The Solid Mandala (17 page)

“I mightn't be very good at it,” Waldo answered truthfully.

“Who knows who'll be good at what?” Wally said; it was an evening of truths, and he had written poems in his day.

(Wally, in fact, was so good at war he got killed for it, and they sent a medal to Cis.)

Wally, who had become one of the Boys, with a leather strap under his lip, and the smell of khaki, took time off to entertain his pal Waldo Brown, at the expense of Cis and Ernie Baker, before leaving for that hypothetical Front.

Cis had got hold of a boiler and done it up in egg sauce. Afterwards, over the port and nuts, Waldo disclosed that he had a voice. He sang
In the Gloaming, The Tide Will Turn
, and
Singing Voices, Marching Feet —
all light, appropriate stuff. The silkiness of his voice brought the tears to Cis's eyes, and Waldo himself
rubbed his pince-nez with a handkerchief between the items. He was smiling slightly for the success of his contribution.

Only Wally sat set stiffer than usual. He had put on weight since the declaration of war, but camp had turned the fat to meat. The pimples were gone, the movements of his buttocks were controlled, and he needed to talk less about the tarts, perhaps had even done one or two of them in the scrub before you got to Permanent Avenue.

He was a good bloke. Waldo might have loved Wally, if that truth had been admitted. As it was, after several beers on the last night but one — the relatives naturally claimed their soldier on the last — they embraced in George Street, furtively, though affectionately, and the stench of khaki was inebriating.

“Do you remember that girl?” Waldo felt it was required of him to ask as they staggered in each other's arms.

“What girl?”

“That Dulcie.”

“Oh,” said Wally.

Soon after that he was sailing away, and the incident was one to forget.

Waldo had to remember the morning Cis came into the Library. He knew it must have happened, because she was in black. At once he would have liked to look for some excuse in the darker warren of the stacks.

When she had told him, Cis said: “And there's these three or four poems, Waldo. I brought them because you're the literary one. What am I to do with them?”

Everybody was watching.

“Oh yes, Mrs Baker,” Waldo said, when he had been in the habit of calling her Cissie. “I'd take, I'd keep them,” he said, “if I were you — well, for the time — wait and see.”

So Mrs Ernie Baker took the three or four poems, which were so unlike her brother, they would in no way help her to realize he had existed. It was reasonable enough, however, it appeared from her face, to suppose the poems might mature by keeping, like wine for instance. She left the Municipal Library in her squashed black hat, her varicose vein just beginning.

Waldo wondered whether anybody listening had expected him to offer nobler advice in the light-coloured, young man's voice he sometimes overheard. He himself was enraged and mortified, not so much by the death of his friend and colleague Walter Pugh, as by the nobler rage which eluded him.

That week-end he went so far as to begin a poem which he hoped might be to some extent expressive of the nobler rage. He wrote:

(As an old man Waldo Brown discovered these lines amongst his papers, and got a thrill, the “genuine
frisson
” as it had come to be called. It was a pity he hadn't finished the thing. In the same sheaf was that other fragment of his youth scribbled on a piece of official note-paper he must have swiped from the Librarian:

That was it! His hands trembled, and the sheet of paper gave out a stronger smell of enclosure. The light had looked different in those days, keen and expectant, at Sarsaparilla. Not even Goethe, a disagreeable, egotistical man and overrated writer, whom he had always detested, could have equalled Waldo Brown's
dazzled morning moon
.)

Towards the end of the War, when it had been on so long people had begun to accept the killing as a clause in a natural law, thus making Waldo Brown feel somehow less responsible for the state of affairs, he walked home one evening by way of O'Halloran Road, to find lights on at “Mount Pleasant”, the jig-saw of partly illuminated lawn looking and smelling freshly mown. He was still wondering when a woman or girl came out, and stood observing from the veranda. Then, she came running down the steps, at such a speed her bosom flew up and down with the exertion — she hadn't yet set in the formal concrete of womanhood — and there, it was Dulcie Feinstein.

