The Solid Mandala Page 13

  So Waldo raced the traffic up the Barranugli Road.

  “Hey, steady on!” Arthur called bumpily. “What are you up to? What’s the point?”

  As Waldo raced the traffic towards Sarsaparilla, unfortunately some of it was going in the wrong direction.

  But he would arrive, and after they had struggled with that gate, and pushed the grass aside with their chests, because by now in places you might have said they were living under grass, he would go as straight as possible in, and collect the box from on top of the wardrobe, that old David Jones dress box in which Mother had kept the little broken fan and some important blue dress, only in the earlier style, with a pattern of rust where the hooks and eyes had eaten in. The D.J. box was, or had been, the ideal receptacle for papers of a private nature. He had even printed PRIVATE on it, not that it ever helped much. But now he would make it actually his, all those warm thrilled and still thrilling words falling from their creator’s hands into the pit at the bottom of the orchard into ash smouldering brittly palpitating with private thoughts. Because fire is the only privacy the thoughts of great men can expect. Allow them to be turned into sculpture and you are lost.

  The wind helped him, and to a certain extent the onward traffic. Arthur was against him of course, as was the opposite stream. But they did arrive at last, on the ramparts of Sarsaparilla, erected laboriously brick by brick, to withstand some hostile thing, by those who had not yet died: the infallible ones with professions and offspring. It was pathetic to think about them. Perhaps like Goethe he was vain, but if small minds could be so obsessed by illusions of permanence, how much less convincing was his own illusion of death?

  So Waldo slowed or was slowed down. It is ridiculous, he panted, to think I may pop off, today, or tomorrow, why, I am good for another twenty years, taking reasonable care, keeping off salt, animal fats, potatoes, and white bread.

  “What’s up?” Arthur asked. “Don’t tell me you’re running out of energy?”

  Because Waldo was standing. Still.

  “No,” he said, so slow. “I was looking at that rose.”

  He was too, on another level.

  “A good specimen of a rose. I like a rose, a white rose,” Arthur said.

  It was not its beauty, its whiteness, its perfection, which interested Waldo, it was the solidity of it. Only apparent, however. If he had come closer and alone, he might have torn the rose to show he was that much stronger. Roseflesh on occasions had made him shiver. How much less exposed to destruction was the form of youth, even with time and memory working against it.

  Waldo liked that. It made him look rather sly. Now they would go home, and while Arthur was occupied with some bungling business of his own, he would take down the private box, he would take out the current notebook. Always taking, taking renews, give too much and the recipient expects all. He liked that, he would write it down. For his PRIVATE pleasure. And the bit about form of youth, time and memory. In that way he would continue living. In the notebooks. In his secret mind. In spite of Arthur. And Goethe.

  Youth is the only permanent state of mind. There was no stage in his life when he hadn’t felt young — he insisted — except sometimes as a little boy. If growing old is to become increasingly aware, as a little boy his premature awareness irritated his elders to the point of slapping. So there are, in fact, no compartments, unless in the world of vegetables.

  Today I am thirty, he had calculated, looking at himself in the glass of the deal dressing-table he shared with Arthur, his brushes and bottles to the right, Arthur’s to the left, as he insisted. His face trembled down one side as he tried to accept the incredible. Sometimes he wondered whether anybody realised there was still the little boy inside him, beside his other self, looking out. His eyes, like his mother’s, were blue, though his were watered down. It always gave him some satisfaction to acknowledge blue eyes in the street, especially those of women. He made them conspirators. Or members of a select club. Though naturally he would never have informed them. (Brown eyes he blackballed automatically. Ugh!)

  It was a penetrating voyage into the glass of the dressing-table (deal for the boys). According to mood, he might take his pince-nez off, blurring the image, allowing his imagination to play amongst the hydrangeas, or alternately he would clip the lenses firmly on, and refuse himself any avenues of escape from that intellectual ruthlessness he knew himself to possess. (He had once described the geography of his face in seven foolscap pages.) The optician’s formula made his eyes appear paler, his chin less pronounced, his moustache patchier under the brilliantine, but hadn’t the whole botched mess — he was prepared to face it — helped give birth to that proven sensibility?

