The Solid Mandala (38 page)

“See this, Mr Feinstein,” he said, “this, this
thing
,” he said, “this is just another mandala.”

This time Mr Feinstein did not attempt to scratch a reply, but sat still, looking at Arthur. Waiting, it seemed.

Then Arthur knew he could never explain what was too big, an enormous marble, filling, rolling round intolerably inside his speechless mouth.

He had sat down opposite the old man, so that they were knee to knee. He was holding Mr Feinstein's cold claws in his own warmer, spongy hands. Otherwise there was nothing he could do.

“The mandala,” he was trying to say, and did, but mouthing it so idiotically, he too might have had a stroke.

Then they sat looking at each other from opposite ends of the tunnel, in a light of such momentary intensity, Arthur at least was too confused to know exactly what he saw.

On the next occasion when he visited the Feinstein-Saporta castle he found Dulcie in their big square living-room seated without her shoes, on a mattress, on the floor. She was wearing a dress in flowing black, the folds of which, together with the lights in her neck and her rounded limbs, made her into something of a statue.

“My father died, Arthur,” she explained, as though the old man had tottered out only a moment before, into the park. The only unusual part of it was: they couldn't expect him back.

Then, when she had gathered up her knees inside her arms, and laid her face against her shoulder, she began dreaming, as she rocked:

“Oh yes, I've mourned for him, and shall continue to mourn. But my father was always embarrassed by what he used to call ‘Jewesses indulging themselves by tearing their clothes and emotions to tatters'. We were only ever allowed to love him on his own terms. I think on the whole that made him unhappy, but any other behaviour would have offended against his principles. A complete surrender to love might have let in God. Of course, in the end, he did. When they were shut up together in a room, he couldn't avoid it. I saw. My father died peacefully.”

Dulcie raised her head.

“You, Arthur,” she said, “are you, I wonder, the instrument we feel you are?”

Whatever she intended to convey he was glad not to grasp it, and lowered his eyes to the level of her breast, from which the milk had trickled, through the black dress. She noticed at once, and covered herself with her scarf. With the same slow but natural motion, she covered her head.

As he continued to visit the Saportas over the years with some regularity, Arthur did not particularly notice Dulcie's greyness or her glasses, nor that Mr Saporta was setting in fat, because friends and lovers enjoy a greater freedom than their bodies: they are at liberty to move out of them, and by special dispensation, communicate with one another through far-sighted eyes.

It was Waldo who suffered, Arthur regretted, from his meeting with the whole Saporta family in Pitt Street, in middle age. The shock of recognition had sent Waldo temporarily off his rocker, with the result that he was knocked down farther along, his pince-nez damaged beyond repair. It was not Arthur who had arranged the meeting, though Waldo seemed to think it was.

All the way to his brother's bedside Arthur had suffered for Waldo's suffering, more particularly for Waldo's fear of death.
The crisp perfection of the sister colliding with the weakness of his stricken brother sent him almost frantic. It put him in a most difficult position: to pacify the bossy sister by keeping quiet, while convincing Waldo he couldn't afford to let him die. Careful regulation of his conduct at last persuaded her they might be left, and at once Waldo sounded less afraid. Though Arthur continued to blub a little to show his brother he needed him. Love, he had found, is more acceptable to some when twisted out of its true shape.

Not that Waldo would accept much. He was too busy with his problems, of libraries, and Mr Crankshaw. Arthur realized he had a problem of his own when Waldo joined the staff of the big new Public Library, where Arthur himself was inclined to read. Fortunately Waldo, in occasional flight through the reading room, was too preoccupied to notice anyone beyond the outskirts of his mind.

He barely noticed the War even, the second one which was going on. In the First War Arthur Brown had been all fireworks and singing. He wore a patient gravity for the Second. Too much had happened down Terminus Road and in other parts. Although still a boy he went more slowly, nursing his jammed fingers, expecting the next kick in the pants.