“Why,” he said, “I thought you got stuck, over the other side.”

“For goodness sake, Waldo, whatever made you think that?” she babbled in her pleasure. “We came back not long after the outbreak of war. It was a bit hair-raising, I admit. There was a submarine.”

Dulcie's formerly frizzy hair was neatly done in a bun at the nape of her neck. She was a very neat, pleasant young woman. There was no mystery, probably never had been. The dark sleeves, ending in narrow white above her elbows, ruled that out. She was too emphatically defined.

“But the house,” he said, “looked dead” — when he had meant deserted; he could have kicked himself for using a word so full of recoil.

“Daddy couldn't bear to come here,” said Dulcie. “He's been so upset by everything. You remember all those intellectual theories about human progress!”

She would have liked, and did try, to keep it light, giggly, and Australian, but in spite of herself the muted 'cello notes rose from her thicker throat, as he had heard them also in her mother. Dulcie, though, it was obvious, the matter-of-fact yet still ready-to-become-hysterical young girl, had not yet experienced the full agony of 'cello music.

“Daddy's not so hard-boiled and materialistic, not to say theoretical, as you might think,” Dulcie was telling Waldo, while keeping her face turned from him, perhaps so that he shouldn't see her eyes.

Still, there was a touch of velvet.

It had grown darker too.

Perhaps feeling that the temporary circumstances, of whatever colour, were slipping from them, she began again girlishly to babble, leaning over the gate, spitting slightly from between her teeth in her effort to get it all out, but all.

“You must come up to tea. To afternoon tea. And we'll have a good yarn. I've got a collection of post-cards I made while we were in Europe. My cousins were sweet to me.”

He was wasting his time hanging round this silly girl at the gate.

“But make it Saturday,” Dulcie warned. “Because I work in
the shop, Waldo, now. In the office. They tell me I'm good at figures. So I have that at least in common with poor old Arthur. How is Arthur, Waldo?” she asked.

He was already mumbling off along the road.

“Give him my love. I do love Arthur.”

Shattering Waldo not by throwing a stone.

“I'll tell Daddy,” she promised — though why?

“So long!” he called back.

It was the kind of expression Daddy's silly girl seemed to ask for.

So they were going up the hill again to Feinsteins' on a Saturday afternoon. How raw he had been formerly: all fluff and pimples, and food-spots, and the Barranugli High hat-band. Waldo touched with the tip of his tongue the hair on his upper lip. It was satisfactorily, wirily male. It shone, he liked to think, with personal magnetism, as well as a dash of brilliantine.

But poor Arthur was almost unchanged, and as things were, probably wouldn't alter much. His shirt-sleeves open at the wrist because the buttons came off at once, he would remain a bigger, shamblier boy, staring this way and that, as if unable to select the detail on which to concentrate. Unless it was numbers. Figures continued to rivet Arthur.

Arthur said: “Thought you knew Feinsteins got back after the outbreak of war. Thought I mentioned it. I must have.”

“If you did, you must have mumbled,” Waldo said.

They were going up the same O'Halloran Road, where new houses, to spite war, were flaunting the same old signs of life.

“How did you know, anyway?”

“Dulcie's p.-c. She sent me a card from some
lake
. An
Italian
lake. I forget. I lost the card. I'm sure I
told
you, Waldo, Feinsteins decided to come back.”

“I wish you could remember the name of the lake.”

For the name of the lake to be withheld was almost as bad as not having received the card.

“It's too difficult. I'm tired,” Arthur said, closing down.

But when they arrived he began to glitter dangerously.

“Oh Mrs Feinstein,” he began, “I am that, I am
so
glad you are receiving us again. In your
salong
.”

And pursed up not only his mouth but the whole of the lower part of his face, in an insult to his brother.

Mrs Feinstein was overjoyed.

