Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

Arthur was now preparing to go in and make that bread and milk, faintly sweetened, which soothed away the flapping of acidulous stomachs after walks. He used to serve it out in pudding basins, and they would take their basins and eat from them in whichever room they wanted to be. Sometimes they would find they had chosen the same room, or Arthur had flopped down in Waldo’s, there was no escaping, nor from the glup glup of someone else’s bread and milk. The louder Arthur glupped, the more ingeniously Waldo managed his spoon. He could feel his teeth, in self defence, moving like the false ones of some over-refined female in a business-women’s luncheonette, though his own teeth, he knew, were still sound as nails, and when alone, and there was no need to set an example, he would worry food like an animal, his pleasure increasing with the violence of the physical act.

In his brother’s company he felt compelled to wipe his mouth, and fold his handkerchief, and say: “If you could listen to yourself eating bread and milk you would hear the tide turning in a sewer.”

Arthur didn’t mind. He very rarely cared what people said.

“Why don’t you care?” Waldo used to ask because it exasperated him so.

“I dunno,” Arthur said, sucking a tooth. “I think it was that time at the Public Library, before we retired, when you called me sir. After that I didn’t bother. I don’t care what people say.”

Waldo couldn’t be expected to remember every word which had ever been uttered, certainly not those it did your health no good to remember.

So he insisted: “But you should. You ought to take a pride in yourself, and care what other people say.”

Arthur continued sucking his teeth.

“Don’t you care if people don’t like you?”

“No,” said Arthur. “Because they mostly do. Except Mrs Allwright. And she went away to Toowoomba.”

Waldo hated his brother for moments such as these. While knowing he should be thankful for Arthur’s insensitivity.

The day they returned from the walk on which Waldo had decided Arthur should die, the latter chose to remain in the kitchen after the bread and milk was served. Waldo was spared listening to the glup glup for the noise the dogs were making as they crunched, or gnawed, or dragged along the floor the mutton flaps on which they were feeding. It was from such treatment that the kitchen boards, which had sloughed their linoleum years ago, got their rich polished look.

The scrape scrape of the mutton flaps, together with the steady crunching of bone, made at a distance a fairly companionable sound.

Waldo was sitting with his legs apart. He was sitting in the room in which their mother had lived her last illness. He ate by full, openly greedy, quickly-swallowed mouthfuls, because now of course he was on his own, and the closeness of his collected works in the dress-box on top of the wardrobe gave him a sense of affluence. If he sometimes bit his spoon between the more voluptuous acts of swallowing, it was for remembering how he had contemplated burning his papers during those panicky moments on the walk.

He was so annoyed at one stage he called out to Arthur: “You shouldn’t have given them the mutton flaps now. Kept them till evening. It’s only middle of the day.”

“Yes,” called Arthur through his bread and milk, “I forgot it’s only middle of the day.”

If Waldo did not criticize further, it was because they did forget. They both forgot. Sometimes the light reminded them, but the light could not tell them the day of the week. It could not remind them when they had been born, only that they were intended to die.

Why were they always dragged back to this? Or he, Waldo. He was afraid Arthur didn’t think about it enough, which could have accounted for his unconcern when faced with signs and accusations.

Just then Arthur came into the room, and caught his brother wiping out the basin with his fingers, which annoyed Waldo considerably.

Arthur stood looking at him.

“I want to talk to you, Waldo,” he said.

“What is the schoolmaster, the head -master, going to announce?” Waldo grumbled.

“We can talk to each other, can’t we? We are brothers, aren’t we?”

Then Waldo saw it printed up as HA! HA!

He only grunted, though, and looked with distaste at the empty basin. He would have liked to complain about the bread and milk he had just eaten, but there isn’t much bread and milk can lack.

Arthur, the mountain in front of him, finally asked: “Do you understand all this about loving?”

“What?”

This, perhaps, was it, which he most dreaded.

“Of course,” said Waldo. “What do you mean?”

“I sometimes wonder,” Arthur said, “whether you have ever been in love.”

Waldo was filled with such an unpleasant tingling, he got up and put the pudding basin down. One of the dogs, it was perhaps Scruffy, had come in to gloat over him.

“I have been in love,” Waldo said cautiously, “well, I suppose, as much as any normal person ever was.”

By now he suspected even his own syntax but Arthur would not notice syntax.

“I just wondered,” he said.

“But what a thing to ask!” Waldo blurted “And what about you?”

At once he could have kicked himself.

“Oh,” said Arthur, “all the time. But perhaps I don’t love enough, or something. Anyway, it’s too big a subject for me to altogether understand.”

“I should think so!” Waldo said.

I should hope so, he might have meant.

“If we loved enough,” Arthur was struggling, kneading with his hands, “then perhaps we could forget to hate.”

“Whom do you hate?” Waldo asked very carefully.

“Myself at times.”

“If you must hate, there’s no reason to pick on yourself.”

“But I can see myself. I’m closest to myself.”

Then Waldo wanted to cry for this poor dope Arthur. Perhaps this was Arthur’s function, though: to drive him in the direction of tears.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, to offer his driest resistance.

“Love,” said Arthur. “And that is what I fail in worst.”

“Oh, God!” Waldo cried.

The light was the whitest mid-day light, of colder weather, and Arthur was standing him up.

“If,” said Arthur, “I was not so simple, I might have been able to help you, Waldo, not to be how you are.”

Then Waldo was raving at the horror of it.

“You’re mad! That’s what you are. You’re mad!”

“All right then,” Arthur said. “I’m mad.”

And went away.

Although he was trembling, Waldo took down his box intending to work, to recover from the shocks he had had. After all, you can overcome anything by will. If the will, the kernel of you, didn’t exist — it didn’t bear thinking about.

So towards evening he re-tied the strings round the bundles of unresponsive papers. He didn’t know what had become of Arthur. He went out and walked round and about, mowing down the tall grass, which stood up again when he had passed, because he was light-boned and old.

So he returned to the house in which they lived, and Arthur was standing, beyond avoiding, in the doorway, waiting for him. Arthur was looking old, but seemed the younger for a certain strength. Or lamplight. For lamplight rinses the smoother, the more innocent faces, making them even more innocent and smooth.

Except Arthur was not all that innocent. He was waiting to trap him, Waldo suspected, in love-talk.

So that he broke down crying on the kitchen step, and Arthur who had been waiting, led him in, and opened his arms. At once Waldo was engulfed in the most intolerable longing, in the smell of mutton flaps and dog, of childhood and old men. He could not stop crying.