Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

Arthur said: “They’re going on a visit to the relatives, so that Dulcie can learn the languages. There are relatives all over the place, like Jews seem to have. And languages come easy to the Jews, Mrs Musto says. I bet they have a good time. Not Mr Feinstein. He can’t leave the business. But Dulcie and her mother. Mrs Hochapfel, she’d be too old to go gadding about, but there’s still that Mrs Terni in Milan.”

A couple of times Waldo walked home past the villa in O’Halloran Road, not to nurse a sense of deprivation, simply out of curiosity, and the shutters were fastened, and the weeds had grown, as though old Feinstein didn’t come there any more, as though the air of Sarsaparilla had lost its savour for him since his wife and daughter went away. On a third evening, Waldo decided to go in, climbing the picket fence because the gate was chained. The grass banks he clambered up no longer seemed to give. Under the hydrangeas, where a steamier, yellower green intensified the desolation, some animal had probably died. His own feet sounded horribly detached on the tesselated veranda, but he had to try to look through the shutters. On fitting his eyes to the slanted slats he couldn’t see anything of course, because of the angle; he had more or less expected that before making the attempt. And then the footsteps began approaching along the gravel. From round the side. He stood and waited.

The icy moment finally arrived. It was old Feinstein himself.

“What do you want?” he asked.

He was not wearing the capple , but a bowler hat, which made him look and sound more formal. He stood there looking at Waldo as if he hadn’t seen him before, although they had met not so very long ago.

Waldo was transformed forcibly into the complete stranger.

“I thought the house might be up for sale. All shut up,” he mumbled.

“Well, it isn’t,” Mr Feinstein said rather angrily.

As he jolted down the concrete steps which the couch-grass was breaking open, Waldo knew that the owner had continued watching him. The fact that the old man’s daughter had given herself to him in his conversation with Walter Pugh seemed to make the incident more icily corrupt.

So much so he would have liked to boast about it to somebody, but there was no one at hand, perhaps never would be, worthy of its subtlety. At tea he merely mentioned, while trimming the fat off his cold mutton:

“Saw old Feinstein up at the house. Didn’t know he went there any more. Wonder what he gets up to on his own?”

Dad suggested he had come to assure himself his property was not deteriorating. Mother thought he might be lonely, and hoped to re-enact some moment before his loneliness set in.

“Trouble with Feinsteins is they’re so damn Jewish. That’s usually the trouble with Jews,” Waldo said, and laughed.

Though he hadn’t met — well, perhaps one other.

“I’ll trouble you not to speak in those terms,” Dad said through a piece of gristle. “Mr Feinstein’s a fine man.”

“Oh yes, old Feinstein,” Waldo agreed.

He knew his father was not acquainted with Feinstein, but that a lifetime of tolerance was at stake, and he was having difficulty in finding the vocabulary to protect it.

Mother too, was looking pained.

“I have never met Mrs Feinstein,” she said, “but I’m sure nothing about her calls for such an unprincipled remark. Besides,” she said, “I thought you were fond of them.”

“I’m not married to them!” Waldo said.

The filthy mutton was sticking in his throat. His rejection of the Feinsteins seemed connected with some far deeper, even less desirable, misery. On the outskirts of the lamplight Dulcie hovered, in that same dress, the sleeves of which were embroidered with the bracts of loose hydrangeas. How he resented brown eyes, whether in Dulcie Feinstein, Arthur, or George Brown, whether offering themselves for martyrdom, or like soft brown animals burrowing in, unconscious, but still burrowing.

“Well, I have been guillotined!” said Waldo Brown cheerfully, throwing his knife and fork together on the plate.

For once he was glad he would be leaving for the Library in the morning. For once too, Arthur was not joining in. Arthur sat munching on his thoughts, his eyelids drooping, so that you could only see the moons of heavy skin. If he had had to face the brown verdict of Arthur’s eyes, Waldo suspected the same unhappiness might have risen up inside him to trouble the surface.

In the morning he left for the Library. And then again. Always.

“That girl Dulcie,” Walter Pugh returned to the subject on a later occasion, “what became of her?”

“I had a letter from her. She’s in Brussels,” Waldo said with the naturalness of inspiration.

“Some people have all the luck! Or spondulicks.”

“It’s not luck. It’s practical, an investment. They’ve taken her to Europe to learn the languages.”

Walter Pugh was breathing hard.

“Not that Dulcie wasn’t a cultured girl already,” Waldo said. “Plays the Beethoven piano sonatas. Does embroidery, too. Petty point .”

After that, Walter invited Waldo to spend the evening at the home of his sister and brother-in-law. Once before Waldo had accepted, and eaten a sociable braise with Cis and Ern — we’re going to treat you just as if you were one of the family — and Wally had spoken about his plans for the future, which were uncomfortably familiar.

This time Waldo said: “Sorry, Wal. Too far. All this train travel — I’m played out by the time I reach home.”

It was true, too. Everywhere was too far from Terminus Road. From time to time he resented it bitterly, and planned to rent that small room in the city where his thoughts might take finite shape instead of remaining the blurred mess he could never sort out. On the other hand, living under grass down Terminus Road allowed his thoughts their flowing line, to tighten which might mean extinction.

So he continued living too far, soon even farther still. Their Brown world, at the end of the yellow-green tunnel called Terminus Road, contracted before the pressure of events. Because war was breaking, had already broken out. Waldo decided in secret that it shouldn’t concern them, though his parents’ unhappiness, viewed through the glare of yellow grass, caused him temporary doubts. His father couldn’t wait to open the papers, but stood by the road, in his braces, perched lopsided on his surgical boot. His mother used to bring out her knitting, out to the veranda, and sit on the day-bed, under the classical pediment. The anger in her flashing needles could not compete eventually with the penumbra easily slicing the classical façade, right through, and the wool; the ineffectual steel, she sat holding.

The gothic arches of dead grass were taking over from the classical. But he would not, would not let it happen.

Waldo Brown at this stage was becoming a smart young fellow. At the Municipal Library they had put him on the catalogue. So the least desirable part of his life was war and all that it implied. In particular he recoiled from those of the enlisted men who wished to make confidences, to turn out all that was most secret, personal, emotional, painful, as though they were emptying a paper bag. Naturally he disguised his feelings, because under the influence of war nobody would have believed in them, least of all those wide-open faces needing to confess, the country faces cured to bacon tints and textures, the faces of the Boys.

Of course everybody loved the Boys, sang to them, with them, about them. All those blouses full of bust with which the streets were suddenly filled, the cheery young matrons who presided over stalls in Martin Place, and the girls, the girls selling metal badges and paper flags — all of them loved the smell of khaki.