The Solid Mandala (32 page)

All this was most mysterious but rewarding to Arthur Brown.

“How did things turn out in Boston?”

“I never cared to enquire. Or Cincinnati. Or Denver City. Ralph always had to play for higher stakes. He never stopped to think whether he had lost the game before. Me, I wouldn't have let 'im
lay a finger on the business. His head,” Mrs Musto explained, “his
business
head was abominable. Otherwise, Ralph was a personable man. One of the sculptured men.” Her voice added to it.

“And do you happen to have a photo of your former husband, Mr Ralph Musto?” Arthur asked. “I mean, it's nice to keep some memento, even of the duds.”

He so much liked to see how other people looked, particularly the husbands of the wives and the wives of the husbands — to work it out.

Mrs Musto grumbled and frowned. Her bosom boiled inside the camisole.

“Ralph,” she said, “was not worth the silver to stand 'im in.”

And opening her mouth she cried out, out of the back of her throat, out of her matrimonial past.

But shut up pretty quick. As though she had realized something for the first time.

“Come to think of it,” she said, “this other one — this
creature —
is the dead spit of Ralph!”

She might have begun hollering again, but remembered enough to gather up her slackness from the chair.

“Oh dear,” she said, “there's this mob I'm expectin'. Evelyn and Bertie are motorin' up, with some divine Peruvian contralto, if she can be got out of bed bi luncheon.

At once Mrs Musto rushed at the pots on her dressing-table, and began to smear, and dab, and hit herself hugely with a powder puff, her bottom sticking out behind.

So Arthur knew he was dismissed.

He meandered down through the cool house, where slavery was made to look the most enticing freedom. He went touching such objects as he passed: the loaded sceptres of tuberoses, a crystal bird, the little Moorish torchbearer, the marbles of Mrs Musto's solitaire board.

Something was nagging at him in the library. He began dawdling through the books, some of them almost too heavy to lift. Some of them. Then his nostrils dilated, with pure animal conviction, or else that psychic sense his mother hoped she possessed. His hair bristling. His blood racing him, his heart thundering, breath
thicker. In no time he was all prickly, looking through the books from which Mr Ralph Musto had learnt more than was good for him. What they would have said at home made him swallow a mouthful of guilt.

He had found, but only just, what he must have been supposed to find, when Mrs Musto came downstairs.

“What,” she said, “Arthur, I never suspected,” she said, “that you were another one for books.

“Yes,” he said, and: “Not exactly.”

Now too guilty even to read.

“Well, I wouldn't touch one,” Mrs Musto said vehemently, “not if I was carried off by a second Deluge, with books instead of animals.”

He could only stand there foolishly, weighed down by the certainly open but trembling book.

“Tell me,” she said, more sympathetic, or inquisitive, “what are you having a read of in Ralph's encyclopaedia?”

She wasn't laughing, so, lowering his head he read out loud, pushing the words well forward with his lips, because he almost doubted he would be able to form them, he was so excited:

“The Mandala is a symbol of totality. It is believed to be the ‘dwelling of the god'. Its protective circle is a pattern of order super — imposed on — psychic — chaos. Sometimes its geometric form is seen as a vision (either waking or in a dream) or — ”

His voice had fallen to the most elaborate hush.

“
Or danced
,” Arthur read.

He was so thunderstruck he was relieved to feel that Mrs Musto, in spite of her enquiry, was preoccupied.

She said: “Evelyn, I think, is on a diet. Oh, dear!”

So Arthur was able to put the encyclopaedia away, and give his most joyful attention to his friend and protectress Mrs Musto.

She was wearing a great hat, on which stiff bundles of feathers had been laid, in the manner of ears of corn in a shallow basket. Although it was still only late morning Mrs Musto was shimmering with moonlight, from her net insertion right down to her ankles, which, it seemed, were hobbled by what looked like a pair of Turkish pants. It was most dazzling. Even her arms, which the
fringe of sleeve above the elbows allowed to escape from custody, were too decently powdered to offend.

