The Solid Mandala Page 10

  And blushed because he thought perhaps she despised him for something, his clothes for instance, which he had forgotten about, or his high-school look.

  “Do you live here?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, and quickly: “No.”

  She came rasping out with what was intended as punctuating laughter.

  “That is,” she said, “we have a house here. And come here on and off. When Daddy feels he wants a change of air.”

  “Funny not having to live at Sarsaparilla,” he said, “and wanting to come here.”

  “I don’t see what’s funny about it.”

  He wasn’t going to tell her if she didn’t realize. It was too long, anyway. He couldn’t take an interest in her.

  She did not seem in any way put out. She began swinging her thin dark arms. She began humming a tune, leading a life of her own. It irritated him not to recognize the tune, but admittedly he had not yet fully decided whether to develop a talent for music, or whether it might queer his pitch in literature. In the meantime they payed for him to take a lesson once a week from Miss Olive Fischer of Barranugli. He used to stay on after school, gnawing at a trotter on the journey home. Between lessons, if he remembered, he aspired to Schubert on the terrible upright in the living-room.

  “What does your old man do?” It was time he condescended.

  Deliberately he used an expression he had always found repulsive. Now it had the right coarse sound, to show what he thought of this Dulcie, and Mrs Musto and her overcultivated garden.

  “He has a music house,” she said.

  “What,” he said, afraid to show his ignorance, “he doesn’t print it, does he?”

  Now he would have liked to look at her. He had always longed to acquire an intimate intellectual friend, with whom to exchange books, and letters written in the kind of literary style which went with such relationships. If ever it began, he would write two, or perhaps three, letters a day, to express his deepest thoughts. Then would come a pause of several days. That was the way, according to collections of correspondence, he knew it to be done.

  “I mean, he isn’t a publisher of music, is he?” Waldo asked, inhaling the moistening air of the garden.

  “No,” she said. “He sells it.”

  “What? Just music?”

  “Instruments as well,” she replied with a candid reserve.

  She might have been bored, or did not care fully to reveal her father’s unimportance and poverty.

  “Do you like him?” he asked suddenly.

  He really wanted to know.

  “Yes,” she said, rather high, breathy with what sounded like sincerity.

  At the same time she turned towards him and he noticed a dark shadow on her upper lip. It made him bite his own and contract his nostrils.

  “Of course I do,” she insisted, though in a questioning tone of voice.

  “I just wondered,” he mumbled.

  He wished she would not continue looking at him. She had the eyes, he saw, of certain dogs, and he had never cared for dogs. They were something to be feared, for their treachery, or else despised for stupidity.

  “I’d hate not to love my father,” Dulcie said. “I can’t imagine what it would feel like.”

  “I don’t love mine. I’m fond of him, I suppose, because he’s there. And you feel sorry for them.”

  He was getting some satisfaction out of telling, yes, he had never put much of it into words before, but it was — the truth. He looked at her to see whether she admired him for it.

  “You’re a queer sort of boy,” she said.

  At least that was better than being somebody nobody ever noticed. Dulcie was noticing him all right. Those silly, brown, watery eyes.

  (Later on when Waldo got to know Dulcie he realized that her brimming eyes were not necessarily a prelude to tears.)

  Now she said: “I don’t think I’d like to be you.”

  Quickly, and surprising to himself, he jerked a branch off one of Mrs Musto’s shrubs. And threw it away.

  “I wouldn’t want you to be,” he said, again surprisingly. “I don’t like myself all that much.”

  But gave up because he was stranding himself somewhere he had never been before. And anyway, he was not saying it for this girl; it was only that she was there, and provoked him. He didn’t believe all he said, ever.

  “You needn’t believe it if you don’t want to.”

  “I like to believe what I’m told.”

  “You’ll be caught, then. Sooner or later.”

  It was the first time he had thought about that too. She had begun to exhilarate him.

  “Don’t you think we ought to go back?” Dulcie suggested.

  He turned, to please her, only taking an oblique path.

