The Solid Mandala Read online

  When he turned he was not surprised to find Bill Poulter looking frightened. While Waldo himself was loving his own moustache with the tip of his tongue.

  He went outside, if not muscular, slim and supple, to where his mother was waiting with that woman. Mother and son crossed the road naturally enough, though in silence, because words were unnecessary, and without his touching her, because they seemed years ago to have come to an agreement not to touch.

  He could hear her slippers in the dust, her old blue woollen dressing-gown dragging through the damp grass on the verge of the road.

  Arthur’s blurry face, which strangers often found disturbing, was waiting for them on the veranda where they had left him, his skin still smeared, though drying. And Mother went up the steps to Arthur, suddenly quicker than Waldo could account for. In the present unsettling circumstances of course she would feel she must comfort somebody afflicted like Arthur, who in many ways had remained her little boy. But Arthur, he saw, was holding their mother. She was not so much looking at him, as to him, into his blurry face, which perhaps was less confused than it should have been.

  Waldo was trembling for unsuspected possibilities. Standing above him his brother appeared huge.

  If only he could have focussed on Arthur’s face to see what Mother was looking for. Because whatever it was she might find would soon be buried in words. The little boy on the step below stood craning up, wriggling his nervous, white worm of a neck, to see. But could not. The sun was shining on his glasses.

  “We’ll have to have our breakfast, anyway. Won’t we?” Arthur was gobbling.

  “Yes, darling,” Mother agreed.

  Waldo had never heard her sound so natural.

  “You shall get it for me.” She sighed. “Wouldn’t you like that?”

  Because in a crisis, Waldo admitted, Arthur had to be humoured.

  “Shall we have milk for a change? Warm milk?” Arthur suggested. “That would be good and soothing, wouldn’t it?”

  It was quite an idea.

  Soon they were holding in their hands, the chipped, while still elegant, porcelain bowls with the pattern of little camomile sprigs, which they had brought out with them from Home.

  “When the doctor gets here I’d better be making tracks,” Arthur mentioned anxiously, looking at his watch, at Mother. “Allwrights’ll be wondering what’s come over me.”

  “I’d hoped you would stay with us,” Mother said, “today.” She added quickly, without looking round: “I’m sure Waldo would appreciate it.”

  As though her little boy Waldo would take for granted anything she might arrange for him with his big brother. Naturally Waldo was grateful. Somebody would ring the Library.

  So he continued watching Mother as she smoothed back Arthur’s moist hair, looking into Arthur’s face, into the avenue she hoped to open up. Finally Waldo saw them only indistinctly, because he had deliberately taken his glasses off.

  Their father, then, was dead. Encouraged by his death, Waldo was often tempted to re-enter his own boyhood. He was only beginning to learn about it, and even where there were flaws in the past, they fascinated, like splinters in the flesh.

  There was no reason why visitors should have guessed at the flaws in Waldo Brown. His confidence appeared firm without being aggressive. His hair was so candid. He would take water to it, and brush it carefully down; it was only later on that he felt the need for brilliantine. During his boyhood strangers were moved by the streaks of water in his innocently plastered, boy’s hair.

  He was growing up taller and straighter than had been expected. His long, bony, usually ink-stained wrist was exposed by the retreating sleeve. Because he was growing too fast. His shirt-cuffs would not button, and frayed at the edges. Naturally they couldn’t afford to buy him so many clothes so often.

  He developed into a Promising Lad. Although weak in mathematics his gift for composition persisted as vocabulary increased to decorate it. There was some mystery of literary ambitions, which his parents scarcely mentioned, through shame or fear, or simply because they didn’t believe. (Waldo began to suspect parents remain unconscious of a talent in their child unless you rub their noses in it.)

