The Cockatoos

by Patrick White

  true as blue he solves the plot is not to fear darling

  what plot Americans don’t they are on our side

  do we know?

  Ivy should

  the Simpson lips eject is it a kiss at any rate an offering glistening white never remember which is honesty which thrift

  it hovers between us

  take this Ivy I am only its temporary host this for you is more than a rotten tooth a token of my trust

  what is too precious breaks or spills it is I who spit at Charles Swimson my hus my lover it swings for ever between us a chain hanging from his chin

  it is out Ivy at last

  from its chaste scabbard the Arabs brought from Africa the sword is only to expect he has sharpened

  oh why God you will save me Mr Cutlack there’s no other reason for your being between us oh oh Clark save me from Aubrey my frightening husband

  ‘Clark? Clark!’ Ivy Simpson had almost rocked the bed apart.

  ‘What’s the trouble, Ivy?’ The eyes looked afraid in his lopsided face, the light making an ungainly, circular motion from his having hit the reading lamp.

  ‘My leg!’ Ivy was gasping, biting mouthfuls of the warm flannel the air had become as she fought the pain she was obviously suffering from.

  Then as her mind resumed control, she thought to explain, ‘I’ve got the most excruciating cramp!’ And jumped up, hobbling, stretching, contorting, again stretching, tiptoe if possible.

  ‘Better if you lie still now.’ Dr Simpson was only incidentally the husband she had left with toothache.

  She obeyed, and he began massaging her calf; her legs, like her breasts, were still youthful. In that appalling dream she had become for an instant Father’s whippet – Emma; he had loved her for her elegance.

  A whippet is at least clean and neat. She was glad she could not remember any of the formlessness, the gibberish – and relieved to have thought of the cramp.

  Charles accepted it. Why shouldn’t he? She could tell she had been convincing. She lay, eyelids fluttering; once or twice she whinged, back still arched, as he stroked her calf with kind, regular hand. It was a comfort. Though she had no vestige of a cramp, she was still suffering from a dream.

  Aubrey Tyndall. He liked to see his name engraved on expensive, superfluous objects, like the cigarette case Mother said was vulgar because the donor had never been more than half explained. He would sit polishing his own engraved name with the ball of a thumb, its whorls black with nicotine. Invited you to call him ‘Aubrey’, but you never had – not to his face. Why not, Ivy? Couldn’t answer. ‘Dad’ is a cosy all-time bore they’ll think you’re my girl if you call me ‘Aubrey’. His voice had never struck deeper. He laughed to hurt as he lowered lids over eyes the expression of which seldom went with what he had been saying. His beard, a tarnished gold, would tingle with sand from the beaches where he spent whole afternoons lying breast down.

  ‘Has it passed?’ It was Dr Simpson.

  ‘I think it has. Yes. You’ve saved me.’ Still weak-eyed, she smiled at him, flickering; because it was Charles he wouldn’t see that her eyelids, her cheeks were withered, papery, probably greasy where the skin had devoured the powder.

  Kindness isn’t breakable. She closed her eyes, reassured, and now it was she rubbing rubbing Aubrey’s shoulder because of the rheumatic pain he had from running round without his clothes he said after the southerly came she was his ugly daughter but good for something at last she had he said the soothing touch her hand sliding over the shoulder down the ribs almost to the thigh the skin not quite gold sea-light gave it a tinge of green of verdigris she rubbed in the embrocation relieved when it vanished the skin less easy to the hand rubbing this disgusting man your father his breasts fattening in a fuzz of dirty gold.

  ‘I think you could leave off, darling,’ Ivy remembered to tell Charles. ‘It’s so – kind,’ she sighed, and scuffed her cheek against the pillow.

  She should have asked after his tooth, but felt too exhausted, or fulfilled, falling asleep.

  They started off with what was scarcely a row, an argument, between the Shacklocks over which road they should take for Agrigento: Clark so obviously knew, and she was complacent in her ignorance. Ivy, who had studied the map before leaving, would not have liked to admit that Mr Shacklock was right: she kept quiet.

  ‘Do you mean to say you’ve spent three whole days here and not been outside that albergo?’ The rented Fiat could hardly contain Clark Shacklock’s incredulity.

