Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

She almost burst.

“You know what — oh, I shouldn’t!” she giggled.

“What?” he asked.

“Just before we left,” she said, quieter, looking behind her, “I went up to the bathroom. Beautiful bathroom — all blue and white — a big bowl of powder … ”

“Go on!” he said. “Sure it wasn’t flour?”

She nearly split.

“Aren’t you awful!” she giggled. “No, though. This is what tickled me.” She could hardly say what she had to. “There was a big bottle of scent, and you know what it was called — l’Amour de Paris! ”

Dulcie Feinstein was enjoying her good giggle, and his rather tinny laughter was genuine enough, except that it disguised a certain envy and admiration. She had pronounced the French words in a way which sounded real French.

“There was a pierrot” — Dulcie was busting herself — “sitting on the moon !”

She dabbed and mopped.

“On the bottle of scent !” She shrieked.

It was strange, when he had decided she should be a serious-minded girl, that she should show this other frivolous side.

“Oh dear!” Dulcie moaned.

But she could not quite destroy his vision, to which the dusky trees pandered with broken hints.

“Do you learn foreign languages?” he asked, with a casualness to hide his interest.

“We have to,” she said. “One of the grandmothers was, well, not exactly French, but lived for some years in France.”

He might have caught her off her guard.

“And German?”

“Daddy,” she said soberly, “is fluent in German.”

Sobriety descended quite. And very soon they were approaching what could be the lit house. It was less impressive than Mrs Musto’s, far less, but neat and solid, a villa more suited to a town, trimly finished, painted up. There was a pepper-pot tower at one side.

“Is that your room?” he asked. “You could write up there.”

“But I couldn’t.”

“Letters?”

“I’m a terrible correspondent. The girls at school are always complaining.”

An elderly gentleman of bald head was putting back his watch and looking out from a lower room, trailing a newspaper after him. Those outside felt safe, knowing the darkness favoured them.

A lady was bringing in a huge tureen.

“Anyway, there’s soup,” Waldo said.

“Yes,” replied Dulcie in her most practical voice. “Mummy lives to make us eat.”

He wished she would go inside because departures always embarrassed him.

“Thank you,” she said.

Oh, Lord.

“And don’t remember the worst things about me.” Again she was giggling, splitting, bursting. “That pierrot on the moon !”

She just wouldn’t go. And he stood rooted in the dust.

Suddenly she stopped. “Your brother,” she said, calm and serious, “is he anything like you? Is he older?”

“No,” he said.

After that she was saying good-night and running up some steps set in a grass bank.

He went away quickly, and decided before reaching home he would think no more about Dulcie Feinstein, whom he didn’t understand in any case. On the whole, though he would only have confessed it to himself, he did not understand people, except those he created by his own imagining. If it hadn’t been for his own visions he might have felt desperate.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” Mother asked.

“Oh, all right.”

“Meet anyone interesting?”

“A mob of kids.”

Nothing annoyed their mother more than what she called a “sloppy Australian vocabulary.” She was wearing her best blue dress for his return.

“Any girls?” Arthur asked.

“Oh, yes !”

He was too tired.

After that Waldo became so thoroughly occupied he hadn’t the time to give thought to Dulcie Feinstein. In any case, he convinced himself Dulcie was de trop . That was one of several phrases he had picked up recently as weapons of defence. He would have liked to use this one on Dulcie, with her Frenchy, foreign airs, if he had been certain how it ought to be pronounced.

Those last terms at Barranugli High he grew superior, even in his attitude to somebody like Johnny Haynes. Dad was going to speak to a client of the bank whose cousin or something was librarian of Sydney Municipal Library. Dad thought there was every possibility, if he asked, and Waldo passed well, that the Library would take him on. It excited Waldo. The only drawback was that the plan might force him into a relationship with his father unconvincing to himself and everybody else.

Thought of all this made him less aggressive. And he studied. He studied in the most obvious place — the train.

Then, the holidays before the end, his parents received a note from Dulcie Feinstein’s mother, written in a black, peculiarly angular, foreign hand, suggesting that their boy Waldo should visit them on the Friday to spend a few hours with her daughter and one or two other young friends .

Waldo noticed Mrs Feinstein had made a point of not including Arthur, though perhaps that was natural, as Dulcie had never met him, and if her mother had, she would not have connected him with the kind of person Dulcie had described meeting at tennis.

Arthur remarked: “Those Feinsteins have a neat place. At the back there’s a brass bell which they keep polished up — like a ship’s bell I think it is — which she told me she rings when she wants to bring the others in.”

“ Who rings?” asked Waldo.

“Mrs Feinstein. Dulcie’s always practising the piano. She plays the piano.”

“You went there?” asked Waldo.

“To deliver the order.”

How much more Arthur might have told, Waldo would have been interested to hear.

But all Arthur would say was: “Feinsteins are some of the quickest payers. They’re fine people.”

He had no time for more than to brush the loose hair and dandruff off his shoulders, as Mother had taught him, and leave for work. Otherwise he would have been late at the store.

The afternoon Waldo had to go to Feinsteins’ he arrived late to show he wasn’t all that keen on coming. Then he got the wind up wondering whether he was expected at all, there was such a withdrawn air about the white-and-green-painted villa. The shutters were not exactly closed, but they might have been. In his uncertainty he went round to the side rather than to the front or the back. That way he had a good look into a large, deserted, but lived-in room, in which an upright piano was more noticeable than the quantities of dark furniture arranged, practically clamped, around it. The piano was obviously Dulcie’s, but he could not connect her with the furniture, the dust-coloured tapestry of which was straining to hold the stuffing down. Many people, however, had no connexion with their furniture.

Presently Mrs Feinstein came, and he was relieved to see she expected him.

“You must have wondered, Waldo,” she said, and smiled at the shutters she was prodding wider open, “whether we have not returned to Sydney.”

There was nothing very extraordinary about Mrs Feinstein except that her r ’s made you wonder, and some of her tenses might have been lifted out of a bad translation. She was old, he supposed, though how old he couldn’t have bothered calculating. Her skin looked soft, more the colour of skin from an unexposed part of her body. Her nose was of interest.

“As a matter of fact,” said Mrs Feinstein, “we nearly postponed your little visit. The Lembergs and Leonard Saporta are down with a grippe .” She was going to be one of those, of irritating habit, who did not explain the persons they were mentioning. “Dulcie, too, has been sick with a cold. She has made herself so miserable. But wanted to enjoy your company.”