The Cockatoos

by Patrick White

  Inside the gardens she glanced round once or twice in spite of a determination not to do so. She would have liked to catch sight of something which convinces. A child, for instance. There were, in fact, bands of children click clacking in different directions. But she had never been much good at children, if she were to be honest: she closed them up. Nor were the trees in this tattered garden more revealing: they had become too dry, too brittle, inside bark which resembled diseased cork or very old basketwork. Only in one corner, where the dust had been replaced by a saucer of mud, apparently the result of flooding from a small ornamental duck pond, a lushness had been achieved, of dark, fleshy leaves, and voices escaping from their normal constriction to curdle and cling on marble benches.

  Her gooseflesh broke out. She was too afraid to enter this thicket with its stench of duck-infested mud.

  She was even more alarmed to hear what sounded like the roaring of a lion, at close quarters, behind some bushes. What chance would she stand, her breakable legs, her conspicuously white dress, in this small park? And what then would become of Charles?

  She noticed that the hitherto random children had begun to stream in the one direction, that of the lion, whose roars were increasing. The other side of a screen of laurels, in one of a row of empty cages, she came across him: bald buttocks, matted mane, one eye extinguished, the survivor still prepared to blaze. As the children tried to climb the loose and irregular net woven out of barbed wire in front of the cage, the tired lion lashed and roared. In spite of his general dilapidation, his jaws might have been dripping blood, his throat choking with raw flesh. Overjoyed by the smell of danger at a safe distance, or out of contempt for shabbiness, the children climbing the barbed wire were baiting their prey, one with a bulrush, others with branches torn from the near-by laurels. A group of parents, skin and teeth made yellower by the black they were wearing, stood smiling their apathy, or else approval.

  Ivy Simpson knew she ought to do something – but what?

  ‘Non avete pietà per questo animale disgraziato che soffre?’ Her Italian came out stilted, when it should have soared passionately.

  One or two of the black adults smiled and frowned at the same time, no more than half comprehending the crazy Inglesa, who was waving arms thin as wishbones, while her laughably insignificant breasts palpitated inside a dress more suited to a girl at her first communion.

  To make things worse, Ivy herself knew that her compassion had been learnt, like her Italian, and that she was distressed, or excited, by some more personal contingency.

  So she moved on, along the row of empty cages, towards where he was standing, mopping the hair at the nape of his neck, while staring with exaggerated interest at the bars in front of him. This last amongst the unoccupied cages was occupied, she now saw, by a sick, skulking wolf.

  Ivy Simpson immediately said, ‘Isn’t it disgraceful! What can be done?’ She spoke too loudly so as to be heard above the roars, as she gesticulated in the direction of the lion-baiting.

  ‘Nothing can be done,’ he assured her. ‘If we were natives, I guess it would be different. We’d do even less.’

  They laughed together in enjoyment of their superior foreign status, then fell to observing in silence the cage in front of which they were standing.

  The starved and worm-infested wolf, Ivy Simpson suddenly realized, was as irrelevant as the lion farther down. The only point in the sick wolf’s existence was that she and Clark Shacklock should be standing together in front of his cage. He would cease to exist as soon as they turned their backs.

  She wondered briefly whether she should comment on their meeting to her companion, but decided not to. Harping on coincidence, if it wasn’t, might have turned the situation into a joke, when life as well as damnation hinges on seriousness.

  Clark Shacklock seemed to understand. He wasn’t wearing his jokey look. He was sweating so seriously, the water bounded off him in blobs, and great waves of heat, rising from his fleshy depths, broke on Ivy almost as though she had been a rock.

  When he offered with some relevance, ‘We might, I thought, drive up to San Fabrizio before dinner. It’s a sight nobody ought to miss.’

  ‘There’s no reason why I should miss it. But weren’t you there already this morning?’

  ‘On a first visit Imelda checks the inventory.’

  ‘In that case,’ Ivy agreed.

  If no reference was made to the absence of Charles and Imelda, she could at least reassure herself that she and Clark each knew that Charles was sick.

