Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

Mrs Poulter, less firm than fleshy now, warier of spontaneity, still lived in the house across the road built by her husband and the lad from Sarsaparilla soon after their arrival. The speed and necessity of its construction had possibly given it that abrupt look, not so much of house, as of houseboat moored in a bay of grass. Never putting out in its semblance of boat, the alternate illusion of house had been strengthened by fuchsias and geraniums springing up to dare the waves.

Even so, several times a day, Mrs Poulter used to come on deck, and lean upon the gunwale of her boat, in her capacity as captain and look-out. It would have been tempting, Waldo thought in rasher moments, to ask Mrs Poulter what she had done with her telescope. Although not exactly inquisitive, her eye clearly yearned to see farther than it could.

On the evening Waldo brought the doll down Terminus Road Mrs Poulter was, as a matter of course, leaning on her gunwale. Whether Bill Poulter was at home or not, Waldo had no time to consider. The speed of events was carrying him along, and the obscure, by now half-frozen desire to present the wretched doll. He was appalled by Mrs Poulter’s cheeks alone, which by this period had started turning mauve.

“Good-evening, Mrs Poulter,” Waldo said.

And then stood. Time had stuck for the two of them. Nor did their familiar surroundings offer for the moment any sign that it might be set going again.

It was Mrs Poulter’s smile which released them both, for it could not be stretched indefinitely, but snapped back into its normally perished self.

“I brought,” Waldo began to eruct, “I lugged this thing all the way down Terminus Road, and think you had better have it as — well, there isn’t anybody else.”

Mrs Poulter did not retreat, for after all it was a good-will offering, not a bludgeon, he was handing, or thrusting, over the gunwale.

She had turned practically puce. She was licking her lips for the brown parcel. Her fingers were fiddling to no effect.

“What — a present, Mr Brown?” she said. “I don’t know what I done to deserve it. Not a present.”

Waldo could not have felt more foolish if he had been sure Bill Poulter was inside. Or Arthur behind their own hedge. What would Arthur, what would anybody think? When, after all, there was no cause.

While Mrs Poulter, clutching her parcel, was again overtaken by paralysis.

“I don’t know, I don’t really.”

Presently he got away, and Mrs Poulter went inside, but although he waited behind their protective hedge in the dusk, there was no indication of what she might have felt on unpacking the huge plastic doll.

Nor was there ever any. Never.

Mrs Poulter continued to come on deck, and nod and smile, her hands hidden in the sleeves of her cardigan, above the fuchsias and geraniums which attempted to disguise her houseboat. The sight, and the thought of it all, made Waldo sweat.

So he got to resent Mrs Poulter, and everyone else who made mysteries as the Peace declined. He began to hate the faces leering and blearing at him in the streets. He hated, in retrospect, Crankshaw and his priests. He hated his brother Arthur, although, or perhaps because, Arthur was the thread of continuity, and might even be the core of truth.

Some years later, when they got them, he hated Arthur’s dogs — though technically one of them was his own. If anyone, thinking of his good, had been interested enough to accuse Waldo Brown of neglecting his responsibilities to his fellow men, nobody could have accused the dogs of neglecting theirs: in being, in reminding at least one of their owners of the exasperation, the frustration of life, in farting and shitting under his nose, in setting beneath his feet traps of elastic flesh and electric fur, to say nothing of iron jaws, in chewing up bank notes, and far more precious, the sheets of thoughts which escaped from his mind — lost for ever. So the whole purpose of the dogs, together with Arthur, seemed to be to remind, constantly to remind.

Then there was the visit, more ominous still, because less expected, more oblique in execution, undoubtedly malicious in conception.

It was a couple of years after they got the dogs that the strange man pushed the gate which never quite fell down. It was a Sunday, Waldo would remember, the silence the heavier for insects. The thickset man came up the path. He was the colour and texture of certain vulgar but expensive bricks, and was wearing tucked into his open shirt one of those silk scarves which apparently serve no other purpose than to stop the hair from bursting out. If it had not been for his vigour, the burly stranger, who inclined towards the elderly by Waldo’s calculating, might have been described as fat. But with such purposefulness animating his aggressive limbs, solid was the more accurate word. Waldo had begun to envy the artificial gloss which streamed from the stranger’s kempt head, and the casual fit of his fashionable clothes, so that it came as a relief to spot one of those zips which might one day get stuck beyond retrieve in some public lavatory, and to realize that, with such a build, in a year or two, a stroke would probably strike his visitor down.

If visitor he were. And not some busybody of an unidentified colleague. Or blackmailer in search of a prey. Or or. Waldo racked his memory, and was racked.

He found himself by now in the dining-room, that dark sanctuary at the centre of the house, from the safety of which on several occasions he had enjoyed watching with Mother the antics of someone unwanted, Mrs Poulter for instance, roaming round by congested paths, snatched at by roses. Only now, with Mother gone, the game had lost some of its zest, he had forgotten some of the rules. The Peace, moreover, had so far receded he couldn’t help wishing the dogs hadn’t gone trailing after Arthur, that they might appear round the corner, and while Scruffy held the stranger up, Runt tear the seat out of his insolent pants.

For the man had begun to knock, and ask: “Anyone at home?” then growing braver, or showing off, to rattle, and shout: “Anyone in hiding? ”

Waldo sincerely wished Mother had been there to deal with things, especially as a woman, more of a female, whether the stranger’s wife or not, was following him up the path. She walked with the quizzical ease of a certain type of expensive woman Waldo had never met, only smelt, and once touched in a bus. She walked smiling, less for any person, than for the world in general and herself. Which was foolish of her when you knew how the axe could fall.

“Perhaps you’ve made a mistake,” the woman said rather huskily, touching her hair, and looking around at nothing more than a summer afternoon.

She was wearing a lime-green dress of more than necessary, though diaphanous, material. Raised to her hair, her arm, exposing the dark shadow of its pit, was a slightly dusty brown. Under his dressing-gown, Waldo got the shivers.

“No, I tell you!” the man insisted.

He continued rattling the door-knob, till he left off to thwack a window-pane with the crook of one of his blunt fingers.

“I can’t believe anyone really lives in it,” said the woman in her inalterably husky voice.

Waldo was sure he had heard somewhere that huskiness of voice was an accompaniment of venereal disease. So however good the stranger might be having it with his wife or whore there was retribution to come. Waldo nearly bit his lip.

But much as he regretted the stranger’s presence and relationship, he thrilled to the evocations of the woman’s voice as she stood amongst the lived-out rosemary bushes, humming, smelling no doubt of something exotic, Amour de Paris out of the pierrot bottle, holding her head up to the light, which struck lime-coloured down, at her breasts, and into her indolent thighs. The result was he longed to catch that moment, if he could, not in its flesh, oh no, but its essence, or poetry, which had been eluding him all these years. The silver wire was working in him ferociously now.