The Solid Mandala Read online

  “Those are my solid mandalas,” Arthur explained to the manager.

  Today the manager was parking early.

  “Shan’t be coming in this morning,” Arthur called. “I’m with my brother. We’re going for a walk.”

  The manager screwed up one of his cheeks in a freshly-shaven synthetic smile.

  Gathered by the wind the two old men flitted across the plate glass, each examining himself, separately, secretly. On the whole each was pleased, for reflexions are translatable symbols of the past, Chinese to the mind which happens to be unfamiliar with them. Some of those who noticed the old blokes might have seen them as frail or putrid, but the Brothers Brown were not entirely unconscious of their own stubbornness of spirit. Arthur, for instance, whose mechanism had in some way threatened his continuity earlier that morning, was still able to enjoy the gusty light of boyhood in the main street of Sarsaparilla, his lips half open to release an expression he had not yet succeeded in perfecting. His body might topple, but only his body. The drier, the more cautious Waldo walked taking greater care in spite of the strength of his moral convictions.

  Everybody to their own. The Presbyterians had their red brick. The convicts had built the Church of England. Over his shoulder the Methoes had hung out their business sign. Waldo Brown, so thin, was filled out considerably by knowing that nothing can only be nothing. It was almost the only gratitude he felt he owed his parents — not love, which is too demanding in the end, affection perhaps, which is more often than not love watered down with pity — but gratitude he could allow himself to offer, a cooler, a more detached emotion when not allied to servility. So Waldo stalked through the main street, in the wind from his oilskin, on only physically brittle bones, knowing in which direction enlightenment lay. Waldo stiffened his neck, and skirted round the Church of England parson with a smile, not of acknowledgment, but identification. As for priests, jokes about them made him giggle. He would look for the vertical row of little black buttons, for the skins of priests which flourished like mushrooms behind leather-padded doors. Waldo believed his parents had just tolerated clergymen as guardians of morality, priests never. Myths, evil enough in themselves, threatened one’s sanity when further abstracted by incense and Latin, and became downright obscene if allowed to take shape in oleograph or plaster.

  On this hitherto evil morning, of a cold wind and disturbances, of decisions and blotting-paper clouds, Waldo Brown’s convictions helped him to breathe less obstructedly. He failed for the moment to notice the smell of mucus in his nostrils. Putting his mind in order had eased the oilskin at his armpits. Intellectual honesty glittered on his glasses, blinding his rather pale eyes. How dreadful if Dulcie. But she hadn’t. It was the kind of near-slip which made him hate Dulcie’s judgment rather than deplore his own temporary lack of it. Suppose his exercise in loving Dulcie had been forced to harden into a permanent imitation of love! The intermittent drizzle of resentment is far easier to bear, may even dry right up. It had, in fact, until Arthur.

  Why had Arthur? Where was Arthur?

  “Look, Waldo, it’s turned to clay!” Arthur called, dawdling, fascinated by the crumbling turd of Mr Hepple’s over-stuffed cocker spaniel.

  “Come along,” Waldo ordered. “It’s only old.”

  The old man and two old dogs gathered round the whitened stool shocked the youth inside Waldo Brown.

  Each of the blue dogs, pointing a swivel nose, sniffed with a delicacy of attention, lifted a leg in turn, aimed sturdily enough, then came on, chests broad to the wind, not so good in the pasterns. It was the old man who lingered, as though unable to decide on the next attitude to adopt.

  Then Arthur Brown spat, or dribbled. It faltered on his chin, hung and swung silverly against the knife-edged light.

  “That sort of smell,” he said, “could give a person diphtheria.”

  It choked Waldo. What had Dulcie seen in Arthur?

  “Didn’t I tell you come along?”

  Arthur came.

  He took his brother by the hand, who would have resisted if he had remembered how to resist. But twin brothers, brothers of a certain age, at times only remember what has been laid down in the beginning.

  They were walking on in the direction Waldo knew now he had not chosen; it had chosen him.

  “Did you ever have diphtheria, Waldo?”

  “You know perfectly well I didn’t.”

  “Yes,” said Arthur.

  The habit of motion, the warmth of skin, were so very comforting, he put out his tongue and licked the air. It might have been barley-sugar.

