There was a catch in this, for Waldo bought nuts from the Health Food in the arcade, and chose a banana, very carefully — just on the turn — at Agostino’s.
“I would not,” he replied, looking at Crankshaw with that degree of steeliness he had forgotten practising as a little boy, on the advice of a booklet on How to Succeed, “I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t given up sandwiches years ago, the quality of Sydney bread being what it is.”
Crankshaw lowered his eyes to look at the folder he was holding.
“Any draughts?” he asked peculiarly.
Was this some obscure reference to the mistake he had made in that report on damage to The Golden Bough? That was years ago, and Waldo hoped, forgotten.
Contempt might in time have transferred itself to his mouth in sounds, but Crankshaw was not interested to wait.
“Very well, Mr Brown,” he said.
Then looked up. That jutting forehead, split down the centre of its louring bone, the cleft hinted at again in the chin, which, it was said, is the sign of a lover. Waldo almost sneeze-laughed. Love me, Cranko, in a white hat!
And Crankshaw looking.
“Are you a Catholic?” the Librarian asked very gently.
If it had not been so subtle, if Waldo had not been keyed up to match his wits against Crankshaw’s question, he might simply have turned and gone out of the room. Instead, he modified his disapproval.
“Technically, I think, Mr Crankshaw, I am not required to answer,” Waldo said, and added, by inspiration, he congratulated himself afterwards: “I prefer not to confirm what you have already in your folder.”
Crankshaw looked so wry-mouthed. He could only end the silence with a laugh, and dismiss his superior subordinate.
So much — this time — for Crankshaw, said Waldo, brushing a few nuts off his own table. He was relieved to return to his corner. He had the trimmest collection of pencils. Was sweating under his collar, though. And knew that his spectacles would have left those white marks, where the metal had eaten into his skin, during a distressing incident. The odder part was: Crankshaw himself must have been a Catholic, considering his intimate friendship with the priest who had written Around the Boree Log.
Priests in white hats. You never could tell.
This Was the year Waldo Brown began what became a considerable fragment of his novel Tiresias a Youngish Man. He was invited, too, in a roundabout way, to address the Beecroft Literary Society, and did, or rather, he read a paper on Barron Field. Afterwards over coffee and Petit Beurre a solicitor congratulated him on the thoroughness of his research. Modesty forced Waldo to admit that the subject was a minor one, but he hoped and felt he had left no stone unturned. Finally, a lady novelist of the Fellowship, had asked him to an evening at her home, to which he hadn’t gone, for scenting sexual motives behind her insistence.
With all this, it was incredible to think a second war had broken out, though of a different kind. For men were tearing one another to pieces in a changed ritual. Mother would not have been in the race with Cousin Mollie’s Japanese doll.
Waldo couldn’t help noticing a certain ferment in the streets. Arthur wouldn’t have let him ignore it.
Arthur said: “Over in Europe they’re dragging the fingernails out of all those Feinstein relatives. They’re sticking whole families in ovens.”
“What’s that to do with us? We don’t put people in ovens here.”
“We didn’t think of it,” Arthur said.
Arthur had a pen friend who was a soldier. He sent his friend a comb, short enough to fit inside the envelope. It began haunting Waldo, the young corporal combing his hair in a desert, singing Yours to a red sunset. The wretched Arthur would not leave anyone alone. Though of course the censor would never allow the comb to arrive.
Waldo was relieved to think that not everybody was irresponsible. Only at night his doubts would return, when the waves of yellowing grass thundered down Terminus Road, to break against what, in spite of the classical pediment, was a disintegrating wooden box, and the great clouds rolled down out of Sarsaparilla to collide in electric upheaval over his undeserving head. Thus pinpointed, he stood accused of every atrocity over and above the few minor ones he had committed unavoidably himself. If it had not been for the insufferable mental climate occasioned by the War, and his incidental, though demanding public career — to say nothing of his ever present family problem — he might have committed to paper that metaphysical statement for which he felt himself almost prepared. One great work, no longer question of an oeuvre. As it was, the War killed Tiresias a Youngish Man. Its substance was bound to return, of course; creative regurgitation would see to that. But in the meantime, in this state of perpetual night and frustration, Waldo would throw himself on the knife-edge of his body in the bed in which they slept, or his twin Arthur did — he himself was more often than not incapable of sleep for dreaming.
