Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

He had nothing then.

He went and scorched himself with a glass of iced lemonade.

Mrs Musto was marshalling her pawns.

“Ronald and Dulcie, versus Dickie and Enid. There! I call that a match!”

Whether they liked it or not they were going out for Mrs Musto’s satisfaction.

Dulcie, it appeared, was expected to serve. Her arms were too thin, too pointed at the elbows. Too dark. She was wearing a pink pink dress.

“Who is that?” one of the young ladies asked.

Nobody exactly knew.

Anyway, Dulcie managed to get the ball over the net. Back and forth forth and back went the felted fated ball.

It was Dulcie’s in the end.

Dulcie scooped it.

How it soared its slow white rocket above the black cedars into taut sky returning into ball as it plummetted past the black cedars down. It hit the hard grass. And bounced. It hit Dulcie in her burnt face.

“Who is it?” they asked one another. “In the pink dress?”

No one knew, exactly.

“Coconut ice,” suggested a future barrister of whom answers and jokes were expected.

Everybody laughed.

The game finished eventually.

The girl Dulcie came off the court rubbing, washing her perspiring hands with a screwed-up handkerchief. She felt the need to detach herself from the others. Threw down the racket. Which probably only Waldo guessed was one of the instruments of torture Mrs Musto kept in the house. Dulcie’s fate confirmed his intention not to be made an exhibition of. By Mrs Musto or anyone else.

Now that he had stopped being afraid he had begun to despise their hostess, along with her kindness, her riches, and her choice of politely insulting guests. Poverty was the only virtue. The girl Dulcie was probably poor. In her pink, as opposed to white, dress. Not that he didn’t despise Dulcie as well. In his crusade of bitterness there was only room for one ardent pauper. The girl in pink, besides, was about his own age, and might handle too clumsily some of the truths he was anxious to establish.

So he avoided Dulcie. Even when he was looking at her you couldn’t have told. Or only Dulcie could have.

She appeared overheated. The uncontrolled tennis ball had plainly branded the side of her face. She was also plain. If not downright ugly. Waldo would have hated to touch her, for fear that she might stick to him, literally, not deliberately, but in spite of herself.

Then why was Mrs Musto bringing Dulcie through the cool ranks of immaculate white initiates, who stood about her lawn sipping fruit cup and giggling through the fragments of meringue?

Dulcie was equally mystified, but made some attempt at disguising it. Though she looked away, she was smiling, and breathing deep. Waldo noticed that her strong teeth formed a prow, as it were, in profile.

“You two, Dulcie and Waldo, ought to find something in common. You are about the same age,” Mrs Musto said — she was as stupid as that. “Aren’t yer stoking up?” she asked, looking sideways at the trestles, believing, and in this she was wiser, that food would fill silences.

So Mrs Musto went away.

Dulcie took and dropped a meringue, which she picked up, dusting off the lawn-clippings. Waldo chose a sandwich, of very thin wet cucumber, because it was nearest to him. He put it in his mouth whole, it was so dainty, and did not notice it after that.

They had nothing to say. Even if he had he would not have allowed himself, not to this ugly dark girl. If Arthur had been there he would have let Arthur bear the brunt of Dulcie. But they circulated a little, from necessity, and if nothing else, mere motion lubricated their stiffened minds.

“Do you live here?” she asked at last.

“Yes,” he said.

And blushed because he thought perhaps she despised him for something, his clothes for instance, which he had forgotten about, or his high-school look.

“Do you live here?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, and quickly: “No.”

She came rasping out with what was intended as punctuating laughter.

“That is,” she said, “we have a house here. And come here on and off. When Daddy feels he wants a change of air.”

“Funny not having to live at Sarsaparilla,” he said, “and wanting to come here.”

“I don’t see what’s funny about it.”

He wasn’t going to tell her if she didn’t realize. It was too long, anyway. He couldn’t take an interest in her.

She did not seem in any way put out. She began swinging her thin dark arms. She began humming a tune, leading a life of her own. It irritated him not to recognize the tune, but admittedly he had not yet fully decided whether to develop a talent for music, or whether it might queer his pitch in literature. In the meantime they payed for him to take a lesson once a week from Miss Olive Fischer of Barranugli. He used to stay on after school, gnawing at a trotter on the journey home. Between lessons, if he remembered, he aspired to Schubert on the terrible upright in the living-room.

“What does your old man do?” It was time he condescended.

Deliberately he used an expression he had always found repulsive. Now it had the right coarse sound, to show what he thought of this Dulcie, and Mrs Musto and her overcultivated garden.

“He has a music house,” she said.

“What,” he said, afraid to show his ignorance, “he doesn’t print it, does he?”

Now he would have liked to look at her. He had always longed to acquire an intimate intellectual friend, with whom to exchange books, and letters written in the kind of literary style which went with such relationships. If ever it began, he would write two, or perhaps three, letters a day, to express his deepest thoughts. Then would come a pause of several days. That was the way, according to collections of correspondence, he knew it to be done.

“I mean, he isn’t a publisher of music, is he?” Waldo asked, inhaling the moistening air of the garden.

“No,” she said. “He sells it.”

“What? Just music?”

“Instruments as well,” she replied with a candid reserve.

She might have been bored, or did not care fully to reveal her father’s unimportance and poverty.

“Do you like him?” he asked suddenly.

He really wanted to know.

“Yes,” she said, rather high, breathy with what sounded like sincerity.

At the same time she turned towards him and he noticed a dark shadow on her upper lip. It made him bite his own and contract his nostrils.

“Of course I do,” she insisted, though in a questioning tone of voice.

“I just wondered,” he mumbled.

He wished she would not continue looking at him. She had the eyes, he saw, of certain dogs, and he had never cared for dogs. They were something to be feared, for their treachery, or else despised for stupidity.

“I’d hate not to love my father,” Dulcie said. “I can’t imagine what it would feel like.”

“I don’t love mine. I’m fond of him, I suppose, because he’s there. And you feel sorry for them.”

He was getting some satisfaction out of telling, yes, he had never put much of it into words before, but it was — the truth. He looked at her to see whether she admired him for it.

“You’re a queer sort of boy,” she said.

At least that was better than being somebody nobody ever noticed. Dulcie was noticing him all right. Those silly, brown, watery eyes.

(Later on when Waldo got to know Dulcie he realized that her brimming eyes were not necessarily a prelude to tears.)

Now she said: “I don’t think I’d like to be you.”

Quickly, and surprising to himself, he jerked a branch off one of Mrs Musto’s shrubs. And threw it away.

“I wouldn’t want you to be,” he said, again surprisingly. “I don’t like myself all that much.”