Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

Soon they were holding in their hands, the chipped, while still elegant, porcelain bowls with the pattern of little camomile sprigs, which they had brought out with them from Home.

“When the doctor gets here I’d better be making tracks,” Arthur mentioned anxiously, looking at his watch, at Mother. “Allwrights’ll be wondering what’s come over me.”

“I’d hoped you would stay with us,” Mother said, “today.” She added quickly, without looking round: “I’m sure Waldo would appreciate it.”

As though her little boy Waldo would take for granted anything she might arrange for him with his big brother. Naturally Waldo was grateful. Somebody would ring the Library.

So he continued watching Mother as she smoothed back Arthur’s moist hair, looking into Arthur’s face, into the avenue she hoped to open up. Finally Waldo saw them only indistinctly, because he had deliberately taken his glasses off.

Their father, then, was dead. Encouraged by his death, Waldo was often tempted to re-enter his own boyhood. He was only beginning to learn about it, and even where there were flaws in the past, they fascinated, like splinters in the flesh.

There was no reason why visitors should have guessed at the flaws in Waldo Brown. His confidence appeared firm without being aggressive. His hair was so candid . He would take water to it, and brush it carefully down; it was only later on that he felt the need for brilliantine. During his boyhood strangers were moved by the streaks of water in his innocently plastered, boy’s hair.

He was growing up taller and straighter than had been expected. His long, bony, usually ink-stained wrist was exposed by the retreating sleeve. Because he was growing too fast. His shirt-cuffs would not button, and frayed at the edges. Naturally they couldn’t afford to buy him so many clothes so often.

He developed into a Promising Lad. Although weak in mathematics his gift for composition persisted as vocabulary increased to decorate it. There was some mystery of literary ambitions, which his parents scarcely mentioned, through shame or fear, or simply because they didn’t believe. (Waldo began to suspect parents remain unconscious of a talent in their child unless you rub their noses in it.)

They were proud of him, though, especially when he jumped up, in his just buttonable knickerbockers, to offer a plate of scones without being prodded. Strangers compared him with potty Arthur, who would have scoffed the lot. Big lump of a thing sitting on a creaking stool, knees under his chin, crumbs tumbling down his chin onto his knees. Munching. Beside the promising Waldo, Arthur tended to fade out. Began to work for Allwright, both behind the counter, and in the sulky delivering the orders after Allwright taught him to drive. Arthur was good with animals; it was perhaps natural for them to accept someone who was only half a human being. It was sad for Browns, not to say a real handicap to a fine boy like Waldo, who, they said, was the twin of the other, you wouldn’t believe it. You’d see them sometimes walking down the road together of an evening, Waldo in the Barranugli High hat-band, carrying his school case, Arthur shambling in the old pair of pants and shirt he wore to work at the store, because you couldn’t expect the parents to spend good money on an outfit just for that. Anyway, there they were. Two twins. You wondered what they talked about.

Waldo knew it all by heart from listening — even when he couldn’t hear.

So they moved through the landscape of boyhood, two figures seen at a distance, or too close up, so close you could look into the pores of their skin, you could see the blackheads and the pimples. Waldo hated that. He hated his interminable pimply face. He preferred to listen to the voices of strangers murmuring what they had decided were the truths. How they would have jumped if they had seen him pop a pimple at the face of the glass. People did not go for pus. So he learned to give them what they wanted. Occasionally, in passing, after returning the scones to the table, he would very carefully brush the crumbs which had fallen on Arthur’s knees, with a candid though unostentatious charity which moved the observer — as well as the performer. Quite genuinely, once he had performed the act. Funny old Arthur was no more funny than your own flesh suffering an unjust and unnecessary torment.

Because Arthur was part of his own parcel of flesh it was easy with Arthur. Less so with Dad. With Dad it was downright difficult, not to say painful at times, particularly during those years when Waldo was going in to the High. There was no escaping his father. They travelled together in the train, one way at least.

Seeing them off in the early light that first morning, Mother said: “You will have each other for company.”

They had. Each used to walk carefully. Going up the road Waldo remembered how their father, to amuse, had told them about the bank messengers in London, in their top hats, the bag chained to a wrist. Later on, when the custom of the walk to the station had been established, and it was not always possible to shorten it by visiting the dunny or remembering books, Waldo felt in his bitterest moments he would have died willingly while performing his regular act of duty. With Arthur it was different. There was no escaping Arthur. At best he became the sound of your own breathing, his silences sometimes consoled. But you might have thought of an escape from Dad, if you had been cleverer or brutal. Fathers are no more than the price you have to pay for life, the tickets of admission. Life, as he began in time to see it, is the twin consciousness, jostling you, hindering you, but with which, at unexpected moments, it is possible to communicate in ways both animal and delicate. So Waldo resented his twin’s absence and freedom as he walked with their father between the throng of weeds up Terminus Road, George Brown lashing out with his gammy leg, to keep up with the son holding back for him.

On one occasion Dad said: “You run on ahead, old man. I’ll take my time.”

And Waldo had. Literally. Spurted up the road on twisting ankles, arms jerking, books thundering in his half-empty case.

Afterwards when they were seated whiter together in the train, they hadn’t spoken, but probably wouldn’t have anyway.

Dad who had been good for stories for little boys, myths of ancient Greece and Rome, to say nothing of recitations from Shakespeare, grew silenter in the face of silence. He had taken up Norwegian, to “read Ibsen in the original”, or to protect himself in the train. Waldo used to watch the words forming visibly under the raggeder moustache. Dad leaned his head against the leather, and closed his eyes. The eyelids looked their nakedest. For many years Waldo could not come at Ibsen out of respect for the private language in which he had written.

Dad, though, was not unaware, so it seemed, painfully, of some of the responsibilities he shirked. Laying down Teach Yourself Norwegian on the seat in the Barranugli train, he opened his eyes one morning and said:

“Waldo, I’ve been meaning to have a talk. For some time. About certain things. About, well, life. And so forth.”

The spidery train was clutching at the rails. The smuts flew in, to sizzle on Waldo’s frozen skin.

“Because,” continued George Brown, “I expect there are things that puzzle you.”

Nhoooh! Waldo might have hooted if the engine hadn’t beaten him to it.

It wasn’t the prospect of his father’s self-exposure which was shaking him. It was the train, shaking out every swollen image he had ever worked on.

“The main thing,” said Dad, sucking his sparrow-coloured moustache, “is to lead a decent, a life you, well, needn’t feel ashamed of.”

O Lord. Waldo had not been taught to pray, because, said Mother, everything depends on your own will, it would be foolishness to expect anything else, we can achieve what we want if we are determined, if we are confident that we are strong.