“Mummy and I are going to slip away,” Dulcie informed him, “without telling anybody. Leave-takings are rather painful when they are not absurd.”
Arthur began his stumbling. The cold light made the situation look so serious. He and Dulcie were walking together in the park, over the dead grass, along the edge of the wild lake. Dulcie was carrying a little muff, and wearing a collar of the same fur.
“But we decided we should tell you,” she added. “Because — ” she paused in thought, “in case you might fret.”
He was so moved as Dulcie spoke, and by the lights in her dark, shimmery fur, that his jaws were munching for every word.
“Don’t mind me, Dulcie!” he said. “After all.”
He could not hobble gratefully enough.
“Have you got a stone in your boot, perhaps?” Dulcie asked.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you want to look?”
“No,” he said, and laughed.
He was laughing at the swamp-hen strutting blue-enamelled through the reeds.
“Shall you send me picture post-cards?” he asked.
She would, of course. Written in coloured inks. In all the languages she proposed to learn.
Together they were making a joke of it.
“And Russian?” he asked.
“Too untidy for post-cards!” Dulcie laughed.
So they were happy together, rounding the empty shelter with its broken glass, and back the other side of the lake. Each moment was the happiest for their passing through it. They were the long-legged lovers, confidently offering their faces to receive each other’s gentleness as they moved in perfect time, in absolute agreement, against the flesh-coloured trunks of the paperbarks. Even when they were silentest, and he listened to Dulcie’s skirt dragging its hem through the wintry grass, and he could smell the smell of cold mud, he reckoned his face wouldn’t have collapsed yet into its normal shapelessness.
“Say a blind person married a blind person, do you think it would matter to them not to have seen each other?” Arthur asked.
“I’ve never thought about it,” Dulcie said.
She was walking with her head raised, looking so far into the distance, she had already left him.
She kept her promise and wrote him, if not several post-cards — you could not expect too much of people when you were not there to remind them of you — at least the card of the Italian lake, the name of which he was unable to read, nor did it matter, nor the foreign languages she had promised, and in which she did, in fact, write:
14th April 1914
Es ist hier sehr nett u. freundlich bei unserer kleinen Pension where we are staying the two of us after being suffocated amiably by relatives. It is so beautiful eating trout beside the water. Je ne peux croire qu’il y’aura guerre — as the know-alls promise — il y a trop de soleil. Mio caro Arturo, we visited a villa, or small castle, out on the lake, and the walls of one of the rooms were studded with rock-crystal! I thought of Arthur — e tutte nostre cosi chiare conversazioni. Affetti! — D.
The foreign languages failed to obscure Dulcie Feinstein focussed as she was in the crystal of his mind. Long after he had lost the card, he had only to revolve the marble in his pocket for Dulcie’s lake with the crystal-studded castle to re-appear.
When war broke out, which was important enough for those who became physically involved, it was more important that the Feinsteins should return, to the life which in fact they had never really left, in the house on the edge of the park. They came. And they appeared older. It continually amazed Arthur Brown that other people were growing older. Mrs Feinstein was older, and sadder, perhaps for this very fact of age. Dulcie was older, different, unexpected — for one thing she was unable to remember what she had written on the post-card.
“Shall we walk in the park,” he suggested, “like we did before you went away?”
“Not today,” she said, frowning slightly.
“Why?” he asked, though there was not much point, and his hopes had never been high.
“I have a headache.”
It must have been the airless room. The windows of the Feinsteins’ town house were more often than not sealed.
“I’ll open the window,” said Arthur.
But she did not seem to think it might help.
“It is not that. I am not in the mood. It is not a day for walking,” she added. “And besides, there are the railings. We should have to go so far along to get to a gate.”
The railings had existed before.
Soon after the remark, he went away, deciding not to admit to Waldo what could only be counted as defeat. In fact, he wouldn’t mention the return of Dulcie and Mrs Feinstein. For some reason, for the moment, he was less able to communicate with them, though if he hadn’t lost the art, he would not have known exactly what he wanted to say.
