Authors: Patrick White
The Solid Mandala (29 page)
He did not care for that, but kept it. He kept everything now, out of spite for Goethe, or respect for posterity.
When Arthur produced something he had found.
“What is it, Waldo?”
“An old dress of Mother's.”
“Why was it behind the copper? She must have forgotten.”
“Put it away!” Waldo shouted. “Where it was!”
To Arthur, who was holding in front of him the sheet of ice, so that Waldo might see his reflexion in it.
Arthur threw away the dress.
Which turned into the sheet of paper Waldo discovered in a corner, not ferreting, but ferreted. On smoothing out the electric paper at once he began quivering.
“Arthur,” he called, “do you know about this?”
“Yes,” said Arthur. “That's a poem.”
“What poem?”
“One I wanted to, but couldn't write.”
Then Waldo read aloud, not so menacingly as he would have liked, because he was, in fact, menaced:
“âmy heart is bleeding for the Viviseckshunist
Cordelia is bleeding for her father's life
all Marys in the end bleed
but do not complane because they know
they cannot have it any other way'”
This was the lowest, finally. The paper hung from Waldo's hand.
“I know, Waldo!” Arthur cried. “Give it to me! It was never ever much of a poem.”
He would have snatched, but Waldo did not even make it necessary.
When his brother had gone, Waldo went into the room in which their mother used to sit at the four o'clock sherry. He took down the dress-box and began to look out shining words. He was old. He was bleeding. He was at last intolerably lustreless. His hands were shaking like the papers time had dried.
While Arthur's drop of unnatural blood continued to glitter, like suspicion of an incurable disease.
Waldo was infected with it.
About four o'clock he went down, Tiresias a thinnish man, the dress-box under his arm, towards the pit where they had been accustomed to burn only those things from which they could bear to be parted. He stood on the edge in his dressing-gown. Then crouched, to pitch a paper tent, and when he had broken several match-sticks â increasingly inferior in quality â got it to burn. The warmth did help a little, and prettiness of fire, but almost immediately afterwards the acrid years shot up his nose.
So he stood up. He began to throw his papers by handfuls, or would hold one down with his slippered foot, when the wind threatened to carry too far, with his slippered foot from which the blue veins and smoke wreathed upward.
It was both a sowing and a scattering of seed. When he had finished he felt lighter, but always had been, he suspected while walking away.
Now at least he was free of practically everything but Arthur.
After he had lain down on the bed he began to consider how he might disembarrass himself, not like silly women in the news who got caught out through falling hair or some such unpremeditated detail, but quick, clean, and subtle, a pass with the tongue he had not yet perfected, but must. As he lay, he raised himself on one creaking elbow, because of the urgency of his problem.
That was when Arthur came in and saw him.
“Waldo!” Arthur was afraid at last. “What are you trying to do to me?”
When Waldo had always wondered, fainter now, whether Arthur noticed the hurt which was intended for him. Or Dulcie. He had never shown her he had noticed that moustache. And Dulcie's moustache might possibly have been the means of her destruction.
But Arthur so practically smooth.
Through the pain of destroying Arthur he noticed more than heard Arthur's last words.
“I know it wasn't much of a poem.” Arthur was shaping his defence. “Oughter have destroyed it at once. Apologise, Waldo.”
The warmed stones of words.
“That poem? That disgusting
blood
myth!” Waldo gasped to hear his own voice.
“I would have given the mandala, but you didn't show you wanted it.”
“I never cared for marbles. My thumb could never control them.”
He was entranced by Arthur's great marigold of a face beginning to open. Opening. Coming apart. Falling.
“Let me go! Wald!
Waldo!
”
As dropping. Down. Down.
IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS THE SEA OF SLEEP OF SUCH
blue in which they lay together with iced cakes and the fragments of glass nesting in each other's arms the furry waves of sleep nuzzling at them like animals.
Dreaming and dozing.
The voices of passengers after Capetown promised icebergs to the south, two-thirds submerged.
