The Solid Mandala (9 page)

When the morning, that golden vacuum, was filled even quicker than he had expected.

Arthur, apparently, had come up from the milking, gone through the house to ask or tell something, then run through the hall in a slither of linoleum, and erupted onto the veranda. There he stood, in front of the still quivering fly-screen door, under the classical pediment which their father had demanded, and where Arthur himself, years ago, had conceived his first tragedy. Now this one was actual. The greasy old rag with which he washed the cow's tits twitched where his fingers ended.

He was bellowing.

“Our father,” he bellowed, “our father is
dead
!” His eyes were swivelling, his crop of orange hair stared. “Waldo?” he cried, looking at his brother coming up the path, quickly, wirily, to share their grief.

Arthur's annunciation, blared out in brass despair, had freed Waldo. They were wringing the grief out of each other on the wormy old veranda. If he knew of his defection Waldo believed his brother would never refer to it — Arthur was too dependent on him — but could he be sure of their mother? With Arthur supporting him, physically at least, Waldo wondered.

He heard her fumbling through the house, breaking it open, flinging back the frail doors, to arrive at the disaster of her life, forgetting that her marriage had been just this. He dreaded that she might burst too precipitately into that dark room and call for him to confirm that what had happened had truly happened.

But when she came, pushing against the rusty gauze, she was in possession of something they might not be able to grasp, and he resented that too. What had happened had no connexion, finally, with her children. What had happened had happened already many times, and only concerned her.

So their mother appeared to ignore them. Although she wore the rather frowsy dressing-gown, which bacon fat had spotted, and spilt porridge hardened on, she was clothed essentially in grief. She could still have been soothing his withered leg. Which she had accepted in the beginning out of pity. Which had now been taken from her by force. So her arms hung. So she went on down the steps, her red-roughened chest ending where the secrecy of white breast began.

Waldo followed her because she was technically their mother. Whereas their mother crossed Terminus Road because she was their father's widow.

Mrs Poulter could have been expecting Mrs Brown. She came down quickly out of her house. Mrs Poulter was already a woman filling out, and prepared to pounce heavily on possible disaster.

Mrs Poulter said: “Oh dear, don't tell me! If there is anything I can do!”

She had begun to whimper. If she did not embrace Mrs Brown it was because she was afraid to. Mrs Brown was too erect and cold.

“It's my husband, Mrs Poulter. I should like to ring for the doctor. If you will allow me. Though we must realize nothing can be done.”

Her pure, inherited voice erected a barrier not only between herself and Mrs Poulter, but those she had conceived in an adulterated tradition. Though Waldo could imitate voices, even adapt himself to situations, if they didn't threaten to extinguish his individuality.

So he said now: “Wait, Mother. Let me see to it.”

It appeared to convince, because she stopped where she was with Mrs Poulter. Nobody but Waldo, and he only in passing, was surprised at his sung command, his
Rigoletto
-tenor tones. After briefly rehearsing the part, he was running springily in, ignoring Bill Poulter in his own house.

“George Brown, Terminus Road.” He was telling the receiver of a man who had died.

The carefully phrased words forced his lips into a smile. He was seducing himself, not the telephone. Just as Dulcie, for a moment in the beginning, in the living room at “Mount Pleasant”, had been seduced by the same silky tenor voice.

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.

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.