He happened to pass by the music store, where old Feinstein, who was following the War in the paper, received him more jovially than might have been expected. Normally it pleased Arthur to look through sheets of music, at the notes of music he would never be able to read.
Today he asked: “What are these?”
“Those are some songs which nobody will buy. Those songs were born to fly-specks and the remainder counter,” Mr Feinstein answered, gloomily turning back to the news.
The pierrot d’amour on the cover certainly conveyed less expectancy, less of the slightly scented breathlessness of the afternoon when Dulcie had explained about the pierrot on Mrs Musto’s bottle. So Arthur sat, and as the clanking tram flung the passengers together, composed his own version of a song, ignoring all those faces with which, in normal circumstances, he would have begun an intimate and, more likely than not, illuminating conversation.
When Waldo realized Feinsteins were back after meeting Dulcie at the gate one evening, and he and Arthur were invited up to “Mount Pleasant” on an afternoon which turned out not a bit as Arthur had hoped and expected — Waldo’s rather than Arthur’s, and instead of something squishy to eat, a few of Arnotts’ hard old biscuits — it was this rather fly-specked version of a pierrot song, composed to the clanking of a crowded tram, which Arthur rendered in Mrs Feinstein’s “salon”. It was really a song for Dulcie, which she alone would understand; she would see behind the words, and the deliberately ridiculous convulsions of his face.
Even though she said: “Oh, what a lovely song!” like some lady arriving for luncheon at Mrs Musto’s he thought Dulcie understood.
So he was able to flop down afterwards, and not exactly sleep, retire behind his eyelids, leaving the field to Waldo. This didn’t mean he didn’t experience Waldo’s torture of Dulcie when he provoked her to music, and all of that episode in the garden, first as Waldo, then as Dulcie, very intensely. He could smell the smell of rotting as they stirred up the dead hydrangea leaves. He could even smell the almond-essence smell of the vegetable-bugs on which they trod. Suffocating. Exhausting in the end. All the answers he could have foretold while the others were still looking for them.
Somewhere at some point Mrs Feinstein had remarked to Waldo: “I am so sorry you will never have had the good chance of meeting Leonard Saporta.”
“Is he a relative?” silly old Waldo asked.
Was he a relative! Leonard Saporta was a born relative.
Arthur had met this Mr Saporta, coming or going, never by arrangement, at Feinsteins’ other house. In Arthur’s life there were the convinced, the unalterable ones, such as Mr Allwright and Leonard Saporta, as opposed to those other fluctuating figures, of Dulcie, Waldo, his parents, even Mrs Poulter, all of whom flickered as frightfully as himself. Whereas Mr Allwright and Leonard Saporta must have kept the solid shape they were moulded in originally. Arthur was grateful for knowing they would never divide, like the others, in front of his eyes, into the two faces, one of which he might not have recognized if it hadn’t been his own.
It was during the First War that Arthur visited Mr Saporta in
his shop. It must have been towards the end, for the merchant himself was there, discharged. Leonard Saporta had enlisted, gone overseas, and returned with several shrapnel wounds which he did not care to talk about. (It was while he had been on leave in France that Leonard had sent Dulcie the little Star of David, which she afterwards wore on a chain round her neck, and which would have become a source of jovial mirth to Mr Feinstein, if his wife had not implored him, with all the resources of her face and muted ’cello notes in her voice, to desist, for Dulcie’s, for everybody’s sake.)
Anyway, Mr Saporta had returned, and the day Arthur went to his shop, approached with the appearance of a merchant receiving a genuine customer — certainly business was pretty slack — and clapping his hands together, asked:
“Well, Arthur, may I show you a few first quality Oriental rugs?”
Altogether Arthur felt too large, too shy, drifting sideways amongst the piles of rugs, which the merchant was preparing to turn over as though they had been the pages of a book.
“No, thank you,” Arthur said, and giggled, “Mr Saporta. I’m really only wasting your time.”
