Patrick White: The Solid Mandala

“Yes,” Arthur said. “Brooding.”

But he sat, and might have continued sitting, in that old leather chair with the burst seat where mice had nested the other winter, the woodwork scratched by dogs reaching up to claim right of affection. Arthur sat in their father’s chair.

Waldo brought the two coats. He helped Arthur into his. Waldo treated the old herringbone rather roughly, to show that what he was doing had been dictated by duty and common sense. He set the matching cap very straight on Arthur’s head. It was, in any case, the angle at which Arthur wore his cap. Waldo was relieved the performance of duty had at last set him free. But duty was honest, whereas he mistrusted the snares of sentiment set by inexhaustible tweed. (It was that good English stuff, from amongst the things discarded by Uncle Charlie, some of which were lasting for ever.)

“When it comes to illness there’s too much giving in to it, not to mention imagination,” Waldo warned.

As he put his own coat on he glanced at his brother’s head, at the shagginess of hair falling from under the tweed cap. Very white. Waldo might have contemplated the word “silvery”, but rejected it out of respect for literature and truth. Arthur’s hair was, in fact, of that doubtful white, with the tobacco stains left by the red which had drained out of it. Unlike Waldo’s own. Waldo on top was a thinned-out dirty-looking grey.

Arthur continued sitting.

And the two old dogs, turning on their cat-feet, forgetful of their withered muscle, watched out of milky eyes. One of them — it was Scruffy — clawed once at Arthur’s knee. The dogs made little whinging noises in anticipation. They were easily delighted.

“You do feel better, though?” Waldo asked, so suddenly and so quietly that Arthur looked up and smiled.

“Yes, Waldo,” Arthur said, and: “Thank you.”

“Pains in the chest are more often than not indigestion. We swallow too quickly in cold weather.”

“Yes, Waldo. Indigestion.”

Then the older of the two dogs, of whiter muzzle, and milkier marble eyes, threw up his head, and gave two ageless sexless barks. The second of the two dogs began to scutter across the boards on widespread legs.

Waldo was leading his brother Arthur, as how many times, out of the brown gloom of the kitchen. The cold light, the kitchen smells, had set almost solid in it. Yet, here they were, the two human creatures, depending on habit for substance as they drifted through. If habit lent them substance, it was more than habit, Waldo considered bitterly, which made them one.

Some had made a virtue out of similar situations: naked-looking, identical boys; laughing girls, he had noticed, exchanging the colours which distinguished them, to mystify their friends; neat, elderly ladies, in polka dots and similar hats, appeared to have survived what was more a harness than a relationship.

But the Browns.

Waldo could feel his brother’s larger, fleshy hand in his thinner, colder one as they stumbled in and out of the grass down what remained of the brick path. The wind drove reasons inward, into flesh. They were reduced, as always, to habit. But stumbled, even so.

Only the old pot-bellied dogs appeared convinced of the mild pleasures they enjoyed, frolicking and farting, though somewhat cranky with each other. One of them — Runt — lifted his leg on a seedy cabbage and almost overbalanced.

His brother was breathing deeply, Waldo saw.

“Which direction are we going to take?” Arthur asked.

“There’s only one.”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “but after Terminus Road?”

“Why, the main road — in the direction of Barranugli.”

Sometimes Waldo would look at his brother and try to remember when he had first been saddled with him. But could not.

“Why the main road?” Arthur asked, fretful today.

He blew out his red, fleshy, but to no extent sensual lips.

“Because I want to see life,” Waldo answered brutally. “You don’t want to deny me that?”

Arthur said: “No.”

Waldo was punctured then. He continued on, a thin man in a turned-down stiff, grey felt hat. What he should have answered, of course, was: Because, on the main road, if anything happens on any of those hills, there will always be plenty of cars to stop. It depressed him he hadn’t been able to say it.

“I like the side roads best,” said Arthur. “You can look at the fennel.”

He had difficulty with his words, chewing them to eject, but when he did, there they stood, solid, and for ever.

There was the sound of Waldo’s stiff oilskin nothing would free from the weathers which had got into it. Waldo’s oilskin used to catch on things, and he always expected to hear it tear. On that gooseberry bush, for instance. Which had not succeeded. Arthur had advised against it — Sarsaparilla was too warm — but Waldo had planted the bush. To demonstrate something or other.

On the broken path Waldo’s oilskin went slithering past the gooseberry thorns. The wind might have cut the skins of the Brothers Brown if they had not been protected by their thoughts.

“We could ring the doctor if you felt you wanted,” Waldo said carefully. “We could go across to Poulters’, though I don’t like to ask favours, be beholden to anybody.”

“No. No.”

Arthur spoke quite briskly. Time, it appeared, removed him quickly from the sources of pain. Sometimes Waldo envied the brother who did not seem to have experienced — though he should have — the ugly and abrasive roughcast of which life was composed.

My brother, Waldo would breathe, at times indulgently enough, and at once he became the elder by years instead of the younger by several hours. Waldo could modulate his voice, more to impress than to please. The rather fine tenor voice, of which the parents had been proud, and Dulcie Feinstein had accompanied in the first excitement of discovery. Men, the insensitive ones, sometimes recoiled from the silken disclosures of Waldo’s voice.

Waldo’s voice and Arthur’s hair. So Mother used to say. (It should have been Waldo’s mind , Waldo knew.)

Sidling brittly down the path, to negotiate the irregular bricks, now pushing Arthur, who liked to be humoured at times into believing he was the leader, Waldo could not avoid staring into his brother’s hair, fascinated, when the wind blew, by the glimpses of pink skin beyond. This head might have flaunted an ostentation of cleanliness, if it had not been for its innocence, and the fact that he knew Arthur was in many ways not exactly clean. Every third Sunday Waldo made him sit on a stool on the back veranda, behind the glass, behind the scratching of the roses, to hack at the excessive hair, and as it first lay against, then flowed away through his fingers, the barber always wondered why he got the shivers, why he hated the smell of his own mucus as he breathed down his thin nose, while the hair lay on the boards, in dead snippets, and livelier love-knots, quite old-girlishly, if not obscenely, soft. It had seemed much coarser when Arthur was a boy.

And Arthur had grown into a big strong man. Was still, for that matter. It was Arthur who lifted the weights. His muscles had remained youthful, perhaps because his wits had been easy to carry.

“This gate, Waldo,” Arthur was saying gently, “will fall to bits any day now.”

Sighing.

He was right. Waldo dreaded it. Averted his mind from any signs of rusty iron, or rotted timber. Unsuccessfully, however. His life was mapped in green mould; the most deeply personal details were the most corroded.

He touched the gate with a free finger. And the gate opened. Once again.

None of the men in the family had been handy. Nor was Mother. But Mother had struggled with the taps, while the boys looked on, hoping that too much water wouldn’t squirt up into her face. Shall I fetch Dad? Arthur would ask. But she did not think it worth an answer.