Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

The little flat sounds which accompanied dangerous approaches were issuing from Waldo’s mouth.

“I don’t understand how they can nail a person through the hands.”

Waldo would not listen any more, though Arthur might be tired of telling. He did tire very quickly, and, if you were lucky, might not revive for half an hour. He seemed to withdraw, to recline on the hugger-mugger cushions of an unhealthily crammed imagination.

In any case, there were the shops, there were the houses of the street you knew, providing signs that man is a rational animal. Waldo liked to look into the houses he passed, obliquely though, for on some of those occasions when he had stared full in he had been faced with displays of perversity to damage temporarily his faith in reason. From a reasonable angle the houses remained the labelled boxes which contain, not passions, but furniture: Green Slopes, Tree Tops, Gibber Gunya, Cootamundra, Tree Tops, The Ridge, Tree Tops , less advisedly, Ma Réve .

“Not mine!” he said aloud.

Waldo knew he was bad-tempered. Long ago, in the days when he was taking up Yoga, Pelmanism, Profitable Short Story Writing, and making lists of what must be achieved or corrected, he had decided to do something about his temper, but had failed as, he consoled himself, many important people had.

Watching him walk controlled along the street leading his backward brother by the hand, no one probably would have guessed he had failed, in that, at least. How convincing an impression he made Waldo knew from observing himself obliquely in the plate-glass windows of shops, and anyway, he had decided early to be his mother’s rather than his father’s son. Anne Brown, born a Quantrell, had created an impression even in one of her old blue dresses with tea-stained lace insertion, or until her last days and illness, which were beyond human control. Waldo understood that those who lowered their eyes in passing were paying homage to someone of his mother’s stock.

Many were perceptive. Others, who turned deliberately away, only wished to disguise their inferiority. Or were disgusted by Arthur. There were, on the other hand, some who hid their embarrassment in a display of exaggerated bonhommie. Like the men in overalls at the Speedex Service Station.

“Hi, mate! Hi, Arthur!” they called, raising their muscular throats. “How’s the Brown Bomb?”

Arthur loved it. He loved the service station. He loved to stare at people, and into houses, which was all very well for Arthur, Waldo allowed, because he could not have interpreted half of what he saw.

All that was steel and concrete, service stations, for example, appalled Waldo, though he would never have admitted in public, he would never have rejected any useable evidence of human progress.

Arthur loved the Speedex Service Station because Ron Salter sometimes had the lollies for him, and Barry Grimshaw on one occasion let him take the gun and grease the nipples of a truck.

“One day I’m gunna come and work with you boys. Permanent,” Arthur called, tagging back on Waldo’s hand. “Then we’ll have a ball! And improve my savings account!”

Of course the men were laughing at Arthur, Waldo knew.

The Speedex Service Station, safely past, thank God — Waldo would allow himself a lapsus linguae if the error had grown into the language — had risen out of what had been Allwright’s General Store. Exhaust fumes and the metallic idiom of mechanics had routed the indolent mornings which used to weigh so heavy on Allwright’s buckled veranda, bulging with bags of potatoes and mash, stacked with the boxes of runty tomatoes the growers brought out from under the seats of their sulkies. To protect the goods on Allwright’s veranda from the visits of dogs had been one of the extra duties of Arthur Brown. Arthur seemed to enjoy that, as a relaxation, while regretting he could not coax the dogs into a permanent relationship.

Nobody seeing the Browns now connected them except in theory with the past, because the past was scarcely worth knowing about. It was remarkable how many of those walking along the Barranugli Road on present errands had only just been born.

“Mr Allwright died lacing up his boots.” Arthur Brown clumped and mumbled, his thick white hair flumping at his collar. Then he had to laugh. “Mrs Allwright thought I’d stuck to the change from Mustos’ order. She’d put it behind the candles. Put it herself. Couldn’t add up, either, except with a pencil and paper.”

After that the road opened out into one of those stretches, a replica of itself at many other points. On the road to Barranugli it was usual for Waldo Brown to forget which bits they had passed, even going quickly in the bus. In the end the bush roads of childhood were no slower than those made by men in the illusions of speed and arrival. The same truck, the same sedan, would stick screeching, roaring, smoking, on its spinning, stationary tires, no longer in the same rut, but in the same concrete channel, the same stretch of infinity. If Waldo Brown had not been a superior man, of intellectual tastes, it might have become intolerable, or perhaps had, because of that.

He yawned till remembering why he had chosen to commit a deliberate assault on distance on that morning. He stopped the yawn. They seemed to be making very little progress. Pedestrians were overtaking them, not to mention the 8.13.

The dust-coloured bus plunged, elastic-sounding, not too rigidly rivetted, down the road to Barranugli. Look into a passing bus, and more often than not you will see something you would rather not. Smeared mauve against the window Mrs Poulter’s face was too stupid exactly to accuse Waldo.

Waldo snorted, even laughed.

It was unusual.

“What’s the joke?” asked Arthur.

“Ain’t no joke!” said Waldo in the comic voice he put on for jokes.

It was most unusual.

And obviously he did not want to tell. So Arthur kept quiet.

Mrs Brown admitted from the beginning that Mrs Poulter had her good points. A cheerful young woman with a high colour and the surly husband. Almost too deliberately on the opposite side of the road, directly opposite — two houses, you were tempted to conclude, eyeing each other for what they could see. Not that the Browns would have been so indiscreet. Excepting Arthur, who loved to talk to Mrs Poulter. He loved to ask her questions, and Mrs Poulter, curiously enough, although an inalterably stupid creature, usually seemed to find an answer. That was one of the reasons Waldo found her so difficult to put up with.

Once Waldo Brown, in one of his less oblique moments — he was quite a bit younger, cruder of course — was tempted to cross the road. How tempted, he had never been sure. It was so dark. It was by that time night, eloquent with leaves and crackling sticks. Waldo heard himself crunch a flowerpot. But he felt he had to walk around a while. He could hear his heart. He could hear the bandicoots, their thrrt thrrt . It was so dark, it was understandable he should have been drawn to the square of light. He couldn’t resist it. And there stood Mrs Poulter, normally so high of colour, turned waxen by the yellow light inside the room. Her breasts two golden puddings, stirred to gentle activity. For Mrs Poulter was washing her armpits at the white porcelain washstand basin. As she returned it again and again the flannel dribbled the water sleepily back, over the porcelain rim, of white, frozen cabbage-leaves. Mrs Poulter dipped, and the tendrils of black hair which had strayed from the yawning armpits were plastered to the yellow, waxy flesh, Waldo observed. He saw the draggle of jet in the secret part of her thighs.

He had never felt guiltier, but guilt will sometimes solidify; he could not have moved for a shotgun. There was no question of that, however, for the door was opening, and Bill Poulter was entering their room. Ohhhh , his wife seemed to be saying, dropping the flannel into the white porcelain cabbage. Mrs Poulter, too, it seemed, was overcome by guilt for her offence against modesty. Her fingers were almost sprouting webs in their efforts to uphold decency, which was exactly what, in fact, they did, for her surprised nipples were perking up over her honestly-intentioned hands. While Bill Poulter advanced, into the room, into the lamplight. Waldo had never seen Mr Poulter look less scraggy, less glum. Because he was wanting something apparently unexpected, a straggly smile had begun to fit itself to the face so unaccustomed to it.