Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

When his heart crashed. So it literally seemed. He was left holding the fragments in front of the mirror. Then went out to see. A lamp he had disarranged on the shelf in taking the one for his own use had tumbled off. He kicked at the pieces. And went back.

To the great dress. Obsessed by it. Possessed. His breath went with him, through the tunnel along which he might have been running. Whereas he was again standing. Frozen by what he was about to undertake. His heart groaned, but settled back as soon as he began to wrench off his things, compelled. You could only call them things, the disguise he had chosen to hide the brilliant truth. The pathetic respect people had always paid him — Miss Glasson, Cornelius, Parslow, Mrs Poulter — and would continue to pay his wits and his familiar shell. As opposed to a shuddering of ice, or marrow of memory.

When he was finally and fully arranged, bony, palpitating, plucked, it was no longer Waldo Brown, in spite of the birthmark above his left collarbone. Slowly the salt-cellars filled with icy sweat, his ribs shivery as satin, a tinkle of glass beads silenced the silence. Then Memory herself seated herself in her chair, tilting it as far back as it would go, and tilted, and tilted, in front of the glass. Memory peered through the slats of the squint-eyed fan, between the nacreous refractions. If she herself was momentarily eclipsed, you expected to sacrifice something for such a remarkable increase in vision. In radiance, and splendour. All great occasions streamed up the gothick stair to kiss the rings of Memory, which she held out stiff, and watched the sycophantic lips cut open, teeth knocking, on cabuchons and carved ice. She could afford to breathe indulgently, magnificent down to the last hair in her moustache, and allowing for the spectacles.

When Waldo Brown overheard: “Scruff! Come here, Runt! Runty? Silly old cunt!”

Arthur’s obscene voice laughing over fat words and private jokes with dogs.

As the situation splintered in his spectacles Waldo was appalled. The chair-legs were tottering under him. Exposed by décolletage, his arms were turning stringy. The liquid ice trickled through his shrinking veins. Shame and terror threatened the satiny lap, under a rustle of beads. Each separate hair of him, public to private, and most private of all the moustache, was wilting back to where it lay normally.

Was he caught? Breathe a thought, even, and it becomes public property.

Only the elasticity of desperation got him out of the wretched dress and into respectability. His things.

When Waldo came out carrying under his arm the ball of some article, Arthur said, so ingratiating:

“I know you won’t be angry, Waldo, but the self-raising had arrived, and I took Mrs Poulter the couple of pound she wanted. Mrs Allwright asked me to. And what do you know, I found her dressing up a big doll! Mrs Poulter! And she began to rouse on me, as if I was to blame. She said she was going to throw the silly thing away, but I told her better not. Not a valuable doll of that size.”

Waldo went outside to the laundry, to the big copper, behind which nobody had ever cleaned, because it was too difficult to reach. He threw the dress behind the copper, and there it stayed.

Now at least he was free, in fact, if not in fact.

When he returned he said: “It serves you right, Arthur. It must have embarrassed you to intrude like that on someone else’s privacy.”

But Arthur didn’t answer. He was mooning about, polishing one of those glass marbles. Arthur seemed content, though of course he couldn’t possibly be.

Waldo was relieved tomorrow was another week-day, and he would return to the safety of the Library. He inhaled the smell of polished varnish. And Miss Glasson, Miss Glasson had promised to lend him the unexpurgated edition of something, he couldn’t for the moment remember what.

His public life became an assurance. Nobody of his group would be expected to strip in public, unless in a purely intellectual sense. (He had to admit that recently they had caught him out over Finnegan’s Wake , but Parslow, he knew for certain, hadn’t got beyond page 10, and Miss Glasson, for all her scruples, sometimes forgot she had skipped the middle volumes of Proust.) Nakedness was not encouraged, or eyes were decently averted whenever it occurred. All the necessary or compulsive exhibitions were reserved for Terminus Road, which he loved because of Memory’s skin, and where he could always ignore Arthur’s burrowing through the long grass in search of that vicious ferret, the other truth.

Waldo had sat down one evening in the corner he would have reserved for himself if choice had been possible, at the little table of knife-knicked limping legs, on the surface of which his boyhood had spilled its blobs of scalding sealing-wax, and was as usual collating and correcting in the Japanese ink he preferred to ordinary blue-black — it had always seemed to him that black-black would perpetuate where blue-black might fail — when Arthur came and dumped himself on the edge of the lamplight, hunching and mumbling playing with one of the glass marbles. As usual Waldo erected his hand as a wall in front of what he was working at.

Even so, he remained unprotected. For he soon noticed Arthur poring over a sheet of paper, one of the private papers, moreover, which he must have picked up from the floor.

“Tennyson wrote some pretty good poetry,” Arthur said.

“What of Tennyson?” Waldo asked.

“This about the silver wire . The one you copied out, Waldo.”

The paper in Arthur’s hand was making a scratching noise on the air.

Waldo could tell his lips were draining. He watched the wall of his hand, which he had raised uselessly in front of his work, grow transparent and unstable. He was trembling.

“How do you know about Tennyson?” he asked.

“I learned to read, didn’t I? I read some bits in that old book of Dad’s, the one the wadding’s bursting out of.”

It was too brutal for Waldo.

“Tennyson,” he said, “is, I suppose, everybody’s property. Tennyson,” he added, “wrote so much he must have had difficulty, in the end, remembering what he had written.”

“Oh, I’m not saying I’ve read all of Tennyson. I wouldn’t want to. Anyway, I couldn’t — could I?”

Waldo continued his automatic writing. Wasn’t most of anybody’s? After all.

“What else do you read, Arthur?” he asked dreading to hear.

“Shakespeare.”

“But you can’t understand Shakespeare?”

“The stories. Anyone can understand people killing one another. It’s in the papers every day.”

“That’s only the bare bones. The blood and thunder. It’s the language that matters.”

“Yes. Language is difficult. But a word will suddenly flash out, won’t it, Waldo? — for somebody who doesn’t always understand.”

Indeed! He was blinded by them. So much so, his eyes were dropping tears of Japanese ink, whether for himself or Arthur he decided not to ask.

Just then Arthur dropped the marble with which he had been playing, and began looking for it crawling about the room, snuffling in dark corners.

His brother! This obscene old man!

More than ever it was necessary for Waldo to leave for the Public Library, in which, for all he knew, other obscenities sat hunching over the tables, but clothed.

One day, after he had had time to forget, at least enough, Miss Glasson was standing at his elbow.

She said: “I’d love to show you an old bloke who’s catching up on his reading. He asks for the most extraordinary things. Sometimes at the desk they nearly split themselves. The Bhagavad Gita , the Upanishads ! He’s interested in Japanese Zen. Oh, and erotological works! Of course there’s a lot they don’t allow him. Mr Hayter vets him very carefully. He might over-excite himself. Some old men, you know!”