The Solid Mandala (20 page)

The bus ran on.

Waldo was relieved Arthur hadn't found out about Mrs Feinstein's death. He couldn't have. He would have announced it immediately.

So Waldo kept quiet. He would have to write, he supposed, although, when you came to consider, he had barely known the woman. Even so, Waldo composed several letters, none of which was suitable, one being too literary, another too matter of fact, almost bordering on the banal, a third, though addressed to the father, suggested by its tone that it was intended for the daughter.

So Waldo decided to walk over to O'Halloran Road quietly one week-end. It was a Sunday, as it turned out, which made his decision more discreet, formal in a way. As he walked, it even began to appear momentous. Could it be that this was one of the crucial points in his life? His mouth grew dry at the idea. He had, if he wanted to be truthful with himself, thought vaguely, though
only vaguely, once or twice, that in the end he might decide to marry Dulcie Feinstein. Now her mother's death was helping a decision crystallize by introducing a certain emotional compulsion and inevitability. It was obvious they had both been waiting for some such occasion to drop their defences and accept an arrangement which could only turn out best for themselves.

As he walked along the roadside, thoughtfully decapitating the weeds, Waldo went over the ways in which he would benefit by marriage with Dulcie. On the financial side they might have to skimp a bit at first, because he would refuse to touch anything Dulcie brought with her until he had proved himself as a husband. Nobody would be in a position to say theirs was not an idealistic marriage. The ring — they would decide on something in the semiprecious line, of course, though he would not suggest an opal, as some women were foolish enough to believe opals bring bad luck. Then, the home. Undoubtedly he would benefit by having a home of his own. A bed to himself. And the meals Dulcie would prepare, rather dainty, foreign-tasting dishes, more digestible, more imaginative and spontaneously conceived. Because food to Mother was something you couldn't avoid, and which she had always offered with a sigh. But it was his work, his real work, which would benefit most. The atmosphere in which to evolve a style. The novel of psychological relationships in a family, based on his own experience, for truth, illuminated by what his imagination would infuse. One of the first things he intended to do was buy a filing cabinet to instal in his study.

It was all so exhilarating. He wondered whether Dulcie would affect surprise. More than probably. He doubted whether any woman, faced with that particular situation, ever came out of it completely honest.

When he arrived at the house Waldo was surprised to find it didn't look any different. He had feared it might be wearing an oppressive air. As it wasn't he felt relieved, though he couldn't help wondering a bit about the Feinsteins. They had
seemed
very fond of the old girl.

He went up, and into the long room in which his relationship with the family had grown. Now there was a smell of dust, of
furniture disturbed, of new, glaring packing-cases. Waldo almost protected his eyes. And heard his breath snore backwards down his throat on discovering his brother Arthur seated with Dulcie on the sofa. They were facing each other, their knees touching. Waldo couldn't help noticing Dulcie's, because her skirt was drawn up higher than usual, exposing the coarse calves which filled her black stockings. For at least she
wore
mourning.

Dulcie and Arthur looked round, out of some intimate, not to say secret, situation in which they had been discovered.

Dulcie couldn't help laughing, which made her look, you couldn't say pretty, but healthy.

“Poor Waldo has seen a ghost!”

Arthur too laughed a bit.

“He got a shock because it's me.”

It was certainly a shock. Arthur was wearing a coat besides, which he almost never did, and his hair was darkened to a deep chestnut by the watering it had undergone.

“Anyway,” he said, “I'm going now, because I've done what I came for. I still have a lot of messages to run, and you like to have Dulcie to yourself. Waldo,” he told her, “is just about the jealousest thing you'll find.”

Waldo could get nothing out but a mumbling, “I I I,” at the same time propping himself against one of Feinsteins' obscenely physical chairs.

But Arthur and Dulcie were again ignoring him.

“Arthur, dear,” Dulcie was saying, “thank you again. I am so touched.”

She was looking into her hand. She could hardly express herself, it appeared, as she sat on the sofa, in her black dress, turning her face at last towards Arthur. Although her mother had died, Dulcie's was not a mourning face. Her expression, rather, attempted to offer joy to those she addressed. Her eyes shone, no longer like those of a suppliant spaniel, but a woman, Waldo feared, of some experience and certainty.

