The Cockatoos

by Patrick White

  Then Felicity sprang, and by some chance, bit the lobe of one of his ears. She actually drew blood. And grew sulky. The blood had frightened her.

  Mummy was annoyed; but Daddy laughed. ‘What have we got here? A little tiger?’ They had to fetch his styptic pencil to stop the bleeding.

  That night when he kissed her in bed, she mumbled back, ‘It’s “tigress”.’

  ‘It’s what?’ he laughed.

  He had forgotten, or didn’t see the point; so she didn’t explain: she lowered her eyes from what Mummy described as ‘Daddy’s splendid teeth’.

  When Humphrey Bannister began asking his wife, ‘Do you think Felicity’s happy?’ she answered spontaneously, ‘Why ever not? She’s got everything a girl could wish for.’

  Humphrey had grown somewhat heavy. ‘She doesn’t seem to speak any more.’

  ‘Girls don’t at her age. They like to have secrets together. Though certainly Felicity hasn’t many friends. That’s because we’ve always been so close as a family.’ It explained the situation perfectly.

  No one could deny Felicity was quiet. She had those spots, too. Her former lollipop of a face had turned, if you wanted to be unkind, or truthful, into an unsuccessful pudding.

  She would lock herself in the lavatory.

  ‘What are you doing, darling?’ Mummy asked.

  ‘Having a read.’

  ‘Oh, but dearest, it’s so unhealthy – I mean, stuffy in there – when you’ve got your nice airy room.’

  There was tension each side of the door.

  When Felicity was sixteen Mrs Bannister organized a small dance, with lured music, a catered supper, and Japanese lanterns on the lawn. Forsaking pink and blue, Felicity might have looked pretty in her pale primrose and a string of Mummy’s pearls if she hadn’t been so awkward; but all the young people were awkward, it seemed, excepting two or three youths who set out to impress by a loud, vulgar braying, in spite of the good addresses they came from. Finally Mrs Bannister was too busy to bother, unless when her guests were wasting the music. But you couldn’t say they weren’t enjoying themselves: all the awkward taffetas and damp shirts exploding under the big bull-magnolia at the bottom of the garden.

  From time to time Humphrey went down, and at once the young people grew silent. He tried to revive the party spirit with bits of slang remembered from his schooldays. A couple of the boys sniggered, but ambiguously, at his attempts; on the whole he didn’t succeed in jollying the young back to where he had found them.

  Not long after the dance Daddy delivered the first lecture on ‘keeping clean and pure for the man who will eventually put all his faith in a girl’.

  ‘Do you understand me, Felicity?’

  She only grunted and scowled. She had never been so acutely conscious of her spots: she could feel unborn clusters forcing their way needle-headed towards the surface of her prickling skin; while Daddy sat crouching in the leather chair concentrating on his mission.

  ‘Because to the right man, Felicity, a girl probably means even more than she does to her parents.’

  The sweat was trickling down Humphrey Bannister’s ribs. If only he could have left Doris to deal with the matter like any other; but you couldn’t afford to take any risks: however high her moral standards, a mother’s hand might be too gentle to turn the key on virginity.

  So Humphrey sweated it out, and Felicity prickled.

  When it was over they might have been made of rubber the way they sprang out of the room by separate doors. Felicity rushed straight to the bathroom to look at her face, and discovered several hitherto invisible spots. She tried to pop one or two of them.

  ‘Oh darling, you may do your skin some irreparable injury!’ Mummy was close behind her in the glass.

  The following morning Mrs Bannister went on a special expedition to buy her daughter a lotion and a cream which she sensibly accepted.

  Felicity, all three of them realized, had finally sloughed her old skin. What had been agonizing seemed so simple now. It was Doris Bannister’s proudest moment when her friend Madge Hopkirk pronounced her daughter a ‘radiant young woman’. Certainly Felicity looked very cool and pleasant, with her transparent, English complexion, the mother liked to think. Even more important, she had learnt to speak a language everybody understood: it gratified Mrs Bannister to find that Felicity could distinguish instinctively between what was ‘marvellous’ and what was ‘ghastly’. The neighbourhood took a pride in the girl. She adored children. And old people. Elderly men didn’t cock their legs – she was too refined – but their heads beat like metronomes in time with her weather predictions, which were almost always what they themselves predicted.

