So he returned to the house in which they lived, and Arthur was standing, beyond avoiding, in the doorway, waiting for him. Arthur was looking old, but seemed the younger for a certain strength. Or lamplight. For lamplight rinses the smoother, the more innocent faces, making them even more innocent and smooth.
Except Arthur was not all that innocent. He was waiting to trap him, Waldo suspected, in love-talk.
So that he broke down crying on the kitchen step, and Arthur who had been waiting, led him in, and opened his arms. At once Waldo was engulfed in the most intolerable longing, in the smell of mutton flaps and dog, of childhood and old men. He could not stop crying.
Arthur led him in and they lay together in the bed which had been their parents’, that is, Waldo lay in Arthur’s vastly engulfing arms, which at the same time was the gothic embrace of Anne Quantrell soothing her renegade Baptist. All the bread and milk in the world flowed out of Arthur’s mouth onto Waldo’s lips. He felt vaguely he should resist such stale, ineffectual pap. But Arthur was determined Waldo should receive. By this stage their smeary faces were melted together.
But so ineffectual. Waldo remained the passive, though palpitating, plastic doll in Arthur’s arms, which he didn’t even attempt to undress, for knowing too well, perhaps, the wardrobe of garments, the repertoire of flesh. Mrs Poulter, who had knitted the sweater Arthur was wearing, must have experienced, if not pleasure, at least satisfied curiosity, probably even a cauterizing fear, in undressing and dressing up her doll. But Arthur, it seemed, was unafraid of anything, and Waldo only afraid of time now that it had begun to slip.
As they lay in the vast bed time was swooping in waves of waves of yellow fluctuating light, or grass. The yellow friction finally revived their flesh. They seemed to flow together as they had, once or twice, in memory or sleep. They were promised a sticky morning, of yellow down, of old yellowed wormy quinces.
Until in the grey hours Waldo not exactly woke, he opened another compartment to find that Arthur had rolled over, onto his back, snoring with a grey, thistly sound, and he, Waldo, was again the dried-up grass-halm caught in the crook of Arthur’s sweater. He began almost at once to twitter, for Arthur’s illusion of love and a greyed-up grass-halm. If the moustaches had mingled — Arthur was smooth — they should have run off a string of little flannel-eyed boys, and girls with damp ringletted hair. But that was the way it hadn’t worked. The carpet Jew had wrapped them (un)fortunately up.
Presently Waldo creaked out of bed and began stealthily washing up the dirty bowls and things, which normally they left till cement had formed. This morning he was making use of them. To ignore the thoughts Arthur might otherwise pounce on when he woke. So Waldo had to work with care, not to avoid making a noise, but to prevent himself giving room to his thoughts. Noise never woke Arthur. He would lie there well into light, and then, still half-asleep, stay picking the dead skin off the soles of his spongy feet, waiting for an opportunity to barge in on other people’s thoughts.
That morning, when Arthur woke finally, he called out to Waldo: “I dreamed about you, Waldo. You had lumps of Pears soap trying to come out of your nostrils. You seemed upset. I wonder what it means.”
Waldo was revolted. He broke a basin.
“Perhaps it means,” said Arthur, “you’re afraid of having a baby.”
“I think,” said Waldo, “I needn’t have any such fear by now.”
“Did you know Dulcie had two miscarriages? She was more upset than I’ve ever known her.”
Arthur came shambling in. In that dreadful sweater on a puce theme Mrs Poulter had knitted for him.
“She loved them I believe,” Arthur said, “more than the real children she had.”
“Miscarriages” — Waldo snorted — “are more than real. I know that!”
Arthur sat down, scuffling up his old-man’s hair, in which stains of his fiery youth were visible still. If you hadn’t known Arthur, his bare feet would have looked peculiarly gentle.
“What are we going to do today?”
“We’re going for a walk.”
“What walk?”
“The same.”
Arthur and Waldo were observing each other.
Then Arthur said, with that fluency and lucidity which his crumbly face would suddenly produce: “That’s all right, Waldo. Because we’ll be together, shan’t we? And if you should feel yourself falling, I shall hold you up, I’ll have you by the hand, and I am the stronger of the two.”