He looked but only saw the sea in varying depths of light and blue. Sometimes in the stillness of a wave he heard a seabird mewing which might have accounted for his sad stomach. He wasn't sick. He hadn't been sick. Waldo was the sick one, they said, Arthur has always been strong. So he must continue to be.
Then suddenly he noticed for the first time without strain, it seemed, the red gold disc of the sun. He was so happy, he ran to reach, to climb on the rails, reaching up. His hands seemed to flutter his breath mewing with the willing effort.
Voices screaming lifted him back, and he noticed he had been scratched by ladies.
“You must never never climb on the rails at sea!” said Mother. “You might fall over, and then you would be lost for ever.”
He looked at her and said: “Yes. I might. For ever.”
Feeling the cold circles eddying out and away from him.
Mother was soon calm again, sitting talking to the lady who, arranged from head to toe in veils, became always more of a silkworm the tighter the better she arranged her veils.
“Yes, he is very different,” Mother agreed, and laughed. “But they are honestly twins. I can vouch for it! The other one â Waldo â has gone with his father to make friends with someone â the Chief Engineer, I believe. Neither George nor Waldo likes engines, but perhaps they feel it is manly to try.”
The Silkworm said she could not bear the ship, there were cockroaches in the Ladies, she could not bear the passengers, they were so common, she could not bear the voyage, it was too unnecessarily long.
“Never again round the Cape!” The Silkworm shuddered inside her cocoon. “All the nicer people travel via the Canal. But Mr Viney-Smith â my husband says we wouldn't stand up to tropical heat.”
“Yes,” Mother said, and sighed, “it is long. But we have come this way because it is cheap. And I don't expect we shall ever travel by any other route. When we arrive, we shall have to stay where we are put.”
That night there was to be a ball. So presently the Silkworm went, to get herself up as the Primrose Pompadour, and win the prize.
Arthur was glad to be alone with Mother. He held the back of her hand to his cheek and rubbed it with the only ring she wore.
But Mother ignored him, or at least half. She half-spoke to the setting sun.
“We mustn't exhibit ourselves,” she said.
“We mustn't what?”
“We mustn't show off. I have given the most disgusting exhibition of false humility. To which I know I am prone.”
Then she looked at him again, and this time it was only for him.
“Promise me never to show off.”
She was all for promises, and he was always promising, even those promises he would have to break.
Because he knew he loved to exhibit himself. He loved it when other people showed off. He loved the feel of the velvety seats.
“How do you like being in a box, Arthur?” It was Granny asking.
They were all for asking how he felt, and he could not have answered, except that he was sleepy and excited. He could only run his hands along the velvet edge, of what was not, except jokingly, a box, floating in the sea of music.
Everybody talked a lot in the box while the ladies in the huge lit scene were singing against one another.
Again it was: how do you like? what do you make of?
This time it was the person who was Mother's Uncle Charlie leaning over the back of his chair.
“Well, what does the young fellow make of
Götterdämmerung?
” Uncle Charlie asked.
To that Arthur could only try to stroke his left shoulder with his cheek. The answer would have been too velvety, too foolish.
“It's a wonder Anne allowed us to carry off her brat to this unrewarding experiment.” Uncle Charlie yawned.
“Poor Anne! She's too harrassed,” said Cousin Mollie Thourault, smelling so flowery, “too upset by the other one's being ill.”
Uncle Charlie, Arthur could feel, had become in some way interested again. He could feel his relative's hand on the nape of his neck. He would have liked to throw the hand off, but was afraid of disturbing Uncle Charlie's thoughts. For his fingers were thoughtful as his voice increased.
“Wouldn't you have thought, Adelaide,” he said to Granny, and against the singing his speaking voice sounded enormous, “she might have suspected some irony of intention? You wouldn't expect it of Him. Irony is not for Baptist-rationalists even when it kills off a few more unacceptable gods.”
“How brutal you are, Charlie!” Granny said laughingly. “Men are more brutal than women, and far more complicated.”
Arthur could not tell, but found out later Granny was right, that even dogs are less brutal than men, because they are less complicated.
