Then she said, averting her face: “Waldo is only your brother, you know. At least he’s no more than that to me. Arthur’s brother.”
“Oh no,” said Arthur, “he’s more than that.”
She hung her head.
“It’s necessary to escape from Waldo.”
“Necessary for you. Not for me.”
It was too obvious. But Dulcie had made her own escape. For the moment at least she did not see very clearly.
“I know you’ll be kind to him, Dulcie.”
“Oh,” she said, “by nature I’m not at all kind!”
Shaking herself with a little frilly movement he would have loved less if it had meant more.
“Yes,” she said, biting her lip, still not looking, “I know I shall be kind because you want it.”
Then Arthur took the mandala out of his pocket. It was the blue taw which Norm Croucher had traded for liquorice straps. The mists rolled up, to be contained by the perfect, glass sphere.
“Dulcie,” he said, “I brought you this.”
Scarcely moving his hand he worked it into motion on the open palm.
“It’s one of the solid mandalas, the blue mandala,” he explained.
“Oh,” she cried, lowering her head.
He had always known the blue mandala would be the one for Dulcie. Her beauty would not evaporate again.
Though first she had to denounce herself, saying: “I have always been — particularly lately — hideously weak. You,” she said, gasping for breath above the glass marble, “were the one, Arthur, who gave me strength — well, to face the truth — well, about ourselves — in particular my own wobbly self.”
Then she was laughing for the riddle solved. She was holding up her full throat, the laughter rippling out of it.
Exactly when Waldo walked in, perhaps neither of them saw. Dulcie, on noticing, tried to strangle her laughter, but she couldn’t.
They both sat looking at Waldo, who had put on his blue serge, and was wearing one of the butterfly collars. He must have been working on his glasses with the shammy for them to shine with just that expression of enquiry. His smile was tight. It had almost reached the point where the twitch began.
So Arthur decided to say the one or two necessary things, and go. He, who could not help himself, could not have helped his brother now. Arthur is the backward one. That was the way the relationship had been arranged. Of the twins. The twin brothers. Waldo had wanted it. Waldo is the one who takes the lead. Joining them together at the hand. And because Waldo needed it that way, only the knife could sever it.
Like Mother’s breast.
The year the Poulters came to live down Terminus Road Mother had gone into hospital at Barranugli for the operation Waldo would not talk about.
“What operation?” he hedged, and decided almost at once: “It’s something that isn’t mentioned, do you hear?”
So Arthur had to tell Mrs Poulter.
“Our mother has lost one of her breasts.”
“That need not be so serious,” said Mrs Poulter, herself a serious and kindly woman.
“But a breast!” he said, wrinkling up.
He could not help looking at their neighbour, so full and firm.
“I expect women are pretty attached to their breasts,” he said.
Mrs Poulter looked the other way. She began to tell about her sick turkey.
Because of its firm whiteness, its generosity at least in theory, he would have liked to discuss the breast with their mother, but as though she knew what to expect she always quickly silenced him.
“Mrs Poulter says,” Arthur said.
“I can’t bear to hear the Name,” said Mother.
“Why?”
“Repetition becomes monotonous.”
He was considering that.
“Besides,” she said, “a grown man — nearly twenty-eight — surely I don’t have to tell you, Arthur, where your thoughts should and shouldn’t lie?”
“I can’t help it,” he said, “if she’s started to live here.”
“Oh, no, it can’t be helped,” Mother agreed. “But one does wonder — why here?”
Soon after their arrival he had gone across the road to speak to the woman in the iron hut, to ask her among many other things, why they were living down Terminus Road. If her answers varied, he accepted the variety; there were several answers to most questions. He took it for granted he would be allowed to squat outside her hut yarning, and eventually, when it was built, he used to barge into her kitchen, though only when her husband wasn’t there. The reason for that was too obvious. Mr Poulter didn’t like him.
“Why did you marry Mr Poulter?” Arthur asked over the tea she had poured out in thick white cups.