On the night of the Peace, when the singing was let loose, the vomit, the piss, the gobs, and the little girls with their wicked bums and flouncing hair, Arthur couldn't make up a song, until at last a couple of lines — or three:

He smiled, though, for all those pairs of twins, and no word between them to express the truth.

When a lady approached him, violet over grey, and fetched out a screech from away back near her uvula:

“You big
man
, where have you
bin?
”

He replied, simply, sadly: “Madam, I am not your cup of tea.”

He wondered where Waldo was. He was glad it was he, not his brother, involved in such a tasteless incident.

Related in more than flesh Waldo had become by then the first of his two preoccupations. Since his discovery of the spirit, Arthur could not go too softly, offering, as it were, this other thing, where his body might repel. He realized he could not run the risk of Waldo's refusing something less material than glass. Glass was shattering enough. In his left pocket, certainly, he continued to carry Waldo's mandala, though for the most part he avoided taking it out. He preferred to contemplate his own, in which the double spiral knit and unknit so reasonably.

This solid mandala he held in his hand as he sat, whenever possible, in the reading room at the Library. For the Books became his second obsession. To storm his way, however late, however dark the obscurer corners of his mind. So he sat twirling the solid mandala, and by shuffling the words together, he made many if not all of the permutations of sense. Admittedly, in flashes of desperation, crushed grass and his own palpitating lump of flesh convinced him more.

Arthur wrestled with the Books. He wrestled with his obstreperous mind, which disgusted far too many by its fleshly lumbering round their thoughts. He knew he must look a real old faggot in the raincoat he wore, not so much for the weather as to cover up his shortcomings. Perhaps, after all, Hindu smoke was the only true and total solution. As for the lotus, he crushed it just by thinking on it.

On one occasion, in some book, he came across a message. Pinned to the back of his mind, it rattled and twitched, painfully, hopefully, if obscure:

He warmed to that repeatedly after he had recovered from the shock. And if one wife, why not two? Or three? He could not have chosen between them. He could not sacrifice his first, his fruitful darling, whose mourning even streamed with a white light. Nor
the burnt flower-pots, the russet apples of his second. Or did the message in the book refer, rather, to his third, his veiled bride? Heavy with alternatives and hoarded wealth, he sat back on the heels of the creaking library chair, opened his raincoat, scratched through his flies, rubbed at his rather cushiony chest.

When the chair collapsed under Arthur Brown he wasn't hurt. It was such a joke.

“You must take care!” It was the young lady, that Miss Glasson. “At your age. Once you start falling. Public property, too!”

When Arthur had got himself another chair he went and took
Alice Through the Looking Glass
. He loved that. His mouth still watered for sweets of any kind. He would shake back his hair before entering.

Or he would glance up. And sometimes Miss Glasson was hovering over her hermaphroditic Adam. If she only knew. On one occasion he decided to tell. And decided not to. Although Miss Glasson was good for a smile, she mightn't have been on for a laugh.

In any case, it was time. It was time to return to Terminus Road. So frustrating. If only he could have retired — but they needed him more than ever, Mrs Allwright and Mrs Mutton, since Mr Allwright died — he would have been able to give all that extra time to his reading.

To
The Brothers Karamazov
. Wonder what Dad would have said!

But there were days, whole weeks, Arthur couldn't help feeling, when he remained congealed, possessed by Terminus Road, and Waldo — it was Waldo. When the great basalt clouds were piled up over their heads, the fragments of shale restlessly flying, the yellow loops of wet grass setting traps for ankles, Waldo had to be comforted. Arthur accepted his duty. Their life was led down Terminus Road. Of course they went to their jobs, they had been so regulated they couldn't have helped going. But their actual life was the one which continued knotting itself behind the classical weatherboard façade. Sometimes Arthur wished Dad hadn't burnt his copy of
The Brothers Karamazov
, so that he could have got on with it at home. Then he realized it mightn't have been
desirable: to introduce all those additional devils into their shaky wooden house.

