The Solid Mandala (35 page)

“Why did you marry Mr Poulter?” Arthur asked over the tea she had poured out in thick white cups.

Mrs Poulter laughed, and thought.

“Well,” she said, “there was his hands. Bill had lovely hands. A man's hands, mind you,” she said.

Arthur looked at his own.

“Of course,” she said, “he's mucked them up by now. Couldn't help it. A working man. Times when he worked on the roads, too. But I must have fell for Bill's hands.”

“Can he play the piano?” Arthur asked.

“Bill would have a fit!” Mrs Poulter was certain.

At that moment Arthur wanted so badly to play the piano, he knew he could have done it, only Mrs Poulter did not own one.

“Here,” she said, “you'll think I'm a funny sort of woman.”

Suddenly anxious, she came and sat down opposite, at the kitchen table.

“Bill's hands! I married Bill because he was the only thing I could ever think of. And because he needed me,” she said.

She leaned so close, almost crouching over the table, he could see the moisture on her sunburnt skin, he could see down the crack between her breasts.

“I expect he must have needed somebody,” Arthur said, serious and interested. “The darning and all that.”

“Yes,” she said.

Her rather blunt white teeth were showing in her smile.

“Bill couldn't put on a mutton-flap to boil.”

She was that firm and pretty, with her smooth arms, and wedding-ring.

“I wonder why I'm telling you all this?”

“Because that's the way people have a yarn.”

“Yes,” she said, laughing. “But a man!”

“A man isn't all that different,” he said, sipping the disinfectant-coloured tea, which had turned pretty mawky by now.

“Not different in himself, I suppose,” she said. “
Some
men. Oh, Idunno!”

Her doubt was not deep enough to last.

“Ah dear,” she said, “it might have been lonely here.” She went and stood against the window. “With only your mum opposite.”

“Mother's good,” Arthur said.

“Ah yes,” Mrs Poulter agreed. “I didn't say Mrs Brown wasn't good.”

Mrs Poulter loved her potplants. She would keep on poking at them, ruffling them up, tweaking them as she talked. From time to time she would stand back to get a better look.

“Do you like boiled fruit-cake?” she asked.

“Too right I do!” said Arthur.

“One day I'll boil a fruit-cake. Ah dear,” she cried, remembering, “there's a lady at Mungindribble has a lovely recipe for boiled fruit-cake. If I only knew.”

“You could write for it, couldn't you? Eh, Mrs Poulter?”

“Yes,” she said, as though she wouldn't.

She was tweaking her cerise geranium.

“It's that long,” she said, “since I got a letter. I knew a girl — one of the housemaids at the station — used to write letters to herself. They took her away in the end.”

“What, to Peaches-and-Plums?”

“What's that?”

“That,” he said, and laughed, pleased because he was able to tell, “why that's the nut-house down at Barranugli. They planted it out so lovely with flowering things that people call it Peaches-and-Plums. See? People come from all round when it's the right season.”

She was delighted.

“Well I never!”

It was the embroidery of life on which they were engaged. They followed no particular pattern and could seldom resist adding another stitch.

That Arthur Brown. Harmless enough. Nobody could ever accuse you.

From her house, like a houseboat moored in the backwaters of grass, Mrs Poulter would often beckon. To tell. To show.

Once she showed him a bloodstained finger she had found in a match-box, in the grass beside the road. Arthur was so upset he had to sit down on Mrs Poulter's step.

“In the grass?” he panted.

“Go on!” she cried. “Don't be silly! It's a trick I learned!”

Which, in fact, it was: Mrs Poulter's own finger, got up with red ink, stuck through the end of the match-box, lying on a bed of cottonwool.

“Golly,” she said, “you're a kid,” she said, “Arthur, at times!”

She had to touch him to comfort him.

And once at dusk, when her husband had gone up the road, taking the cow for a late service, Arthur Brown had jumped out at Mrs Poulter on her way back from the dunny to the house.

“
Urrrhhhh
!” she screamed.

“Ha! Who got a fright?”