For the time being, lapped so deliriously in linings of dark red velvet, sleep was carrying him off. Or music. Who and where were the gods? He could not have told, but knew, in his flooded depths. Tell Waldo about the lady in the brass helmet. The primrose pomp. If the crimson flood of music had been of Waldo's world.
“Wake up, darling!” Mother said.
And of course they were sitting on the deck. The dying sun had turned them cold.
“You funny boy!” she said. “Falling asleep just anywhere. Perhaps it's a blessing,” she added.
Again she was looking out to sea. And he loved her.
He would have loved to see the icebergs, but never ever did they pop up, not even though he looked to the line which divided sea from sky. Only in sleep the icebergs moaned, and jostled one another, crunching and tinkling. The moons of sky-blue ice fell crashing silently down to splinter into glass balls which he gathered in his protected hands.
Somehow at least he knew from the beginning he was protected. Perhaps it was Waldo. Not everybody has a twin. He must hang on to Waldo.
“You're a funny pair,” said the woman at Barranugli when she brought in the big brown teapot. “Are there many others like you at Home?”
“I should hope not,” Waldo answered; it had made him angry. “I should hope we are different from just anybody.”
The woman went out. She didn't seem to understand their speech.
Arthur had not contributed because he mostly left it to his brother who was quick at answering questions. Perhaps if things had made him angrier Arthur might have answered back more often, but he was lazy enough to leave it to Waldo.
They lodged at first with those people at Barranugli, Mr and Mrs Thompson â he was a joiner who hadn't taken to them. But it was convenient because of Dad's job at the bank. Arthur and Waldo went to school only a couple of blocks away, where nobody understood them until they managed to learn the language. Even so, Waldo, then and always, preferred to speak English because, he said, it had a bigger vocabulary. Arthur did not care. Or he did. He developed the habit of speaking mostly in Australian. He wanted to be understood. He wanted them to trust him too. Waldo, he knew, was suspicious of men, though Waldo himself was inclined to call them Australians.
Dad was at the bank then. They looked in to see him whenever possible, to be made a fuss of by the young ladies, and Mr Mackenzie would give them things, sometimes even sixpences. Best of all Arthur liked to go upstairs to the residence. He loved other people's houses, and never quite succeeded in breaking himself of
a habit, it shocked Mother terribly, of opening cupboards and drawers to look inside. Mother continued shocked even after he pointed out it was the best way of getting to know about the owners.
“It's a form of dishonesty,” Mother said.
“It's not! It's not!” Arthur shouted.
“I shouldn't like to think you were dishonest.”
He could feel inside him the rush of words which wouldn't come.
“What's dishonest,” he blathered, jerking his head against the gag, “when all you want is know, talk to people? I can talk better if I know them better.”
“People tell you as much as they want you to know.”
“Is that honest?”
“Don't excite yourself, dearest. It isn't good for you. We do know that.”
It wasn't good for him. But Mother could also be unjust.
So at least he didn't look inside any of the cupboards or drawers at the bank manager's residence. It would apparently have been too humiliating for Dad. Whenever they were taken upstairs Arthur had to content himself with the sound of silence, the brown shadows, and the mystery of the bank manager's wife.
“Mrs Mackenzie is bed-ridden,” Mother explained.
“What?”
“She's delicate. An invalid. She has to stay in bed.”
“What's wrong with her?”
“That's something we don't ask.”
Waldo said: “I think Mrs Mackenzie is a pressed flower,” and giggled.
It was of the greatest interest to Arthur. Certainly Mrs Mackenzie's hand had the dry cool scratch of clean writing-paper or pressed flowers. And yellow, she was yellow, in her still, brown room, with a blow-fly that had got inside, and the little prayer-desk, or
pre-dew
, she called it, which she was no longer strong enough to kneel against.
“Perhaps,” suggested Arthur, “if you wore a surgical appliance.”
But Mrs Mackenzie appeared too delicate to see any point. She only wet her lips.
So Arthur didn't collect Mrs Mackenzie, although he was the one interested in people. Waldo was more interested in words and all that Waldo was going to do. Natural enough â Waldo was the clever twin.
