Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

It was Waldo who disturbed the peace.

“I’m thinking of writing a play,” he announced. “It’s going to be a Greek tragedy.”

Dad raised his head as though scenting an approach.

“How?” he asked. “You never ever saw one. Haven’t even read one.”

“I read part of a play,” said Waldo. “The one about the man on the rock.”

It was difficult to tell whether Dad was annoyed or pleased.

“You’d better learn to live first.”

“Don’t discourage him, George,” said Mother, enjoying the possibilities.

Waldo began to sidle. He was never easily carried away.

“I’ll write it,” he said. “Afterwards I’ll act it. Here on the veranda.”

Then Arthur, who had come up carrying the full pail, on the way from the tether to the scullery, halted, and started gulping for words.

“Waldo,” he said, “I can act in your play, can’t I? Can’t I?” he repeated.

It was suddenly too much for everybody else. They fell silent, in the light through the young quince trees. The western horizon was a thin, strangling, copper wire.

Arthur had put down his pail. They heard the clank when the handle fell.

“Can’t I?” he gulped.

“No,” said Waldo.

Because he knew this was something he could not bear to share with his brother, whose breathing he used to listen to whenever he woke in the night, the brother who looked almost right inside him when they opened their eyes on twin pillows in the morning.

Arthur was not put off. He was as usual so good-tempered. Leaving the pail he began to clamber up on the veranda.

“Oh well,” he said, “I’ll have to write a Greek tragedy myself. Then I can act all the parts.”

Dad was prepared to humour him, and Mother said: “Yes, dear. Certainly” — in one of her softer voices, and touched him.

A gentle attention prevailed, because from certain angles and at certain moments, Arthur was a strong and handsome boy. Now he was standing astride the veranda, raising his flushed throat, so that the words rising were clearly visible inside.

“And what will your play be about, Arthur?” Mother asked.

“A cow,” Arthur blurted out.

“But a Greek tragedy!”

“A cow’s as Greek, I suppose,” said Dad, “as anything else.” Then he added, in the voice of somebody whose opinion is sometimes asked: “Whether she’s a figure of tragedy is a matter for consideration.”

Arthur was grappling with his problem.

“This is a big, yellow cow,” he told them. “She’s all blown out, see, with her calf. Then she has this calf. It’s dead. See?”

There was Arthur pawing at the boards of the veranda. At the shiny parcel of dead calf.

Everyone else was looking at the ground by now, from shame, or, Waldo began to feel, terror.

“You can see she’s upset, can’t you?” Arthur lowed. “Couldn’t help feeling upset.”

It was suddenly so grotesquely awful in the dwindling light and evening silence.

“Couldn’t help it,” Arthur bellowed.

Thundering up and down the veranda he raised his curved, yellow horns, his thick, fleshy, awful muzzle. The whole framework of their stage shook.

“That’s enough, I think,” said Dad.

“Oh, Arthur,” Mother was daring herself to speak, “we understand enough without your telling us any more.”

Arthur stopped at once, as though he had been going to in any case.

“But it isn’t all tragedy,” he reassured. “Because she can have other calves, can’t she? And does. She has eighteen before she dies.”

“Yes,” sighed Mother. “Cows often last for years, and lead very useful lives.”

“So you see?” Arthur laughed.

Dad got up and limped inside. You could hear him lifting the porcelain shade off the big lamp.

Mother continued sitting on the day-bed, which she used to say had an elegance, a character of its own, even though vicissitude had battered it a bit. In time, in the dusk, she might have forgotten about her family.

At least Waldo was the only one who had remained standing by. He could not help wondering how Arthur of all people had thought about that play. Ridiculous, when not frightening. Waldo would write a play, something quite different, when he had thought of one.

Then Dad, who had brought the dining-room to light, called from inside: “What about tea, Mother?”

He sounded tired again, and patient.

Mother said: “Yes,” and went in as if nothing had happened, to get the meal she had stopped trying to call “dinner”.

Only Waldo lingered on the stage which no longer contained their wooden play.

These were the flickering, barely-experienced, obsessive moments with which the mind dealt more fully after they had been stored up. At the time, the rambling structure of days impressed its greater importance on the eye by sheer mass of repetitive detail. The Brown boys never stopped, it seemed, marching up the hill to school. There was the endless, suffocating, chalkdust fear of wondering how little you could get away with. There was the rather exhilarating traffic of the yard: taws for liquorice, or liquorice for taws. Brutality left its victories and its bruises. Once Arthur got a ferret from a boy called Eb Honeysett. I’m going to love it dearly, Waldo, Arthur confessed privately, I’m going to call it Scratch. Scratch looked over his shoulder and never came up out of the burrow. They were marching up the hill to school. Waldo could not bear to listen to Arthur breathing the way he breathed, and would look round to see whether anyone behind might be hearing, though of course if they were, he never let on there was anything unusual. He could not bear what he had to bear, his responsibility for Arthur.

Occasionally they went up the hill earlier with Dad — Mother said he would appreciate it — when their father left to catch the train. Dad had to leave pretty early. At times it was barely milky light. The stationmaster’s lamp grated on the morning. But everyone, wider awake than normal, was exchanging conversation about the weather and other matters which had suddenly assumed importance. Dad, who had spent the night clearing his throat and turning on the other side of the wall, was perhaps the widest awake of any of them. As they walked with him past the loaded thistles and rusty docks, or crunched around the little, painted-up siding, Dad’s head, in spite of the hair, the eyebrows, and moustache, had the naked look of cherrystones. At that hour, but only then, he seemed to see through anyone. His eyes, Mother said, were black, though Waldo knew that that was imagination; they were brown. They were terribly brown as Dad stood shuddering in the dewy morning under the billycock hat he continued to wear, and which gave him away as a Pom.

Waldo was always glad when the little train steamed off with Dad in the direction of Barranugli, and they need not expect him back till evening. He had an idea Arthur was glad too. But Arthur would grow sleepy again, and catch hold of Waldo’s hand, which even then Waldo hated.

He would say: “You’re a big fat helpless female,” as they mucked around the sideroads in the blazing dew. In the empty classroom, waiting for the time to pass, he would say: “We’re not propping each other up, are we?” Then, of all times, perhaps he loved Arthur most. It was good not to have to think, but sit.

“I’m that tired,” Arthur used to say, laying his head on the desk, and making the noise as though he had constipation and was straining on the dunny.

“It isn’t ‘that’. It’s just ‘tired’,” Waldo used to say, ever so prim.

It made Arthur giggle. Then Waldo might giggle too, motion rubbing their skins together. In the empty classroom hatred had never broken itself against the blackboard.