The Solid Mandala (28 page)

Arthur was now preparing to go in and make that bread and milk, faintly sweetened, which soothed away the flapping of acidulous stomachs after walks. He used to serve it out in pudding basins, and they would take their basins and eat from them in whichever room they wanted to be. Sometimes they would find they had chosen the same room, or Arthur had flopped down in Waldo's, there was no escaping, nor from the glup glup of someone else's bread and milk. The louder Arthur glupped, the more ingeniously Waldo managed his spoon. He could feel his teeth, in self defence, moving like the false ones of some over-refined female in a business-women's luncheonette, though his own teeth, he knew, were still sound as nails, and when alone, and there was no need to set an example, he would worry food like an animal, his pleasure increasing with the violence of the physical act.

In his brother's company he felt compelled to wipe his mouth, and fold his handkerchief, and say: “If you could listen to yourself eating bread and milk you would hear the tide turning in a sewer.”

Arthur didn't mind. He very rarely cared what people said.

“Why don't you care?” Waldo used to ask because it exasperated him so.

“I dunno,” Arthur said, sucking a tooth. “I think it was that time at the Public Library, before we retired, when you called me sir. After that I didn't bother. I don't care what people say.”

Waldo couldn't be expected to remember every word which had ever been uttered, certainly not those it did your health no good to remember.

So he insisted: “But you should. You ought to take a pride in yourself, and care what other people say.”

Arthur continued sucking his teeth.

“Don't you care if people don't like you?”

“No,” said Arthur. “Because they mostly do. Except Mrs Allwright. And she went away to Toowoomba.”

Waldo hated his brother for moments such as these. While knowing he should be thankful for Arthur's insensitivity.

The day they returned from the walk on which Waldo had decided Arthur should die, the latter chose to remain in the kitchen after the bread and milk was served. Waldo was spared listening to the glup glup for the noise the dogs were making as they crunched, or gnawed, or dragged along the floor the mutton flaps on which they were feeding. It was from such treatment that the kitchen boards, which had sloughed their linoleum years ago, got their rich polished look.

The scrape scrape of the mutton flaps, together with the steady crunching of bone, made at a distance a fairly companionable sound.

Waldo was sitting with his legs apart. He was sitting in the room in which their mother had lived her last illness. He ate by full, openly greedy, quickly-swallowed mouthfuls, because now of course he was on his own, and the closeness of his collected works in the dress-box on top of the wardrobe gave him a sense of affluence. If he sometimes bit his spoon between the more voluptuous acts of swallowing, it was for remembering how he had contemplated burning his papers during those panicky moments on the walk.

He was so annoyed at one stage he called out to Arthur: “You shouldn't have given them the mutton flaps now. Kept them till evening. It's only middle of the day.”

“Yes,” called Arthur through his bread and milk, “I forgot it's only middle of the day.”

If Waldo did not criticize further, it was because they did forget. They both forgot. Sometimes the light reminded them, but the light could not tell them the day of the week. It could not remind them when they had been born, only that they were intended to die.

Why were they always dragged back to this? Or he, Waldo. He was afraid Arthur didn't think about it enough, which could
have accounted for his unconcern when faced with signs and accusations.

Just then Arthur came into the room, and caught his brother wiping out the basin with his fingers, which annoyed Waldo considerably.

Arthur stood looking at him.

“I want to talk to you, Waldo,” he said.

“What is the schoolmaster, the
head
-master, going to announce?” Waldo grumbled.

“We can talk to each other, can't we? We are brothers, aren't we?”

Then Waldo saw it printed up as
HA! HA!

He only grunted, though, and looked with distaste at the empty basin. He would have liked to complain about the bread and milk he had just eaten, but there isn't much bread and milk can lack.

Arthur, the mountain in front of him, finally asked: “Do you understand all this about loving?”

“What?”

This, perhaps, was it, which he most dreaded.

“Of course,” said Waldo. “What do you mean?”

“I sometimes wonder,” Arthur said, “whether you have ever been in love.”

