Aubrey, she could tell from the fumes of whisky (he had taken with him a little flask ‘for the journey’), was bending in the direction of her ear. ‘That’s the sort of hocus pocus which sells it to the fairies and hysterical women. Come on, let’s leave them to it!’
She had been taught to respond with obedience, possibly all she would ever learn to offer. When she got outside, and Aubrey, just ahead, was relieving himself by spitting on the pavement, she glanced back into the church’s brick interior (it had much the same ugliness as a factory) where she was leaving behind, she could feel, something of herself which Aubrey – nobody could ever touch, but which on the other hand, she might never dare redeem.
It was still a long journey by ferry. Aubrey fortunately fell asleep, though he jogged her shoulder, from time to time, with his shoulder. The wart on her thumb was hurting.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Why not?’
They were crossing the piazza through dense sunlight. The church they were struggling towards was their favourite. For archaeological, architectural, historical – all the right Australian-rational reasons, they loved Rome. (You can turn your back on the Vatican; and that monster, St Peter’s, can be rather fun.) Grateful for shared opinions, their hands brushed as they went inside their church; their fingers tangled together, she would have dared anyone to say ‘vulgarly’: their age alone precluded that.
The light had so worked on the prospect of diminishing arches that the columns glowed with an opalescence of illuminated alabaster, while windows offered human faces constantly shifting masks in softest purple and crimson velvet.
Ivy Simpson knew she would have looked more haggard if it had not been for these charitable disguises. She was glad to hide behind them, and to feel her feet gliding with recently acquired ease across marble so black, yet clear, they might have been miraculously walking on benign water.
In the cloister, a cat, a young tabby queen, teats showing through her belly fur, lay patting at a spray of jasmine, claws furled inside her pad.
Neighbourhood clocks recording the passage of time finally drew the Simpsons back inside the church, and at the point where they should have branched off to pay respects at the tomb of a great man, Charles made a discovery which almost jerked Ivy’s hand off at the wrist.
‘D’you know what? We forgot to ask for the laundry!’
‘Yes. We forgot.’ Her machinery was so run down she had to admit to her own appalling domestic omission. ‘I should have remembered.’
‘We both should have.’
‘I am the one – if anybody.’ She didn’t insist beyond that, but Charles had accepted it at last; he too must be feeling tired.
When they flopped down on contiguous chairs in one of the side aisles, it was simultaneously and in silence. That it happened to be level with the grisly saint, permanently bleeding in her glass case, was not a matter for comment this morning.
It only occurred to Ivy she should have inquired about the toothache. ‘Hasn’t the swelling gone down, darling? Your jaw looks almost back to normal.’ In the circumstances her eyes could not give it attention enough.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The pain seems to have gone since we arrived. So much sanctity around!’ It was the kind of joke, flat to anybody else, they enjoyed when feeling tired or run-down.
‘Do you think Sicily made us imagine things? Of course I don’t mean your toothache – that, obviously, was real enough – but there were stages when I was prepared to think I might be developing the ugliest diseases. Or that my vision was distorting what it actually saw into all kinds of perverse forms. Sometimes they were beautiful perversions.’ She snorted, and pursed her lips in a way he associated with Ivy. ‘Perhaps I shall have my eyes checked – when we get back.’
‘If it puts your mind at rest. Your eyes, Ivy, were always the best part of you.’ Spoken by anybody else, not necessarily Aubrey Tyndall, but the kindest friend, it might have reminded her how plain she was.
They were silent after that, seated in a continuum, however short or protracted the rest of their life together might be, sorting discoloured snapshots, listening to uneven tape-recordings of each other’s voice, briefly touching hands to convey what the average deaf-and-dumb fail to express by other means, occasionally allowing the sheer weight of recollected experience to carry them out of the familiar shallows into the sunless, breathless depths – when they felt brave enough not to resist.
Till Charles Simpson asked, ‘Haven’t we sat here long enough?’ He had been taught to believe that inactivity is immoral.
‘Oh, have we? Yes. I suppose we ought to move on.’
They did, and suddenly she thought she could detect a limp.