Not long after Dad died Mother had said: There is no reason why you boys shouldn’t have this larger bed, after all you are men, and I shall take the bed and room you have outgrown. So they moved into what had been their parents’ bed, where Waldo gradually overcame his distaste. It was not for Arthur, Arthur was inescapable. It was their father’s limp disjointing his thoughts, it was even more, the great baroque mess of their Quantrell heritage, which Waldo loved to distraction, its crimson rooms and stone corridors extending through the terrors of sleep and war. By comparison, their own immediate Tudor imbroglio was a mere bucket of blood.
On one occasion, during the night, during the despair, Arthur had comforted Waldo.
“You had the blues last night,” Arthur yawned.
You never knew what distortion of fact he might come out with. But Waldo could not feel concerned on such a clear morning, himself a man of responsibility and discretion, almost of action, as he dashed at his hair with a touch of brilliantine. His hair lost that dusty look. He settled the expanding arm-bands on purposeful arms.
“By gosh,” he said quite boyishly, “the old Municipal’s fairly going to hum.”
“How?” asked Arthur out of a yawn.
As he grew older he liked to take it easier. He would lie in bed until he heard the fat spitting. Then he would rise, in a flurry of iron joints, a ringing of brass balls.
“Matters are coming to a head,” said Waldo, but would not explain beyond: “It concerns our friend Crankshaw.”
“You’ll have my blessings,” Arthur said, “as you gather round the boree log.”
Actually Waldo was surprised he had succeeded in forming any kind of plan during the years of anxiety and stress through which he had been living. Quite apart from everything else he had always been expecting Cissie Baker to return clutching those few poems perpetrated by her dead brother and his former colleague Walter Pugh. He could not have borne the first sight of her black figure creaking through the turnstile.
That morning the old Municipal, as if regretful of having provided a setting for what Waldo had catalogued as Inquisition of a Living Mind, was spreading snares of nostalgia and regret. Even ugliness has its virtue in the end. Certainly Waldo’s corner was darker than ever, but it had driven him on occasions to pour light on obscurity, just as the stench of disinfectant on that morning sternly assaulted a wretched catarrh and stripped the last vestige of doubt from his intention. He was so spare and purposeful as he went and stuck his nose for the last time in one of the linted books, which, ever since his youth and the patronage of the late Mrs Musto, had reminded him of the stink of old putrefying men in raincoats. Smelling them for the last time he laughed out loud in the deserted stacks.
Then he sat down and wrote several drafts before the final version.
He let it be eleven before knocking on the Librarian’s door. There was still a mouthful of muddy tea in Crankshaw’s cup, and he had not yet started looking for something to do. The room smelled, as always, of the beastly treacle in an old and bubbly pipe.
“What can I do for you, Mr Brown?” Crankshaw asked, ev
er so affable, moving a box of pins from A to B.
Little realizing how he would be pricked.
“Mr Crankshaw, I have decided to resign,” Waldo said, coming to the point. “In fact, I am tendering my written resignation.”
And he fetched the paper round on Crankshaw’s desk with a frivolous twirl, unrehearsed, which reminded him once again of the maid in a Restoration play, though this time he did not care.
Crankshaw was obviously stunned.
“Have you given it all possible thought?” he asked between bubbling into his filthy pipe.
Waldo appreciated the all possible. Thoroughly characteristic.
“I have been thinking it over for years,” he said not quite accurately.
“Made any plans?”
Waldo said no he hadn’t though he had but wasn’t going to tell.
The Librarian looked at Waldo, who was again conscious of the cleft chin, which, so it was said, is the sign of a lover.
“If there is any way in which I can assist,” Crankshaw offered.
It was the exact tone of his dictation.
