When her science let her down, it was agreed that: “Mollie has always been an unreliable correspondent.”
In the absence of letters Mother got considerable pleasure out of prospectuses and catalogues. She collected election circulars, to fold into spills, after studying the photographs of those who had heard the call to office.
She would have liked to take out old family photographs, but misalliance had deterred her from keeping any.
“The faces on my side,” she mentioned, “were too cruel. On his, too mean.”
Waldo couldn’t remember faces. He recollected scents and sensations: of the flowering, steely, soft and prickly perfumes in the dark of wardrobes; of an old woman’s cushiony hands in their mail of rings; of geranium disinfecting with its pink a heraldic urn in which a cat had shat. The chocolate campanile, swooning earthwards from the too green, the too daringly transcendental touch of dusk, often recurred on the screen of his mind. Had he actually experienced, or had he selected out of hearsay, the icy vision of the blue woman about to descend the stairs? In blue, it could only have been his mother, though the diamonds must have choked her principles. For that reason she had “gone over”. But her conversion to sacrificial love and socialism had convinced neither side. The ice-blue ancestral stare, and the little black rats of eyes gnawing at holes in fogged lace, were at least united in chasing her away.
“We used to drive down to Tallboys — that was before the family — before anything happened,” Mother liked to tell, and joined her hands closer on the kitchen table. “It was quite a journey. Mamma could not endure carriages for any distance. They upset her pug. Poor Grumble! Grannie was so kind to dogs. The gardeners were always setting the stage, it seemed, as we arrived. Nothing ever grew. It was potted out. The shrubs were sculpture which never got finished. Oh, and dogs, more dogs!” Her eyes would shine after sherry, particularly after she took to the four o’clock sherry. “The willowy, bronze and golden breeds, snoozing on the steps, amongst the lichen! And Mollie. Mollie remained good, better than most who accept the status quo. She had a hundred dolls, I believe. I believe we counted them. Once she allowed me to tear up a Japanese doll because I decided I wanted to. It was the nanny who made a scene.”
Mother scarcely ever laughed over any of her pictures, even when they gave her pleasure. They were far too serious, even the funny ones, for laughter.
“Always when we arrived they would take us in, and fortify us with cups of soup, flavoured, I should say, with port — with port-wine.”
This reminded her of her sherry, and although it was only half-past four and she had put the bottle back, she would take it down again, to refresh her tumbler.
“After you had gone upstairs,” Waldo sometimes had to assist.
But she grew vague, with sherry and memory. She did not care to describe elaborate interiors. They yawned too dark in her mind.
Not that he needed reminders. He had dared reconstruct the house, room by room, and add it to his other experience of life.
Sometimes Mother, under the influence of four o’clock, would add a detail, a cupola or tower, and he would lean forward to visualize, and formally preserve.
“Tallboys was an omnium gatherum! A shocking architectural muddle!” How he loved the language her mouth was conducting through a ritual of elaborate slovenliness. “The façade was Palladian. They used to pour out elderberry wine for the huntsmen on frosty mornings. Lord, it was cold! You could almost hear the stone crack.”
She poured herself another.
“But Tudor, the original Tudor, Mother.”
Still so far to go, he grew anxious for the end of it.
“Oh, Tudor! Tudor was too down-to-earth, too much like human beings living and loving and stabbing and poisoning one another. Tudor got pushed back hugger-mugger behind the stone. The kitchens were in the Tudor part of this great baroque treadmill. When I say ‘baroque’ I only mean it fig — figuratively, I think.”
She formed her hands into a globe above the waning gold of sherry.
“Wasn’t there also the gothic,” he dared, “the Gothic Folly?”
“Oh, the Gothick Folly!” she laughed, or sniggered, and they shared in the knowingness. “Uncle Charlie always pronounced it with a k. That was Waldo’s Folly.”
She needn’t have told him. He had been there, gloved and sensual, attended by salukis and an Arab.
“Waldo,” she said, pronouncing it as though it had been someone else’s name, “Waldo had such peculiar vices they were kept locked up, behind a grille, in the library.”
