The Solid Mandala (6 page)

Miss Dallimore's sister giggled her pleasure. For Mrs Musto was the lady in whose house at Sarsaparilla the Dallimores were spending the few months of her trip to Europe. Waldo knew all about it, and was bored at last, he realized, by people.

“I can't tell you what it did to us,” Miss Dallimore continued, “our visit to such a” — here she was searching — “to such a
historic
English home.”

Miss Dorothy, to show she was sharing the experience, gave what sounded like a moan.

“Our only disappointment,” Miss Dallimore confessed, “was that Lord Tolfree himself didn't put in an appearance. Was indisposed.”

Mother blushed, and Waldo on hearing the name again felt the little twinge, of anxiety as much as pleasure. He returned to Miss Dallimore with greater interest. She was the colour of marmalade under her sugar hat.

“A chill, I believe — wasn't it, Dolly? — on his liver.”

“Uncle Charlie's liver,” said Mother, “was always playing up.”

The Miss Dallimores appeared distressed, though the elder one quickly found a reason for brightening up.

“In any case,” she said, “it has been so delightful to make the acquaintance of the Honourable Mrs Thourault's cousin. In Sarsaparilla.”

“The
Ho
n-our-able Mrs
Thou
-rault!” Arthur repeated, or almost sang, pronouncing the II dreamily.

“The only pity is,” said the persevering Miss Dallimore, “that Mr Brown should still be at his bank.”

“It's a long journey from Barranugli.”

The skin between Mother's eyes grew pinched as it did when she thought about Dad and the bank.

“Oh yes,
tiring!
” Miss Dallimore agreed emphatically. “Australia
is
tiring. The distances are tiring.”

“The
Ho
n Mrs Thou-ou-
rault
!” Arthur sang, dreamier.

Miss Dorothy giggled, but turned it nervously into a sigh, and sat waggling her ankle some more.

“But perhaps,” Miss Dallimore revived again, “perhaps in time” — she was at her marmalady brightest — “they will give him Sydney, and then you will come to live among us!”

It was obviouf'y the only place to live. But Mother looked down. Just as Waldo, and at last Arthur, were looking up, at Miss Dallimore's idea. That Dad should be given Head Office.

Mother did not speak. Arthur could have been about to start the hiccups. Never before, Waldo saw, had he been closer to his mother, to his brother. They were close enough to suffocate.

Then Arthur hiccupped: “When are we going to the bank, Mum? It's time we visited the bank again. Mr Mackenzie gives us humbugs. Mr Mackenzie has a stuffed fox.”

“Why,” said Miss Dallimore, “what a very interesting and thoughtful person Mr Mackenzie must be.”

She had got up. The two Miss Dallimores were on their feet. They were doing things to their clean-smelling gloves.

“Why has your dress got holes in it?” Arthur hiccupped, looking rather too closely into the elder Miss Dallimore's material.

“That is part of the design, I expect!”

Miss Dallimore laughed to make it sound braver as, followed by her sister, she tried to walk slowly down the path.

Mother seemed to have forgotten the ricketty bamboo table, from which Arthur finished the rock-cakes, and from which only much later she began to sweep the crumbs. As Dad was coming through the gate.

“Two women,” Mother told him. “Two ladies.”

She showered the grass with sugary crumbs.

“Ladies? What ladies?”

“I mentioned them,” said Mother, “only this morning. The ones who have come to Mrs Musto's.”

“Tenants?”

“They are doing a little caretaking — oh, but very genteel — while Mrs Musto is away.”

The Miss Dallimores did not call again, and there was no reason to remember them — except when Arthur asked: “When will they give you Head Office, Dad?”

“On their day of judgment,” their father answered.

The Bank.

It was a squat building, solid, the brown paint of which had blistered in the Barranugli sun. In the brownish-yellow glare Arthur always stood to burst a few of the paint blisters, and once had said, only for himself, in little higher than a whisper: “Diarrhoea.” Outside the bank it was so hot, so brown, everybody as Mother would call it “visibly perspiring”. Cool inside the building, though, and solemn. Several times when they were smaller Mother had taken them to Barranugli, shopping, and visiting at the bank. But had stopped, Waldo realized, because Dad no longer wanted it.

