The Solid Mandala Page 11

  Presently Mrs Feinstein came, and he was relieved to see she expected him.

  “You must have wondered, Waldo,” she said, and smiled at the shutters she was prodding wider open, “whether we have not returned to Sydney.”

  There was nothing very extraordinary about Mrs Feinstein except that her r’s made you wonder, and some of her tenses might have been lifted out of a bad translation. She was old, he supposed, though how old he couldn’t have bothered calculating. Her skin looked soft, more the colour of skin from an unexposed part of her body. Her nose was of interest.

  “As a matter of fact,” said Mrs Feinstein, “we nearly postponed your little visit. The Lembergs and Leonard Saporta are down with a grippe.” She was going to be one of those, of irritating habit, who did not explain the persons they were mentioning. “Dulcie, too, has been sick with a cold. She has made herself so miserable. But wanted to enjoy your company.”

  He did not believe it. And even Mrs Feinstein’s smile wavered.

  What could he say to this woman, whose voice smelled of old plush, and sounded with slashed ’cello notes?

  Fortunately Dulcie came in. She was in embroidered white today, which made her arms look yellower.

  She said: “Hello,” and stood applying a ball of damp handkerchief to her inflamed nose.

  “Poor Dulcie!” moaned Mrs Feinstein in suffocating sympathy.

  “Oh, Mummy!” Dulcie protested from the other side of her cold. “I am not dead!”

  Mrs Feinstein looked as though she could have mourned for her daughter most professionally if she had been.

  Instead, she went, it soon sounded, to prepare and fetch food.

  “You won’t be interested in us,” said Dulcie, not particularly looking at Waldo. “Anyway, we’re not at all what you’d like us to be. We don’t read books, or only occasionally — or discuss interesting topics. My parents are boring.”

  Dulcie was certainly very different from what he had expected, but he supposed it was the cold having its effect, making her what Mother called “morbid”.

  “You can play the piano, can’t you?” he said.

  Because the piano was the dominant object in the room.

  “Oh,” she said, “I sit down at it. I work at it. I wanted very badly to play, I mean, to show off brilliantly in public. Until I realized it was not for me. I’m really,” she said, “a very mundane individual.”

  She paused as though the language she was using might sound too daring, too much like a dialogue she had rehearsed. It was from the dark rôle he had expected on the first occasion, when she hadn’t played it.

  “I’m sorry my cousins didn’t come,” she said, sitting down on the piano stool and picking at the ivory skin of the exposed keys. “They’re very entertaining. Dina can impersonate people,” she said, “killingly.”

  With the result that Waldo grew entranced. He would have liked to think that Dulcie sat in the pepper-pot tower keeping a journal, and that he would succeed eventually in reading it by stealth, after which she would find out and know that he knew.

  As though to confirm these possibilities Dulcie broke into the semblance of a piece on the piano, full of clotted notes, which she was creating purely for herself, it was implied, in her sultry, morbid, becolded condition.

  “Doesn’t Dulcie play nicely,” said Mrs Feinstein, coming in with a trayful of inherited-looking china and a strange black cake.

  “Oh, Mummy!” Dulcie protested.

  “She will never be a performer, though, and I am glad,” Mrs Feinstein said. “I have heard many of the greatest performers. Acchhh, yes!” After this expression of pain and reverence, she put the tray down, and turned quite skittish. “We have been working the planchette the other evening,” she said, looking at her daughter, “and Dulcie asked it what she will become. Afterwards. In life.”

  Mrs Feinstein glanced again, this time obviously for permission.

  “No,” said Dulcie. “It’s too uninteresting.”

  Her swollen nose aggravated her angry sullen look. She was really very ugly. The fall of slightly frizzy hair, not long enough to fulfil a graceful purpose, was tied behind her head by a cerise bow.

  “Will you take tea, Waldo?” asked Mrs Feinstein in her kind of translation.

  Waldo said all right he would. If it had not been for the dark and interesting cake, again he would have felt sorry he had come.