It was not till towards the end of their stay at Barranugli, on an occasion when Waldo had gone behind the counter to give his views to two of the clerks sitting at their ledgers, that Arthur decided to go up alone to the residence, and if things had turned out otherwise, might even have started looking through the cupboards and drawers. But it did not happen that way.
The residence above the bank was laid out rather unusually. Almost at the top of the stairs there was a little half-landing where you were offered a choice of directions. Arthur had never been there long or unencumbered enough to discover what lay beyond the right-hand turn, beyond the brown linoleum and the thick brown light. On the morning when he should have found out, he was, so to speak, arrested. He was approaching the little landing, when he stood, and held on to the banister.
For precisely at that moment, Mrs Mackenzie the manager's wife, yellower, brittler than ever before, flew or blew across the landing in the sound of her own starchy nightdress. He could hear the sound of her long, rather fine, but yellow feet, just scratching the surface of the linoleum, somewhat sandpapery in effect.
On seeing Arthur, Mrs Mackenzie too, was arrested. On the little landing. She stood looking down at her own toe-nails. He was surprised to find her so tall. Far taller than her tobacco-y husband. Perhaps it was from lying in bed.
Then Mrs Mackenzie said, still staring at her toes, which were curling upward to meet her gaze: “My husband has taken the trap, and gone to Wilberforce for the day.”
Arthur wished he knew what to say.
“It is business,” she said. Then she laughed out of pale gums. “Men are a business to themselves.”
The nightdress looked quite solid compared with skinny Mrs Mackenzie.
Suddenly she said, looking straight at him, and he recognized the look: “I am sick, you know. Didn't they tell you? I shouldn't have left my bed. My husband will be so upset. When he returns from Wilberforce. If he doesn't find me arranged.”
She began to drift back to her room, trailing the sound, not of flesh, but skin and crumpled starch.
“All right, Mrs Mackenzie,” Arthur felt he had to call out as she flitted, “I only know as much as you've told me.”
It was disappointingly true, for he never found out whether the manager's wife had some important secret, or whether he had simply caught her on her way to break into a pot of jam.
Just then Waldo started calling from the bottom of the stairs, and he had to go down, when he would have liked to stay and at least watch Mrs Mackenzie arrange her invalid arms in the right position on the counterpane. He loved the ladies, and even though they didn't take him seriously, knew quite a lot about them. On the whole he didn't require the confirmation of cupboards and drawers.
About this time they bought the land down Terminus Road. On several occasions Dad had been out there on his own. He had met a storekeeper, a man called Allwright, who told him Sarsaparilla was a coming place.
“Not that we're interested in that sort of thing,” Dad warned them when he got back from one of his expeditions. “What we want is to live to ourselves don't we? with a minimum of nosey parkers. Well, Mr Allwright believes Sarsaparilla will never lose its backwaters, though the greater part of it is bound to open up.”
“Oh dear,” Mother was beginning, she seemed afraid of something. “Do you think Mr Allwright is trustworthy? You know you are too trusting, George.”
“Any major move,” said Dad, “is a leap in the dark. And you, Mother, were the biggest leap of all.”
Mother kept quiet, as Arthur got to know, when Dad confused the issues.
Soon they all went out to Sarsaparilla on the train, to see the land and meet Mr Allwright, so that Mother would be convinced.
“But it's so
far
, George!” she complained in the swaying train. “Imagine after a day at the bank!”
Because Dad did not answer and looked so grim they knew it was all going to happen. While the train strewed their laps with smuts.
Mr Allwright met them at the siding with a buggy. Arthur did not look at him closely, and years afterwards, trying to remember the first time he set eyes on his employer, wondered why the first occasion had left so little impression on him. Mr Allwright can never have been a particularly young-looking man. He was tall and fairly broad, oblong like a bar of chocolate. His full moustache, his thick glasses, his waistcoat over his shirtsleeves, all made you feel he was an honest man. Perhaps the reason you didn't at first notice anyone so solid was that you knew he would still be there, he would keep till later. Anyway, Arthur hardly bothered to look, but was staring in all other directions, at Sarsaparilla, which lay glittering with early summer.
