Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

Waldo opened by flicking his head. Then he squatted down, to watch in silence, as he had learnt from seeing other men, or comment knowledgeably on the weather.

Bill Poulter chopped. He nearly always had a sucked-looking cigarette-butt hanging extinct from his lower lip. Though sometimes he would pause to roll a fresh one.

“So you think it’s gunna rain, do yer?” Bill responded antiphonally as he rolled his next cigarette. “Could do,” he dared add. “Clouds are comun from the right direction.”

The situation couldn’t be called desperate. The climate was too positive. A smell of male exertion on the air encouraged Waldo to come to the point.

“Ever go in for reading books?” he asked very cautiously.

“Nah.” Bill swung the axe, and split the knottiest chunk of wood. “Never ever have the time.”

“I’d lend you a few decent books,” Waldo offered.

Something had made him boyish.

“If you read the paper,” he coaxed, “and I see you do take the Herald , you might find you had time for a read of a book.”

“Nah,” said Bill. “Wife reads the paper. But what’s the point? Don’t know anybody down in Sydney.”

Waldo’s long wrists hung between his squatting thighs as he watched Bill Poulter chop.

“Then there’s nothing I can do for you,” he said at last.

Bill didn’t deny that. He was flinging the wood into a barrow, piece by piece, as he split it, and the fuller the barrow the more wooden the thud.

Bill said through his ugly teeth: “Don’t find time enough for thinkun, let alone gettun littery.”

Waldo refused to feel humiliated. He continued squatting for a little, smiling a shallow smile at the chunks of wood, at the knots split apparently by light.

Soon after this Bill Poulter got taken by the Council and Waldo saw less of their neighbour, as their movements did not coincide. On occasions when he did catch sight of Bill, the stringy rather than muscular arms with veins so prominent as to become obtrusive, he no longer flicked his head sideways. And Bill did not even look, forcing Waldo to remember the day he had offered the books. It had become so sickeningly physical. It was as if he had been snubbed for making what they called in the papers an indecent proposition.

But Waldo did not hate Bill, not exactly, or not yet. You could only despise ignorant, suspicious minds. Or the simple, wide-open ones. That Mrs Poulter, for example, with her puddings, and her hens troubled with the white diarrhoea. Not that he spoke to her. Not that he saw her, even. But knew she was there.

Arthur used to keep him informed: “Mrs Poulter let me taste the lemon sago pudding. When I brought the order down. She has a hen, she says, will bust herself from laying eggs the size she does. Mrs Poulter says there was a goat she knew at Numburra ate a basinful of yeast. The goat blew up.”

“Why,” Waldo asked, “do you have to listen to that stupid, babbling cow?”

“I don’t just listen. We tell each other things.”

“I’m sick to death of the very Name!” Mother said at last.

Arthur told quietly after that, but told: “When I was over there Sunday afternoon she was washing her hair. In a kero tin. She makes a lotion out of bay leaves. She showed me the leaves. You never saw such lovely hair. But it’s not what it was. It used to reach down below her waist.”

“You have your job, son,” said Dad in some difficulty — he had begun by those years to gasp. “Why don’t you concentrate on that?”

Arthur kept quiet.

And Mrs Poulter remained the same young woman, of firm flesh and high complexion, her hair glistening in certain lights. There was nothing you could have accused her of. Nothing. Except perhaps her living in the boat-shaped erection immediately opposite, with the fowl-sheds and wire-netting behind.

Arthur began to go very carefully, to speak very softly.

“She took me over the hill,” he no more than breathed. “We saw the Chinese woman standing under the wheel-tree. You ought to see a wheel-tree flowering. I would never have seen without she took me.”

Waldo shuddered.

He used to feel relieved starting for the Library while the greeny-yellow light reflected off the arching grass was still too weak to paralyze. He was glad of his job on the catalogue. At least Dad had retired, and buses had replaced the train which used to run between Sarsaparilla and Barranugli, so Waldo could give himself to the more pneumatic bus, and reflect bitterly on his relationship with his father. His mother too. She who might have conceived him in more appropriate circumstances must expect to share the blame.

On several occasions, when she was old and preparing to die, Waldo tempted his mother by asking:

“Why did you marry Dad?”

Her teeth were giving her difficulty, and she would not always answer at first.

“Because, I suppose,” she once replied, managing her old and complicated teeth, “we were members of the Fabian Society. And your father was a good man. Oh, yes, I loved him. I loved him. The way one does.”

She was determined not to be caught out.

But Dad. In that dark street. With the Baptist chapel at one end.

After he retired, Dad would sometimes recall, in the spasmodic phrasing which came with the asthma, his escape by way of Intellectual Enlightenment, and the voyage to Australia, from what had threatened to become a permanence in black and brown, but in the telling, he would grow darker rather than enlightened, his breathing thicker, clogged with the recurring suspicion that he might be chained still. Waldo was not sure, but had an idea his father had turned against him because he, of all the gang, had escaped.

Dad would look at him and say: “Anyway, Waldo, you have had the opportunity — I gave it to you at the start.” (As if he had, but that was what the poor devil liked to think.) “Nothing ought to hold you back. Although, I admit, your brother will be a handicap.”

You could see that behind the words their father was really hoping his son Waldo might be re-captured, to remain chained to the rest of them. Waldo had to have a quiet laugh. As if he were the one a shingle short! He wouldn’t stay chained to Arthur, or anyone else. He was only marking time, and would create the work of art he was intended to create, perhaps even out of that impasto of nonconformist guilt from which Dad had never struggled free and was so desperately longing to unload on someone else. The irony of it would be that Dad should inspire something memorable, something perfect. But first Waldo must cultivate detachment.

In the meantime it amused him to see his colleagues at the Library remain unconscious of what was hatching. Unquenchable mediocrities, their only experience of genius was on paper.

Not the least subtle and satisfying moments of his life at that period were those of his return to Sarsaparilla, by exhausted summer light, or breath-taking winter dark, his thought so lucid, so pointed, so independent, he could have started — if he had had a pencil and notebook, which he never had — there and then at the Barranugli bus stop to rough out something really important.

It came as a shock on such an evening when the voices of two men cut in.

He knew the men by sight, one of them a Council employee, a fellow called Holmes, of bad reputation, generally pretty far gone in drink, the other a stooge to his companion of the moment.

Holmes was saying: “Sawney bugger!” He laughed without mirth. “Now don’t tell me Bill Poulter isn’t a sawney. Because I know. Know why ’e went sick last week?”

“No. Why?” his companion asked because it was expected of him.

“It’s ’is missus. ’Is missus is leading ’im by the nose.”

“Go on!” said the other, smaller, beadier, perking up. “A fine class of woman if it’s the one I think.”