“There!” she said, when she was sitting in her long hair.
He loved watching her as she sat inside her shiny tent. He half closed his eyes, out of pleasure, and against the sun, and from then on all that was spoken and acted was as inescapable as conviction and dreams.
Shaking the veil of hair from where it hung across her face, Mrs Poulter said:
“Sometimes I used to think I’d go into service, proper like. In some big house in the city. Where the lady did a lot of entertaining. All the ladies in fashionable gowns covered with jewellery. And I’d be going round, handing the eatables, or changing the glasses, with nobody taking any notice or wondering what I was thinking. Then, while I was offering the vegetables at table, there would be one man of some importance, a bank manager, say, or a doctor, who would look up into my face and realize I was different. I’d be waiting for him when he came to fetch his coat, and we’d walk off together to catch the tram.”
Arthur listened, who was grinning with the glare and the mass of jewellery.
Mrs Poulter said: “It’s funny I went on having that sort of ideas long after I’d married Bill.” She paused, then she did not ask, but said: “It isn’t wrong to think about what will never happen. I love Bill,” Mrs Poulter said.
Arthur loved Mrs Poulter. He loved her jewellery.
He said: “Will you let me touch your hair, Mrs Poulter, just to feel?”
She looked round, not at him, but over her shoulder.
“It’s a funny sort of thing to do,” she said, “but you can if you like.”
So he crawled just so close that he could put out his hand and stroke the tips of her shiny hair. Warmed by the sun, it seemed to be leading a life of its own, like some kind of sleepy animal.
Till in his turn Arthur suddenly realized what was intended of him.
“I’m going to dance for you, Mrs Poulter,” he said. “I’m going to dance a mandala.”
He knew she was preparing to laugh, but wouldn’t, because she had grown fond of him.
“The mandala?” she said, soberly enough. “I never heard of a dance called that. Not any of the modern ones.”
He did not attempt to explain, because he felt he would make her see.
So Arthur Brown danced, beginning at the first corner, from which he would proceed by stages to the fourth, and beyond. He who was so large, so shambly, found movement coming to him on the hillside in the bay of blackberries. The bands of his shirtsleeves were hanging open at the wrists. The bluish shadows in the less exposed parts of his skin, of his wrists, and the valley between his breasts, were soon pearled over.
In the first corner, as a prelude to all that he had to reveal, he danced the dance of himself. Half clumsy, half electric. He danced the gods dying on a field of crimson velvet, against the discords of human voices. Even in the absence of gods, his life, or dance, was always prayerful. Even though he hadn’t been taught, like the grocer, to go down on his knees and stick his hands together. Instead, offering his prayer to what he knew from light or silences. He danced the sleep of people in a wooden house, groaning under the pressure of sleep, their secrets locked prudently up, safe, until their spoken thoughts, or farts, gave them away. He danced the moon, anaesthetized by bottled cestrum. He danced the disc of the orange sun above icebergs, which was in a sense his beginning, and should perhaps be his end.
While Mrs Poulter sat looking, playing with the tips of her dark hair. Sighing sometimes. Then looking down.
In the second corner he declared his love for Dulcie Feinstein, and for her husband, by whom, through their love for Dulcie, he was, equally, possessed, so they were all three united, and their children still to be conceived. Into their corner of his mandala he wove their Star, on which their three-cornered relationship was partly based. Flurries of hydrangea-headed music provided a ceremony of white notes falling exactly into place, and not far behind, the twisted ropes of dark music Waldo had forced on Dulcie the afternoon of strangling. There she was, the bones of her, seated on the upright chair, in black. And restored to flesh by her lover’s flesh. The inextinguishable, always more revealing eyes.
Dulcie’s secrets, he could see, had been laid bare in the face of Mrs Poulter, who might otherwise have become the statue of a woman, under her hair, beside the blackberry bushes. Though she was swaying slightly as he began to weave her figure into the appropriate corner. In Mrs Poulter’s corner he danced the rite of ripening pears, and little rootling suckling pigs. Skeins of golden honey were swinging and glittering from his drunken mouth. Until he reached the stillest moment. He was the child she had never carried in the dark of her body, under her heart, from the beat of which he was already learning what he could expect. The walls of his circular fortress shuddered.
Mrs Poulter was at that point so obviously moved, she would have liked to throw the vision off, or stop him altogether, but he would not let her.
He had begun to stamp, but brittly rigid, in his withering. In the fourth corner, which was his brother’s, the reeds sawed at one another. There was a shuffling of dry mud, a clattering of dead flags, or papers. Of words and ideas skewered to paper. The old, bent, over-used, aluminium skewers. Thus pinned and persecuted, what should have risen in pure flight, dropped to a dry twitter, a clipped twitching. He couldn’t dance his brother out of him, not fully. They were too close for it to work, closest and farthest when, with both his arms, he held them together, his fingers running with candle-wax. He could not save. At most a little comfort gushed out guiltily, from out of their double image, their never quite united figure. In that corner of the dance his anguished feet had trampled the grass into a desert.
