Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

Arthur led him in and they lay together in the bed which had been their parents’, that is, Waldo lay in Arthur’s vastly engulfing arms, which at the same time was the gothic embrace of Anne Quantrell soothing her renegade Baptist. All the bread and milk in the world flowed out of Arthur’s mouth onto Waldo’s lips. He felt vaguely he should resist such stale, ineffectual pap. But Arthur was determined Waldo should receive. By this stage their smeary faces were melted together.

But so ineffectual. Waldo remained the passive, though palpitating, plastic doll in Arthur’s arms, which he didn’t even attempt to undress, for knowing too well, perhaps, the wardrobe of garments, the repertoire of flesh. Mrs Poulter, who had knitted the sweater Arthur was wearing, must have experienced, if not pleasure, at least satisfied curiosity, probably even a cauterizing fear, in undressing and dressing up her doll. But Arthur, it seemed, was unafraid of anything, and Waldo only afraid of time now that it had begun to slip.

As they lay in the vast bed time was swooping in waves of waves of yellow fluctuating light, or grass. The yellow friction finally revived their flesh. They seemed to flow together as they had, once or twice, in memory or sleep. They were promised a sticky morning, of yellow down, of old yellowed wormy quinces.

Until in the grey hours Waldo not exactly woke, he opened another compartment to find that Arthur had rolled over, onto his back, snoring with a grey, thistly sound, and he, Waldo, was again the dried-up grass-halm caught in the crook of Arthur’s sweater. He began almost at once to twitter, for Arthur’s illusion of love and a greyed-up grass-halm. If the moustaches had mingled — Arthur was smooth — they should have run off a string of little flannel-eyed boys, and girls with damp ringletted hair. But that was the way it hadn’t worked. The carpet Jew had wrapped them (un)fortunately up.

Presently Waldo creaked out of bed and began stealthily washing up the dirty bowls and things, which normally they left till cement had formed. This morning he was making use of them. To ignore the thoughts Arthur might otherwise pounce on when he woke. So Waldo had to work with care, not to avoid making a noise, but to prevent himself giving room to his thoughts. Noise never woke Arthur. He would lie there well into light, and then, still half-asleep, stay picking the dead skin off the soles of his spongy feet, waiting for an opportunity to barge in on other people’s thoughts.

That morning, when Arthur woke finally, he called out to Waldo: “I dreamed about you, Waldo. You had lumps of Pears soap trying to come out of your nostrils. You seemed upset. I wonder what it means.”

Waldo was revolted. He broke a basin.

“Perhaps it means,” said Arthur, “you’re afraid of having a baby.”

“I think,” said Waldo, “I needn’t have any such fear by now.”

“Did you know Dulcie had two miscarriages? She was more upset than I’ve ever known her.”

Arthur came shambling in. In that dreadful sweater on a puce theme Mrs Poulter had knitted for him.

“She loved them I believe,” Arthur said, “more than the real children she had.”

“Miscarriages” — Waldo snorted — “are more than real. I know that!”

Arthur sat down, scuffling up his old-man’s hair, in which stains of his fiery youth were visible still. If you hadn’t known Arthur, his bare feet would have looked peculiarly gentle.

“What are we going to do today?”

“We’re going for a walk.”

“What walk?”

“The same.”

Arthur and Waldo were observing each other.

Then Arthur said, with that fluency and lucidity which his crumbly face would suddenly produce: “That’s all right, Waldo. Because we’ll be together, shan’t we? And if you should feel yourself falling, I shall hold you up, I’ll have you by the hand, and I am the stronger of the two.”

So there was nothing for it but to go.

Every morning, sooner or later, they went for the walk, longer, and then longer, Waldo always hoped. They would return about mid-day, later if it had been longer. They returned to the basins of bread and milk.

Meat they ate also on occasions: a lump of beef, mutton flaps, rather rubbery from the dangers boiled out of them. Or sometimes they would tempt fate, they would join in stuffing a mutton flap, with the old bent aluminium skewers always taking on fresh shapes, or raining on the floor, as hands fought to contain a sculpture of dough, or torture dead meat into submission. As they slapped and pinned, during their joint effort, they might begin to laugh, probably for different reasons. At least they had the meat in common. While the skewers threatened to pierce their hands.

If Arthur made no other attempt to convert Waldo to the love he preached, it was perhaps because love in the end becomes an abstraction like anything else. From meat to Bonox in several acts. Anyway, brown.

It troubled Waldo no end the night he woke to discover the worst had happened. Sinking low is never sinking low enough. Since he had not yet recovered his vocabulary, he could only call faeces shit.

Or shout and bellow.

When Arthur had lit the lamp he said: “All right, Waldo. Don’t we know? I know I’m responsible for a lot.”

As he fetched the basin he added: “But have never jibbed at mopping up.”

Muttering still: “To go back to what I told you. To let Runt and Scruffy in the bed. Then we’d be all of us together.”

Waldo thought he couldn’t allow himself to fall asleep ever again. And find that . Only walk, which is another kind of sleep.

Which they did every day.

Once he looked at Arthur and said: “At least it must be doing us good.”

Arthur said: “Yes, it’s obviously doing us good.”

So that Waldo flung himself at the dress-box almost every afternoon with such passion he had torn off one of the cardboard sides. He sat with his papers spread out round him, weighted with stones when the wind blew. Mostly he corrected, though sometimes, as his throat rustled drily, he would also write.

On one occasion he wrote: In the extreme of his youth, which was fast approaching, Tiresias suffered difficulties with his syntax and vocabulary, he found that words, turning to stones, would sink below the surface, out of sight.

He did not care for that, but kept it. He kept everything now, out of spite for Goethe, or respect for posterity.

When Arthur produced something he had found.

“What is it, Waldo?”

“An old dress of Mother’s.”

“Why was it behind the copper? She must have forgotten.”

“Put it away!” Waldo shouted. “Where it was!”

To Arthur, who was holding in front of him the sheet of ice, so that Waldo might see his reflexion in it.

Arthur threw away the dress.

Which turned into the sheet of paper Waldo discovered in a corner, not ferreting, but ferreted. On smoothing out the electric paper at once he began quivering.

“Arthur,” he called, “do you know about this?”

“Yes,” said Arthur. “That’s a poem.”

“What poem?”

“One I wanted to, but couldn’t write.”

Then Waldo read aloud, not so menacingly as he would have liked, because he was, in fact, menaced:

“‘my heart is bleeding for the Viviseckshunist

Cordelia is bleeding for her father’s life

all Marys in the end bleed

but do not complane because they know

they cannot have it any other way’”

This was the lowest, finally. The paper hung from Waldo’s hand.

“I know, Waldo!” Arthur cried. “Give it to me! It was never ever much of a poem.”

He would have snatched, but Waldo did not even make it necessary.

When his brother had gone, Waldo went into the room in which their mother used to sit at the four o’clock sherry. He took down the dress-box and began to look out shining words. He was old. He was bleeding. He was at last intolerably lustreless. His hands were shaking like the papers time had dried.