Mrs Poulter laughed, and thought.
“Well,” she said, “there was his hands. Bill had lovely hands. A man’s hands, mind you,” she said.
Arthur looked at his own.
“Of course,” she said, “he’s mucked them up by now. Couldn’t help it. A working man. Times when he worked on the roads, too. But I must have fell for Bill’s hands.”
“Can he play the piano?” Arthur asked.
“Bill would have a fit!” Mrs Poulter was certain.
At that moment Arthur wanted so badly to play the piano, he knew he could have done it, only Mrs Poulter did not own one.
“Here,” she said, “you’ll think I’m a funny sort of woman.”
Suddenly anxious, she came and sat down opposite, at the kitchen table.
“Bill’s hands! I married Bill because he was the only thing I could ever think of. And because he needed me,” she said.
She leaned so close, almost crouching over the table, he could see the moisture on her sunburnt skin, he could see down the crack between her breasts.
“I expect he must have needed somebody,” Arthur said, serious and interested. “The darning and all that.”
“Yes,” she said.
Her rather blunt white teeth were showing in her smile.
“Bill couldn’t put on a mutton-flap to boil.”
She was that firm and pretty, with her smooth arms, and wedding-ring.
“I wonder why I’m telling you all this?”
“Because that’s the way people have a yarn.”
“Yes,” she said, laughing. “But a man!”
“A man isn’t all that different,” he said, sipping the disinfectant-coloured tea, which had turned pretty mawky by now.
“Not different in himself, I suppose,” she said. “Some men. Oh, Idunno!”
Her doubt was not deep enough to last.
“Ah dear,” she said, “it might have been lonely here.” She went and stood against the window. “With only your mum opposite.”
“Mother’s good,” Arthur said.
“Ah yes,” Mrs Poulter agreed. “I didn’t say Mrs Brown wasn’t good.”
Mrs Poulter loved her potplants. She would keep on poking at them, ruffling them up, tweaking them as she talked. From time to time she would stand back to get a better look.
“Do you like boiled fruit-cake?” she asked.
“Too right I do!” said Arthur.
“One day I’ll boil a fruit-cake. Ah dear,” she cried, remembering, “there’s a lady at Mungindribble has a lovely recipe for boiled fruit-cake. If I only knew.”
“You could write for it, couldn’t you? Eh, Mrs Poulter?”
“Yes,” she said, as though she wouldn’t.
She was tweaking her cerise geranium.
“It’s that long,” she said, “since I got a letter. I knew a girl — one of the housemaids at the station — used to write letters to herself. They took her away in the end.”
“What, to Peaches-and-Plums?”
“What’s that?”
“That,” he said, and laughed, pleased because he was able to tell, “why that’s the nut-house down at Barranugli. They planted it out so lovely with flowering things that people call it Peaches-and-Plums. See? People com
e from all round when it’s the right season.”
She was delighted.
“Well I never!”
It was the embroidery of life on which they were engaged. They followed no particular pattern and could seldom resist adding another stitch.
That Arthur Brown. Harmless enough. Nobody could ever accuse you.
From her house, like a houseboat moored in the backwaters of grass, Mrs Poulter would often beckon. To tell. To show.
Once she showed him a bloodstained finger she had found in a match-box, in the grass beside the road. Arthur was so upset he had to sit down on Mrs Poulter’s step.
“In the grass?” he panted.
“Go on!” she cried. “Don’t be silly! It’s a trick I learned!”
Which, in fact, it was: Mrs Poulter’s own finger, got up with red ink, stuck through the end of the match-box, lying on a bed of cottonwool.
“Golly,” she said, “you’re a kid,” she said, “Arthur, at times!”
She had to touch him to comfort him.
And once at dusk, when her husband had gone up the road, taking the cow for a late service, Arthur Brown had jumped out at Mrs Poulter on her way back from the dunny to the house.
