The Solid Mandala (27 page)

Rage shot up through his drought, not only at Miss Glasson, but all those human beings who were conspiring against him with his brother. But he went on.

Coming level with the raincoat he confirmed that Arthur was inside it in the flesh. On such a fine warm day it was not surprising he was glittering with white sweat. The reason his brother had worn the raincoat could only have been to deceive his brother.

There he sat, exposed, though, under the dismal grease-spots. Munching and mumbling over, of all things, a book. Playing with a glass marble. How it would have crashed, shattering the Public Library. But never smashed. Arthur's glass was indestructible. Only other people broke.

Having to decide quickly what action to take Waldo pulled out an excruciatingly noisy chair and sat down exactly opposite. His attitude at the table was so intense, he was so tightly clamped to the chair, he realized at once he might be giving himself away, not only to Miss Glasson, but to all those others who would be watching him. At least he had the presence of mind to relax almost immediately.

Arthur, as soon as he had swum up out of his thoughts, closed his mouth, and smiled.

“Hello, Waldy,” he said rather drowsily.

Waldo winced.

“You have never called me that before. Why should you begin now?”

“Because I'm happy to see you. Here in the Library. Where you work. I never looked you up on any occasion because I thought it would disturb you, and you mightn't like it.”

This was so reasonable a speech Waldo could only regret he was unable to squash it.

“Do you come here often?” he asked.

“Only on days when I run a message for Mrs Allwright. Today she sent me to fetch her glasses, which are being fitted with new frames.” He felt in his pocket. “That reminds me, I forgot about
them so far. I couldn't come here quick enough to get on with
The Brothers Karamazov
.”

Arthur made his mention of the title sound so natural, as though trotting out a line of condensed milk to a customer at Allwrights'.

“But,” said Waldo, ignoring the more sinister aspect of it, “is there any necessity to come to the Public Library? You could buy for a few shillings. In any case, there's the copy at home. Dad's copy.”

“I like to come to the Public Library,” said Arthur, “because then I can sit amongst all these people and look at them when I'm tired of reading. Sometimes I talk to the ones near me. They seem surprised and pleased to hear any news I have to give them.”

He stopped, and squinted into the marble, at the brilliant whorl of intersecting lines.

“I can't read the copy at home,” he who had been speaking gently enough before, said more gently. “Dad burned it. Don't you remember?”

Waldo did now, unpleasant though the memory was, and much as he respected books, and had despised their in many ways pitiful father, his sympathies were somehow with Dad over
The Brothers Karamazov
. Which George Brown had carried to the bonfire with a pair of tongs. Waldo found himself shivering, as though some unmentionable gobbet of his own flesh had lain reeking on the embers.

“I think he was afraid of it,” said Arthur. “There were the bits he understood. They were bad enough. But the bits he didn't understand were worse.”

All the loathing in Waldo was centred on
The Brothers Karamazov
and the glass marble in Arthur's hands.

“And
you
understand!” he said to Arthur viciously.

Arthur was unhurt.

“Not a lot,” he said. “And not the Grand Inquisitor. That's why I forgot Mrs Allwright's glasses today. Because I had to get here to read the Grand Inquisitor again.”

Waldo could have laid his head on the table; their lifetime had exhausted him.

“What will it do for you? To understand? The Grand Inquisitor?”

Though almost yawning, he felt neither lulled nor softened.

“I could be able to help people,” Arthur said, beginning to devour the words. “Mrs Poulter. You. Mrs Allwright. Though Mrs Allwright's Christian Science, and shouldn't be in need of help. But you, Waldo.”

Arthur's face was in such a state of upheaval, Waldo hoped he wasn't going to have a fit, though he had never had one up till now. And why did Arthur keep on lumping him together with almost all the people they knew? Mercifully he seemed to be overlooking the Saportas.

“The need to ‘find somebody to worship'. As he says. Well, that's plain enough.” Arthur had begun to slap the book and raise his voice alarmingly. “That's clear. But what's all this about bread? Why's he got it in for poor old
bread?
”

He was mashing the open book with his fist.