  On his thirtieth birthday he smiled at himself in reflection, for the strangeness of it. Then he shuffled the expanding arm-bands up his sleeves, put on his workday coat, and went into the kitchen where she was getting his breakfast for him.

  “It’s odd to think I’m thirty,” he said, forestalling the probable question of how he felt about it.

  He stood looking down at the pair of eggs, their ruffles edged with a brown frizz.

  “I think, dear, you were born thirty,” she said.

  In her cool voice. Allowing him her cool kiss. She, if anybody, should have known.

  His mother was wearing the old blue dressing-gown with the safety-pin which failed to disguise the financial truth or her operation. Since Dad died in 1922 she had been dependent on him. (Arthur contributed something.)

  Some people would have considered his — their mother, dowdy. He could only think of her as timeless, actually so, because she was not taken in by his thirtieth birthday. She, too, realized there were no compartments. Thirty or seventeen.

  At seventeen — on his seventeenth birthday as it turned out — he had presented himself at Sydney Municipal Library, to take up the position he got thanks to Fairy Flour. So it had been hinted. Only the malicious could have ignored the true state of affairs: a spotty youth wheeling trollies of books between the stacks. Neither light nor air played much part in the sinecure his patroness had bought him. Sometimes the cages were jammed so full, his fellow-suffering and cracking ribs caused him to wonder how easily a person might contract consumption and retire early on a pension. He read one or two works on the subject of that disease. Shoving them back according to numbers he got to hate the physical presence of books. Never lost his respect for them, of course. But could have hurt any book shoving it back. Occasionally he shoved one so far away from its recorded cell he hoped it would never be found again. The thick porous pages of some of the old public books, ravelled at the edges into lint, clotted with snot, smeary with spittle and nicotine, smelled of old men in greasy raincoats, in hats which their foreheads melted, but which soon set stiff and cold if left standing.

  Pffeugh, the books! The injustice necessity had done him was proclaimed by the mirrors of many public lavatories, along with the warnings against venereal disease. He would drop in to wash his hands, though who knew if you mightn’t pick up something worse from the tap. Still, you had to wash your hands. There was a period when he couldn’t wash them enough.

  His purple hands. It was the ink-pads. He was marked from the start. But hadn’t he given himself to books? Waldo is the bookish one, takes after his father in that. And sometimes even then, in the stacks of the Municipal Library, in the sound of dust, and the smell of decaying, aged flesh, he would open a book to dedicate himself anew. And he would stand shivering for the daring of words, their sheer ejaculation.

  On one occasion Waldo Brown had found:

  In my dry brain my spirit soon,

  Down-deepening from swoon to swoon,

  Faints like a dazzled morning moon.

  The wind sounds like a silver wire,

  And from beyond the noon a fire

  Is pour’d upon the hills, and nigher

  The skies stoop down in their desire …

  He shut the book so quick, so tight, the explosion might have been heard by a
nyone coming to catch him at something forbidden disgraceful and which he would never dare again until he could no longer resist. He looked round, but found nobody else in the stacks. Only books. A throbbing of books. He went to the lavatory to wash his hot and sticky hands.

  So the life had its compensations, an orgasm in dry places, a delicious guilt of the intellect. It made him superior to poor Dad, whose innocence from a previous age must have denied him even the vicarious sensuality of literature.

  Waldo Brown was superior also to Walter Pugh, his superior by eighteen months.

  Waldo didn’t care for Walter. Pimples were just about the only thing they had in common (if you discounted literature, which, in Wally’s case, Waldo couldn’t believe in). Waldo was thin, might pass for tall, with thin to disappearing lips, his sculptured chin, good carriage inherited from his mother — distinction, in fact, was how he saw it in writing — whereas Wally was thick, to very fat on hot days, a splurge of lips a little open, a little shiny from the bacon he could have been eating a moment or two before, his seams splitting, especially at the thighs of those pants belonging to something else.

