Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

Catching sight of that interminable face in shrivelled kid, as he did now, in what wasn’t even a fun-fair mirror, he was sorry about it. For being the cause of everybody’s shame. If he could only have revealed himself glistening in a sphere of glass.

At one stage in his limping progress, he squared his shoulders, he put on the cloak of an air, and swirled inside the Public Library, squelching over the polished rubber, trailing his identity round the room in which he had begun the struggle to find it. If he no longer felt moved to take down a book, it was because in the end knowledge had come to him, not through words, but by lightning.

They , however, were not much struck. They came and told him he must leave. He was distracting the readers. In any case, everyone he had known was gone, or dead. Only the incident at the table, between himself and Waldo and the Karamazovs, lived by virtue of his imperishability. He prepared to leave, though, as he had been asked to. Now, as then, nobody arrested him.

That was something they were saving up.

In the meantime he strewed the streets with peanut shells. He stole a book called How to Relax the New Way , not because he wanted to read it, but to try out the criminal tendency so recently acquired. Only very occasionally now he derived comfort from remembering: I am Waldo’s dill brother of whom nothing is expected.

Then, on a street corner, he found himself standing crying, for what, he had forgotten. Unless because it was getting dark too soon.

That night he took the bus out to Dulcie’s place, hoping he might find he had been invited.

The house on the edge of the park increased in possibilities at night. Darkness, by dissolving its ironwork, its gingerbread columns, its cement shell, had made it more truly a castle, the electric stars screwed into silhouetted battlements. All the shutters had been thrown open, as if the secret of the precincts might be shared, if only then, and only from a distance. Although the gate squealed piercingly as Arthur worked himself inside, it was easy enough to clamber up the yielding lawns without giving himself away. But cold. He farted once. The nerves twittered inside him as the sound of voices singing swelled the already gigantic house. Manoeuvring through the outer wall of shrubs, avoiding the webs of light both hung and spread to catch any such intruder, he succeeded in reaching a window, and in clinging to a rope of creepers.

There he hung a while. As the singers withdrew their breath the upright candle-flames made the room look vast and black. The Saportas were preparing to dine, amongst their children and their children’s children. Several shabbier relatives, unexpectedly younger than their hosts, were assisting at the ceremony. Only her beauty still aglow inside her revealed Dulcie in the old woman of fuzzy sideburns and locked joints, caged by her own back. Leonard Saporta’s skin was draped in greyish-yellow folds, though age had not lessened his conviction when he spoke.

“She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she putteth forth her hands to the needy.”

Arthur longed for Dulcie to put out her hand to him, while knowing she would not, she could not. She lowered her eyes to avoid meeting with approval. But as she sat in her violet dress, her painful claws with their smouldering of rings twitched to receive the homage her family was paying her. It was, after all, her right.

“She openeth her mouth in wisdom,” continued the husband in his wife’s praise, “and the law of lovingkindness is on her tongue.”

Arthur longed to hear Dulcie speak, but it wasn’t yet her moment. She knew, and was content to wait, while her husband blessed the wine, which their son, their Aaron-Arthur, held. Mr Saporta, it appeared, was afflicted with the permanent trembles.

After the washing of the hands, the old bungling, and the small determined ones, after the bread had been uncovered, after all this, oh dear, endlessness of songs, and prayers, and blessings, the chatter broke above the dishes, above the golden steam, the scent of cloves, and he did not hear his darling speak. Her eyes accepted the situation, as her lips moved, expressing approval, but of others.

While Mr Saporta trembled worse than ever, to assist a grandson measuring out his drops for him.

Practically built by this time into the network of steel vines, the intruder had been numbed. If he could have freed himself, and climbed in to test their lovingkindness, they would surely have kissed him, and fed him, and put him to sleep in linen sheets. But looked at him with surprise and disbelief. Or they might not have recognized somebody their lives had left behind. Just as he himself could no longer identify some of the Feinstein furniture.

So he went away without attempting to storm their fortress, and on the following day he felt the sun burning between his shoulder-blades, he felt a resistance leaving him. He would have liked to lie down and rest his head on the grass, if all the grass in those parts hadn’t been worn to scurf. Remembering the springy green cushions grass can become as it collaborates with sleep, he decided to take the train back. To Mrs Poulter, naturally. Whose need was as great as his. Who had sat with him on the grass, under the great orange disc of the sun, and burned with him in a fit of understanding or charity. So the drowsily revolving wheels, of trains, of buses, carried him back, as he sat twirling the solid mandala in his pocket.

When he got there she turned round. Her voice, overcoming surprise, might have been expecting him. He sat down, and she went to him.

“Where have you been?” she asked. “What have you done?”

Stroking his hair with the continuous motions of a younger woman. Only her skin, which was dry and withered, kept on catching.

“Eh?” she asked. “All this time?”

“I ran away,” he said, “because I got a shock.”

“Yes, yes,” she said, stroking. “We know. You must of. You needn’t tell, Arthur. Do you hear?”

It was so much what he had hoped for, he had to protect her from her innocence.

“After Waldo died — after I killed him — I ran away.”

She did not even stop stroking.

“You didn’t kill Waldo, Arthur. Waldo — do you hear? was ready to die. He only took such a time dying.”

“I don’t think, Mrs Poulter, I could live without my brother. He was more than half of me.”

“Oh no,” Mrs Poulter said. “No more than a small quarter.”

She was breathing hard, holding his head against her side.

“I was the one who should have died,” said Arthur. “In the beginning. They never told me.”

Mrs Poulter was rocking, bruising what had been his head before she had taken possession of it.

“Only Waldo told me. In the end. When it was too late. I’d killed him. I killed Waldo in the end.”

Then Mrs Poulter threw away his head. She went to the window where the plants were choking out the light. She began to part the big swollen geranium heads.

“I don’t believe you, Arthur,” she said, “any more than Sergeant Foyle will believe, who is here now.”

Arthur realized he was hearing the approaching, then the halting, motor-bike. It was very still inside the reflected red of the geraniums.

“He’s over the road,” she said. “Constable Kentwell with him in the side-car. The both of them going to investigate. Afterwards they’re bound to come in here, and what you have to tell him Sergeant Foyle will never believe.”

“If it’s the truth,” Arthur said.

“There’s a truth above truth at times. That,” Mrs Poulter said, “is what a person, if she’s honest, believes.”

“That’s okay for you,” he said. “You’re safe. You’ve got your religion to believe in.”