  “This is Mohntorte,” Mrs Feinstein said, and cut into the cake as if it had been flesh.

  “Poppy seeds,” Dulcie explained, brightening.

  “Is it an opiate?” Waldo heard his cracked voice.

  “No, but what a pity!” Dulcie came to life; her face began to lose its swollen look.

  Mrs Feinstein sucked her teeth, as though to defend her poppy cake, and at the same time a little drop of dribble appeared at one corner of her mouth.

  “If it were an opiate, then we should float off perhaps,” Dulcie said, in such a rich and gliding voice that Waldo looked at her, and seeing her eyes, imagined her dancing, her white dress swirling out from her in waves.

  “What ideas!” protested her mother, breathing heavily. “My husband is particularly fond of the Mohntorte,” Mrs Feinstein added, turning to consult a gold clock with a partly naked woman reclining beside it under a glass dome.

  Waldo bit into the black, tobacco-y cake. As he wasn’t sure how he felt about it, he wondered what to tell them if they asked. But they didn’t.

  “There is mint tea for Dulcie,” murmured Mrs Feinstein, pouring out.

  The scented steam added to the slightly dreamy atmosphere, of colds and poppies. Dulcie’s frizzy, animal hair had undergone a transformation. Now it flowed, particularly along one of her white-embroidered shoulders where it happened to have arranged itself. And there were her eyes. As she sipped her mint tea, they brimmed and shimmered through the steamy curtain, infused with some virtue he still had to understand. Waldo had no experience of girls, except girls giggling or turning away on trains, or girls leading boys up side streets, to perform acts he knew about at second hand from Johnnny Haynes. But Dulcie Feinstein seemed to fit into none of the known categories of girlhood. Perhaps in the end her eyes would give away their secret and all would be explained.

  They might have continued in this agreeable state of surmise and abstraction if Mr Feinstein hadn’t come in. At once the gauze was lifted. It was as though a game of billiards were taking place in the wrong room.

  “So this is Waldo Brown,” said Mr Feinstein. “How are we doing, Waldo?” Mr Feinstein asked.

  He spoke with a fairly strong Australian accent, to make up perhaps for anything foreign about him. His hand was cold, dry, and firm. His bald head looked as though it might have felt of billiard balls, the click of which was suggested not so much by the words against his teeth, as the ideas he kept on coming out with.

  “I have heard about you, Waldo,” Mr Feinstein clicked. “I have heard about your father. He is, they say, a fine man.”

  It surprised Waldo that anyone should have heard of somebody so unimportant as his father, let alone imagine him a “fine man”.

  “A man of independent ideas,” said Mr Feinstein. “The courage of his own convictions. No man today, of any intellectual honesty, could adopt any but a rationalist stand in view of politico-economic developments and the advances in scientific discovery.”

  Now it was Waldo who had begun to feel important, thanks to Mr Feinstein’s vocabulary and confidences, though he was frightened to think he mightn’t be able to live up to them.

  “Don’t you agree?” Mr Feinstein asked.

  Waldo made what he hoped might sound an acceptable noise. No one else, he saw, could help him. Mrs Feinstein sat smiling up at her husband. She had ceased to exist, except as a smile and a dress covered with little steel beads. Dulcie had sucked her lips in. She was looking down at something, probably a crumb, so that he was no longer able to see her eyes.

  “We Jews,” said Mr Feinstein, and he at
tached an almost visible weight to it, “we Jews are not always all that enlightened. But when we are, then we are. Take my old father — who founded the firm — another independent mind for you — my old father had seen the light before reaching these to-some-extent,” Mr Feinstein cleared his throat, “enlightened shores.”

  The lights cannoned off his head onto his daring, curved nose.

  Dulcie sighed. She was looking out, though respectfully, into the garden, where a gloom had gathered. She felt the need to dab her soggy nose.

  “You will notice I said ‘to-some-extent’ enlightened,” continued Mr Feinstein, performing a balancing trick on the tips of the upturned fingers of his right hand. “That is because I don’t like to be carried away into dishonest over-emphasis in either direction.”

