Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

“Oh, yes,” she said, “I am well ! Didn’t you gather I am very healthy?”

Suddenly he knew he would like to say: Dearest, dearest Dulcie — taking her hands in his hands with a suppleness not peculiar to them.

Instead he continued standing stiffly, against the prospect of staggy hydrangeas, their leaves yellow and speckled from neglect.

Dulcie, he realized, had begun to cry. Very softly. Which made it worse.

“What is it?” he asked, in a tone to match — worse and worse.

“There is so much I don’t, I shall never be able to grasp,” she said abruptly, in a comparatively loud and shocking voice.

At the same time she held out her arms, not to him, but in one of the ugly gestures with which she had fought Beethoven, again in an attempt to embrace some recalcitrant vastness.

Fortunately Arthur woke, and it was clearly time to go.

“Then you can have a proper cry,” Arthur advised through a yawn.

“I’ve done all the crying, proper or improper, I intend to do,” Dulcie said.

She sounded so very practical.

“Give my regards, Arthur,” she said, “to your mother. I hope one day we shall meet.”

Arthur was dawdling his way through the garden. He could have been feeling depressed.

“Oh. My mother,” he murmured, then: “You mightn’t like each other,” he called back.

As it was too probable to answer, Dulcie went inside, closing the door, against the glass panels of which Waldo saw her figure pressed, very lightly, fleetingly. He remembered seeing a fern pressed under glass, the ribs more clearly visible.

Then he and Arthur were going away. Arthur was holding him by the hand.

Anything so unassessable, and in a way he did not wish to assess their relationship with the Feinsteins, was liable to suffer from the more positive occurrences. The Poulters, for instance. The Poulters arrived in Terminus Road perhaps about 1920, anyway, Dad had retired, but had not died. Waldo remembered with difficulty the occasion of his first setting eyes on the Poulters. All too soon there were the heap of bricks, the matchsticks of timber, but before that, yes, he could remember the day the man and woman trampled round and round in the grass, more like cattle let loose on fresh pasture. Then the man appeared to be pacing out dimensions. Mother went inside saying she had heartburn, but Waldo stayed to watch, in spite of the felted chug-chug from somewhere in the region of his throat or heart. The man was a thin one. The woman, more noticeably fleshed, had stupid-looking calves, which Waldo thought he would have liked to slap if he had been following her up a flight of stairs. Slap slap. To make her hop. After a bit the strangers went away, driving in a sulky with a sweaty horse, lowering their eyes to avoid the glances of those who had the advantage over them by being there already.

“They hired that horse and trap for the day,” Arthur informed the family as they sat at tea eating the salmon loaf.

No one any longer asked how Arthur knew. (He had, in fact, gone across the road, to look closer, and ask.)

“They’re from up country,” he said. “Mr Poulter was a rouseabout, Mrs Poulter helped at the homestead.”

“But why have they come down here?” Mother wondered.

“To be more independent,” Arthur explained at once.

Waldo laughed. He had begun to feel gratifyingly superior.

“But why Terminus Road? Why directly opposite us?” Mother couldn’t leave it alone.

“They had to go some where,” Arthur said.

“What have we got to hide, Annie?” Dad asked.

Only Mother and Waldo knew.

And the Poulters came.

Bill Poulter, who remained scraggy, and awkwardly articulated, began to build the home. There was someone, some lad out of Sarsaparilla, giving him a hand. They were putting together the blank box, very quickly, it seemed, so much so the grey flannel undervests hung darker from their shoulders to their ribs. In the end the structure looked less a square house than an oblong houseboat.

All this time Mrs Poulter had been living in a tin shed on the site. She cooked on an open fire, and the smell of burning wood floated up and crossed the road, together with the smells from her boiling pot, or more accurately, half a kero tin.

Mrs Poulter herself began to come across the road. She borrowed a cup of sugar, a cup of rice. She was the high-complexioned decent young woman they got to know, who put on a brave red hat to walk up Terminus Road to Allwrights’ or the post-office. Sometimes Arthur brought the orders home for her, sometimes if it was closing time, they walked down together, Arthur carrying the brown-paper bags and the newspaper parcels. She seemed to take to him, or at least she didn’t mind, as some women did.

From the beginning Mrs Poulter gave the impression of wanting to perform some charitable act.

“If you was ever sick, you know, you’d only have to give us a shout, Mrs Brown, and I’d come across and do what I could. Sit with you at night, or anything like that. Or if it was the men, Bill would. I think Bill would,” she was careful to add.

Waldo knew how this sort of thing embarrassed their mother.

Mrs Poulter told Mother the War had got on Bill’s nerves sort of, not that he had been gassed or shell-shocked, or gone overseas even, but from being in a camp. Afterwards he couldn’t settle. That was one of several reasons why they had come to Sarsaparilla. Where she hoped to keep a few hens, and grow flowers, she loved all flowers. Bill was going to get taken on by the Shire Council. Only temporary. Because Council labourer wasn’t much of a job for a man. Bill could kill, milk, fell trees, he had once entered for a wood-chopping competition though he hadn’t won. It was terrible dry up-country where they had come from. That was Mungindribble. Her own people came from Numburra. Her auntie had started having the indigestion, they thought, when it turned out to be cancer. They said, said Mrs Poulter, there was a cure for it from violet leaves. If only she could make certain, she would perhaps grow the violets, and post the leaves in a moist parcel.

Mother decided after that not to encourage Mrs Poulter. Though you couldn’t say Mother wasn’t always polite, not to say kind. She gave Mrs Poulter a piece of lace insertion.

Sometimes when his wife crossed the road, to borrow, return, or yarn, Bill Poulter would come down to the grass edge of their side, and stand looking across, squinting because of the sun. His arms, usually exposed as far as the armpits, for he had had her cut off the sleeves, were stringy rather than muscular, with prominent veins. He never had much to say, not even, it seemed, to his wife.

Although the material wasn’t promising, Waldo began to wonder whether he could make Bill Poulter his friend. He walked springily at the prospect, deciding how he should go about it. He had never really had a friend of his own sex, unless you could count Walter Pugh, for whom he could never have really cared, because of those ridiculous literary ambitions. But take Bill Poulter — virgin soil, so to speak. He might turn Bill into whatever he chose by cultivating his crude manliness for the best.

So, if Bill Poulter happened to be hoeing or hewing within easy distance as he passed, Waldo took to flicking his head sideways at him, as he had seen other men, and sometimes his neighbour would flick back, nothing more, in recognition. On other occasions Bill just didn’t seem to see. Waldo used to walk quite prim and virginal wondering whether Bill would recognize or not. It began to matter a great deal.

Until he knew he must take the bull by the horns, as it were, if he intended to influence their neighbour’s mind and future. He might, for a start, lend him a book, something quite simple and primitive, Fenimore Cooper, say, they still had The Deerslayer in the Everyman edition. Waldo made his decision returning from the Library on a Friday night. That Sunday morning he went across to Bill Poulter, who was splitting a pile of wood for the stove. (Mrs Poulter had gone up the road to church or chapel, or whatever brand of poison she took.)