But her back presented itself as a wall which had to be scaled. Was he strong enough? A weak character — oh no, no character is weak if the obsessions are only strong enough. Besides, his obsession was acquiring the surge of Beethoven’s proposition. B. was certainly strong enough, if a mightily unpleasant old man writing music on a lavatory wall.
At that moment Waldo Brown realized Mrs Feinstein’s nose reminded him of the uncircumcised penis of an Anglican bishop he had noticed in a public lavatory. The connection was too obvious, too obscene to resist, and he was forced to bring out his handkerchief to sneeze.
So much for Dad, he decided. And the Jews. He was sorry about Dad, the brown burrowing but never arriving eyes, and the twitch of a moustache on your skin years ago.
Dulcie broke off just then, saying: “I can’t go any farther.”
Immediately afterwards she turned round, her appearance dishevelled, as though she had walked out between storms. Branches still wet and aggressive had hit her in the face, without however breaking her trance, deepening it even, by making her gasp and swallow down the black draught of sky which otherwise she might have shuddered back from. As she sat looking out at them from her irrelevant body with such a pure candour of expression Waldo saw it was he who had lost. He might never be able to forgive her the difficulties she put in the way of loving her.
“I bit off more than I could chew,” she admitted with that same awful honesty.
“It was my fault, I’m afraid,” Waldo answered politely.
It could have made it worse if Dulcie hadn’t been so cool and reasonable, hands in her lap, still seated on the carpet-covered music-stool. Because of this innate reasonableness, which was another surprise silly, frivolous, mysterious Dulcie had sprung on him, he would have liked to counter it with something really good, of such truth, simplicity, and directness, say, Der Jüngling an der Quelle, that he would have shamed her further, even deeply, for her pretentious performance of the Beethoven. But he feared Schubert might not collaborate in this. He would have to rely on a few ballads to decorate his passable voice.
For he sensed that Mrs Feinstein was about to invite him to take his turn at showing off.
“Don’t you in any way perform, Waldo?” she asked in what he heard to be a disbelieving voice.
So the moment had arrived. He said he would sing a few songs.
“Though I warn you, I accompany myself very badly, with little more than one finger!”
“Oh,” said Dulcie, “perhaps I can help.”
And did when she heard the titles. He sang them In the Gloaming, The Tide Will Turn, and Singing Voices, Marching Feet. At once he regretted denying his own skill at the piano, for as he glanced down Dulcie’s neck, and at her dexterous hands, he realized he was putting, not so much no expression, as the wrong one, into the words he was singing. Because how could Dulcie have learnt the accompaniments, if not at some sing-song for the Boys? Thumping out worse, no doubt, in a vulgar low-cut blouse, as the bacon-faced men, smelling of khaki and old pennies, propped themselves up on the piano. Anyone coarsening so early as Dulcie, in both arms and figure, could only have acted openly. The authentic AIF brooch she must have worn would barely have held her breasts together.
After this discovery he confessed his voice was dry.
“You will tire yourself, giving so much.” Mrs Feinstein sighed.
And Dulcie said: “I never realized you had such a charming tenor voice.”
With the result that it almost rose again, silkily, in his injured throat.
But the afternoon, like the lolling Arthur, had just about exhausted itself. As the others sat nibbling at a few last crumbs of conversation, his head rolled without waking, and for a moment Waldo noticed with repulsion the whites of his brother’s upturned eyes.
If he had not been making other discoveries he would have woken Arthur. Instead he noticed Dulcie was wearing, not the AIF brooch, but a Star of David on a gold chain.
“Are you religious?” he asked, as brittlely as the question demanded.
She pulled an equally brittle face. He might have teased her some more if Mrs Feinstein hadn’t wandered off at a tangent.
“I am so sorry,” she said, “You will not have had the opportunity of meeting Leonard Saporta. On another occasion he was to have come, but he had the grippe or something, I seem to remember. This time he has been too impulsive. He slammed a door, and cut his hand on the glass knob.”
“Is he a relative?” Waldo asked.
Mrs Feinstein said: “No.”