“Oh, Arthur,” she cried, “I don't know how we can deprive ourselves of the pleasure of seeing you more often.”

She couldn't stop hugging him, as though he were only a boy. Which he was.

Events had aged Mrs Feinstein. Her skin was more than ever of that exposed-private-flesh colour, with a dusting of grey. She had shrunk into herself somewhat, excepting her nose, which hung, suggesting something Waldo wished he could remember.

“What have you got for us to eat today?” Arthur asked.

But Mrs Feinstein looked sad and grey. She gave a sideways look. She said: “We are a lot older than we were.”

When Dulcie brought the tea there was a plate with biscuits from the tin.

Still, Arthur was pleased.

“I could eat the lot,” he said, and started by the coloured ones.

Dulcie showed her picture post-cards.

“I want to know,” Waldo said, putting on a mildly accusatory expression, “the name of the Italian lake.”

“Which one?” Dulcie asked. “There are several.”

She was bent above her post-cards, trying, it seemed, to disguise herself as an absorbed little girl, to whom the names of lakes meant less than their colours and gloss. But for Waldo the withheld name was a source of increasing resentment, as though she had been unfaithful to him intellectually.

Arthur began to sing; he loved to join in the singing in the streets.

Waldo was afraid his brother would become dangerous that afternoon, particularly when Arthur suggested to Mrs Feinstein that he should take the tray out to the kitchen. Waldo waited for the crash.

It had not yet happened, when Arthur burst back into the room,
wearing, his shouting seemed to emphasize, the
capple
Mr Feinstein had kept as a symbol of his emancipation.

Arthur hissed rather than sang.

Waldo could only sit holding his kneecaps, from which sharp blades had shot out on Arthur's re-appearance.

Arthur sang the answer to his question without waiting for anyone to try:

Mrs Feinstein, who had behaved so
piano
since her welcome, with hands in the sleeves of a coat she was wearing although it wasn't cold, began to shriek with laughter.

Arthur sang,

There he stopped abruptly, and his face, which had become impasted with the thick white substance of his song, returned to what was for Arthur normal, as he hung his ruff together with Mr Feinstein's
capple
on the knob of a chair.

“What a lovely song! Where did you learn it?” Dulcie finished laughing, and asked.

Her upper lip was encrusted with little pearly beads.

“I made it up,” said Arthur, primly.

Not so prim as Waldo.

Waldo said: “I think you'd better sit down. Otherwise you'll over-excite yourself.”

Arthur obeyed, and when he was again seated, they heard Mrs Feinstein's throat settling itself back, as though to suggest they were all as they were in the beginning.

Presently Waldo asked Dulcie: “Don't you still play the piano?”

“Yes,” she answered guiltily.

“Can you play us the
Moonlight Sonata?
”

Now, he thought, he'd show her up.

“It might be disastrous,” Dulcie said, but got out of her chair to prepare for it.

It seemed as though they were all under compulsion with the exception of Arthur, who had contributed enough to their dissolution, and fallen asleep, masticating a few last crumbs of Arnotts' biscuit.

The moon was rising, however jerkily, as Dulcie began to play.

Waldo at once knew how wrong he had been to encourage her to make an exhibition of herself. Needn't have accepted, of course, if she hadn't wanted to. But it was going to be a heroic struggle. Not in the beginning, not in the
Adagio what's-it
. There she could lay the atmosphere on, and did, in almost visible slabs. Dulcie's ever so slightly hairy arms were leaning on the solid air, first one side, then the other. Building up her defences against inevitable suicide somewhere along that road which was never moonlit enough. Her shoulders, however, were getting above themselves. If she had started humbly, the music had made her proud. It was kidding her all over again into becoming the genius she was never intended to be, dissolving the bones in her arms with a promise of release, offering a universe of passion instead of plunketty-plunk on the home upright. For moments Waldo was truly tortured by that innocence in others to which he was periodically subjected. He could, at last, have been responsible.