  Arthur said: “You know when you are ill, really ill, not diphtheria, which we haven’t had, but anything, pneumonia — you can’t say we haven’t had pneumonia — you can get, you can get much farther in.”

  “Into what?”

  It tired Waldo.

  “Into anything.”

  The wind coming round the corner, out of Plant Street and heading for Ada Avenue, gave Waldo Brown the staggers. Arthur, on the other hand, seemed to have been steadied by thoughtfulness.

  He said: “One day perhaps I’ll be able to explain — not explain, because it’s difficult for me, isn’t it, to put into words — but to make you see. Words are not what make you see.”

  “I was taught they were,” Waldo answered in hot words.

  “I dunno,” Arthur said. “I forget what I was taught. I only remember what I’ve learnt.”

  If he stumbled at that point it was because he had turned his right toe in. Although she tried, Mother had not broken him of it.

  “Mrs Poulter said,” said Arthur.

  “Mrs Poulter!”

  Waldo yanked at the oblivious hand. Mrs Poulter was one of the fifty-seven things and persons Waldo hated.

  “She said not to bother and I would understand in my own way. But I don’t, not always, to be honest. Not some things. I don’t understand cruelty.”

  The little flat sounds which accompanied dangerous approaches were issuing from Waldo’s mouth.

  “I don’t understand how they can nail a person through the hands.”

  Waldo would not listen any more, though Arthur might be tired of telling. He did tire very quickly, and, if you were lucky, might not revive for half an hour. He seemed to withdraw, to recline on the hugger-mugger cushions of an unhealthily crammed imagination.

  In any case, there were the shops, there were the houses of the street you knew, providing signs that man is a rational animal. Waldo liked to look into the houses he passed, obliquely though, for on some of those occasions when he had stared full in he had been faced with displays of perversity to damage temporarily his faith in reason. From a reasonable angle the houses remained the labelled boxes which contain, not passions, but furniture: Green Slopes, Tree Tops, Gibber Gunya, Cootamundra, Tree Tops, The Ridge, Tree Tops, less advisedly, Ma Réve.

  “Not mine!” he said aloud.

  Waldo knew he was bad-tempered. Long ago, in the days when he was taking up Yoga, Pelmanism, Profitable Short Story Writing, and making lists of what must be achieved or corrected, he had decided to do something about his temper, but had failed as, he consoled himself, many important people had.

  Watching him walk controlled along the street leading his backward brother by the hand, no one probably would have guessed he had failed, in that, at least. How convincing an impression he made Waldo knew from observing himself obliquely in the plate-glass windows of shops, and anyway, he had decided early to be his mother’s rather than his father’s son. Anne Brown, born a Quantrell, had created an impression even in one of her old blue dresses with tea-stained lace insertion, or until her last days and illness, which were beyond human control. Waldo understood that those who lowered their eyes in passing were paying homage to someone of his mother’s stock.

  Many were perceptive. Others, who turned deliberately away, only wished to disguise their inferiority. Or were disgusted by Arthur. There were, on the other hand, some who hid their embarrassment in a displa
y of exaggerated bonhommie. Like the men in overalls at the Speedex Service Station.

  “Hi, mate! Hi, Arthur!” they called, raising their muscular throats. “How’s the Brown Bomb?”

  Arthur loved it. He loved the service station. He loved to stare at people, and into houses, which was all very well for Arthur, Waldo allowed, because he could not have interpreted half of what he saw.

  All that was steel and concrete, service stations, for example, appalled Waldo, though he would never have admitted in public, he would never have rejected any useable evidence of human progress.

  Arthur loved the Speedex Service Station because Ron Salter sometimes had the lollies for him, and Barry Grimshaw on one occasion let him take the gun and grease the nipples of a truck.

  “One day I’m gunna come and work with you boys. Permanent,” Arthur called, tagging back on Waldo’s hand. “Then we’ll have a ball! And improve my savings account!”

  Of course the men were laughing at Arthur, Waldo knew.

  The Speedex Service Station, safely past, thank God — Waldo would allow himself a lapsus linguae if the error had grown into the language — had risen out of what had been Allwright’s General Store. Exhaust fumes and the metallic idiom of mechanics had routed the indolent mornings which used to weigh so heavy on Allwright’s buckled veranda, bulging with bags of potatoes and mash, stacked with the boxes of runty tomatoes the growers brought out from under the seats of their sulkies. To protect the goods on Allwright’s veranda from the visits of dogs had been one of the extra duties of Arthur Brown. Arthur seemed to enjoy that, as a relaxation, while regretting he could not coax the dogs into a permanent relationship.

  Nobody seeing the Browns now connected them except in theory with the past, because the past was scarcely worth knowing about. It was remarkable how many of those walking along the Barranugli Road on present errands had only just been born.

  “Mr Allwright died lacing up his boots.” Arthur Brown clumped and mumbled, his thick white hair flumping at his collar. Then he had to laugh. “Mrs Allwright thought I’d stuck to the change from Mustos’ order. She’d put it behind the candles. Put it herself. Couldn’t add up, either, except with a pencil and paper.”

  After that the road opened out into one of those stretches, a replica of itself at many other points. On the road to Barranugli it was usual for Waldo Brown to forget which bits they had passed, even going quickly in the bus. In the end the bush roads of childhood were no slower than those made by men in the illusions of speed and arrival. The same truck, the same sedan, would stick screeching, roaring, smoking, on its spinning, stationary tires, no longer in the same rut, but in the same concrete channel, the same stretch of infinity. If Waldo Brown had not been a superior man, of intellectual tastes, it might have become intolerable, or perhaps had, because of that.

  He yawned till remembering why he had chosen to commit a deliberate assault on distance on that morning. He stopped the yawn. They seemed to be making very little progress. Pedestrians were overtaking them, not to mention the 8.13.

  The dust-coloured bus plunged, elastic-sounding, not too rigidly rivetted, down the road to Barranugli. Look into a passing bus, and more often than not you will see something you would rather not. Smeared mauve against the window Mrs Poulter’s face was too stupid exactly to accuse Waldo.

  Waldo snorted, even laughed.

  It was unusual.

  “What’s the joke?” asked Arthur.

  “Ain’t no joke!” said Waldo in the comic voice he put on for jokes.

  It was most unusual.

  And obviously he did not want to tell. So Arthur kept quiet.

  Mrs Brown admitted from the beginning that Mrs Poulter had her good points. A cheerful young woman with a high colour and the surly husband. Almost too deliberately on the opposite side of the road, directly opposite — two houses, you were tempted to conclude, eyeing each other for what they could see. Not that the Browns would have been so indiscreet. Excepting Arthur, who loved to talk to Mrs Poulter. He loved to ask her questions, and Mrs Poulter, curiously enough, although an inalterably stupid creature, usually seemed to find an answer. That was one of the reasons Waldo found her so difficult to put up with.

  Once Waldo Brown, in one of his less oblique moments — he was quite a bit younger, cruder of course — was tempted to cross the road. How tempted, he had never been sure. It was so dark. It was by that time night, eloquent with leaves and crackling sticks. Waldo heard himself crunch a flowerpot. But he felt he had to walk around a while. He could hear his heart. He could hear the bandicoots, their thrrt thrrt. It was so dark, it was understandable he should have been drawn to the square of light. He couldn’t resist it. And there stood Mrs Poulter, normally so high of colour, turned waxen by the yellow light inside the room. Her breasts two golden puddings, stirred to gentle activity. For Mrs Poulter was washing her armpits at the white porcelain washstand basin. As she returned it again and again the flannel dribbled the water sleepily back, over the porcelain rim, of white, frozen cabbage-leaves. Mrs Poulter dipped, and the tendrils of black hair which had strayed from the yawning armpits were plastered to the yellow, waxy flesh, Waldo observed. He saw the draggle of jet in the secret part of her thighs.

  He had never felt guiltier, but guilt will sometimes solidify; he could not have moved for a shotgun. There was no question of that, however, for the door was opening, and Bill Poulter was entering their room. Ohhhh, his wife seemed to be saying, dropping the flannel into the white porcelain cabbage. Mrs Poulter, too, it seemed, was overcome by guilt for her offence against modesty. Her fingers were almost sprouting webs in their efforts to uphold decency, which was exactly what, in fact, they did, for her surprised nipples were perking up over her honestly-intentioned hands. While Bill Poulter advanced, into the room, into the lamplight. Waldo had never seen Mr Poulter look less scraggy, less glum. Because he was wanting something apparently unexpected, a straggly smile had begun to fit itself to the face so unaccustomed to it.

