The Solid Mandala (37 page)

For another, for Mother, another pleasure.

“Here's a drop to help out,” Arthur used to say, or: “Thought you might be going short.”

At such times she would hardly turn her cheek, let alone look over her shoulder.

“Thank you, dear. It was thoughtful of you.”

As though she scarcely needed him.

He would hear her crinkle up the foil, however. And sometimes the corks were terribly tight.

“My wrists are losing their strength,” she complained.

Needing him.

“You couldn't do without me. Eh? Could you? Eh?”

“Hardly,” she had to admit.

His strength of wrist, if not of principle, as Mrs Allwright insisted, often made him laugh.

“Everyone's got their uses.”

“Almost everyone,” Mother said.

Then she would sit down to nursing the bottle. She was going
to make it last till tonight. Oh, yes. You could if you tried. You stood a chance up to the first third.

But at the first third Mother would have to begin.

“Tell me, Arthur,” she would say, “tell me if you feel I've failed you.”

The importance of it made the sherry slop over the glass.

“No!” she said, quickly, in her own defence. “Don't tell me! Nobody normal ever enjoyed settling their accounts.”

She would grow louder, annoyed too, at spilling the good stuff in her glass.

“All good money,” she complained. “But don't tell me. Nobody likes to be told. That they've got a spot. On their nose. On the night of the ball.”

Insects in the air made it sound more fretful.

“At least,” she said, “once upon a time — when people observed the conventions — all that sort of thing was avoided. Nowadays it isn't considered realistic. Then, it wasn't good form.”

“Oh,” she said, shaking her hair, “we would dance, though! In the mornings the lawns used to swim up under the windows. We would swim out, just as we were, against the mist. The ladies, of course, were at a disadvantage because their hems were filled with dew. Heavier than anyone would believe. To sink a punt. If one hadn't felt so light with light. The men in kilts came off best. I never cared for the nubbly knees of black Scots. Strong men can be boring in their aggressiveness. And weak.”

She could not forgive them their strong legs.

“But if you could have seen us
dancing
! And dancing on the lawns, amongst the topiary, on the mist which was pouring out of the lake. That,” she said, sinking her mouth in the glass, “was before I married your father. It was all utterly rotten. But how deliriously memorable” — working her mouth around it — “after the mutton fat has dragged one down. Do you know, Arthur,” she said, looking at him, “I believe you inherited your love of dancing from your mother.”

“What dancing?”

“Let me see,” she said. “I don't know
what
dancing. At least,” she said, “nothing
formal
. Movement, though. Dancing,” she said,
“can compensate. Cure, in some cases. Victims of infantile paralysis recover, they say, the use of their limbs by dancing. Or swimming.”

He would have liked to give her his third mandala, but realized in time their mother could not have used it.

Against his better judgement Arthur offered Waldo the mandala during their mother's last illness.

“Mother is real sick,” he said.

The lamplight seemed to draw them into its circle.

“Mother is not
sick
!” Waldo shouted.

All this sickness, of their mother's, of the old weatherboard house, with its dry-rotten tremors and wooden tick tick, seemed to concentrate itself in Arthur's stomach, till from looking at his own hands, soothing, rather than soothed by, the revolving marble, he realized that the knot at the heart of the mandala, at most times so tortuously inwoven, would dissolve, if only temporarily, in light.

And it seemed as though the worst could only happen for the best. It was most important that his brother, shuffling his papers, looking for a sheet mislaid, or just looking — that Waldo, too, should know.

“If it would help I would give it to you, Waldo, to keep,” Arthur said.

Offering the knotted mandala.

While half sensing that Waldo would never untie the knot.

Even before Waldo gave one of his looks, which, when interpreted, meant: By offering me a glass marble you are trying to make me look a fool, I am not, and never shall be a fool, though I am your twin brother, so my reply, Arthur, is not shit, but shit!

As he shouted: “No, Arthur! Go, Arthur!”

But Arthur was rooted. His hand closed on the icy marble. If he had not been his twin brother, would Waldo have hated him?