Those peppercorns! He knew. He had fingered the reseda silk through the bars.
But Mother’s voice was dwindling with the sherry.
“He died at Smyrna, I think it was. They brought him home, rather smelly, so they say — the Greeks hadn’t done a proper job — and put him in the tomb he had built for himself. In marble from Paros. Beside the lake. Mollie and I liked to play there in August. It was so — cool. And full of echoes.”
Round about five her mouth grew slobbery on the glass, and she would glance sideways at his abstemious thimbleful.
“They are all dead now,” she said drily, “I suppose.” Adding quickly, however: “When Cousin Mollie writes she will tell us the symptoms.” And more meditative: “A pity your father died. He would have enjoyed hearing. Of course you never knew your father. For a frail man he was strong. Strong.”
Suddenly he hated that strength, and his parents’ withdrawal into a room of their own. Resentment lingered, forcing him on some mornings to deliver lectures.
“Mother,” he said, “I want to talk to you.”
“Oh, yes?”
She did so hope he would. She was raising her face to receive helpful advice.
“The sherry is all very well. In moderation. It is moderation which makes life bearable.”
Her little knotted laughs remained the most youthful sign in her.
“Sherry is the last perquisite!” Then, making an ugly mouth: “The perks! The cooking sherry! The cook wouldn’t have crooked her finger. The housekeeper wouldn’t have gargled with it.”
Waldo said: “I forbid you, Mother!”
He admired the sound of her kind strong son.
“My dear little sherry-wine!”
And it continued to trickle in.
“Poor soul! What else has she got?” was Mrs Poulter’s argument.
“Here’s an odd one, Mother, that I brought back from the store, because it’s Saturday, and it helps you when you’re feeling sick.”
Arthur made Waldo sick. He was glad he had the Library, even though a doubtful blessing.
Because Crankshaw had started playing up.
Crankshaw said: “Mr Brown, can you truly answer for the accuracy of these references?”
“Why should I falsify them, Mr Crankshaw?”
Did he hear a simpering note in his own voice? Sometimes, to his horror, he thought he sounded like a maid in a Restoration play.
He waited for the titters.
Which did not come.
Only Crankshaw grumbling: “I wouldn’t say you falsified. Only that you might have got them wrong.”
He was a heavy man, with a family at Roseville.
“Who can say,” Mr Brown said.
He was only certain that Crankshaw had it in for him.
But, as an alternative to Crankshaw, he had to take the train, the bus, home.
“She is sick,” Mrs Poulter told him. “You ought to get the doctor to her.”
“My health is my own affair,” Mother insisted, making it easier for him. “To the end I shall keep it so. I shall know when it is the end.”
She knew, apparently, it would be a long time from then, because she died ten years after George Brown her husband. Anne Quantrell was carved out of stone, the true gothick. At least Waldo had that satisfaction, although it caused him to suffer before he could inscribe her name on what he always hoped was the authentic dust.
“Mother won’
t die easy,” Mrs Poulter became of the opinion.
Mrs Poulter didn’t actually like Mrs Brown, because Mrs Brown would not allow her to. Mrs Brown didn’t actively dislike Mrs Poulter, she simply resented encroachment of any kind. Waldo Brown couldn’t like Mrs Poulter, because of, well, everything. Whether Arthur had loved Mrs Poulter or not, in this one instance he had listened to reason, sensed the shocking anomaly of it, and choked her off. So that human relationships, particularly the enduring ones, or those which we are forced to endure, are confusingly marbled in appearance, Waldo Brown realized, and noted in a notebook.
He knew also he dreaded his mother’s death, in which event, he would be exposed to Crankshaw, and not exposed, but left to Arthur. Perhaps he dreaded Arthur most of all, because of something Arthur might tell him one day.
But for the moment Mother showed no signs of dying, she only grew more difficult.
She would flare up on the edge of a room in which he was thinking, or making notes. At night, by lamplight, her hair was terrible. It got out of control. It looked like an old grey gooseberry bush. More often than not, she was dangling a bottle by its neck.