  On the back seat, Charles Simpson raised a buttock preparatory to answering. ‘The other evening we went for a bit of a stroll as far as the Villa Giulia.’

  ‘We didn’t go inside, though,’ Ivy added.

  Mr Shacklock admitted that a toothache can be pretty traumatic. ‘But how I envy you your self-sufficiency! Like a couple of plants – needless to say, nice, sensitive ones – all these days in a room at the Hotel Gattopardo!’

  Mrs Shacklock turned her head. ‘My husband doesn’t mean to be offensive. He has always loved and envied plants.’ Then she subsided to observe the landscape, herself not unlike a plant, more of a vegetable, a large creamy gourd with overtones of gold.

  Mr Shacklock, on the other hand, was of the animal kingdom: too compulsive by far.

  Seated behind their hosts, the Simpsons’ contained irony communicated itself through loosely linked hands. Once or twice Ivy glanced at Charles without, she thought, giving them away, though you can never be sure of those driver’s mirrors. She was only surprised Charles had accepted the invitation to drive with unknown Americans to Agrigento after their frankly hideous night. She gave him an extra look to see whether it was truly he who had plunged the sword into her – tummy. Memories of her dream were so gross and frightening she put them out of her head again.

  ‘Are you comfortable, Charles and Ivy?’ Clark Shacklock called. ‘Fiat cars are designed – back seat, anyway – for the dangling legs of dwarfs.’

  The Simpsons could not have felt more relaxed, though they did not come at Christian names, or not until Lercara Friddi.

  Along the road Clark Shacklock drew their attention to points of interest. Ivy Simpson, who had read the guidebook in advance, could have confirmed that most of what he told was truthful.

  Sometimes his natural exuberance drove him to add extravagant touches. ‘See that church on the escarpment? They say Our Lady put in an appearance there before the last elections. It helped the Christian Democrats a lot.’

  The Simpsons looked at each other. They enjoyed that. They were prepared to admit Clark Shacklock, if shyly, to their own Enlightenment, not that he wouldn’t have barged in sooner or later regardless of whether they allowed him. It was less certain what beliefs Mrs Shacklock held. She was probably moody – or dumb, Ivy Simpson decided.

  As they drove, Imelda Shacklock continued looking from side to side at the landscape. From the back seat you caught sight of her rather full, creamy cheeks; otherwise, when she stared ahead you had only the view of a strong neck and tawny hair in the tousled style. Clark, by contrast, attempted repeatedly to face his back-seat passengers while driving. If it had been her own husband, Ivy Simpson might have felt shocked and frightened, but as it was someone of whom she knew nothing, his driver’s daring became an acceptable technique, and she could listen calmly to his tales of Shacklock travels. He told these in such detail you wondered what he could be gleaning at present. Perhaps he would be briefed by his wife: she was absorbing the landscape with such obvious concentration.

  It was certainly a very fine one, immense and dusty in the heat of morning. Human or even animal activity hardly belonged, though there were clues to both: in the stubble recurring patterns, geometrical to the point where they suggested rites; the neat architecture of a haystack, a slice carved out of its pediment; cow-pats in an olive grove; a hovel teetering against the sky. In spite of the fact that she was holding hands – loosely and discreedy – with Charles, who had begun asking Mr Shacklock the kind
of statistical questions men are moved to ask each other, and for which Clark seemed to have all the answers, the landscape through which they were hurtling might have been for Ivy Simpson alone. She would not have cared to admit to Charles that this was the kind of experience he could never share. Fortunately it was a possibility which would never arise in conversation, but if it did, she would almost certainly deny that she had ever aspired to, let alone experienced, any form of levitation. Immersed in his pragmatic exchange with Mr Shacklock, Charles did not notice her hair was streaming, or realize that her skirt was catching in the branches she skimmed, and that the door of a barn, huddled in the bushes of an airless hollow beside the road, scarcely made her nails blench as she tore at the rusty hasp to explore the darkness inside.