“We have never, it seems, got to know each other, not, I mean, as human beings, and everyone, I expect you will agree, has the potentialities.” So Crankshaw uttered. “I would have liked to see you out at Roseville. We might have had a chat. But apparently I was slow in asking.”
Tell that to the priests and the white hats! Waldo smiled the smile which left the token of a dimple in his lean right cheek. He could not be caught so late in the piece.
He went out and took down his homburg. They would think the Librarian had entrusted him with business of a confidential nature. So he escaped without further embarrassment from the scene of Cissie Baker’s offering him, in another war, her soldier-brother’s poems.
The streets were full of soldiers now. Waldo Brown could have outmarched the most virile of them, up King and along Macquarie, to the big new Public Library they had opened a couple of years before, and where he began without delay offering his services.
Time thus spent is not life lived, but belongs in a peculiar purgatorial category of its own. Waldo got used to it, and even detected in his face signs of moral purification. If any, his religion had become a cultivation of personal detachment, of complete transparency — he was not prepared to think emptiness — of mind. In this way he suffered no immediate hurt, and would only remember years afterwards fragments of conversation overheard.
For instance, from during his petitioning:
“This Brown cove — this Waldo — sounds nutty enough to me.”
“Oh, Crankshaw agrees. But advises we should give him a trial. Says he’s a glutton for continuity.”
“All very well for old Crank.”
“He’s an honest man, Mr O’Connell.”
“Except when it comes to his throw-outs. No man can afford to be honest then.”
(This part alone made Waldo Brown inclined to lose the faith he didn’t have in human nature.)
“Ah well, fit him in somewhere, I suppose. Waldo Brown. Somewhere amongst the introverts. Some corner. They like that. Let him sharpen his pencils and sweep up the crumbs of his rubber in peace.”
Such was the texture of mind he had cultivated, Waldo only saw this dialogue printed black on its transparent screen perhaps six years afterwards, and immediately realized O’Connell was somebody to hate.
Arthur’s dog helped him reach his conclusion.
One Saturday morning when Allwright had allowed him to knock off early, Arthur had gone in to Barranugli and bought from the pet shop a blue pup. Waldo found his brother seated on the edge of the veranda grunting apparently with joy, kneading the formless lump of fat, gazing at it, snout against snout, staring into the animal’s rather unpleasant marbles of eyes.
The puppy, grunting or growling back, bristled up on seeing Waldo.
“Don’t tell me!” the latter rattled. “I thought we had this out last time you did it. You were younger then, Arthur. But look at you now, an old man!”
“Fifty-six,” Arthur said.
He could not cuddle the puppy less.
“Well, then,” said Waldo. “At your age. You won’t outlast that dog. And what am I going to do with one? Arthur? Quite apart from that, what about his biting the postman, shitting in corners, or not even corners? What it will eat, too, a large dog, at post-war prices. At cheapest, stinking horseflesh, fetching in the blow-flies.”
“Keep the meat in a bucketful of water. Under the coral tree.”
Arthur’s hands grew noticeably gentler wrapping the pup in enormous velvetty flaps of dough. The pup was either grinning back, or waiting to sink its teeth in Arthur’s not too human snout.
“But all that yellow fat on horseflesh! Ugh! There’s something about an old man with a dog. Arthur? Now, young children. Parents, I’ve read, often invest in a pup to teach their children the facts of life. That’s unpleasant in itself, though practical. You can’t say it isn’t normal. But later on it’s the people who are in some way denied or denying — sexually frustrated women, selfish, childless couples, narcissists — who keep dogs. People in some way peculiar.”
Waldo’s voice continued on a curve with no prospect of coming full circle. When Arthur interrupted.
“I am peculiar,” he said.
So dreamy since shutting the pup to sleep in his arms, this old man was looking peculiarly awful.
“I warn you,” Waldo said irrelevantly.
Anyway, this time Arthur refused to return the pup.