  As the moist grey heat streamed past the open windows of the car, she was moved to remark, ‘I’ve read that the panorama is superb.’

  ‘If you can see it for the haze.’

  It seemed doubtful that they would: the fumes of the city were rising below them as solid as fungus.

  ‘Oh, I do hope,’ was jolted out of Ivy Simpson as the car, reaching a curve, must have flung her hand between Clark Shacklock’s thighs.

  He could not have put it there himself, for he was glancing at what lay for the moment in his lap, his detachment too pronounced, his surprise too obvious: at this faintly freckled, woman’s skin; at the ring time had thinned and refined, while shrivelling the finger which was wearing it.

  If it had been her own impulse, it would have appeared a vulgar one, Ivy realized, though she was no great expert on vulgarity: she ignored farts, and refused to react to men’s jokes when they verged on coarseness; nor had she ever been drunk, while sometimes wondering what it would feel like. It was not her own mechanism, but the jolting Fiat, which knocked the non-giggles out of her. (How much more reliable their own solid Rover!) In fact the only out-and-out laughter pursuing them round the curves was, not surprisingly, Aubrey Tyndall’s: Father would have wanted this.

  ‘Did you say “before dinner”?’ she gasped when again in possession of her hand.

  This time it was Clark Shacklock, a large man, who had the giggles (or was it farts?) shaken out of him. ‘The agnolotti,’ he bellowed, ‘at the Gattopardo!’

  The recurring curve in the road laid her head on his shoulder, but a bump helped her recover it at once.

  Oh my grey my suffering husband! For several kilometres Ivy Simpson sat recalling her actual life. But what is actual?

  She held herself erect in spite of the jolting and her embrocated thoughts, and soon they were drawing up in one of the spaces authorized for cars in front of the duomo.

  ‘The cloister first!’ Clark would have flung himself out more youthfully if part of him hadn’t caught on something.

  Ivy emerged with greater strategic caution, lowering her head, stretching the legs which could still surprise her pleasurably. (She had never understood his love for his Emma his whippet little more than an emblem of chilly grace and controlled movement perfection he called her.)

  When she had patted her hair she said, ‘I wonder whether I shall be disappointed.’

  It must have made Clark Shacklock anxious. ‘The cloister’s more austere,’ he warned. ‘But wait till you see the duomo. It’s my guess you’ll be bowled over – not by the façade – by the apparition you’ll find inside.’

  She shook herself after that, for having behaved like a capricious whippet, and shivered in advance for the apparition promised her.

  Aubrey Tyndall was allowing them to move decently, primly in her own case, towards the cloister. She might even catalogue the details by heart for poor Charles who was having the toothache.

  Ivy Simpson noticed her hands, and knew she had always despised them, whether skinny-old in a wedding ring, or slithering on Aubrey’s shoulder, or picking her nose as a nail-bitten schoolgirl. Not my Lalique Ivy! The same hands dropped Mother’s precious bowl which call me Aubrey had scorned.

  ‘I expect it will all be fascinating,’ she assured him, and linked an arm with his thicker, fleshier one.

  They advanced by synchronized strides on the cloister she might find austere.

  Clark looked over his shoulde
r once, and she forgave him; it might have presaged worse if he had marched too straight and too jauntily. As for herself, she didn’t look back. She unlinked her arm, bowed her head, and dabbed at her sticky eyes, not with a handkerchief, but a tissue she found in her bag, and which she let fall after use in spite of her own disapproval.

  The cloister of San Fabrizio was, if anything, more austere than he had told her to expect. The rays from a copper disc were striking through tumid cloud and gathering dusk to pierce its heart – without drawing blood, it would seem: the baked earth of a wilting garden was scored with fissures, and only plants able to endure permanent drought and complete neglect ad survived the Sicilian summer. Coupled columns elegantly twisted should have writhed with sensuous life instead of standing passively. Here and there the late sunlight did kindle a glitter, of glass rather than fire, in the eyes with which a creator had endowed their stone forms, but more often than not, empty sockets returned a grey, stony stare. Hoarse Arab affirmations of faith would have echoed through this cloister more convincingly, one felt, than the rippled ecstasies of Christian mystics.

