Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

“I believe in you, Arthur.”

So she did, this man and child, since her God was brought crashing down.

Then they heard the shot, the second shot.

“What are they shooting?” he asked.

When she did not answer, the aged man or crumpled child began to whimper, so she went to him again, because it was necessary to take him in her arms, all the men she had never loved, the children she had never had.

“It is something that had to be done,” she said groggily, because she was an elderly shaky woman, stiff in the joints, and the positions of love did not come easy to her. But she slid down painfully to her knees, along his side, until by instinct she was encircling her joy and duty with her arms — ritually, as it were.

And Arthur was considerably comforted when she was kneeling against him. The shots, which had at first pierced his heart and paralysed his spine, continued on into the duller regions of memory.

“They were too old,” she tried to sound convincing. “You will feel happier,” she said.

“Yes,” he agreed, to please her.

He had the sniffles, however. So she wiped the nose of her little boy, her old, snotty man.

“What will become of me?” he asked, when he had recovered, and got his breath.

“Well,” she said.

She had to think.

“They’ll take you somewhere,” she said, “where they’ll look after you. Perhaps to some home or other.”

She was not so soft as to say: I will keep you for ever — though that was what she would have done for choice, carried him for ever under her heart, this child too tender to be born.

“It won’t be the Home of Peace,” said Arthur. “I’m not ready for the Home of Peace.”

“Oh dear, no!” she said. “You’re not! We’ve life to live yet,” she said.

She did honestly believe it. Since her Lord and master Jesus had destroyed himself that same day, she had been given this man-child as token of everlasting life.

“I know,” Arthur said, hesitating too, because it was a serious admission. “They’ll probably take me to Peaches-and-Plums.”

It sounded so inevitable she rested her cheek against his cheek.

“That will be nice, won’t it?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “It’ll be all right.”

She might have heard the chugging of his heart if it hadn’t been for the noise of her own.

“If you’ll visit me,” he said. “And bring things.”

“Tuesdays and Fridays are the days, I believe. And what sort of things would you like?” she asked.

“Ju-jubes,” he said. “The orange ones.”

“Ju-jubes. And anything else. Oh, I’ll come, Arthur! I’ll never miss!”

Until they were looking at each other so close they were reflected in each other’s eyes.

“Have you got that thing?” she asked. “That marble?”

Her leg was hurting her, her knees, from kneeling all that while on the lino.

“I got one,” he said. “I lost Waldo’s on the way.”

“I have mine,” she said, “somewhere.”

Because in the course of years, and really it had all been a piece of nonsense, something pagan she dared say, she would never of let on to the minister, she had put it away, and forgot where, and not really regretted till now. When Arthur was bringing out his.

They might have paired.

But there was no need, she saw. In her wrinkling misery for a moment she was pretty certain she saw their two faces becoming one, at the centre of that glass eye, which Arthur sat holding in his hand.

Nonsense really. It was the blur which made it. For when she had wiped her eyes on his shoulder, there was the same steady unblinking marble, or boy’s toy.

“You’ll have that at least,” she said brightly, “to take along with you.”

“Yes,” he said, with faint conviction.

Putting it back for safety in his pocket.

When Sergeant Foyle came in, there was that Mrs Poulter kneeling beside Arthur Brown. The sergeant had noticed her in her day, but had stopped giving her thought. Now she had her back to him, broad in the beam, the veins showing blue in the white skin behind her knees, just above where the stockings ended, one of them torn.

As for Arthur Brown, he was sitting and staring, at nothing in the room, you felt. Now and then he flinched at outside noises, like a nervous dog.

People said there had been something on at one time between Mrs Poulter and Arthur Brown. From what he saw the sergeant believed it, though again from what he saw, nothing of an indecent nature. There she was, wiping and coaxing that nut, as a woman will cuddle a baby, provided it is hers, after she has let it mess itself. The sergeant couldn’t abide a slut. But this old, at any rate, elderly biddy, was clean. Clean as beeswax. And as she half-turned, rising half-sighing on a probably needle-riddled foot, taking the weight off her numb knees, he was reminded of a boyhood smell of cold, almost deserted churches, and old people rising transparent and hopeful, chafing the blood back into their flesh after the sacrament.

“You have come, Sergeant, I expect,” she said, “for my friend Mr Arthur Brown.”

On her feet, she was somewhat older than he had expected. She spoke in a high, clear, not altogether natural voice. But perhaps she was upset by his catching her out in too private a position. The train of events would have rocked many women hysterical by now.

“Yes,” he said. “Mr Brown will be all right with me. We’ll take good care of him,” he said.

The situation had begun to make Sergeant Foyle feel curiously insubstantial. The other side of the geranium plants the leaden evening was hanging lower than before. Those dogs. They shook young Gary Kentwell, who had trod back into a blooming baked custard someone had left standing on the path. For a moment perhaps each of the men had tasted a sick taste. Only for a moment. The sergeant himself shot the brutes, through the window, pretty quick. Old, mangy, in every way pitiful animals, if it had not been for the expression on them. As for their acts. Sergeant Foyle came as near as nothing to spitting on Mrs Poulter’s floor.

“There, you see,” she was saying to Arthur Brown, “everyone will be kind. Until I come. You must be kind to him,” she told the sergeant, as if the old boy hadn’t been there, and more than likely he wasn’t. “Kindness is something he understands.”

Sergeant Foyle was not going to pass judgment, except superficially, neither on the living brother, nor the dead.

When the old woman hunted him back towards the scullery, and said: “This is a good man, Sergeant. You know it in your heart” — he had to reply: “It’s not a matter of hearts, Mrs Poulter. The issue is something to be decided by better heads than mine.”

But the old woman had worked herself into a state of exaltation.

“This man would be my saint,” she said, “if we could still believe in saints. Nowadays,” she said, “we’ve only men to believe in. I believe in this man.”

“Okay, Mrs Poulter.”

The sergeant was pretty embarrassed. He couldn’t remember, ever, having to get himself out of a similar corner.

“Well,” he said, “Arthur — young fuller — how about coming along for a ride in the side-car?”

Arthur Brown got up. Filling the room, the body of this very vast old man had become the least part of him.

“Yes,” he said, and turning to the woman: “You’ll come on Tuesday, Mrs Poulter, as you promised?”

Then Mrs Poulter no longer cared.

“Oh yes, I’ll come! I’ll come, my pet! You needn’t worry! I’ll come, my love!”

Her head adrift above her cardigan was on fire with all the reflexions of grief.

“And bring the ju-jubes?”

“Yes,” she cried, “the orange ones!”