Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

At least the long cry in his throat grew watery and obscure. Mercifully it was choked at birth.

Again memory was taking a hand. He remembered it was that boy, that Johnny Haynes, they could have cut each other’s throats, telling him behind the dunny to watch out for hoarse-voiced men and women, they were supposed to be carriers of syph.

Waldo might have continued congratulating himself on this piece of practical information, if the man hadn’t just then shouted at the woman:

“But I know it is! It’s the place all right. I’d bet my own face. There’s that erection they had my old man stick on top because they wanted what Waldo’s dad used to call a ‘classical pediment’. I ask you!”

But the woman apparently did not care to be asked. She remained indifferent. Or ignorant.

It was Waldo who was moved, not by the materialization of Johnny Haynes, but by the motion of his own life, its continual fragmentation, even now, as Johnny, by his blow, broke it into a fresh mosaic. All sombre chunks, it seemed. Of an old blue-shanked man under his winter dressing-gown, which he wore because the house was dark and summer slow in penetrating.

So it was only natural he should continue hating Haynes, clopping like a stallion with his mare all round the house, staring vindictively at it from under his barbered eyebrows — what vanity — as though he intended to tear bits of the woodwork off. Waldo remembered reading some years earlier, before the demands of his own work had begun to prevent him following public affairs, that Johnny Haynes was going to the top, that he had become a member of parliament — if you could accept that sort of thing as the top — and been involved in some kind of shady business deal. Exonerated of course. But. You could tell. Only gangsters dressed their women like that.

Then, edging round the secure fortress of the dining-room, Waldo saw that Johnny had come to a stop in the yard. After kicking at the house once or twice, to bring it down, or relieve his frustration, the visitor appeared the victim of a sudden sentimental tremor.

“I would have been interested,” he grumbled, “to take a look at old Waldo. And the dill brother. The twin.”

Waldo had never hated Johnny Haynes so intensely as now, for trying to undermine his integrity in such seductive style, and when Johnny added: “I was never too sure about the twin; I think he wasn’t so loopy as they used to make out” — then Waldo knew he was justified.

O God, send at least the dogs, he prayed, turning it into a kind of Greek invocation as he was not a believer, and no doubt because of his blasphemy against reality, the dogs failed to come.

Instead, the mortals went.

“The Brothers Brown!” Johnny snort-laughed.

“If they ever existed,” the woman replied dreamily.

Then she shuddered.

“What’s wrong?” Johnny asked.

“A smell of full grease-trap,” the woman answered in her hoarse voice. “There are times when you come too close to the beginning. You feel you might be starting all over again.”

At once they were laughing the possibility off, together with anything rancid. They were passing through to the lime-coloured light of the front garden, where the woman’s body revived. The mere thought of their nakedness together gave Waldo Brown the gooseflesh, whether from disgust or envy he couldn’t have told. But his mouth, he realized, was hanging open. Like a dirty old man dribbling in a train. Whereas Johnny Haynes was the elderly man, asking for trouble of the lime-coloured woman, wife or whore, who was going to give him syph or a stroke.

Anyway, they were going out the gate. Most indecently the light was showing them up, demolishing the woman’s flimsy dress, as the member of parliament passed his hand over, and round, and under her buttocks, which she allowed to lie there a moment, in the dish where those lime-coloured fruits had too obviously lain before.

More than anything else these dubious overtures, such an assault on his privacy, made Waldo realize the need to protect that part of him where nobody had ever been, the most secret, virgin heart of all the labyrinth. He began very seriously indeed to consider moving his private papers — the fragment of Tiresias a Youngish Man , the poems, the essays, most of which were still unpublished — out of the locked drawer in his desk to more of a hiding place, somewhere equal in subtlety to the papers it was expected to hide. Locks were too easily picked. He himself had succeeded in raping his desk, as an experiment, with one of the hairpins left by Mother. Arthur was far from dishonest, but had the kind of buffalo mind which could not restrain itself from lumbering into other people’s thoughts. How much easier, more open to violation, the papers. So it became imperative at last. To find some secret, yet subtly casual, cache.

In the end he decided on an old dress-box of Mother’s, lying in the dust and dead moths on top of the wardrobe, in the narrow room originally theirs and finally hers. Choked by quince trees, the window hardly responded to light, unless the highest blaze of summer. A scent of deliquescent quinces was married to the other smell, of damp. The old David Jones dress box lay in innocence beyond suspicion. Heavy though, for its innocence. Waldo discovered when he took it down some article which had been put away and forgotten, something more esoteric than could have come from a department store.

It turned out to be one of Mother’s old dresses shuddering stiffly awkwardly through his fingers, and the scales of the nacreous fan flopping floorwards. He would have to investigate. Afterwards. Arthur was out roaming with the dogs. Waldo almost skipped to transfer the papers, so easily contained: his handwriting was noted for its neatness and compression — in fact he was often complimented.

Then, as though the transfer of the papers had been too simple on an evening set aside for subtlety, he remembered the old dress. He stooped to pick up the little fan. One of the ribbons connecting the nacreous blades must have snapped in the fall. The open fan hung lopsided, gap-fingered. But glittering.

In the premature obscurity which quince branches were forcing on the room Waldo fetched and lit a lamp, the better to look at what he had found. Rust had printed on the dress a gratuitous pattern of hooks and eyes. Not noticeably incongruous. Age had reconciled their clusters with the icy satin and shower of glass which swirled through his fingers creating a draught. It was a dress for those great occasions of which few are worthy. He need not mention names, but he could see her two selves gathered on the half-landing at the elbow in the great staircase, designed by special cunning to withstand the stress of masonry and nerves. Standing as she had never stood in fact, because, although memory is the glacier in which the past is preserved, memory is also licensed to improve on life. So he became slightly drunk with the colours he lit on entering. How his heart contracted inside the blue, reverberating ice, at the little pizzicato of the iridescent fan as it cut compliments to size and order. Disorderly in habit, because the years had gradually frayed her, Mother kept what he liked to think of as a sense of moral proportion. Which he had inherited together with her eyes. There were those who considered the eyes too pale, too cold, without realizing that to pick too deeply in the ice of memory is to blench.

Merely by flashing his inherited eyes he could still impress his own reflexion in the glass — or ice.

Mother had died, hadn’t she? while leaving him, he saw, standing halfway down the stairs, to receive the guests, the whole rout of brocaded ghosts and fleshly devils, with Crankshaw and O’Connell bringing up the rear. Encased in ice, trumpeting with bugles, he might almost have faced the Saportas, moustache answering moustache.