Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

“Wake up, darling!” Mother said.

And of course they were sitting on the deck. The dying sun had turned them cold.

“You funny boy!” she said. “Falling asleep just anywhere. Perhaps it’s a blessing,” she added.

Again she was looking out to sea. And he loved her.

He would have loved to see the icebergs, but never ever did they pop up, not even though he looked to the line which divided sea from sky. Only in sleep the icebergs moaned, and jostled one another, crunching and tinkling. The moons of sky-blue ice fell crashing silently down to splinter into glass balls which he gathered in his protected hands.

Somehow at least he knew from the beginning he was protected. Perhaps it was Waldo. Not everybody has a twin. He must hang on to Waldo.

“You’re a funny pair,” said the woman at Barranugli when she brought in the big brown teapot. “Are there many others like you at Home?”

“I should hope not,” Waldo answered; it had made him angry. “I should hope we are different from just anybody.”

The woman went out. She didn’t seem to understand their speech.

Arthur had not contributed because he mostly left it to his brother who was quick at answering questions. Perhaps if things had made him angrier Arthur might have answered back more often, but he was lazy enough to leave it to Waldo.

They lodged at first with those people at Barranugli, Mr and Mrs Thompson — he was a joiner who hadn’t taken to them. But it was convenient because of Dad’s job at the bank. Arthur and Waldo went to school only a couple of blocks away, where nobody understood them until they managed to learn the language. Even so, Waldo, then and always, preferred to speak English because, he said, it had a bigger vocabulary. Arthur did not care. Or he did. He developed the habit of speaking mostly in Australian. He wanted to be understood. He wanted them to trust him too. Waldo, he knew, was suspicious of men, though Waldo himself was inclined to call them Australians.

Dad was at the bank then. They looked in to see him whenever possible, to be made a fuss of by the young ladies, and Mr Mackenzie would give them things, sometimes even sixpences. Best of all Arthur liked to go upstairs to the residence. He loved other people’s houses, and never quite succeeded in breaking himself of a habit, it shocked Mother terribly, of opening cupboards and drawers to look inside. Mother continued shocked even after he pointed out it was the best way of getting to know about the owners.

“It’s a form of dishonesty,” Mother said.

“It’s not! It’s not!” Arthur shouted.

“I shouldn’t like to think you were dishonest.”

He could feel inside him the rush of words which wouldn’t come.

“What’s dishonest,” he blathered, jerking his head against the gag, “when all you want is know, talk to people? I can talk better if I know them better.”

“People tell you as much as they want you to know.”

“Is that honest?”

“Don’t excite yourself, dearest. It isn’t good for you. We do know that.”

It wasn’t good for him. But Mother could also be unjust.

So at least he didn’t look inside any of the cupboards or drawers at the bank manager’s residence. It would apparently have been too humiliating for Dad. Whenever they were taken upstairs Arthur had to content himself with the sound of silence, the brown shadows, and the mystery of the bank manager’s wife.

“Mrs Mackenzie is bed-ridden,” Mother explained.

“What?”

“She’s delicate. An invalid. She has to stay in bed.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“That’s something we don’t ask.”

Waldo said: “I think Mrs Mackenzie is a pressed flower,” and giggled.

It was of the greatest interest to Arthur. Certainly Mrs Mackenzie’s hand had the dry cool scratch of clean writing-paper or pressed flowers. And yellow, she was yellow, in her still, brown room, with a blow-fly that had got inside, and the little prayer-desk, or pre-dew , she called it, which she was no longer strong enough to kneel against.

“Perhaps,” suggested Arthur, “if you wore a surgical appliance.”

But Mrs Mackenzie appeared too delicate to see any point. She only wet her lips.

So Arthur didn’t collect Mrs Mackenzie, although he was the one interested in people. Waldo was more interested in words and all that Waldo was going to do. Natural enough — Waldo was the clever twin.

It was not till towards the end of their stay at Barranugli, on an occasion when Waldo had gone behind the counter to give his views to two of the clerks sitting at their ledgers, that Arthur decided to go up alone to the residence, and if things had turned out otherwise, might even have started looking through the cupboards and drawers. But it did not happen that way.

The residence above the bank was laid out rather unusually. Almost at the top of the stairs there was a little half-landing where you were offered a choice of directions. Arthur had never been there long or unencumbered enough to discover what lay beyond the right-hand turn, beyond the brown linoleum and the thick brown light. On the morning when he should have found out, he was, so to speak, arrested. He was approaching the little landing, when he stood, and held on to the banister.

For precisely at that moment, Mrs Mackenzie the manager’s wife, yellower, brittler than ever before, flew or blew across the landing in the sound of her own starchy nightdress. He could hear the sound of her long, rather fine, but yellow feet, just scratching the surface of the linoleum, somewhat sandpapery in effect.

On seeing Arthur, Mrs Mackenzie too, was arrested. On the little landing. She stood looking down at her own toe-nails. He was surprised to find her so tall. Far taller than her tobacco-y husband. Perhaps it was from lying in bed.

Then Mrs Mackenzie said, still staring at her toes, which were curling upward to meet her gaze: “My husband has taken the trap, and gone to Wilberforce for the day.”

Arthur wished he knew what to say.

“It is business,” she said. Then she laughed out of pale gums. “Men are a business to themselves.”

The nightdress looked quite solid compared with skinny Mrs Mackenzie.

Suddenly she said, looking straight at him, and he recognized the look: “I am sick, you know. Didn’t they tell you? I shouldn’t have left my bed. My husband will be so upset. When he returns from Wilberforce. If he doesn’t find me arranged.”

She began to drift back to her room, trailing the sound, not of flesh, but skin and crumpled starch.

“All right, Mrs Mackenzie,” Arthur felt he had to call out as she flitted, “I only know as much as you’ve told me.”

It was disappointingly true, for he never found out whether the manager’s wife had some important secret, or whether he had simply caught her on her way to break into a pot of jam.

Just then Waldo started calling from the bottom of the stairs, and he had to go down, when he would have liked to stay and at least watch Mrs Mackenzie arrange her invalid arms in the right position on the counterpane. He loved the ladies, and even though they didn’t take him seriously, knew quite a lot about them. On the whole he didn’t require the confirmation of cupboards and drawers.

About this time they bought the land down Terminus Road. On several occasions Dad had been out there on his own. He had met a storekeeper, a man called Allwright, who told him Sarsaparilla was a coming place.

“Not that we’re interested in that sort of thing,” Dad warned them when he got back from one of his expeditions. “What we want is to live to ourselves don’t we? with a minimum of nosey parkers. Well, Mr Allwright believes Sarsaparilla will never lose its backwaters, though the greater part of it is bound to open up.”