The Solid Mandala Page 12

  “It’s different with women,” Dulcie answered.

  At least from that moment Waldo knew that Dulcie was seeing Arthur for the first time. She was so obviously upset. She tried to make it look as though the whole idea of prayer-caps, and superstition generally, repelled her, whereas it was the lumpy look of Arthur Brown slobbering with imbecile excitement. Although Waldo was personally distressed that she should react in this way to his brother, he was relieved to find she was sincere.

  “Now I shall be able to remember you in your room, Dulcie, now that I have seen your face,” Arthur was saying, or gobbling, “even if you never want to see me again.”

  At this Mrs Feinstein began to protest by noises.

  “Why should I — ” Dulcie gave a high, unexpected laugh “ — not want?”

  She ended awkwardly in mid-air.

  Because Arthur had gone up too close to her, the way he would with people in whom he was interested, to remember also by touch, it seemed.

  “Here, Arthur,” Waldo was beginning to say, to interrupt, to drag him off.

  But Mrs Feinstein’s smile continued to find the situation reasonable.

  “Because we mightn’t have enough to say to each other,” Arthur said, looking too closely at Dulcie, into her eyes. “I mean, people can say and say, by the yard, but they don’t always seem to have learnt the same words.”

  Then Dulcie appeared to be making a great effort.

  “I think, Arthur,” she said, “you may be able to tell me a lot I shall want to hear. We may be able to teach,” she said, “to teach each other things.”

  “Will you,” Arthur shouted, seizing the opportunity, “teach me the piano? Will you? Can we start now?”

  “Oh, yes!” Dulcie said, and laughed with the greatest pleasure and relief.

  Waldo knew he must get out quickly. Find the dunny. As he went barging out he heard the discords of music spattering out of the upright piano under Arthur’s hands. He knew how Arthur’s not quite controlled hands were behaving.

  Behind him now, all was music of a kind, and laughter, as he blundered down the passage. He heard at last, against the doors he opened, Mrs Feinstein following him.

  “I want,” he mumbled foolishly.

  “You want the bath-room?” Mrs Feinstein asked most sympathetically.

  “No,” he said, in what he heard was his surliest voice. “The other.”

  “Here,” she said, opening a door.

  So that he did not have to go any farther, out through any grass, looking for a dunny. Here was a real porcelain lavatory with mahogany seat, on which he sat down at once and gave way to the diarrhoea which had been threatening him.

  And now the music was flowing from unseen hands — they could only have been Dulcie Feinstein’s — though under Arthur’s influence, he feared. Waldo wished he could have conceived a poem. He had not yet, but would — it was something he had kept even from himself. If it would only come shooting out with the urgency of shit and music. He rocked with the spasms of his physical distress, and the strange drunkenness which the unbridled music, muffled by perhaps several doors, provoked in him. Was Dulcie playing an étude? He hoped it was an étude. He hoped against hope the Influential Client would soon speak. Then he would no walk up the hill to Feinsteins’, and present himself, and say: Here I am, an intellectual, working at Sydney Municipal Library — kindness is not enough, you must respect, not my genius exactly, but at least my Australian-literary ambitions.

  When Waldo returned at last he was emptied out. He had washed his face, and might have felt better if he hadn’t heard a sound of tea-spoons somewhere, from kitchen or pantry. Which meant that Mrs Feinstein was getting the tea. Which meant that Arthur was alone with Dulcie.

  The music had stopped now.

  As he hurried he was not afraid Arthur would behave in any way violently, oh no, it was rather the violence of what his twin might say.

  Entering the room, Waldo made himself appear, he imagined, dry and correct. At least they would not see how he felt. Only he would know.

  Arthur and Dulcie were sitting on the twin music-stool which held the music underneath. They were turned so that they faced each other. Their foreheads appeared almost to be touching.

  “What, a peerrot sitting on the moon? On the bottle?”

  “A pierrot painted on the bottle,” Dulcie confirmed.

  Arthur was entranced by what he was hearing and seeing, and Dulcie had changed. When he came into the room Waldo felt for the first time this is Dulcie being herself. You couldn’t say she was exactly ugly. Or perhaps he was just used to her by now.

