The Solid Mandala (42 page)

“She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she putteth forth her hands to the needy.”

Arthur longed for Dulcie to put out her hand to him, while knowing she would not, she could not. She lowered her eyes to avoid meeting with approval. But as she sat in her violet dress, her painful claws with their smouldering of rings twitched to receive the homage her family was paying her. It was, after all, her right.

“She openeth her mouth in wisdom,” continued the husband in his wife's praise, “and the law of lovingkindness is on her tongue.”

Arthur longed to hear Dulcie speak, but it wasn't yet her
moment. She knew, and was content to wait, while her husband blessed the wine, which their son, their Aaron-Arthur, held. Mr Saporta, it appeared, was afflicted with the permanent trembles.

After the washing of the hands, the old bungling, and the small determined ones, after the bread had been uncovered, after all this, oh dear, endlessness of songs, and prayers, and blessings, the chatter broke above the dishes, above the golden steam, the scent of cloves, and he did not hear his darling speak. Her eyes accepted the situation, as her lips moved, expressing approval, but of others.

While Mr Saporta trembled worse than ever, to assist a grandson measuring out his drops for him.

Practically built by this time into the network of steel vines, the intruder had been numbed. If he could have freed himself, and climbed in to test their lovingkindness, they would surely have kissed him, and fed him, and put him to sleep in linen sheets. But looked at him with surprise and disbelief. Or they might not have recognized somebody their lives had left behind. Just as he himself could no longer identify some of the Feinstein furniture.

So he went away without attempting to storm their fortress, and on the following day he felt the sun burning between his shoulder-blades, he felt a resistance leaving him. He would have liked to lie down and rest his head on the grass, if all the grass in those parts hadn't been worn to scurf. Remembering the springy green cushions grass can become as it collaborates with sleep, he decided to take the train back. To Mrs Poulter, naturally. Whose need was as great as his. Who had sat with him on the grass, under the great orange disc of the sun, and burned with him in a fit of understanding or charity. So the drowsily revolving wheels, of trains, of buses, carried him back, as he sat twirling the solid mandala in his pocket.

 

When he got there she turned round. Her voice, overcoming surprise, might have been expecting him. He sat down, and she went to him.

“Where have you been?” she asked. “What have you done?”

Stroking his hair with the continuous motions of a younger woman. Only her skin, which was dry and withered, kept on catching.

“Eh?” she asked. “All this time?”

“I ran away,” he said, “because I got a shock.”

“Yes, yes,” she said, stroking. “We know. You must of. You needn't tell, Arthur. Do you hear?”

It was so much what he had hoped for, he had to protect her from her innocence.

“After Waldo died — after I killed him — I ran away.”

She did not even stop stroking.

“You didn't kill Waldo, Arthur. Waldo — do you hear? was ready to die. He only took such a time dying.”

“I don't think, Mrs Poulter, I could live without my brother. He was more than half of me.”

“Oh no,” Mrs Poulter said. “No more than a small quarter.”

She was breathing hard, holding his head against her side.

“I was the one who should have died,” said Arthur. “In the beginning. They never told me.”

Mrs Poulter was rocking, bruising what had been his head before she had taken possession of it.

“Only Waldo told me. In the end. When it was too late. I'd killed him. I killed Waldo in the end.”

Then Mrs Poulter threw away his head. She went to the window where the plants were choking out the light. She began to part the big swollen geranium heads.

“I don't believe you, Arthur,” she said, “any more than Sergeant Foyle will believe, who is here now.”

Arthur realized he was hearing the approaching, then the halting, motor-bike. It was very still inside the reflected red of the geraniums.

“He's over the road,” she said. “Constable Kentwell with him in the side-car. The both of them going to investigate. Afterwards they're bound to come in here, and what you have to tell him Sergeant Foyle will never believe.”

“If it's the truth,” Arthur said.

“There's a truth above truth at times. That,” Mrs Poulter said, “is what a person, if she's honest, believes.”

“That's okay for you,” he said. “You're safe. You've got your religion to believe in.”