When Mrs Poulter leaned forward. She was holding her hair by handfuls in knots of fists, he could see — waiting.
Till in the centre of their mandala he danced the passion of all their lives, the blood running out of the backs of his hands, water out of the hole in his ribs. His mouth was a silent hole, because no sound was needed to explain.
And then, when he had been spewed up, spat out, with the breeze stripping him down to the saturated skin, and the fit had almost withdrawn from him, he added the little quivering footnote on forgiveness. His arms were laid along his sides. His head hung. Facing her.
He fell down, and lay, the rise and fall of his ribs a relief, to say nothing of her eyes, which he knew could only have been looking at him with understanding for his dance.
Arthur must have dozed, for when he got up, Mrs Poulter was putting the finishing touches to her hair. Her head was looking so neat, though her nostrils were still slightly flared, from some experience recently suffered.
Then Arthur knew that she was worthy of the mandala. Mrs Poulter and Dulcie Feinstein he loved the most — after Waldo of course.
So he put his hand in his pocket, and knelt down beside her, and said: “I’m going to let you have the mandala, Mrs Poulter.”
It was the gold one, in which the sparks glinted, and from which the rays shot upward whenever the perfect sphere was struck by its counterpart.
“Ah, that’s good! Isn’t it, Arthur?” Mrs Poulter said, inclining over her open hand. “I would like to have a loan of that!”
“I want you to keep it. Wouldn’t you like it?”
She looked up, and said: “Yes.”
After that they began to walk home.
The perfection of the day saddened him in retrospect. He knew it could never recur. At meals the members of his family were already avoiding, composing. It was only a matter of time. If he mentioned his friend Mrs Poulter, Mother would start murmuring against “the Name”. Waldo did more than murmur. Waldo exploded finally.
“If only you saw the obscenity in such a situation! I ask you! And my brother!” The forked veins in Waldo’s forehead were bursting blue.
It was a good thing perhaps that Arthur was mixing the bread. That on its own might have helped establish his honesty if Mrs Poulter herself had not contributed.
“Mrs Poulter has decided,” he
was able to tell Waldo as he folded and re-folded the dough.
One evening shortly before, he had gone across the road, in hopes of exchanging a word or two, or not even that — of being together. The dishes were stacked beside the sink, for her husband had eaten his tea and gone inside. Bill Poulter spent much of his spare time lying on the bed, either nursing an ulcer, or listening to the walls, waiting for a doubt to be confirmed. While his wife finished whatever had to be done.
Now Mrs Poulter was straining the milk. She was looking stern, Arthur noticed. While holding her head delicately, she was frowning at the cow-hair in the muslin. He realized almost at once that he, and not the cow-hair, was the cause of it all.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Oh,” she said. “Nothing,” she said, tilting the strainer this way and that. “That is,” she said, “we shan’t be going on any more walks. Not from now.”
She sounded so cool.
“Mr Poulter doesn’t like it,” she said. “They don’t like it. So you’ll have to lump it, Arthur.”
She was making herself sound brutal — he could hear that — so as he would not be hurt by the brutality of what they called life, only by her. He would realize she was a coarse and brutal woman unworthy of his trust.
“So there we are,” she said, looking at him for the first time, slamming the strainerful of hair and muslin back into the empty bucket.
“All right,” he said. “All right, Mrs Poulter” — trying to work out his steps towards the door. “I don’t have to tell you I’ll be sorry, though.”
The night of his outburst Waldo congratulated Arthur on the decision he and Mrs Poulter had come to. Waldo was obviously pleased by what he called its ethical rectitude, though immediately gloomy over a situation he had read about but not experienced. Perhaps Waldo was a bit jealous, as well as contemptuous, of Arthur’s miserable affair. If he had not admired his brother, Arthur might have felt hurt.
What did hurt Arthur was the attitude of Bill Poulter who, every time they ran across each other, turned his face away from the obscenity Waldo had brought to light.
All of this lost its importance the morning their father died.
The metal of the bucket as Arthur milked was too obtrusive. The too clear morning clanked. Waldo, he knew, would be prowling round outside the house in his shirtsleeves and arm-bands, before putting on his coat, before leaving for the Library. Arthur stood up, giving the cow’s voluminous velvety belly a push. For the time being she was only a thing. He had already begun to pant for what must have happened. He ran through the grass, slopping the milk.
Waldo by then was running off, away from the house, into the garden. It was much as Arthur had expected.
And finding their father in the dark room. Because touch was his approach, Arthur touched George Brown’s head. Before pushing his way through the house. Before bursting out on the classical-tragic veranda.
The words were shouted out of him: “Our father, our father is dead!”
Not that George Brown had done more than withdraw from Arthur a second time. Who would bear it now as before. Perhaps their afflictions, which had caused the withdrawal, helped him to.
Or Waldo’s running away.
Soon Waldo was coming back along the path, and Arthur had to control his own unhappiness. He had to take Waldo in his arms. Pity replaced admiration. Not that he would have admitted it, or not more than occasionally.