  Then the room was consumed by darkness — and was it mirth? was it Mrs Poulter’s? In that direction at least, the darkness seemed intensified in a concentrated fuzziness. Then there was the sound of what was probably Bill Poulter’s belt slapping the end of the iron bedstead, followed by the jingle of brass balls and dislocated iron.

  Waldo went home, not without crunching two more flowerpots.

  Trudging along the Barranugli Road Waldo Brown was tempted to glance, if only obliquely, at Arthur.

  Arthur’s lips were slightly open, if anything slightly purpler than before.

  He said: “Those chrysanths will get crushed in a full bus. They’ll have had it by the time she arrives.”

  “Who?” said Waldo.

  “Mrs Poulter.”

  Then they were walking somewhat quicker, because Waldo had to defend himself from the kind of conversation he had been making with his brother ever since speech had come to them. Or rather he must withdraw his mind from his mind’s mirror.

  Altogether they were rocking a bit, in an effort to gather speed, or avoid reflexions. The blue dogs, who had settled down to a steady trot just ahead, barrels rolling, tails at work like handles, pinned back their ears on sensing a threat to their heels. One of the dogs looked back over his shoulder to see what the men could be getting up to. His splather of tongue hung, palpitating suspiciously, against the yellow stumps and bleeding gums.

  When Arthur, as though in sympathy with the dog, held up his thick white muzzle and began to howl.

  “Aohhhhh!” — actually it was a man — “I never went on such a walk! What’s it leading to?”

  The two dogs were terrified. Their tongues thinned, till exhaustion forced them to spread them again. They would have liked to continue looking straight ahead, but their slitted eyes were drawn perpetually towards the corners of the slits. Their ears had become the ears of crouching hares. Their necks wore staring ruffs.

  Waldo Brown simply jerked at his brother.

  “
It’s nothing,” he said, “but exercise.”

  And jerked again, so that Arthur was trotting like a dog, while Waldo strode on longer legs, the loosened sheets of his iron oilskin chattering in the surrounding wind, his shod heels gashing the stones. The cryptomerias the retinosperas the golden cypresses were running together by now. At times the brothers reeled.

  When the flap of Waldo’s oilskin struck the driver’s door of the semi-trailer lurching past, it brought a man rushing out of the garden of one of the homes.

  “Steady on!” cried their protector. “You’ll get hit, if that’s what you’re after, and I’ll have to call the ambulance.”

  “The ambulance? Oh, no!” Arthur began to shout.

  Waldo was forced to stop.

  “Thank you,” he said. “We’re in full control of ourselves.”

  It was his glasses made him look colder. The rimless glass might have been an emanation of the rather pale eyes.

  “Okay,” replied the man, and laughed — he was bald, the big pursy type, with a joggle of belly. “I don’t wanter interfere. Only thought,” he dwindled.

  Waldo continued dragging his brother in his course, though he had already decided they would turn when the helpful man was out of sight.

  Arthur was lagging.

  “But the ambulance,” he blubbered. “And you were hit, Waldo! That other time. Remember?”

  Yes, Waldo Brown had been hit somewhere in the middle stretch of Pitt Street, it must have been 1934. He did not like to think about it now, not only because it was connected with complete loss of dignity, his broken pince-nez, the herd of human beasts halted in their trampling surge only by the skin of his body, then Arthur at the hospital, but because the accident had taken place soon after, you might have said because of, the Encounter. Waldo had been too angry, too upset after running into the last people he wanted to see, their children too, a memorial to all those who had contributed towards their embodiment. Waldo recognized for instance in her grand-daughter Mrs Feinstein’s ridiculous nose, in Mr Saporta’s son the promise of the father’s manly shoulders, and in both her children Dulcie’s eyes, Dulcie’s eyes, in less commanding, more supplicatory mood. More nostalgic still was the absence of those qualities with which Waldo might have endowed the children he had not got with Dulcie.