“Do yer like me?” Mrs Musto asked, and smiled.

“Oh yes!” said Arthur.

He did so genuinely.

Then again a thought appeared to cross Mrs Musto's face. Perhaps it was the shimmer of her dress which caused her thoughts to flicker on and off, or dart fishlike to the surface.

“Poor Waldo,” she said. “Something must be done about yer brother. I am goin' to give a tennis afternoon, and ask a mob of youngsters. But yer mustn't tell,” she warned sternly. “You understand?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, as he heard the melancholy sound of his relationship with Mrs Musto snapping.

“I shall ask that Feinstein girl,” she decided. “Does it work, though? A
couple
of lost souls.”

Arthur did not know how to say it often has to.

He said instead: “I'd better be getting back to the mare. She's restless when she's finished her nose-bag. By the way, Mrs Musto,” he said, turning in the doorway on a little mat which was threatening to shoot from under his feet, “there isn't any demerara.”

But she was running, hat down, at a big bowl of roses, and didn't hear.

Arthur only half-resumed his round, for thinking, as he clacked at Allwrights' mare, how bitter it was the Feinsteins also, who might have become his private property, were being given to his brother Waldo. If the thought didn't grow unbearable, it was because, as Mrs Musto had pointed out, Waldo was in need of a kind. What this need could be, Arthur was not yet certain, much occupied as he was in working out his own needs and relationships.

Then the thought of the mandalas made him begin again rocking on the buggy seat. If only the curtain on his mystery hadn't stuck halfway up.

That Sunday he decided to ask help from somebody — Dad, or Waldo, either of whom was naturally better informed. Over what remained of the salmon loaf, by then reduced to a pink dribble and the little white rounds of crumbly bone, Arthur was rehears
ing his speech: Now tell me, Waldo, you will know. But suddenly he knew his brother wouldn't. Which relieved him somewhat. Because he would not have cared to ask an intellectual favour of Waldo's face. That left their father. Why he did not propose to ask their mother, he wasn't sure, only that their relationship depended more on obscurity and touch. So there was Dad. Cleaning his moustache of salmon.

When the others had withdrawn to their own more private corners in the house, Arthur began.

“Tell me, Dad,” he said, “there's something I want to ask you.”

George Brown looked at first as though he had been hit.

Then he let out his breath, and said: “If you can't ask me, son, I don't know who you can.”

Dad did not always sound convincing. But Arthur had begun to enjoy it.

“What,” he asked, “is the meaning of ‘totality'?”

Again George Brown might have been recovering from a blow.

“Well,” he said, “it is one of those words so simple in themselves as to be difficult of explanation. So very simple,” he repeated.

Clearing his throat, freeing his teeth, finally blowing his nose.

Then, as he marched out of the room, Arthur of course had to follow, bumping one or two things in the hurry. In fact, together, Dad and he were shaking the whole house.

Dad took the dictionary down.

“Accuracy in the first place can only be called a virtue,” George Brown recommended. “Always remember that, Arthur.”

Arthur said yes he would, while concentrating on holding his breath for what might come.

Dad read out: “Totality is ‘the quality of being total'.”

He looked at Arthur.

“That is to say,” said Dad, he could not clear his throat enough, “it means,” he said, “‘that which is a whole',” adding: “Spelt with a
w —
naturally.”

Then Arthur realized Dad would never know, any more than Waldo. It was himself who was, and would remain, the keeper of mandalas, who must guess their final secret through touch and light. As he went out of the room his lips were half-open to release
an interpretation he had not yet succeeded in perfecting. His body might topple, but only his body, as he submitted the marble in his pocket to his frenzy of discovery.

Arthur discovered Feinsteins too.

Whenever he went up the slope to “Mount Pleasant”, climbing Feinsteins' red concrete steps, usually the morning was at its finest stage of glitter. Sometimes there had been rain, and the droplets were still hanging. Or music. There was often music, and if Arthur did not march in time, as he would have liked to, it was because it wasn't that kind. Cheerful enough, but music which could suddenly knife. There were glossy mornings when he was bleeding trickling through the mouth.

