Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

Miss Glasson of Neutral Bay sniggered, and it did not fit her face.

Waldo stared frowning down at his sheet of addenda. He would have liked to plug his ears with stones, when he only had his fists.

“What’s so very funny?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “It was wrong of me.” She could sound rather wistful. “But I thought it might have appealed to your sense of the grotesque. Such a funny old man.”

In Miss Glasson’s more unguarded moments there was a lot which appeared “funny old” and “quaint”.

Waldo hoped she would leave him, but she wouldn’t, goaded on an empty morning, it seemed, by a longing to witness rape.

“Today his tastes are comparatively simple,” she persisted. “He’s back on The Brothers Karamazov and Alice Through the Looking Glass . Oh, I do wish,” this time Miss Glasson only half-giggled, “I do wish you’d let me point him out. I’m sure you’d find it rewarding. Just a peep. I shan’t show myself. I sometimes talk to him, and it would be such a shame if he felt he could no longer trust me.”

Waldo did not want, but knew he had to.

On reaching the reading room Miss Glasson led him about a third of the way down, through the law students and the cut lunches in waxed-paper. Waldo was deafened by his own squelching heart and the sound of other people’s catarrh.

“There!” hissed Miss Glasson, nudging, half-pointing at the figure in a raincoat at the other end.

Waldo was relieved to feel she was preparing to abandon him to his fate.

He went on. Long before it was possible, he identified the smell of the old man, which was that of the overloaded stacks in his youth at the Municipal Library. He went on, into the remembered smell, but before arriving at the form Miss Glasson had conjured up to disgust his curiosity, and which he was planning to skirt discreetly round, he became convinced he would recognize the heart pulsing like a squeezed football bladder under the old man’s dirty raincoat. Still some way distant from the climax of disgust, Waldo was listening to his own breathing stretched beside him in the bed at night.

Rage shot up through his drought, not only at Miss Glasson, but all those human beings who were conspiring against him with his brother. But he went on.

Coming level with the raincoat he confirmed that Arthur was inside it in the flesh. On such a fine warm day it was not surprising he was glittering with white sweat. The reason his brother had worn the raincoat could only have been to deceive his brother.

There he sat, exposed, though, under the dismal grease-spots. Munching and mumbling over, of all things, a book. Playing with a glass marble. How it would have crashed, shattering the Public Library. But never smashed. Arthur’s glass was indestructible. Only other people broke.

Having to decide quickly what action to take Waldo pulled out an excruciatingly noisy chair and sat down exactly opposite. His attitude at the table was so intense, he was so tightly clamped to the chair, he realized at once he might be giving himself away, not only to Miss Glasson, but to all those others who would be watching him. At least he had the presence of mind to relax almost immediately.

Arthur, as soon as he had swum up out of his thoughts, closed his mouth, and smiled.

“Hello, Waldy,” he said rather drowsily.

Waldo winced.

“You have never called me that before. Why should you begin now?”

“Because I’m happy to see you. Here in the Library. Where you work. I never looked you up on any occasion because I thought it would disturb you, and you mightn’t like it.”

This was so reasonable a speech Waldo could only regret he was unable to squash it.

“Do you come here often?” he asked.

“Only on days when I run a message for Mrs Allwright. Today she sent me to fetch her glasses, which are being fitted with new frames.” He felt in his pocket. “That reminds me, I forgot about them so far. I couldn’t come here quick enough to get on with The Brothers Karamazov .”

Arthur made his mention of the title sound so natural, as though trotting out a line of condensed milk to a customer at Allwrights’.

“But,” said Waldo, ignoring the more sinister aspect of it, “is there any necessity to come to the Public Library? You could buy for a few shillings. In any case, there’s the copy at home. Dad’s copy.”

“I like to come to the Public Library,” said Arthur, “because then I can sit amongst all these people and look at them when I’m tired of reading. Sometimes I talk to the ones near me. They seem surprised and pleased to hear any news I have to give them.”

He stopped, and squinted into the marble, at the brilliant whorl of intersecting lines.

“I can’t read the copy at home,” he who had been speaking gently enough before, said more gently. “Dad burned it. Don’t you remember?”

Waldo did now, unpleasant though the memory was, and much as he respected books, and had despised their in many ways pitiful father, his sympathies were somehow with Dad over The Brothers Karamazov . Which George Brown had carried to the bonfire with a pair of tongs. Waldo found himself shivering, as though some unmentionable gobbet of his own flesh had lain reeking on the embers.

“I think he was afraid of it,” said Arthur. “There were the bits he understood. They were bad enough. But the bits he didn’t understand were worse.”

All the loathing in Waldo was centred on The Brothers Karamazov and the glass marble in Arthur’s hands.

“And you understand!” he said to Arthur viciously.

Arthur was unhurt.

“Not a lot,” he said. “And not the Grand Inquisitor. That’s why I forgot Mrs Allwright’s glasses today. Because I had to get here to read the Grand Inquisitor again.”

Waldo could have laid his head on the table; their lifetime had exhausted him.

“What will it do for you? To understand? The Grand Inquisitor?”

Though almost yawning, he felt neither lulled nor softened.

“I could be able to help people,” Arthur said, beginning to devour the words. “Mrs Poulter. You. Mrs Allwright. Though Mrs Allwright’s Christian Science, and shouldn’t be in need of help. But you, Waldo.”

Arthur’s face was in such a state of upheaval, Waldo hoped he wasn’t going to have a fit, though he had never had one up till now. And why did Arthur keep on lumping him together with almost all the people they knew? Mercifully he seemed to be overlooking the Saportas.

“The need to ‘find somebody to worship’. As he says. Well, that’s plain enough.” Arthur had begun to slap the book and raise his voice alarmingly. “That’s clear. But what’s all this about bread? Why’s he got it in for poor old bread? ”

He was mashing the open book with his fist.

“Eh? Everybody’s got to concentrate on something. Whether it’s a dog. Or,” he babbled, “or a glass marble. Or a brother, for instance. Or Our Lord, like Mrs Poulter says.”

Waldo was afraid the sweat he could feel on his forehead, the sweat he could see streaming shining round his eyes, was going to attract even more attention than Arthur’s hysteria.

“Afraid.” Arthur was swaying in his chair. “That is why our father was afraid. It wasn’t so much because of the blood, however awful, pouring out where the nails went in. He was afraid to worship some thing. Or body. Which is what I take it this Dostoevsky is partly going on about.”

Suddenly Arthur burst into tears, and Waldo looked round at all the opaque faces waiting to accuse him, him him, not Arthur. But just as suddenly, Arthur stopped.

“That’s something you and I need never be, Waldo. Afraid. We learned too late about all this Christ stuff. From what we read it doesn’t seem to work, anyway. But we have each other.”