Patrick White: The Solid Mandala

The wind was frittering with Arthur’s hair, tinkering with the fragile gate.

Suddenly the smell of rotting wood, of cold fungus, shot up through Waldo’s nose. He could hardly bear, while exquisitely needing, the rusty creaking of his memory. If Arthur had been, say, a dog, he might have touched the back of his head. That hair.

But Waldo Brown, although he kept them, did not believe in touching dogs. It gave them, he said, a wrong sense of their own importance. But why, Waldo, Arthur would persist, I like to touch dogs, I’d like to have Scruffy at least in the bed, if you’d allow it. Half the time it was useless to explain to Arthur.

“This gate,” Waldo said, “will outlast us both.”

“I hope so.” Arthur laughed. “It would be dreadful if it didn’t. No one would put up another. Remember when I cut my hand on the saw? I’d try, though. Again. I’d have a go.”

It was too feeble, too foolish. Waldo Brown took his brother by the hand as they entered Terminus Road.

“Mrs Poulter is probably bunching the flowers. I saw her picking them,” Arthur said. “White chrysanths for Mother’s Day.”

Waldo did not comment. Already he was too tired.

“Perhaps if we hang around she’ll come out,” said Arthur, “and then we can walk together to the bus.”

“No,” said Waldo.

His thin, male steps crunched. He walked primly, in the sound of his oilskin, planning in advance where to put his feet.

Whereas Arthur was not exactly running, but lumbering and squelching, while some distress, of feminine origin, was fluttering in his big, old-man’s body.

“Oh, but why, Waldo? She’s such a good neighbour.”

I am very fond of Mrs Poulter, she is a thoroughly good-hearted, reliable young woman, Mother used to say. Doors closing. Waldo remembered sitting alone with his mother, in the dining room, at the centre of the house, while Mrs Poulter roamed calling round: I don’t want to intrude Mrs Brown on you or anyone but Mr Brown could have the use of the mower if he likes any time any time provided Bill is at the Council. As he and his mother continued hidden, in collusion, as it were, though this was never discussed. Waldo was officially her favourite, Arthur her duty.

Arthur had been Dad’s favourite, in the beginning. Who’s coming for the ice-cream horn? Not Waldo, George, it only brings the pimples out.

“I wonder why Mrs Poulter is so awful?”

Arthur, puffing, threatened to topple, but saved himself on Waldo’s oilskin.

“I don’t say she’s awful !”

“If you don’t say, it’s likely to fester,” said Arthur, and sniggered.

Some of his remarks were of the kind which should have crumbled along with the cornflour cakes in the mouths of elderly women.

“It’s splinters that fester,” Waldo answered facetiously.

“Perhaps,” said Arthur, and sniggered again.

Because they were brothers, twins moreover, they shared secrets warmer than appeared.

The two old dogs were having a whale of a time amongst the fresh cow-turds and paspalum tussocks. They growled on and off to proclaim their pleasure and virility.

Arthur was thoughtful.

“You ought to write something about Mr Saporta.”

“Whatever made you think of Saporta?”

“I saw them.”

“When?”

Arthur was silent, stumbling.

“When? When, Arthur?”

Arthur had begun to pout.

“Some time ago, I think.”

Waldo averted his face from something. Then he said very distinctly, enunciating from between his original teeth, in his cold, clear, articulate voice:

“I don’t want to think about the Saportas.”

The sun caught the gold of his spectacles with a brilliance which turned the skin beneath the eyes to washed-out violet.

“What made you think about Leonard Saporta?” he asked more gently.

“I don’t know,” Arthur grumbled.

But not bad-tempered. Arthur was never what you could have called bad-tempered; it was just that sometimes the more difficult thoughts grated on the way out of him.

“I expect it was Dulcie,” he said at last.

Waldo went on crunching over the bush soil of the neglected surface of Terminus Road. Soon at least they’d come out on tar.

“But Leonard Saporta was such a very ordinary man. I have nothing against him. But why I should write about him!”

Lady callers had enquired about Waldo’s Writing as though it had been an illness, or some more frightening, more esoteric extension of cat’s-cradle.

“There is nothing in Leonard Saporta,” said Waldo, “that anyone could possibly write about.”

Arthur walked looking at the stones.

“Well,” he said carefully, “if you ask my opinion,” and sometimes Mrs Poulter did, “simple people are somehow more” — he formed his lips into a trumpet — “more transparent,” he didn’t shout.

But Waldo was deafened by it.

“More transparent?”

He hated it. He could have thrown away the fat parcel of his imbecile brother’s hand.

“Yes,” said Arthur. “I mean, you can see right into them, right into the part that matters. Then you can write about them, if you can write, Waldo — can’t you? I mean, it doesn’t matter what you write about, provided you tell the truth about it.”

Scruffy and Runt had started a rabbit.

“What do you know?”

Waldo was worrying it with his teeth.

“No,” said Arthur.

“You were always good at figures,” Waldo had to admit.

He was yanking at his twin’s blue-veined hand.

“Yes. That was useful, wasn’t it?” said Arthur. “Even Mrs Allwright, who didn’t like me, admitted it was useful.”

Waldo was striding now. The great gates of his creaking oilskin had opened on his narrow chest and the long legs stuffed inside the gum-boots. His flies were spattered with fat from a remote occasion at the stove.

“Oh,” cried Waldo Brown in anguish, “but I have not expressed half of what is in me to express!”

The heavy Arthur had to run to keep up with his brother. He was whimpering, too.

“Don’t worry,” he blubbered. “There’s time, Waldo, isn’t there? There’s still time. You can write about Mr Saporta and the carpets, and all the fennel down the side roads.”

Just then that Mr Dun straightened amongst the stakes up which he had been coaxing his peas. He looked away quickly though, from what he saw.

Waldo Brown saw a small mean face recognizing.

“One of the carpets had,” Arthur whimpered, “right in the centre, what I would say was a mandala.”

Waldo could not walk too fast. He had hoped originally for intellectual companions with whom to exchange the Everyman classics and play Schubert after tea.

“Come on!” he mumbled.

He hated his brother.

Mr Dun, who had finished looking, erected a behind.

“He didn’t look at us. Or not properly,” Arthur said.

“He hasn’t been here long enough to know us.”

“But I know him.”

“That is different.”

The Brothers Brown had almost emerged from the subfusc vegetation, the clotted paddocks of Terminus Road, into the world in which people lived, not the Poulters or the Duns or themselves, but families in advertised clothes, who belonged to Fellowships, and attended Lodges, and were not afraid of electrical gadgets. Waldo yearned secretly for the brick boxes to an extent where his love had become hatred. He would have to control, as he had always known how to control, himself, his parents, his colleagues — and his brother.

Now when he heard his own breathing united with Arthur’s, and realised how it might startle a stranger, he thought it better to advise:

“It won’t do not to remember that your heart may be starting to give trouble. When I said not to brood, I meant not to brood . To take care is only reasonable.”