‘Oh, darling, what is it?’
‘What? Nothing. My leg’s gone to sleep.’
So they plodded on, over the uneven marble. Nobody should accuse her of resorting to prayer; instead, she wished for the physical strength to shore him up if ever it became necessary, and more: the power to exorcize the phantasms each might otherwise continue half believing in.
‘Oh,’ she protested hopelessly.
As they came out on the steps the sunlight was making her stagger, and he put an arm under hers to support her.
The Cockatoos
DRESSED CASUAL FOR Sunday and his mission, Mr Goodenough ran at the path.
As soon as she opened, he started trying to freshen up his patter, which by now was on the stale side, ‘… the old door-knock for the Heart Foundation. Care to make a contribution?’ He touched the heart pinned to his shirt.
Half expecting Jehovah she frowned at first at the paper heart, then smiled, it was almost dreamy, for remembering the smell of raspberry tartlets aligned on greaseproof in one of the safe kitchens of childhood.
‘Oh yes,’ she said and sighed and went down a passage to fetch her purse.
She was a tall, thin, yellow-skinned woman. Like most people in the neighbourhood, Mrs Davoren and Mr Goodenough had lived there many years without addressing each other more than ritually and in the street; though nobody held anything against anybody else, excepting Figgis, who had been an undertaker, and was still a nark.
‘There,’ she said, handing the two-dollar bill, which was as much as you had reckoned Mrs Davoren would part with. ‘What with the price of things! Never seems to stop, does it?’
If his smile was more like a tightening of the skin, it was because he was writing a receipt on his knee. ‘What initial have we?’ he asked.
‘O’, she said. ‘Mrs O. Davoren.’
‘What about your old man? Think he’s good for a coupler bucks?’
‘I don’t really know. He mightn’t be here.’
‘Seen ’im come in. Went around the back.’
‘Oh, well, he could be here – at the back.’
‘Wouldn’t like to ask ’im, would you?’
Clyde Goodenough turned on the smile which made ladies overlook his lack of stature and his varicose veins. He liked to play the charmer with strangers; it was all above board, of course.
Something must have worked with Mrs Davoren: if not charm, an autumn sunlight, or the paper heart pinned to his shirt or, most likely, her own munificence.
She suddenly said, and it was the heart she was staring at, ‘Mr Davoren and I haven’t spoken for six – no, it must be seven years.’
You could have knocked Mr Goodenough over.
‘But there must be things you gotter say – on and off – like putting out the garbage or paying the milk.’
‘There are things – yes – and then we write them on a pad – which we keep for that purpose.’
In spite of it all, Mr Goodenough turned on the smile again. ‘What about pushing the pad at ’im for the Heart Foundation’s Door-Knock?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t!’ she said, her feet shifting on the gritty step. ‘No, I just couldn’t!’ Then, although everything seemed to show how she regretted her impulsiveness, Mrs Davoren confided still more rashly, ‘It began on account of the bo
odgie. He didn’t bother. When I went down to Kiama for Essie’s funeral – he let my boodgie – die.’
Gawd strewth! ‘Anyway, you’ve got a cockie now,’ Mr Goodenough consoled, as he handed the receipt and returned the ballpoint to his shirt pocket. ‘Looks pretty tame, too.’
‘A cockie?’ She couldn’t have looked more alarmed if he had mentioned a tiger.
‘That cockatoo in front – walking around in front of the tree.’
Mrs Davoren’s thin legs and long feet carried her by quick steps along the concrete as far as the corner.
‘A cockatoo!’ she breathed.
Under a gumtree, a fairly large one for a front yard in those parts, a cockatoo was striding and stamping. He looked angry, Mr Goodenough thought. The sulphur crest flicked open like a many-bladed pocketknife. Then he screeched, and opened his wings, and flew away across the park. It was an ugly, clumsy-looking action.
‘Ohhh!’ Mrs Davoren was moaning. ‘D’you think he’ll come back?’
‘Must have forgot to latch the cage door, did you?’
