‘It’s just that she’s left all her cleaning things in my room, for some time now, and there’s no sign of her. Oh, I’m sorry.’ Sorry because, in attempting to cross his legs, he had upended the box of handkerchiefs, which spread gracefully on the floor.
Mr Kidd hurried to right them.
‘Not to worry, not to worry! I do it all the time,’ he said, and stroked each handkerchief as he returned it to the box. They were all admirably smooth. ‘Aren’t they beautiful? I send them out, you see, to be laundered.’ He took evident pleasure in this; not only in the act of sending and laundering, but the words themselves.
The bird worked intimately with its seeds, as if mending them. Christopher watched it lift its bright head and say, ‘Violet!’
‘Pretty little thing, isn’t it?’ said Mr Kidd. ‘Belongs to my wife.’
Although Mr Kidd had mentioned, in the lounge, the birth of two children, Christopher had imagined the old man as a lifelong bachelor of regular habits. Now he must accommodate a wife. Actually, there was a neatness to Mr Kidd’s dress that suggested wifely attentions.
‘Or belonged to my wife, I should say.’
So now Christopher must think ‘widower’, a word that always flapped at him out of Dickens, with a faint scent of camphor and a long, black, slightly feminine coat.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said.
‘So was I, Chris, let me tell you. So was I. She brought this bird with her when we got married. I mean it — brought it with her to the wedding. It was like a, whaddya call it, a dowry. Like a ring on my finger, this bird.’
And he gestured toward a photograph propped against a box, a sepia arrangement of bride, groom, and, yes, bird, although ‘bird’ was suggested more by the courtly lift of the woman’s arm than the avian blur perched upon it.
‘Nineteen forty-eight,’ said Mr Kidd.
‘This is the same bird?’
‘It is,’ said Mr Kidd.
‘This bird is over sixty years old?’ said Christopher, too polite to be distinctly incredulous, but he itched to take up his phone and research the lifespan of parrots.
‘It’s older than that,’ said Mr Kidd. ‘I’ll tell you all about it sometime. It’s quite a story. You’ll be interested, Chris. This is right in your line.’
He sat cheerfully on the bed, his head cocked, his arms rigid and his fists on his knees. Christopher beheld his loneliness and said, ‘I’m all ears.’ This colloquialism struck him as false, as something Mr Kidd would say. But it was Christopher’s habit to fall into the speech patterns of those around him, and in this way he succumbed at last to the shabby sociability of the St George Hotel.
‘Well, well,’ said Mr Kidd, and he sprang from the bed toward the bird. It didn’t cease cracking its seed until he opened the cage door; then it stood quite still and said, ‘Hello! Hello!’
‘Hello, darling,’ said Mr Kidd. ‘You won’t come out?’
He offered his hand, but the bird remained motionless.
‘Suit yourself,’ he said, but just as he went to close the door, the bird flew in a bright flurry into the room, settling at first on top of the wardrobe, then on the basin, and finally on Christopher’s leg. Christopher sat rigid with anxiety — he realised he had never actually touched a bird — but it was placid enough, and he found he enjoyed the light weight of its claws on his knee.
‘I met my wife young,’ said Mr Kidd. ‘My parents were actors. Whole family, actually. I’m an insurance man myself — was. On the road as much as my parents were, just a different kettle of acting fish, really, if you think about it. I say actors but I don’t mean Shakespeare, I’m talking music hall stuff.
‘Well, Violet — my wife — was from another theatre family. Her mother was Gladys Nie — you won’t know her, but she was big news back in the day, she tap-danced in gold tights and sang like a bugle, but they called her the Blue Canary because she performed with a blue parrot on one shoulder. And she had this daughter we all loved, and that was Violet. I was playing piano for our act back then — we were the Kidds & Kids, my brothers on fiddle and horn, Dad sang, Mum sang, we all danced. And I just met this girl, Violet, and fell for her. There was one song she did with her mother, she came out in a white dress like this was The Nutcracker, and she and Gladys sang about a man they were both in love with — mother and daughter both in love with the same fellow! — who turned out to be a woman dressed as a man, and she ran off with the father.’
Mr Kidd, laughing, unleashed a bubble of watery snot; he attended to it without embarrassment, using one of his laundered handkerchiefs.
‘Now, Violet was only seventeen, so we had to wait, and we were touring all the time, not always to the same places — she’d be in Grafton and I’d be in Bendigo, say — and along comes the war and I’m called up, but they turned me down for service on account of my asthma and I end up running errands for the War Damage Commission, which is how I got into insurance.’
The bird shifted on Christopher’s knee, as if to remind Mr Kidd to get on with it.
‘So finally the war’s over, Vi’s twenty-one, and on our wedding day she shows up with her mother’s blue parrot on her arm. It’s a wedding present. She carries it down the aisle, it sits on her shoulder all through the wedding breakfast, and finally we’re alone in this little hotel in Brisbane and here’s this bird. And I say, “Look, Vi, I can’t do it with a bird in the room” — there was no cage, see, to cover over. So she put it in her suitcase, and I said, “Won’t it die? No air?” and she just shakes her head at me and that’s that, my mind wasn’t on the bird, let me tell you. What a night.
‘In the morning, Vi opens her suitcase and out comes the bird, right as rain. And I say, “Shouldn’t we feed it?” and she laughs at me and says, “No need.” Then she tells me the strangest thing. “This bird,” she says, “has been in my family since 1851.”’
Mr Kidd paused. The bird picked discreetly at its chest feathers. ‘Knock,’ it said matter-of-factly. Christopher listened for sounds that the maid might have returned to his room.
‘She says, “Bob, we’re married now and I’ll tell you everything. A Chinaman made this bird for my great-grandmother, and it isn’t real.”’
‘Not real?’ said Christopher, looking at the bird, which hopped on his knee.
Mr Kidd rubbed his hands together. ‘I told you I had a model for you, didn’t I?’ he said, and his pleasure in saying it seemed to make his eyes water a little; he touched them with his handkerchief.
‘Well, I was a newly married man, I was ready to agree to anything, but I couldn’t wrap my head around it — the thing looked so real, you can see for yourself, and here she was saying it was clockwork. An “automaton” is the word, but you’ll know that with your thesis.’
‘Yes,’ said Christopher. ‘There was a duck that ate and defecated, the Vaucanson duck, right in my time period.’
Mr Kidd nodded. ‘So I asked her to show me its insides, and she said no, taking it apart would break it forever and there was nothing else like it in the world. And my Violet said to me, “Bob, by god, if you ever doubt this bird I’ll walk out the door and never come back.” She’s saying this, mind, without a stitch on, and she looked so serious — what could I do? I made a vow more solemn, I reckon, than our marriage. Tell me you would’ve done any different, Chris, faced with a beautiful naked woman.’