinced, and rightly. Nobody could have questioned her loyalty to him, in the larger sense, either in the squalid present, or the good old plushier days of power and respect. When Egypt had gone to so many women’s heads.

  Harold Fazackerley had returned to Egypt after the First World War. His friend Dudley Burd had kept his promise. First Dudley’s father, then Dudley himself, became Harold Fazackerley’s employer. Friends more than employers, though Evelyn always maintained friendship wasn’t the elastic affair Harold liked to believe. Anyway, he was in the habit of calling his employer ‘Dud’ to his face, and of helping himself from the decanter before he had been invited; while to employ an ‘Aussie’, and to refer to his manager’s wife as a ‘Dink’, seemed to entertain Dudley Burd.

  All very well, and amusing, for an Englishman of Sir Dudley’s wealth and rank to season his conversation with crude colonial salt; but Evelyn detested it. For a long time she couldn’t avail herself of the familiarity the Burds appeared genuinely wanting to share. Her hand trembled holding gin. She was nervous, she supposed, in the beginning: it was agony to imagine the colours she had chosen clashed, or that she was making mistakes at dinner parties, or that her accent might be showing through. ‘Oh no, Sir Dudley,’ she might say. ‘Thank you. Really. I’d rather not. Well, you see, not every Australian girl is at home on a horse. Just as’, she added with a little giggle, ‘not every Australian speaks with an accent.’ She hated to hear her own giggle. But the scent of gin was anaesthetizing her gaucherie, giving her courage. She liked, she had to admit, the faint scent of leather and sweat, of horses, and the men who had been riding them.

  Or Win: the trailing, the devastating, interchangeable scents of Win Burd.

  ‘Ev, darling, what a bloody bore those Rockcliffes proposing to barge in for lunch! It would be much more fun to get ginned up a little together, and enjoy a siesta afterwards. But you’re not drink-ing! Evelyn?’

  ‘Oh yes, Lady Burd! Thank you. I’m doing nicely.’

  Again that giggle. When she wasn’t stupid. Probably less so than Lady Burd.

  Early on, the Burds had suggested she drop the Sir and Lady. But she couldn’t bring herself to. If she hadn’t done it in her own time it might have seemed unnatural, and she would have felt embarrassed.

  Also, perhaps, she did enjoy the sound of the title.

  ‘That’s so terribly kind of you, Lady Burd … Yes, Lady Burd … We’d be thrilled.’

  Because Win used to telephone sometimes in that slurry, half-ginned voice, and suggest that Evelyn and Harold might like to spend the weekend in the Delta, which meant: use the house on what was referred to by the Burds’ British dependants as the Estate. Evelyn was delighted for a time to receive its freedom, but she had to be so careful not to give anything like a display of girlish or vulgar enthusiasm, and she had to take particular care over her enunciation. She couldn’t afford to throw accent and grammar over her shoulder like Win Burd. The upper-class English could get away with murder.

  Sometimes when Harold had leave the Fazackerleys might spend a week or fortnight at the house on the Estate. The Burds found it a bit of a bore; they preferred the Aegean and the elaborately simple luxury of their converted caique. But in spite of the Egyptians and the flies Evelyn decided to love the Delta. She became the chatelaine. Of the Burds’ certainly rather spartan, but cool, shuttered, whitewashed house. With lands stretching between canals. And mango trees heavy with nauseating fruit.

  ‘You’d think they’d introduce some upholstery, at least, and a few modern conveniences,’ Evelyn complained once. ‘The mattresses are like lying on the ground.’

  Harold had to make excuses for the Burds.

  ‘They like to rough it now and again.’

  ‘Oh, I suppose so,’ Evelyn agreed, ‘if you have something as smooth as rose marble to return to.’

  But even without benefit of staircase, Evelyn Fazackerley came into her own as chatelaine, standing, for instance, in the doorway which separated dining-room from kitchen quarters, frowning, shouting, ‘Gibbou wahed foutah, Mohammed!’ to the slave.

  Harold might say, ‘Darling – why do Anglo-Saxons have to shout at foreigners?’

  ‘But I wasn’t shouting,’ Evelyn replied. ‘I was making myself understood. And surely if you classify Arabs as “foreigners” it raises them to the level of Europeans? Not that I’m sticking up for Europeans! They’re there – we know – but I don’t know any, and don’t particularly want to.’

