The Solid Mandala (23 page)

With so much reading, and the kind of conversation they made, time passed.

Then suddenly he noticed, or the inexorable Mrs Poulter had, the eyeballs were lolling, the long yellow teeth were protruding from their mother's skull, her fingers, to which Arthur would attach the figures of cat's-cradle, stuck out like sticks at the ends of her arms.

Noticing him stare at her, Mother said: “At least we have our health, whatever else is taken from us.”

Waldo Brown blundered out, the grass catching at his ankles, the moths and one of his father's paper bags hitting him in the face. Crossing the road he heard to his surprise its foreign surface under his feet — of the road beside which they had lived their lives.

“Yes, Mr Brown,” Mrs Poulter said. “I'll be only too happy.”

Mrs Poulter brought the doctor. And the minister, as she had threatened. Amongst them they arranged for Mrs Brown to be removed to something called a Home of Peace. They sent for Waldo, but before he could arrive his mother was gone, fortunately too drugged to realize the damage to her principles.

Waldo said he wouldn't go in. He did not care to look at her, because what was the point. Dead, he said, is dead. One had to be realistic about it.

Arthur, whom he hadn't allowed to accompany him, dreading the almost inevitable scene, murmured that he would speak to somebody who'd know what ought to be done about their mother. In the special circumstances, it did not seem improbable, and Waldo let him.

So Anne Quantrell — never a Brown in spite of her love for that sallow little man with the gammy leg — was cremated by arrangement.

Waldo was surprised to hear Arthur had been present.

“Who arranged it all?” Waldo asked somewhat cagily.

“Mr Saporta.”

Nothing more was said. Arthur's incomplete mind must have included compartments in which delicacy predominated. Or he may have sensed intuitively something of the hurt Dulcie had done Waldo by not respecting his intentions, by refusing to accept his sacrifice, and devouring instead that vulgar commercial Jew, Saporta. So at least dotty old Arthur kept quiet, until a couple of years later when, perhaps through no fault of his, though seemingly by somebody's pre-arrangement, the ghastly meeting between Waldo and the whole Saporta family was staged on a corner of King and Pitt. After the accident, in which Waldo lost his pince-nez, and decided it would be more practical to replace it with spectacles, Arthur did recapitulate, inevitably, the whole Feinstein-Saporta history. Waldo forgave him. There was too much else to disturb Waldo, then, and over many years.

There was Crankshaw first and continuously.

It was difficult exactly to put a finger on what difference in mediocrity distinguished the Librarian from the mediocre. Mr Crankshaw was several years his junior when appointed the superior of Mr Brown. For anyone so heavy, such a bear in pinstripes, Crankshaw trod remarkably gently round the sensibilities of those who were officially inferiors, without ever, but ever, failing to bruise. From time to time Waldo considered opening a special notebook in which to analyze the character of Crankshaw,
working up his observations into a portrait, a detail eventually of some vast corrosive satire on the public services. (Fortunately such victims were always too vain or too obtuse to recognize themselves.)

Poor Crankshaw, he was almost obliterated by brisket and a jutting forehead. He had the hands of one who had felled timber, without having known the feel of an axe, except the one he used, by law of gravity, on those beneath him. He had read several books, and was personally acquainted with that priest who wrote
Around the Boree Log
. Crankshaw's pet subject, however, was Numbers of Readers. Poor Turnstile Crankshaw! Would receive an obituary, anyway, as a public servant in an unassailable position. He had a wife who reeked of the dry-cleaner's, and three or four girls in white hats, who gave shower teas for their friends, without ever being showered upon themselves. Poor Crankshaw.

Waldo might have felt magnanimous if he had not been persecuted. But one of the juniors would come tapping on his desk:

“Mr Crankshaw, Mr Brown.”

Crankshaw would heave himself creakingly round in his bucket chair. He was so heavy.

“Mr Brown,” he began, on the first of several progressively intensifying occasions, “we are starting a welfare drive. Do you find you have time enough to digest your sandwich?”

There was a catch in this, for Waldo bought nuts from the Health Food in the arcade, and chose a banana, very carefully — just on the turn — at Agostino's.

