The Solid Mandala Read online

  Dulcie herself was quick to destroy nostalgia.

  “If I met a ghost in Pitt Street I’d be more inclined to believe! But it’s you, Waldo — or isn’t it?”

  She did not touch him, but looked as though she would have liked to, as she started to break up into laughter. Dulcie fizzed. It came spluttering unconvincingly out of her middle-aged body, dressed in what he remembered afterwards as affluent black, in no way remarkable except that it made her look hotter. Out of the dress her neck, thicker than before, rose reddening and congesting. She was embarrassed no doubt by the presence of the ox her husband.

  Saporta stood smiling in the manner of those men who will never have anything of importance to say and in its absence hopefully allow good-will to ooze out of the pores of their faces. He had despised Saporta from the beginning, but what Waldo was now ashamed to realize was that he, too, had nothing to say. He was smiling wider than any boy inescapably face to face with kind friends of his parents.

  Then he said: “Oh, I’m real enough — Dulcie.” It made him cough, his smile teetered, and it was most fortunate he saved himself in his arrested state, from adding: Touch me and see.

  In any case the Saportas would have been too stupid to grasp the full extent of any such banality. He was glad. Because everything about him was temporarily so unlike him.

  “Are you well, Waldo? I hope you are well. At least you look well,” Dulcie babbled with the greatest ease. She had become, evidently, one of those women.

  Waldo could have told her one or two things about mental anguish, but did not wish to involve himself. It was significant he thought, looking at her, at her heavy moustache — he had been right — and the glistening buckle of her strong teeth, that she did not enquire after Arthur’s health.

  Saporta began rocking on his heels, in his waisted, too blue pinstripe, too much shirt-cuff showing, too obviously check — in fact what you would have expected.

  Saporta said: “Why don’t you come out and see us? We’re still out at Centennial Park — the old people’s house. Come out and have a bite of tea.”

  It would have stuck in Waldo’s throat. Saporta did not add: Come out, both of you — though the eyes, half sharp, half dreamy, wholly Jewish, and brown, seemed to express it.

  Waldo said: “Thank you. It would be very nice.”

  He could feel his awful smile returning. At least the sun was on his side. The sun was a battering-ram.

  And what about the children? They stood looking too neat, too well behaved, for the moment docile, whatever springs might be waiting coiled inside them.

  “These are the children,” Waldo said, because one had to.

  The little girl, dangling a miniature handbag, tinkled with tiny golden ear-rings. The boy, older, stood looking up. The beige flannel circles round his eyes, Dulcie’s eyes, would have turned them into targets if Waldo hadn’t been the target.

  “The children,” Waldo did not exactly gasp.

  “Yes,” said Dulcie Saporta.

  And at once she began throbbing and vibrating, her black dress trickling and flashing with the steel beads he seemed to remember on her mother. Dulcie put a hand on the girl’s head, and the three of them, the four even, because you could not seperate Saporata from his flesh, the four then, transcended their own vulgarity.

  “Looks as though we’ve got an intelligent boy,” Saporta said. “This other one, this monster, is a woman. She only thinks about running around.”

  Jokey. At this juncture Waldo would not have trusted himself to retaliate.

  “What are they called?” he asked instead.

  “The girl is Lynette,” Dulcie said, as though nobody would ever question it. “The boy,” she continued, and stopped.

  Waldo who was tingling with certainty could feel the tears starting not even ridiculously behind his pince-nez. All moisture was delicious, voluptuous, redeeming, as he waited for his certainty to be confirmed by the ’cello notes of Dulcie’s voice. In the blazing sun a green shade of white hydrangeas had begun to dissolve the mounting beauty of Dulcie’s face.

  “Yes. The boy,” Waldo blared; it was more confident than a question.

  Still Dulcie hesitated, either from excessive sensibility, or because she was one of those wives who finally expect their husbands to deal with the difficult matters. So Saporta, an ox, but a benign one, heaved and said:

  “The boy we called Arthur.”