  ‘I am not disappointed. It is different, though,’ she protested, with the smile, and in the voice, of the tasteful amateur of culture.

  Clark’s laughter was appropriately lacking in mirth. ‘Wait! This isn’t what we came here for!’

  Again confidence faltered in her: would she be equal to the duomo? could she destroy enough of what she loved to come to grips with what she feared? the Godhead: as a mere word leaping at her from off the printed page, it made her turn over quickly, to escape something far beyond what Charles and she had agreed to find acceptable.

  So she was rattled by Clark’s reminder. ‘No,’ she answered, giggling; ‘not what we came for!’ To snigger gave her the courage to become still further unlike herself; this way she might overcome the remorse of an Arab asceticism which lingered in the draughty cloister alongside her own rational principles.

  ‘I can’t guarantee you’ll like it,’ he was practically shouting, ‘if the Romanesque doesn’t turn you on.’

  She thought she could detect a trembling in him, and put out a dry hand to confirm. When she had hoped to make use of a resilient, rubbery voluptuary to collaborate with her in a moral suicide more brilliant than any her mind had hitherto conceived, was he planning to lead her to safety over some frail suspension bridge of his own?

  ‘That remains to be seen,’ she decided.

  Renewed spasms of sniggers on her part bumped her against him. That they should stay pressed together longer than was physically congruous, her burning drought against his streaming shirt, and yes – rubbery breasts, was less shocking than reassuring.

  ‘Hold hard, girlie!’ Whether or not she had actually heard it as he withdrew, her assurance was increased.

  She could now face the duomo, and whatever might be in store for her in the way of illumination or damnation.

  ‘But Clark,’ she heard that her r had perceptibly altered as she became more adaptable, ‘this isn’t the way, is it? Where are we going, Clarrk?’

  ‘The terrace first. The lights should be coming out.’

  She complained, but followed, mumbling grumbles. He might have been dragging her away from the dance at which she was fated to disgrace herself, his heavy, moist hand wrapping her dry, brittle one, her white skirt brushing against the dusk, the cymbidium leaves, the knowing laughter from jam-packed benches. She stumbled so clumsily. (What if she developed polio? In Sicily!)

  ‘There’s magnificence for you!’ He was offering her a different genre, or the opportunity to make the end a truly physical one, splattered on rock.

  ‘It’s cold, Clark.’ Arranging a fretful, invisible gauze. ‘We ought to go inside the duomo. We’ll find it chiuso if we put it off much longer.’

  A breeze had come, dispersing some of the steam from the cauldron of the city. Lights simmered. Immediately around them a smell of growth, as well as rotting, assaulted the nostrils. It could have been black hair hanging from pockets in a giant ficus which began rustily swinging in the night. Her breasts might have been swelling behind the pleats of the white dress.

  ‘You’re right. We ought to go in. We don’t want to miss vespers.’ Was Clark’s voice crossing itself in the dark?

  Men should be braver. They were on the whole. It was she who was jittering with terror, as though her father had proposed an indecency of which she might be capable. She would have to be, on the heights, or in the chasms, towards which she was being propelled by her own choice.

  They scuttled through the thickening dark as fast as her club foot or incipient polio allowed, and reached the door which was standing open for them.

  As they entered she sidestepped. A loathing returned out of childhood, when one of them had flown out of the fly-proof meat-safe and hit her in the face. She dreaded what the carapace contained. And here it was – her scarafaggio! a black one. She could not avoid she was grinding it into smearing it over the jewels of marble.

  After Charles had shaved (it was tricky on the swollen side) he pasted his armpits with the deodorant stick, and put on the dark suit they had sent for pressing, more out of habit than for any celebration. He was wearing a dark tie too, with narrow white stripe, which might have been a club or school tie, but wasn’t. (Ivy had bought it for him, thinking it was something he would like.) While sprinkling eau-de-Cologne on a handkerchief to carry in his breast pocket, it occurred to him, looking in the glass, that strangers, particularly foreign ones, might suspect him of being in disguise. It was partly his lopsided face. He had been having a toothache, he remembered. He went in to wash his hands a second time. Whatever he did, it seemed, became a ritual of sorts: he might have been preparing to examine a patient.

