The Solid Mandala (18 page)

Not Mrs Feinstein. She was responsible for nothing. She was beating time, chasing the tail end of a tune, out of her fur sleeve.

Waldo frowned. He wished he could remember what Mrs Feinstein's nose.

He yawned. They had entered on a boring stretch, during which he watched himself opening the Private Papers on a Sunday — such an abuse, but Sunday was the day of abuse — taking out his pen to immortalize a false moment, bottling the essence of Dulcie Feinstein's
sostenuto
.

When a succession of little pure notes trickled from her fingers into the living-room, suddenly and unexpectedly, but right. He could have sunk his teeth in the nape of her neck where the little curls were unfurling, from beneath the bun, with the logic of notes of music on the page.

With less logic than tenacity Dulcie began to shape the
Allegretto
. The paper moon was dangling. Unwisely she allowed herself to indulge in coy skips and pretty side-steps for the
Allegretto
, and did not recover her balance in time for arrival at the precipice.

Dulcie plainly wasn't prepared, and never would be, for Beethoven's prestiferous night. It made her lunge at the piano as if to crack, to tear the walnut open. Her arms lashing. Her fingers clutching at the keyboard. From the muscles in her neck, her throat must have been swelling, knotting, reddening, strangling with the poetry which had got into it.

Would it escape without his assistance? Or someone else's? Waldo could only look at her back and wonder. By now his pants were a network of creases. He thought he loved Dulcie, increasingly, if moodily.

But her back presented itself as a wall which had to be scaled. Was he strong enough? A weak character — oh no, no character is weak if the obsessions are only strong enough. Besides, his obsession was acquiring the surge of Beethoven's proposition. B. was certainly strong enough, if a mightily unpleasant old man writing music on a lavatory wall.

At that moment Waldo Brown realized Mrs Feinstein's nose reminded him of the uncircumcised penis of an Anglican bishop he had noticed in a public lavatory. The connection was too obvious, too obscene to resist, and he was forced to bring out his handkerchief to sneeze.

So much for Dad, he decided. And the Jews. He was sorry about
Dad, the brown burrowing but never arriving eyes, and the twitch of a moustache on your skin years ago.

Dulcie broke off just then, saying: “I can't go any farther.”

Immediately afterwards she turned round, her appearance dishevelled, as though she had walked out between storms. Branches still wet and aggressive had hit her in the face, without however breaking her trance, deepening it even, by making her gasp and swallow down the black draught of sky which otherwise she might have shuddered back from. As she sat looking out at them from her irrelevant body with such a pure candour of expression Waldo saw it was he who had lost. He might never be able to forgive her the difficulties she put in the way of loving her.

“I bit off more than I could chew,” she admitted with that same awful honesty.

“It was my fault, I'm afraid,” Waldo answered politely.

It could have made it worse if Dulcie hadn't been so cool and reasonable, hands in her lap, still seated on the carpet-covered music-stool. Because of this innate reasonableness, which was another surprise silly, frivolous, mysterious Dulcie had sprung on him, he would have liked to counter it with something really good, of such truth, simplicity, and directness, say,
Der Jüngling an der Quelle
, that he would have shamed her further, even deeply, for her pretentious performance of the Beethoven. But he feared Schubert might not collaborate in this. He would have to rely on a few ballads to decorate his passable voice.

For he sensed that Mrs Feinstein was about to invite him to take his turn at showing off.

“Don't you in any way perform, Waldo?” she asked in what he heard to be a disbelieving voice.

So the moment had arrived. He said he would sing a few songs.

“Though I warn you, I accompany myself very badly, with little more than one finger!”

“Oh,” said Dulcie, “perhaps I can help.”

And did when she heard the titles. He sang them
In the Gloaming, The Tide Will Turn
, and
Singing Voices, Marching Feet
. At once he regretted denying his own skill at the piano, for as he glanced down Dulcie's neck, and at her dexterous hands, he
realized he was putting, not so much no expression, as the wrong one, into the words he was singing. Because how could Dulcie have learnt the accompaniments, if not at some sing-song for the Boys? Thumping out worse, no doubt, in a vulgar low-cut blouse, as the bacon-faced men, smelling of khaki and old pennies, propped themselves up on the piano. Anyone coarsening so early as Dulcie, in both arms and figure, could only have acted openly. The authentic AIF brooch she must have worn would barely have held her breasts together.