  They were proud of him, though, especially when he jumped up, in his just buttonable knickerbockers, to offer a plate of scones without being prodded. Strangers compared him with potty Arthur, who would have scoffed the lot. Big lump of a thing sitting on a creaking stool, knees under his chin, crumbs tumbling down his chin onto his knees. Munching. Beside the promising Waldo, Arthur tended to fade out. Began to work for Allwright, both behind the counter, and in the sulky delivering the orders after Allwright taught him to drive. Arthur was good with animals; it was perhaps natural for them to accept someone who was only half a human being. It was sad for Browns, not to say a real handicap to a fine boy like Waldo, who, they said, was the twin of the other, you wouldn’t believe it. You’d see them sometimes walking down the road together of an evening, Waldo in the Barranugli High hat-band, carrying his school case, Arthur shambling in the old pair of pants and shirt he wore to work at the store, because you couldn’t expect the parents to spend good money on an outfit just for that. Anyway, there they were. Two twins. You wondered what they talked about.

  Waldo knew it all by heart from listening — even when he couldn’t hear.

  So they moved through the landscape of boyhood, two figures seen at a distance, or too close up, so close you could look into the pores of their skin, you could see the blackheads and the pimples. Waldo hated that. He hated his interminable pimply face. He preferred to listen to the voices of strangers murmuring what they had decided were the truths. How they would have jumped if they had seen him pop a pimple at the face of the glass. People did not go for pus. So he learned to give them what they wanted. Occasionally, in passing, after returning the scones to the table, he would very carefully brush the crumbs which had fallen on Arthur’s knees, with a candid though unostentatious charity which moved the observer — as well as the performer. Quite genuinely, once he had performed the act. Funny old Arthur was no more funny than your own flesh suffering an unjust and unnecessary torment.

  Because Arthur was part of his own parcel of flesh it was easy with Arthur. Less so with Dad. With Dad it was downright difficult, not to say painful at times, particularly during those years when Waldo was going in to the High. There was no escaping his father. They travelled together in the train, one way at least.

  Seeing them off in the early light that first morning, Mother said: “You will have each other for company.”

  They had. Each used to walk carefully. Going up the road Waldo remembered how their father, to amuse, had told them about the bank messengers in London, in their top hats, the bag chained to a wrist. Later on, when the custom of the walk to the station had been established, and it was not always possible to shorten it by visiting the dunny or remembering books, Waldo felt in his bitterest moments he would have died willingly while performing his regular act of duty. With Arthur it was different. There was no escaping Arthur. At best he became the sound of your own breathing, his silences sometimes consoled. But you might have thought of an escape from Dad, if you had been cleverer or brutal. Fathers are no more than the price you have to pay for life, the tickets of admission. Life, as he began in time to see it, is the twin consciousness, jostling you, hindering you, but with which, at unexpected moments, it is possible to communicate in ways both animal and delicate. So Waldo resented his twin’s absence and freedom as he walked with their father between the throng of weeds up Terminus Road, George Brown lashing out with his gammy leg, to keep up with the son holding back for him.

  On one occasion Dad said: “You run on ahead, old man. I’ll take my time.”

  And Waldo had. Literally. Spurted up the road on twisting ankles, arms jerking, books thundering in his half-empty case.

  Afterwards when they were seated whiter together in the train, they hadn’t spoken, but probably wouldn’t have anyway.
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br />   Dad who had been good for stories for little boys, myths of ancient Greece and Rome, to say nothing of recitations from Shakespeare, grew silenter in the face of silence. He had taken up Norwegian, to “read Ibsen in the original”, or to protect himself in the train. Waldo used to watch the words forming visibly under the raggeder moustache. Dad leaned his head against the leather, and closed his eyes. The eyelids looked their nakedest. For many years Waldo could not come at Ibsen out of respect for the private language in which he had written.

  Dad, though, was not unaware, so it seemed, painfully, of some of the responsibilities he shirked. Laying down Teach Yourself Norwegian on the seat in the Barranugli train, he opened his eyes one morning and said:

  “Waldo, I’ve been meaning to have a talk. For some time. About certain things. About, well, life. And so forth.”

  The spidery train was clutching at the rails. The smuts flew in, to sizzle on Waldo’s frozen skin.

  “Because,” continued George Brown, “I expect there are things that puzzle you.”