The mention of relatives set her off sighing again, and he hardly dared, though did finally enquire after the Signora Terni of Milan.
“Old, old.” Mrs Feinstein protested against it. “Very aged.”
Then Waldo grew more daring.
“And Madame Hochapfel?”
Mrs Feinstein was desolated. She emulated Arthur in showing the whites of her eyes.
“Before we have reached Europe,” Mrs Feinstein replied in a voice from beyond the grave.
“Aunt Gaby had lived, Mummy,” Dulcie suggested.
Her idea was to staunch the ’cello music, but it sounded, rather, as though she had turned her mother’s lament into a duet.
When Mrs Feinstein began to take herself in hand.
“I don’t know what Daddy would have to say to so much Jewish emotionalism. I was thankful we did not have him with us, either in Paris or Milan. Poor things, they are devout.” Mrs Feinstein smiled for the sick, though it could have been she enjoyed the sickness. “Of course we did whatever was expected of us while we were there. We did not have the heart to tell them we have given up all such middle-aged ideas, to conform,” she said, “to conform with the spirit of progress. Daddy, I am afraid, who is more forceful in his expression, would have offended.”
After that she disappeared, trailing the outdoor coat she was wearing. It was so out of place. It was also so shapeless it might have been inherited.
Waldo would have woken Arthur, only he saw that Dulcie, in some distraction, had thrown open the glass doors, and was holding her handkerchief to her upper lip, while breathing the rather foetid air of their wartime garden.
“Aren’t you well?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I am well! Didn’t you gather I am very healthy?”
Suddenly he knew he would like to say: Dearest, dearest Dulcie — taking her hands in his hands with a suppleness not peculiar to them.
Instead he continued standing stiffly, against the prospect of staggy hydrangeas, their leaves yellow and speckled from neglect.
Dulcie, he realized, had begun to cry. Very softly. Which made it worse.
“What is it?” he asked, in a tone to match — worse and worse.
“There is so much I don’t, I shall never be able to grasp,” she said abruptly, in a comparatively loud and shocking voice.
At the same time she held out her arms, not to him, but in one of the ugly gestures with which she had fought Beethoven, again in an attempt to embrace some recalcitrant vastness.
Fortunately Arthur woke, and it was clearly time to go.
“Then you can have a proper cry,” Arthur advised through a yawn.
“I’ve done all the crying, proper or improper, I intend to do,” Dulcie said.
She sounded so very practical.
“Give my regards, Arthur,” she said, “to your mother. I hope one day we shall meet.”
Arthur was dawdling his way through the garden. He could have been feeling depressed.
“Oh. My mother,” he murmured, then: “You mightn’t like each other,” he called back.
As it was too probable to answer, Dulcie went inside, closing the door, against the glass panels of which Waldo saw her figure pressed, very lightly, fleetingly. He remembered seeing a fern pressed under glass, the ribs more clearly visible.
Then he and Arthur were going away. Arthur was holding him by the hand.
Anything so unassessable, and in a way he did not wish
to assess their relationship with the Feinsteins, was liable to suffer from the more positive occurrences. The Poulters, for instance. The Poulters arrived in Terminus Road perhaps about 1920, anyway, Dad had retired, but had not died. Waldo remembered with difficulty the occasion of his first setting eyes on the Poulters. All too soon there were the heap of bricks, the matchsticks of timber, but before that, yes, he could remember the day the man and woman trampled round and round in the grass, more like cattle let loose on fresh pasture. Then the man appeared to be pacing out dimensions. Mother went inside saying she had heartburn, but Waldo stayed to watch, in spite of the felted chug-chug from somewhere in the region of his throat or heart. The man was a thin one. The woman, more noticeably fleshed, had stupid-looking calves, which Waldo thought he would have liked to slap if he had been following her up a flight of stairs. Slap slap. To make her hop. After a bit the strangers went away, driving in a sulky with a sweaty horse, lowering their eyes to avoid the glances of those who had the advantage over them by being there already.
“They hired that horse and trap for the day,” Arthur informed the family as they sat at tea eating the salmon loaf.