So there was nothing for it but to go.
Every morning, sooner or later, they went for the walk, longer, and then longer, Waldo always hoped. They would return about mid-day, later if it had been longer. They returned to the basins of bread and milk.
Meat they ate also on occasions: a lump of beef, mutton flaps, rather rubbery from the dangers boiled out of them. Or sometimes they would tempt fate, they would join in stuffing a mutton flap, with the old bent aluminium skewers always taking on fresh shapes, or raining on the floor, as hands fought to contain a sculpture of dough, or torture dead meat into submission. As they slapped and pinned, during their joint effort, they might begin to laugh, probably for different reasons. At least they had the meat in common. While the skewers threatened to pierce their hands.
If Arthur made no other attempt to convert Waldo to the love he preached, it was perhaps because love in the end becomes an abstraction like anything else. From meat to Bonox in several acts. Anyway, brown.
It troubled Waldo no end the night he woke to discover the worst had happened. Sinking low is never sinking low enough. Since he had not yet recovered his vocabulary, he could only call faeces shit.
Or shout and bellow.
When Arthur had lit the lamp he said: “All right, Waldo. Don’t we know? I know I’m responsible for a lot.”
As he fetched the basin he added: “But have never jibbed at mopping up.”
Muttering still: “To go back to what I told you. To let Runt and Scruffy in the bed. Then we’d be all of us together.”
Waldo thought he couldn’t allow himself to fall asleep ever again. And find that. Only walk, which is another kind of sleep.
Which they did every day.
Once he looked at Arthur and said: “At least it must be doing us good.”
Arthur said: “Yes, it’s obviously doing us good.”
So that Waldo flung himself at the dress-box almost every afternoon with such passion he had torn off one of the cardboard sides. He sat with his papers spread out round him, weighted with stones when the wind blew. Mostly he corrected, though sometimes, as his throat rustled drily, he would also write.
On one occasion he wrote: In the extreme of his youth, which was fast approaching, Tiresias suffered difficulties with his syntax and vocabulary, he found that words, turning to stones, would sink below the surface, out of sight.
He did not care for that, but kept it. He kept everything now, out of spite for Goethe, or respect for posterity.
When Arthur produced something he had found.
“What is it, Waldo?”
“An old dress of Mother’s.”
“Why was it behind the copper? She must have forgotten.”
“Put it away!” Waldo shouted. “Where it was!”
To Arthur, who was holding in front of him the sheet of ice, so that Waldo might see his reflexion in it.
Arthur threw away the dress.
Which turned into the sheet of paper Waldo discovered in a corner, not ferreting, but ferreted. On smoothing out the electric paper at once he began quivering.
“Arthur,” he called, “do you know about this?”
“Yes,” said Arthur. “That’s a poem.”
“What poem?”
“One I wanted to, but couldn’t write.”
Then Waldo read aloud, not so menacingly as he would have liked, because he was, in fact, menaced:
“‘my heart is bleeding for the Viviseckshunist
Cordelia is bleeding for her father’s life
all Marys in the end bleed
but do not complane because they know
they cannot have it any other way’”
This was the lowest, finally. The paper hung from Waldo’s hand.
“I know, Waldo!” Arthur cried. “Give it to me! It was never ever much of a poem.”
He would have snatched, but Waldo did not even make it necessary.
When his brother had gone, Waldo went into the room in which their mother used to sit at the four o’clock sherry. He took down the dress-box and began to look out shining words. He was old. He was bleeding. He was at last intolerably lustreless. His hands were shaking like the papers time had dried.
While Arthur’s drop of unnatural blood continued to glitter, like suspicion of an incurable disease.
Waldo was infected with it.
About four o’clock he went down, Tiresias a thinnish man, the dress-box under his arm, towards the pit where they had been accustomed to burn only those things from which they could bear to be parted. He stood on the edge in his dressing-gown. Then crouched, to pitch a paper tent, and when he had broken several match-sticks — increasingly inferior in quality — got it to burn. The warmth did help a little, and prettiness of fire, but almost immediately afterwards the acrid years shot up his nose.
