The Solid Mandala (21 page)

Dulcie stirred, and the springs in the sofa remonstrated anomalously.

“I was hoping you would come yesterday,” she said, in a private tone intended only for her lover.

Since his arrival, her throat was permanently raised, to whatever he might do to it.

“Saturdays are out of the question,” Leonard Saporta replied, sweating yellower round the nose, and explained with awful earnestness to Waldo: “I attend the synagogue Saturday.”

Both Dulcie and Saporta needed to explain a lot. They were both of them proud and shy to do so.

“Leonard is a carpet merchant. He inherited the business from his father.”

They were doing it all for hurt Waldo, who was not so hurt he couldn't pity in turn. It was their illusion of strength which made their dependence pitiable.

With the fag-end of her intelligence Dulcie could have sensed
this. She began to complain about humidity, while staring at her lover's wrist; he was wearing a gun-metal wristlet watch. Finally, falling vaguer still, she sat removing a stray hair from her tongue.

“Well,” said Waldo, getting up, “I am not one to mow the lawn on Sunday, but,” he positively insisted, “know when I ought to make myself scarce.”

Having launched his joke, he laughed slightly.

Mr Saporta was easing the sleeves of this business suit down from where they had rucked up, over his rather muscular forearms.

“If you ever care to look me up. In the city, Waldo. My number, Waldo, is in the book.” He meant it, too — he was so earnest.

Waldo had never before heard his name repeated enough to grow ashamed of it.

He got out quickly after that. But Dulcie followed him into the garden.

“You see,” she said, “how unavoidable it was. I know, Waldo, you will understand.”

The Star of David, glinting from between her breasts, gave him the clue he should have followed in the beginning.

“We should all be ready,” he said, “to admit our mistakes.”

Not least his own: the many fragmentary impressions of Dulcie Feinstein, elbowing her way through the lashing rejoinders of ungovernable music, in loose embroidery of white hydrangeas, and flashes of gunpowdery flesh, merging only now into the mosaic of truth — of a rather coarse little thing the carpet merchant was leading back into his ghetto of ignorance and superstition.

In the convention of human intercourse he threw in automatically: “Mr Saporta, I'm sure, is a very reliable man.”

Dulcie winced, and tormented her upper lip.

“I would like to think you could come to us,” she said.

Lowering her head she groped her way out from under the hydrangeas to stand exposed at the top of the steps, and continued standing as he went slack-kneed down.

“That you could feel our door was open. However you may want to accuse me for what I was incapable of being. Don't you think it better,” she finished, “for all of us, to accept the past out of which we've grown, out of which we're still growing?”

He did look back just once at Mrs Saporta, increasing, bulging, the Goddess of a Thousand Breasts, standing at the top of her steps, in a cluster of unborn, ovoid children. This giant incubator hoped she was her own infallible investment. But she would not suck him in. Imagining to hatch him out.

“I'm past the incubation stage!” he called.

So much for Dulcie Feinstein Saporta and her lust for possession. He was tempted to look back again, to see whether his scorn had knocked her bleeding to the steps. He resisted, however.

And after he had turned the privet corner, which in theory chokes those who are susceptible, her eyes continued to follow him, to engulf in the light of conquest, or love, and he did then choke momentarily. He regretted not being years younger, when he might have run some of the distance home, churning up the dust for a disguise. Or cried less dry and secretly. For the tragedy of this ugly girl. Wiping his eyes with the back of his hand instead of his pince-nez with a handkerchief.

As soon as he got back, Mother said: “Your father is far from well, dear. You ought to go in and talk to him.”

“Oh, Mother,” he protested, “when did that do anybody any good?”

If, on hanging up his hat, his conscience twitched for his parents, he knew from experience that Dad would be listening intently to his own thoughts, nor did their mother always seem to hear since they had become the furniture of the house in which they had been placed.

Dad had retired a year or two early on account of his health. They were loyal about it at the bank. They presented him with an engraved watch. There were other considerations. But none of it seemed to compensate for some indignity of life which hung about haunting him.