No one any longer asked how Arthur knew. (He had, in fact, gone across the road, to look closer, and ask.)
“They’re from up country,” he said. “Mr Poulter was a rouseabout, Mrs Poulter helped at the homestead.”
“But why have they come down here?” Mother wondered.
“To be more independent,” Arthur explained at once.
Waldo laughed. He had begun to feel gratifyingly superior.
“But why Terminus Road? Why directly opposite us?” Mother couldn’t leave it alone.
“They had to go somewhere,” Arthur said.
“What have we got to hide, Annie?” Dad asked.
Only Mother and Waldo knew.
And the Poulters came.
Bill Poulter, who remained scraggy, and awkwardly articulated, began to build the home. There was someone, some lad out of Sarsaparilla, giving him a hand. They were putting together the blank box, very quickly, it seemed, so much so the grey flannel undervests hung darker from their shoulders to their ribs. In the end the structure looked less a square house than an oblong houseboat.
All this time Mrs Poulter had been living in a tin shed on the site. She cooked on an open fire, and the smell of burning wood floated up and crossed the road, together with the smells from her boiling pot, or more accurately, half a kero tin.
Mrs Poulter herself began to come across the road. She borrowed a cup of sugar, a cup of rice. She was the high-complexioned decent young woman they got to know, who put on a brave red hat to walk up Terminus Road to Allwrights’ or the post-office. Sometimes Arthur brought the orders home for her, sometimes if it was closing time, they walked down together, Arthur carrying the brown-paper bags and the newspaper parcels. She seemed to take to him, or at least she didn’t mind, as some women did.
From the beginning Mrs Poulter gave the impression of wanting to perform some charitable act.
“If you was ever sick, you know, you’d only have to give us a shout, Mrs Brown, and I’d come across and do what I could. Sit with you at night, or anything like that. Or if it was the men, Bill would. I think Bill would,” she was careful to add.
Waldo knew how this sort of thing embarrassed their mother.
Mrs Poulter told Mother the War had got on Bill’s nerves sort of, not that he had been gassed or shell-shocked, or gone overseas even, but from being in a camp. Afterwards he couldn’t settle. That was one of several reasons why they had come to Sarsaparilla. Where she hoped to keep a few hens, and grow flowers, she loved all flowers. Bill was going to get taken on by the Shire Council. Only temporary. Because Council labourer wasn’t much of a job for a man. Bill could kill, milk, fell trees, he had once entered for a wood-chopping competition though he hadn’t won. It was terrible dry up-country where they had come from. That was Mungindribble. Her own people came from Numburra. Her auntie had started having the indigestion, they thought, when it turned out to be cancer. They said, said Mrs Poulter, there was a cure for it from violet leaves. If only she could make certain, she would perhaps grow the violets, and post the leaves in a moist parcel.
Mother decided after that not to encourage Mrs Poulter. Though you couldn’t say Mother wasn’t always polite, not to say kind. She gave Mrs Poulter a piece of lace insertion.
Sometimes when his wife crossed the road, to borrow, return, or yarn, Bill Poulter would come down to the grass edge of their side, and stand looking across, squinting because of the sun. His arms, usually exposed as far as the armpits, for he had had her cut off the sleeves, were stringy rather than muscular, with prominent veins. He never had much to say, not even, it seemed, to his wife.
Although the material wasn’t promising, Waldo began to wonder whether he could make Bill Poulter his friend. He walked springily at the prospect, deciding how he should go about it. He had never really had a friend of his own sex, unless you could count Walter Pugh, for whom he could never have really cared, because of those ridiculous literary ambitions. But take Bill Poulter — virgin soil, so to speak. He might turn Bill into whatever he chose by cultivating his crude manliness for the best.
So, if Bill Poulter happened to be hoeing or hewing within easy distance as he passed, Waldo took to flicking his head sideways at him, as he had seen other men, and sometimes his neighbour would flick back, nothing more, in recognition. On other occasions Bill just didn’t seem to see. Waldo used to walk quite prim and virginal wondering whether Bill would recognize or not. It began to matter a great deal.
