Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

Sundays of a morning she went to church, unless she had a throat, or her leg was hurting. She took it easy up the road to church, because Bill never got a car, she could understand, it was his nerves, nor came with her, most of Sunday morning he lay on the bed, it was not exactly that Bill didn’t believe , she suspected, but like most men he left it to the women. It was anyway too delicate a matter for men. Not that she knew what it amounted to herself, not all of it, but knew. It was her own breath, her own body, the blood quicker in her own veins. But she wished she could see more clearly. She wished she could see . Recognize the face they spoke about.

In the days when she had gone with poor Arthur lovely walks through the paddocks and blackberrying in season as far as the Chinese farm she had almost seen or at least known so intimately so many details vein of leaf blade of grass sound and silence funny enough by Arthur’s being there his head a fire amongst the blackberry bushes Arthur got cured of his trouble anyway on that day to dance the thing the mandala she still had the marble but too afraid to take it out for fear of facing what though on the day she had known there was never no need for fear with her and Arthur cured of all.

Of course she knew he was a nut. Though he wasn’t. They’ll say anybody’s a nut. They said about Jesus.

So the bonfire of Arthur’s head had never quite gone out for Mrs Poulter. Even though she never addressed him after. Unless addressed. In the moments of years. It was the only secret Bill wouldn’t ever get out of her, if Bill was to ask for all. It was too difficult. Unlike their own lovely-fitting grooved love of the beginning, it could not be fitted to word or hand. If she and Arthur was answerable for the day in the blackberry bushes, where in a moment or two they had gone through more than you live in years, they was answerable only to the Lord God, to who the last answers are made. She was no knowall, but she did know that.

So Mrs Poulter, on cold evenings, after the telly had closed down, would roam far and wide through her wooden house and up the yard, crying softly, above grief: My darling, my curly pig, there is an end to blood and squealing if only we can remember how.

For she could never quite remember what they had seen and understood there below the Chinese farm.

But got at last to remembering she had not seen, she had not seen Waldo, she had not seen Him — Arthur — since when.

It was a Saturday, a Saturday afternoon, when Mrs Poulter, trying to mind her own business, failing to outstare the hedge opposite, decided to bake a nice custard. After all, someone could be sick, and neighbourliness was another thing to curiosity. It put fresh heart, fresh life into Mrs Poulter to bake the custard. She put on her watermelon cardigan.

However many times she had crossed the road to Browns’ she had never got used to it. Her flesh grew prickly for the crunched sand. That gate, which they never mended for not knowing how to, poor things, a matter of upbringing, was standing open. Which was unusual. Somebody had forced it back so hard on its hinge it had stuck in the grass. No sign of dogs neether.

“Scruffy?” she called, for courage. “Runt? Runty? Where’s the boys?”

All those old wormy woody quince-trees were pressing against the house, against most of the windows. Mrs Poulter went round the side, carrying as a protection her baked custard, but her heart and the silence were getting too big for her.

She wasn’t going to not exactly look, but glance, to see whether one of the gentlemen was in their room. Sick. She was almost sure of something by now. She was glad she had brought the lightly-flavoured vanilla custard.

Then Mrs Poulter looked. She couldn’t quite see at first for their never cleaning the windows. Then it was Mr Waldo she saw, laid on the bed in the closed room, through the curtains of dust, and that was their Scruffy sitting, unusually, on the bed. Waldo in that old dressing-gown fallen open. No longer sick, Waldo.

Mrs Poulter almost was. She had to stand the custard on the ground. She could feel her own cries stuck in lumps in her stiffened throat. And the other dog, Runt, crouching on the floor. Swallowing down. Runt swallowed and glared growled at Mrs Poulter out of his almost blind eyes.

All of them almost blind by now. Waldo Brown stiff with blindness. Mrs Poulter blind with loathing. She had known for days almost, and wouldn’t admit, only there are some things you can smell — Waldo dead.

Or worse than dead.

His throat open on the gristly apple. Torn by the throat.

Then their Scruffy sitting on the bed, he hadn’t even noticed her, lowered his head, pulling at that other part of Waldo Brown, she wouldn’t have hardly dared look if it hadn’t stopped being real, as Scruffy pulled, pulled at the old soft perished rubber.

Mrs Poulter trod on the edge of her custard dish. She could not scream. The sounds were knotted up inside her.

And when she turned, beginning to run, she wasn’t so much moving, as moved along the brick path by moments, over the clumps of grass, her legs in half-frozen motion. Running. Tumbling inside her soaking clothes.

At the gate she did cry out: “ Urrrrhhhh! ” only there was nobody to hear.

Mrs Poulter continued running. She did not believe she had seen what she had seen, but again, believed. She would not believe. That is, she believed in everything now under the bruised and bursting sky. Not to say heaven .

For the clouds were building up, from beyond and over Sarsaparilla, for the armageddon of which Mrs Poulter had read and heard. She knew now. All the films, all the telly, all the black-and-white of the papers was turning real, as the great clouds, the great tanks, ground up groaning over Sarsaparilla. To lock together. Men burning in their steel prisons. Mrs Poulter went zigzagging over the ruts, along the road, along the banks, over the tussocks, to save those who need not die. But age had made her top-heavy. Hope was faint. She knew now. The flat faces of all those Chinese guerillas or Indonesians, it was the same thing, dragged out across the dreadful screen. All those Jews in ovens, that was long ago, but still burning, lying in heaps. Lone women bashed up in Mosman, Maroubra, Randwick, places you went only in your sleep. Little girls held to the ground. The bleeding wombs of almost all women.

Mrs Poulter lurched, but ran, her watermelon cardigan flickering, up Terminus Road, through the rainy green.

And He released His hands from the nails. And fell down, in a thwack of canvas, a cloud of dust.

It was not Arthur. Arthur would never ever of done that. He was not God. Arthur was a man.

Just this side of Duns’ Mrs Poulter’s heel came off.

So that she went racketting round the back, lurching worse, smashing the fuchsias, crushing a lobelia border, grabbing the back door-knob, which, although highly polished, was not all that secure.

Mrs Poulter stood rattling the knob. The door was locked, on account of it was bowling day, and Mrs Dun, she knew, was nervous on her own.

“Mrs Dun!” Mrs Poulter called in her highest voice.

She would never of dared call Mrs Dun Edna. What she would tell, she couldn’t think. She was still living it all.

Then Mrs Dun came through the house to the glassed-in back veranda. She had not had time to put her teeth in. She looked to be suffering from neuralgia, though that, with Mrs Dun, was not the case. It was her normal look. With something added by the rattling of the knob.

Mrs Poulter, who longed to share her terror with someone, saw that her friend Mrs Dun was already far too terrified.

“What,” said Mrs Dun, “what is it?”

Her lips so pale behind the glass.