  The sun taking aim fulfilled its function of battery — in reverse. Waldo was staggered. Perhaps after all the children were not the coiled springs he had feared, rather the innocent objects of a discussion, for they were looking frightened.

  Dulcie too, though not innocent, was visibly, was deservedly frightened.

  “Are you well, Waldo?” she had returned to asking. “You are not looking well. The sun. Let us go into Bergers’ for a little — they’ll give us a chair — till it passes.”

  Saporta put a meaty hand.

  “Thank you,” Waldo said, only then, and only to Dulcie. “I can’t spare the time for illness.”

  Then he made his dash. He had to escape to somewhere, away from all those who had possessed while ignoring him over the years. Nothing would have stopped him, though Dulcie did run after him half a block, to use the advantage of her eyes at the point of their overflowing.

  His voice flew fatuously into a higher register.

  “No, Dulcie!” he was fluting over his shoulder. “What need is there to argue, to explain, when we all understand the situation. Arthur perhaps, my Arthur, is the only one who won’t. Or does he?”

  After all that had happened, he couldn’t have dragged Arthur in, if Arthur wasn’t the chief of those who had possessed him, and also perhaps to hurt Dulcie, to force some secret unhappiness into the open, to push it over the brink.

  Only he had not dared wait long enough to see, but raced off down Pitt Street, catching his toe in a grating, recovering, sticking out his jaw, a pronounced one in its delicate way. All down Pitt Street he raced, past the stationers’ shops, through a smell of pies. The stiff collar he still made a point of wearing to the Library, his butterfly collar, was melting. Although not of the latest, there is a period at which anybody’s style is inclined to set, Waldo Brown liked to think, in timelessness.

  Then, every one of his bones was breaking. He was lying on the melting tar, immoveable amongst the timeless faces, trying to remember what his intentions could have been. But he was unable. Intentions exist only in time.

  “Give me my spect — my glasses,” he was able to order.

  Perhaps if he saw better he would see.

  They handed him his pince-nez. It was broken.

  Just how bloody an accident he was he could not tell, because blood and tar are similarly sticky, nor could he see whether the blur of sympathy was hardening into contempt or that fleshy slab of hostility.

  He was feeling around, then allowing himself to be felt. He was lifted drifting in the extra-corporeal situation in which he found himself placed.

  When he could experience distaste again he knew that Arthur was approaching. Somebody, a sister, from the volume of starch, the stir of authority, was leading his brother down the ward. He could tell from the way enamel was clattering, hangings twitching.

  “Mr Brown,” said the sister, “your twin brother.”

  It sounded spaced out in a smile.

  “Only for a couple of minutes. And you,” she said to Arthur, “mustn’t be upset, because Mr Brown isn’t really hurt.”

  If she only knew.

  Who had inflicted Arthur on him? Somebody well-meaning, or sadistic, from the Library, he could only suppose.

  “You must pull yourself together,” the sister was saying. “I can see you know how to.”

  Because at first Arthur was so upset. Waldo could feel rather than hear his brother gibbering and blubbing. Waldo did not want to hear.

  Finally, from behind his eyelids, he could sense Arthur subsiding.

  Arthur asked: “Di
d they give you oxygen, Waldo, on the way?”

  “There was no need,” Waldo replied.

  At least that was the answer it was decided he should give, always from behind those merciful walls, his eyelids.

  “If you were to die,” Arthur was saying, “I know how to fry myself eggs. There’s always the bread. I could live on bread-and-milk. I have my job, haven’t I? Haven’t I, Waldo?”

  “Yes,” said Waldo.

  “I might get a dog or two for company.”

  Arthur’s anxiety began, it seemed, to heave again.

  “But who’ll put the notice in the paper?” he gasped. “The death notice!”

  “Nobody to read it,” Waldo suggested.

  “But you gotta put it,” Arthur said. “I know! I’ll ask Dulcie! Dulcie’ll do it!”