  Bloody old bore, Waldo decided. If he continued half-listening it was only because of the impression of solidity Mr Feinstein created.

  “Take this little cap, Waldo,” said Mr Feinstein, taking a very strange one off the knob of a chair, “this capple. Perhaps you haven’t met one before. Well,” he said, “it is part of the big circus act. But if I wear it — which I do,” and he popped it gravely on his head, “it is not that I am allowing myself to be put through any reactionary hoop. It is because this capple happens to protect my nut from draughts.”

  Here Mr Feinstein flopped into one of the over-stuffed chairs. For a moment the cap seemed to have extinguished some of his conviction. Then he began to shine again, and laugh.

  “Eh?” he laughed. “There couldn’t be a more practical use!”

  And his wife laughed to keep him company.

  It was better when old Feinstein showed off some of his other possessions: a walking-stick made from rhinoceros hide, the signed photo of Sarah Bernhardt, a ship in a bottle, and the gold clock on the mantelpiece.

  “This nude lady,” he explained, and winked, “represents Reason keeping an eye on Time. Because of course Time becomes unbearable if you don’t approach it rationally.”

  Waldo looked at the clock, then realized how late it was. Supposing Feinsteins thought he was trying to cadge another meal?

  He began to grunt, and redden, and grind a foot into the roses on the carpet. At last he said he ought to go. They did not stop him.

  But suddenly Mrs Feinstein remembered. She was one who smiled almost habitually, it seemed. Mrs Feinstein smiled and said:

  “You will come again, Waldo. When Dulcie is recovered. And then you will see the garden.”

  “There’s nothing in the garden,” said Dulcie, “but old hydrangeas. And agapanthus.”

  “Ohhh!” roared her father. “When we pay a man to keep the beds filled with flowers?”

  Dulcie put her arm through her father’s, and automatically rested her head against his shoulder, but did not answer. Looking at them, Waldo grew guilty for his own foreignness.

  When normally you didn’t think about her, it was Mrs Feinstein who appeared to be trying to put him at his ease. Mrs Feinstein, hovering and smiling, had taken over from her steel dress.

  “There is one thing, Waldo,” she said, “I would like you to promise. Next time you come I want you to bring your brother.”

  “Arthur? But you don’t know,” he started quickly.

  “Oh yes, I do,” Mrs Feinstein answered in an everyday voice. “He has been here. He so enjoyed ringing the bell.”

  Waldo looked at Dulcie, who at least on that occasion had been inside practising the piano. Now she did not look up, except for a moment to say: “Good-bye,” when her eyes expressed nothing but the return of her cold. He could not be sure whether she had already made his brother’s acquaintance.

  At the prospect of Arthur’s introduction into his relationship with the Feinsteins, Waldo found he cherished that relationship more than he was prepared to admit. It was not the Feinsteins themselves who interested him particularly. Old Feinstein, with more or less his own parents’ ideas, was frankly a bore, but it was at least something to have become a target for the theories of somebody not his parent, and in another way Mrs Feinstein, of doubtful syntax, and skin with the peculiar uncovered look, confirmed his individual existence as comfortingly as cake. As for their daughter, he was not yet sure of Dulcie, of what part she was intended to play, or whether she despised and rejected him. But he had received her, jealously, expectantly, into his mind, and allowed her to drift there passively, along with the musty flavour of poppy seeds and the dense little tune on the walnut piano. The Feinsteins were too private an experience, then, to resist Arthur. Arthur would explode into, and perhaps shatter, something which could not be repaired.

  So Waldo continued remembering, when circumstances didn’t force him to forget. There were fortunately the exams ahead. He had to study; he was, and would remain weak in Maths. There was also the question of the Influential Client of the bank, whether he had spoken — by now it did not seem as though the latter realized how much depended on him. Waldo would wake at night in a sweat. Once he dreamed he was working on the railway as a fettler, and had not dared admit his true, his elective work. As he lay there beneath the creaking roof, at home, he thought how safe he would be returning from the books in the Library to write his own. Comparatively safe, anyway. He would still have to face Arthur and his own doubts.