George Brown had to suffer. The threads of his breath tangled in his chest, or visibly, smokily, smelling of saltpetre, in the room in which he spent his nights. He rarely succeeded in cutting the tangle. (Nor could Waldo use blotting-paper for years after his father's death without the sensation of anxious distress.)

After his retirement George Brown mostly sat.

“Where is your book, dear?” Mother used to ask; it would have been pointless to name the book.

He cleared his throat before replying: “Thank you, I'm resting my eyes.”

In the beginning, faced with the luxury of years to spend, he had promised them jokily: “I'll have time now to give Gibbon another run.”

He sat, at least, holding a volume or two. On a wet afternoon he opened the Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco, but complained that silverfish had eaten the introduction since he had been there last. If opening a book was an occupation, closing one became a relief.

Waldo fortunately did not have to wonder what he might do for this man who was also by accident his father, because so clearly he didn't expect anything to be done. If passion stirred in George Brown, it was for the more unassuming manifestations of nature. On an expedition to Barranugli he bought a rain-gauge, which he set up on a patch where, for some reason, the grass refused to grow. The rainfall he noted down at the back of an old ledger. He would knock on the barometer beside the hat-stand, and read the thermometer nailed to the classical veranda. He collected seeds of all kinds, to put in paper bags, which he hung by the necks, and forgot. Though what appeared to be his favourite occupation was the watch he kept on the flux of light, which required him to do nothing about it.

Only sometimes in the gentle recurrences of light and dark, he seemed to gather hints of some larger, cataclysmic plan. Then his gothic shoulders would arch more acutely, and his already inactive hands turn to stone. He would cough the cough his family had come to recognize as having no outlet.

“Where is that Mrs Poulter?” he would ask between the coughing.

Arthur grew soft, and didn't know.

“Haven't clapped ear to
her
since Tuesday,” Dad used to say, making it sound contemptuous because he had developed a weakness for her.

He loved her because she paraded the minutiae of flesh and blood while always keeping them under control.

Mrs Poulter would come and say: “When we was at Mungindribble they allowed us the quarter of a sheep, and some of the offal if we was lucky. Bill got so as he couldn't stand the sight of offal. From the regular killin'. Threw it to the dogs. Lovely fry. I like a nice lamb's fry before it loses its shine on a slab.”

Mrs Poulter's moist, young-woman's lips would glow with no more assistance than she got from contemplating the desiderata of life.

Then there were the mysteries.

Mrs Poulter said: “There was a feller cut 'is own throat down the line beyond Numburra. We women went down to lay out the body. We all of us took something — scones, or a soda loaf, there was one person took a basin of brawn. All shared, like. There's more what they call community spirit up country.” She sighed. “And we had to come down here. But we're happy.”

She let down her eyelashes then, afraid she might have said too much.

Mrs Poulter, who had faith also in food, used to bring dishes to George Brown. It amused Mother.

“Here is a macaroni pudding, Mr Brown,” Mrs Poulter might say, lowering the basin for him to look inside. “Nice,” she coaxed. “Nutmeg on the top. You must eat, you know, to keep your strength up.”

It was more than advice. That, too, she tried to turn into a mystery.

“Making a sacrament of food. ‘Take eat' is what she would
like
to say,” said Dad, laughing for his own joke at the expense of the Churches and Mrs Poulter.

Waldo frowned, not for any lack of taste or feebleness in his father's joke, but for the flickering memory of some feebleness in himself the day of his meeting with Leonard Saporta and parting from Her. He still heard the slash of that lawn-mower running itself deliberately against the stones.

And Dad, darkening, began to cough. He could never forgive the Baptist Church. Its chocolate campanile “leaning a bit,
but not far enough” stuck in his mind. He couldn't let it rest.

“It's a pity you weren't born a Quaker,” Waldo said. “There would have been less architecture. And you could have left them just the same.”