  “You are right,” she was saying, in reply to some remark of Arthur’s, though speaking rather to herself. “Amour is not the same as love. Amour has a different shape — a different meaning.”

  Waldo was so horrified he might have expressed his feelings, but fortunately Mrs Feinstein brought the tea things, and at the same time rain was beginning.

  “Oh dear, I do hate thunder!” Mrs Feinstein admitted, and the things on the tray rattled. “It makes me so afraid! Shut the window, Dulcie, do, please! They say lightning strikes through open windows.”

  “We shan’t be able to breathe,” said Dulcie, but did as she was told.

  “Arthur and I shall exchange anecdotes to drown the thunder,” Mrs Feinstein promised.

  “Is this real cinnamon toast?” Arthur asked, helping himself to two or three fingers and stuffing them buttery into his mouth.

  He looked perfectly happy, sitting in a chair shaped like a toast-rack, while Mrs Feinstein told about her aunt Madame Hochapfel who had sometimes been mistaken for the Empress Eugénie, and whose salon used to be frequented by people of artistic inclinations.

  “Every Sunday. Only a minor salon,” Mrs Feinstein added out of modesty.

  “But to be in business in a small way is better than not being in it at all,” Arthur said through his mouthful of toast. “I mean, to have your own. To be independent.”

  Mrs Feinstein agreed that her aunt Madame Hochapfel had kept an independent salon.

  Dulcie apparently had her thoughts. Waldo couldn’t sink into his. He felt as brittle as a dry sponge. Other people had their anecdotes, or the obvious riches of their thoughts. The big drops of rain and fleshy leaves plastering the windows accentuated his unfortunate drought, his embarrassing superficiality.

  Yet he knew the theory of it all. It was only a question of time. It was the mean time which weighed so heavily. It made the palms of his hands sweat.

  “And Russia.” Mrs Feinstein sighed. “I can only remember the pine forests.”

  “That’s something,” said Arthur. “I bet they smelled.”

  Mrs Feinstein breathed deep.

  “On a visit when I have been a litde girl. To another branch. With another aunt — Signora Terni of Milan.”

  The branch of a shrub, or perhaps an unpruned hydrangea, was scratching the window. They realized the rain was over. Mrs Feinstein put on her skittish act. Her private-flesh-coloured face appeared less grey.

  “Arthur,” she decided, “will help me clear the things.”

  So Waldo saw the garden, as he had been promised, with Dulcie, because she had him on her hands. The leaves were still dripping with moisture. An air of cold showers above had more or less dislodged the green gloom from underneath.

  “These are the hydrangeas you told about,” said Waldo, although they did not interest him at all.

  “Yes,” said Dulcie, dully. “And the agapanthus.”

  From this occasion he would remember her breaking up into the crumbly fragments of greeny-white hydrangeas. Her dress, at any rate. Because she herself was dark brown, and ugly.

  “Arthur and Mummy are enjoying themselves immensely,” she said. “I think it will take me some time to understand Arthur.”

  “What is there to understand?” Waldo tried not to shout.

  His voice sounded horribly dry and cracked under the dripping hydrangeas.

  �
��Though for that matter,” she said, “I don’t understand myself.”

  She had come out in a pimple on one side of her large nose. Which made the dog-silliness of her eyes look more obscene.

  He wished he had been taught to do or say something he hadn’t been. He could blame his parents, of course. But it didn’t help matters.

  And soon he and Arthur were walking down the steps, between the painted phlox, out of this Feinstein world which in the end had no connexion with them. However sickening and personal the longing, however convincing Madame Hochapfel’s features at the moment of introduction, however close the wet mops of white hydrangeas, parting ridiculed them.

  Arthur at least knew what to say.

  “Good-bye,” he was trumpeting. “I had a great time. I’ll come back, Dulcie, for the rest of the piano lessons. I’m not going to worry about the theory. I’m going to begin with one of those frilly pieces.”

  They were walking down the red concrete steps, which had been painted shiny to please Mr Feinstein no doubt.

  Arthur called back then, as though he had been giving it thought: “I’ll have to come back anyway, to tell you what I’ve worked out.”

