Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

“That’s something,” said Arthur. “I bet they smelled.”

Mrs Feinstein breathed deep.

“On a visit when I have been a litde girl. To another branch. With another aunt — Signora Terni of Milan.”

The branch of a shrub, or perhaps an unpruned hydrangea, was scratching the window. They realized the rain was over. Mrs Feinstein put on her skittish act. Her private-flesh-coloured face appeared less grey.

“Arthur,” she decided, “will help me clear the things.”

So Waldo saw the garden, as he had been promised, with Dulcie, because she had him on her hands. The leaves were still dripping with moisture. An air of cold showers above had more or less dislodged the green gloom from underneath.

“These are the hydrangeas you told about,” said Waldo, although they did not interest him at all.

“Yes,” said Dulcie, dully. “And the agapanthus.”

From this occasion he would remember her breaking up into the crumbly fragments of greeny-white hydrangeas. Her dress, at any rate. Because she herself was dark brown, and ugly.

“Arthur and Mummy are enjoying themselves immensely,” she said. “I think it will take me some time to understand Arthur.”

“What is there to understand?” Waldo tried not to shout.

His voice sounded horribly dry and cracked under the dripping hydrangeas.

“Though for that matter,” she said, “I don’t understand myself.”

She had come out in a pimple on one side of her large nose. Which made the dog-silliness of her eyes look more obscene.

He wished he had been taught to do or say something he hadn’t been. He could blame his parents, of course. But it didn’t help matters.

And soon he and Arthur were walking down the steps, between the painted phlox, out of this Feinstein world which in the end had no connexion with them. However sickening and personal the longing, however convincing Madame Hochapfel’s features at the moment of introduction, however close the wet mops of white hydrangeas, parting ridiculed them.

Arthur at least knew what to say.

“Good-bye,” he was trumpeting. “I had a great time. I’ll come back, Dulcie, for the rest of the piano lessons. I’m not going to worry about the theory. I’m going to begin with one of those frilly pieces.”

They were walking down the red concrete steps, which had been painted shiny to please Mr Feinstein no doubt.

Arthur called back then, as though he had been giving it thought: “I’ll have to come back anyway, to tell you what I’ve worked out.”

Waldo was furious, who in the end had not known how to say a thing. Of course those who are sensitive don’t.

“What do you mean,” he began choking, after they had gone some way, “what you have worked out? ”

“Well,” said Arthur, “you’ve got to work out something if you’re not happy.”

“But you ’re happy, Dulcie’s happy! It would only be asking for sympathy to say you weren’t.”

“She mightn’t be,” Arthur said.

He wouldn’t say any more. He started snorting, and grunting, and finally picking his nose for comfort.

They got home.

And then there were the exams. Waldo passed with Flying Colours, even managed to scrape through Maths — where Johnny Haynes failed.

Then there was the letter summoning to the interview. (What price the Feinsteins now?) It turned out Waldo was accepted by Sydney Municipal Library on the strength of his scholastic career at Barranugli High, his suitable appearance — and a favour asked.

In the end the Influential Client forgot to speak. It was Mrs Musto who got Waldo the job, through Alderman Caldicott, son of her former gardener. Then Mrs Musto retired, to her house, her shrubs, and her servants. She did not venture very far into other people’s lives, because she had been bitten once, no, twice, in the course of human relations, and did not want to risk her hand again.

The preliminaries to dying, to what in the end is the simplest act of all, were so endlessly complicated.

“Mrs Allwright used to say,” said Arthur, “when she did her block at me, when she couldn’t find the things she’d put away, or had given somebody the wrong change, she used to say: ‘I sometimes wish you’d die , Arthur Brown. Then Mr Allwright would come to his senses and realize how we’ve been wasting our time.’”

Arthur would assume the voices of those who were addressing him. So that now on the unmade pavement on the Barranugli Road the mother with kiddy in stroller turned round to wonder whatever the old nut could be going on about. One old nut, or two? It was a shame to allow them their freedom. Somebody else always payed the price.

“But it was Mr Allwright who died,” Arthur continued. “Lacing up his boots. Mrs Allwright took up Christian Science. She’d do anything not to wake up and find she was dead.”

“You don’t wake up,” Waldo reminded.

He wouldn’t listen. Only it was not possible not to listen.

“Eh? “asked Arthur.

Though of course he had heard. Arthur always did hear, even with traffic whizzing or lurching along the Barranugli Road.

“Wonder if Mrs Allwright died. That’s the worst of it when people leave the district. Sometimes their relatives forget, or don’t know how to put the notice in the column. Or perhaps Mrs Allwright didn’t die. By rights, by logic — wouldn’t you say? — Christian Scientists don’t.”

“Death, thank God” — Waldo caught himself, “comes to everyone.”

Or almost everyone.

He wouldn’t listen. He began to count, to name the passing cars: the Chev the Renault the Holden two more three Holdens the Morris Minor the Bentley — that was Mr Hardwick who’d done a deal with the Council over Anglesey Estate only it couldn’t be proved. Nobody would have known that Waldo Brown, so unmechanical, could name the cars. Perhaps even Arthur hadn’t found out. It was Waldo’s secret vice.

Arthur who found out everything caused his brother to turn round, to test his face. Arthur, as Waldo dreaded, knew, and was smiling.

“What is it?”

“I waved at the Holden,” Arthur smiled, “and the lady waved back.”

Oh well. Arthur was not infallible. So Waldo Brown decided to indulge his other secret vice. If Arthur died. It was not impossible — that dead weight on the left hand. Waldo Brown dragged quicker, if not to effect, to think. He would do how was it he would blow everything the first editions of Thomas Hardy the whole Everyman Library quite a curiosity nowadays Mother’s spoons with crests on them the emerald ring the Hon Cousin Molly Thourault left in fact one big bonfire the land the developers were after if Anglesey Estate then why not Browns’ place Terminus Road see an alderman no alderman was so dishonest you couldn’t teach him a point or two approach a minister if necessary the Minister for Local Govt if only Mrs Musto were alive and say it is imperative imperative was the word that W. Brown of honourable service should end in a blaze of last years.

They were so dry Waldo had to lick his lips. He hoped he wouldn’t give himself a heart. His oilskin sounded slithery with speed.

If it was immoral, then he was immoral. Had been, he supposed, for many years. Perhaps always. The million times he had buried Arthur. But only now, or recently, had he perfected his itinerary of islands. He would visit islands first, because they symbolized, if only symbolized, what he craved. Of course he knew about the other things too, the bars and Americans. He would know how to sit in bars and drink, what was it, Pernod Fils, and stick his hand up under the raffia skirt of some lovely lousy brownskinned poster-girl complete with ukulele. And get the pox, and not do anything about it, what was the point at his age, in spite of all the modern drugs.