However often he had been invited to drop the “Mister” in favour of “Leonard”, Arthur had not been able to — something to do with the respect in which he held the merchant’s solid foundations.
Not that Mr Saporta was particularly rich in goods, it seemed, and his appearance was undoubtedly what Mother and Waldo would have described as “loud”: the suit too flash, the shoulders too broad, the teeth too gold, the moustache too clearly parted under the great curve of his nose. Yet you could not have caught the merchant’s eye without suspecting him of gentleness and honesty. Perhaps, also, he was slightly, if only very slightly, stupid. For Arthur sensed on his way through life that only the very clever and the very stupid can dare to be dishonest.
On this occasion the merchant went on turning over his rugs for the pleasure of showing them off, only occasionally straightening his back on account of the twinges caused by the shrapnel, when Arthur started pointing with his toe.
“That! That! That is it!”
“That,” Mr Saporta agreed, “is a very fine Turkish rug. From Panderma.”
Arthur scarcely heard, and certainly he did not need the name.
“It has the mandala in the centre! But don’t you see, Mr Saporta?”
“Don’t know about the mandala,” the merchant said.
He obviously did not want or need it.
“Have you seen Dulcie?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Arthur, looking up.
He was suddenly certain this was a secret he would not mind the merchant sharing.
Mr Saporta’s glistening eyebrows looked very grave, as though he could not make up his mind how much depended on him personally, and how much could be expected to happen in spite of himself. Fearing his friend, at this, if only at this point, might be in need of assistance, Arthur began to chatter on what probably sounded too high, too irrelevant a note:
“One morning — one Saturday — I’ll come down from Sarsaparilla, Mr Saporta — to give us more time — and you shall show me all your rugs.”
But Mr Saporta hesitated.
“Not Saturdays,” he said. “Saturdays I am otherwise engaged. I go to the synagogue,” he reminded. “And my family expects me afterwards.”
He sounded sombre, but a sombreness of such rich dark colours and vibrating harmonies, Arthur was at once reassured.
Seeing his friend thus enclosed he went away soon afterwards, and in the street realized for the first time that the Star of David was another mandala, and that Dulcie’s marriage to Mr Saporta would be arranged.
In his joy and distress he sang one of those shapeless songs: joy that the person he loved most — after Waldo — would be made round, as he saw it, distress that he could not relieve Waldo of his ignorance. Waldo could only relieve himself.
All the way down Terminus Road Arthur’s twitching throat kept up a shapeless, practically a wordless singing.
And then the Peace came. He had always loved the excuse for singing in the streets. He bought a rattle. He bought a blower which unravelled as far as a pink feather on its end. He went to Sydney, to the streets for which celebrations are created, and for the occasion he composed a song:
“After the fireworks the fireworks
after the gas the gasworks
I shan’t mind my chop chop chop
after a day in the shop shop shop
no no no no no no no no NO!
Love is the biggest firework of all
don’t be afraid when it bursts
don’t be afraid if it hurts
it’s the best the fieriest way
to go off BANG!
oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh OH!”
“Fuckun mophret!” A man spat.
And a girl shrieked: “Don’t let him touch me! That orange nut!” before disappearing as fast as her new button-boots and the crowd would allow.
But many of them kissed Arthur Brown. They seemed to want a mascot of some sort. They got him drunk. Who blew out his blower with the pink feather on the end, to stroke suddenly familiar features. In particular, he enjoyed the retreat of the sterner noses. Always when his blower had recoiled, again, there was someone to kiss him on his large face, slobbery with the joy of fulfilment, of recognition. Everybody was being and doing.
When things had settled down again he heard that Mrs Feinstein was dead. Although she had been his friend he didn’t exactly grieve for her, realizing that she had in fact died on her last trip to Europe. But again he went to the city, this time in search of Dulcie, in the house at Centennial Park. Some woman relative told him where she was, and that Mr Feinstein was too disconsolate to receive even those he knew intimately. Arthur found Dulcie sitting on an upright chair, on the edge of a room, wearing the black dress.
