Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

Mrs Feinstein was quite willing. Wearing the same dress as before, she had obviously prepared herself for understanding Arthur Brown. She stuck her most sympathetic smile on her flesh-coloured face.

“You must tell me all about yourself, Arthur,” Mrs Feinstein said.

Fortunately Arthur wasn’t taken in by that. He was too interested, in any case, in the room, the same big over-furnished living-room in which they had received Waldo alone on the previous occasion. Arthur was soon walking about looking at everything as though he must remember for ever.

“What is that?” he asked.

“That is a prayer-cap,” Mrs Feinstein explained pleasantly, “which people used to wear in the days when they still have been superstitious.”

“Well, that’s an idea,” Arthur said too thoughtfully. “I never saw anybody praying in a cap.”

For a terrible moment Waldo thought he was going to put it on. He might have, if Dulcie hadn’t opened the door.

“Did you ever pray in a cap?” Arthur asked as though he had met her before, and she was only, as it were, re-appearing.

“It’s different with women,” Dulcie answered.

At least from that moment Waldo knew that Dulcie was seeing Arthur for the first time. She was so obviously upset. She tried to make it look as though the whole idea of prayer-caps, and superstition generally, repelled her, whereas it was the lumpy look of Arthur Brown slobbering with imbecile excitement. Although Waldo was personally distressed that she should react in this way to his brother, he was relieved to find she was sincere.

“Now I shall be able to remember you in your room, Dulcie, now that I have seen your face,” Arthur was saying, or gobbling, “even if you never want to see me again.”

At this Mrs Feinstein began to protest by noises.

“Why should I — ” Dulcie gave a high, unexpected laugh “ — not want?”

She ended awkwardly in mid-air.

Because Arthur had gone up too close to her, the way he would with people in whom he was interested, to remember also by touch, it seemed.

“Here, Arthur,” Waldo was beginning to say, to interrupt, to drag him off.

But Mrs Feinstein’s smile continued to find the situation reasonable.

“Because we mightn’t have enough to say to each other,” Arthur said, looking too closely at Dulcie, into her eyes. “I mean, people can say and say, by the yard, but they don’t always seem to have learnt the same words.”

Then Dulcie appeared to be making a great effort.

“I think, Arthur,” she said, “you may be able to tell me a lot I shall want to hear. We may be able to teach,” she said, “to teach each other things.”

“Will you,” Arthur shouted, seizing the opportunity, “teach me the piano? Will you? Can we start now?”

“Oh, yes!” Dulcie said, and laughed with the greatest pleasure and relief.

Waldo knew he must get out quickly. Find the dunny. As he went barging out he heard the discords of music spattering out of the upright piano under Arthur’s hands. He knew how Arthur’s not quite controlled hands were behaving.

Behind him now, all was music of a kind, and laughter, as he blundered down the passage. He heard at last, against the doors he opened, Mrs Feinstein following him.

“I want,” he mumbled foolishly.

“You want the bath-room?” Mrs Feinstein asked most sympathetically.

“No,” he said, in what he heard was his surliest voice. “The other.”

“Here,” she said, opening a door.

So that he did not have to go any farther, out through any grass, looking for a dunny. Here was a real porcelain lavatory with mahogany seat, on which he sat down at once and gave way to the diarrhoea which had been threatening him.

And now the music was flowing from unseen hands — they could only have been Dulcie Feinstein’s — though under Arthur’s influence, he feared. Waldo wished he could have conceived a poem. He had not yet, but would — it was something he had kept even from himself. If it would only come shooting out with the urgency of shit and music. He rocked with the spasms of his physical distress, and the strange drunkenness which the unbridled music, muffled by perhaps several doors, provoked in him. Was Dulcie playing an étude? He hoped it was an étude . He hoped against hope the Influential Client would soon speak. Then he would no walk up the hill to Feinsteins’, and present himself, and say: Here I am, an intellectual, working at Sydney Municipal Library — kindness is not enough, you must respect, not my genius exactly, but at least my Australian-literary ambitions.

When Waldo returned at last he was emptied out. He had washed his face, and might have felt better if he hadn’t heard a sound of tea-spoons somewhere, from kitchen or pantry. Which meant that Mrs Feinstein was getting the tea. Which meant that Arthur was alone with Dulcie.

The music had stopped now.

As he hurried he was not afraid Arthur would behave in any way violently, oh no, it was rather the violence of what his twin might say.

Entering the room, Waldo made himself appear, he imagined, dry and correct. At least they would not see how he felt. Only he would know.

Arthur and Dulcie were sitting on the twin music-stool which held the music underneath. They were turned so that they faced each other. Their foreheads appeared almost to be touching.

“What, a peerrot sitting on the moon? On the bottle?”

“A pierrot painted on the bottle,” Dulcie confirmed.

Arthur was entranced by what he was hearing and seeing, and Dulcie had changed. When he came into the room Waldo felt for the first time this is Dulcie being herself. You couldn’t say she was exactly ugly. Or perhaps he was just used to her by now.

“You are right,” she was saying, in reply to some remark of Arthur’s, though speaking rather to herself. “ Amour is not the same as love. Amour has a different shape — a different meaning.”

Waldo was so horrified he might have expressed his feelings, but fortunately Mrs Feinstein brought the tea things, and at the same time rain was beginning.

“Oh dear, I do hate thunder!” Mrs Feinstein admitted, and the things on the tray rattled. “It makes me so afraid! Shut the window, Dulcie, do, please! They say lightning strikes through open windows.”

“We shan’t be able to breathe,” said Dulcie, but did as she was told.

“Arthur and I shall exchange anecdotes to drown the thunder,” Mrs Feinstein promised.

“Is this real cinnamon toast?” Arthur asked, helping himself to two or three fingers and stuffing them buttery into his mouth.

He looked perfectly happy, sitting in a chair shaped like a toast-rack, while Mrs Feinstein told about her aunt Madame Hochapfel who had sometimes been mistaken for the Empress Eugénie, and whose salon used to be frequented by people of artistic inclinations.

“Every Sunday. Only a minor salon,” Mrs Feinstein added out of modesty.

“But to be in business in a small way is better than not being in it at all,” Arthur said through his mouthful of toast. “I mean, to have your own. To be independent.”

Mrs Feinstein agreed that her aunt Madame Hochapfel had kept an independent salon.

Dulcie apparently had her thoughts. Waldo couldn’t sink into his. He felt as brittle as a dry sponge. Other people had their anecdotes, or the obvious riches of their thoughts. The big drops of rain and fleshy leaves plastering the windows accentuated his unfortunate drought, his embarrassing superficiality.

Yet he knew the theory of it all. It was only a question of time. It was the mean time which weighed so heavily. It made the palms of his hands sweat.

“And Russia.” Mrs Feinstein sighed. “I can only remember the pine forests.”