‘Oh, no! He’s wild. I never set eyes on him before. Though he could have belonged to someone, of course. How they’ll suffer when they find they’ve lost their cockatoo!’
Mr Goodenough made his getaway.
‘Do you think if I put out seed?’ Mrs Davoren was desperately calling for advice. ‘I read somewhere that sunflower seed …’
‘P’raps.’ Clyde Goodenough had reached the gate; one thing about the Door-Knock, it was giving him plenty to tell the wife.
Mrs Davoren went back along the concrete and was swallowed up inside her house.
Olive Davoren found consolation moving around through her dark house, unless she happened to hear Him moving around at the same time, in a different part; this was liable to give her heartburn. Dadda had left her comfortable: the house in a respectable street, and the interest in Friendly Loans, which Mr Armstrong the partner managed. The house was in liver brick, not so large as to attract thieves, but large enough to impress those who officially weren’t. The tuck-pointing was falling out. She must have it fixed. And woodwork painted, inside and out. But not yet. For the trials she would have to bear, at any rate in the interior, and perhaps for having to face Mick at moments when she least wanted to.
Dadda had been right, she wished she had listened. That man is you can’t say no good but a no-hoper you can’t blame him you can’t blame a man for the Irish in him. Hard to believe she had been so headstrong as a girl. Whether it was marriage or music, she was the one that knew. And ended up not scarcely daring to hold an opinion. Except on the one subject.
This evening she could hear Him (your Irishman) stalking through the rear part of the house. She heard the wire door twang as he stepped out into the back yard. He liked to pick the grubs off the fuchsias growing alongside the palings.
As for music, her violin had lain untouched these many years on the top shelf of her silky-oak-veneer wardrobe. Whenever she remembered she buried it deeper under the overflow of linen from the press.
She was artistic. Mumma took her to the Eisteddfods, fluffed out her skirt, prinked her hair before the performance. When they found it was the violin rather than recitation, Dadda sent her to the Con. Although she knew that she should love Bach, and did, she decided she would play the Bruch at her first concert with orchestra.
(None of it ever meant a thing to Mick, who liked to listen – in the early days – to his own silky Irish tenor, over the sink, or in front of friends.)
But she, she had her vocation, till Professor Mumberson took her through the baize door, not into the office, but outside in the tiled corridor, to tell her confidentially I have had to fail you Olive in the circumstances … What those circumstances were she hadn’t asked, because she couldn’t believe. It was Dadda who asked and got the answer, but never told, because he was a kind man. If he had a belief in money and what it would buy he didn’t succeed in buying Professor Mumberson. Dadda couldn’t believe in his own failure, just as she would never (till she married Mick) let herself believe in hers.
She took a few pupils at first, kids from the neighbourhood who acquired an accomplishment of sorts and got it cheap. Most of them hated it: sawing away, all elbows and fingers, in a front room overlooking the park. Her own demonstration of a theme often seemed to sound as deadly thin, its tone as yellow, as the grass around the araucarias.
Not that it mattered: those were war years, and everything could be blamed on the War. (Mrs Dulhunty fell downstairs and broke a hip the night of the Jap sub in the harbour.) It was only when the War was over that you realized the great excuse it had been.
Once while they were still speaking, after they became man and wife, He told her how the War had given him the best years of his life. A sergeant-pilot in the Middle East, he kept his medals in a tin box. He told her he would always hope to take part in another war.
She had just put the food in front of him. ‘It doesn’t say much for me, does it? I’m to blame, I suppose. Because somebody is always to blame.’ She would truly have liked to accept it, not out of spite either, if not from what you would call love; it was as simple as that.
He cocked his head to one side, and laughed at the plateful of overdone steak (it was how he liked it) and she couldn’t see his light-coloured eyes for the angle at which he was holding himself. She had wanted to catch sight of the eyes, of a slate blue, or more sort of periwinkle, as she worked out while they were still what people call ‘courting’, and herself still craving for love or hurt. At that time he was driving the interstate passenger buses. They met at Mildura, or it could have been Wagga, where he took over. She forgot what she ought to remember.
