Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

“Looks as though we’ve got an intelligent boy,” Saporta said. “This other one, this monster, is a woman. She only thinks about running around.”

Jokey. At this juncture Waldo would not have trusted himself to retaliate.

“What are they called?” he asked instead.

“The girl is Lynette,” Dulcie said, as though nobody would ever question it. “The boy,” she continued, and stopped.

Waldo who was tingling with certainty could feel the tears starting not even ridiculously behind his pince-nez. All moisture was delicious, voluptuous, redeeming, as he waited for his certainty to be confirmed by the ’cello notes of Dulcie’s voice. In the blazing sun a green shade of white hydrangeas had begun to dissolve the mounting beauty of Dulcie’s face.

“Yes. The boy,” Waldo blared; it was more confident than a question.

Still Dulcie hesitated, either from excessive sensibility, or because she was one of those wives who finally expect their husbands to deal with the difficult matters. So Saporta, an ox, but a benign one, heaved and said:

“The boy we called Arthur.”

The sun taking aim fulfilled its function of battery — in reverse. Waldo was staggered. Perhaps after all the children were not the coiled springs he had feared, rather the innocent objects of a discussion, for they were looking frightened.

Dulcie too, though not innocent, was visibly, was deservedly frightened.

“Are you well, Waldo?” she had returned to asking. “You are not looking well. The sun. Let us go into Bergers’ for a little — they’ll give us a chair — till it passes.”

Saporta put a meaty hand.

“Thank you,” Waldo said, only then, and only to Dulcie. “I can’t spare the time for illness.”

Then he made his dash. He had to escape to somewhere, away from all those who had possessed while ignoring him over the years. Nothing would have stopped him, though Dulcie did run after him half a block, to use the advantage of her eyes at the point of their overflowing.

His voice flew fatuously into a higher register.

“No, Dulcie!” he was fluting over his shoulder. “What need is there to argue, to explain, when we all understand the situation. Arthur perhaps, my Arthur, is the only one who won’t. Or does he?”

After all that had happened, he couldn’t have dragged Arthur in, if Arthur wasn’t the chief of those who had possessed him, and also perhaps to hurt Dulcie, to force some secret unhappiness into the open, to push it over the brink.

Only he had not dared wait long enough to see, but raced off down Pitt Street, catching his toe in a grating, recovering, sticking out his jaw, a pronounced one in its delicate way. All down Pitt Street he raced, past the stationers’ shops, through a smell of pies. The stiff collar he still made a point of wearing to the Library, his butterfly collar, was melting. Although not of the latest, there is a period at which anybody’s style is inclined to set, Waldo Brown liked to think, in timelessness.

Then, every one of his bones was breaking. He was lying on the melting tar, immoveable amongst the timeless faces, trying to remember what his intentions could have been. But he was unable. Intentions exist only in time.

“Give me my spect — my glasses,” he was able to order.

Perhaps if he saw better he would see.

They handed him his pince-nez. It was broken.

Just how bloody an accident he was he could not tell, because blood and tar are similarly sticky, nor could he see whether the blur of sympathy was hardening into contempt or that fleshy slab of hostility.

He was feeling around, then allowing himself to be felt. He was lifted drifting in the extra-corporeal situation in which he found himself placed.

When he could experience distaste again he knew that Arthur was approaching. Somebody, a sister, from the volume of starch, the stir of authority, was leading his brother down the ward. He could tell from the way enamel was clattering, hangings twitching.

“Mr Brown,” said the sister, “your twin brother.”

It sounded spaced out in a smile.

“Only for a couple of minutes. And you,” she said to Arthur, “mustn’t be upset, because Mr Brown isn’t really hurt.”

If she only knew.

Who had inflicted Arthur on him? Somebody well-meaning, or sadistic, from the Library, he could only suppose.

“You must pull yourself together,” the sister was saying. “I can see you know how to.”

Because at first Arthur was so upset. Waldo could feel rather than hear his brother gibbering and blubbing. Waldo did not want to hear.

Finally, from behind his eyelids, he could sense Arthur subsiding.

Arthur asked: “Did they give you oxygen, Waldo, on the way?”

“There was no need,” Waldo replied.

At least that was the answer it was decided he should give, always from behind those merciful walls, his eyelids.

“If you were to die,” Arthur was saying, “I know how to fry myself eggs. There’s always the bread. I could live on bread-and-milk. I have my job, haven’t I? Haven’t I, Waldo?”

“Yes,” said Waldo.

“I might get a dog or two for company.”

Arthur’s anxiety began, it seemed, to heave again.

“But who’ll put the notice in the paper?” he gasped. “The death notice!”

“Nobody to read it,” Waldo suggested.

“But you gotta put it,” Arthur said. “I know! I’ll ask Dulcie! Dulcie’ll do it!”

So relieved to find himself saved.

When the sister came and led Arthur away Waldo knew from the passage of air and the gap which was left. His eyelids no longer protected him. He was crying for Dulcie he would have liked to think, only it would not have been true. He was crying for Arthur, for Arthur or himself.

“That time you almost died,” said Arthur.

They were struggling against the Barranugli Road.

“When you might have, but didn’t,” Arthur gulped.

“No! The point is: I didn’t, I didn’t!”

Waldo had perhaps shrieked. The two blue dogs sank their heads between their shoulders.

Waldo had shrunk inside his oilskin, which was so stiff it could have continued standing on its own.

“People die,” he said, “usually in one of two ways. They are either removed against their will, or their will removes them.”

“What about our father?”

Waldo did not want to think about that.

“That was certainly different,” he admitted. “In the past,” he stammered, “I think some people simply died.”

“Oh dear, this walk is pointless!” Arthur began to mutter. “Can’t you see? What are we doing? Can’t we turn?”

“Yes,” said Waldo. “It is pointless.”

So they turned, and the two old dogs were at once joyful. They tossed their sterns in the air, and cavorted a little. Their tongues lolled on their grinning teeth. One of the dogs farted, and turned to smell whether it was he.

The two brothers walking hand in hand back back up along the Barranugli Road did not pause to consider who was who. They took it for granted it had been decided for them at birth, and at least Waldo had begun to suspect it might not be possible for one of them to die without the other.

His father’s was the first death Waldo literally had to face — for that matter, the only one, as Mother was taken to the home and at the end he was able to avoid her death-mask. So the first remained the only occasion, which was probably why he had always been disinclined to remember. He was the first to discover, though not the first to announce, for the obvious reason that Waldo had always recoiled from explosions, and what is the announcement of death but the unpleasantest of all explosions?

It was early morning too, which made it worse, the light that gentler dandelion before the metal starts to clang. Arthur was down milking the cow. He had to milk, separate, and grab his breakfast before leaving for the store. Waldo by then was working at Sydney Municipal Library, and had decided on his type. He was the neat, the conscientious type, tie knotted rather small, the expanding arm-bands restraining the sleeves of his poplin shirt (white). Mostly, as on the morning, he would go outside, walk round the house neither fast nor slow once or twice, or into what they called the Orchard, before putting on his coat. His usually nondescript hair glittered with sunlight, and the brilliantine, of which the normally too synthetic scent was oddly convincing amongst the real smells of early morning. Reality is so often less convincing, unless involvement such as Waldo was at that moment experiencing translates it into a work of art. There were many sensations, many sights he felt he might transfer to a notebook if only they would grow more distinct. (Waldo by this period had written several articles, there was the fragment of a novel, and he had joined the Fellowship of Australian Writers.) He had already written in his notebook: Death is the last of the chemical actions , and although, like all great truths, it sounded familiar, he had no reason to believe it was the fruit of someone else’s mind.