“Urrrhhhh!” she screamed.
“Ha! Who got a fright?”
She had, too. She had broken out in the trembles.
“Thought I was going to criminally assault!”
Even after they had pushed inside her house Arthur couldn’t get over his joke.
“That’s the sort of thing I don’t go for. Not a bit of it, Arthur. Never ever do it again,” Mrs Poulter said, switching on the light.
Then he was afraid his friend might have stopped liking him.
“Are you honest?” she had to ask.
He was so afraid, he hoped the light would show her he was.
“Don’t you know me, Mrs Poulter? Eh?”
“I thought I did,” she said.
“When shall we go for a walk, eh? For another walk?”
“That depends,” she said, “on a lot of things.”
Her eyelids would not let him make sure.
“Now,” she said, taking up a book, “I’m going to settle down. By myself.”
Mrs Poulter liked to read the paper for the deaths and ads. She did not care for books, though she owned two. She owned the Bible and Pears’ Cyclopaedia. Sometimes she would sit with one or the other, which meant, he discovered, that she had begun to get sick of him.
“I’m going to settle down, and have a read of the Cyclopaedia,” she was telling him now.
Of course it was inconceivable that Mrs Poulter shouldn’t want him to walk with her. He knew this as he went away. Or did he, though? Arthur was sweating, he was crying, as he crossed back over Terminus Road. Too many pictures of contentment flickered in front of his mind’s eye. She had a little black pig which ran rootling round the back yard. She could lift the combs out of the hives without ever bothering to put on a veil. She stored pears on high shelves, the burn fading out of her skin towards the armpits.
Once Arthur dreamed the dream in which a tree was growing out of his thighs. It was the face of Dulcie Feinstein lost amongst the leaves of the higher branches. But Mrs Poulter came and sat on the ground beside him, and he put out his hand to touch what he thought would be her smooth skin, and encountered rough, almost prickly, bark. He would have liked to wake Waldo to tell him. In the morning of course he could barely remember.
And in the morning, it was a Sunday, Mrs Poulter said: “What about that walk, Arthur, you and me was going to take? Oh,” she said, “not now! Morning’s for church, isn’t it?”
So he had to wait.
For the rather sultry, still stately afternoon, while people were either asleep, or holding their full stomachs, or totting up the past with a relative. He saw Mrs Poulter looking up and down, still dressed in her church-going clothes.
“Where shall we go?” she asked.
“I dunno,” he said, and sighed.
So they went.
They crossed paddocks, they stalked like turkeys through belts of thinned-out scrub, they visited a plopping creek where neither had ever been before. Arthur picked up the dry cow-pats and sent them spinning through the Sunday air. If neither spoke they were not so far absent, it seemed, from each other’s thoughts.
“Funny none of you Browns never ever went to church,” she said.
“I suppose they went in the beginning. Till they found out.”
“Found out what?”
“That they could do without it.”
“Ah, but it’s lovely!” Mrs Poulter said.
“They began to feel it wasn’t true.”
“What isn’t true?”
He saw her raise her head, her neck stiffen.
“Oh, all that!” said Arthur Brown, spinning a cow-turd. “About virgins. About Him,” he said.
“Don’t tell me,” said Mrs Poulter, as prim as Waldo, “that you don’t believe in Our Lord Jesus Christ?”
“Don’t know all that much about Him.”
For the moment he cared less for her.
“How do you know, anyway?”
“It’s what everyone has always known,” she said. Then, looking at the toes of her shoes as they advanced, she said very softly: “I couldn’t exist without Our Lord.”
“Could He exist without you?” It seemed reasonable enough to enquire.
But she might not have heard.
“Mother says Christians are all the time gloating over the blood.”
“Don’t you believe they crucified Our Lord?” she said looking at him angrily.
He had begun to feel exhausted.
“I reckon they’d crucify a man,” he said. “Yes,” he agreed, trundling slower. “From what you read. And what we know. Christians,” he said, “are cruel.”