“You can tell if you like,” Arthur said. “Otherwise people may feel hurt.”

“I shall have to make up my mind,” Dulcie answered.

She was offering her face almost as though for a kiss. Waldo forced himself to concentrate on the ugly shadow of Dulcie's encroaching moustache.

“For the moment,” she was saying, “I'd like to keep it as something between ourselves.”

“That's up to you,” said Arthur.

He was trying to imitate a man giving his permission, but had to finish it off with a boy's wriggle of his fat neck. After that, he left.

Waldo was embarrassed, not only by the situation, but by the shambles of a room, the clutter of old newspapers, and the packing-cases which Dulcie, apparently, had been filling dutifully with ornaments and books.

“I'm sorry if I interrupted,” Waldo felt he ought to say.

He was glad he hadn't composed a speech to suit his intention, because certainly he would have forgotten it.

“It was nothing,” said Dulcie, “nothing.”

It didn't sound convincing, and she got up and emptied her hand into a little tortoiseshell box, which she took out of one of the half-packed cases, and which Waldo had noticed in a cabinet in the days of false permanence.

“What I came to say was really of no importance either.” Perhaps that was going too far. “I mean,” he said, “it is not of immediate importance, because Mrs Feinstein, and nothing I can say in sympathy will help,” he said, “either you, or your father. Or Mrs Feinstein.”

He was pleased with that, its humility.

Dulcie had begun to bite her lip. She was after all a loving daughter. Or was it a dutiful one? Waldo thought he might prefer a dutiful to a loving wife. It was not that he was cold, exactly, but would have to give so much time to his writing.

“Mother was unhappy towards the end,” Dulcie was saying. “Her aunts meant so much to her. She resented their being carried off. Then there was the matter of her conscience. But I can't very well go into that. One's conscience is one's own affair.”

The word “affair” sounded ill-chosen. Otherwise he was impressed by her rational approach.

“How I agree!” he said quickly. “Nobody should meddle with another's conscience.”

He looked at her to see what line he should take next. But Dulcie apparently wished to talk about herself.

“Everybody has been so kind,” she said. “Since it happened — that was too terrible to tell about — I haven't felt unhappy. I never expected the death of somebody I loved could make me happy. But it has, Waldo. It seems to have made the living more accessible. Arthur, for instance,” Dulcie paused. “He was right, I see now, in suggesting I should tell others what he has done for me, given me. He brought me,” she paused again, “one of his glass marbles.”

Waldo was astonished, then horrified, at the strangeness of it.

“He calls them,” she was continuing.

But there Dulcie hesitated longer, as though she were not yet ready.

“Yes! Yes!” Waldo got it in quickly, so that she would understand, either that he knew, or that he didn't want to be told. “Poor Arthur!”

He was in fact deeply relieved to discover Dulcie was such a compassionate girl. Her acceptance of Arthur, her interest in his brother, helped him to visualize himself in sickness. She was cool. She had a soothing, practical hand.

“I always wanted, Dulcie, to understand you,” Waldo said, “and today I believe I can. What I have found,” he stammered, “is exactly what I hoped to find.”

Dulcie was looking at him, obviously wanting to hear more. As a student of human nature, he knew that nobody, however modest, could resist being told something more about their character. Ladies, moreover, were the livelihood of fortune-tellers.

“Dear Dulcie,” he said, “my feelings for you are based on what you truly are. You are what I need, and I hope what I can offer will be what you feel you want. We have music and literature in common. Taste, I like to think. There can't be religious differences, because each of us has seen the light. We expect nothing of life but what we can humanly make of it.”

If only the Feinsteins' room hadn't grown so still. He had begun to hear the silence. Dulcie in her black dress was at her very very
stillest. She could perhaps be waiting to break out in some demonstration of love. Modesty no doubt had imposed restraint, until she could feel she had received the last inch of encouragement. Or had he offended? Was it about religion? Which was always and unexpectedly liable to raise its ugly head.

Then Dulcie, suddenly, was overflowing with what, in spite of faith in his own proposition, he had hoped to postpone hearing. He would have much preferred to see it in writing, because, after all, situations of such a nature could only be of the embarrassing sort.