  “Sometimes I think I’d like to become a great actor.” He had never thought it in his life. He had never seen a play, other than the one Arthur had acted on the front veranda. “Wouldn’t you like to act out great tragic parts?”

  “I’d never be able to. I’d get stage-fright,” Dulcie said.

  Either she was losing interest, or she didn’t believe in him.

  He would have to try another direction.

  “What I really want to do,” he said, “is write.”

  He heard himself make it sound like a natural function. Perhaps it was because, until now, he had shied away from expressing anything so personal and complicated. It would not be possible even to try with Mother or Dad. But in this girl he might be addressing the kind of complicated human being his reading told him did exist.

  “Oh,” she said, “I like to read. I’ve just finished The Mill on the Floss.”

  She was looking at him again.

  “Maggie Tulliver,” he said, to show.

  “Yes!” she said, her eyes brimming once more, so it couldn’t be with tears.

  “A very passionate girl, Maggie,” said Waldo Brown, making it sound particularly precise.

  Dulcie blushed, and withdrew the expression which had been growing on her face.

  “What you are going to write” she said, “do you think it will be novels?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” he said, “what,” he said, “what form it’ll take. Sometimes I think novels, sometimes plays. It might even be some kind of philosophical work.”

  He was leading Dulcie back now towards the other members of the party. With things becoming so difficult, he had had to abandon a plan for luring her deeper into the garden by carefully chosen, oblique ways. The prospect of listening to a dialogue between the young grazier and would-be barrister seemed momentarily preferable to his own efforts at invention. It would have been so much easier if he had been able to tell her: I want to, and am going to, write about myself.

  Some of those dressed in white were looking absently, though not all that absently, Waldo could see, in their direction. He suspected they were really wondering what he had been up to with a girl in pink alone in the garden.

  Somehow they involved him with Dulcie more deeply than before.

  “Don’t they make you want to vomit?”

  “Oh!” She made a little unhappy sound. “Some of them are probably quite nice. If you get to know them.”

  “I wouldn’t trust them.”

  Dulcie was silent, and he would have liked to think he had won her over, but was afraid he had simply fallen flat.

  “What’s your other name?” he asked.

  “Feinstein.”

  She pronounced it frankly, and in the foreign way, which made Dulcie Feinstein sound suddenly darker, exotic, though superficially there was nothing foreign about her. He put the tip of his tongue between his lips to stop the smile of pleasure coming to them. Not that his trend of thought wouldn’t have stopped it in due course.

  “My name’s Brown,” he said.

  “I know. I heard Mrs Musto when you came.”

  That made it sound worse.

  He said: “It’s the most horrible name anyone could ever have. Brown!” He
drew it out as though blaming the person responsible.

  “Probably most people hate the name they’ve got,” she said. “Take Dulcie.”

  “It’s not bad,” he said slowly. “It’s sort of exotic.”

  That was a word he had decided to adopt.

  “No, it isn’t. It’s awful, really. It means ‘sweet’. And Dulcie’s a plump girl with fair hair and blue eyes. A complexion.”

  She was so anxious to reveal the true state of affairs, get it over quickly, that she was licking the dark shadow on her upper lip between the rushed phrases.

  Arthur had been right, Waldo realized. Dulcie would probably grow a moustache.

  Although they had almost reached the group of guests there was one more question he wanted her to answer before he could feel satisfied.

  “Do you know my brother?” he asked.

  “No,” said Dulcie.

  Surprise had turned her reply into a query. But of course you could never tell. A spasm of malice made him want to shout: I bet you don’t, he’s only that ginger dill who serves you with the sugar down at Allwrights’!

  He was safe, though. You could always control your own impulses, if it was important enough to control them, and perhaps Dulcie Feinstein would continue in ignorance of his uncontrollable twin.

  Mrs Musto’s tennis party was going limp by now. She herself had the air of wanting to put up her feet and enjoy a boiled egg on a tray. So she was giving her last commands.

  “Stubbens will run down to the station with those of yer who aren’t motorin’.”