  Waldo was furious, who in the end had not known how to say a thing. Of course those who are sensitive don’t.

  “What do you mean,” he began choking, after they had gone some way, “what you have worked out?”

  “Well,” said Arthur, “you’ve got to work out something if you’re not happy.”

  “But you’re happy, Dulcie’s happy! It would only be asking for sympathy to say you weren’t.”

  “She mightn’t be,” Arthur said.

  He wouldn’t say any more. He started snorting, and grunting, and finally picking his nose for comfort.

  They got home.

  And then there were the exams. Waldo passed with Flying Colours, even managed to scrape through Maths — where Johnny Haynes failed.

  Then there was the letter summoning to the interview. (What price the Feinsteins now?) It turned out Waldo was accepted by Sydney Municipal Library on the strength of his scholastic career at Barranugli High, his suitable appearance — and a favour asked.

  In the end the Influential Client forgot to speak. It was Mrs Musto who got Waldo the job, through Alderman Caldicott, son of her former gardener. Then Mrs Musto retired, to her house, her shrubs, and her servants. She did not venture very far into other people’s lives, because she had been bitten once, no, twice, in the course of human relations, and did not want to risk her hand again.

  The preliminaries to dying, to what in the end is the simplest act of all, were so endlessly complicated.

  “Mrs Allwright used to say,” said Arthur, “when she did her block at me, when she couldn’t find the things she’d put away, or had given somebody the wrong change, she used to say: ‘I sometimes wish you’d die, Arthur Brown. Then Mr Allwright would come to his senses and realize how we’ve been wasting our time.’”

  Arthur would assume the voices of those who were addressing him. So that now on the unmade pavement on the Barranugli Road the mother with kiddy in stroller turned round to wonder whatever the old nut could be going on about. One old nut, or two? It was a shame to allow them their freedom. Somebody else always payed the price.

  “But it was Mr Allwright who died,” Arthur continued. “Lacing up his boots. Mrs Allwright took up Christian Science. She’d do anything not to wake up and find she was dead.”

  “You don’t wake up,” Waldo reminded.

  He wouldn’t listen. Only it was not possible not to listen.

  “Eh? “asked Arthur.

  Though of course he had heard. Arthur always did hear, even with traffic whizzing or lurching along the Barranugli Road.

  “Wonder if Mrs Allwright died. That’s the worst of it when people leave the district. Sometimes their relatives forget, or don’t know how to put the notice in the column. Or perhaps Mrs Allwright didn’t die. By rights, by logic — wouldn’t you say? — Christian Scientists don’t.”

  “Death, thank God” — Waldo caught himself, “comes to everyone.”

  Or almost everyone.

  He wouldn’t listen. He began to count, to name the passing cars: the Chev the Renault the Holden two more three Holdens the Morris Minor the Bentley — that was Mr Hardwick who’d done a deal with the Council over Anglesey Estate only it couldn’t be proved. Nobody would have known that Waldo Brown, so unmechanical, could name the cars. Perhaps even Arthur hadn’t found out. It was Waldo’s secret vice.

  Arthur who found out everything caused his brother to turn round, to test his face. Arthur, as Waldo dreaded, knew, and was smiling.

  “What is it?”

  “I waved at the Holden,” Arthur smiled, “and the lady waved back.”

  Oh well. Arthur was not infallible. So Waldo Brown decided to indulge his other secret vice. If Arthur died. It was not impossible — that dead weight on the left hand. Waldo Brown dragged quicker, if not to effect, to think. He would do how was it he would blow everything the first editions of Thomas Hardy the whole Everyman Library quite a curiosity nowadays Mother’s spoons with crests on them the emerald ring the Hon Cousin Molly Thourault left in fact one big bonfire the land the developers were after if Anglesey Estate then why not Browns’ place Terminus Road see an alderman no alderman was so dishonest you couldn’t teach him a point or two approach a minister if necessary the Minister for Local Govt if only Mrs Musto were alive and say it is imperative imperative was the word that W. Brown of honourable service should end in a blaze of last years.

  They were so dry Waldo had to lick his lips. He hoped he wouldn’t give himself a heart. His oilskin sounded slithery with speed.