  ‘Aren’t you being narrow minded?’

  She looked at him. Because he was in love with her he was making it sound almost a virtue. So she was reassured.

  ‘I am accused!’ she said softly, looking down into the greasy bean soup.

  Evelyn Fazackerley was slim. She wore a lot of white. In the reflective dark of the old Delta house, surrounded by a steamy, indolent landscape, she saw herself as the spirit of cool. If only her arms hadn’t been quite so thin, or the pores hadn’t stood so wide open in her otherwise immaculate skin.

  But her power allowed her to forget such details. She was amazed, even shocked, by the passion she seemed to inspire in her husband during those steamy summer months.

  ‘By the time October is here,’ Win Burd used to say, ‘I’m destroyed, I’m an Alexandrian whore.’

  Win, of course, was extravagant in every way. She could afford to be.

  One summer while they were all still comparatively young the Burds had lent the house in the Delta for the Fazackerleys to take a week’s leave. The prospect no longer pleased Evelyn: the mango trees, the dark rooms, the smell, and worse, the taste of primus, Egyptian women afloat in black along the paths of the canals, laughing at what she was never going to discover – all would be the same as before, except that Mohammed had been replaced by Mustapha, and Mustapha by Osmin.

  Moreover, Evelyn brooded, the Burds only lent the house in summer when the Delta was at its steamiest.

  It was two nights to their departure. Harold had come in, she realized.

  ‘You remember that cove, that Dowson, the engineer from the Nepal? The one I was at school with. Well, he’s in Alex, Evelyn. Been sick. He’s just discharged from hospital.’

  It was far too sticky and undignified a night. Having to remember that engineer was to do so only irritably.

  ‘I’d have taken him for a Scot,’ she said. ‘But he wasn’t.’

  Harold was in his kind mood. Its feelers were gently reaching out.

  ‘I think he’s hard up for something to do. A bit lonely, I’d say. He’s got another ten days before joining his ship. I told him he’d better come out to Kafr el Zayat with us.’

  ‘Oh, darling! That means I’ve got to set to and buy a whole lot of extra stuff! You’re most unreasonable at times.’

  ‘You’ve only got to ring the Nile Col
d in the morning,’ Harold said.

  She laughed rather high. She was wearing a lime sash.

  ‘You do show me up, darling,’ she said. ‘And more often than not you’re perfectly right.’

  It was the sort of moment which made their relationship such a special one.

  Harold kissed her. He had been drinking, but only the way everybody did. It added to his masculinity.

  ‘Dowson has a friend,’ he said.

  ‘A friend? Then how can he be lonely?’

  Harold was slowed down.

  ‘Well, I mean. A manner of speaking. And anyway, the friend’s a Greek. It isn’t the same as your own kind.’

  ‘A Greek? I’ve never met a Greek.’

  ‘It may be an interesting experience. This one has just come from an archaeological dig somewhere in Upper Egypt.’

  ‘You don’t mean to say you …’ Evelyn could only break off.

  ‘Couldn’t very well avoid it. He’s a stranger, and Dowson’s friend. I had to ask him.’

  ‘I ask you! You sit drinking in some bar, and before you know, you’ve invited all the rag-tag in the bar! Darling, I do think you might have considered the position you’re putting us in. Bad enough the stodgy engineer. I know he’s honest, if uncouth in almost every way. But a Greek. In Win and Dudley’s home.’

  ‘Win and Dudley have been known to invite Armenians, and I never heard the silver was missing.’

  ‘That is different. The Burds are responsible to themselves.’

  Nothing was spoken at dinner, except when Evelyn said, ‘Esh, Khalil. Gawam!’

  The drought from which she was suffering had grown so intense it was surprising such plentiful tears gushed over the coffee.

  ‘Oh, darling, I am silly! I am silly!’ she said, making it sillier.

  When he came and sat against her, the familiar outline of his body through the wringing shirt robbed her of her last control. She kissed his hands through the mess of tears. She and Harold were melting together in a scent of jasmine and moist flower-beds.

  So next morning he promised to ring Dowson after Evelyn had rung the Nile Cold Storage. Reason had decided against the Greek. Evelyn said such a very simple man as Dowson would be easily persuaded. Harold said he hoped he would.