  The old people of the neighbourhood continued calling her ‘Tchitchy’ to show they had known and cherished her from the beginning.

  Mrs Burstall, who was what Mrs Bannister would have called ‘ordinary’ if she had allowed herself such an undemocratic thought, was also perhaps their most interested neighbour, ‘Now we must find Mr Right, Tchitchy; then we’ll really be off to the races.’

  It was the more embarrassing in that John Galbraith had already arrived on the scene, had progressed in fact, from tentative overtures, to something more sustained and noticeable.

  Mrs Bannister barely breathed at the telephone, ‘… Department of External Affairs … Yes, Madge. Between posts … John never mentions it but I know from a reliable source that the Prime Minister has taken him up … Oh, I shan’t presume to hope, but time will show … No. She hasn’t given me a single clue, but I wouldn’t ask. Felicity is a girl of delicate sensibility.’

  Doris Bannister’s own sensibility was charmed by the erect young man in charcoal flannel; his wristwatch made her feel quite drunk; his receding hair saddened her as she realized how history repeats itself.

  ‘Canberra,’ her lips dared to mould the plastic word, ‘so cold – empty I’ve always found. Of course there are the lovely trees – but one can’t live with trees alone – not indefinitely, anyway.’

  He enjoyed her little epigram enough to laugh at it. Had she gone a shade too far, though? She would venture anything for her child. Or for this intolerably desirable young man.

  It was high time Felicity took matters into her own hands.

  Though it had been Felicity who accepted John Galbraith’s proposal, the engagement became a communal triumph. Mrs Bannister didn’t know her neighbours socially, but almost every one of them had stopped different members of the family in the street to offer congratulations, and in Felicity’s case, admire the ring.

  Everybody was impressed, except perhaps Mrs Burstall, who would have preferred a larger stone in a more important setting. Anyone else could see the ring was in the best of taste, as you would have expected from a young man who was a B.A. and diplomat, and Tchitchy Bannister, who had started work with Moira Pomfrett in the interior decorating business – all the most exclusive homes. The lovely sapphire, moreover, was the exact shade of Tchitchy’s eyes. Even when, owing to the fiancé’s posting to Djakarta, the engagement became so drawn-out you sometimes wondered whether it was on, the ring was still there to remind: it would suddenly flare up in the neighbourhood’s imagination to illuminate otherwise lustreless lives.

  To those who had shared in this romantic efflorescence it was all the greater shock the night that fiend the prowler climbed into Tchitchy Bannister’s room some said got into bed though it wasn’t in the papers they all bought the Sun that evening the Herald next morning it was not in any of the papers to confirm the prowler had slashed at Tchitchy with a knife but decent people were so upset they couldn’t eat a mouthful for several days for participating in the night the prowler tore apart the long white perfect thighs as though they had been a boiler’s flesh only luck it wasn’t your own Trish or Wendy or yes it might have been yourself in Tchitchy Bannister’s bed while as for the elderly prostate-stricken gentlemen they drove it home as never before and certainly never after.

  So it was very terrible for everyone.


  In its actual relationship with the Bannisters, the neighbourhood strictly ignored facts: you could only treat the matter as though the whole family had gone through a serious illness; you asked about their health and what they were eating to keep their strength up, and recommended a nice invalid’s programme on the box. That was for the parents only: with the girl it was more difficult because you yourself had seen her wrestling in bed with a randy stranger, the tattooes on his arms, her vaccination marks, as she tried to hold off the knife.

  So, on the whole, the neighbourhood tended to avoid Tchitchy Bannister. In any case, Tchitchy herself had changed. For one thing, she began to dress different, though you couldn’t say it wasn’t in the fashion: it was in the style of no style. But apart from all that black, which after all was what a great many of the young girls were wearing, her face was different, as you might have expected, if you could get a look at it, because she had taken to doing her hair different. Come to think of it this Felicity had always been a girl you couldn’t say you exactly knew, although you knew her. Talking to her was like as if the real Felicity was something, some sort of metal, say, shimmering and changing under the water as you looked down from the solid jetty. Now even this tantalizing and distant object had been eclipsed by the event which had passed over it, and the hair which she had begun wearing in the carefully messed-up style of today.