“But it's their only little outing,” Mother had protested.

“He's big now, Anne. What if he got out of hand?” Waldo heard. “What if you couldn't control him?”

Waldo regretted they no longer visited the bank. His sense of importance suffered from the lapse. The bank itself was so reliable, permanent, with its smell of fresh paper money, and the neat young ladies in patent-leather sleeves, and Mr Mackenzie, who came out from behind the frosted glass.

“So these are the boys,” said Mr Mackenzie the first time.

“The twin boys,” Arthur corrected.

Because people did not always realize, though in the case of Mr Mackenzie naturally he must have known.

Even if he hadn't he would not have shown any surprise. He was, it seemed, all right, in spite of the dandruff, and smelling like the bowl of an old treacly pipe.

Mr Mackenzie took them up into the residence to show them to Mrs Mackenzie, who was an invalid, they said. She was in every other way uninteresting. But Mr Mackenzie produced the humbugs, slightly melted in their paper bag, and pointed out the fox in its place on the window-ledge of a landing. Teeth bared. Arthur
got so excited on first acquaintance with the fox he almost embraced it, board and all — the red fox, not quite so red as Arthur, and softer. Arthur's hair was what you could only call coarse until length and age softened it.

Afterwards, sucking humbugs, they went back into the public bank, and stood in front of the cage in which Dad was counting money. Mother would smile to encourage him. But not the boys. It was too solemn a moment for the boys, the way Dad flicked the stiff notes, as though to tear the corners off, and writing down figures in pencil. Sometimes a group of young ladies would gather, to ask questions, and laugh, and flatter. Once a Miss Simpson had touched Arthur's hair, and exclaimed: “Oh, but it's such
harsh
stuff!” She had done it, though. Possibly she had won a dare.

But Dad very seldom looked up, even when there weren't any clients; he was so busy.

It was, he thought, the occasion of their last visit to the bank as children, that Waldo noticed their father looking out from the cage in which he stood: the citron-coloured face, its seams nicked by the cut-throat with flecks of black, morning blood, the moustache, interesting to touch before it had grown raggedy. Their father's eyes were brown, which Arthur had inherited. Their father's stare was at that moment directed outward, and not. He had not yet developed his asthma, though might have that morning in the tearing silence of the brown bank. Suddenly his shoulders hunched, to resist, it seemed, compression by the narrow cage, his eyes were more deeply concentrated on some invisible point. More distinctly even than the morning he found their father dead Waldo would remember the morning of their last visit to the bank.

Afterwards in the racketty train which was taking them back to Sarsaparilla, Mother asked: “What is it, Waldo? What is it, dearest?”

Unusual for her; she was by no means
soft
.

But how could he tell her? And he knew, what was more, she was only asking to be told something she already knew. (In his crueller moments as a man, Waldo suspected their mother was not always able to resist a desire to probe their common wounds.)

So he sat in the spidery local train and willed it to dislocate the vision of those normally liquid eyes set like glass inside the cage. For ever, it seemed, and ever.

But the train did not co-operate, and it was only on walking up their garden path, when he trod on one of those brown slugs which had come out too soon in search of evening moisture, that Waldo was able to relieve his feelings. As he crushed the slug, his own despair writhed and shrivelled up.

 

The old men weaving along the main street, the one stalking, the other stumping, had known their surroundings so long they could have taken them to bits, brick by brick, tile by tile, the new concrete kerbing, and Council-approved parapets. They would even have known how the bits should be put together again. The old men were still fascinated by what they knew, while often overwhelmed by it. For it was overwhelming, really. Take Woolworths. Though Arthur Brown loved Woolworths.

“Can't we go into Woolies, Waldo?”

“It isn't open yet.”

Arthur liked to spend mornings in Woolworths costing the goods. Because of course things were marked up higher than should have been allowed. Often they told him not to be a nuisance, and sent him out. Once the manager had searched his pockets, and found the bus tickets, the rather grey handkerchief — Arthur's laundry always came out grey — and the glass taws he carried around.

“Those are my solid mandalas,” Arthur explained to the manager.

Today the manager was parking early.

“Shan't be coming in this morning,” Arthur called. “I'm with my brother. We're going for a walk.”

The manager screwed up one of his cheeks in a freshly-shaven synthetic smile.

Gathered by the wind the two old men flitted across the plate glass, each examining himself, separately, secretly. On the whole each was pleased, for reflexions are translatable symbols of the past, Chinese to the mind which happens to be unfamiliar with
them. Some of those who noticed the old blokes might have seen them as frail or putrid, but the Brothers Brown were not entirely unconscious of their own stubbornness of spirit. Arthur, for instance, whose mechanism had in some way threatened his continuity earlier that morning, was still able to enjoy the gusty light of boyhood in the main street of Sarsaparilla, his lips half open to release an expression he had not yet succeeded in perfecting. His body might topple, but only his body. The drier, the more cautious Waldo walked taking greater care in spite of the strength of his moral convictions.

Everybody to their own. The Presbyterians had their red brick. The convicts had built the Church of England. Over his shoulder the Methoes had hung out their business sign. Waldo Brown, so thin, was filled out considerably by knowing that nothing can only be nothing. It was almost the only gratitude he felt he owed his parents — not love, which is too demanding in the end, affection perhaps, which is more often than not love watered down with pity — but gratitude he could allow himself to offer, a cooler, a more detached emotion when not allied to servility. So Waldo stalked through the main street, in the wind from his oilskin, on only physically brittle bones, knowing in which direction enlightenment lay. Waldo stiffened his neck, and skirted round the Church of England parson with a smile, not of acknowledgment, but identification. As for priests, jokes about them made him giggle. He would look for the vertical row of little black buttons, for the skins of priests which flourished like mushrooms behind leather-padded doors. Waldo believed his parents had just tolerated clergymen as guardians of morality, priests never. Myths, evil enough in themselves, threatened one's sanity when further abstracted by incense and Latin, and became downright obscene if allowed to take shape in oleograph or plaster.

On this hitherto evil morning, of a cold wind and disturbances, of decisions and blotting-paper clouds, Waldo Brown's convictions helped him to breathe less obstructedly. He failed for the moment to notice the smell of mucus in his nostrils. Putting his mind in order had eased the oilskin at his armpits. Intellectual honesty glittered on his glasses, blinding his rather pale eyes. How dreadful
if Dulcie. But she hadn't. It was the kind of near-slip which made him hate Dulcie's judgment rather than deplore his own temporary lack of it. Suppose his exercise in loving Dulcie had been forced to harden into a permanent imitation of love! The intermittent drizzle of resentment is far easier to bear, may even dry right up. It had, in fact, until Arthur.

Why had Arthur? Where was Arthur?

“Look, Waldo, it's turned to clay!” Arthur called, dawdling, fascinated by the crumbling turd of Mr Hepple's over-stuffed cocker spaniel.

“Come along,” Waldo ordered. “It's only old.”

The old man and two old dogs gathered round the whitened stool shocked the youth inside Waldo Brown.

Each of the blue dogs, pointing a swivel nose, sniffed with a delicacy of attention, lifted a leg in turn, aimed sturdily enough, then came on, chests broad to the wind, not so good in the pasterns. It was the old man who lingered, as though unable to decide on the next attitude to adopt.

Then Arthur Brown spat, or dribbled. It faltered on his chin, hung and swung silverly against the knife-edged light.

“That sort of smell,” he said, “could give a person diphtheria.”

It choked Waldo. What had Dulcie seen in Arthur?

“Didn't I tell you come along?”

Arthur came.

He took his brother by the hand, who would have resisted if he had remembered how to resist. But twin brothers, brothers of a certain age, at times only remember what has been laid down in the beginning.

They were walking on in the direction Waldo knew now he had not chosen; it had chosen him.

“Did you ever have diphtheria, Waldo?”

“You know perfectly well I didn't.”

“Yes,” said Arthur.

The habit of motion, the warmth of skin, were so very comforting, he put out his tongue and licked the air. It might have been barley-sugar.

Arthur said: “You know when you are ill, really ill, not diph
theria, which we haven't had, but anything, pneumonia — you can't say we haven't had pneumonia — you can get, you can get much farther in.”