“I would not,” he replied, looking at Crankshaw with that degree of steeliness he had forgotten practising as a little boy, on the advice of a booklet on
How to Succeed
, “I wouldn't have, if I hadn't given up sandwiches years ago, the quality of Sydney bread being what it is.”

Crankshaw lowered his eyes to look at the folder he was holding.

“Any draughts?” he asked peculiarly.

Was this some obscure reference to the mistake he had made in that report on damage to
The Golden Bough?
That was years ago, and Waldo hoped, forgotten.

Contempt might in time have transferred itself to his mouth in sounds, but Crankshaw was not interested to wait.

“Very well, Mr Brown,” he said.

Then looked up. That jutting forehead, split down the centre of its louring bone, the cleft hinted at again in the chin, which, it was said, is the sign of a lover. Waldo almost sneeze-laughed. Love me, Cranko, in a white hat!

And Crankshaw looking.

“Are you a Catholic?” the Librarian asked very gently.

If it had not been so subtle, if Waldo had not been keyed up to match his wits against Crankshaw's question, he might simply have turned and gone out of the room. Instead, he modified his disapproval.

“Technically, I think, Mr Crankshaw, I am not required to answer,” Waldo said, and added, by inspiration, he congratulated himself afterwards: “I prefer not to confirm what you have already in your folder.”

Crankshaw looked so wry-mouthed. He could only end the silence with a laugh, and dismiss his superior subordinate.

So much — this time — for Crankshaw, said Waldo, brushing a few nuts off his own table. He was relieved to return to his corner. He had the trimmest collection of pencils. Was sweating under his collar, though. And knew that his spectacles would have left those white marks, where the metal had eaten into his skin, during a distressing incident. The odder part was: Crankshaw himself must have been a Catholic, considering his intimate friendship with the priest who had written
Around the Boree Log
.

Priests in white hats. You never could tell.

This Was the year Waldo Brown began what became a considerable fragment of his novel
Tiresias a Youngish Man
. He was invited, too, in a roundabout way, to address the Beecroft Literary Society, and did, or rather, he read a paper on Barron Field. Afterwards over coffee and Petit Beurre a solicitor congratulated him on the thoroughness of his research. Modesty forced Waldo to admit that the subject was a minor one, but he hoped and felt he had left no stone unturned. Finally, a lady novelist of the Fellowship, had asked him to an evening at her home, to which he hadn't gone, for scenting sexual motives behind her insistence.

With all this, it was incredible to think a second
war
had broken
out, though of a different kind. For men were tearing one another to pieces in a changed ritual. Mother would not have been in the race with Cousin Mollie's Japanese doll.

Waldo couldn't help noticing a certain ferment in the streets. Arthur wouldn't have let him ignore it.

Arthur said: “Over in Europe they're dragging the fingernails out of all those Feinstein relatives. They're sticking whole families in ovens.”

“What's that to do with us? We don't put people in ovens here.”

“We didn't think of it,” Arthur said.

Arthur had a pen friend who was a soldier. He sent his friend a comb, short enough to fit inside the envelope. It began haunting Waldo, the young corporal combing his hair in a desert, singing
Yours
to a red sunset. The wretched Arthur would not leave anyone alone. Though of course the censor would never allow the comb to arrive.

Waldo was relieved to think that not everybody was irresponsible. Only at night his doubts would return, when the waves of yellowing grass thundered down Terminus Road, to break against what, in spite of the classical pediment, was a disintegrating wooden box, and the great clouds rolled down out of Sarsaparilla to collide in electric upheaval over his undeserving head. Thus pinpointed, he stood accused of every atrocity over and above the few minor ones he had committed unavoidably himself. If it had not been for the insufferable mental climate occasioned by the War, and his incidental, though demanding public career — to say nothing of his ever present family problem — he might have committed to paper that metaphysical statement for which he felt himself almost prepared. One great work, no longer question of an
oeuvre
. As it was, the War killed
Tiresias a Youngish Man
. Its substance was bound to return, of course; creative regurgitation would see to that. But in the meantime, in this state of perpetual night and frustration, Waldo would throw himself on the knife-edge of his body in the bed in which they slept, or his twin Arthur did — he himself was more often than not incapable of sleep for dreaming.