  So relieved to find himself saved.

  When the sister came and led Arthur away Waldo knew from the passage of air and the gap which was left. His eyelids no longer protected him. He was crying for Dulcie he would have liked to think, only it would not have been true. He was crying for Arthur, for Arthur or himself.

  “That time you almost died,” said Arthur.

  They were struggling against the Barranugli Road.

  “When you might have, but didn’t,” Arthur gulped.

  “No! The point is: I didn’t, I didn’t!”

  Waldo had perhaps shrieked. The two blue dogs sank their heads between their shoulders.

  Waldo had shrunk inside his oilskin, which was so stiff it could have continued standing on its own.

  “People die,” he said, “usually in one of two ways. They are either removed against their will, or their will removes them.”

  “What about our father?”

  Waldo did not want to think about that.

  “That was certainly different,” he admitted. “In the past,” he stammered, “I think some people simply died.”

  “Oh dear, this walk is pointless!” Arthur began to mutter. “Can’t you see? What are we doing? Can’t we turn?”

  “Yes,” said Waldo. “It is pointless.”

  So they turned, and the two old dogs were at once joyful. They tossed their sterns in the air, and cavorted a little. Their tongues lolled on their grinning teeth. One of the dogs farted, and turned to smell whether it was he.

  The two brothers walking hand in hand back back up along the Barranugli Road did not pause to consider who was who. They took it for granted it had been decided for them at birth, and at least Waldo had begun to suspect it might not be possible for one of them to die without the other.

  His father’s was the first death Waldo literally had to face — for that matter, the only one, as Mother was taken to the home and at the end he was able to avoid her death-mask. So the first remained the only occasion, which was probably why he had always been disinclined to remember. He was the first to discover, though not the first to announce, for the obvious reason that Waldo had always recoiled from explosions, and what is the announcement of death but the unpleasantest of all explosions?

  It was early morning too, which made it worse, the light that gentler dandelion before the metal starts to clang. Arthur was down milking the cow. He had to milk, separate, and grab his breakfast before leaving for the store. Waldo by then was working at Sydney Municipal Library, and had decided on his type. He was the neat, the conscientious type, tie knotted rather small, the expanding arm-bands restraining the sleeves of his poplin shirt (white). Mostly, as on the morning, he would go outside, walk round the house neither fast nor slow once or twice, or into what they called the Orchard, before putting on his coat. His usually nondescript hair glittered with sunlight, and the brilliantine, of which the normally too synthetic scent was oddly convincing amongst the real smells of early morning. Reality is so often less convincing, unless involvement such as Waldo was at that moment experiencing translates it into a work of art. There were many sensations, many sights he felt he might transfer to a notebook if only they would grow more distinct. (Waldo by this period had written several articles, there was the fragment of a novel, and he had joined the Fellowship of Australian Writers.) He had already written in his notebook: Death is the last of the chemical actions, and although, like all great truths, it sounded familiar, he had no reason to believe it was the fruit of someone else’s mind.

  Then, on that morning of dew and light, Waldo Brown found himself looking through the window, into the room in which their father kept his nights, dark still, with the reek of saltpetre from the papers the old man used to burn on account of the asthma he developed in the years preceding his retirement. George Brown, as the boys referred to him in fun, was stuck at the table where usually he sat out the darkness. His knees were most irregularly, not to say uglily, placed. He had laid his head on the table, where, it seemed, he had not been able to get it lower. So his outstretched hand was protesting, if not his other dangling one.

  It would not at first trickle through Waldo Brown’s mind that their father was dead. It was too much an outrage against habit. But facts are facts. And Waldo Brown respected facts as much as he respected habit. Suddenly, that which would not trickle, gushed.

  Immediately Waldo went away — he had to — deeper into the garden, where the prairie-grass pierced the serge trousers he had pressed that night under the mattress. He stood picking off a leaf or two, waiting for somebody else to handle an intolerable situation.