She had, too. She had broken out in the trembles.

“Thought I was going to criminally assault!”

Even after they had pushed inside her house Arthur couldn't get over his joke.

“That's the sort of thing I don't go for. Not a bit of it, Arthur. Never ever do it again,” Mrs Poulter said, switching on the light.

Then he was afraid his friend might have stopped liking him.

“Are you honest?” she had to ask.

He was so afraid, he hoped the light would show her he was.

“Don't you know me, Mrs Poulter? Eh?”

“I thought I did,” she said.

“When shall we go for a walk, eh? For another walk?”

“That depends,” she said, “on a lot of things.”

Her eyelids would not let him make sure.

“Now,” she said, taking up a book, “I'm going to settle down. By myself.”

Mrs Poulter liked to read the paper for the deaths and ads. She did not care for books, though she owned two. She owned the Bible and Pears' Cyclopaedia. Sometimes she would sit with one or the other, which meant, he discovered, that she had begun to get sick of him.

“I'm going to settle down, and have a read of the Cyclopaedia,” she was telling him now.

Of course it was inconceivable that Mrs Poulter shouldn't want him to walk with her. He knew this as he went away. Or did he, though? Arthur was sweating, he was crying, as he crossed back over Terminus Road. Too many pictures of contentment flickered in front of his mind's eye. She had a little black pig which ran rootling round the back yard. She could lift the combs out of the hives without ever bothering to put on a veil. She stored pears on high shelves, the burn fading out of her skin towards the armpits.

Once Arthur dreamed the dream in which a tree was growing out of his thighs. It was the face of Dulcie Feinstein lost amongst the leaves of the higher branches. But Mrs Poulter came and sat on the ground beside him, and he put out his hand to touch what he thought would be her smooth skin, and encountered rough, almost prickly, bark. He would have liked to wake Waldo to tell him. In the morning of course he could barely remember.

And in the morning, it was a Sunday, Mrs Poulter said: “What
about that walk, Arthur, you and me was going to take? Oh,” she said, “not
now
! Morning's for church, isn't it?”

So he had to wait.

For the rather sultry, still stately afternoon, while people were either asleep, or holding their full stomachs, or totting up the past with a relative. He saw Mrs Poulter looking up and down, still dressed in her church-going clothes.

“Where shall we go?” she asked.

“I dunno,” he said, and sighed.

So they went.

They crossed paddocks, they stalked like turkeys through belts of thinned-out scrub, they visited a plopping creek where neither had ever been before. Arthur picked up the dry cow-pats and sent them spinning through the Sunday air. If neither spoke they were not so far absent, it seemed, from each other's thoughts.

“Funny none of you Browns never ever went to church,” she said.

“I suppose they went in the beginning. Till they found out.”

“Found out what?”

“That they could do without it.”

“Ah, but it's lovely!” Mrs Poulter said.

“They began to feel it wasn't true.”

“What isn't true?”

He saw her raise her head, her neck stiffen.

“Oh, all that!” said Arthur Brown, spinning a cow-turd. “About virgins. About Him,” he said.

“Don't tell me,” said Mrs Poulter, as prim as Waldo, “that
you
don't believe in Our Lord Jesus Christ?”

“Don't know all that much about Him.”

For the moment he cared less for her.

“How do
you
know, anyway?”

“It's what everyone has always known,” she said. Then, looking at the toes of her shoes as they advanced, she said very softly: “I couldn't exist without Our Lord.”

“Could He exist without
you
?” It seemed reasonable enough to enquire.

But she might not have heard.

“Mother says Christians are all the time gloating over the blood.”

“Don't you believe they crucified Our Lord?” she said looking at him angrily.

He had begun to feel exhausted.

“I reckon they'd crucify a man,” he said. “Yes,” he agreed, trundling slower. “From what you read. And what we know. Christians,” he said, “are cruel.”

“
They
were not Christians,” Mrs Poulter said. “Men are cruel.”

There was a wind starting. A raw sun was sawing at them. They had gone too far.