Not long after Dad died Mother had said: There is no reason
why you boys shouldn't have this larger bed, after all you are men, and I shall take the bed and room you have outgrown. So they moved into what had been their parents' bed, where Waldo gradually overcame his distaste. It was not for Arthur, Arthur was inescapable. It was their father's limp disjointing his thoughts, it was even more, the great baroque mess of their Quantrell heritage, which Waldo loved to distraction, its crimson rooms and stone corridors extending through the terrors of sleep and war. By comparison, their own immediate Tudor imbroglio was a mere bucket of blood.

On one occasion, during the night, during the despair, Arthur had comforted Waldo.

“You had the blues last night,” Arthur yawned.

You never knew what distortion of fact he might come out with. But Waldo could not feel concerned on such a clear morning, himself a man of responsibility and discretion, almost of action, as he dashed at his hair with a touch of brilliantine. His hair lost that dusty look. He settled the expanding arm-bands on purposeful arms.

“By gosh,” he said quite boyishly, “the old Municipal's fairly going to hum.”

“How?” asked Arthur out of a yawn.

As he grew older he liked to take it easier. He would lie in bed until he heard the fat spitting. Then he would rise, in a flurry of iron joints, a ringing of brass balls.

“Matters are coming to a head,” said Waldo, but would not explain beyond: “It concerns our friend Crankshaw.”

“You'll have my blessings,” Arthur said, “as you gather round the boree log.”

Actually Waldo was surprised he had succeeded in forming any kind of plan during the years of anxiety and stress through which he had been living. Quite apart from everything else he had always been expecting Cissie Baker to return clutching those few poems perpetrated by her dead brother and his former colleague Walter Pugh. He could not have borne the first sight of her black figure creaking through the turnstile.

That morning the old Municipal, as if regretful of having provi
ded a setting for what Waldo had catalogued as
Inquisition of a Living Mind
, was spreading snares of nostalgia and regret. Even ugliness has its virtue in the end. Certainly Waldo's corner was darker than ever, but it had driven him on occasions to pour light on obscurity, just as the stench of disinfectant on that morning sternly assaulted a wretched catarrh and stripped the last vestige of doubt from his intention. He was so spare and purposeful as he went and stuck his nose for the last time in one of the linted books, which, ever since his youth and the patronage of the late Mrs Musto, had reminded him of the stink of old putrefying men in raincoats. Smelling them for the last time he laughed out loud in the deserted stacks.

Then he sat down and wrote several drafts before the final version.

He let it be eleven before knocking on the Librarian's door. There was still a mouthful of muddy tea in Crankshaw's cup, and he had not yet started looking for something to do. The room smelled, as always, of the beastly treacle in an old and bubbly pipe.

“What can I do for you, Mr Brown?” Crankshaw asked, ever so affable, moving a box of pins from A to B.

Little realizing how he would be pricked.

“Mr Crankshaw, I have decided to resign,” Waldo said, coming to the point. “In fact, I am tendering my written resignation.”

And he fetched the paper round on Crankshaw's desk with a frivolous twirl, unrehearsed, which reminded him once again of the maid in a Restoration play, though this time he did not care.

Crankshaw was obviously stunned.

“Have you given it all possible thought?” he asked between bubbling into his filthy pipe.

Waldo appreciated the
all possible
. Thoroughly characteristic.

“I have been thinking it over for years,” he said not quite accurately.

“Made any plans?”

Waldo said no he hadn't though he had but wasn't going to tell.

The Librarian looked at Waldo, who was again conscious of the cleft chin, which, so it was said, is the sign of a lover.

“If there is any way in which I can assist,” Crankshaw offered.

It was the exact tone of his dictation.

“We have never, it seems, got to know each other, not, I mean, as human beings, and everyone, I expect you will agree, has the potentialities.” So Crankshaw uttered. “I would have liked to see you out at Roseville. We might have had a chat. But apparently I was slow in asking.”