  If it was immoral, then he was immoral. Had been, he supposed, for many years. Perhaps always. The million times he had buried Arthur. But only now, or recently, had he perfected his itinerary of islands. He would visit islands first, because they symbolized, if only symbolized, what he craved. Of course he knew about the other things too, the bars and Americans. He would know how to sit in bars and drink, what was it, Pernod Fils, and stick his hand up under the raffia skirt of some lovely lousy brownskinned poster-girl complete with ukulele. And get the pox, and not do anything about it, what was the point at his age, in spite of all the modern drugs.

  The Chev the Holden the Citroen quite neat the Holden two six seventeen Holdens one Fiat-2500 flash tripe-hounds. The traffic he was certain was sending his temperature up.

  Of course, in spite of his intellectual tastes and creative gift, it was the hotels he was craving for. Always had been. He had started long ago writing for the brochures to have them waiting Poste Restante G.P.O. Tore them up after reading and threw them out of the train window before reaching Barranugli. The women would be waiting in the foyers of the posh luxury hotels held down by plush buttons but waiting in their shingled hair their long cigarette-holders gently balanced. Clara Bow — or was it Marilyn Monroe? And Mrs Clare Booth Luce and Mary Macarthy, he wouldn’t overlook the intellectuals. To make conversation with the more established intellectual women. Though women, even Dulcie would suddenly tire him, not so much Mary Macarthy, who was more what you would call a Force. Of course though it was the beds he was really looking forward to, the fine linen, or perhaps sometimes silk with monograms, to feel his long limbs had never aged, and now at last, without Arthur, able to lead a celibate life. Spiritually celibate.

  Waldo blushed, and worked his adam’s apple. Down. Over. Something.

  One thing, he decided, he would never do. He wouldn’t touch a penny of Arthur’s savings, out of delicacy, because he had willed Arthur dead.

  “There,” he said, looking round.

  “What?”

  “That’s the worst hill done with. So you can stop moaning now.”

  “I’m not moaning. I’ve settled down to enjoy a healthful walk.”

  So faint normally it could have been a refraction from the memory of Arthur’s carrot hair, the bluish tinge
in Arthur’s skin appeared just that much deeper than when they started out, that morning, on a purpose. Abnormally blue.

  No, he would not touch a penny of Arthur’s wretched account. He would make it over to that skinny Jew boy Arthur Saporta, with brown flannel patches round his eyes. Whatever Arthur Saporta meant. Beyond the fact that he had his mother Dulcie Feinstein’s eyes.

  If Arthur Brown died.

  But it finally seemed improbable, on that morning or ever, which meant the alternative. Waldo scuttled at the thought. He was still young enough not to believe in his own death. He kicked the nearest of the blue dogs — Scruffy it was — on deliberate purpose.

  “You always hated Scruffy!” Arthur moaned. “Because he was mine.”

  Waldo could not feel he owned anything — certainly not Runt his dog — perhaps still his box of manuscripts clippings letters of appreciation — perhaps still Arthur also — if Waldo Brown Terminus Road Sarsaparilla no flowers please ever since the accident he had kept it legibly written out and easy to find if he were inadvertently inadvertently was the word to die.

  Paper flowers on the other hand didn’t. So he must make sure of his boxful of papers. Sometimes going through the manuscripts the clippings the letters of appreciation he would feel them still warm with the reason which had brought them into existence. The thoughts. Even if he had not produced what you might call a substantial body of work the fragments and notebooks were still alive with private thought. The minds of others appropriating paring hacking rubbing with a sandpaper of lies impairing invariably ossified what had been tenuously personal. Was he vain to have lost faith in public sculpture? Unlike some. Take Goethe, Goethe must have worn a track through the carpet leaping at his notebooks to perpetuate he thought a Great Thought. The vanity was that men believed their thought remained theirs once turned over to the public. All those goggle-eyed women reverent for their own reverence trailing past a sculpture of poetry and epigrams, and earnest young people fingering IMPROVING ON because it is ordained that great works of art should be exposed, becoming what they were never intended for: done-by-the-public sculpture.