There was too little time those days to nurse suspicion. Arthur was too busy playing cat's-cradle with their mother, arranging the string round her fingers, since she was no longer able to work them into the required positions.

“Doesn't this entertain you?” he asked.

“Infinitely,” Mother said.

It was important — Arthur was convinced she agreed with him — that Waldo shouldn't know their mother was dying. That might have turned out unbearable.

When, suddenly, Mrs Poulter, the doctor, and the minister, had her removed.

When she was dead Arthur went to Mr Saporta, who, because he was in business, knew how to have her disposed of. Although the whole of him was racked by the part which had been amputated, Arthur was fascinated to watch the coffin jerking down the ramp towards the curtain. What if it, if they all, stuck?

However, he would be careful to hide from Waldo, who had not, of course, been to the funeral, any of his own fears and suspicions.

On one occasion Arthur did slip up.

“Do you approve of the Hindu custom of burning people who have died?”

Waldo's hand was stiffening in his hand. They were walking up Terminus Road, up the last hill before Sarsaparilla.

“It's hygienic, at least,” Waldo said.

“So is cremation, isn't it?” said Arthur. “I was thinking of the smoke, only. It must be beautiful to watch the smoke. Don't you think? Uncurling out of the fire?'

“Picturesque is perhaps the word,” Waldo said from between his teeth.

He sounded like somebody biting on a pipe, though he, for that matter neither of them had ever learnt to smoke.

After Mother's death their twin lives would not have diverged all that much if Arthur hadn't developed his sense of responsibility towards the Saportas. Of course Waldo could not be told about that. If Arthur usually got possession of what Waldo did not tell, it was because he had his sense of touch, and from lying beside Waldo in their parents' bed, on nights when his brother needed comforting. Arthur's spongy largeness, not to say, at some times, cloudiness of mind, became an asset then. To envelop the unclouded terrors of night.

So, it was not so much because he didn't have the clothes, as out of sympathy for Waldo, that he didn't go to the Saporta wedding. He had to control his disappointment. For he would have
liked to watch Dulcic standing with Mr Saporta under the canopy-thing, he would have loved to experience the breaking of the glass.

That was already as far back as 1922, the year George Brown had died. Dulcie and Leonard got married, and on the occasions when Mrs Allwright sent Arthur to the city for something unobtainable in Barranugli, he would visit the Saportas in their house on the edge of the park. It was really Mr Feinstein's house, where they had gone to live with him after he had his first stroke, after the death of his wife.

The Feinsteins' house looked enormous because of the many flourishes it made — battlements and turrets, spires and balconies, bull's-eyes and dormers, even a gargoyle or two, which the weather was cracking and chipping too soon. Although it looked like a partly fortified cement castle, with veins in it after the leaves of the Virginia creeper had fallen off, it was a fairly normal, human house inside. From the beginning Dulcie didn't allow the inherited furniture to take over. It was she who pushed it around, often into unpremeditated groups. She was also a director of the music house, while Mr Saporta remained in rugs — as it should have been. The Saportas were pretty substantially established.

Arthur Brown visited them all through the two children and several miscarriages. Sometimes he sat in company with others, elderly Jewish ladies and uncles, who eventually overcame their surprise. They respected Arthur. Perhaps, for some obscure reason, they even valued his presence amongst them.

When he played with his glass marbles, and explained: “These are my two remaining mandalas,” they sat forward, expressing the greatest interest and pleasure, and on one occasion, one of the elderly uncles remarked: “There, Magdi, I told you this young man is in some way phenomenal.”

Naturally Arthur was pleased. Though not deceived. He waited to be alone with Dulcie, when they might resume that life which they alone were permitted to enjoy. His thighs would quiver in anticipation of blissfully joyful union with his love.

For Dulcie's beauty had increased with marriage, was more out-flowing, her eyes more lustrous in communication. She would
often put her hand in Arthur's, particularly during pregnancy.

“You know,” she would say, and laugh, looking down at her swollen figure, “I am a slave to
all this
.”

