The Solid Mandala (31 page)

Arthur could never take time off like his brother reading books. He would never have been able to protect Waldo if he, too, had so exposed and weakened himself. Arthur could only afford to look up a book on the sly. In time, he thought, he might, perhaps, just begin to understand.

In the meantime there was his family. All the members of his family were frail. As he went down to milk, there they were, sitting on the classical veranda: Mother who knew better than anyone how things ought to be done, had sliced her finger doing the beans; Waldo who knew how to think, was screwed up tighter than his own thoughts; and poor Dad, very little made him sweat under his celluloid collar.

So Arthur had to go carefully. He tried to prevent the bucket from clanking. He was glad of the opportunity to give Jewel's udder a punch — holding up her milk as per usual — and bury his head in their cow's side.

But when he returned along the path of trampled grass, he would have liked to cry. If they wouldn't have seen it. For there they were. Still. With Waldo going to write some old tragedy of a play.

Arthur had by some means to distract.

So he stood the bucket, and said more or less: “I'll act you my tragedy of a cow.”

For nobody would be able to accuse him of not fully understanding a cow. And they sat looking at him, almost crying for his tragedy. As he stamped up and down, pawing and lowing, for the tragedy of all interminably bleeding breeding cows. By that time his belly was swollen with it. He could feel the head twisting in his guts.

Everybody had begun to share his agony, but that, surely, was what tragedy is for.

When Mother suddenly tried to throw the expression off her face, and said: “Oh Arthur, we understand your tragedy without your showing us any more.”

And at that moment he felt Dad turn against him. It was some question of afflictions, Except in theory, the afflicted cannot love one another. Well, you couldn't altogether blame Dad. With his aching leg.

“I wish I knew how it felt,” said Arthur.

“Why?” asked Dad, biting his moustache.

“It would make it easier, wouldn't it? if I understood.”

Dad didn't seem to think it would. And Arthur knew that he
was right. Their limping and lumbering together would not help. For his father it would have been detestable.

As for Waldo, Arthur was closest to his twin when silentest, the moment before falling asleep, or walking down the side roads at Sarsaparilla, or in the class early, after seeing their father off. Dozing awake amongst the quickly solidifying rows of desks, they sat propping each other up.

Except on the morning when Waldo accused.

“You're just a big fat helpless female.”

Arthur did not tell him: If that's the way you want it. He simply said: “I'm that tired.”

He layed his face sideways on the desk, and dreamed a short, unsatisfactory dream about someone he was on the point of meeting.

Then Waldo punching. Waldo shouting.

“Wake up, you dope! They're coming in!”

“They've seen us, haven't they? before, Waldo?”

Waldo gave him that extra punch for luck.

“Waldo the dope and Arthur the dill,” Arthur chanted as the kids came in.

He gave the performance they expected of him. They seemed to like him for it. Arthur was only wretched for betraying Waldo so easily.

Nobody could remember, not even Arthur Brown himself, when he developed his head for figures. The gift was found growing in him, as naturally as hair for instance. He was safest with numbers. The steel springs of clocks could not be unwound so logically. Arthur's awkward fingers would become steel tentacles reaching out for the solution of his problem. What Waldo called those messy-awful melting-chocolate eyes would set hard in the abstraction which should have been foreign to him. How did he do it? He just knew. And immediately after, was laughing it off. The brown sloppy awful eyes had a squint in them too, or in one of them.

“Music and mathematics have something in common,” Mother was happy to remember.

Arthur would have liked them to. But it was Waldo who learned
to play, with care, from Miss Olive Fischer of Barranugli,
The Raindrop Prelude, The Turkish Rondo
, and
Fur Eliza
.

That was later on, however. Till then, Waldo grumbled: “When can I have those real lessons?”

“When the money has been saved up,” said Mother, “you shall both have lessons.”

“What! Arthur?”

“Why not Arthur?” Mother said. “Arthur may be a musical genius.”

Waldo went so silent he must have been offended.