Waldo was filled with such an unpleasant tingling, he got up and put the pudding basin down. One of the dogs, it was perhaps Scruffy, had come in to gloat over him.

“I have been in love,” Waldo said cautiously, “well, I suppose, as much as any normal person ever was.”

By now he suspected even his own syntax but Arthur would not notice syntax.

“I just wondered,” he said.

“But what a thing to ask!” Waldo blurted “And what about you?”

At once he could have kicked himself.

“Oh,” said Arthur, “all the time. But perhaps I don't love enough, or something. Anyway, it's too big a subject for me to altogether understand.”

“I should think so!” Waldo said.

I should hope so, he might have meant.

“If we loved enough,” Arthur was struggling, kneading with his hands, “then perhaps we could forget to hate.”

“Whom do you hate?” Waldo asked very carefully.

“Myself at times.”

“If you
must
hate, there's no reason to pick on yourself.”

“But I can see myself. I'm closest to myself.”

Then Waldo wanted to cry for this poor dope Arthur. Perhaps this was Arthur's function, though: to drive him in the direction of tears.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” he said, to offer his driest resistance.

“Love,” said Arthur. “And that is what I fail in worst.”

“Oh, God!” Waldo cried.

The light was the whitest mid-day light, of colder weather, and Arthur was standing him up.

“If,” said Arthur, “I was not so simple, I might have been able to help you, Waldo, not to be how you are.”

Then Waldo was raving at the horror of it.

“You're mad! That's what you are. You're mad!”

“All right then,” Arthur said. “I'm mad.”

And went away.

Although he was trembling, Waldo took down his box intending to work, to recover from the shocks he had had. After all, you can overcome anything by will. If the will, the kernel of you, didn't exist — it didn't bear thinking about.

So towards evening he re-tied the strings round the bundles of unresponsive papers. He didn't know what had become of Arthur. He went out and walked round and about, mowing down the tall grass, which stood up again when he had passed, because he was light-boned and old.

So he returned to the house in which they lived, and Arthur was standing, beyond avoiding, in the doorway, waiting for him. Arthur was looking old, but seemed the younger for a certain strength. Or lamplight. For lamplight rinses the smoother, the more innocent faces, making them even more innocent and smooth.

Except Arthur was not all that innocent. He was waiting to trap him, Waldo suspected, in love-talk.

So that he broke down crying on the kitchen step, and Arthur who had been waiting, led him in, and opened his arms. At once Waldo was engulfed in the most intolerable longing, in the smell of mutton flaps and dog, of childhood and old men. He could not stop crying.

Arthur led him in and they lay together in the bed which had been their parents', that is, Waldo lay in Arthur's vastly engulfing arms, which at the same time was the gothic embrace of Anne Quantrell soothing her renegade Baptist. All the bread and milk in the world flowed out of Arthur's mouth onto Waldo's lips. He felt vaguely he should resist such stale, ineffectual pap. But Arthur was determined Waldo should receive. By this stage their smeary faces were melted together.

But so ineffectual. Waldo remained the passive, though palpitating, plastic doll in Arthur's arms, which he didn't even attempt to undress, for knowing too well, perhaps, the wardrobe of garments, the repertoire of flesh. Mrs Poulter, who had knitted the sweater Arthur was wearing, must have experienced, if not pleasure, at least satisfied curiosity, probably even a cauterizing fear, in undressing and dressing up her doll. But Arthur, it seemed, was unafraid of anything, and Waldo only afraid of time now that it had begun to slip.

As they lay in the vast bed time was swooping in waves of waves of yellow fluctuating light, or grass. The yellow friction finally revived their flesh. They seemed to flow together as they had, once or twice, in memory or sleep. They were promised a sticky morning, of yellow down, of old yellowed wormy quinces.

Until in the grey hours Waldo not exactly woke, he opened another compartment to find that Arthur had rolled over, onto his back, snoring with a grey, thistly sound, and he, Waldo, was again the dried-up grass-halm caught in the crook of Arthur's sweater. He began almost at once to twitter, for Arthur's illusion of love and a greyed-up grass-halm. If the moustaches had mingled — Arthur was smooth — they should have run off a string of little flannel-eyed boys, and girls with damp ringletted hair. But that
was the way it hadn't worked. The carpet Jew had wrapped them (un)fortunately up.