  Of course most of them were motoring. They were of the very best, though none could compete with Fairy Plain and Self-Raising Flour.

  While the motorists were disguising themselves their hostess approached Waldo as though to conspire with him.

  “You,” she said, clearing her throat, because, he was sure, she had forgotten his name, “wouldn’t mind, I know, walking across with the Feinstein girl. It’s not very far out of yer way.”

  Since their return from the garden Dulcie had disappeared, and he rather hoped he had lost her. He had had enough of a good thing. Nor did he feel he might impress her more on that occasion. But here she was, coming out of the house, smoother than before, and in the lesser light, her dress a deepening coconut ice. Carefully she looked away, to show she did not understand what was being arranged.

  “That will be nice!” she said at once, however, and so brightly it could have meant more.

  Her hitherto moony brown eyes could also flash, he observed.

  Yet as soon as Mrs Musto had dismissed them, he and Dulcie began to behave mechanically. While the charge of the motor brigade suggested that the others were exercising their own free will, the two on foot could only accept their portion of dust. They looked at their fellow guests as though they had never seen them before, nor did the motorists attempt to wave, the acquaintanceship was so obviously closed.

  Dulcie walked without giving much thought to grace.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” she asked. “I am! I’m looking forward to a good tuck-in. All that stuff at Mrs Musto’s, I hardly dared touch a thing!”

  “Food isn’t so important,” said Waldo.

  “Mmmmm,” she answered on a high note.

  He was afraid his remark hadn’t sounded too effective, so he had to try to improve on it.

  “We could exist on a handful of dried dates if we were Arabs.”

  “But we’re not. And aren’t you a gloomy old thing!” Dulcie replied.

  Was she laughing at him?

  “You needn’t tell me we’re not Arabs,” he said, even surlier. “But we might be before we’re finished.”

  “I shan’t. I shall work. You can always live simply, but well, if you want to.”

  It sounded so plain and sane his throat contracted as it did sometimes on his going into the kitchen and smelling an ovenful of Arthur’s bread. He was glad he didn’t have to answer Dulcie.

  Objects were growing fuzzy in the fading light, a dark green to greenish black. Dust was whiter for the shadows. The silence might have lain heavy, but Dulcie didn’t give it a chance.

  She almost burst.

  “You know what — oh, I shouldn’t!” she giggled.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Just before we left,” she said, quieter, looking behind her, “I went up to the bathroom. Beautiful bathroom — all blue and white — a big bowl of powder … ”

  “Go on!” he said. “Sure it wasn’t flour?”

  She nearly split.

  “Aren’t you awful!” she giggled. “No, though. This is what tickled me.” She could hardly say what she had to. “There was a big bottle of scent, and you know what it was called — l’Amour de Paris!”

  Dulcie Feinstein was enjoying her good giggle, and his rather tinny laughter was genuine enough, except that it disguised a certain envy and admiration. She had pronounced the French words in a way which sounded real French.

  “There was a pierrot” — Dulcie was busting herself — “sitting on the moon!”

  She dabbed and mopped.

  “On the bottle of scent!” She shrieked.

  It was strange, when he had decided she should be a serious-minded girl, that she should show this other frivolous side.

  “Oh dear!” Dulcie moaned.

  But she could not quite destroy his vision, to which the dusky trees pandered with broken hints.

  “Do you learn foreign languages?” he asked, with a casualness to hide his interest.

  “We have to,” she said. “One of the grandmothers was, well, not exactly French, but lived for some years in France.”

  He might have caught her off her guard.

  “And German?”

  “Daddy,” she said soberly, “is fluent in German.”

  Sobriety descended quite. And very soon they were approaching what could be the lit house. It was less impressive than Mrs Musto’s, far less, but neat and solid, a villa more suited to a town, trimly finished, painted up. There was a pepper-pot tower at one side.

  “Is that your room?” he asked. “You could write up there.”

  “But I couldn’t.”

  “Letters?”

  “I’m a terrible correspondent. The girls at school are always complaining.”

