Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

He did not attempt to explain, because he felt he would make her see.

So Arthur Brown danced, beginning at the first corner, from which he would proceed by stages to the fourth, and beyond. He who was so large, so shambly, found movement coming to him on the hillside in the bay of blackberries. The bands of his shirtsleeves were hanging open at the wrists. The bluish shadows in the less exposed parts of his skin, of his wrists, and the valley between his breasts, were soon pearled over.

In the first corner, as a prelude to all that he had to reveal, he danced the dance of himself. Half clumsy, half electric. He danced the gods dying on a field of crimson velvet, against the discords of human voices. Even in the absence of gods, his life, or dance, was always prayerful. Even though he hadn’t been taught, like the grocer, to go down on his knees and stick his hands together. Instead, offering his prayer to what he knew from light or silences. He danced the sleep of people in a wooden house, groaning under the pressure of sleep, their secrets locked prudently up, safe, until their spoken thoughts, or farts, gave them away. He danced the moon, anaesthetized by bottled cestrum. He danced the disc of the orange sun above icebergs, which was in a sense his beginning, and should perhaps be his end.

While Mrs Poulter sat looking, playing with the tips of her dark hair. Sighing sometimes. Then looking down.

In the second corner he declared his love for Dulcie Feinstein, and for her husband, by whom, through their love for Dulcie, he was, equally, possessed, so they were all three united, and their children still to be conceived. Into their corner of his mandala he wove their Star, on which their three-cornered relationship was partly based. Flurries of hydrangea-headed music provided a ceremony of white notes falling exactly into place, and not far behind, the twisted ropes of dark music Waldo had forced on Dulcie the afternoon of strangling. There she was, the bones of her, seated on the upright chair, in black. And restored to flesh by her lover’s flesh. The inextinguishable, always more revealing eyes.

Dulcie’s secrets, he could see, had been laid bare in the face of Mrs Poulter, who might otherwise have become the statue of a woman, under her hair, beside the blackberry bushes. Though she was swaying slightly as he began to weave her figure into the appropriate corner. In Mrs Poulter’s corner he danced the rite of ripening pears, and little rootling suckling pigs. Skeins of golden honey were swinging and glittering from his drunken mouth. Until he reached the stillest moment. He was the child she had never carried in the dark of her body, under her heart, from the beat of which he was already learning what he could expect. The walls of his circular fortress shuddered.

Mrs Poulter was at that point so obviously moved, she would have liked to throw the vision off, or stop him altogether, but he would not let her.

He had begun to stamp, but brittly rigid, in his withering. In the fourth corner, which was his brother’s, the reeds sawed at one another. There was a shuffling of dry mud, a clattering of dead flags, or papers. Of words and ideas skewered to paper. The old, bent, over-used, aluminium skewers. Thus pinned and persecuted, what should have risen in pure flight, dropped to a dry twitter, a clipped twitching. He couldn’t dance his brother out of him, not fully. They were too close for it to work, closest and farthest when, with both his arms, he held them together, his fingers running with candle-wax. He could not save. At most a little comfort gushed out guiltily, from out of their double image, their never quite united figure. In that corner of the dance his anguished feet had trampled the grass into a desert.

When Mrs Poulter leaned forward. She was holding her hair by handfuls in knots of fists, he could see — waiting.

Till in the centre of their mandala he danced the passion of all their lives, the blood running out of the backs of his hands, water out of the hole in his ribs. His mouth was a silent hole, because no sound was needed to explain.

And then, when he had been spewed up, spat out, with the breeze stripping him down to the saturated skin, and the fit had almost withdrawn from him, he added the little quivering footnote on forgiveness. His arms were laid along his sides. His head hung. Facing her.

He fell down, and lay, the rise and fall of his ribs a relief, to say nothing of her eyes, which he knew could only have been looking at him with understanding for his dance.

Arthur must have dozed, for when he got up, Mrs Poulter was putting the finishing touches to her hair. Her head was looking so neat, though her nostrils were still slightly flared, from some experience recently suffered.

Then Arthur knew that she was worthy of the mandala. Mrs Poulter and Dulcie Feinstein he loved the most — after Waldo of course.

So he put his hand in his pocket, and knelt down beside her, and said: “I’m going to let you have the mandala, Mrs Poulter.”

It was the gold one, in which the sparks glinted, and from which the rays shot upward whenever the perfect sphere was struck by its counterpart.

“Ah, that’s good! Isn’t it, Arthur?” Mrs Poulter said, inclining over her open hand. “I would like to have a loan of that!”

“I want you to keep it. Wouldn’t you like it?”

She looked up, and said: “Yes.”

After that they began to walk home.

The perfection of the day saddened him in retrospect. He knew it could never recur. At meals the members of his family were already avoiding, composing. It was only a matter of time. If he mentioned his friend Mrs Poulter, Mother would start murmuring against “the Name”. Waldo did more than murmur. Waldo exploded finally.

“If only you saw the obscenity in such a situation! I ask you! And my brother!” The forked veins in Waldo’s forehead were bursting blue.

It was a good thing perhaps that Arthur was mixing the bread. That on its own might have helped establish his honesty if Mrs Poulter herself had not contributed.

“Mrs Poulter has decided,” he was able to tell Waldo as he folded and re-folded the dough.

One evening shortly before, he had gone across the road, in hopes of exchanging a word or two, or not even that — of being together. The dishes were stacked beside the sink, for her husband had eaten his tea and gone inside. Bill Poulter spent much of his spare time lying on the bed, either nursing an ulcer, or listening to the walls, waiting for a doubt to be confirmed. While his wife finished whatever had to be done.

Now Mrs Poulter was straining the milk. She was looking stern, Arthur noticed. While holding her head delicately, she was frowning at the cow-hair in the muslin. He realized almost at once that he, and not the cow-hair, was the cause of it all.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said. “Nothing,” she said, tilting the strainer this way and that. “That is,” she said, “we shan’t be going on any more walks. Not from now.”

She sounded so cool.

“Mr Poulter doesn’t like it,” she said. “ They don’t like it. So you’ll have to lump it, Arthur.”

She was making herself sound brutal — he could hear that — so as he would not be hurt by the brutality of what they called life, only by her. He would realize she was a coarse and brutal woman unworthy of his trust.

“So there we are,” she said, looking at him for the first time, slamming the strainerful of hair and muslin back into the empty bucket.

“All right,” he said. “All right, Mrs Poulter” — trying to work out his steps towards the door. “I don’t have to tell you I’ll be sorry, though.”

The night of his outburst Waldo congratulated Arthur on the decision he and Mrs Poulter had come to. Waldo was obviously pleased by what he called its ethical rectitude , though immediately gloomy over a situation he had read about but not experienced. Perhaps Waldo was a bit jealous, as well as contemptuous, of Arthur’s miserable affair. If he had not admired his brother, Arthur might have felt hurt.