“They were not Christians,” Mrs Poulter said. “Men are cruel.”
There was a wind starting. A raw sun was sawing at them. They had gone too far.
“Here!” he called. “How long is this walk gunna last?”
He reached out for her hand, and she allowed him to take it.
“You’re surely not tired?” she said, but he could tell she was not giving it thought. “A big man like you!”
There wasn’t any malice in it. She continued speaking very gently.
“Fancy,” she said, almost for herself, “if you was my kid, Arthur. I wonder whether you’d like it.”
“Yes,” he answered.
He would have liked it for the pleasure it would have given her, and because nobody could have objected any more to his being with her.
“When are we going for another walk, Mrs Poulter?” he asked, and lagged to put a weight on her hand.
“We haven’t finished this one yet.”
But suddenly they had. They had taken a short cut neither of them had suspected, and there they were, plunging down on Terminus Road.
“Well now,” she said, “here we are home without any of the trouble!”
“Yes,” he said, gloomily.
That night he dreamed he was licking the wounds, like a dog. He wondered whether he had been doing right, to lick up non-existent blood. Fortunately Waldo, who was sleeping, need never know. He had reached out and touched him to make sure. He reached out to feel for the mandala, his own special, on top of the po cupboard, but heard it roll, scamper out of reach. It would have involved too much to retrieve it, so he lay there miserably conscious of the distance between his desire and perfect satisfaction.
Even the walks with Mrs Poulter were not all that satisfactory, because it was only natural to talk, and you kept on coming up against a wall, if not religion, something else.
“Did you never ever have any children, Mrs Poulter?” he asked.
“No,” she answered.
From where he was walking, as mostly, a little behind, he thought it sounded sulkily.
“Do you mind?”
“Oh,” she said, “life isn�
�t just children. I’ve got my husband.”
“Does he like you?”
“What a funny thing to ask!”
“Well,” he said, “you always wonder what a person likes.”
This time it was a holiday, and she was not wearing her church dress, something clean though, and cottony. He liked to watch it moving close to her full, but still quite firm body. It suprised him to realize Mrs Poulter was younger than himself, nor did he altogether want it. He preferred it when he could forget about ages, when Mrs Poulter could grow into the larger-sized wise woman she really was, telling of cures for illnesses.
“This isn’t half a slope,” Mrs Poulter complained, grunting.
“It’s that all right!” he agreed, and giggled.
But suddenly they had climbed out, panting and dazzled.
“Oh, look!” she called, pointing.
“That’s a wheel-tree,” said Arthur.
He could tell because Mrs Musto had shown him one. Still panting, he stood smiling, proud of the treeful of fiery wheels.
And under the tree was standing the Chinese woman, whom he often remembered afterwards. They stood looking at one another. Then the Chinese woman, so little connected with them or their other surroundings, turned, it seemed resentfully, and went behind some poultry sheds. There was no great reason why he should remember her, except as part of the dazzle of the afternoon. For that reason he did.
Soon afterwards they plunged on down into the blackberries, and were grabbing the enamelled berries by the handful to drop into Mrs Poulter’s little can, and scoffing them besides, till their faces were inked over.
“What a sight you are, Arthur!” Mrs Poulter sounded quite pleased.
“Speak for yourself!” He pointed, and laughed.
It suited her, and the shadow from her hat. Her face might have been mysteriously tattooed.
Afterwards they sat down on the grass, in a bay formed by the blackberry bushes. Their few bits of luggage were spread around. It was peculiarly their ground once they had staked their claim. It was so well protected Mrs Poulter, after glancing round once or twice, announced rather nicely:
“I tell you what, Arthur, I’m going to take down my hair, and nobody will see or think it strange.”
It was sensible enough, he thought, because you couldn’t hardly count himself. Besides, he had watched Mrs Poulter washing her hair in the kero tin, in the days when she was living in the iron hut.
The Solid Mandala Page 28