“I believe in you, Arthur.”

So she did, this man and child, since her God was brought crashing down.

Then they heard the shot, the second shot.

“What are they shooting?” he asked.

When she did not answer, the aged man or crumpled child began to whimper, so she went to him again, because it was necessary to take him in her arms, all the men she had never loved, the children she had never had.

“It is something that had to be done,” she said groggily, because she was an elderly shaky woman, stiff in the joints, and the positions of love did not come easy to her. But she slid down painfully to her knees, along his side, until by instinct she was encircling her joy and duty with her arms — ritually, as it were.

And Arthur was considerably comforted when she was kneeling against him. The shots, which had at first pierced his heart and paralysed his spine, continued on into the duller regions of memory.

“They were too old,” she tried to sound convincing. “You will feel happier,” she said.

“Yes,” he agreed, to please her.

He had the sniffles, however. So she wiped the nose of her little boy, her old, snotty man.

“What will become of me?” he asked, when he had recovered, and got his breath.

“Well,” she said.

She had to think.

“They'll take you somewhere,” she said, “where they'll look after you. Perhaps to some home or other.”

She was not so soft as to say: I will keep you for ever — though that was what she would have done for choice, carried him for ever under her heart, this child too tender to be born.

“It won't be the Home of Peace,” said Arthur. “I'm not ready for the Home of Peace.”

“Oh dear, no!” she said. “You're not! We've life to live yet,” she said.

She did honestly believe it. Since her Lord and master Jesus had
destroyed himself that same day, she had been given this man-child as token of everlasting life.

“I know,” Arthur said, hesitating too, because it was a serious admission. “They'll probably take me to Peaches-and-Plums.”

It sounded so inevitable she rested her cheek against his cheek.

“That will be nice, won't it?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “It'll be all right.”

She might have heard the chugging of his heart if it hadn't been for the noise of her own.

“If you'll visit me,” he said. “And bring things.”

“Tuesdays and Fridays are the days, I believe. And what sort of things would you like?” she asked.

“Ju-jubes,” he said. “The orange ones.”

“Ju-jubes. And anything else. Oh, I'll come, Arthur! I'll never miss!”

Until they were looking at each other so close they were reflected in each other's eyes.

“Have you got that thing?” she asked. “That marble?”

Her leg was hurting her, her knees, from kneeling all that while on the lino.

“I got one,” he said. “I lost Waldo's on the way.”

“I have mine,” she said, “somewhere.”

Because in the course of years, and really it had all been a piece of nonsense, something pagan she dared say, she would never of let on to the minister, she had put it away, and forgot where, and not really regretted till now. When Arthur was bringing out his.

They might have paired.

But there was no need, she saw. In her wrinkling misery for a moment she was pretty certain she saw their two faces becoming one, at the centre of that glass eye, which Arthur sat holding in his hand.

Nonsense really. It was the blur which made it. For when she had wiped her eyes on his shoulder, there was the same steady unblinking marble, or boy's toy.

“You'll have that at least,” she said brightly, “to take along with you.”

“Yes,” he said, with faint conviction.

Putting it back for safety in his pocket.

When Sergeant Foyle came in, there was that Mrs Poulter kneeling beside Arthur Brown. The sergeant had noticed her in her day, but had stopped giving her thought. Now she had her back to him, broad in the beam, the veins showing blue in the white skin behind her knees, just above where the stockings ended, one of them torn.

As for Arthur Brown, he was sitting and staring, at nothing in the room, you felt. Now and then he flinched at outside noises, like a nervous dog.

People said there had been something on at one time between Mrs Poulter and Arthur Brown. From what he saw the sergeant believed it, though again from what he saw, nothing of an indecent nature. There she was, wiping and coaxing that nut, as a woman will cuddle a baby, provided it is hers, after she has let it mess itself. The sergeant couldn't abide a slut. But this old, at any rate, elderly biddy, was clean. Clean as beeswax. And as she half-turned, rising half-sighing on a probably needle-riddled foot, taking the weight off her numb knees, he was reminded of a boyhood smell of cold, almost deserted churches, and old people rising transparent and hopeful, chafing the blood back into their flesh after the sacrament.

“You have come, Sergeant, I expect,” she said, “for my friend Mr Arthur Brown.”

On her feet, she was somewhat older than he had expected. She spoke in a high, clear, not altogether natural voice. But perhaps she was upset by his catching her out in too private a position. The train of events would have rocked many women hysterical by now.

“Yes,” he said. “Mr Brown will be all right with me. We'll take good care of him,” he said.

The situation had begun to make Sergeant Foyle feel curiously insubstantial. The other side of the geranium plants the leaden evening was hanging lower than before. Those dogs. They shook young Gary Kentwell, who had trod back into a blooming baked custard someone had left standing on the path. For a moment perhaps each of the men had tasted a sick taste. Only for a moment. The sergeant himself shot the brutes, through the window, pretty
quick. Old, mangy, in every way pitiful animals, if it had not been for the expression on them. As for their acts. Sergeant Foyle came as near as nothing to spitting on Mrs Poulter's floor.

“There, you see,” she was saying to Arthur Brown, “everyone will be kind. Until I come. You
must
be kind to him,” she told the sergeant, as if the old boy hadn't been there, and more than likely he wasn't. “Kindness is something he understands.”

Sergeant Foyle was not going to pass judgment, except superficially, neither on the living brother, nor the dead.

When the old woman hunted him back towards the scullery, and said: “This is a good man, Sergeant. You know it in your heart” — he had to reply: “It's not a matter of hearts, Mrs Poulter. The issue is something to be decided by better heads than mine.”

But the old woman had worked herself into a state of exaltation.

“This man would be my saint,” she said, “if we could still believe in saints. Nowadays,” she said, “we've only men to believe in. I believe in this man.”

“Okay, Mrs Poulter.”

The sergeant was pretty embarrassed. He couldn't remember, ever, having to get himself out of a similar corner.

“Well,” he said, “Arthur — young fuller — how about coming along for a ride in the side-car?”

Arthur Brown got up. Filling the room, the body of this very vast old man had become the least part of him.

“Yes,” he said, and turning to the woman: “You'll come on Tuesday, Mrs Poulter, as you promised?”

Then Mrs Poulter no longer cared.

“Oh yes, I'll come! I'll come, my pet! You needn't worry! I'll come, my love!”

Her head adrift above her cardigan was on fire with all the reflexions of grief.

“And bring the ju-jubes?”

“Yes,” she cried, “the orange ones!”

For Arthur the orange disc had not moved noticeably since he began his upward climb. It was the accompaniment which confused, by its increase in complexity: the groaning, and tinkling, and splintering of invisible icebergs.

But he realized he should be talking to his friend.

So he said: “By Tuesday I'll have plenty to tell. We'll walk about the grounds together. That's how time passes. In little attentions.”

Somewhere it had to happen, and at this point Sergeant Foyle led out his charge into a more normal air. The sergeant glanced back once — well, to nod, it was the only sociable thing he could do, and the old girl was still standing in the doorway, arms crossed, holding herself together by handfuls, from under the armpits. The sergeant turned, and went on, to avoid looking any longer at her mouth.

 

Later in the afternoon, after she had patted her cheeks with Cyclax, like they told you, and drunk a cup of strong tea, and switched on the telly, though not the sound, the flicker of pictures which she didn't have to look at, Mrs Poulter got control of herself. She did the things which needed doing. She threw a handful to the hens, she milked the cow, she stood the milk. Then she saw about Bill's tea.

When Bill came in, from looking at a boar out Schofields way, she could hear him stamping off the mud. He was still spry except when he stopped to think about himself.

“What's the news, Mother?” he asked.

It was his usual question, and that evening she would have to think a bit. Though of course you could always tell about the grub in the cabbage, or the double-yolkers. By news Bill never meant news. News could make Bill lay around without his teeth imagining an ulcer. He would turn pale at any suggestion of the knife.