  In the circumstances, as he stood picking at the quince leaves, it was a minor shock to notice the hairs on his man’s wrist, when he had shrunk up inside his man’s body. Without the reminder of his wrist the boy inside him might have remained in possession. And Miss Huxtable, of intellectual doubts, had asked him only that Tuesday his opinion of Sheila Kaye-Smith. He had given it, too, in sternest terms.

  It made him look over his shoulder, wondering whether he would ever be accepted again, at the Library where he was a man strutting, or by his family, who must by now have known the worst. Or had realized and forgotten. That was the virtue of families, their willingness or determination to forget.

  When the morning, that golden vacuum, was filled even quicker than he had expected.

  Arthur, apparently, had come up from the milking, gone through the house to ask or tell something, then run through the hall in a slither of linoleum, and erupted onto the veranda. There he stood, in front of the still quivering fly-screen door, under the classical pediment which their father had demanded, and where Arthur himself, years ago, had conceived his first tragedy. Now this one was actual. The greasy old rag with which he washed the cow’s tits twitched where his fingers ended.

  He was bellowing.

  “Our father,” he bellowed, “our father is dead!” His eyes were swivelling, his crop of orange hair stared. “Waldo?” he cried, looking at his brother coming up the path, quickly, wirily, to share their grief.

  Arthur’s annunciation, blared out in brass despair, had freed Waldo. They were wringing the grief out of each other on the wormy old veranda. If he knew of his defection Waldo believed his brother would never refer to it — Arthur was too dependent on him — but could he be sure of their mother? With Arthur supporting him, physically at least, Waldo wondered.

  He heard her fumbling through the house, breaking it open, flinging back the frail doors, to arrive at the disaster of her life, forgetting that her marriage had been just this. He dreaded that she might burst too precipitately into that dark room and call for him to confirm that what had happened had truly happened.

  But when she came, pushing against the rusty gauze, she was in possession of something they might not be able to grasp, and he resented that too. What had happened had no connexion, finally, with her children. What had happened had happened already many times, and only concerned her.

  So their mother appeared to ignore them. Although she wore the rather frowsy dressing-gown, which bacon fat had spotted, and spilt porridge hardened on, she was clothed essentially in grief. She could still have been soot
hing his withered leg. Which she had accepted in the beginning out of pity. Which had now been taken from her by force. So her arms hung. So she went on down the steps, her red-roughened chest ending where the secrecy of white breast began.

  Waldo followed her because she was technically their mother. Whereas their mother crossed Terminus Road because she was their father’s widow.

  Mrs Poulter could have been expecting Mrs Brown. She came down quickly out of her house. Mrs Poulter was already a woman filling out, and prepared to pounce heavily on possible disaster.

  Mrs Poulter said: “Oh dear, don’t tell me! If there is anything I can do!”

  She had begun to whimper. If she did not embrace Mrs Brown it was because she was afraid to. Mrs Brown was too erect and cold.

  “It’s my husband, Mrs Poulter. I should like to ring for the doctor. If you will allow me. Though we must realize nothing can be done.”

  Her pure, inherited voice erected a barrier not only between herself and Mrs Poulter, but those she had conceived in an adulterated tradition. Though Waldo could imitate voices, even adapt himself to situations, if they didn’t threaten to extinguish his individuality.

  So he said now: “Wait, Mother. Let me see to it.”

  It appeared to convince, because she stopped where she was with Mrs Poulter. Nobody but Waldo, and he only in passing, was surprised at his sung command, his Rigoletto-tenor tones. After briefly rehearsing the part, he was running springily in, ignoring Bill Poulter in his own house.

  “George Brown, Terminus Road.” He was telling the receiver of a man who had died.

  The carefully phrased words forced his lips into a smile. He was seducing himself, not the telephone. Just as Dulcie, for a moment in the beginning, in the living room at “Mount Pleasant”, had been seduced by the same silky tenor voice.