Presently Waldo creaked out of bed and began stealthily washing up the dirty bowls and things, which normally they left till cement had formed. This morning he was making use of them. To ignore the thoughts Arthur might otherwise pounce on when he woke. So Waldo had to work with care, not to avoid making a noise, but to prevent himself giving room to his thoughts. Noise never woke Arthur. He would lie there well into light, and then, still half-asleep, stay picking the dead skin off the soles of his spongy feet, waiting for an opportunity to barge in on other people's thoughts.

That morning, when Arthur woke finally, he called out to Waldo: “I dreamed about you, Waldo. You had lumps of Pears soap trying to come out of your nostrils. You seemed upset. I wonder what it means.”

Waldo was revolted. He broke a basin.

“Perhaps it means,” said Arthur, “you're afraid of having a baby.”

“I think,” said Waldo, “I needn't have any such fear by now.”

“Did you know Dulcie had two miscarriages? She was more upset than I've ever known her.”

Arthur came shambling in. In that dreadful sweater on a puce theme Mrs Poulter had knitted for him.

“She loved them I believe,” Arthur said, “more than the real children she had.”

“Miscarriages” — Waldo snorted — “are more than real. I know that!”

Arthur sat down, scuffling up his old-man's hair, in which stains of his fiery youth were visible still. If you hadn't known Arthur, his bare feet would have looked peculiarly gentle.

“What are we going to do today?”

“We're going for a walk.”

“What walk?”

“The same.”

Arthur and Waldo were observing each other.

Then Arthur said, with that fluency and lucidity which his crumbly face would suddenly produce: “That's all right, Waldo. Because we'll be together, shan't we? And if you should feel yourself falling, I shall hold you up, I'll have you by the hand, and I am the stronger of the two.”

So there was nothing for it but to go.

Every morning, sooner or later, they went for the walk, longer, and then longer, Waldo always hoped. They would return about mid-day, later if it had been longer. They returned to the basins of bread and milk.

Meat they ate also on occasions: a lump of beef, mutton flaps, rather rubbery from the dangers boiled out of them. Or sometimes they would tempt fate, they would join in stuffing a mutton flap, with the old bent aluminium skewers always taking on fresh shapes, or raining on the floor, as hands fought to contain a sculpture of dough, or torture dead meat into submission. As they slapped and pinned, during their joint effort, they might begin to laugh, probably for different reasons. At least they had the meat in common. While the skewers threatened to pierce their hands.

If Arthur made no other attempt to convert Waldo to the love he preached, it was perhaps because love in the end becomes an abstraction like anything else. From meat to Bonox in several acts. Anyway, brown.

It troubled Waldo no end the night he woke to discover the worst had happened. Sinking low is never sinking low enough. Since he had not yet recovered his vocabulary, he could only call faeces shit.

Or shout and bellow.

When Arthur had lit the lamp he said: “All right, Waldo. Don't we know? I know I'm responsible for a lot.”

As he fetched the basin he added: “But have never jibbed at mopping up.”

Muttering still: “To go back to what I told you. To let Runt and Scruffy in the bed. Then we'd be all of us together.”

Waldo thought he couldn't allow himself to fall asleep ever again. And find
that
. Only walk, which is another kind of sleep.

Which they did every day.

Once he looked at Arthur and said: “At least it must be doing us good.”

Arthur said: “Yes, it's obviously doing us good.”

So that Waldo flung himself at the dress-box almost every afternoon with such passion he had torn off one of the cardboard sides. He sat with his papers spread out round him, weighted with stones when the wind blew. Mostly he corrected, though sometimes, as his throat rustled drily, he would also write.

On one occasion he wrote: In the extreme of his youth, which was fast approaching, Tiresias suffered difficulties with his syntax and vocabulary, he found that words, turning to stones, would sink below the surface, out of sight.