“Here!” he called. “How long is this walk gunna last?”

He reached out for her hand, and she allowed him to take it.

“You're surely not tired?” she said, but he could tell she was not giving it thought. “A big man like you!”

There wasn't any malice in it. She continued speaking very gently.

“Fancy,” she said, almost for herself, “if you was my kid, Arthur. I wonder whether you'd like it.”

“Yes,” he answered.

He would have liked it for the pleasure it would have given her, and because nobody could have objected any more to his being with her.

“When are we going for another walk, Mrs Poulter?” he asked, and lagged to put a weight on her hand.

“We haven't finished this one yet.”

But suddenly they had. They had taken a short cut neither of them had suspected, and there they were, plunging down on Terminus Road.

“Well now,” she said, “here we are home without any of the trouble!”

“Yes,” he said, gloomily.

That night he dreamed he was licking the wounds, like a dog. He wondered whether he had been doing right, to lick up non-existent blood. Fortunately Waldo, who was sleeping, need never know. He had reached out and touched him to make sure. He reached out to feel for the mandala, his own special, on top of the po cupboard, but heard it roll, scamper out of reach. It would have
involved too much to retrieve it, so he lay there miserably conscious of the distance between his desire and perfect satisfaction.

Even the walks with Mrs Poulter were not all that satisfactory, because it was only natural to talk, and you kept on coming up against a wall, if not religion, something else.

“Did you never ever have any children, Mrs Poulter?” he asked.

“No,” she answered.

From where he was walking, as mostly, a little behind, he thought it sounded sulkily.

“Do you mind?”

“Oh,” she said, “life isn't just children. I've got my husband.”

“Does he like you?”

“What a funny thing to ask!”

“Well,” he said, “you always wonder what a person likes.”

This time it was a holiday, and she was not wearing her church dress, something clean though, and cottony. He liked to watch it moving close to her full, but still quite firm body. It suprised him to realize Mrs Poulter was younger than himself, nor did he altogether want it. He preferred it when he could forget about ages, when Mrs Poulter could grow into the larger-sized wise woman she really was, telling of cures for illnesses.

“This isn't half a slope,” Mrs Poulter complained, grunting.

“It's that all right!” he agreed, and giggled.

But suddenly they had climbed out, panting and dazzled.

“Oh, look!” she called, pointing.

“That's a wheel-tree,” said Arthur.

He could tell because Mrs Musto had shown him one. Still panting, he stood smiling, proud of the treeful of fiery wheels.

And under the tree was standing the Chinese woman, whom he often remembered afterwards. They stood looking at one another. Then the Chinese woman, so little connected with them or their other surroundings, turned, it seemed resentfully, and went behind some poultry sheds. There was no great reason why he should remember her, except as part of the dazzle of the afternoon. For that reason he did.

Soon afterwards they plunged on down into the blackberries, and were grabbing the enamelled berries by the handful to drop
into Mrs Poulter's little can, and scoffing them besides, till their faces were inked over.

“What a sight you are, Arthur!” Mrs Poulter sounded quite pleased.

“Speak for yourself!” He pointed, and laughed.

It suited her, and the shadow from her hat. Her face might have been mysteriously tattooed.

Afterwards they sat down on the grass, in a bay formed by the blackberry bushes. Their few bits of luggage were spread around. It was peculiarly
their
ground once they had staked their claim. It was so well protected Mrs Poulter, after glancing round once or twice, announced rather nicely:

“I tell you what, Arthur, I'm going to take down my hair, and nobody will see or think it strange.”

It was sensible enough, he thought, because you couldn't hardly count himself. Besides, he had watched Mrs Poulter washing her hair in the kero tin, in the days when she was living in the iron hut.

“There!” she said, when she was sitting in her long hair.

He loved watching her as she sat inside her shiny tent. He half closed his eyes, out of pleasure, and against the sun, and from then on all that was spoken and acted was as inescapable as conviction and dreams.

Shaking the veil of hair from where it hung across her face, Mrs Poulter said: