The Solid Mandala (33 page)

“You will hear more about this, Arthur, from Mr Allwright,” she glumphed, and swallowed.

While Mrs Mutton looked at the window, through and away, managing her teeth.

Arthur did not expect to hear any more, nor did he, on account of the understanding which existed unexpressed between himself and Mr Allwright on the subject of Mr Allwright's wife.

And then there was his meeting, the first official, socially ratified meeting with Dulcie Feinstein, not that she needed to exist more completely than she did already in his mind. It was only that Dulcie, he knew, had to turn round and face whatever it was in Arthur Brown.

Arthur had the shakes by the time they reached the house. It was impossible to gather to what extent Waldo was already established at the Feinsteins'. Much as he admired his brother for his
scholastic brilliance, his knowledge of the world, his self-sufficiency, he had begun to fear for Waldo, for some lack of suppleness in his relationships with other people. There were moments when Waldo was as rigid as a closed cupboard, which no one but his brother had learnt the trick of jerking open. So he trembled for Waldo on the way to Feinsteins', for fear that Waldo had been there too often alone.

He was somewhat reassured, however, by the sight of Mr Feinstein gleaming in the doorway. Old Feinstein sometimes gave Arthur a bob or two. And then the appearance of Mrs Feinstein, in her rustling, metal-beaded dress.

“Why, Mrs Feinstein, you do look good! Like oil on water,” he was moved to say.

It was a good beginning, with all the indications of a love feast.

If only Dulcie would declare herself.

Then she came in. In that white, loosely-embroidered dress, a flurry of white hydrangea heads. If he was at all flustered it was because of her beauty and the movement of the flowery flowing dress. He was, in fact, so overcome he began to babble all that silly rot about her father's old
capple
, a performance which Dulcie obviously found distasteful, it was showing so clearly on her face.

He continued babbling, he heard: “Now that I've seen your face. Even if you never want to see me again.”

At the same time he knew, of course, that this could not be true; Dulcie herself let him see it. When he went up to examine her more closely, by touch as well, he saw her suddenly closed face open out again as it must in response to music. In spite of the natural shyness of any young girl, she accepted his entry into her thoughts.

“Oh yes,” she seemed to be, and was in fact, saying, “we shall have so much to exchange, to share.”

More than anxiety, fear that something precious might escape her, was making her take him by the hand.

“Of course I shall teach you the piano!” Dulcie agreed, laughing with a joyful relief.

They couldn't get down to it quick enough, regardless of anyone else present.

Dulcie would play a scale, or form the shapes of fully-fleshed music, or explain the theory of what she was doing. While in between Arthur was glad to splash around with his unmanageable hands, which, he now realized, she would never notice. Why should she? She understood his sudden splurges and sallies of music.

It was the most exquisite fulfilment Arthur Brown had experienced yet.

He hardly noticed when Waldo shot out of the room, nor did he more than half-see that his brother had returned looking pale.

For Dulcie was telling Arthur about the
pierrot d'amour
on the scent-bottle in Mrs Musto's bathroom where, in spite of his familiarity with the house, he had never been.

“That's interesting now, Dulcie,” he said. “
Amour
sounds different from
love
. Eh? Doesn't it?”

“Oh yes,” she agreed. “The words are different. They have a different shape. Probably even a different meaning.”

He would have liked to give it further thought, but this was after all a social occasion.

When the tea came, and the rain, when they were all sitting round behind rain-pelted windows, eating the buttery cinnamon toast and exchanging anecdotes, Arthur knew how to retract what some people considered his aggressive personality. He knew how to lick his buttery fingers with the daintiness required. Most delicious of all, because most apparent, were the tales Mrs Feinstein had to tell of Europe. He could see the lights of the prescribed cities like the bottles in a chemist's window. He could smell the forests of Russia which Mrs Feinstein had visited with an aunt.

“To think,” he said, “that the world is another mandala!”

“Another what, Arthur?” Mrs Feinstein asked.

But already she was thinking other thoughts.

Like poor old Waldo. It should have been Waldo's afternoon, afterwards at least, under the dripping hydrangeas with Dulcie, while Arthur helped Mrs Feinstein clear away the things. Instead of Waldo's afternoon, it would become Waldo's tragedy, because he wouldn't know how to act. Only Arthur and Dulcie in the end would know the parts they and others must act out.

Only Arthur knew that Mrs Feinstein was planning to take Dulcie overseas. On a cold day in early winter Mrs Allwright and Mrs Mutton had sent him to Sydney to execute some small commissions.

“Mummy and I are going to slip away,” Dulcie informed him, “without telling anybody. Leave-takings are rather painful when they are not absurd.”

Arthur began his stumbling. The cold light made the situation look so serious. He and Dulcie were walking together in the park, over the dead grass, along the edge of the wild lake. Dulcie was carrying a little muff, and wearing a collar of the same fur.

“But we decided we should tell you,” she added. “Because — ” she paused in thought, “in case you might fret.”

He was so moved as Dulcie spoke, and by the lights in her dark, shimmery fur, that his jaws were munching for every word.

“Don't mind me, Dulcie!” he said. “After all.”

He could not hobble gratefully enough.

“Have you got a stone in your boot, perhaps?” Dulcie asked.

“No,” he said. “I don't know.”

“Don't you want to look?”

“No,” he said, and laughed.

He was laughing at the swamp-hen strutting blue-enamelled through the reeds.

“Shall you send me picture post-cards?” he asked.

She would, of course. Written in coloured inks. In all the languages she proposed to learn.

Together they were making a joke of it.

“And Russian?” he asked.

“Too untidy for post-cards!” Dulcie laughed.