But Dad didn't care for other people's jokes on serious matters.

“There's too much you boys, reared in the light in an empty country, will never understand. There aren't any shadows in Australia. Or discipline. Every man jack can do what he likes.”

Because he wanted to believe it, he did believe — if not of himself.

Towards the end he appeared to have repaired the deficiencies of his sons enough to refer to them in the abstract.

“Whatever else,” he once said to Mrs Poulter, “the children are our testament.”

Then, remembering from hints she had dropped, that their visitor might die intestate, he gave her an old raincoat.

“There's still plenty of wear in it,” he gasped. “Your husband will find it useful.”

The effort tuned up his cough as he limped a little way along the path.

When their father died at last but suddenly, Waldo was determined that the shock would not prevent his enjoying their mother's company and the secrets she had been waiting to tell. Family matters of an exalted nature had always been stirring in his mind. If he resisted toying with the possibility of his not being his father's son, it was because a twin brother denied him that luxury. Though Waldo might have been better got, Arthur's getting and fate could hardly be improved upon. Still, there were certain details of their mother's breeding, which reserve — and possibly breeding — had prevented her telling, and for which Waldo intended some time in the future to ask. In fact, it didn't turn out quite like that. His father — of all people Dad — hadn't altogether let go. There were the paper bags filled with the seed he had left, and which nobody ever thought to take down. The paper bags continued hanging by their necks, rattling the husks and seed inside them whenever a wind blew, and sometimes disagreeably, after dark, coming into dry collision with a living face.

What is more, Mother changed, as though the moral respon
sibility of protecting a marriage with a man not her social equal had at last been lifted. So she lifted at last the grave structure of her face, roughened red over milky skin. She rearranged the straying grey of her hair, for whom it was difficult to tell.

Not for Waldo, he discovered almost at once.

“Tell me,” she said, “about the book you are writing.”

He could feel the flesh shrivel on his bones.

“What book?” he asked.

Her question, her look had been practically indecent.

“You needn't tell me,” she said, “if you don't want to.”

And continued smiling at him in the way of those who know through hearsay or intuition that something is being hushed up.

As he had to live with it, he decided to ignore her indiscretion, while hiding his private papers in another place. No book, certainly. His life was his book, until at some point in age and detachment it wrote itself logically into the words with which his mind and notebooks were encrusted.

In the meantime, his mother smiled at him, and worse still, forgot.

“I can never remember,” she complained, “whether I have paid the rates. At least they won't cut us off, as I am told can happen to those who go in for telephones and electricity.”

It had been decided years before that neither of these advantages would enrich their lives. Lamplight emphasized the family circle, and they could go across the road to ring for a doctor in the event of sickness, as they had been forced to also in their one experience of death.

In the beginning Waldo had been tempted to remark: The progressive spirit surely doesn't eschew the telephone. (He was fond of “eschew”.) But on thinking it over, he did not exactly dread, he had doubts about the inquisition the telephone might have subjected him to. So he kept quiet.

“To return to the rates,” Mother harped, “now that Dad is gone, you boys
— you
, Waldo,” she corrected herself, “ought to take them on as one of your responsibilities. You pay for the things, anyway.”

He liked
that
! And hoped she would forget about it along with other threats.

For so many years she had been saying: “You are men now,” as though she were in doubt.

On the other hand she would fly into passions if they brought her letters from the box.

“You boys must never collect my letters!” Her own commands made her tremble. “That is one small pleasure you must allow me to enjoy. Besides, you might drop a letter somewhere in the rosemary. That wretched, thick stuff! A letter might lie in it unnoticed for years, and disintegrate in the weather.”

But she loved the rosemary when it was not against her. She would crush it with her trembly fingers, and sigh.

“Next week — next week definitely, there will be a letter from Cousin Mollie.”

She was convinced she was psychic, and would have liked to see a ghost, though she did not believe in ghosts on principle. Premonitions were a different matter; they were scientifically acceptable.