  An elderly gentleman of bald head was putting back his watch and looking out from a lower room, trailing a newspaper after him. Those outside felt safe, knowing the darkness favoured them.

  A lady was bringing in a huge tureen.

  “Anyway, there’s soup,” Waldo said.

  “Yes,” replied Dulcie in her most practical voice. “Mummy lives to make us eat.”

  He wished she would go inside because departures always embarrassed him.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Oh, Lord.

  “And don’t remember the worst things about me.” Again she was giggling, splitting, bursting. “That pierrot on the moon!”

  She just wouldn’t go. And he stood rooted in the dust.

  Suddenly she stopped. “Your brother,” she said, calm and serious, “is he anything like you? Is he older?”

  “No,” he said.

  After that she was saying good-night and running up some steps set in a grass bank.

  He went away quickly, and decided before reaching home he would think no more about Dulcie Feinstein, whom he didn’t understand in any case. On the whole, though he would only have confessed it to himself, he did not understand people, except those he created by his own imagining. If it hadn’t been for his own visions he might have felt desperate.

  “Did you enjoy yourself?” Mother asked.

  “Oh, all right.”

  “Meet anyone interesting?”

  “A mob of kids.”

  Nothing annoyed their mother more than what she called a “sloppy Australian vocabulary.” She was wearing her best blue dress for his return.

  “Any girls?” Arthur asked.

  “Oh, yes!”

&nb
sp; He was too tired.

  After that Waldo became so thoroughly occupied he hadn’t the time to give thought to Dulcie Feinstein. In any case, he convinced himself Dulcie was de trop. That was one of several phrases he had picked up recently as weapons of defence. He would have liked to use this one on Dulcie, with her Frenchy, foreign airs, if he had been certain how it ought to be pronounced.

  Those last terms at Barranugli High he grew superior, even in his attitude to somebody like Johnny Haynes. Dad was going to speak to a client of the bank whose cousin or something was librarian of Sydney Municipal Library. Dad thought there was every possibility, if he asked, and Waldo passed well, that the Library would take him on. It excited Waldo. The only drawback was that the plan might force him into a relationship with his father unconvincing to himself and everybody else.

  Thought of all this made him less aggressive. And he studied. He studied in the most obvious place — the train.

  Then, the holidays before the end, his parents received a note from Dulcie Feinstein’s mother, written in a black, peculiarly angular, foreign hand, suggesting that their boy Waldo should visit them on the Friday to spend a few hours with her daughter and one or two other young friends.

  Waldo noticed Mrs Feinstein had made a point of not including Arthur, though perhaps that was natural, as Dulcie had never met him, and if her mother had, she would not have connected him with the kind of person Dulcie had described meeting at tennis.

  Arthur remarked: “Those Feinsteins have a neat place. At the back there’s a brass bell which they keep polished up — like a ship’s bell I think it is — which she told me she rings when she wants to bring the others in.”

  “Who rings?” asked Waldo.

  “Mrs Feinstein. Dulcie’s always practising the piano. She plays the piano.”

  “You went there?” asked Waldo.

  “To deliver the order.”

  How much more Arthur might have told, Waldo would have been interested to hear.

  But all Arthur would say was: “Feinsteins are some of the quickest payers. They’re fine people.”

  He had no time for more than to brush the loose hair and dandruff off his shoulders, as Mother had taught him, and leave for work. Otherwise he would have been late at the store.

  The afternoon Waldo had to go to Feinsteins’ he arrived late to show he wasn’t all that keen on coming. Then he got the wind up wondering whether he was expected at all, there was such a withdrawn air about the white-and-green-painted villa. The shutters were not exactly closed, but they might have been. In his uncertainty he went round to the side rather than to the front or the back. That way he had a good look into a large, deserted, but lived-in room, in which an upright piano was more noticeable than the quantities of dark furniture arranged, practically clamped, around it. The piano was obviously Dulcie’s, but he could not connect her with the furniture, the dust-coloured tapestry of which was straining to hold the stuffing down. Many people, however, had no connexion with their furniture.