He was always telling her, still friendly, ‘What sort of head have you got? To forget!’ She never forgot the chill thrill of the slate – or periwinkle – eyes; she could remember whole sonatas she would never have the ability to play.
Olive Davoren sopped up her nose with a mauve Kleenex she found down her front. On account of the cockie – she remembered that – she tiptoed past the glass doors. Perhaps because of the brown Holland the light the blinds allowed from under them sat on the lino as solid as bars of yellow soap.
She twitched aside the blind from a bow-window, to see whether the cockatoo. There were two of them. Stamping and striding around the tree. Her heart was beating. Sometimes the birds got so angry, she could hear them screeching through the glass. She wouldn’t have dared open the window: she might have frightened the cockatoos. Who tore at the lawn with furious beaks, or calming down, composed their crests along their heads, eyes tender with a wisdom which, like most wisdom, threatened to become obscure or irrelevant.
Oh dear, Olive Davoren moaned beneath her breath, the sunflower seed is what I must remember …
And what would He have to say when he found she was coaxing cockatoos? Mick! Her scorn rose above her pallid hair; she had rinsed it Thursday, though to what purpose?
She had told him, ‘You let it die on purpose. Because I was gone. You knew I loved the bird. You was jealous – that was it!’ Her grief made her forget the grammar she had always been respectful of.
‘It was sick,’ he said. ‘Anyone could see. A person only had to look at its toenails.’
‘I should have cut his claws,’ she admitted. ‘But was afraid. He was too frail and small.’
‘Sick to anyone else.’
(She had asked to see what they had taken from her – you couldn’t have called it a child. She had even touched it. And wouldn’t ever let herself remember. He certainly wouldn’t be one to remind her of it.)
She must have cried at that point. She had called her boodgie Perk, but the bird hadn’t lived up to it. And died.
So they seemed agreed not to speak. At any rate, for the time being, for a few days after the burial. It probably surprised them both that their decision should have hardened into permanence. In her case, there was a wound left over, from which all the blood hadn’t flowed; some
remained to suppurate. When at the secret burial – she would have died if anyone had seen – she had cried everything out of her, she thought, at the roots of Mrs Herbert Stevens.
It was seven years since Perk died; before that they had it – more or less what people call ‘good’. Dadda took this Irishman into the business, but he couldn’t stick it. Had to lead an outdoor life. He was happiest on the buses, she guessed, meeting people and leaving it at that. Girls offered him lollies, girls he had never set eyes on. They called him ‘Mick’ soon as ever they found out. He had black hair and a strong neck, yarning into the mike about the historical places they were passing through. Yes, the buses suited Mick.
As soon as they were seated at the café table he complimented her on her hands. Well, she knew her hands were fine from seeing them at the violin, but it hurt rather than flattered hearing it from the Irishman; her throat tightened, and she could not look at him for some time. It didn’t seem to worry him: he was telling her about his boyhood at Lucan, how he used to sit, legs dangling, on a stone parapet, watching the water flow beneath the bridge of a Sunday.
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Was there nothing better to do?’
‘That’s what you do in Ireland.’ She couldn’t help noticing his teeth when he laughed. ‘Waitin’ for somethun to turn up!’
Beyond the window, under the tree, the two cockatoos had raised their crests, not the violent flicking of knives, but gentle almost as ladies’ fans. Their currants of eyes looked sweet and moist.
Somebody was coming from around the corner. It was Him, she saw. She made to open the window, by instinct, against her principle, to call out and warn Mick not to frighten the cockies.
But he was walking down the path, not exactly tiptoe, keeling over on the edges of his soles, looking in the opposite direction, as though he hadn’t seen, or didn’t want to let on that he had.
He passed by, and the cockatoos held their expression of sweet, black-eyed wisdom.
He had reached the gate, his blue suit shiny around the shoulders and the seat, that he must have been wearing for best ever since he left off being the sergeant-pilot. His body was that of a younger man, his hair greyish, such of it as you could see. For he was wearing the hat which made it look as though he was going farther than a few doors along, to Her.
The Cockatoos Page 25