Once, at the height of a storm, when the rain was coming down aslant, in slate-pencils, against the roof, the water coming through the rusty iron, in that same place, into the basin, in the scullery, and the quince-twigs squeaking against, the rose-thorns scratching on, the panes, Waldo shouted:

“I wonder what you damn well think about, Arthur!”

“Well,” said Arthur slowly, because it was a difficult one to answer, “what most people think about, I suppose.”

“Nothing!” Waldo shouted back. “That's the answer!”

“Or everything,” Arthur only mumbled, because Waldo seemed so put out.

“You think about nothing!” Waldo had begun to cry. “No worries on your mind!”

“If you want to know, I was thinking about Tiresias,” Arthur said to interest him. “How he was changed into a woman for a short time. That sort of thing would be different, wouldn't it, from the hermaphroditic Adam who carries his wife about with him inside?”

Then Waldo took him by the wrists.

“Shut up!” he ordered. “Do you understand? If you think thoughts like these, keep them to yourself, Arthur. I don't want to hear. Any such filth. Or madness.”

Waldo might have wrenched Arthur's hands off at the wrists if only he had been strong enough. But he wasn't.

Instead he sat down rather hard, and Arthur went to him, to comfort him, because they only had each other. Waldo knew this. He put his head on the table, under the falling rain, and cried.

Waldo was such a terrible problem to Arthur, their love for each other, that there were whole visits to the Library when he couldn't bring himself to take down
The Brothers Karamazov
. He preferred
Alice
.

But he had to return to what had become, if not his study, his obsession. There was all this Christ jazz. Something of which Mrs Poulter had explained. But he couldn't exactly relate it to men, except to the cruelty some men practise, in spite of themselves,
as a religion they are brought up in. Reading
The Brothers Karamazov
he wished he could understand whose side anyone was on.

Who was the Grand Inquisitor?

Then quite suddenly one morning at the Library Waldo was sitting at the same table, opposite him, making that scene. Afterwards Arthur could not remember in detail what was said. You couldn't exactly say
they
were
speaking
, because the remarks were being torn out of them helter skelter, between tears and gusts of breathlessness, like handfuls of flesh. The raw, bleeding remarks were such that Waldo kept looking round to see who might be noticing. As for Arthur, he did not care. Their relationship was the only fact of importance, and such an overwhelming one.

“I shan't ask if you've come here, if you're making this scene, to humiliate me,” Waldo was saying, “because the answer is too obvious. That has been your chief object in life. If you would be truthful.”

“Why hurt yourself, Waldo?” Arthur was given the strength to reply. “Kick a dog, and hurt yourself. That's you all over.”

“For God's sake don't drag in the dogs! And who, I'd like to know, wanted the miserable animals? And why?”

“We both did,” said Arthur, “so that we could have something additional — reliable — to love. Because we didn't have faith in each other. Because we are — didn't you say yourself, Waldo? — abnormal people and selfish narcissyists.”

Waldo was looking in every direction at once, and especially at that Miss Glasson, who, although standing at the far end of the room, might have been holding a telescope. She had that kind of eye.

“Afraid,” Arthur was saying, and now he did begin to feel a kind of terror rising in him. “Like our father. I mean Dad. Not the one they pray to. But Dad putting Dostoevsky on the fire.”

He knew the flames of argument must be colouring his face in the way which distressed strangers, even Waldo, most. But for the moment he was almost glad he couldn't control himself.

“Afraid of the blood and the nails, which as far as I can see, is
what everyone is afraid of, but wants, and what Dostoevsky is partly going on about. Do you see, Waldo,” he was bursting with it, “what we must avoid?”

Suddenly Arthur burst into tears because he saw that Waldo was what the books referred to as a lost soul. He, too, for that matter, was lost. Although he might hold Waldo in his arms, he could never give out from his own soul enough of that love which was there to give. So his brother remained cold and dry.