The Solid Mandala Read online

  “You’re simple,” he said instead.

  “That is how I was born,” she replied.

  “You ought to move in with that pair of poofteroos across the road.”

  “There’s more in the Brothers Brown than meets the eye,” she would defend them.

  “I bet there is!” her husband said, doing things with his tongue to the tooth which was always with him.

  He would sit with his back to her most evenings, or that was how life seemed to have arranged it, and when he had finished his glass of beer — he was very moderate; she was fortunate in that — she would slip the plate of food in front of him, somehow from round the side.

  “A couple of no-hopers with ideas about ’emselves,” he would grumble, and then regurgitate: “The Brothers Bloody Brown!”

  When the sight of his hands hardened by the shovel would rend her, and she would say:

  “You’ve gone and tore yourself again. The sleeve.”

  “What?” he used to say, throwing off her concern with his shoulder. “What’s this old thing for but tearing?”

  Attempts on herself seldom hurt Mrs Poulter; it was the attacks on other people. The Mister Browns, for instance. Unable to decide how they might be protected she would take them a baked custard. And return the better for it.

  Seated in the flumping bus her own charity made her smile with faint pleasure. When suddenly she seized her companion quite roughly by the arm.

  “Look!” Mrs Poulter almost shouted.

  Mrs Dun was so shaken her upper plate was prised from her jaw and lay for a moment with its mate.

  “What?” she protested.

  Looking stricken for the accident. Twice at least she had dreamt of being rammed by a removal van.

  “What we was talking about!” cried Mrs Poulter. “The two men! The retired brothers!”

  Then Mrs Dun did resentfully notice the two old men, stumping, trudging, you couldn’t have said tottering — or if so, it was only caused by their age and infirmities — along what passed for pavement between Barranugli and Sarsaparilla. The strange part was the old gentlemen rose up, if only momentarily, blotting out the suburban landscape, filling the box of Mrs Dun’s shuddering mind. She was still shocked, of course, by Mrs Poulter’s thoughtless alarm. It could have been that. But she almost smelled those old men. The one in the stiff oilskin, the other in yellowed herring-bone, in each case almost to the ankle. And, as they trudged, or tottered, they were holding each other by the hand. It was difficult to decide which was leading and which was led. But one was the leader, she could sense. She sensed the scabs, the cracks which wet towels had opened in their old men’s skin.

  Several of the young typists in the ladies’ vicinity had been roused by Mrs Poulter’s outcry. But barely giggled. It was as though they had seen it all before.

  “There!” exclaimed Mrs Poulter, turning in triumph to her friend. “It might have been laid on!”

  She was so pleased she laughed. But she did not succeed in making it a joke. Mrs Dun had screwed up her mouth.

  “Looks funny to me,” she said, and with added disapproval: “I thought you was warning of an accident.”

  “Mr Waldo Brown was hit with a car,” Mrs Poulter conceded. “Once.”

  It was the best she could offer.

  “I never saw two grown men walkin’ hand in hand,” Mrs Dun murmured.

  “They are old.” Mrs Poulter sighed. “I expect it helps them. Twins too.”

  “But two men!”

  “For that matter I never saw two grown women going hand in hand.”

  The breath was snoring between Mrs Dun’s corrected teeth.

  “Which was the big one? The one that was leading? The one in the oilskin?”

  “That was Mr Waldo. But I never thought of ’im as big. He’s thin.”

  “Seemed big to me.”

  “Arthur Brown is big-built. The thick-set one.”

  Although the gentlemen had been left far behind by now, Mrs Poulter glanced over her shoulder. As if hoping to confirm something.

  The old men rose up again in Mrs Dun’s mind, and she hated what she saw.

  “You come on down some time to my place,” Mrs Poulter coaxed, “and they’re bound to be around. Somewhere. Potterin’ about behind the hedge.”

  “Don’t catch me!” Mrs Dun decided.

  “And those blue dogs?” she asked. “Do they belong to the gentlemen?”

  “That’s their dogs. They’re attached to their dogs,” Mrs Poulter said firmly.

  “Scruffy old things,” said Mrs Dun. “I hate dogs. They might bite yer.”