After this discovery he confessed his voice was dry.

“You will tire yourself, giving so much.” Mrs Feinstein sighed.

And Dulcie said: “I never realized you had such a charming tenor voice.”

With the result that it almost rose again, silkily, in his injured throat.

But the afternoon, like the lolling Arthur, had just about exhausted itself. As the others sat nibbling at a few last crumbs of conversation, his head rolled without waking, and for a moment Waldo noticed with repulsion the whites of his brother's upturned eyes.

If he had not been making other discoveries he would have woken Arthur. Instead he noticed Dulcie was wearing, not the AIF brooch, but a Star of David on a gold chain.

“Are you religious?” he asked, as brittlely as the question demanded.

She pulled an equally brittle face. He might have teased her some more if Mrs Feinstein hadn't wandered off at a tangent.

“I am so sorry,” she said, “You will not have had the opportunity of meeting Leonard Saporta. On another occasion he was to have come, but he had the
grippe
or something, I seem to remember. This time he has been too impulsive. He slammed a door, and cut his hand on the glass knob.”

“Is he a relative?” Waldo asked.

Mrs Feinstein said: “No.”

The mention of relatives set her off sighing again, and he hardly dared, though did finally enquire after the Signora Terni of Milan.

“Old, old.” Mrs Feinstein protested against it. “Very aged.”

Then Waldo grew more daring.

“And Madame Hochapfel?”

Mrs Feinstein was desolated. She emulated Arthur in showing the whites of her eyes.

“Before we have reached Europe,” Mrs Feinstein replied in a voice from beyond the grave.

“Aunt Gaby had lived, Mummy,” Dulcie suggested.

Her idea was to staunch the 'cello music, but it sounded, rather, as though she had turned her mother's lament into a duet.

When Mrs Feinstein began to take herself in hand.

“I don't know what Daddy would have to say to so much Jewish emotionalism. I was thankful we did not have him with us, either in Paris or Milan. Poor things,
they
are devout.” Mrs Feinstein smiled for the sick, though it could have been she enjoyed the sickness. “Of course we did whatever was expected of us while we were there. We did not have the heart to tell them we have given up all such middle-aged ideas, to conform,” she said, “to conform with the spirit of progress. Daddy, I am afraid, who is more forceful in his expression, would have offended.”

After that she disappeared, trailing the outdoor coat she was wearing. It was so out of place. It was also so shapeless it might have been inherited.

Waldo would have woken Arthur, only he saw that Dulcie, in some distraction, had thrown open the glass doors, and was holding her handkerchief to her upper lip, while breathing the rather foetid air of their wartime garden.

“Aren't you well?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “I am
well
! Didn't you gather I am very healthy?”

Suddenly he knew he would like to say: Dearest, dearest Dulcie — taking her hands in his hands with a suppleness not peculiar to them.

Instead he continued standing stiffly, against the prospect of staggy hydrangeas, their leaves yellow and speckled from neglect.

Dulcie, he realized, had begun to cry. Very softly. Which made it worse.

“What is it?” he asked, in a tone to match — worse and worse.

“There is so much I don't, I shall never be able to grasp,” she said abruptly, in a comparatively loud and shocking voice.

At the same time she held out her arms, not to him, but in one of the ugly gestures with which she had fought Beethoven, again in an attempt to embrace some recalcitrant vastness.

Fortunately Arthur woke, and it was clearly time to go.

“Then you can have a proper cry,” Arthur advised through a yawn.

“I've done all the crying, proper or improper, I intend to do,” Dulcie said.

She sounded so very practical.

“Give my regards, Arthur,” she said, “to your mother. I hope one day we shall meet.”

Arthur was dawdling his way through the garden. He could have been feeling depressed.

“Oh. My mother,” he murmured, then: “You mightn't like each other,” he called back.