  It was Mrs Shacklock who disturbed one’s sense of sole possession. The strong neck with the creases in it, the large but by no means flabby torso, performed heavy obeisances to left and right as the car sprang with them through a pass. Ivy Simpson wondered whether Imelda Shacklock was a person she would ever get to know. She did not think she could actively dislike the woman, because it wasn’t in her nature to dislike others (hate for her father had exhausted her capacity for dislikes) till for a moment, and alarmingly, she visualized Imelda’s white body spread-eagle in a patch of grass, her fleshy necklaces quite distinct, and still more startling, the black tuft where her thighs forked.

  Ivy Simpson felt so guilty she sat forward on the edge of her seat. ‘I shall never be grateful enough, Mrs Shacklock, for your persuading us to come on this fantastic drive.’

  Now it was Mrs Shacklock’s turn to look alarmed as she hesitated to expose her own state of mind. ‘Yes,’ she mumbled over practically incapable lips, ‘it is a – a generous landscape, isn’t it?’ ashamed of her opaqueness and inadequacy.

  While Clark Shacklock chose that moment to turn round and, between statistics, wink. ‘Don’t tell me, Ivy, you’re a member of the Romantics’ Club!’ His face was too burnt and jolly for his remark to have been in any way an accusation or sneer – though it might have been.

  His glance lingered long enough to remind her of her reputation as a plain woman. What apparently he failed to notice were the flashes of gold which came and went in her streaming hair, and the shape she could feel her lips taking inside the confines of an actually small mouth.

  She resettled herself in her seat, and only now remembered she was still holding Charles’s hand.

  Whatever her attitude to the Shacklocks, it was soon after, at Lercara Friddi, that Ivy decided to plump for Christian names.

  Mrs Shacklock, who seemed to make all the minor decisions, murmured that this was probably as good as anywhere for a stop. A juke box was hammering home its message in the unfinished concrete roadhouse where her husband drew up amongst the rubble. As they entered through a plastic curtain, its fly-spotted strips slithered on their faces, and Ivy asked, ‘Do you think we dare risk the gabinetti, Imelda?’

  ‘I guess we’ll have to – or last out till Agrigento.’

  ‘Better a bush, perhaps!’

  Ivy Simpson would have liked to use her daring, together with the threatening horrors of the gabinetti, as the cement for an alliance with Imelda Shacklock. But as Imelda either wouldn’t, or didn’t know how to play, Ivy was saddled with her own rakishness at the moment when the mirror showed her the cracks in her lips and the knots in her swag of dust-laden hair.

  Clark Shacklock only half looked at the two women on their return; he was telling Charles about discovering certain Caravaggios. ‘What makes them a bonus is finding them unexpectedly in these obscure and, on the whole, mediocre churches. Like suddenly coming across the Goya in San Anton, Madrid.’

  The Simpsons looked appropriately grave, and Charles coughed, and remarked, ‘Yes.’ Art made him nervous; he was always reading books about it, trying to learn, but hadn’t succeeded in bringing it alive. ‘We haven’t been to Madrid,’ he admitted.

  Ivy blushed.

  ‘But you must!’ Clark Shacklock’s thighs heaved; the Shacklocks had been everywhere it seemed, and sometimes more than once. ‘If only for the Goyas. That Communion of San José is the greatest spiritual experience.’ He glanced from one Simpson to the other, to see if they would dare disbelieve.

  If Charles was uneasy, his swollen face increased his expression of earnestness.

  ‘I still prefer the Burtonville Goya.’ Imelda Shacklock was smiling into the large old handbag she had opened.

  It must have been a great comfort to own such a capacious, though shabby, bag. On her otherwise naked, plump hands, she was wearing an enormous slumberous stone Ivy could not identify.

  Imelda appeared elated to hold an opinion of her own, but Clark wanted to demolish her. ‘The Burtonville Goya? The hell it is! Our intentions were of the best. We just hadn’t been around. And didn’t know Goya. We didn’t know ourselves.’

  But Imelda Shacklock smiled as she stirred up the contents of her handbag. ‘I have always known what I am. And what I want.’

  ‘You’re so goddam stubborn. It’s three to one that the Burtonville Goya’s a fake. We have that in writing if you’d care to open your eyes to it.’

  Rudeness in a marriage always pained Ivy Simpson. She looked unhappily at Charles. She would have to persuade herself that Americans obey a different set of rules.

  ‘What is Burtonville?’ she asked rather carefully.