  “One of them does,” Mrs Poulter had to admit. “Runt does. But they’ve had them so many years. Nearly as old as themselves. As dogs go.”

  The bus faltered.

  “Between you and me,” Mrs Poulter hesitated, “I don’t like dogs eether. But what can you do?”

  Mrs Dun did not answer, and it seemed to give her the upper hand.

  “Do you have any family, Mrs Dun?” Mrs Poulter asked with a formality which made it unobjectionable.

  “Got a niece,” Mrs Dun said.

  “Ah,” said Mrs Poulter, “a niece is nice.”

  She was attempting to repair some of the bent petals of the white chrysanths. Excitement had not been good for them.

  “Bill and I are alone now. There was no kiddies,” Mrs Poulter said. “One or two relatives up north. But I think they’re gone by this. It’s Bill that writes the letters. If ever any of the relatives come — and some of them did, once or twice — Bill stayed up the end of the paddock.”

  The petals of the white chrysanths were, it seemed, beyond repair.

  “You drift apart, don’t you?” Mrs Poulter said.

  “Yairs,” said Mrs Dun, and: “Yairs.”

  In High Street the overstuffed bus began to spew out its coloured gobbets.

  “Wonder what those two old fellers were doin’ so far from Terminus Road?” Mrs Poulter nursed her curiosity as they waited to be carried by the common stream.

  “You wonder what goes on in some people’s minds,” said Mrs Dun.

  “I beg yours?”

  “What goes on in people’s minds. Because it does go on. You’ve only got to read the papers.”

  “But two respectable old gentlemen like the Mister Browns? They was probably only taking a walk to get their circulation going.” Mrs Poulter had turned mauve. “Anyway,” she said, “what goes on in other people’s minds is private. I wouldn’t want to know what goes on inside of my own husband’s mind.”

  Although Mrs Dun might have wanted, she suggested she didn’t by drawing in her chin.

  “I was never one,” she said, “not to keep to meself, and mind me own business.”

  “Aren’t I right then?” Mrs Poulter continued, still too loud, and still too mauve.

  Creating in the bus. Mrs Dun wondered whether she had been wise in the first place to accept Mrs Poulter’s friendship.

  “As for those old men,” said Mrs Dun, “they’re nothing to me.”

  “They’re nothing to me,” Mrs Poulter agreed.

  But the situation made her want to cry. And Mrs Dun could feel it. She could feel her own gooseflesh rise. As they waited to escape from the suffocating bus the features of their familiar town began fluctuating strangely through the glass. Like that blood-pressure thing was on your arm. Nor did it help either lady to know the other could be involved.

  “Only those old men of yours had a look, had a look of,” Mrs Dun stumbled over what was too much for her.

  “Yes?” Mrs Poulter’s voice reached out.

  The lips were parted in her mauve cheeks. The eyes were so liquid. It was as though she were waiting to swallow down some longed-for communication while half expecting it to choke her if she did.

  But Mrs Dun could not oblige. Her neck jerked, the wrinkles closed, and Mrs Poulter, ruffling up her chrysanthemums, remarked in a neutral tone of voice:

  “After I’ve left the fl
owers, I usually make for the cafeteria, and have a coffee. It warms you up on cold mornings.”

  “Yairs,” said Mrs Dun. “Or a malted. The malted’s what I go for.”

  II. Waldo

  “PUT ON YOUR COAT, AND WE’LL GO FOR A WALK,” HE DECIDED at last. “Otherwise you’ll sit here brooding.”

  “Yes,” Arthur said. “Brooding.”

  But he sat, and might have continued sitting, in that old leather chair with the burst seat where mice had nested the other winter, the woodwork scratched by dogs reaching up to claim right of affection. Arthur sat in their father’s chair.

  Waldo brought the two coats. He helped Arthur into his. Waldo treated the old herringbone rather roughly, to show that what he was doing had been dictated by duty and common sense. He set the matching cap very straight on Arthur’s head. It was, in any case, the angle at which Arthur wore his cap. Waldo was relieved the performance of duty had at last set him free. But duty was honest, whereas he mistrusted the snares of sentiment set by inexhaustible tweed. (It was that good English stuff, from amongst the things discarded by Uncle Charlie, some of which were lasting for ever.)