“Eh? Everybody's got to concentrate on something. Whether it's a dog. Or,” he babbled, “or a glass marble. Or a brother, for instance. Or Our Lord, like Mrs Poulter says.”

Waldo was afraid the sweat he could feel on his forehead, the sweat he could see streaming shining round his eyes, was going to attract even more attention than Arthur's hysteria.

“Afraid.” Arthur was swaying in his chair. “That is why our father was afraid. It wasn't so much because of the blood, however awful, pouring out where the nails went in. He was afraid to worship some thing. Or body. Which is what I take it this Dostoevsky is partly going on about.”

Suddenly Arthur burst into tears, and Waldo looked round at all the opaque faces waiting to accuse him, him him, not Arthur. But just as suddenly, Arthur stopped.

“That's something you and I need never be, Waldo. Afraid. We learned too late about all this Christ stuff. From what we read it doesn't seem to work, anyway. But we have each other.”

He leaned over across the table and appeared about to take Waldo's hands.

Waldo removed his property just in time.

“You'd better get out,” he shouted. “This is a reading room. You can't shout in here. You're drawing attention to us.”

Arthur continued sitting, looking at the book, mumbling, seeming to suck up some last dreg.

“But I don't understand. All.”

“You will leave this place, please, at once,” Waldo commanded in a lower voice. “Please,” he repeated, and added very loudly: “sir.”

Arthur was so surprised he looked straight into Waldo's face.

“Okay,” he said, his mouth so open it could scarcely form words.

“But the Inquisitor,” he said, recovering himself.

And again looking down, he began to tear several pages out of the book.

“You have no right!” Waldo screamed, and snatched at what he discovered afterwards he had stuffed in his own pocket.

“This is a public library,” Arthur mumbled.

Whom Waldo was shoving running in something approaching the professional manner through the inner swing doors.

Arthur did not look back, but walked in his raincoat, over the inlaid floor, through the hall. Nor did the Lithuanian attendant, from some charitable instinct, attempt to arrest the offender, for which Waldo was afterwards thankful.

In the meantime Miss Glasson had come running up.

“Oh dear!” she was panting. “What a scene! How embarrassing for you! And I feel I'm the one to blame. But you came out of it splendidly. I was afraid he might grow violent. One can never be certain of any of these peculiar old men. I am so relieved,” she said, “you are not in any way hurt.”

He was in fact only hurt that Miss Glasson did not appear to see. But what could you expect of her, or anybody else?

He began to sleek back into place his thin, but presentable hair, and to pull down the sleeves of his coat, which had rucked up towards his elbows, and stuck.

And later on, as he was passing, O'Connell came out of his office and congratulated Mr Brown on his neat handling of a vandal, not to say madman. Waldo would have liked to enjoy
praise, but in a flash of frosted glass and closing door he suspected he saw, seated on leather, at the other end of O'Connell's room, Crankshaw, was it? and a priest.

The rest of the day was not quite in focus. In the evening he returned as usual to Sarsaparilla, carrying a small parcel of New Zealand cod he had bought for their tea. As the train rocked his bones the hoardings were proclaiming a millenium. He was too tired to contradict, even in his hour of personal triumph. He was so tired he would not have been able to resist the figure in the old raincoat, for he realized the other side of Lidcombe that his brother was sitting ahead of him. Arthur either remained unaware, or made no attempt to approach, anyway, there and then.

For at Barranugli he came and sat, equably, silently, beside Waldo in the Sarsaparilla bus, and they remained together after getting down.

As they walked down Terminus Road, Waldo realized that, somewhere, he had left his parcel of New Zealand cod. He was too tired to care.

The children running along behind them — as would often happen, on account of Arthur — were playing a game dependent on a string of screams from which occasional words would dangle.

Perhaps understanding they should not advance beyond the pale, the children dissolved on seeing the Brothers Brown enter Terminus Road.

And when there was silence, Arthur took Waldo by the hand.

