Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

“I don’t know,” Waldo answered, truthfully.

But Arthur was never deterred by vagueness of any description, or absence of trust.

“I hope it will be good,” he said, and smiled.

To satisfy his curiosity, the expression implied, was less important than his brother’s self-fulfilment.

Waldo’s throat could have wobbled for some repeated hurt he had to suffer. If he had not been so importantly occupied he might have felt mortified as well. As it was, he accepted the wounds inflicted on him by circumstances — or his own nature. He accepted Arthur his twin brother, who was, as they put it, a shingle short.

So the lives of the brothers fused by consent at some points. Arthur’s harsh blaze of hair would soften in certain lights, drenching his expression in that secrecy of innocence. Partly his white skin helped, though more than partly, his simplicity. It explained why Arthur would suddenly take leave of his face.

Whenever it happened Waldo could only allow himself to feel irritated as opposed to annoyed.

“Get along, then!” he used to say. “I’ve got to concentrate.”

As Arthur continued hanging round.

“All right” — he could be so reasonable — “I am rather clumsy, aren’t I? I do barge around and knock things over. But sometimes those things are standing in my way.”

Waldo frowned, and stared at the paper. When Arthur went out of the room he wouldn’t have any excuse left.

“I’ll go, then,” Arthur promised sweetly. “I hope you think of something interesting.”

Other people continued to reduce Waldo’s intentions and make them appear foolishly capricious, if not downright idiotic. They did not grasp the extent of his need to express some thing . Otherwise how could he truly say: I exist. The prospect of remaining a nonentity like the school teachers or his parents made him sweat behind the knees.

Perhaps it was through his, you could not say wilfully abnormal, behaviour that other people in the end got wind of his secret intentions. His mother, for instance. She herself would put on a kind of milky smile, and walk softly, as though he were sick or something. Then in his presence she began to make mention of “Waldo’s writing”, but so discreetly that for a long time no caller dared infringe on her discretion.

Finally Mother foolishly said: “One day, Waldo, you must tell me about your Writing.”

It was too much.

If no comment was made by Dad, the reader in the family, who sat there in painful attitudes, pushing his bad leg in yet some other direction, re-reading Religio Medici, Sesame and Lilies , and then Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs by the Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco, which the other day he had picked up cheap — if Dad seemed unaware behind his eyebrows and his sucked moustache that anything unusual was going on, it was because their father, Waldo was suddenly convinced, had failed to be a writer.

To the end of his life Waldo cultivated his gift for distinguishing failures. With the exception of Johnny Haynes, about whom he couldn’t make up his mind, he was particularly sensitive to those failures who had been dumped in the long grass at what was called Sarsaparilla. Sars-per-illa! Had a history in the early days, they told you. Then, apparently, history drew in her horns. There was Allwrights’ store, and the post-office stuck in the side of Mrs Purves’s house. There were the cow cockies and market gardeners. There were the homes of the aged, the eccentric, the labourers, the rich, though the last hardly counted, existing only spasmodically on kept lawns, amongst their shrubs, in varnished dogcarts, or, in Mrs Musto’s case, behind the wind-screen of a motor car. It was really the grass that had control at Sarsaparilla, deep and steaming masses of it, lolling yellow and enervated by the end of summer. As for the roads, with the exception of the highway, they almost all petered out, first in dust, then in paddock, with dollops of brown cow manure — or grey spinners — and the brittle spires of seeded thistles.

When his thoughts grew too much for him, too blurred, or too entangled, his mind a choked labyrinth without a saving thread, Waldo Brown would stalk along the country roads, exchanging his own blurred world for that other, dusty, external, but no more actual one, in which he continued hoping to discover a distinct form, some object he hadn’t noticed before, while Arthur kicking up the dust behind — it was impossible to escape Arthur unless Arthur himself chose to escape — conducted his monologue, if not dialogue with dust or sun, peewee or green-sprouted cow-turd. Like injustice, the dust always recurred to daze, unless from a sudden mushroom of it, Mrs Musto’s chariot unwound, honking by her orders to warn pedestrians of her coming.

Stubbens, her chauffeur, did not like honking.

“But if you’ve got one,” she used to insist.

Everything was geared to Mrs Musto’s orders.

“You boys care for a lift?” she would call when she had pulled Stubbens up. “By ghost, isn’t it hot, eh? Hot enough to burn the parson’s nose!”

Because she was so rich — Fairy Flour — it was accepted that Mrs Musto should speak so authentically. Her chauffeur Stubbens never turned a hair.

When you had wrenched the door open — Stubbens didn’t open doors for boys — and climbed pulling Arthur, somehow, up, it was coolly awful to sit beside Mrs Musto in her motor overwhelmed by her appurtenances: the green veil, which did not prevent her adding to her freckles, the too collapsible parasol, the alpaca cape, prayer-book, and smelling-salts, on longer journeys, it was said — though Waldo had never travelled far enough in Mrs Musto’s company — cold plum pudding and a bottle of port-wine.

When they were seated Mrs Musto would give her usual command: “Wind ’er up, Stubbens” — and to the objects of her kindness, as Stubbens wound and wound: “Hold yer ribs, boys, or he’ll crack a couple for yer!”

She loved perpetual motion, and clergymen, and presents — to give rather than receive, though one so rich as Mrs Musto naturally received a lot. She loved to eat rich food, surrounded by those who condescended to call her their friend, after which she would drop off in the middle of a sentence to revive burping in the middle of another. Music was her grandest passion, which did not prevent her snoring through it, but she could always be relied upon to applaud generously at the end. And sometimes she would organize tennis parties for those she referred to as the “youngsters”. Youngsters, Mrs Musto used to say, are my investment against old age.

Mrs Brown once remarked she hoped the market would not let Mrs Musto down.

But somehow Mother did not altogether care for Mrs Musto, who had “known about the Browns” in the beginning. She could not bear Mrs Musto’s kindness.

“Oh, but she is so kind!” Mother used to sigh. “One can’t deny it. I will not hear a word against the poor thing, though she is — one must face it — what I call a soloist.”

Certainly Mrs Musto loved to talk. In fact, talk was another of her grand passions.

“What are mouths given us for? Yairs, I know — food. Lovely, too. Within everybody’s reach in a country like Australia. Give me a good lump of corned beef, with a nice slice of yellow fat, and a boiled onion. Ooh, scrumptious! There are, of course, other things besides. But never forget one in remembering the other. As I said to the Archbishop, it doesn’t pay, never ever, not even an evangelical, to neglect the flesh altogether. The Archbishop was of my opinion. But She — She — She’s not only a poor doer, she’s clearly starving ’erself to make sure of a comfy passage to the other side. As I didn’t hesitate to tell ’er. But as I was saying — what was I saying? Conversation is the prime purpose this little slit was given us for — to communicate in words . We are told: in the beginning was the Word. Which sort of proves, don’t it?”