Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

“Because I am in love,” she said.

If only their attitudes had been less awkward. But the angle at which he was placed on the sofa made sitting downright painful.

“I’m in love with, I’m engaged to, Len Saporta.”

He remembered her saying on a former occasion: “I’m really a very mundane individual,” and now she had tried to inject her announcement with something of the same banality, but there Dulcie failed. Her voice reverberated. The pity she was offering him shone with what she was unable to share. Her bosom, the riper for experience, filled not not, he hoped, with indecent impatience. He looked down fascinated at her breasts. He was never quite sure of that part of the anatomy, of what it might contain.

“It’s a pity,” he said, “your mother will never know.”

That a daughter became engaged while a mother was still high in her coffin, he prevented himself adding.

“Oh, but she did! She knew,” said Dulcie. “She half-agreed. There was only this dreadful business of conscience. Though that was only on account of my father.”

Dulcie was quite prepared to let nobody’s conscience rest, except apparently her own. Waldo did not greatly care by now.

“Leonard, you see, is a practising Jew. And our darling, neat-and-tidy rationalist parents are apt to throw fits over principles.”

Gongs could not have sounded louder in Waldo’s ears.

Dulcie looked down.

“I am making it sound frivolous,” she said, “because I can’t convey the importance of the step I’m taking. There are times,” she said in a suddenly metallic voice, her tongue acting as a quivering clapper, “when I am deaf, dumb, and blind with it.”

Or besotted, as women become, he had read, with some man. For this one coming into the room. For this Jew. For there was no doubt the young man, of physical, not to say vulgar appearance, now entering, was Mr Saporta.

What hell!

Dulcie looked, and Waldo avoided her dazzlement.

“This is my fiancé, Waldo,” she recovered herself and added.

They were again in Australia.

“I’ve never stopped hearing about you, Waldo,” Leonard Saporta said.

He gave one of those big laughs, which come up deep, leathery, but most respectful, from the region of the pocket-book. He also gave his hand, fleshy, but firm flesh, promising a warmth of male comradeship. Leonard Saporta was obviously designed for clubs, if a club would have admitted him.

“And now we meet!” Again ox-eyed Saporta laughed, sweating at the roots of his nose. “Whatever prevented us till now? Fate, eh?”

Waldo could not think of a better answer than Saporta’s own — unless a glass door-knob and the ’flu. It was thoroughly ridiculous what all three of them were going through. Even Saporta, probably an athlete, as well as the returned soldier his badge proclaimed, worked only by consent of hinges. These allowed him to incline just so far in the direction of his new-found, valued friend. In slightly different circumstances Waldo could have been the object of his courtship, Waldo felt. Well, he wouldn’t have fallen for it.

Dulcie stirred, and the springs in the sofa remonstrated anomalously.

“I was hoping you would come yesterday,” she said, in a private tone intended only for her lover.

Since his arrival, her throat was permanently raised, to whatever he might do to it.

“Saturdays are out of the question,” Leonard Saporta replied, sweating yellower round the nose, and explained with awful earnestness to Waldo: “I attend the synagogue Saturday.”

Both Dulcie and Saporta needed to explain a lot. They were both of them proud and shy to do so.

“Leonard is a carpet merchant. He inherited the business from his father.”

They were doing it all for hurt Waldo, who was not so hurt he couldn’t pity in turn. It was their illusion of strength which made their dependence pitiable.

With the fag-end of her intelligence Dulcie could have sensed this. She began to complain about humidity, while staring at her lover’s wrist; he was wearing a gun-metal wristlet watch. Finally, falling vaguer still, she sat removing a stray hair from her tongue.

“Well,” said Waldo, getting up, “I am not one to mow the lawn on Sunday, but,” he positively insisted, “know when I ought to make myself scarce.”

Having launched his joke, he laughed slightly.

Mr Saporta was easing the sleeves of this business suit down from where they had rucked up, over his rather muscular forearms.

“If you ever care to look me up. In the city, Waldo. My number, Waldo, is in the book.” He meant it, too — he was so earnest.

Waldo had never before heard his name repeated enough to grow ashamed of it.

He got out quickly after that. But Dulcie followed him into the garden.

“You see,” she said, “how unavoidable it was. I know, Waldo, you will understand.”

The Star of David, glinting from between her breasts, gave him the clue he should have followed in the beginning.

“We should all be ready,” he said, “to admit our mistakes.”

Not least his own: the many fragmentary impressions of Dulcie Feinstein, elbowing her way through the lashing rejoinders of ungovernable music, in loose embroidery of white hydrangeas, and flashes of gunpowdery flesh, merging only now into the mosaic of truth — of a rather coarse little thing the carpet merchant was leading back into his ghetto of ignorance and superstition.

In the convention of human intercourse he threw in automatically: “Mr Saporta, I’m sure, is a very reliable man.”

Dulcie winced, and tormented her upper lip.

“I would like to think you could come to us,” she said.

Lowering her head she groped her way out from under the hydrangeas to stand exposed at the top of the steps, and continued standing as he went slack-kneed down.

“That you could feel our door was open. However you may want to accuse me for what I was incapable of being. Don’t you think it better,” she finished, “for all of us, to accept the past out of which we’ve grown, out of which we’re still growing?”

He did look back just once at Mrs Saporta, increasing, bulging, the Goddess of a Thousand Breasts, standing at the top of her steps, in a cluster of unborn, ovoid children. This giant incubator hoped she was her own infallible investment. But she would not suck him in. Imagining to hatch him out.

“I’m past the incubation stage!” he called.

So much for Dulcie Feinstein Saporta and her lust for possession. He was tempted to look back again, to see whether his scorn had knocked her bleeding to the steps. He resisted, however.

And after he had turned the privet corner, which in theory chokes those who are susceptible, her eyes continued to follow him, to engulf in the light of conquest, or love, and he did then choke momentarily. He regretted not being years younger, when he might have run some of the distance home, churning up the dust for a disguise. Or cried less dry and secretly. For the tragedy of this ugly girl. Wiping his eyes with the back of his hand instead of his pince-nez with a handkerchief.

As soon as he got back, Mother said: “Your father is far from well, dear. You ought to go in and talk to him.”

“Oh, Mother,” he protested, “when did that do anybody any good?”

If, on hanging up his hat, his conscience twitched for his parents, he knew from experience that Dad would be listening intently to his own thoughts, nor did their mother always seem to hear since they had become the furniture of the house in which they had been placed.

Dad had retired a year or two early on account of his health. They were loyal about it at the bank. They presented him with an engraved watch. There were other considerations. But none of it seemed to compensate for some indignity of life which hung about haunting him.