Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

Her little knotted laughs remained the most youthful sign in her.

“Sherry is the last perquisite!” Then, making an ugly mouth: “The perks! The cooking sherry! The cook wouldn’t have crooked her finger . The housekeeper wouldn’t have gargled with it.”

Waldo said: “I forbid you, Mother!”

He admired the sound of her kind strong son.

“My dear little sherry-wine!”

And it continued to trickle in.

“Poor soul! What else has she got?” was Mrs Poulter’s argument.

“Here’s an odd one, Mother, that I brought back from the store, because it’s Saturday, and it helps you when you’re feeling sick.”

Arthur made Waldo sick. He was glad he had the Library, even though a doubtful blessing.

Because Crankshaw had started playing up.

Crankshaw said: “Mr Brown, can you truly answer for the accuracy of these references?”

“Why should I falsify them, Mr Crankshaw?”

Did he hear a simpering note in his own voice? Sometimes, to his horror, he thought he sounded like a maid in a Restoration play.

He waited for the titters.

Which did not come.

Only Crankshaw grumbling: “I wouldn’t say you falsified . Only that you might have got them wrong.”

He was a heavy man, with a family at Roseville.

“Who can say,” Mr Brown said.

He was only certain that Crankshaw had it in for him.

But, as an alternative to Crankshaw, he had to take the train, the bus, home.

“She is sick,” Mrs Poulter told him. “You ought to get the doctor to her.”

“My health is my own affair,” Mother insisted, making it easier for him. “To the end I shall keep it so. I shall know when it is the end.”

She knew, apparently, it would be a long time from then, because she died ten years after George Brown her husband. Anne Quantrell was carved out of stone, the true gothick. At least Waldo had that satisfaction, although it caused him to suffer before he could inscribe her name on what he always hoped was the authentic dust.

“Mother won’t die easy,” Mrs Poulter became of the opinion.

Mrs Poulter didn’t actually like Mrs Brown, because Mrs Brown would not allow her to. Mrs Brown didn’t actively dislike Mrs Poulter, she simply resented encroachment of any kind. Waldo Brown couldn’t like Mrs Poulter, because of, well, everything. Whether Arthur had loved Mrs Poulter or not, in this one instance he had listened to reason, sensed the shocking anomaly of it, and choked her off. So that human relationships, particularly the enduring ones, or those which we are forced to endure, are confusingly marbled in appearance, Waldo Brown realized, and noted in a notebook.

He knew also he dreaded his mother’s death, in which event, he would be exposed to Crankshaw, and not exposed, but left to Arthur. Perhaps he dreaded Arthur most of all, because of something Arthur might tell him one day.

But for the moment Mother showed no signs of dying, she only grew more difficult.

She would flare up on the edge of a room in which he was thinking, or making notes. At night, by lamplight, her hair was terrible. It got out of control. It looked like an old grey gooseberry bush. More often than not, she was dangling a bottle by its neck.

She would barge in, shouting: “Waldo, it’s time you decided to marry. What about the little Jewess? That Miss Finkelstein. We were all Jews, weren’t we, before we stopped to think? Or was that somebody else?”

Waldo hunched himself over his papers.

“Miss Feinstein? She’s probably a mother.”

“All to the good. What would you have done without your mother?”

“Dulcie has a little boy,” said Arthur, “and a little girl some years younger. That was what they wanted.”

His mother and brother had come in on purpose to add to the litter of his room, the desperate untidiness of his thoughts, which blew at times like old newspapers or straw round packing-cases which never got packed. They had come in deliberately to conjure up Dulcie. He knew that if he spoke he would deflect nobody from their pre-determined actions. He alone was free to choose. The one choice he would never be free to make was that of his relationship with other people. So he ground his fists into his ears, he hunched his shoulders, and squirmed on the needle-points of his buttocks. He must cling to his gift.

Mother would go presently. He heard her opening other doors. She would walk as far as, and no farther than, the house allowed her, before sitting down to finish the bottle. She would end up cold on the bed, the old blue gown parted on her jutting legs, the long lovely Quantrell legs in which the varicose veins had come. And he would draw the curtains of her skirt, shivering for the hour, or an offence against taste.

Mother could be relied on to drop off. But Arthur stuck. Standing by the lamp, head inclined, staring into one of those glass marbles. Watching the revolutions of a glass marble on the palm of his hand.

“If you have to stay, don’t fidget, at least!” Waldo ordered.

Arthur raised his head.

“Mother is real sick. Didn’t you know?”

“Is it necessary to speak like that? It doesn’t come naturally to you.”

“It comes natural to me to speak natural in a natural situation,” Arthur said.

The porcelain lampshade was jiggling, Waldo heard. He could feel the frail old kitchen chair reacting badly to the stress of emotion.

“Mother is not sick!” he shouted. “We know her weakness. I will not be bullied into thinking that what isn’t is!”

“Ssshhe’s asleep! You might wake her, Waldo, if you shout.”

Arthur had turned, and was towering, flaming above him, the wick smoking through the glass chimney.

But his skin, remaining white and porous, attempted to soothe. Arthur put out one of the hands which disgusted Waldo if he ever stopped to think about them, which, normally, he didn’t.

Arthur said: “If it would help I’d give it to you, Waldo, to keep.”

Holding in his great velvetty hand the glass marble with the knot inside.

“No!” Waldo shouted. “Go!”

“Where?”

There was, in fact, nowhere.

And the Poulter woman kept nagging at him. She appeared one evening, out of the waves of grass, and said: “Waldo — Mr Brown, I’ve come to have a word with you. It’s time we saw things realistic.” From Mrs Poulter ! “It’s no business of mine, I know. I would think twice if I was a friend, but I’m worse than that, only a neighbour.”

He looked at this woman who had aged across the road from them. It was terrifying to see the way other people aged.

“Your mother lying in bed all these months,” Mrs Poulter said, “and nothing to do for her.”

“She’s comfortable enough.”

“Oh yes, I’m comfortable,” Mother called, whose hearing would reach farther, through doors and windows, the longer she lay living. “Since I didn’t have to think about the salmon loaf I’m comfortable.”

Mrs Poulter lowered her voice. “She’s used right up. Eaten up. It’s the poison’s got into her veins.”

Then Waldo invited their neighbour to leave.

“Who helped pour it into them?” he shouted at her down the path.

“Whoever you kill, Mr Brown,” she turned and shouted back, “it won’t be me! I’ll only die by the hand of God!”

She saw immediately, however, that she had cause to feel ashamed.

“I’m always here as you know,” she said in her usual voice, “and can telephone the doctor — the minister,” she said, “if you can’t come at doing it yourself.”

The minister made his flesh creep.

How long now, he tried to calculate, had their mother kept to her room? He used to go in to her at night and read her The Pick-wick Papers , which she didn’t much care for, but was used to.