He called it Scruffy, and might have created what he named. Arthur present, the dog’s attention was all for Arthur, its large tongue lolling out of its smaller mouth, its nose perpetually swivelling. In Arthur’s absence, the marble-eyes were fixed on distance and some abstraction of the man.
Once when Arthur wasn’t there Waldo tried kicking Scruffy, and the dog growled back, but realizing its own inferiority, did not attack its punisher. Waldo was satisfied. It occurred to him then to go to the bucket where they kept the horseflesh, he couldn’t get there quick enough, to cut off a strip of the submerged meat, and dangle the purple spongy stuff under the puppy’s frantic nose. The animal gulped, would have eaten more, but was content instead to slobber over Waldo’s hands and wrists. Waldo, too, was content, but to feel so immensely superior.
He couldn’t resist telling Arthur at least the conclusion of the story.
“It ate from me,” he said. “It took some meat.”
“Natural thing for a dog to do.”
Then Arthur began to look sly.
“Waldo,” he said, “how about letting Scruffy come and sleep in the bed? So as we’d all be together.”
Waldo almost spat, the way elderly, ignorant people used to spit at a bad smell to keep disease out of their mouths.
“What do you think a bed is for?” he asked.
His question inevitably turned him prim.
“For dogs to lie in, of course,” said Arthur.
But he did not try it on again.
And Waldo waited, before confessing a plan of his own. For it was about this time that he allowed himself to remember a dialogue of the Public Library overheard six years earlier. The confirmed perfidy of Crankshaw, not to mention O’Connell, perhaps recommended the honesty of dogs.
So Waldo in turn grew sly.
He finally said: “What do you say, Arthur, if I get a mate for Scruffy, one which will be really mine, as Scruffy is obviously yours?”
“What, and breed together? That would be whacko! Nobody’s breeding down Terminus Road.”
“My dog will not be a female.” Waldo was very firm.
“Any dog will be one more,” said Arthur. “Would you like me to choose it?”
“I shall choose it,” Waldo said, “because it’s going to be my dog.”
Waldo brought back his pup. It could not have been much younger than Arthur’s Scruffy, though rather smaller.
“That dog might be sick,” said Arthur.
&nb
sp; “That’s because it isn’t yours;” Waldo replied. “The sort of thing people say when they grow resentful. It may be smaller than Scruffy, but, I should say, tougher.”
From clinging to life, perhaps. Though Waldo would not have admitted it at first. His dog, a shade of blue similar to that of Arthur’s Scruffy, had a staring coat, plastered in places from confinement in the pet-shop window. It had a mattery eye, and its barrel-belly, swollen by the knots of worms probably inside it, gave surface shelter to a busy race of fleas.
But Waldo proposed to love his dog the way man does, according to tradition.
“What are you going to call him?” Arthur asked.
“Runt,” said Waldo, on a high note, and immediately.
His own honesty cut him painfully. For it was not the dog he was humiliating. To atone for dishonesty in other men, in Crankshaw, not to mention O’Connell — he had thought it out, oh, seriously — he would mortify himself through love for this innocent though in every other way, repulsive creature, his dog. At least Arthur neither applauded nor discouraged Waldo’s moral strength. To give him his due, there was a strain of delicacy in Arthur.
As for Runt and Scruffy, they accepted the fatality of their arbitrary relationship, gnawing, licking, tumbling each other over. They enjoyed the luxury of each other’s farts.
And Runt grew fat. His glossy blue glimmered at its best like star sapphires. He would catapult suddenly at Arthur, always greedy for the taste of his hands. Or less impulsive, but no less desirous, the creature would roll over on its back, exposing its belly and a slight erection.
“Whose dog is this?” Waldo complained, jokily at first.
Then it became a serious matter. Runt was really Arthur’s dog. Nor did Scruffy care particularly for anyone outside the triangular relationship chance had constructed, out of himself, with Runt and Arthur.
Waldo got to hate Runt. He got to hate both the dogs, on account of all the tenderness — the tendresse, to quote the French, and which sounded much more tender — he had promised himself, and been denied.
The Solid Mandala Page 19
