Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

“You must come up to tea. To afternoon tea. And we’ll have a good yarn. I’ve got a collection of post-cards I made while we were in Europe. My cousins were sweet to me.”

He was wasting his time hanging round this silly girl at the gate.

“But make it Saturday,” Dulcie warned. “Because I work in the shop, Waldo, now. In the office. They tell me I’m good at figures. So I have that at least in common with poor old Arthur. How is Arthur, Waldo?” she asked.

He was already mumbling off along the road.

“Give him my love. I do love Arthur.”

Shattering Waldo not by throwing a stone.

“I’ll tell Daddy,” she promised — though why?

“So long!” he called back.

It was the kind of expression Daddy’s silly girl seemed to ask for.

So they were going up the hill again to Feinsteins’ on a Saturday afternoon. How raw he had been formerly: all fluff and pimples, and food-spots, and the Barranugli High hat-band. Waldo touched with the tip of his tongue the hair on his upper lip. It was satisfactorily, wirily male. It shone, he liked to think, with personal magnetism, as well as a dash of brilliantine.

But poor Arthur was almost unchanged, and as things were, probably wouldn’t alter much. His shirt-sleeves open at the wrist because the buttons came off at once, he would remain a bigger, shamblier boy, staring this way and that, as if unable to select the detail on which to concentrate. Unless it was numbers. Figures continued to rivet Arthur.

Arthur said: “Thought you knew Feinsteins got back after the outbreak of war. Thought I mentioned it. I must have.”

“If you did, you must have mumbled,” Waldo said.

They were going up the same O’Halloran Road, where new houses, to spite war, were flaunting the same old signs of life.

“How did you know, anyway?”

“Dulcie’s p.-c. She sent me a card from some lake . An Italian lake. I forget. I lost the card. I’m sure I told you, Waldo, Feinsteins decided to come back.”

“I wish you could remember the name of the lake.”

For the name of the lake to be withheld was almost as bad as not having received the card.

“It’s too difficult. I’m tired,” Arthur said, closing down.

But when they arrived he began to glitter dangerously.

“Oh Mrs Feinstein,” he began, “I am that, I am so glad you are receiving us again. In your salong .”

And pursed up not only his mouth but the whole of the lower part of his face, in an insult to his brother.

Mrs Feinstein was overjoyed.

“Oh, Arthur,” she cried, “I don’t know how we can deprive ourselves of the pleasure of seeing you more often.”

She couldn’t stop hugging him, as though he were only a boy. Which he was.

Events had aged Mrs Feinstein. Her skin was more than ever of that exposed-private-flesh colour, with a dusting of grey. She had shrunk into herself somewhat, excepting her nose, which hung, suggesting something Waldo wished he could remember.

“What have you got for us to eat today?” Arthur asked.

But Mrs Feinstein looked sad and grey. She gave a sideways look. She said: “We are a lot older than we were.”

When Dulcie brought the tea there was a plate with biscuits from the tin.

Still, Arthur was pleased.

“I could eat the lot,” he said, and started by the coloured ones.

Dulcie showed her picture post-cards.

“I want to know,” Waldo said, putting on a mildly accusatory expression, “the name of the Italian lake.”

“Which one?” Dulcie asked. “There are several.”

She was bent above her post-cards, trying, it seemed, to disguise herself as an absorbed little girl, to whom the names of lakes meant less than their colours and gloss. But for Waldo the withheld name was a source of increasing resentment, as though she had been unfaithful to him intellectually.

“Como, Lugarno,

Have a banarno … ”

Arthur began to sing; he loved to join in the singing in the streets.

Waldo was afraid his brother would become dangerous that afternoon, particularly when Arthur suggested to Mrs Feinstein that he should take the tray out to the kitchen. Waldo waited for the crash.

It had not yet happened, when Arthur burst back into the room, wearing, his shouting seemed to emphasize, the capple Mr Feinstein had kept as a symbol of his emancipation.

“Who am Ieeehhh?

Guess! Guess! Guesss! ”

Arthur hissed rather than sang.

Waldo could only sit holding his kneecaps, from which sharp blades had shot out on Arthur’s re-appearance.

Arthur sang the answer to his question without waiting for anyone to try:

“ Peerrot d’amor

At half-past four,

That’s what I am!

How the leaves twitter —

And titter!

No one is all that dry,

But Ieeehhh !”

Mrs Feinstein, who had behaved so piano since her welcome, with hands in the sleeves of a coat she was wearing although it wasn’t cold, began to shriek with laughter.

“I am the bottom of the bottom,”

Arthur sang,

“But shall not dwell

On which well.

Might see my face

At the bott- urrhm! ”

There he stopped abruptly, and his face, which had become impasted with the thick white substance of his song, returned to what was for Arthur normal, as he hung his ruff together with Mr Feinstein’s capple on the knob of a chair.

“What a lovely song! Where did you learn it?” Dulcie finished laughing, and asked.

Her upper lip was encrusted with little pearly beads.

“I made it up,” said Arthur, primly.

Not so prim as Waldo.

Waldo said: “I think you’d better sit down. Otherwise you’ll over-excite yourself.”

Arthur obeyed, and when he was again seated, they heard Mrs Feinstein’s throat settling itself back, as though to suggest they were all as they were in the beginning.

Presently Waldo asked Dulcie: “Don’t you still play the piano?”

“Yes,” she answered guiltily.

“Can you play us the Moonlight Sonata? ”

Now, he thought, he’d show her up.

“It might be disastrous,” Dulcie said, but got out of her chair to prepare for it.

It seemed as though they were all under compulsion with the exception of Arthur, who had contributed enough to their dissolution, and fallen asleep, masticating a few last crumbs of Arnotts’ biscuit.

The moon was rising, however jerkily, as Dulcie began to play.

Waldo at once knew how wrong he had been to encourage her to make an exhibition of herself. Needn’t have accepted, of course, if she hadn’t wanted to. But it was going to be a heroic struggle. Not in the beginning, not in the Adagio what’s-it . There she could lay the atmosphere on, and did, in almost visible slabs. Dulcie’s ever so slightly hairy arms were leaning on the solid air, first one side, then the other. Building up her defences against inevitable suicide somewhere along that road which was never moonlit enough. Her shoulders, however, were getting above themselves. If she had started humbly, the music had made her proud. It was kidding her all over again into becoming the genius she was never intended to be, dissolving the bones in her arms with a promise of release, offering a universe of passion instead of plunketty-plunk on the home upright. For moments Waldo was truly tortured by that innocence in others to which he was periodically subjected. He could, at last, have been responsible.

Not Mrs Feinstein. She was responsible for nothing. She was beating time, chasing the tail end of a tune, out of her fur sleeve.

Waldo frowned. He wished he could remember what Mrs Feinstein’s nose.