He noticed she failed to blush, although he realized it embarrassed her to take her belly outside the family circle, and that she would blush more often than not at the comments made by aunts. With him alone she was composed, as though in their common mind, they could contemplate in peace the child curled and sprouting like a bean.

Once, before the birth of their first, Dulcie said: “Today, I think, when he comes in, Leonard is going to tell you something.”

“Why Leonard?” Arthur asked, and began to sweat.

He was afraid something might be spoilt.

“It's the kind of important thing,” said Dulcie, “which I think the man ought to tell.”

Then she smiled, and Arthur saw it was because her husband had entered the room and was making his way amongst the mounds of inherited furniture.

“I shall leave you together,” said Dulcie, heartlessly, Arthur felt. “I shall go up to Father.”

She went out from them in full sail.

Arthur was horrified and disturbed.

Thickened by marriage and good sauces, huskier of voice from the many excellent cigars he had smoked, Mr Saporta was prepared to tell.

He said: “Arthur, when this kid is born — this boy,” because that was what they had decided it would be, “we want, both of us, to call him ‘Arthur'.”

“Why?” said Arthur.

He was more than ever disturbed.

“Because of all you mean to Dulcie,” Mr Saporta said.

Arthur sat tingling in his thighs. He realized his watery mouth was hanging open, but knowing did not help him close it.

“What about when this boy gets to know whose name he's saddled with?” he asked.

“It will not be his only name,” Mr Saporta said, and his glance hoped he had found an acceptable solution. “We shall also call
him ‘Aaron'. That will be his Jewish name. But for everyday purposes — ‘Arthur'.”

Arthur was relieved to think he might be blamed less bitterly.

“Aaron.”

After trying it out he was tolerably content.

Though he would not wait for Dulcie to return. Taking Mr Saporta by the wrist — the latter no longer wore the little gun-metal wristlet-watch, but a large golden disc which showed practically everything — Arthur confirmed that it was time for him to leave. Even though Dulcie was coming down the stairs, though he was close enough to hear the sound of her skirt after she had finished calling to him, he neither looked back nor answered, but hurried throbbing spongily along the street.

Sometimes on arrival at the house he would go up unannounced to old Mr Feinstein, who had chosen to live in a narrow, maid's room, or attic, when his daughter and son-in-law moved in. There he was spending his last days, between newspapers and tobacco, taking refuge from what he referred to as the Jewish Reaction. Although his speech had not been made unintelligible by his first attack — that happened only with the third — his tongue was noticeably clumsier, and his right arm had withered on its trunk.

“I will not deny they thrive on superstition,” Mr Feinstein referred to his children, “but it could also be the extra food. Because Jews, Arthur, use their religion as an excuse to overeat.”

Mr Feinstein continued going to the store until the third stroke prevented it.

On the last occasion Arthur saw his friend, the old gentleman had been sat up in one of those arm-chairs which continue to survive their owners.

“I shall leave you to talk to him,” Dulcie said practically.

“Why?” asked Arthur.

“Because the baby is singing for his supper.”

Old Mr Feinstein appeared fairly satisfied by now with everything which was done for him. To the centre of his chest they had pinned a card, with the words, the phrases, and the names he was most likely to need, and he would make his rather suffocated sounds, and scratch at the card with the less withered of his hands.

As the old man snuffled and gasped Arthur leaned forward to read what was printed there, but could not decide which of it all might suit what his friend wanted to say.

ARTHUR
, he saw, and:
AARON. GOOD FOR BUSINESS, I WANT THE CHAMBER PLEASE
. The word
TORAH
puzzled Arthur.

“What's this
TORAH
?” he had to ask, though without the greatest expectations.

Then Mr Feinstein scratched at his chest, at the print which hardly served to explain.

CHANGEABLE WEATHER
, Arthur read.

He would have liked to do something for this old man whose strings had tangled and trussed him. But he himself could only shamble round the narrow room, looking for help from the old gentleman's possessions. It was a relief to discover on a cluttered shelf the little Star of David he had seen Dulcie wearing round her neck.