“Whatever happens,” Arthur said, “we have each other.”

“Yes,” said Waldo.

Who was otherwise too weary. As his brother led him along and down their familiar road he was too tired to cry.

The incident at the Library did not exactly wind up Waldo's
career, for it happened two years before his retirement, and in the time left he presented himself regularly for duty. He could not feel he was running down, and nobody ever suggested it. He was content. He would himself have admitted to the incidental signs of age: red rims under watery eyes, papery skin which, if pinched up, remained standing in a blue ridge, his tyrant bladder. But the physical, the superficial, was of minor concern. He was still young and twitching at the level where the Incident — the incidents, were continually being re-enacted.

Arthur continued remarkably active. After the death of Allwright in 1951, the widow had kept him on. He was necessary to her, especially for the deliveries, and because he remembered the prices she forgot. At home as usual he baked the bread three times a week. And made the butter twice, from whichever cow. Waldo never remembered the names, the number in the series. He hated cows.

All this while the mutton fat was curdling round them in skeins, clogging corners, filling bowls with verdigris tints and soft white to greyish fur. You couldn't be bothered to empty the mutton fat out. Like a family, it was with you always. Set.

And dogs. The dogs had reached what was probably their prime. They would lay themselves out in glistening sleep on warm bricks, or coming to, would narrow their eyes at the sun, and lick their private parts, and contemplate the flavour. The young strong dogs loved each other in the end, which was strange, considering. Scruffy used to wander off in search of sexual excitement, and once Waldo came across him locked in a little bitch outside the Sarsaparilla post-office. Waldo hurried in to buy his stamps, not wanting several ladies to connect him with Arthur's dog.

Scruffy returned on that occasion, as on many others, holding his tail at an angle, fulfilled, and yet respectable.

Runt was less inclined to stray. Though he was Waldo's dog he waited longing for Arthur to return. He preferred games of mounting, rounding his eyes, twitching his impeccable tail. Runt and Scruffy loved each other.

Then suddenly Waldo Brown was retired. All that had to be said was said, the documents and the objects received, the addresses
exchanged. He realized that Miss Glasson, Cornelius, Parslow, Mr Hayter — who had never joined them in the intellectual breathers on the edge of the Botanic Gardens — even O'Connell himself, had grown brittler, if jollier, their silences deeper, their vision in-turned. Though there was none of them who would not ignore his own involutions, looking up in friendship even after he had been caught out picking his nose the moment before.

Waldo said good-bye to them all. They made arrangements to meet, to discuss Bartok, Sartre, the milder statements of Picasso — it was so important to keep abreast — and Waldo smiled, agreeing, while knowing he would not care to. Not now that he was retired. He had work to do.

He said to Arthur: “A good job the Widow Allwright is selling out. Because it's time you retired too.”

There was no reason why his brother should be let off.

“I, of course, shall find a lot to look into,” Arthur said. “But what about you, Waldo? What will you do?”

Knowing that Arthur's contradictory eye was on him, Waldo answered: “I have my work.”

As if it wasn't twitching inside, barely contained by, the dress-box on top of the wardrobe.

“Oh yes,” said Arthur, satisfied, “the book you're going to write.”

As if Waldo, and all those in collaboration, hadn't been writing it all his life. Now that he was retired it was only a matter of settling himself, of sifting and collating the evidence, of A progressing to B.

So, they were retired.

 

When the two old men returned from the walk which wasn't Arthur's last, pushing at the gate which had not yet fallen down, pushing with their chests in places at the grass which had swallowed up shoes, crockery, sauce bottles, salmon tins, anything of an incidental or ephemeral nature, including the sticks of rosebushes and stubborn trunks of long-dead rosemary, they came to the house in which they must go on living. For the moment at least, Waldo saw, Arthur could not die. If they hadn't been knotted
together by habit he might have continued resenting Arthur's failure to accept the plan he didn't know about. As it was, Waldo could even make a compensation out of the prospect of prolonged mutual habit. Habit in weaker moments is soothing as sugared bread and milk.