So he stood up. He began to throw his papers by handfuls, or would hold one down with his slippered foot, when the wind threatened to carry too far, with his slippered foot from which the blue veins and smoke wreathed upward.
It was both a sowing and a scattering of seed. When he had finished he felt lighter, but always had been, he suspected while walking away.
Now at least he was free of practically everything but Arthur.
After he had lain down on the bed he began to consider how he might disembarrass himself, not like silly women in the news who got caught out through falling hair or some such unpremeditated detail, but quick, clean, and subtle, a pass with the tongue he had not yet perfected, but must. As he lay, he raised himself on one creaking elbow, because of the urgency of his problem.
That was when Arthur came in and saw him.
“Waldo!” Arthur was afraid at last. “What are you trying to do to me?”
When Waldo had always wondered, fainter now, whether Arthur noticed the hurt which was intended for him. Or Dulcie. He had never shown her he had noticed that moustache. And Dulcie’s moustache might possibly have been the means of her destruction.
But Arthur so practically smooth.
Through the pain of destroying Arthur he noticed more than heard Arthur’s last words.
“I know it wasn’t much of a poem.” Arthur was shaping his defence. “Oughter have destroyed it at once. Apologise, Waldo.”
The warmed stones of words.
“That poem? That disgusting blood myth!” Waldo gasped to hear his own voice.
“I would have given the mandala, but you didn’t show you wanted it.”
“I never cared for marbles. My thumb could never control them.”
He was entranced by Arthur’s great marigold of a face beginning to open. Opening. Coming apart. Falling.
“Let me go! Wald! Waldo!”
As dropping. Down. Down.
III. Arthur
IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS THE SEA OF SLEEP OF SUCH blue in which they lay together with iced cakes and the fragments of glass nesting in each other’s arms the furry waves of sleep nuzzling at them like animals.
Dreaming and dozing.
The voices of passengers after Capetown promised icebergs to the south, two-thirds submerged.
He looked but only saw the sea in varying depths of light and blue. Sometimes in the stillness of a wave he heard a seabird mewing which might have accounted for his sad stomach. He wasn’t sick. He hadn’t been sick. Waldo was the sick one, they said, Arthur has always been strong. So he must continue to be.
Then suddenly he noticed for the first time without strain, it seemed, the red gold disc of the sun. He was so happy, he ran to reach, to climb on the rails, reaching up. His hands seemed to flutter his breath mewing with the willing effort.
Voices screaming lifted him back, and he noticed he had been scratched by ladies.
“You must never never climb on the rails at sea!” said Mother. “You might fall over, and then you would be lost for ever.”
He looked at her and said: “Yes. I might. For ever.”
Feeling the cold circles eddying out and away from him.
Mother was soon calm again, sitting talking to the lady who, arranged from head to toe in veils, became always more of a silkworm the tighter the better she arranged her veils.
“Yes, he is very different,” Mother agreed, and laughed. “But they are honestly twins. I can vouch for it! The other one — Waldo — has gone with his father to make friends with someone — the Chief Engineer, I believe. Neither George nor Waldo likes engines, but perhaps they feel it is manly to try.”
The Silkworm said she could not bear the ship, there were cockroaches in the Ladies, she could not bear the passengers, they were so common, she could not bear the voyage, it was too unnecessarily long.
“Never again round the Cape!” The Silkworm shuddered inside her cocoon. “All the nicer people travel via the Canal. But Mr Viney-Smith — my husband says we wouldn’t stand up to tropical heat.”
“Yes,” Mother said, and sighed, “it is long. But we have come this way because it is cheap. And I don’t expect we shall ever travel by any other route. When we arrive, we shall have to stay where we are put.”
That night there was to be a ball. So presently the Silkworm went, to get herself up as the Primrose Pompadour, and win the prize.
Arthur was glad to be alone with Mother. He held the back of her hand to his cheek and rubbed it with the only ring she wore.
But Mother ignored him, or at least half. She half-spoke to the setting sun.
“We mustn’t exhibit ourselves,” she said.