  Most important, the ring had gone, claimed Mrs Burstall, who was the bravest, or the least ashamed. She had got a good look at Felicity’s hand, only incidentally, on stopping her to ask, ‘How’s the job going, Felicity?’

  ‘Oh, I gave it away – that one.’ She twitched at the tangle of hair, which could be used as a curtain if necessary.

  But for the moment she was exposed to anybody interested, and Mrs Burstall thought she had never seen such a naked face: she had never come across such loaded eyes.

  ‘Well, if that’s what you feel,’ said Mrs Burstall. ‘A person’s independence is what matters, isn’t it?’

  ‘If there’s any such thing, I guess it does.’ She laughed too, through her colourless lips, and it sounded cool, not to say cold.

  If Mrs Burstall hadn’t been ever so slightly frightened she might have taken offence: Tchitchy Bannister, always straightforward and pleasant in her conversation, had started talking clever. Even taking into account that the girl must have been changed by what had happened to her, Mrs Burstall was glad to be alone again with the dahlias after the young person had marched off in her high boots and black suit. Mrs Burstall gathered her house-gown tight around her. Anyway, she had found that Felicity was no longer wearing the diplomatist’s ring.

  The young man had not been seen in those parts since the unpleasantness. Except once, by Mr Jerrold. Mr Jerrold, now retired, had been taking his little dog for its lunchtime outing when he noticed some English make of car drawn up farther down, on the park side of the street. The car’s uncommonness made him want to inspect it, when he realized the individual in the driving seat was Felicity Bannister’s young man, and that the girl herself was there beside him. It might have been very embarrassing for Mr Jerrold if all three of them hadn’t been facing in the same direction. At least he could walk on, only half looking while listening, and frustrating his dog’s desire to pee on one of the flashing hub-caps.

  Actually Mr Jerrold saw and heard very little because the young couple’s heads were inclined: they seemed to be silently examining the dashboard, as though some delicate instrument incorporated in it had been giving trouble; or they could simply have come to the end of what they had to say.

  Immediately on receiving her letter John Galbraith had telephoned Felicity Bannister and announced she could expect him on a day and at a time named. His voice in Canberra, though faint, sounded more than ever warm and kind. Neither of the reasons for her letter was mentioned during the telephone call.

  Mrs Bannister said, ‘I know John will be understanding.’

  Seeing her mother’s face, hearing her voice, Felicity was determined to avoid the pitfalls ‘understanding’ might lead her into, just as she would resist any attempt on her mother’s part to woo her lover. Mrs Bannister had done up her mouth, and was rather scented for eleven o’clock in the morning.

  So, while the car could still only just be heard, Felicity began not exactly running, but almost, down the sloping path in the front garden, managing the two short flights of steps with what her speed made look like finical skill, and arrived by contrast with a thumping burst of gracelessness amongst the hibiscus at the bottom. Her dress was the simplest: an old white cotton tennis frock her mother disapproved of.

  She felt a heart-rending thrill of pleasure as the grey Aston Martin drew up.

  John embraced Felicity with a warmth which must have enslaved Mrs Bannister afresh if she had been watching, which no doubt she was.

  ‘Now, darling,’ he said, ‘we can talk the sense we don’t write in the heat of the moment.’

  It sounded so blandly reasonable.

  ‘Yes, at least we can talk.’ If she agreed on that point, Felicity was also aware that reason might not protect her from the shape of his back and the texture of its cloth, not to mention the leather of the Aston Martin’s upholstery. ‘That is why I’ve come down here,’ she added too breathlessly, ‘so that we can discuss – sensibly – without interruptions.’

  They drove a little way along the parkside. Beyond the railing, mounted police were carrying out a morning exercise in support of reason. In more normal circumstances the landscape would have been too familiar to notice. Now it amazed: burnt and ragged, with sheets of escaped newspaper trapped again in the pine-scrub.

