Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

He did not believe it. And even Mrs Feinstein’s smile wavered.

What could he say to this woman, whose voice smelled of old plush, and sounded with slashed ’cello notes?

Fortunately Dulcie came in. She was in embroidered white today, which made her arms look yellower.

She said: “Hello,” and stood applying a ball of damp handkerchief to her inflamed nose.

“Poor Dulcie!” moaned Mrs Feinstein in suffocating sympathy.

“Oh, Mummy!” Dulcie protested from the other side of her cold. “I am not dead !”

Mrs Feinstein looked as though she could have mourned for her daughter most professionally if she had been.

Instead, she went, it soon sounded, to prepare and fetch food.

“You won’t be interested in us,” said Dulcie, not particularly looking at Waldo. “Anyway, we’re not at all what you’d like us to be. We don’t read books, or only occasionally — or discuss interesting topics. My parents are boring.”

Dulcie was certainly very different from what he had expected, but he supposed it was the cold having its effect, making her what Mother called “morbid”.

“You can play the piano, can’t you?” he said.

Because the piano was the dominant object in the room.

“Oh,” she said, “I sit down at it. I work at it. I wanted very badly to play, I mean, to show off brilliantly in public. Until I realized it was not for me. I’m really,” she said, “a very mundane individual.”

She paused as though the language she was using might sound too daring, too much like a dialogue she had rehearsed. It was from the dark rôle he had expected on the first occasion, when she hadn’t played it.

“I’m sorry my cousins didn’t come,” she said, sitting down on the piano stool and picking at the ivory skin of the exposed keys. “They’re very entertaining. Dina can impersonate people,” she said, “killingly.”

With the result that Waldo grew entranced. He would have liked to think that Dulcie sat in the pepper-pot tower keeping a journal, and that he would succeed eventually in reading it by stealth, after which she would find out and know that he knew.

As though to confirm these possibilities Dulcie broke into the semblance of a piece on the piano, full of clotted notes, which she was creating purely for herself, it was implied, in her sultry, morbid, becolded condition.

“Doesn’t Dulcie play nicely,” said Mrs Feinstein, coming in with a trayful of inherited-looking china and a strange black cake.

“Oh, Mummy!” Dulcie protested.

“She will never be a performer, though, and I am glad,” Mrs Feinstein said. “I have heard many of the greatest performers. Acchhh, yes!” After this expression of pain and reverence, she put the tray down, and turned quite skittish. “We have been working the planchette the other evening,” she said, looking at her daughter, “and Dulcie asked it what she will become. Afterwards. In life.”

Mrs Feinstein glanced again, this time obviously for permission.

“No,” said Dulcie. “It’s too uninteresting.”

Her swollen nose aggravated her angry sullen look. She was really very ugly. The fall of slightly frizzy hair, not long enough to fulfil a graceful purpose, was tied behind her head by a cerise bow.

“Will you take tea, Waldo?” asked Mrs Feinstein in her kind of translation.

Waldo said all right he would. If it had not been for the dark and interesting cake, again he would have felt sorry he had come.

“This is Mohntorte ,” Mrs Feinstein said, and cut into the cake as if it had been flesh.

“Poppy seeds,” Dulcie explained, brightening.

“Is it an opiate?” Waldo heard his cracked voice.

“No, but what a pity!” Dulcie came to life; her face began to lose its swollen look.

Mrs Feinstein sucked her teeth, as though to defend her poppy cake, and at the same time a little drop of dribble appeared at one corner of her mouth.

“If it were an opiate, then we should float off perhaps,” Dulcie said, in such a rich and gliding voice that Waldo looked at her, and seeing her eyes, imagined her dancing, her white dress swirling out from her in waves.

“What ideas!” protested her mother, breathing heavily. “My husband is particularly fond of the Mohntorte ,” Mrs Feinstein added, turning to consult a gold clock with a partly naked woman reclining beside it under a glass dome.

Waldo bit into the black, tobacco-y cake. As he wasn’t sure how he felt about it, he wondered what to tell them if they asked. But they didn’t.

“There is mint tea for Dulcie,” murmured Mrs Feinstein, pouring out.

The scented steam added to the slightly dreamy atmosphere, of colds and poppies. Dulcie’s frizzy, animal hair had undergone a transformation. Now it flowed, particularly along one of her white-embroidered shoulders where it happened to have arranged itself. And there were her eyes. As she sipped her mint tea, they brimmed and shimmered through the steamy curtain, infused with some virtue he still had to understand. Waldo had no experience of girls, except girls giggling or turning away on trains, or girls leading boys up side streets, to perform acts he knew about at second hand from Johnnny Haynes. But Dulcie Feinstein seemed to fit into none of the known categories of girlhood. Perhaps in the end her eyes would give away their secret and all would be explained.

They might have continued in this agreeable state of surmise and abstraction if Mr Feinstein hadn’t come in. At once the gauze was lifted. It was as though a game of billiards were taking place in the wrong room.

“So this is Waldo Brown,” said Mr Feinstein. “How are we doing, Waldo?” Mr Feinstein asked.

He spoke with a fairly strong Australian accent, to make up perhaps for anything foreign about him. His hand was cold, dry, and firm. His bald head looked as though it might have felt of billiard balls, the click of which was suggested not so much by the words against his teeth, as the ideas he kept on coming out with.

“I have heard about you, Waldo,” Mr Feinstein clicked. “I have heard about your father. He is, they say, a fine man.”

It surprised Waldo that anyone should have heard of somebody so unimportant as his father, let alone imagine him a “fine man”.

“A man of independent ideas,” said Mr Feinstein. “The courage of his own convictions. No man today, of any intellectual honesty, could adopt any but a rationalist stand in view of politico-economic developments and the advances in scientific discovery.”

Now it was Waldo who had begun to feel important, thanks to Mr Feinstein’s vocabulary and confidences, though he was frightened to think he mightn’t be able to live up to them.

“Don’t you agree?” Mr Feinstein asked.

Waldo made what he hoped might sound an acceptable noise. No one else, he saw, could help him. Mrs Feinstein sat smiling up at her husband. She had ceased to exist, except as a smile and a dress covered with little steel beads. Dulcie had sucked her lips in. She was looking down at something, probably a crumb, so that he was no longer able to see her eyes.

“We Jews,” said Mr Feinstein, and he attached an almost visible weight to it, “we Jews are not always all that enlightened. But when we are, then we are. Take my old father — who founded the firm — another independent mind for you — my old father had seen the light before reaching these to-some-extent,” Mr Feinstein cleared his throat, “enlightened shores.”

The lights cannoned off his head onto his daring, curved nose.

Dulcie sighed. She was looking out, though respectfully, into the garden, where a gloom had gathered. She felt the need to dab her soggy nose.

“You will notice I said ‘to-some-extent’ enlightened,” continued Mr Feinstein, performing a balancing trick on the tips of the upturned fingers of his right hand. “That is because I don’t like to be carried away into dishonest over-emphasis in either direction.”