  Nhoooh! Waldo might have hooted if the engine hadn’t beaten him to it.

  It wasn’t the prospect of his father’s self-exposure which was shaking him. It was the train, shaking out every swollen image he had ever worked on.

  “The main thing,” said Dad, sucking his sparrow-coloured moustache, “is to lead a decent, a life you, well, needn’t feel ashamed of.”

  O Lord. Waldo had not been taught to pray, because, said Mother, everything depends on your own will, it would be foolishness to expect anything else, we can achieve what we want if we are determined, if we are confident that we are strong.

  And here was George Brown knotting together the fingers which had learnt to handle the pound notes so skilfully. Who had nothing to feel ashamed of. Except perhaps his own will.

  O Lord. The Barranugli train bellowed like a cow in pastures not her own.

  “For instance, all these diseases.” George Brown found himself looking at his own flies. He looked away.

  Waldo, though he did not want to, could not help looking at his father, at the sweat shining on the yellow edge of his celluloid collar.

  “There’s a bit of advice, Waldo,” he was saying, “I’d like to give any boy. You can’t be too careful of those lavatory seats. I mean, the public lavatories. You can develop, well, a technique of balance. And avoid a lot of trouble. That way.”

  When he had sweated it out George Brown turned again to Teach yourself Norwegian. Waldo could recognize by then the shapes of the repeated phrases: Hun hoppet i sjøen …1 Han merest det og reddet henne …2 Jeg har span penger for a kiøpe en gave til min søster …3 Because Dad had frightened, then embarrassed him, which was worse, he grew angry. He began to relate the solemn idiocy of the recited words to the unrelenting motion of the train. He would have liked to shout: A pox on old lavatory seats! Or worse — the scribbled words he had seen on walls. He sat looking sideways at his father. Min bloody søster! He sat there muttering: I fucked my auntie Friday night.

  In the varnished box in which they were sitting George Brown shifted on the parched leather, while holding down the pages of the book the draught was agitating. Hun hoppet i sjøen … Han merket det … It looked as though the only way was to memorize.

  While Waldo, it seemed, was all memory and brutal knowledge. Tell me, Dad, he was tempted to make a challenge of it — tell me something I don’t know.

  The raucous train gave to the unuttered words the cracked accents of insolence. The more scornfully Waldo rocked the more the obscene upholstery swelled, in contours of bulbous women, and opulent crutches of purple men. One serge gorilla, tufted with orange hair, passed his gold-and-ruby ring under a corsetted bum in Shadbolt Lane. No man is all that attractive, she said, that there isn’t a copy or two of him about. The man called her his copy-cat, and both laughed to bust their guts, to split the narrow stairs up which they were feeling their way.

  Night thoughts, struggling from under the cestrum, floated on the surface bloated and gloating. The cestrum was at its scentiest at night, filling, and swelling, and throbbing, and spilling, while all the time rooted at a distance in its bed. Its branches creaked, though, enough for Arthur to breathe your dreams.

  Sitting in the train Waldo suddenly looked straight into his father’s face. The train sniggered smuttily. Waldo might have leant back to continue enjoying the escape he had made, if his clothes tightening hadn’t constrained him, together with the fear that freedom might be the equivalent of isolation. So that in the end he would have liked to touch his father’s goodness, but could only be touched by it. His narrow body began not exactly to shiver, it was the train, running them over the outskirts of Barranugli, past the seeding docks and rusty tins, the tethered goats, and in their back yards, women whose pale skins still showed traces of night and mutton fat.

  Dad was stuffing his book into his pocket — Dad alone must have kept the pocket editions going — and they were getting out at Barranugli. Amongst the other arrivals at the station Waldo usually saw to it that they drew apart gradually, to avoid what, for both of them, would have been the embarrassment of saying good-bye.

  If George Brown threw away Teach Yourself Norwegian it was not because he no longer needed it. He could never rely on himself to sit in the train without a book. He began Thus Spake Zarathustra, and shortly after, went over to The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, which he had picked up, he was proud to tell, the one for ninepence, the other for sixpence, second-hand.

