Patrick White: The Solid Mandala

THE SOLID MANDALA

Patrick White was born in England in 1912. He was taken to Australia (where his father owned a sheep farm) when he was six months old, but educated in England, at Cheltenham College and King’s College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war; he returned after the war to Australia.

He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he has turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. Technically brilliant, he is one modern novelist to whom the oft-abused epithet ‘visionary’ can safely be applied. He died in September 1990.

“THERE’S MORE LIFE UP THIS END,” MRS POULTER SAID.

“Yairs,” said Mrs Dun. Then, because never let it be hinted that she did not make her contribution, she added: “Yairs.”

“It’s the shops that gives it life,” Mrs Poulter said. “There’s nothing like shops.”

“It’s the shops all right.”

“These days a woman could do the whole of ’er shoppin’ in Sarsaparilla. But it isn’t the same.”

“It isn’t the same.”

“Not like you catch the bus to Barranugli and spend the mornin’ muckin’ around. Mind you, it isn’t the ha’penny. There’s some women will spend a shillun to save the odd ha’penny.”

Mrs Dun sucked her teeth.

“But it makes a change in a person’s life, muckin’ around the big shops,” said Mrs Poulter. “With a friend,” she said.

“Yairs,” agreed Mrs Dun. “Yairs.”

She was looking straight ahead, past the mounds of hair. A young lady couldn’t squeeze a hat on nowadays even if she wanted to. Mrs Dun was fascinated by the ha’penny. If what Mrs Poulter said was true, some women lost one-and-eleven on the round trip!

“You can muck around on your own, of course,” Mrs Poulter was saying, “but a friend is what makes the difference.”

“A friend,” said Mrs Dun. “Yairs.”

Each of the ladies sat rather careful, because they had not known each other all that long, and the situation had not been proved unbreakable.

“If I hadn’t of spoke to you in the bus that morning,” Mrs Poulter said, “we mightn’t of got to know each other.”

Mrs Dun smiled, and blushed as far as her complexion allowed. Mrs Dun was the sallow sort.

“Though living in Terminus Road,” said Mrs Poulter.

“Both down the same road.”

The bus became a comfort. Even when it jumped, which it did fairly frequently, all the young girls frowning, or giggling, the bolder of them knocking the ash off their cigarettes with their mother o’ pearl finger nails, the two ladies were not unpleasantly thrown against each other. Mrs Dun perhaps benefited from it more, though Mrs Poulter, it could not be denied, enjoyed the involuntary contact with her small, dry, decent friend.

Mrs Poulter sighed. It was so important to be decent.

“What, I wonder,” she asked, “made you,” she coughed, “come to live down Terminus Road?”

“Mr Dun took a fancy to the veranda.”

“You’ve got a nice veranda all right. I like a veranda. A good old-fashioned veranda.”

“I’ll say!” said Mrs Dun.

“Nowadays it’s all payshows. You can’t sit on a payshow.”

“Exposin’ themselves!” said Mrs Dun quite vehemently.

“In all weathers.”

Everyone was too obsessed by the start of another day — no hope this side of the tea-break — to notice the in no way exposed ladies in the eight-thirteen from Sarsaparilla, though it was perhaps doubtful whether anyone would ever notice Mrs Poulter or Mrs Dun unless life took its cleaver to them. For the present, however, they had the protection of their hats.

“Why did you? ” asked Mrs Dun.

“Did I what?”

“Come to live down Terminus Road.”

“Well,” said Mrs Poulter, peeping inside her plump glove to see if the ticket was still there, “when we first come from up north — both my hubby and me was country people — we wanted it quiet like. We was young and shy. Oh, it was Bill’s nerves, too. Bill said: ‘It’ll give us time to find our feet. It’ll always open up in time. Land is always an investment.’”

“Oh, yairs. Land is an investment.”

But a sadness was moistening Mrs Poulter.

“In those days,” she said from out of the distance, “all the roads at Sarsaparilla were dead ends. Not only Terminus. You couldn’t go anywhere as the crow.”

“Eh?” Mrs Dun asked.

“As the crow flies,” Mrs Poulter explained.

“Oh, the crow,” her friend murmured, seeming uneasy at the idea.

“There was a Chinese woman lived on a hill up at the back. I never ever knew her. I seen her once. They were people of means, so people said. Growin’ vegetables and things. They’d planted one of those what-they-call wheel-trees. Well, I seen her standing under it when it was in flower.”

Mrs Dun sucked her teeth.

“You wouldn’t of said she was without refinement,” Mrs Poulter remembered. “But a Chinese is never the same.”

It was something Mrs Dun had not even contemplated.

“And anyway, the Chinese person isn’t the point.”

Just then the bus nearly shook apart, and one of the young lady typists lost her balance. It was those stiletto heels.

“These old buses!” Mrs Poulter heaved, and laughed.

Mrs Dun went a deeper yellow as she grasped the rail.

“They’re a downright disgrace!” Mrs Poulter laughed.

The sadness had been shaken out of her. She was happy again.

Presently she couldn’t resist: “That veranda of yours must be a real luxury, dryin’ laundries in the rain.”

“I’ll say it is!” said Mrs Dun.

She had a certain relentlessness of conviction. If it hadn’t been for her gloves her knuckles would have shown up white on the chrome rail.

The bus was making slow progress, on account of the pay-as-you-enter, and queues at the shelters, and kiddies who had missed the special. Mrs Poulter looked out. She was proud of the glossier side of Sarsaparilla, of the picture windows and the texture brick. She brightened with the leaves of the evergreens which the sun was touching up. Then she saw Bill, and waved. But he did not respond. He went on sweeping the gutters for the Council. It was against Bill Poulter’s principles to acknowledge his wife in public. Sometimes on her appearing he went so far as to take time off to roll himself a cigarette. But never wave. She accepted it. She was content enough to realize he was wearing the old fawn sweater, no longer presentable except for work, because the loose stitch she had been trying out had begun to stretch and sag.