Round the back Mrs Feinstein, a decent sort of woman, used to come out — they did not keep a maid, either from wanting to act modest, or because they only lived there half the time — she would receive the groceries herself.

“You must tell me your name,” she said in the beginning, and ever so naturally replied: “Arthur Brown? That is a name I shouldn't forget!”

“No, Mrs Feinstein,” he said, “and I'm glad you won't.”

So gallant. The ladies liked that — though not all of them.

Mrs Feinstein liked it so much she gave him a cool drink in the kitchen.

“This is ice-cold lemonade,” she said, explaining its virtue.

It was certainly ice-cold, and scented, if rather weak.

“You should drink it slowly, and concentrate,” Mrs Feinstein advised. “Then you will extract the
prana
from this lemonade.”

“The what?”

“It is Indian,” she said, “for ‘vital force'.”

It made her grow thoughtful.

“Of course we don't know exactly if this is a practice which has been
scientifically approved of
, but it's a nice idea, don't you think?”

It gave her so much pleasure, Arthur could only share it. He lost his breath on the lemonade.

Once she let him pull a ship's bell, and it clanged against the music with which the house was filled.

“Ssshhh!” she warned, holding a finger to her large nose.

If he was not encouraged to explore their house it was perhaps because of the young girl inside. Practising.

It added to the mystery of “Mount Pleasant”, and Arthur liked to leave by the other path, when he could look, at first carefully, then pressing his face against the glass, at Dulcie Feinstein's back.

She never looked over her shoulder, although, considering the strength of his interest, it was difficult to believe she could not feel his presence outside. As she played and played — the prickly scales, or the
etoods
, the polkas and gavottes, which would never be for him — his flesh pressed against the pane must have been turning that sickly-plant tone of green, of faces forcing themselves behind glass. From time to time his stomach accepted a delicious thrust of misery. In the Feinsteins' moist garden. In which music broke and scattered, or lashed back, tail to fang, like snakes or thoughts.

Once Mrs Feinstein came out and caught him, and looked the other way so as not to appear annoyed. She was determined, it seemed, though politely, to prevent him seeing more of her daughter. Though he had, he thought, once, at the store: a skinny girl with a dark shadow on her upper lip, standing probably having the sulks beside a bag of potatoes. But that was different. This would have been the real Dulcie swaying the music out of her body and shaking back her dark hair, if her mother hadn't been determined to keep her a faceless mystery. She succeeded too. Dulcie Feinstein never turned round. Only the smell of lanoline drifted sometimes as far as Arthur.

Once in the course of his humdrum yet complicated relationship with Mrs Feinstein he dared mention his brother, and she said yes she knew of Waldo, but delicacy or something prevented Arthur encouraging her to add to her uncommunicative reply.

So he was able to keep the Feinsteins, and particularly Dulcie, as part of his own secret life, which was naturally so unsuspected nobody tried to enter it. What irritated some of them was when a withdrawal into himself drew attention to the luminous edges of his face, where at any time the skin was of a whiteness to suggest blue.

More than anyone Mrs Allwright would grow resentful if she
could tell by his expression that he was absent without leave.

“That boy — ‘man' I shall never hardly bring myself to say — is not
logical
from one minute to another,” Mrs Allwright remarked to Mrs Mutton over the pumpkin scones.

Leave alone someone else's logic, Mrs Mutton had trouble in mastering her own wind.

“I hope the scones are good, Mrs Mutton, Mrs Allwright,” Arthur said, coming round alongside the glassed-in veranda. “Because it would be too bad if they weren't.”

Then Mrs Allwright had to titter.

“You can't help laughing!” she used to say.

Sometimes Arthur would do his best to give the old girls a real good laugh. On one occasion he had even begun to caper and sing:

At that point Mrs Allwright averted her face as if it had been too full of scone, and spoke sounding thick and soggy.