But Mother was determined Arthur should be a genius. She sat beside him remembering all that she had learnt — sometimes of an evening she would flop down on that hard stool and play the Paderewski minuet, crossing her wrists at the moment they were waiting for — but sat beside Arthur stiff and stern to supervise his scales. Arthur's hands became ungovernable then. He could not manage the angular scales, though of course he could hear, he could
see
in advance the splotches of sound. If he could only have moulded music like he knew how to work butter and knead the dough. Or add up the notes until they made a musical whole.

He couldn't. And Mother gave up. She grew sad, though not, she said, on account of that. Instead, they entered deeper into their conspiracy of butter and bread. Only she and Arthur were to understand the mystery they had to celebrate. Arthur was only too glad to adopt the rites she imposed on him. By lamplight he and Mother became their own closed circle in the kitchen.

This development gave Arthur Brown a satisfaction more intense than any he experienced before the coming of Mrs Poulter.

In the meantime they decided schools were wasted on him. Arthur Brown was taken on by Mr Allwright about the time Waldo began at Barranugli High. Arthur Brown's apprenticeship was arranged quite quickly and easily, in spite of, he learned at once, the opposition of Mr Allwright's wife.

He went to the store, and on finding himself the right side of the counter, grew more serious for a bit, took to damping down his orange hair, got the hiccups frequently, and would stand alone waiting for custom, twisting an invisible ring on his little finger.

If he stood alone it was because his employer would be out delivering the orders, and his employer's wife inside, pouring tea for her sister Mrs Mutton, who was almost always visiting behind the shop.

“You must realize, Arthur,” Mrs Allwright explained, “my sister depends on my support. She has never been the same since Mr Mutton passed on. You must just do your best, and make your mistakes, and learn things, like all of us, the painful way.”

When Mrs Allwright said painful she meant painful, that he knew. He knew Mrs Allwright and Mrs Mutton were sitting out there on the closed-in veranda waiting for him to make those mistakes. Like the incident of Mrs Musto's change. That sort of thing was what gave him the terrible hiccups. On one occasion Mrs Allwright administered so large a drink of vinegar it shrivelled his inside and left him winded. From the way she laughed he must have looked comical.

His own solemnity did not last too long. He learned too thoroughly the extent of Mrs Allwright's stock, and could tot up so quick she herself got sarcastic about it.

“Oh dear!” she shrieked. “Don't you put me to shame, Arthur! I'll have to watch out while you're around. You'll catch me out, won't you?”

“You're not all that mathematical, Mrs Allwright,” Arthur had to admit.

Which made her turn nasty.

“I never cared for brass,” she said, “in particular from subordinate young men.”

“Sub-what?” he asked, hiccuping.

But Mrs Allwright had returned to Mrs Mutton.

Even before he learned to drive the buggy his outside duties were more diverting. To run outside and chase away the dogs when they began pissing on the overflow produce. To stack on the veranda the cases delivered by farmers' wives, almost all of whom enjoyed his jokes. Sometimes he would simply lean against a post with the empty theatre of the distance spread around him, no sound but the hooting of a train in the cutting or a chattering of sods in the coral tree, as he took out one of those glass marbles left over from
the school yard. Not to play with. It had developed into something more serious than play. For the circle of the distant mountains would close around him, the golden disc spinning closer in the sky, as he contemplated the smaller sphere lying on the palm of his hand.

He would put it away quickly, though, on hearing anyone approach from behind. He was less afraid of theft, or even total destruction, than he was of damage by scorn.

Once or twice Mr Allwright descended on him before he could hide the marble. But it did not seem to matter. For Mr Allwright's smile slid around and away from it.

He would make a remark such as: “Mare cast a shoe other side of ‘Ferndale'. Remind me Thursday morning, Arthur, to take her up to Harry Booth's.”

Mr Allwright was so discreet.

Even if he had been able to explain to his employer the mystery of his glass marbles, it was possibly unnecessary. As for Mrs Allwright, there was no question. She was a voracious cat who could not digest half of what she gobbled up. He left her to the pleasures of Mrs Mutton's company. Her elder sister, all in black, sat on the glassed-in veranda, sipping Indian tea, and masticating pumpkin scones.