“We mustn’t what?”
“We mustn’t show off. I have given the most disgusting exhibition of false humility. To which I know I am prone.”
Then she looked at him again, and this time it was only for him.
“Promise me never to show off.”
She was all for promises, and he was always promising, even those promises he would have to break.
Because he knew he loved to exhibit himself. He loved it when other people showed off. He loved the feel of the velvety seats.
“How do you like being in a box, Arthur?” It was Granny asking.
They were all for asking how he felt, and he could not have answered, except that he was sleepy and excited. He could only run his hands along the velvet edge, of what was not, except jokingly, a box, floating in the sea of music.
Everybody talked a lot in the box while the ladies in the huge lit scene were singing against one another.
Again it was: how do you like? what do you make of?
This time it was the person who was Mother’s Uncle Charlie leaning over the back of his chair.
“Well, what does the young fellow make of Götterdämmerung?” Uncle Charlie asked.
To that Arthur could only try to stroke his left shoulder with his cheek. The answer would have been too velvety, too foolish.
“It’s a wonder Anne allowed us to carry off her brat to this unrewarding experiment.” Uncle Charlie yawned.
“Poor Anne! She’s too harrassed,” said Cousin Mollie Thourault, smelling so flowery, “too upset by the other one’s being ill.”
Uncle Charlie, Arthur could feel, had become in some way interested again. He could feel his relative’s hand on the nape of his neck. He would have liked to throw the hand off, but was afraid of disturbing Uncle Charlie’s thoughts. For his fingers were thoughtful as his voice increased.
“Wouldn’t you have thought, Adelaide,” he said to Granny, and against the singing his speaking voice sounded enormous, “she might have suspected some irony of intention? You
wouldn’t expect it of Him. Irony is not for Baptist-rationalists even when it kills off a few more unacceptable gods.”
“How brutal you are, Charlie!” Granny said laughingly. “Men are more brutal than women, and far more complicated.”
Arthur could not tell, but found out later Granny was right, that even dogs are less brutal than men, because they are less complicated.
For the time being, lapped so deliriously in linings of dark red velvet, sleep was carrying him off. Or music. Who and where were the gods? He could not have told, but knew, in his flooded depths. Tell Waldo about the lady in the brass helmet. The primrose pomp. If the crimson flood of music had been of Waldo’s world.
“Wake up, darling!” Mother said.
And of course they were sitting on the deck. The dying sun had turned them cold.
“You funny boy!” she said. “Falling asleep just anywhere. Perhaps it’s a blessing,” she added.
Again she was looking out to sea. And he loved her.
He would have loved to see the icebergs, but never ever did they pop up, not even though he looked to the line which divided sea from sky. Only in sleep the icebergs moaned, and jostled one another, crunching and tinkling. The moons of sky-blue ice fell crashing silently down to splinter into glass balls which he gathered in his protected hands.
Somehow at least he knew from the beginning he was protected. Perhaps it was Waldo. Not everybody has a twin. He must hang on to Waldo.
“You’re a funny pair,” said the woman at Barranugli when she brought in the big brown teapot. “Are there many others like you at Home?”
“I should hope not,” Waldo answered; it had made him angry. “I should hope we are different from just anybody.”
The woman went out. She didn’t seem to understand their speech.
Arthur had not contributed because he mostly left it to his brother who was quick at answering questions. Perhaps if things had made him angrier Arthur might have answered back more often, but he was lazy enough to leave it to Waldo.
They lodged at first with those people at Barranugli, Mr and Mrs Thompson — he was a joiner who hadn’t taken to them. But it was convenient because of Dad’s job at the bank. Arthur and Waldo went to school only a couple of blocks away, where nobody understood them until they managed to learn the language. Even so, Waldo, then and always, preferred to speak English because, he said, it had a bigger vocabulary. Arthur did not care. Or he did. He developed the habit of speaking mostly in Australian. He wanted to be understood. He wanted them to trust him too. Waldo, he knew, was suspicious of men, though Waldo himself was inclined to call them Australians.
The Solid Mandala Page 23