She smiled at him, and he saw that grief had destroyed her face, all except the bones, which were a polished yellow. Even so, she shone with a grave ivory beauty of her own.
“Sit down,” she said, in someone else’s voice. “Was the train full?” she asked, as though he had arrived for some other purpose.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, Dulcie.”
“They always are at this time of day.”
That seemed to upset her. She would obviously have liked to cry, only she had dried up inside, there was nothing there but a rack of coughing.
He sat comforting her by stroking the back of her hand with one of his forefingers.
“Hasn’t Mr Saporta been?” he asked.
“Oh, I think so. Yes. Of course.”
If he had not known her to be genuine, her manner could have appeared false. Perhaps, it now occurred to him, Dulcie herself had not yet realized. Otherwise, she must surely have found the means for grief out of her love for Mr Saporta.
It was then he conceived the idea of giving Dulcie Feinstein one of his solid mandalas. Supposing he had been wrong, that she was not intended to marry the carpet merchant, that she would never sit down with her children at that over-crowded, over-laden, family table after the service at the synagogue — then without his help she would have no means of relieving her continued drought, of filling her dreadful emptiness.
They sat together for a little. They talked about the price of flowers, and in greater danger, the migration of birds. The room had been abandoned by all those ever connected with it.
Dulcie leaned forward at last, and wiped his mouth with her handkerchief. Perhaps her kindness was to soften an expression which suggested she wanted him to leave.
When he had got up, she said: “I shall let you know when you are to come. Probably at Sarsaparilla. Daddy, I expect, will sell “Mount Pleasant”. There is not what you would call point in it now.”
She kissed him when he left soon after.
Then — he did not want to think it — she forgot.
Even after it was known they were at Sarsaparilla to collect their belongings and sell the house, he ha
rdly dared wonder at the reason for Dulcie’s neglect. Waldo even had found out Feinsteins were there, though naturally Waldo made no mention of a death. Waldo had begun looking at himself in the glass. So Arthur decided not to delay. He went up to “Mount Pleasant” uninvited.
Dulcie said: “Oh, Arthur, I am so glad! We made an arrangement, didn’t we? I forget exactly what. But now you’ve come. So perhaps I’m not so much to blame.”
If Dulcie had been different, again he might have suspected her of putting it on. She was still dressed in black, though. She was standing amongst the packing cases, in the smell of dust from a dismantled room.
“Why, Dulcie,” he said, in his excitement over a genuine discovery, “I didn’t know we have the same colour of eyes!”
“Yes,” she said — like that.
Whereas on the previous occasion Dulcie Feinstein’s face had been whittled down to the yellow bone, this afternoon she was restored to flesh, out of which the eyes were shining, not, he saw, with the dry fever of wordless grief, not inward-looking, but steady with a lovely confidence.
“Come and let us sit down,” she said, pushing aside a packing case.
So that Arthur, too, grew confident.
When they were seated on the sofa, knee to knee, Dulcie could not suppress a little, passing, unexpectedly humorous whimper.
“My poor darling mother,” she said, “it has turned out exactly as she always expected it to!”
With her hand she might have been smoothing Mrs Feinstein’s perpetual earth.
“I mean, she predicted I would decide to marry Leonard Saporta,” Dulcie said, looking straight at Arthur.
There was now no need, he saw, to offer the mandala, but he would, because he still wanted to, because they were all four, he and Dulcie, Mrs Feinstein and Leonard Saporta, so solidly united.
“I want you, and Leonard has agreed — ” said Dulcie, “I want you to come to our wedding, Arthur.”
“Oh, no!”
He had to sit back. She could not have been more astonished.
“Oh, no!” he repeated. “Waldo would be far too — far too shocked.”
She drew her mouth in rather uglily, against her teeth, down against her gums. She could have been sucking a lemon the moment before.
The Solid Mandala Page 27