Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

At sixty-seven Mrs Poulter still liked a bit of colour. She knitted herself the cardigans. She loved the latest, her watermelon cardigan. Even though it had just come in through High Fashion and the magazines, without boasting, she had thought of it herself years ago. Watermelon. On chilly evenings she would tuck her hands inside the cuffs, and draw the wool down over her bust, and walk to the gate, and back to the steps, and down to the fence, to look, just to see. Of course she never expected anyone, and nobody ever came. It wasn’t necessary. She was that snug in her watermelon cardigan. And soon she would go inside, to get Bill’s tea, and watch the telly after he had eaten whatever it was, chops usually, or else a braise, and laid down.

Mrs Poulter was still quite bright of countenance. Her skin had gone to rags of course, at her age, but she had her health, her colour, which she helped out with Cyclax, more discreet than the other brands. More refined-smelling, more like a kind of ointment for the skin. No one could object to a person doing something for her chaps. Of course she couldn’t alter herself. She was born brownish and healthy-looking. If she cracked up like some old enamel pot it was what happens in time.

When Bill asked her, her skin had been as smooth as plums. She was not, you couldn’t say, pretty, but without being vain, nice-looking, in those cotton frocks she made up from the patterns, buying the stuff at Mrs Fat’s. And a gay hat. She waited for the ones they used to send up to Fats’ from Sydney. She was not what they call sophisticated then, none of them was in those days, at Numburra or at Mungindribble. Bill would drive in in the trap. They would drive down by the river, there was nowhere else to go, but in good seasons it was lovely, flowers to pick, the trees was lovely, big smooth-barked gums standing straight and cool by the river. That was where Bill asked her, and she accepted so quick — how could she not of? — she felt a bit ashamed wondering what Bill. Oh, well. She loved a handsome man, and never looked at another. It was his teeth, it was his hands, yes, above all it was his hands that she could never stop looking at, or wrists, a man’s wrists never seemed to know their own strength, but then a man never seemed to know. So she could afford to keep on looking. What of it, if you love a person? That was what the Bible told you. It was only with the ministers that sin came in, but they didn’t always understand. She loved, she had loved Bill. Wearing his hat that way, and in the Army afterwards. She had only to look at Bill and would have melted if he had wanted. But. Bill wasn’t one of those with only the one thought in their heads. Bill was not uneducated. Could write a stylish letter. You weren’t at everybody’s mercy with a man like that around. Could use educated words. He was not just rouseabout and Council labourer start and finish. No one altogether realized that. Not those Browns. Waldo walking that stiff with all he was supposed to know you would of thought he had the piles. Poor Arthur you couldn’t very well expect.

Stringing fresh green beans sprayed her with the same chill smell as when she thought the name. Arthur Brown. That was different. That was years afterwards.

In the beginning there was Bill. It was of course a white wedding, and such a dusty day, but they had their photo took, with everybody all standing in the dust. There was no honeymoon, because Bill couldn’t run to it, and she didn’t complain. When they were together in the back room she tried to show it made no difference to her. She was not happy, she was more than happy, knowing what she had got. Well, there was nothing wrong with it, was there? She lay back wondering about the laundry, but grew too tired to wonder long, and everyone knew about it, anyway.

Those first years she could have eaten Bill. It wasn’t right. He had his principles, it seemed. It made her proud. And him such a manly man. She loved his throat. It was wrong perhaps, but she loved where the hair began and ended.

She loved him, her husband.

She loved him. Oh my darling, she said between mouthfuls. His legs like a pair of scissors would cut her short.

How terrible the War was, only a woman could of known. She received his letters, of course, while he was at Liverpool and down the coast, but it did not ease her body growing softer for him.

They took away the little girl she lost. First the sister let her look. In after years sometimes she would cry, thinking how nice it would of been, to have her little girl to tell things to.

Bill never mentioned it. Well, you couldn’t expect him to. She was the woman. Sometimes she felt she embarrassed him.

Anyway, he had changed when he returned. While remaining her husband.

At least she had her faith, which Bill didn’t altogether approve of, but it was what she was brought up to, if she didn’t always understand, but hoped to in time, not through the ministers, she would never of dared ask, but somehow. She had her Lord Jesus. Who was a man. By that she meant nothing blasphemous. Humankind. That was what they turned him into, wasn’t it?

Mrs Poulter would lick her lips thinking it out, with very slight Cyclax. She knew herself by the glass to be what they call highly-coloured.

My darling, she would say, walking amongst the white chrysanths, she would say to the little black curly pig. No one could lift the combs out so gently as she. In winter she stood saucers of sugar outside the hives.

At first she used to cry when the pigs were dragged out squealing, to be hitched up by one leg, and bled. Later on she changed. Bill asked how could you live without butchers. There’s the vegetarians, she said. The vegetarians are nuts. So, if men could only live normal by butchery, then she accepted it.

But would go in quickly beyond range of squealing, and switch on the radio, or better, after they got it, the telly. She loved the telly. It made her sit forward, holding her elbows, not exactly tense, but waiting, most of all for the real programmes, when they let off one of the bombs, or an aeroplane caught fire at the moment of crashing, or those guerillas they’d collared, of course they were only Orientals, and once it showed you the bodies they’d shot. The news made the rubber eat into her, she would hear herself wheeze, the news items so real, you only sometimes overheard the squeals of a stuck and bleeding pig.

One mid-winter evening the squealing got so bad, she went and slammed the window shut, although it had only been open a crack. She broke a nail, they was so brittle, she got the indigestion, she couldn’t concentrate on the telly for all that old sadness returning. Couldn’t breathe, not in what they call them now the step-ins. The sister had said perhaps it was all for the best. But only to make it easier. All the while they was firing on a mob of squealing Orientals, in Singapore, or some such place. You wouldn’t believe.

Mrs Poulter sat and hiccuped for a misborn child and a plastic doll writhing on the square of gelatine.

That bally doll, why she should remember she didn’t know, or why Waldo Brown had bought her the doll. Even so, she had wanted to keep it and dress it nice, until poor Arthur found her out. With a big lump of a rubbery doll. She wasn’t half ashamed. If you came to think there was a lot of things, the loveliest, made you ashamed by remembering them. Those first days with Bill, which were lawful and sacred, she had behaved so natural perhaps it had put him against her, only because she loved, and could not learn enough about him. Anyway. That nasty doll she had took down the gully with the spade and buried it in the loose bush soil beside the creek. And felt a little easier. For a while only. Because after the rain she had dared look and there was its legs, dimpled too, and mulberry nylon skirt, sticking out of the sand and leaves, like a corpse they find at Frenchs Forest. She kicked the thing. She got the hiccups. In that chilly hollow of yellow draining floodwater it was too sad to stay thinking of what was done with. She couldn’t scramble quick enough up and over the rocks. Must of strained her back.