She would barge in, shouting: “Waldo, it’s time you decided to marry. What about the little Jewess? That Miss Finkelstein. We were all Jews, weren’t we, before we stopped to think? Or was that somebody else?”
Waldo hunched himself over his papers.
“Miss Feinstein? She’s probably a mother.”
“All to the good. What would you have done without your mother?”
“Dulcie has a little boy,” said Arthur, “and a little girl some years younger. That was what they wanted.”
His mother and brother had come in on purpose to add to the litter of his room, the desperate untidiness of his thoughts, which blew at times like old newspapers or straw round packing-cases which never got packed. They had come in deliberately to conjure up Dulcie. He knew that if he spoke he would deflect nobody from their pre-determined actions. He alone was free to choose. The one choice he would never be free to make was that of his relationship with other people. So he ground his fists into his ears, he hunched his shoulders, and squirmed on the needle-points of his buttocks. He must cling to his gift.
Mother would go presently. He heard her opening other doors. She would walk as far as, and no farther than, the house allowed her, before sitting down to finish the bottle. She would end up cold on the bed, the old blue gown parted on her jutting legs, the long lovely Quantrell legs in which the varicose veins had come. And he would draw the curtains of her skirt, shivering for the hour, or an offence against taste.
Mother could be relied on to drop off. But Arthur stuck. Standing by the lamp, head inclined, staring into one of those glass marbles. Watching the revolutions of a glass marble on the palm of his hand.
“If you have to stay, don’t fidget, at least!” Waldo ordered.
Arthur raised his head.
“Mother is real sick. Didn’t you know?”
“Is it necessary to speak like that? It doesn’t come naturally to you.”
“It comes natural to me to speak natural in a natural situation,” Arthur said.
The porcelain lampshade was jiggling, Waldo heard. He could feel the frail old kitchen chair reacting badly to the stress of emotion.
“Mother is not sick!” he shouted. “We know her weakness. I will not be bullied into thinking that what isn’t is!”
“Ssshhe’s asleep! You might wake her, Waldo, if you shout.”
Arthur had turned, and was towering, flaming above him, the wick smoking through the glass chimney.
But his skin, remaining white and porous, attempted to soothe. Arthur put out one of the hands which disgusted Waldo if he ever stopped to think about them, which, normally, he didn’t.
Arthur said: “If it would help I’d give it to you, Waldo, to keep.”
Holding in his great velvetty hand the glass marble with the knot inside.
“No!” Waldo shouted. “Go!”
“Where?”
There was, in fact, nowhere.
And the Poulter woman kept nagging at him. She appeared one evening, out of the waves of grass, and said: “Waldo — Mr Brown, I’ve come to have a word with you. It’s time we saw things realistic.” From Mrs Poulter! “It’s no business of mine, I know. I would think twice if I was a friend, but I’m worse than that, only a neighbour.”
He looked at this woman who had aged across the road from them. It was terrifying to see the way other people aged.
“Your mother lying in bed all these months,” Mrs Poulter said, “and nothing to do for her.”
“She’s comfortable enough.”
“Oh yes, I’m comfortable,” Mother called, whose hearing would reach farther, through doors and windows, the longer she lay living. “Since I didn’t have to think about the salmon loaf I’m comfortable.”
Mrs Poulter lowered her voice. “She’s used right up. Eaten up. It’s the poison’s got into her veins.”
Then Waldo invited their neighbour to leave.
“Who helped pour it into them?” he shouted at her down the path.
“Whoever you kill, Mr Brown,” she turned and shouted back, “it won’t be me! I’ll only die by the hand of God!”
She saw immediately, however, that she had cause to feel ashamed.
“I’m always here as you know,” she said in her usual voice, “and can telephone the doctor — the minister,” she said, “if you can’t come at doing it yourself.”
The minister made his flesh creep.
How long now, he tried to calculate, had their mother kept to her room? He used to go in to her at night and read her The Pick-wick Papers, which she didn’t much care for, but was used to.
“It’s stuck to us, hasn’t it?” she said. “That makes it all the better as a plaster.”