As it was too probable to answer, Dulcie went inside, closing the door, against the glass panels of which Waldo saw her figure pressed, very lightly, fleetingly. He remembered seeing a fern pressed under glass, the ribs more clearly visible.

Then he and Arthur were going away. Arthur was holding him by the hand.

Anything so unassessable, and in a way he did not wish to assess their relationship with the Feinsteins, was liable to suffer from the more positive occurrences. The Poulters, for instance. The Poulters arrived in Terminus Road perhaps about 1920, anyway, Dad had retired, but had not died. Waldo remembered with difficulty the occasion of his first setting eyes on the Poulters. All too soon there were the heap of bricks, the matchsticks of timber, but before that, yes, he could remember the day the man and woman trampled round and round in the grass, more like cattle let loose on fresh pasture. Then the man appeared to be pacing out dimensions. Mother went inside saying she had heartburn, but Waldo stayed to watch, in spite of the felted chug-chug from somewhere in the region of his throat or heart. The man was a thin one. The woman, more noticeably fleshed, had stupid-looking
calves, which Waldo thought he would have liked to slap if he had been following her up a flight of stairs. Slap slap. To make her hop. After a bit the strangers went away, driving in a sulky with a sweaty horse, lowering their eyes to avoid the glances of those who had the advantage over them by being there already.

“They hired that horse and trap for the day,” Arthur informed the family as they sat at tea eating the salmon loaf.

No one any longer asked how Arthur knew. (He had, in fact, gone across the road, to look closer, and ask.)

“They're from up country,” he said. “Mr Poulter was a rouseabout, Mrs Poulter helped at the homestead.”

“But why have they come down here?” Mother wondered.

“To be more independent,” Arthur explained at once.

Waldo laughed. He had begun to feel gratifyingly superior.

“But why Terminus Road? Why directly opposite us?” Mother couldn't leave it alone.

“They had to go
some
where,” Arthur said.

“What have we got to hide, Annie?” Dad asked.

Only Mother and Waldo knew.

And the Poulters came.

Bill Poulter, who remained scraggy, and awkwardly articulated, began to build the home. There was someone, some lad out of Sarsaparilla, giving him a hand. They were putting together the blank box, very quickly, it seemed, so much so the grey flannel undervests hung darker from their shoulders to their ribs. In the end the structure looked less a square house than an oblong houseboat.

All this time Mrs Poulter had been living in a tin shed on the site. She cooked on an open fire, and the smell of burning wood floated up and crossed the road, together with the smells from her boiling pot, or more accurately, half a kero tin.

Mrs Poulter herself began to come across the road. She borrowed a cup of sugar, a cup of rice. She was the high-complexioned decent young woman they got to know, who put on a brave red hat to walk up Terminus Road to Allwrights' or the post-office. Sometimes Arthur brought the orders home for her, sometimes if it was closing time, they walked down together, Arthur carrying
the brown-paper bags and the newspaper parcels. She seemed to take to him, or at least she didn't mind, as some women did.

From the beginning Mrs Poulter gave the impression of wanting to perform some charitable act.

“If you was ever sick, you know, you'd only have to give us a shout, Mrs Brown, and I'd come across and do what I could. Sit with you at night, or anything like that. Or if it was the men, Bill would. I think Bill would,” she was careful to add.

Waldo knew how this sort of thing embarrassed their mother.

Mrs Poulter told Mother the War had got on Bill's nerves sort of, not that he had been gassed or shell-shocked, or gone overseas even, but from being in a camp. Afterwards he couldn't settle. That was one of several reasons why they had come to Sarsaparilla. Where she hoped to keep a few hens, and grow flowers, she loved all flowers. Bill was going to get taken on by the Shire Council. Only temporary. Because Council labourer wasn't much of a job for a man. Bill could kill, milk, fell trees, he had once entered for a wood-chopping competition though he hadn't won. It was terrible dry up-country where they had come from. That was Mungindribble. Her own people came from Numburra. Her auntie had started having the indigestion, they thought, when it turned out to be cancer. They said, said Mrs Poulter, there was a cure for it from violet leaves. If only she could make certain, she would perhaps grow the violets, and post the leaves in a moist parcel.