She began shaking her head in what appeared a convulsion of passion. He was surprised at the strength of her hand, and wondered how he would manage her.

“Oh, Waldo, Waldo!” Dulcie was almost crying. “It never entered my head that anyone else could get hurt!”

Then she sat down again, bringing a crump out of the sofa, and the smell of dust, but it had to be remembered the Feinsteins had spent only part of their time at the house at Sarsaparilla.

“Anyone,” he said, “anyone at all sensitive expects to suffer in love. That is what refines it.”

“But,” said Dulcie, sinking her chin, swallowing some recurrence of emotion.

Although the scene was going to his head he didn't forget he must not lose touch with a lower level, and balanced himself accordingly on the sofa beside her. He would not stare, but was immensely conscious of her eyes brimming with a love she was still too timid to express. Tender Dulcie!

“I am not in love, though,” she said. “At least,” she said, “I am afraid,” but there she halted.

“There is nothing to be afraid of.”

He said it in a tone not suited to his voice, but felt he carried it off.

Then Dulcie had begun again in a strain which repressed emotion was making exceedingly dry. The springs in the dust-coloured sofa groaned.

“I'm afraid, Waldo, that what I want to say is: I can't love you in the way you seem to want me to.”

Sympathy swam on the surface of her eyes, he began to realize with disgust, watery sympathy, or worse still, poisonous pity; yet in their depths Dulcie's eyes appeared to remain passionate.

“Because I am in love,” she said.

If only their attitudes had been less awkward. But the angle at which he was placed on the sofa made sitting downright painful.

“I'm in love with, I'm engaged to, Len Saporta.”

He remembered her saying on a former occasion: “I'm really a very mundane individual,” and now she had tried to inject her announcement with something of the same banality, but there Dulcie failed. Her voice reverberated. The pity she was offering him shone with what she was unable to share. Her bosom, the riper for experience, filled not not, he hoped, with indecent impatience. He looked down fascinated at her breasts. He was never quite sure of that part of the anatomy, of what it might contain.

“It's a pity,” he said, “your mother will never know.”

That a daughter became engaged while a mother was still high in her coffin, he prevented himself adding.

“Oh, but she did! She knew,” said Dulcie. “She half-agreed. There was only this dreadful business of conscience. Though that was only on account of my father.”

Dulcie was quite prepared to let nobody's conscience rest, except apparently her own. Waldo did not greatly care by now.

“Leonard, you see, is a practising Jew. And our darling, neat-and-tidy rationalist parents are apt to throw fits over principles.”

Gongs could not have sounded louder in Waldo's ears.

Dulcie looked down.

“I am making it sound frivolous,” she said, “because I can't convey the importance of the step I'm taking. There are times,” she said in a suddenly metallic voice, her tongue acting as a quivering clapper, “when I am deaf, dumb, and blind with it.”

Or besotted, as women become, he had read, with some man. For this one coming into the room. For this Jew. For there was no doubt the young man, of physical, not to say vulgar appearance, now entering, was Mr Saporta.

What hell!

Dulcie looked, and Waldo avoided her dazzlement.

“This is my fiancé, Waldo,” she recovered herself and added.

They were again in Australia.

“I've never stopped hearing about you, Waldo,” Leonard Saporta said.

He gave one of those big laughs, which come up deep, leathery, but most respectful, from the region of the pocket-book. He also gave his hand, fleshy, but firm flesh, promising a warmth of male comradeship. Leonard Saporta was obviously designed for clubs, if a club would have admitted him.

“And now we meet!” Again ox-eyed Saporta laughed, sweating at the roots of his nose. “Whatever prevented us till now? Fate, eh?”

Waldo could not think of a better answer than Saporta's own — unless a glass door-knob and the 'flu. It was thoroughly ridiculous what all three of them were going through. Even Saporta, probably an athlete, as well as the returned soldier his badge proclaimed, worked only by consent of hinges. These allowed him to incline just so far in the direction of his new-found, valued friend. In slightly different circumstances Waldo could have been the object of his courtship, Waldo felt. Well, he wouldn't have fallen for it.