With so much reading, and the kind of conversation they made, time passed.
Then suddenly he noticed, or the inexorable Mrs Poulter had, the eyeballs were lolling, the long yellow teeth were protruding from their mother’s skull, her fingers, to which Arthur would attach the figures of cat’s-cradle, stuck out like sticks at the ends of her arms.
Noticing him stare at her, Mother said: “At least we have our health, whatever else is taken from us.”
Waldo Brown blundered out, the grass catching at his ankles, the moths and one of his father’s paper bags hitting him in the face. Crossing the road he heard to his surprise its foreign surface under his feet — of the road beside which they had lived their lives.
“Yes, Mr Brown,” Mrs Poulter said. “I’ll be only too happy.”
Mrs Poulter brought the doctor. And the minister, as she had threatened. Amongst them they arranged for Mrs Brown to be removed to something called a Home of Peace. They sent for Waldo, but before he could arrive his mother was gone, fortunately too drugged to realize the damage to her principles.
Waldo said he wouldn’t go in. He did not care to look at her, because what was the point. Dead, he said, is dead. One had to be realistic about it.
Arthur, whom he hadn’t allowed to accompany him, dreading the almost inevitable scene, murmured that he would speak to somebody who’d know what ought to be done about their mother. In the special circumstances, it did not seem improbable, and Waldo let him.
So Anne Quantrell — never a Brown in spite of her love for that sallow little man with the gammy leg — was cremated by arrangement.
Waldo was surprised to hear Arthur had been present.
“Who arranged it all?” Waldo asked somewhat cagily.
“Mr Saporta.”
Nothing more was said. Arthur’s incomplete mind must have included compartments in which delicacy predominated. Or he may have sensed intuitively something of the hurt Dulcie had done Waldo by not respecting his intentions, by refusing to accept his sacrifice, and devouring instead that vulgar commercial Jew, Saporta. So at least dotty old Arthur kept quiet, until a couple of years later when, perhaps
through no fault of his, though seemingly by somebody’s pre-arrangement, the ghastly meeting between Waldo and the whole Saporta family was staged on a corner of King and Pitt. After the accident, in which Waldo lost his pince-nez, and decided it would be more practical to replace it with spectacles, Arthur did recapitulate, inevitably, the whole Feinstein-Saporta history. Waldo forgave him. There was too much else to disturb Waldo, then, and over many years.
There was Crankshaw first and continuously.
It was difficult exactly to put a finger on what difference in mediocrity distinguished the Librarian from the mediocre. Mr Crankshaw was several years his junior when appointed the superior of Mr Brown. For anyone so heavy, such a bear in pinstripes, Crankshaw trod remarkably gently round the sensibilities of those who were officially inferiors, without ever, but ever, failing to bruise. From time to time Waldo considered opening a special notebook in which to analyze the character of Crankshaw, working up his observations into a portrait, a detail eventually of some vast corrosive satire on the public services. (Fortunately such victims were always too vain or too obtuse to recognize themselves.)
Poor Crankshaw, he was almost obliterated by brisket and a jutting forehead. He had the hands of one who had felled timber, without having known the feel of an axe, except the one he used, by law of gravity, on those beneath him. He had read several books, and was personally acquainted with that priest who wrote Around the Boree Log. Crankshaw’s pet subject, however, was Numbers of Readers. Poor Turnstile Crankshaw! Would receive an obituary, anyway, as a public servant in an unassailable position. He had a wife who reeked of the dry-cleaner’s, and three or four girls in white hats, who gave shower teas for their friends, without ever being showered upon themselves. Poor Crankshaw.
Waldo might have felt magnanimous if he had not been persecuted. But one of the juniors would come tapping on his desk:
“Mr Crankshaw, Mr Brown.”
Crankshaw would heave himself creakingly round in his bucket chair. He was so heavy.
“Mr Brown,” he began, on the first of several progressively intensifying occasions, “we are starting a welfare drive. Do you find you have time enough to digest your sandwich?”
The Solid Mandala Page 18