After the storekeeper had taught him to drive the buggy, and he was allowed to go round delivering the orders, Arthur felt more independent than before. To flick the flies off Treasure's rump, as the bay mare clumped and snorted down the empty roads, her rear opening curiously like a passion fruit. The yellow dung went plop plop. Arthur Brown would roll on his seat in time with the buggy long before its motion called for it.

Waldo decided in later years: Arthur is an unconfessed voluptuary.

Arthur liked that; it sounded in itself voluptuous.

He liked best of all to arrive with Mrs Musto's order, crunching round the drive to the back, where Louie presided over the girls, behind the virginia creeper and the plumbing. After he had scrambled down, and gone inside with the deal case full of groceries, they would feed him cherry conserve, or peaches in brandy,
or if he could get there early enough, voluptuous slices of boiled ham.

“I shan't forget how to live, eh?” With difficulty he forced it out, through his stuffed mouth, past his fatty lips.

“Spare the masters, feed the servants. That's my motter!” Louie used to say.

Then when the old girl got on the tube: “That's 'Er. No one need spare 'Er. Not Fairy Flour.”

“Yes, madam. Oh no, madam,” Louie breathed into the mouthpiece. “There is the ham, madam, for luncheon, as we 'ad agreed, hadn't we? Oh yes, madam. After the consommy jelly in
tasses
. And the celery sticks will taste lovely stuffed. And the marsala bomb to finish off with. Yes, madam.”

“No bomb would finish '
Er
,” Louie said after she had stuck the stopper in the mouthpiece.

She and her mistress had been quarrelling it out for close on twenty years.

After the grocery items had been checked, more often than not Arthur would get up and wander past the green baize door to the inner parts of Mrs Musto's house. He had never been denied access to them. Everyone was mostly too busy: dusting, digesting, looking for somebody who couldn't be found, sulking, making it up, or preparing to give in their notice yet again. He would plunge deeper through the high rooms, fingering the blind busts, and books nobody ever read, the unused china, and the photographs of those who had ceased to matter. Mrs Musto seemed on the whole to prefer to know people only slightly. They were always preparing her crammed house for the entrance of someone she hadn't yet got to know.

The morning he went so far as to explore an upstairs room Arthur was surprised to find Mrs Musto standing in her bloomers and camisole. Mrs Musto, too, was surprised. It appeared as though she had just finished having a cry. Her impulse was to scream, until she realized who it was.

“Oh dear, Arthur,” she said, “it is you! I am sure yer will understand.”

Then she flopped into a chair, as though she could not have
stood any longer, her ankles and emotions swelling as they were, and sat like a half-filled bag of flour.

“What is it, Mrs Musto?” Arthur asked, not only because he was curious to know, but because she obviously wanted him to.

“As you are interested,” she said, “it is, well, it is Him. Stubbens, I mean.”

Then she re-arranged her arms, from which the skeins of flesh were dangling over the arms of the chair.

“It is that
creature
,” she said. “Nobody could call me difficult, but I am not wax in
anybody's
hands.”

Remembering the blunt but well-kept hands of the elderly chauffeur who had been a groom, Arthur couldn't help remarking:

“Wouldn't mind betting he manicures them.”

But Mrs Musto ignored it.

“If my husband,” she mumbled, as she bungled her thoughts, “if my husband was only available.”

Arthur waited, because he saw it was intended.

“Ralph — ” Mrs Musto picked her way, “I lost me husband, Arthur, in Palermo. We had gone there against advice. It was already too late. Too hot. Perhaps you know I suffer from the prickly heat. And
She —
this woman from Boston — carried Ralph off by the scruff of the neck — in her teeth, yer might say — if they hadn't been a denture. Out of a
cathedral
!”

Mrs Musto was so upset.

“Ralph could charm the ladies just by lecturin' to 'em. He had fagged it up — out of books — for no other purpose. He could talk to 'em about the Crusades. He told them about those chastity contraptions. I can hardly bear to hear the term, let alone use it. Because, indecency apart, Ralph had assaulted their chastity before they ever guessed he had the key.”