Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

He yawned. They had entered on a boring stretch, during which he watched himself opening the Private Papers on a Sunday — such an abuse, but Sunday was the day of abuse — taking out his pen to immortalize a false moment, bottling the essence of Dulcie Feinstein’s sostenuto .

When a succession of little pure notes trickled from her fingers into the living-room, suddenly and unexpectedly, but right. He could have sunk his teeth in the nape of her neck where the little curls were unfurling, from beneath the bun, with the logic of notes of music on the page.

With less logic than tenacity Dulcie began to shape the Allegretto . The paper moon was dangling. Unwisely she allowed herself to indulge in coy skips and pretty side-steps for the Allegretto , and did not recover her balance in time for arrival at the precipice.

Dulcie plainly wasn’t prepared, and never would be, for Beethoven’s prestiferous night. It made her lunge at the piano as if to crack, to tear the walnut open. Her arms lashing. Her fingers clutching at the keyboard. From the muscles in her neck, her throat must have been swelling, knotting, reddening, strangling with the poetry which had got into it.

Would it escape without his assistance? Or someone else’s? Waldo could only look at her back and wonder. By now his pants were a network of creases. He thought he loved Dulcie, increasingly, if moodily.

But her back presented itself as a wall which had to be scaled. Was he strong enough? A weak character — oh no, no character is weak if the obsessions are only strong enough. Besides, his obsession was acquiring the surge of Beethoven’s proposition. B. was certainly strong enough, if a mightily unpleasant old man writing music on a lavatory wall.

At that moment Waldo Brown realized Mrs Feinstein’s nose reminded him of the uncircumcised penis of an Anglican bishop he had noticed in a public lavatory. The connection was too obvious, too obscene to resist, and he was forced to bring out his handkerchief to sneeze.

So much for Dad, he decided. And the Jews. He was sorry about Dad, the brown burrowing but never arriving eyes, and the twitch of a moustache on your skin years ago.

Dulcie broke off just then, saying: “I can’t go any farther.”

Immediately afterwards she turned round, her appearance dishevelled, as though she had walked out between storms. Branches still wet and aggressive had hit her in the face, without however breaking her trance, deepening it even, by making her gasp and swallow down the black draught of sky which otherwise she might have shuddered back from. As she sat looking out at them from her irrelevant body with such a pure candour of expression Waldo saw it was he who had lost. He might never be able to forgive her the difficulties she put in the way of loving her.

“I bit off more than I could chew,” she admitted with that same awful honesty.

“It was my fault, I’m afraid,” Waldo answered politely.

It could have made it worse if Dulcie hadn’t been so cool and reasonable, hands in her lap, still seated on the carpet-covered music-stool. Because of this innate reasonableness, which was another surprise silly, frivolous, mysterious Dulcie had sprung on him, he would have liked to counter it with something really good, of such truth, simplicity, and directness, say, Der Jüngling an der Quelle , that he would have shamed her further, even deeply, for her pretentious performance of the Beethoven. But he feared Schubert might not collaborate in this. He would have to rely on a few ballads to decorate his passable voice.

For he sensed that Mrs Feinstein was about to invite him to take his turn at showing off.

“Don’t you in any way perform, Waldo?” she asked in what he heard to be a disbelieving voice.

So the moment had arrived. He said he would sing a few songs.

“Though I warn you, I accompany myself very badly, with little more than one finger!”

“Oh,” said Dulcie, “perhaps I can help.”

And did when she heard the titles. He sang them In the Gloaming, The Tide Will Turn , and Singing Voices, Marching Feet . At once he regretted denying his own skill at the piano, for as he glanced down Dulcie’s neck, and at her dexterous hands, he realized he was putting, not so much no expression, as the wrong one, into the words he was singing. Because how could Dulcie have learnt the accompaniments, if not at some sing-song for the Boys? Thumping out worse, no doubt, in a vulgar low-cut blouse, as the bacon-faced men, smelling of khaki and old pennies, propped themselves up on the piano. Anyone coarsening so early as Dulcie, in both arms and figure, could only have acted openly. The authentic AIF brooch she must have worn would barely have held her breasts together.

After this discovery he confessed his voice was dry.

“You will tire yourself, giving so much.” Mrs Feinstein sighed.

And Dulcie said: “I never realized you had such a charming tenor voice.”

With the result that it almost rose again, silkily, in his injured throat.

But the afternoon, like the lolling Arthur, had just about exhausted itself. As the others sat nibbling at a few last crumbs of conversation, his head rolled without waking, and for a moment Waldo noticed with repulsion the whites of his brother’s upturned eyes.

If he had not been making other discoveries he would have woken Arthur. Instead he noticed Dulcie was wearing, not the AIF brooch, but a Star of David on a gold chain.

“Are you religious?” he asked, as brittlely as the question demanded.

She pulled an equally brittle face. He might have teased her some more if Mrs Feinstein hadn’t wandered off at a tangent.

“I am so sorry,” she said, “You will not have had the opportunity of meeting Leonard Saporta. On another occasion he was to have come, but he had the grippe or something, I seem to remember. This time he has been too impulsive. He slammed a door, and cut his hand on the glass knob.”

“Is he a relative?” Waldo asked.

Mrs Feinstein said: “No.”

The mention of relatives set her off sighing again, and he hardly dared, though did finally enquire after the Signora Terni of Milan.

“Old, old.” Mrs Feinstein protested against it. “Very aged.”

Then Waldo grew more daring.

“And Madame Hochapfel?”

Mrs Feinstein was desolated. She emulated Arthur in showing the whites of her eyes.

“Before we have reached Europe,” Mrs Feinstein replied in a voice from beyond the grave.

“Aunt Gaby had lived, Mummy,” Dulcie suggested.

Her idea was to staunch the ’cello music, but it sounded, rather, as though she had turned her mother’s lament into a duet.

When Mrs Feinstein began to take herself in hand.

“I don’t know what Daddy would have to say to so much Jewish emotionalism. I was thankful we did not have him with us, either in Paris or Milan. Poor things, they are devout.” Mrs Feinstein smiled for the sick, though it could have been she enjoyed the sickness. “Of course we did whatever was expected of us while we were there. We did not have the heart to tell them we have given up all such middle-aged ideas, to conform,” she said, “to conform with the spirit of progress. Daddy, I am afraid, who is more forceful in his expression, would have offended.”

After that she disappeared, trailing the outdoor coat she was wearing. It was so out of place. It was also so shapeless it might have been inherited.

Waldo would have woken Arthur, only he saw that Dulcie, in some distraction, had thrown open the glass doors, and was holding her handkerchief to her upper lip, while breathing the rather foetid air of their wartime garden.

“Aren’t you well?” he asked.