Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

George Brown had to suffer. The threads of his breath tangled in his chest, or visibly, smokily, smelling of saltpetre, in the room in which he spent his nights. He rarely succeeded in cutting the tangle. (Nor could Waldo use blotting-paper for years after his father’s death without the sensation of anxious distress.)

After his retirement George Brown mostly sat.

“Where is your book, dear?” Mother used to ask; it would have been pointless to name the book.

He cleared his throat before replying: “Thank you, I’m resting my eyes.”

In the beginning, faced with the luxury of years to spend, he had promised them jokily: “I’ll have time now to give Gibbon another run.”

He sat, at least, holding a volume or two. On a wet afternoon he opened the Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco, but complained that silverfish had eaten the introduction since he had been there last. If opening a book was an occupation, closing one became a relief.

Waldo fortunately did not have to wonder what he might do for this man who was also by accident his father, because so clearly he didn’t expect anything to be done. If passion stirred in George Brown, it was for the more unassuming manifestations of nature. On an expedition to Barranugli he bought a rain-gauge, which he set up on a patch where, for some reason, the grass refused to grow. The rainfall he noted down at the back of an old ledger. He would knock on the barometer beside the hat-stand, and read the thermometer nailed to the classical veranda. He collected seeds of all kinds, to put in paper bags, which he hung by the necks, and forgot. Though what appeared to be his favourite occupation was the watch he kept on the flux of light, which required him to do nothing about it.

Only sometimes in the gentle recurrences of light and dark, he seemed to gather hints of some larger, cataclysmic plan. Then his gothic shoulders would arch more acutely, and his already inactive hands turn to stone. He would cough the cough his family had come to recognize as having no outlet.

“Where is that Mrs Poulter?” he would ask between the coughing.

Arthur grew soft, and didn’t know.

“Haven’t clapped ear to her since Tuesday,” Dad used to say, making it sound contemptuous because he had developed a weakness for her.

He loved her because she paraded the minutiae of flesh and blood while always keeping them under control.

Mrs Poulter would come and say: “When we was at Mungindribble they allowed us the quarter of a sheep, and some of the offal if we was lucky. Bill got so as he couldn’t stand the sight of offal. From the regular killin’. Threw it to the dogs. Lovely fry. I like a nice lamb’s fry before it loses its shine on a slab.”

Mrs Poulter’s moist, young-woman’s lips would glow with no more assistance than she got from contemplating the desiderata of life.

Then there were the mysteries.

Mrs Poulter said: “There was a feller cut ’is own throat down the line beyond Numburra. We women went down to lay out the body. We all of us took something — scones, or a soda loaf, there was one person took a basin of brawn. All shared, like. There’s more what they call community spirit up country.” She sighed. “And we had to come down here. But we’re happy.”

She let down her eyelashes then, afraid she might have said too much.

Mrs Poulter, who had faith also in food, used to bring dishes to George Brown. It amused Mother.

“Here is a macaroni pudding, Mr Brown,” Mrs Poulter might say, lowering the basin for him to look inside. “Nice,” she coaxed. “Nutmeg on the top. You must eat, you know, to keep your strength up.”

It was more than advice. That, too, she tried to turn into a mystery.

“Making a sacrament of food. ‘Take eat’ is what she would like to say,” said Dad, laughing for his own joke at the expense of the Churches and Mrs Poulter.

Waldo frowned, not for any lack of taste or feebleness in his father’s joke, but for the flickering memory of some feebleness in himself the day of his meeting with Leonard Saporta and parting from Her. He still heard the slash of that lawn-mower running itself deliberately against the stones.

And Dad, darkening, began to cough. He could never forgive the Baptist Church. Its chocolate campanile “leaning a bit, but not far enough” stuck in his mind. He couldn’t let it rest.

“It’s a pity you weren’t born a Quaker,” Waldo said. “There would have been less architecture. And you could have left them just the same.”

But Dad didn’t care for other people’s jokes on serious matters.

“There’s too much you boys, reared in the light in an empty country, will never understand. There aren’t any shadows in Australia. Or discipline. Every man jack can do what he likes.”

Because he wanted to believe it, he did believe — if not of himself.

Towards the end he appeared to have repaired the deficiencies of his sons enough to refer to them in the abstract.

“Whatever else,” he once said to Mrs Poulter, “the children are our testament.”

Then, remembering from hints she had dropped, that their visitor might die intestate, he gave her an old raincoat.

“There’s still plenty of wear in it,” he gasped. “Your husband will find it useful.”

The effort tuned up his cough as he limped a little way along the path.

When their father died at last but suddenly, Waldo was determined that the shock would not prevent his enjoying their mother’s company and the secrets she had been waiting to tell. Family matters of an exalted nature had always been stirring in his mind. If he resisted toying with the possibility of his not being his father’s son, it was because a twin brother denied him that luxury. Though Waldo might have been better got, Arthur’s getting and fate could hardly be improved upon. Still, there were certain details of their mother’s breeding, which reserve — and possibly breeding — had prevented her telling, and for which Waldo intended some time in the future to ask. In fact, it didn’t turn out quite like that. His father — of all people Dad — hadn’t altogether let go. There were the paper bags filled with the seed he had left, and which nobody ever thought to take down. The paper bags continued hanging by their necks, rattling the husks and seed inside them whenever a wind blew, and sometimes disagreeably, after dark, coming into dry collision with a living face.

What is more, Mother changed, as though the moral responsibility of protecting a marriage with a man not her social equal had at last been lifted. So she lifted at last the grave structure of her face, roughened red over milky skin. She rearranged the straying grey of her hair, for whom it was difficult to tell.

Not for Waldo, he discovered almost at once.

“Tell me,” she said, “about the book you are writing.”

He could feel the flesh shrivel on his bones.

“What book?” he asked.

Her question, her look had been practically indecent.

“You needn’t tell me,” she said, “if you don’t want to.”

And continued smiling at him in the way of those who know through hearsay or intuition that something is being hushed up.

As he had to live with it, he decided to ignore her indiscretion, while hiding his private papers in another place. No book, certainly. His life was his book, until at some point in age and detachment it wrote itself logically into the words with which his mind and notebooks were encrusted.

In the meantime, his mother smiled at him, and worse still, forgot.

“I can never remember,” she complained, “whether I have paid the rates. At least they won’t cut us off, as I am told can happen to those who go in for telephones and electricity.”