Until he knew he must take the bull by the horns, as it were, if he intended to influence their neighbour’s mind and future. He might, for a start, lend him a book, something quite simple and primitive, Fenimore Cooper, say, they still had The Deerslayer in the Everyman edition. Waldo made his decision returning from the Library on a Friday night. That Sunday morning he went across to Bill Poulter, who was splitting a pile of wood for the stove. (Mrs Poulter had gone up the road to church or chapel, or whatever brand of poison she took.)
Waldo opened by flicking his head. Then he squatted down, to watch in silence, as he had learnt from seeing other men, or comment knowledgeably on the weather.
Bill Poulter chopped. He nearly always had a sucked-looking cigarette-butt hanging extinct from his lower lip. Though sometimes he would pause to roll a fresh one.
“So you think it’s gunna rain, do yer?” Bill responded antiphonally as he rolled his next cigarette. “Could do,” he dared add. “Clouds are comun from the right direction.”
The situation couldn’t be called desperate. The climate was too positive. A smell of male exertion on the air encouraged Waldo to come to the point.
“Ever go in for reading books?” he asked very cautiously.
“Nah.” Bill swung the axe, and split the knottiest chunk of wood. “Never ever have the time.”
“I’d lend you a few decent books,” Waldo offered.
Something had made him boyish.
“If you read the paper,” he coaxed, “and I see you do take the Herald, you might find you had time for a read of a book.”
“Nah,” said Bill. “Wife reads the paper. But what’s the point? Don’t know anybody down in Sydney.”
Waldo’s long wrists hung between his squatting thighs as he watched Bill Poulter chop.
“Then there’s nothing I can do for you,” he said at last.
Bill didn’t deny that. He was flinging the wood into a barrow, piece by piece, as he split it, and the fuller the barrow the more wooden the thud.
Bill said through his ugly teeth: “Don’t find time enough for thinkun, let alone gettun littery.”
Waldo refused to feel humiliated. He continued squatting for a little, smiling a shallow smile at the chunks of wood, at the knots split apparently by light.
Soon after this Bill Poulter got taken by the Council and Waldo saw less of their neighbour, as
their movements did not coincide. On occasions when he did catch sight of Bill, the stringy rather than muscular arms with veins so prominent as to become obtrusive, he no longer flicked his head sideways. And Bill did not even look, forcing Waldo to remember the day he had offered the books. It had become so sickeningly physical. It was as if he had been snubbed for making what they called in the papers an indecent proposition.
But Waldo did not hate Bill, not exactly, or not yet. You could only despise ignorant, suspicious minds. Or the simple, wide-open ones. That Mrs Poulter, for example, with her puddings, and her hens troubled with the white diarrhoea. Not that he spoke to her. Not that he saw her, even. But knew she was there.
Arthur used to keep him informed: “Mrs Poulter let me taste the lemon sago pudding. When I brought the order down. She has a hen, she says, will bust herself from laying eggs the size she does. Mrs Poulter says there was a goat she knew at Numburra ate a basinful of yeast. The goat blew up.”
“Why,” Waldo asked, “do you have to listen to that stupid, babbling cow?”
“I don’t just listen. We tell each other things.”
“I’m sick to death of the very Name!” Mother said at last.
Arthur told quietly after that, but told: “When I was over there Sunday afternoon she was washing her hair. In a kero tin. She makes a lotion out of bay leaves. She showed me the leaves. You never saw such lovely hair. But it’s not what it was. It used to reach down below her waist.”
“You have your job, son,” said Dad in some difficulty — he had begun by those years to gasp. “Why don’t you concentrate on that?”
Arthur kept quiet.
And Mrs Poulter remained the same young woman, of firm flesh and high complexion, her hair glistening in certain lights. There was nothing you could have accused her of. Nothing. Except perhaps her living in the boat-shaped erection immediately opposite, with the fowl-sheds and wire-netting behind.
Arthur began to go very carefully, to speak very softly.
“She took me over the hill,” he no more than breathed. “We saw the Chinese woman standing under the wheel-tree. You ought to see a wheel-tree flowering. I would never have seen without she took me.”
The Solid Mandala Page 15