  The third occasion on which he came in contact with the Feinsteins Waldo knew there was no escaping something which was being prepared. Mrs Feinstein’s formal note deliberately arranged it for the Saturday. So that you are able to introduce your brother to our circle, the writing ended underlined.

  Waldo wondered whether he dared pretend he had not received the letter. In that way time, naked but finally rational, might solve his problem.

  It was Arthur who decided which line they were to take.

  “Saturday,” he was telling Mother, “both of us are going up to Feinsteins’. Do you think there’ll be a big tea? Will there be other people? Or shall I have an opportunity of making conversation with Mrs Feinstein?”

  Waldo could not decide whether he was hearing what he heard.

  “What put it into your head,” he asked, “that the Feinsteins are expecting you?”

  “The letter,” Arthur said, “which you left lying on the dressing-table. I thought you meant me to read it, Waldo, seeing as she’s invited me.”

  Mother did not even correct the grammar, but told Arthur it would be in order for him to go without his coat provided he wore his silk shirt. That was good enough to stand up to any formality.

  As they walked up the hill to Feinsteins’ on the day, Waldo saw that Mother’s present of a silk shirt was much too large for Arthur. It ballooned out on his shoulders, a physical deformity to all the rest. The water, besides, was trickling down the red side-burns from Arthur’s attempts to reduce his staring hair.

  “I am looking forward to this opportunity,” he said, “of meeting Mrs Feinstein socially.”

  He was trembling by the time they reached “Mount Pleasant”, whereas it was Waldo who should have trembled, if resentment hadn’t tempered him.

  Phlox was fluttering in the beds, beside the steps which led from the road, by steep, yet clipped, grassy banks, to Feinsteins’ door.

  Arthur was gasping.

  “We came, all right!” he called from near the top.

  As Mr Feinstein appeared in the doorway.

  “You needn’t tell me!” The old boy laughed. “And on a Saturday!”

  In the hall he took Waldo aside.

  “You realize,” he said, “this is to bear out a theory I expounded. Do you know, Waldo, it is the Sabbath today? Yet here is your brother blowing like a flame, or spirit of enlightenment, through a Jewish household, with all the doors thrown open.”

  Waldo only half-listened. He was too agonized wondering what Arthur might get up to.

  “Shall we have a feast then Mr Feinstein?” Arthur called from somewhere behind.

  “Oh, yes! It will be all feast!” Mr Feinstein was shining with laughter.
“Once upon a time it was only for a family of Jews mumbling together behind closed doors.”

  “Shall we be your family?” Arthur was gibbering with hope and pleasure.

  “Naturally!” Mr Feinstein could not laugh enough; his stomach was laughing behind the gold chain, to say nothing of his illuminated cranium. “We expected nothing less.”

  Though when his wife appeared he withdrew, Waldo suspected, for good. It would be for Mrs Feinstein, rather, to produce the cakes of enlightenment.

  Mrs Feinstein was quite willing. Wearing the same dress as before, she had obviously prepared herself for understanding Arthur Brown. She stuck her most sympathetic smile on her flesh-coloured face.

  “You must tell me all about yourself, Arthur,” Mrs Feinstein said.

  Fortunately Arthur wasn’t taken in by that. He was too interested, in any case, in the room, the same big over-furnished living-room in which they had received Waldo alone on the previous occasion. Arthur was soon walking about looking at everything as though he must remember for ever.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “That is a prayer-cap,” Mrs Feinstein explained pleasantly, “which people used to wear in the days when they still have been superstitious.”

  “Well, that’s an idea,” Arthur said too thoughtfully. “I never saw anybody praying in a cap.”

  For a terrible moment Waldo thought he was going to put it on. He might have, if Dulcie hadn’t opened the door.

  “Did you ever pray in a cap?” Arthur asked as though he had met her before, and she was only, as it were, re-appearing.