So they were happy together, rounding the empty shelter with its broken glass, and back the other side of the lake. Each moment was the happiest for their passing through it. They were the long-legged lovers, confidently offering their faces to receive each other's gentleness as they moved in perfect time, in absolute agreement, against the flesh-coloured trunks of the paperbarks. Even when they were silentest, and he listened to Dulcie's skirt dragging its hem through the wintry grass, and he could smell the smell of
cold mud, he reckoned his face wouldn't have collapsed yet into its normal shapelessness.

“Say a blind person married a blind person, do you think it would matter to them not to have seen each other?” Arthur asked.

“I've never thought about it,” Dulcie said.

She was walking with her head raised, looking so far into the distance, she had already left him.

She kept her promise and wrote him, if not several post-cards — you could not expect too much of people when you were not there to remind them of you — at least the card of the Italian lake, the name of which he was unable to read, nor did it matter, nor the foreign languages she had promised, and in which she did, in fact, write:

The foreign languages failed to obscure Dulcie Feinstein focussed as she was in the crystal of his mind. Long after he had lost the card, he had only to revolve the marble in his pocket for Dulcie's lake with the crystal-studded castle to re-appear.

When war broke out, which was important enough for those who became physically involved, it was more important that the Feinsteins should return, to the life which in fact they had never really left, in the house on the edge of the park. They came. And they appeared older. It continually amazed Arthur Brown that other people were growing older. Mrs Feinstein was older, and sadder, perhaps for this very fact of age. Dulcie was older, different, unexpected — for one thing she was unable to remember what she had written on the post-card.

“Shall we walk in the park,” he suggested, “like we did before you went away?”

“Not today,” she said, frowning slightly.

“Why?” he asked, though there was not much point, and his hopes had never been high.

“I have a headache.”

It must have been the airless room. The windows of the Feinsteins' town house were more often than not sealed.

“I'll open the window,” said Arthur.

But she did not seem to think it might help.

“It is not that. I am not in the mood. It is not a day for walking,” she added. “And besides, there are the railings. We should have to go so far along to get to a gate.”

The railings had existed before.

Soon after the remark, he went away, deciding not to admit to Waldo what could only be counted as defeat. In fact, he wouldn't mention the return of Dulcie and Mrs Feinstein. For some reason, for the moment, he was less able to communicate with them, though if he hadn't lost the art, he would not have known exactly what he wanted to say.

He happened to pass by the music store, where old Feinstein, who was following the War in the paper, received him more jovially than might have been expected. Normally it pleased Arthur to look through sheets of music, at the notes of music he would never be able to read.

Today he asked: “What are these?”

“Those are some songs which nobody will buy. Those songs were born to fly-specks and the remainder counter,” Mr Feinstein answered, gloomily turning back to the news.

The
pierrot d'amour
on the cover certainly conveyed less expectancy, less of the slightly scented breathlessness of the afternoon when Dulcie had explained about the
pierrot
on Mrs Musto's bottle. So Arthur sat, and as the clanking tram flung the passengers together, composed his own version of a song, ignoring all those faces with which, in normal circumstances, he would have begun an intimate and, more likely than not, illuminating conversation.

When Waldo realized Feinsteins were back after meeting Dulcie
at the gate one evening, and he and Arthur were invited up to “Mount Pleasant” on an afternoon which turned out not a bit as Arthur had hoped and expected — Waldo's rather than Arthur's, and instead of something squishy to eat, a few of Arnotts' hard old biscuits — it was this rather fly-specked version of a pierrot song, composed to the clanking of a crowded tram, which Arthur rendered in Mrs Feinstein's “salon”. It was really a song for Dulcie, which she alone would understand; she would see behind the words, and the deliberately ridiculous convulsions of his face.

Even though she said: “Oh, what a lovely song!” like some lady arriving for luncheon at Mrs Musto's he thought Dulcie understood.

So he was able to flop down afterwards, and not exactly sleep, retire behind his eyelids, leaving the field to Waldo. This didn't mean he didn't experience Waldo's torture of Dulcie when he provoked her to music, and all of that episode in the garden, first as Waldo, then as Dulcie, very intensely. He could smell the smell of rotting as they stirred up the dead hydrangea leaves. He could even smell the almond-essence smell of the vegetable-bugs on which they trod. Suffocating. Exhausting in the end. All the answers he could have foretold while the others were still looking for them.

Somewhere at some point Mrs Feinstein had remarked to Waldo: “I am so sorry you will never have had the good chance of meeting Leonard Saporta.”

“Is he a relative?” silly old Waldo asked.

Was he a relative! Leonard Saporta was a born relative.

Arthur had met this Mr Saporta, coming or going, never by arrangement, at Feinsteins' other house. In Arthur's life there were the convinced, the unalterable ones, such as Mr Allwright and Leonard Saporta, as opposed to those other fluctuating figures, of Dulcie, Waldo, his parents, even Mrs Poulter, all of whom flickered as frightfully as himself. Whereas Mr Allwright and Leonard Saporta must have kept the solid shape they were moulded in originally. Arthur was grateful for knowing they would never divide, like the others, in front of his eyes, into the two faces, one of which he might not have recognized if it hadn't been his own.

It was during the First War that Arthur visited Mr Saporta in his shop. It must have been towards the end, for the merchant himself was there, discharged. Leonard Saporta had enlisted, gone overseas, and returned with several shrapnel wounds which he did not care to talk about. (It was while he had been on leave in France that Leonard had sent Dulcie the little Star of David, which she afterwards wore on a chain round her neck, and which would have become a source of jovial mirth to Mr Feinstein, if his wife had not implored him, with all the resources of her face and muted 'cello notes in her voice, to desist, for Dulcie's, for everybody's sake.)

Anyway, Mr Saporta had returned, and the day Arthur went to his shop, approached with the appearance of a merchant receiving a genuine customer — certainly business was pretty slack — and clapping his hands together, asked: