Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

Then, on that morning of dew and light, Waldo Brown found himself looking through the window, into the room in which their father kept his nights, dark still, with the reek of saltpetre from the papers the old man used to burn on account of the asthma he developed in the years preceding his retirement. George Brown, as the boys referred to him in fun, was stuck at the table where usually he sat out the darkness. His knees were most irregularly, not to say uglily, placed. He had laid his head on the table, where, it seemed, he had not been able to get it lower. So his outstretched hand was protesting, if not his other dangling one.

It would not at first trickle through Waldo Brown’s mind that their father was dead. It was too much an outrage against habit. But facts are facts. And Waldo Brown respected facts as much as he respected habit. Suddenly, that which would not trickle, gushed.

Immediately Waldo went away — he had to — deeper into the garden, where the prairie-grass pierced the serge trousers he had pressed that night under the mattress. He stood picking off a leaf or two, waiting for somebody else to handle an intolerable situation.

In the circumstances, as he stood picking at the quince leaves, it was a minor shock to notice the hairs on his man’s wrist, when he had shrunk up inside his man’s body. Without the reminder of his wrist the boy inside him might have remained in possession. And Miss Huxtable, of intellectual doubts, had asked him only that Tuesday his opinion of Sheila Kaye-Smith. He had given it, too, in sternest terms.

It made him look over his shoulder, wondering whether he would ever be accepted again, at the Library where he was a man strutting, or by his family, who must by now have known the worst. Or had realized and forgotten. That was the virtue of families, their willingness or determination to forget.

When the morning, that golden vacuum, was filled even quicker than he had expected.

Arthur, apparently, had come up from the milking, gone through the house to ask or tell something, then run through the hall in a slither of linoleum, and erupted onto the veranda. There he stood, in front of the still quivering fly-screen door, under the classical pediment which their father had demanded, and where Arthur himself, years ago, had conceived his first tragedy. Now this one was actual. The greasy old rag with which he washed the cow’s tits twitched where his fingers ended.

He was bellowing.

“Our father,” he bellowed, “our father is dead !” His eyes were swivelling, his crop of orange hair stared. “Waldo?” he cried, looking at his brother coming up the path, quickly, wirily, to share their grief.

Arthur’s annunciation, blared out in brass despair, had freed Waldo. They were wringing the grief out of each other on the wormy old veranda. If he knew of his defection Waldo believed his brother would never refer to it — Arthur was too dependent on him — but could he be sure of their mother? With Arthur supporting him, physically at least, Waldo wondered.

He heard her fumbling through the house, breaking it open, flinging back the frail doors, to arrive at the disaster of her life, forgetting that her marriage had been just this. He dreaded that she might burst too precipitately into that dark room and call for him to confirm that what had happened had truly happened.

But when she came, pushing against the rusty gauze, she was in possession of something they might not be able to grasp, and he resented that too. What had happened had no connexion, finally, with her children. What had happened had happened already many times, and only concerned her.

So their mother appeared to ignore them. Although she wore the rather frowsy dressing-gown, which bacon fat had spotted, and spilt porridge hardened on, she was clothed essentially in grief. She could still have been soothing his withered leg. Which she had accepted in the beginning out of pity. Which had now been taken from her by force. So her arms hung. So she went on down the steps, her red-roughened chest ending where the secrecy of white breast began.

Waldo followed her because she was technically their mother. Whereas their mother crossed Terminus Road because she was their father’s widow.

Mrs Poulter could have been expecting Mrs Brown. She came down quickly out of her house. Mrs Poulter was already a woman filling out, and prepared to pounce heavily on possible disaster.

Mrs Poulter said: “Oh dear, don’t tell me! If there is anything I can do!”

She had begun to whimper. If she did not embrace Mrs Brown it was because she was afraid to. Mrs Brown was too erect and cold.

“It’s my husband, Mrs Poulter. I should like to ring for the doctor. If you will allow me. Though we must realize nothing can be done.”

Her pure, inherited voice erected a barrier not only between herself and Mrs Poulter, but those she had conceived in an adulterated tradition. Though Waldo could imitate voices, even adapt himself to situations, if they didn’t threaten to extinguish his individuality.

So he said now: “Wait, Mother. Let me see to it.”

It appeared to convince, because she stopped where she was with Mrs Poulter. Nobody but Waldo, and he only in passing, was surprised at his sung command, his Rigoletto -tenor tones. After briefly rehearsing the part, he was running springily in, ignoring Bill Poulter in his own house.

“George Brown, Terminus Road.” He was telling the receiver of a man who had died.

The carefully phrased words forced his lips into a smile. He was seducing himself, not the telephone. Just as Dulcie, for a moment in the beginning, in the living room at “Mount Pleasant”, had been seduced by the same silky tenor voice.

When he turned he was not surprised to find Bill Poulter looking frightened. While Waldo himself was loving his own moustache with the tip of his tongue.

He went outside, if not muscular, slim and supple, to where his mother was waiting with that woman. Mother and son crossed the road naturally enough, though in silence, because words were unnecessary, and without his touching her, because they seemed years ago to have come to an agreement not to touch.

He could hear her slippers in the dust, her old blue woollen dressing-gown dragging through the damp grass on the verge of the road.

Arthur’s blurry face, which strangers often found disturbing, was waiting for them on the veranda where they had left him, his skin still smeared, though drying. And Mother went up the steps to Arthur, suddenly quicker than Waldo could account for. In the present unsettling circumstances of course she would feel she must comfort somebody afflicted like Arthur, who in many ways had remained her little boy. But Arthur, he saw, was holding their mother. She was not so much looking at him, as to him, into his blurry face, which perhaps was less confused than it should have been.

Waldo was trembling for unsuspected possibilities. Standing above him his brother appeared huge.

If only he could have focussed on Arthur’s face to see what Mother was looking for. Because whatever it was she might find would soon be buried in words. The little boy on the step below stood craning up, wriggling his nervous, white worm of a neck, to see. But could not. The sun was shining on his glasses.

“We’ll have to have our breakfast, anyway. Won’t we?” Arthur was gobbling.

“Yes, darling,” Mother agreed.

Waldo had never heard her sound so natural.

“You shall get it for me.” She sighed. “Wouldn’t you like that?”

Because in a crisis, Waldo admitted, Arthur had to be humoured.

“Shall we have milk for a change? Warm milk?” Arthur suggested. “That would be good and soothing, wouldn’t it?”

It was quite an idea.