  “When it comes to illness there’s too much giving in to it, not to mention imagination,” Waldo warned.

  As he put his own coat on he glanced at his brother’s head, at the shagginess of hair falling from under the tweed cap. Very white. Waldo might have contemplated the word “silvery”, but rejected it out of respect for literature and truth. Arthur’s hair was, in fact, of that doubtful white, with the tobacco stains left by the red which had drained out of it. Unlike Waldo’s own. Waldo on top was a thinned-out dirty-looking grey.

  Arthur continued sitting.

  And the two old dogs, turning on their cat-feet, forgetful of their withered muscle, watched out of milky eyes. One of them — it was Scruffy — clawed once at Arthur’s knee. The dogs made little whinging noises in anticipation. They were easily delighted.

  “You do feel better, though?” Waldo asked, so suddenly and so quietly that Arthur looked up and smiled.

  “Yes, Waldo,” Arthur said, and: “Thank you.”

  “Pains in the chest are more often than not indigestion. We swallow too quickly in cold weather.”

  “Yes, Waldo. Indigestion.”

  Then the older of the two dogs, of whiter muzzle, and milkier marble eyes, threw up his head, and gave two ageless sexless barks. The second of the two dogs began to scutter across the boards on widespread legs.

  Waldo was leading his brother Arthur, as how many times, out of the brown gloom of the kitchen. The cold light, the kitchen smells, had set almost solid in it. Yet, here they were, the two human creatures, depending on habit for substance as they drifted through. If habit lent them substance, it was more than habit, Waldo considered bitterly, which made them one.

  Some had made a virtue out of similar situations: naked-looking, identical boys; laughing girls, he had noticed, exchanging the colours which distinguished them, to mystify their friends; neat, elderly ladies, in polka dots and similar hats, appeared to have survived what was more a harness than a relationship.

  But the Browns.

  Waldo could feel his brother’s larger, fleshy hand in his thinner, colder one as they stumbled in and out of the grass down what remained of the brick path. The wind drove reasons inward, into flesh. They were reduced, as always, to habit. But stumbled, even so.

  Only the old pot-bellied dogs appeared convinced of the mild pleasures they enjoyed, frolicking and farting, though somewhat cranky with each other. One of them — Runt — lifted his leg on a seedy cabbage and almost overbalanced.

  His brother was breathing deeply, Waldo saw.

  “Which direction are we going to take?” Arthur asked.

  “There’s only one.”

  “Yes,” said Arthur, “but after Terminus Road?”

  “Why, the main road — in the direction of Barranugli.”

  Sometimes Waldo would look at his brother and try to remember when he had first been saddled with him. But could not.

  “Why the main road?” Arthur asked, fretful today.

  He blew out his red, fleshy, but to no extent sensual lips.

  “Because I want to see life,” Waldo answered brutally. “You don’t want to deny me that?”

  Arthur said: “No.”

  Waldo was punctured then. He continued on, a thin man in a turned-down stiff, grey felt hat. What he should have answered, of course, was: Because, on the main road, if anything happens on any of those hills, there will always be plenty of cars to stop. It depressed him he hadn’t been able to say it.

  “I like the side roads best,” said Arthur. “You can look at the fennel.”

  He had difficulty with his words, chewing them to eject, but when he did, there they stood, solid, and for ever.

  There was the sound of Waldo’s stiff oilskin nothing would free from the weathers which had got into it. Waldo’s oilskin used to catch on things, and he always expected to hear it tear. On that gooseberry bush, for instance. Which had not succeeded. Arthur had advised against it — Sarsaparilla was too warm — but Waldo had planted the bush. To demonstrate something or other.

  On the broken path Waldo’s oilskin went slithering past the gooseberry thorns. The wind might have cut the skins of the Brothers Brown if they had not been protected by their thoughts.

  “We could ring the doctor if you felt you wanted,” Waldo said carefully. “We could go across to Poulters’, though I don’t like to ask favours, be beholden to anybody.”

  “No. No.”

  Arthur spoke quite briskly. Time, it appeared, removed him quickly from the sources of pain. Sometimes Waldo envied the brother who did not seem to have experienced — though he should have — the ugly and abrasive roughcast of which life was composed.