  Wally said: “I’d give anything for a tart tonight on me way home. Sit all night there at home with Cis and Ern. Sometimes I think I’ll bust, Waldo, if I don’t get meself a girl. There was one on the ferry gave me the eye. I just on accepted the invite walking up from the wharf. You could do it in that bit of scrub before you get to Permanent Avenue.”

  “You’d be very unwise,” Waldo said.

  “Oh, I know,” said Wally Pugh. “The pox and all that. Or a kid. But I’ll bust, Waldo, if I don’t. I’m gunna!”

  Even when the glass above the wash-basin spelled the warnings out.

  “The trouble with you, Waldo, you’re cold. Or is it luck? Praps after all you’re a lucky bugger.”

  “It’s not what they told me Friday,” Waldo felt himself compelled.

  His hands folding over the soap enjoyed a sensuality of their own.

  “Who?” asked Wal.

  “The two of them. I can’t say they appealed. Not particularly. Though the one in pink wasn’t bad.”

  “You mean you did them both?”

  Waldo was too superior to answer.

  “Golly!” Walter Pugh said. “Did you know them?”

  “One of them, slightly. The other was her friend.”

  “What was their names, Waldo?”

  “I think the friend was Nell. Yes, Nell. The one I knew — slightly, she’s called Dulcie.”

  “And Dulcie’s good, eh? You bloody old bugger! You fast old dark horse!”

  “She’s only what I’d call pretty average. She’s a thin, dark, plain girl. She’ll never be up to much because of the salt-cellars. She’s hairy too, about the arms.”

  Betrayals brought the gooseflesh out on Waldo. Irresistibly.

  “But you got your whack, you old bugger!”

  “If that’s what appeals, but it doesn’t — to me — particularly.”

  “Go on! Then you are cold, Waldo. You’re the coldest fish I’ll ever hope to meet.”

  Only superior.

  Walter Pugh showed Waldo three poems he had written. Waldo would have called them jingles, rather. When he had written enough of them, as he intended, Walter was going to offer them as a volume, and join the ranks of the Australian poets. Waldo’s lips fairly disappeared, though he didn’t comment. He knew for certain he would never show Wally anything he wrote, he would never show anyone; it was too foolish. Certainly he had confided in Dulcie Feinstein that he was going to be a writer, but then he was only — sixteen, was it? and stupid.

  And not long after, Mrs Feinstein had taken her daughter away. So it was told.

  Arthur said: “They’re going on a visit to the relatives, so that Dulcie can learn the languages. There are relatives all over the place, like Jews seem to have. And languages come easy to the Jews, Mrs Musto says. I bet they have a good time. Not Mr Feinstein. He can’t leave the business. But Dulcie and her mother. Mrs Hochapfel, she’d be too old to go gadding about, but there’s still that Mrs Terni in Milan.”

  A couple of times Waldo walked home past the villa in O’Halloran Road, not to nurse a sense of deprivation, simply out of curiosity, and the shutters were fastened, and the weeds had grown, as though old Feinstein didn’t come there any more, as though the air of Sarsaparilla had lost its savour for him since his wife and daughter went away. On a third evening, Waldo decided to go in, climbing the picket fence because the gate was chained. The grass banks he clambered up no longer seemed to give. Under the hydrangeas, where a steamier, yellower green intensified the desolation, some animal had probably died. His own feet sounded horribly detached on the tesselated veranda, but he had to try to look through the shutters. On fitting his eyes to the slanted slats he couldn’t see anything of course, because of the angle; he had more or less expected that before making the attempt. And then the footsteps began approaching along the gravel. From round the side. He stood and waited.

  The icy moment finally arrived. It was old Feinstein himself.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  He was not wearing the capple, but a bowler hat, which made him look and sound more formal. He stood there looking at Waldo as if he hadn’t seen him before, although they had met not so very long ago.

  Waldo was transformed forcibly into the complete stranger.

  “I thought the house might be up for sale. All shut up,” he mumbled.

  “Well, it isn’t,” Mr Feinstein said rather angrily.

  As he jolted down the concrete steps which the couch-grass was breaking open, Waldo knew that the owner had continued watching him. The fact that the old man’s daughter had given herself to him in his conversation with Walter Pugh seemed to make the incident more icily corrupt.