  Ivy was good with patients; they sent flowers to her telephone voice. Going down in the narrow lift he was almost suffocated by a perfume. But burst out in time. To find the urnful of tuberoses, and a live bee working their plastic flesh.

  The lounge was practically deserted. Unavoidably, one or two Dutch. In a far corner, the woman, their American, sat reading a book (two books in fact), her capacious leather bag lying on the carpet beside her. If he did not approach her it was to some extent out of respect for her un-American activity, but more because friendship was something Ivy conducted for them both.

  Seated in a corner opposite this Mrs – Scudamore? Charles Simpson ordered a Scotch and soda, and expected the worst. (If Ivy had been with him they might have enjoyed a Campari – so much cheaper darling. Hardly, but he wouldn’t have contradicted her for the world.)

  He began waiting, well, it was for Ivy, then they would go in to dinner. An eclipse of the moon had been predicted: he had witnessed several, and one of the sun at the age of twelve through a piece of glass smoked over a candle flame. Several times the end of the world had passed him by, till now it was prophesied again by an organization which busied itself with esoteric matters. Why was he born an unbeliever? He wished he could have at any rate half believed – not in God; that would be unnecessarily pretentious – but in the end of the world, for instance.

  He cleared his throat and wondered whether he should go across and speak to the American woman, but didn’t.

  Would Ivy, in those ragged gardens, remember to look for the moon? He was sorry he hadn’t reminded her. If they hadn’t discussed the world’s end, it was because each would have taken it for granted that the other had dismissed such an irrational event. Nature and their education had miraculously absolved them from looking for apocalyptic solutions.

  Only in dreams, or half sleep, or spasms of pain, did Charles Simpson experience doubts. But the toothache had left him temporarily.

  Now he was sitting on the edge of his chair, not so much contemplating, as examining his hands. He liked to think of them as practical rather than sensitive, for that again would have been pretentious; if they were not creative, they had in numerous instances helped prolong life, whether that was desirable or not, in the
present light.

  In the present light he was shivering, so he locked his hands, and glanced across at the American woman to see whether she had noticed. It was unlikely that she would have. Ivy never had. Not the least trace of blood on his thoughts. His murders were all too methodically conceived. His only real fear was that the official voice might lay at his door some compulsive mayhem he had committed unconsciously: little girls; old unsuspecting women with pulses in their goitrous throats; Ivy whose love was too precious – her trachea glugging and spluttering in the dust.

  He glanced again at Mrs – Shacklock? but she continued turning the pages of her books, as though the answers might be contained in the smaller of the two. He was surprised that she, that almost anyone but Charles Simpson, should find themselves in need of confirmation.

  Presently he went over and asked, ‘Did you know that an eclipse is predicted for tonight?’

  ‘I believe Clark said something about it.’

  She smiled, but Charles Simpson could not feel it was intended for him in particular. At the same time she laid down the book she was holding, and stretched her arms above her head, and pressed her white, muscular calves in a curve against the chair, as though she found his presence in her orbit fortuitous rather than deliberately suppliant.

  Charles consulted his wrist. ‘If we went outside we might get a look at it.’

  ‘I’ll leave that to Clark. Astronomy isn’t one of my subjects.’

  ‘Which are your subjects?’ He found himself sitting down, speaking like a turgid pedant, grimacing with what must appear amateurish gallantry.

  Imelda Shacklock said, ‘I guess I’m ignorant on the whole.’

  He was sitting almost knee to knee with this creamy goddess, whose composure inspired her yawns, the flexing of her calves, even her professed ignorance, with a vegetable dignity.

  ‘And that’s how Clark wants it,’ she brooded. ‘I can learn up anything he – or anybody else – expects of me, because I’m not all that dumb. But I’m content, I’ve found, just with being. Why not? Isn’t that a worthy occupation?’