  As the police wove their orderly patterns, wheeling and re-forming in accordance with commands from the voice of a superior, a second voice was superimposed: that of a dog-trainer bullying a pale young Labrador into obedience amongst the hummocks of dirty sand. Suddenly the man cursed, the dog squealed once or twice before bolting on a wide and hysterical trajectory, the trainer following, pitting a foolish wheedle against the torn screams of his dog, while the rocking-horse policemen continued to revolve, uneasy in their manliness.

  It might have been more disturbing if the usual morning silence hadn’t taken over soon after; till the silence itself disturbed, when you thought how it would make personal decisions clang.

  John Galbraith said, when they had more or less settled down, ‘I’ve found a buyer for the car – the chef at the Brazilian Embassy.’

  ‘Is he paying you a good price?’

  ‘Not good enough. But I’m lucky to be let off so lightly. And I’ve lived it up in the Aston Martin.’

  ‘Yes. You’ve lived it up.’

  As he took her hand in his assured, larger one, she thought how comfortably happy they might have been together, like those minor couples at dinner parties whose affection for each other seems to have protected them not only against the attacks of lust, but also the exigencies of love.

  ‘The Aston Martin was an extravagance, of course.’ She said it so equably. ‘But it was what you wanted. I wonder what you’ll get in Rome to replace it.’

  ‘That’s for you to – half decide.’ He turned on one of the smiles she felt he must have been practising on the drive from Canberra. (Did a corner of his mouth twitch?) ‘Because you can’t believe, can you? that anything – that whatever happened – can make any difference to us – Felicity – darling.’

  It had made enough difference for him to be looking at her with a curiosity he had prevented himself showing till now. He was trying to visualize the minutest detail of what the man had done to her. His hand bound to hers had grown sweaty. His rather colourless, fleshy, but pleasing, and to no extent sensual lips looked clumsy for once. John Galbraith’s mouth had been formed by tactful conversation, foreign languages, and the strategic smile, though he enjoyed doing his duty by a kiss.

  ‘I mean – you don’t imagine I can love you less?’ He was now doing his duty by words.

  �
��Yes,’ she said. ‘I know.’ She didn’t believe him passionate enough ever to be unfaithful to her.

  ‘Then I take it you think the letter you wrote as unreasonable as I do. But you felt you had to write it.’

  ‘Oh, I had to write it.’

  ‘In case I was the kind of bastard who might go back on an agreement.’

  ‘Oh, I knew you’d keep your word, John. But I suddenly felt I mightn’t be able to keep mine. That’s why I wrote the letters: because I found I didn’t love you in the way you imagine and expect me to.’

  ‘But if you love me?’

  ‘Yes. I love you. Only it isn’t what I expect of love.’

  He took away his hand. It might have looked less hurried if he hadn’t been holding hers.

  ‘Did this man’s lust make it so clear?’

  ‘No. It certainly wasn’t his lust. I don’t think it was anything that happened between us – only the fact that it happened. And I had had no part in it.’

  ‘Surely the thing about marriage is that two people do take part in it?’

  ‘They can – and sometimes they don’t. As in a rape.’

  ‘I can’t see the analogy.’

  She must persist. ‘So I had to break the engagement. Incidentally, how can love be “engaged”?’ She laughed because she had just that moment thought of it. ‘And how can an engagement be “broken”? Anything big enough ought to be “shattered”!’

  She must have leant towards him, because he was retreating: barely perceptibly. His face was so still and wooden he must have been holding his breath.

  While she continued laughing. ‘“Break” is a miserable little verb!’

  His Adam’s apple went up and down, twice, like a fast lift; then he asked, ‘Is there anything we ought to do? Anything formal, I mean. To show that it’s off?’

  It must have been the first time in her life anybody had asked her what to do.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell my mother. Otherwise, I guess you just let it fade out.’

  He was looking at her with the moist eyes of a grateful dog. ‘Well, if that’s what you feel, Felicity. I’ll be only too glad to do anything you want.’