  So much so he would have liked to boast about it to somebody, but there was no one at hand, perhaps never would be, worthy of its subtlety. At tea he merely mentioned, while trimming the fat off his cold mutton:

  “Saw old Feinstein up at the house. Didn’t know he went there any more. Wonder what he gets up to on his own?”

  Dad suggested he had come to assure himself his property was not deteriorating. Mother thought he might be lonely, and hoped to re-enact some moment before his loneliness set in.

  “Trouble with Feinsteins is they’re so damn Jewish. That’s usually the trouble with Jews,” Waldo said, and laughed.

  Though he hadn’t met — well, perhaps one other.

  “I’ll trouble you not to speak in those terms,” Dad said through a piece of gristle. “Mr Feinstein’s a fine man.”

  “Oh yes, old Feinstein,” Waldo agreed.

  He knew his father was not acquainted with Feinstein, but that a lifetime of tolerance was at stake, and he was having difficulty in finding the vocabulary to protect it.

  Mother too, was looking pained.

  “I have never met Mrs Feinstein,” she said, “but I’m sure nothing about her calls for such an unprincipled remark. Besides,” she said, “I thought you were fond of them.”

  “I’m not married to them!” Waldo said.

  The filthy mutton was sticking in his throat. His rejection of the Feinsteins seemed connected with some far deeper, even less desirable, misery. On the outskirts of the lamplight Dulcie hovered, in that same dress, the sleeves of which were embroidered with the bracts of loose hydrangeas. How he resented brown eyes, whether in Dulcie Feinstein, Arthur, or George Brown, whether offering themselves for martyrdom, or like soft brown animals burrowing in, unconscious, but still burrowing.

  “Well, I have been guillotined!” said Waldo Brown cheerfully, throwing his knife and fork together on the plate.

  For once he was glad he would be leaving for the Library in the morning. For once too, Arthur was not joining in. Arthur sat munching on his thoughts, his eyelids drooping, so that you could only see the moons of heavy skin. If he had had to face the brown verdict of Arthur’s eyes, Waldo suspected
the same unhappiness might have risen up inside him to trouble the surface.

  In the morning he left for the Library. And then again. Always.

  “That girl Dulcie,” Walter Pugh returned to the subject on a later occasion, “what became of her?”

  “I had a letter from her. She’s in Brussels,” Waldo said with the naturalness of inspiration.

  “Some people have all the luck! Or spondulicks.”

  “It’s not luck. It’s practical, an investment. They’ve taken her to Europe to learn the languages.”

  Walter Pugh was breathing hard.

  “Not that Dulcie wasn’t a cultured girl already,” Waldo said. “Plays the Beethoven piano sonatas. Does embroidery, too. Petty point.”

  After that, Walter invited Waldo to spend the evening at the home of his sister and brother-in-law. Once before Waldo had accepted, and eaten a sociable braise with Cis and Ern — we’re going to treat you just as if you were one of the family — and Wally had spoken about his plans for the future, which were uncomfortably familiar.

  This time Waldo said: “Sorry, Wal. Too far. All this train travel — I’m played out by the time I reach home.”

  It was true, too. Everywhere was too far from Terminus Road. From time to time he resented it bitterly, and planned to rent that small room in the city where his thoughts might take finite shape instead of remaining the blurred mess he could never sort out. On the other hand, living under grass down Terminus Road allowed his thoughts their flowing line, to tighten which might mean extinction.

  So he continued living too far, soon even farther still. Their Brown world, at the end of the yellow-green tunnel called Terminus Road, contracted before the pressure of events. Because war was breaking, had already broken out. Waldo decided in secret that it shouldn’t concern them, though his parents’ unhappiness, viewed through the glare of yellow grass, caused him temporary doubts. His father couldn’t wait to open the papers, but stood by the road, in his braces, perched lopsided on his surgical boot. His mother used to bring out her knitting, out to the veranda, and sit on the day-bed, under the classical pediment. The anger in her flashing needles could not compete eventually with the penumbra easily slicing the classical façade, right through, and the wool; the ineffectual steel, she sat holding.