  As far as Waldo was concerned the journey to Barranugli repeated itself for more than years. Towards the end, not by choice, he was growing his first moustache. The truth was: they wouldn’t give him the money for a razor to shave it off.

  “Arr, why?” he shouted at them angrily, in the house which had grown too small for him.

  His father put on his gravest expression, and said in his most prudent voice: “Men who start shaving too early always regret it. Besides,” he said, “at your age most young fellows get a lot of enjoyment out of cultivating a moustache. Moustaches are in fashion, I would have thought.”

  Waldo looked at his father. It was bad enough to be a twin without having to identify himself in other ways.

  Mother, who was mending, had to try to smooth things over.

  “You wouldn’t want to turn into one of those blue men,” she said, “who are all shadow by five o’clock.”

  “I’m not that colour,” Waldo said. “I’m not a dago.”

  “That is not a word,” said Dad, “I ever want to hear in my house.”

  And Mother’s fingers started trembling. Later on, when she was ill, and fanciful, and old, Anne Brown, born a Quantrell, said to her sons absently: “It was for his principles, I suppose. And kindness. Poor George, he was too kind. It left him too often open to attack. And I, yes, I grew tough, I think. It often happens that the wives of kind men grow tough and stringy protecting them.”

  For the present, a victim of their unconcern, Waldo could do nothing about himself. He could not afford a razor, so he cherished his resentment in unfrequented corners, his pulses raging, nursing his threadbare elbows. (His school things had to “do”.)

  Arthur said: “Don’t worry, Waldo. Lots of people like a moustache. Let me feel.”

  He might have done it, if Waldo hadn’t shouldered him off. The great lump. Arthur’s fingers smelled of aniseed and honey.

  Waldo shouted: “You stink!”

  Nothing was said by anyone else because so much had been said already.

  “I think Dulcie,” said Arthur, “will probably grow a moustache. I like Dulcie.”

  “Who?” Waldo shouted worse.

  “That girl.”

  “You know nothing about any girl!”

  Nor did Waldo. Nor did he want to. He hated almost everyone, but above all, his family. They knew too much and not enough about one another.

  But they were proud of Waldo. While remaining weak at Maths, he carried off prizes for other subject
s. He had Idylls of the King, and Travels with a Donkey, and Tacitus in 2 vols. He even read them. He was always reading books, but because Dad was the reader in the family he did most of it furtively.

  Most of what he did he did secretly, as though making a secret of his acts gave them a special importance. It was only too bad that more people were not in the secret, for in the circumstances he could only appear important to himself. And Arthur. Arthur hardly commented when Waldo read beside a shielded lamp half the night, or in the dunny, or copied extracts into notebooks, but it was natural for Arthur to accept a twin brother’s secret life. Perhaps Arthur even had a secret life of his own, but necessarily of such simplicity you did not stop to think about, let alone enter it.

  On one occasion Arthur paused in some involved, though unimportant, activity as Waldo was sitting with a sheet of paper, his hand held to protect it, like a wall.

  Arthur felt the need to ask: “What are you doing, Waldo?”

  When he had considered long enough, Waldo answered: “I am writing.”

  “What about?” Arthur asked.

  “I don’t know,” Waldo answered, truthfully.

  But Arthur was never deterred by vagueness of any description, or absence of trust.

  “I hope it will be good,” he said, and smiled.

  To satisfy his curiosity, the expression implied, was less important than his brother’s self-fulfilment.

  Waldo’s throat could have wobbled for some repeated hurt he had to suffer. If he had not been so importantly occupied he might have felt mortified as well. As it was, he accepted the wounds inflicted on him by circumstances — or his own nature. He accepted Arthur his twin brother, who was, as they put it, a shingle short.

  So the lives of the brothers fused by consent at some points. Arthur’s harsh blaze of hair would soften in certain lights, drenching his expression in that secrecy of innocence. Partly his white skin helped, though more than partly, his simplicity. It explained why Arthur would suddenly take leave of his face.