  My brother, Waldo would breathe, at times indulgently enough, and at once he became the elder by years instead of the younger by several hours. Waldo could modulate his voice, more to impress than to please. The rather fine tenor voice, of which the parents had been proud, and Dulcie Feinstein had accompanied in the first excitement of discovery. Men, the insensitive ones, sometimes recoiled from the silken disclosures of Waldo’s voice.

  Waldo’s voice and Arthur’s hair. So Mother used to say. (It should have been Waldo’s mind, Waldo knew.)

  Sidling brittly down the path, to negotiate the irregular bricks, now pushing Arthur, who liked to be humoured at times into believing he was the leader, Waldo could not avoid staring into his brother’s hair, fascinated, when the wind blew, by the glimpses of pink skin beyond. This head might have flaunted an ostentation of cleanliness, if it had not been for its innocence, and the fact that he knew Arthur was in many ways not exactly clean. Every third Sunday Waldo made him sit on a stool on the back veranda, behind the glass, behind the scratching of the roses, to hack at the excessive hair, and as it first lay against, then flowed away through his fingers, the barber always wondered why he got the shivers, why he hated the smell of his own mucus as he breathed down his thin nose, while the hair lay on the boards, in dead snippets, and livelier love-knots, quite old-girlishly, if not obscenely, soft. It had seemed much coarser when Arthur was a boy.

  And Arthur had grown into a big strong man. Was still, for that matter. It was Arthur who lifted the weights. His muscles had remained youthful, perhaps because his wits had been easy to carry.

  “This gate, Waldo,” Arthur was saying gently, “will fall to bits any day now.”

  Sighing.

  He was right. Waldo dreaded it. Averted his mind from any signs of rusty iron, or rotted timber. Unsuccessfully, however. His life was mapped in green mould; the most deeply personal details were the most corroded.

  He touched the gate with a free finger. And the gate opened. Once again.

  None of the men in the family had been handy. Nor was Mother. But Mother had struggled with the taps, while the boys looked on, hoping that too much water wouldn’t squirt up into her fa
ce. Shall I fetch Dad? Arthur would ask. But she did not think it worth an answer.

  The wind was frittering with Arthur’s hair, tinkering with the fragile gate.

  Suddenly the smell of rotting wood, of cold fungus, shot up through Waldo’s nose. He could hardly bear, while exquisitely needing, the rusty creaking of his memory. If Arthur had been, say, a dog, he might have touched the back of his head. That hair.

  But Waldo Brown, although he kept them, did not believe in touching dogs. It gave them, he said, a wrong sense of their own importance. But why, Waldo, Arthur would persist, I like to touch dogs, I’d like to have Scruffy at least in the bed, if you’d allow it. Half the time it was useless to explain to Arthur.

  “This gate,” Waldo said, “will outlast us both.”

  “I hope so.” Arthur laughed. “It would be dreadful if it didn’t. No one would put up another. Remember when I cut my hand on the saw? I’d try, though. Again. I’d have a go.”

  It was too feeble, too foolish. Waldo Brown took his brother by the hand as they entered Terminus Road.

  “Mrs Poulter is probably bunching the flowers. I saw her picking them,” Arthur said. “White chrysanths for Mother’s Day.”

  Waldo did not comment. Already he was too tired.

  “Perhaps if we hang around she’ll come out,” said Arthur, “and then we can walk together to the bus.”

  “No,” said Waldo.

  His thin, male steps crunched. He walked primly, in the sound of his oilskin, planning in advance where to put his feet.

  Whereas Arthur was not exactly running, but lumbering and squelching, while some distress, of feminine origin, was fluttering in his big, old-man’s body.

  “Oh, but why, Waldo? She’s such a good neighbour.”

  I am very fond of Mrs Poulter, she is a thoroughly good-hearted, reliable young woman, Mother used to say. Doors closing. Waldo remembered sitting alone with his mother, in the dining room, at the centre of the house, while Mrs Poulter roamed calling round: I don’t want to intrude Mrs Brown on you or anyone but Mr Brown could have the use of the mower if he likes any time any time provided Bill is at the Council. As he and his mother continued hidden, in collusion, as it were, though this was never discussed. Waldo was officially her favourite, Arthur her duty.