  Clark Shacklock continued frowning: it was too soon for him to avoid including Mrs Simpson in the anger his wife had roused in him. ‘Burtonville? There’s a small collection – a museum, I suppose you’d call it – we founded back home – I and Imelda – when we first laid hands on money, in our idealistic youth. Some of our intentions misfired, as you must have gathered, though Imelda is still determined to Christian Science the truth.’

  Imelda laughed and snapped her handbag shut; there were moments when she seemed hardly to belong to Clark.

  ‘Oh, I would like to see the Burtonville Museum!’ Ivy wanted genuinely to console, so she avoided mentioning the dubious Goya (a painter she thought she might find morbid, whether fake or real) and made her desire an innocuously collective one.

  ‘So you shall – when you visit the States.’ That he put some slight value on their friendship did not help her to believe that she – or Charles – would ever see the Burtonville collection.

  Nor perhaps did Clark Shacklock himself believe. He put an end to anything equivocal or unresolved by slapping down payment, together with an extravagant tip, for the acqua minerale they had just finished. He appeared to be paying, more than anything, for the physical pleasure of a return to natural amiability. This may have been what he was inviting Ivy Simpson to share. The cushion of his lower lip, with its slight dent swelled and glowed. Over the V of his shirt a glistening wave of black hair curved quivering without breaking. Ivy wondered how far she could believe in Clark Shacklock’s ‘great spiritual experience’.

  But it was time to push on to Agrigento.

  A curtain of brown heat had been lowered between them and the mountains. They looked down at a dry stream, a pale wrinkle at the bottom of a valley. Neither houses, nor even a power station, any longer convinced. The passengers in the car with an egg-shell chassis had reached a stage where their own suffering flesh was the real proof of human continuance. Though probably none of them would have admitted to such a negative conclusion. Because all four were educated. Hadn’t they exchanged the names of universities, or colleges, they had attended in Australia, or the States?

  As the large Americans were bounced onward, and the skinnier Australians slithered stickily against each other on the back seat, Charles Shacklock began telling over his shoulder how he had read in some magazine that Sicilian boys of the deprived class sat masturbating in the schoolroom under their teacher’s nose.

  Charles Simpson deplored, sociologically and medically, what he was able to laugh at as a man, while Ivy was proud to appear broadminded, though the scene she
visualized brought the gooseflesh out on her, and she wondered how she might have reacted if her own husband had told the story. Imelda Shacklock seemed unmoved, or else she was inured.

  Very practically, Mrs Shacklock had brought a picnic basket along (‘you can never be sure in Sicily’). After the rigours of the Archaeological Museum and the scramble up to the Sanctuary of Demeter, when Ivy might have more than grazed her knee if Clark hadn’t steadied her, it was decided to open their basket in the shadow of the Temple of Concord.

  Charles whispered, ‘Isn’t this great, Ivy?’ but she suspected it was less for the temple than the sight of food which the poor darling’s tooth might allow him to enjoy only in the abstract.

  She whispered back, ‘Is it hurting, dearest?’ but Charles avoided answering.

  Imelda Shacklock conjured her picnic lunch: there were foie gras sandwiches, and a cold chicken, and some enormous peaches only slightly bruised, and a thermos of chilled wine.

  Clark almost at once began complaining in the half-angry, half-jocular voice he used on his wife – that is, when he wasn’t wholly angry, ‘Sicily rides again, Imelda! Something in this basket downright stinks.’

  ‘The chicken, I guess,’ Imelda said. ‘But it’s only a chicken’s normal smell. No worse than some underwear.’

  Ivy flinched.

  ‘That’s your goddam Christian Science again!’ Clark grumbled on. ‘I wonder how many are born Christian Scientists without ever realizing.’

  Embarrassment made Ivy’s voice sound more than usually girlish. ‘As far as I’m concerned, I can’t smell a thing. Excepting peaches!’ She inhaled ecstatically.

  Each Simpson found the food ‘delicious’, though if they had been as callously truthful as Clark Shacklock they might have admitted the chicken was tainted.

  For the sake of his tooth, Charles concentrated on the foie gras sandwiches, which at other times, Ivy knew, he would have considered far too rich. She herself drank a second glass, more than her share, of the chilled wine, hoping it might protect her from the chicken.