Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

It had been decided years before that neither of these advantages would enrich their lives. Lamplight emphasized the family circle, and they could go across the road to ring for a doctor in the event of sickness, as they had been forced to also in their one experience of death.

In the beginning Waldo had been tempted to remark: The progressive spirit surely doesn’t eschew the telephone. (He was fond of “eschew”.) But on thinking it over, he did not exactly dread, he had doubts about the inquisition the telephone might have subjected him to. So he kept quiet.

“To return to the rates,” Mother harped, “now that Dad is gone, you boys — you , Waldo,” she corrected herself, “ought to take them on as one of your responsibilities. You pay for the things, anyway.”

He liked that ! And hoped she would forget about it along with other threats.

For so many years she had been saying: “You are men now,” as though she were in doubt.

On the other hand she would fly into passions if they brought her letters from the box.

“You boys must never collect my letters!” Her own commands made her tremble. “That is one small pleasure you must allow me to enjoy. Besides, you might drop a letter somewhere in the rosemary. That wretched, thick stuff! A letter might lie in it unnoticed for years, and disintegrate in the weather.”

But she loved the rosemary when it was not against her. She would crush it with her trembly fingers, and sigh.

“Next week — next week definitely, there will be a letter from Cousin Mollie.”

She was convinced she was psychic, and would have liked to see a ghost, though she did not believe in ghosts on principle. Premonitions were a different matter; they were scientifically acceptable.

When her science let her down, it was agreed that: “Mollie has always been an unreliable correspondent.”

In the absence of letters Mother got considerable pleasure out of prospectuses and catalogues. She collected election circulars, to fold into spills, after studying the photographs of those who had heard the call to office.

She would have liked to take out old family photographs, but misalliance had deterred her from keeping any.

“The faces on my side,” she mentioned, “were too cruel. On his, too mean.”

Waldo couldn’t remember faces. He recollected scents and sensations: of the flowering, steely, soft and prickly perfumes in the dark of wardrobes; of an old woman’s cushiony hands in their mail of rings; of geranium disinfecting with its pink a heraldic urn in which a cat had shat. The chocolate campanile, swooning earthwards from the too green, the too daringly transcendental touch of dusk, often recurred on the screen of his mind. Had he actually experienced, or had he selected out of hearsay, the icy vision of the blue woman about to descend the stairs? In blue, it could only have been his mother, though the diamonds must have choked her principles. For that reason she had “gone over”. But her conversion to sacrificial love and socialism had convinced neither side. The ice-blue ancestral stare, and the little black rats of eyes gnawing at holes in fogged lace, were at least united in chasing her away.

“We used to drive down to Tallboys — that was before the family — before anything happened,” Mother liked to tell, and joined her hands closer on the kitchen table. “It was quite a journey. Mamma could not endure carriages for any distance. They upset her pug. Poor Grumble! Grannie was so kind to dogs . The gardeners were always setting the stage, it seemed, as we arrived. Nothing ever grew. It was potted out. The shrubs were sculpture which never got finished. Oh, and dogs, more dogs!” Her eyes would shine after sherry, particularly after she took to the four o’clock sherry. “The willowy, bronze and golden breeds, snoozing on the steps, amongst the lichen! And Mollie. Mollie remained good, better than most who accept the status quo . She had a hundred dolls, I believe. I believe we counted them. Once she allowed me to tear up a Japanese doll because I decided I wanted to. It was the nanny who made a scene.”

Mother scarcely ever laughed over any of her pictures, even when they gave her pleasure. They were far too serious, even the funny ones, for laughter.

“Always when we arrived they would take us in, and fortify us with cups of soup, flavoured, I should say, with port — with port-wine.”

This reminded her of her sherry, and although it was only half-past four and she had put the bottle back, she would take it down again, to refresh her tumbler.

“After you had gone upstairs,” Waldo sometimes had to assist.

But she grew vague, with sherry and memory. She did not care to describe elaborate interiors. They yawned too dark in her mind.

Not that he needed reminders. He had dared reconstruct the house, room by room, and add it to his other experience of life.

Sometimes Mother, under the influence of four o’clock, would add a detail, a cupola or tower, and he would lean forward to visualize, and formally preserve.

“Tallboys was an omnium gatherum! A shocking architectural muddle!” How he loved the language her mouth was conducting through a ritual of elaborate slovenliness. “The façade was Palladian. They used to pour out elderberry wine for the huntsmen on frosty mornings. Lord, it was cold! You could almost hear the stone crack.”

She poured herself another.

“But Tudor, the original Tudor, Mother.”

Still so far to go, he grew anxious for the end of it.

“Oh, Tudor! Tudor was too down-to-earth, too much like human beings living and loving and stabbing and poisoning one another. Tudor got pushed back hugger-mugger behind the stone. The kitchens were in the Tudor part of this great baroque treadmill. When I say ‘baroque’ I only mean it fig — figuratively, I think.”

She formed her hands into a globe above the waning gold of sherry.

“Wasn’t there also the gothic,” he dared, “the Gothic Folly?”

“Oh, the Gothick Folly!” she laughed, or sniggered, and they shared in the knowingness. “Uncle Charlie always pronounced it with a k . That was Waldo’s Folly.”

She needn’t have told him. He had been there, gloved and sensual, attended by salukis and an Arab.

“Waldo,” she said, pronouncing it as though it had been someone else’s name, “Waldo had such peculiar vices they were kept locked up, behind a grille, in the library.”

Those peppercorns! He knew. He had fingered the reseda silk through the bars.

But Mother’s voice was dwindling with the sherry.

“He died at Smyrna, I think it was. They brought him home, rather smelly, so they say — the Greeks hadn’t done a proper job — and put him in the tomb he had built for himself. In marble from Paros. Beside the lake. Mollie and I liked to play there in August. It was so — cool. And full of echoes.”

Round about five her mouth grew slobbery on the glass, and she would glance sideways at his abstemious thimbleful.

“They are all dead now,” she said drily, “I suppose.” Adding quickly, however: “When Cousin Mollie writes she will tell us the symptoms.” And more meditative: “A pity your father died. He would have enjoyed hearing. Of course you never knew your father. For a frail man he was strong. Strong.”

Suddenly he hated that strength, and his parents’ withdrawal into a room of their own. Resentment lingered, forcing him on some mornings to deliver lectures.

“Mother,” he said, “I want to talk to you.”

“Oh, yes?”

She did so hope he would. She was raising her face to receive helpful advice.

“The sherry is all very well. In moderation. It is moderation which makes life bearable.”