Arthur would have liked to admire their mother less. He would have liked her to continue loving him, but she had no time, from living in her own thoughts. Excepting the morning George Brown died. She needed him then. To get them breakfast.
“Yes, darling,” she sighed.
It was like somebody turning in bed, turning, waking, returning to your arms, asleep.
“You shall get it for me,” she breathed. “Wouldn’t you like that?”
Of course he liked it. Anything to keep on the move. To keep her eyes on him. He brought the warm milk in her favourite bowls with the pattern of camomile sprigs. He couldn’t help it if he couldn’t manage the skin of boiled milk. If the skin swung from his lip. It brought an expression to her eyes, out of the depths. She was wincing, her eyebrows pinched together, for their father dead in another room, or the string of burnt milk.
“It always burns,” he apologized, “if you so much as turn your back.”
But neither Waldo nor Mother had ears for it. They were too busy translating their own thoughts. Waldo used to say Dad was teaching himself Norwegian to translate his thoughts into a language which could not be read.
So Arthur said: “I’d better be making tracks. Allwrights will be wondering.”
Then Mother’s: “I’d hoped you would stay with us.”
Though her voice made him interpret it as “me”. He was afraid that, on finding himself left out, Waldo might feel hurt.
“Today,” said Mother.
If only today. It was only today that Arthur was the big brother, or lover. When she was stroking back his damp, his ugly old hair, he moved his cheek, his neck, just so much, against his shoulder, to catch her hand in the hinge. And she didn’t even cry out. She went on looking into his face for someone else.
And soon her voice lost its satin. The milk was standing cold in the bowl under the wrinkle of skin. She no longer needed Arthur.
Until she needed him again for the sherry. He would bring the occasional bottle in case she had forgot, and ask Mrs Allwright to chalk it up. It was the only thing he bought on credit.
“You’ll rot your liver, Arthur, if you’re not careful,” Mrs Allwright said. “I’m surprised at a man, otherwise steady, like you.”
“Every person’s got their vice,” Arthur quoted Mrs Poulter.
“I like to think I haven’t,” Mrs Allwright said. “I like to feel I have dispensed with vice. Anyone can who tries. To live up to the advice we are given in the Gospels.”
Of course Arthur knew that Mrs Allwright knew. It was all over Sarsaparilla. What’ll happen when she’s filled the gully with her bottles? Mrs Allwright knew all right, but enjoyed this game of not knowing. That was how she got her pleasure, though she wouldn’t have admitted it, even with her hand on the Gospels.
For another, for Mother, another pleasure.
“Here’s a drop to help out,” Arthur used to say, or: “Thought you might be going short.”
At such times she would hardly turn her cheek, let alone look over her shoulder.
“Thank you, dear. It was thoughtful of you.”
As though she scarcely needed him.
He would hear her crinkle up the foil, however. And sometimes the corks were terribly tight.
“My wrists are losing their strength,” she complained.
Needing him.
“You couldn’t do without me. Eh? Could you? Eh?”
“Hardly,” she had to admit.
His strength of wrist, if not of principle, as Mrs Allwright insisted, often made him laugh.
“Everyone’s got their uses.”
“Almost everyone,” Mother said.
Then she would sit down to nursing the bottle. She was going to make it last till tonight. Oh, yes. You could if you tried. You stood a chance up to the first third.
But at the first third Mother would have to begin.
“Tell me, Arthur,” she would say, “tell me if you feel I’ve failed you.”
The importance of it made the sherry slop over the glass.
“No!” she said, quickly, in her own defence. “Don’t tell me! Nobody normal ever enjoyed settling their accounts.”
She would grow louder, annoyed too, at spilling the good stuff in her glass.
“All good money,” she complained. “But don’t tell me. Nobody likes to be told. That they’ve got a spot. On their nose. On the night of the ball.”
Insects in the air made it sound more fretful.
“At least,” she said, “once upon a time — when people observed the conventions — all that
sort of thing was avoided. Nowadays it isn’t considered realistic. Then, it wasn’t good form.”
“Oh,” she said, shaking her hair, “we would dance, though! In the mornings the lawns used to swim up under the windows. We would swim out, just as we were, against the mist. The ladies, of course, were at a disadvantage because their hems were filled with dew. Heavier than anyone would believe. To sink a punt. If one hadn’t felt so light with light. The men in kilts came off best. I never cared for the nubbly knees of black Scots. Strong men can be boring in their aggressiveness. And weak.”
She could not forgive them their strong legs.
“But if you could have seen us dancing! And dancing on the lawns, amongst the topiary, on the mist which was pouring out of the lake. That,” she said, sinking her mouth in the glass, “was before I married your father. It was all utterly rotten. But how deliriously memorable” — working her mouth around it — “after the mutton fat has dragged one down. Do you know, Arthur,” she said, looking at him, “I believe you inherited your love of dancing from your mother.”
“What dancing?”
“Let me see,” she said. “I don’t know what dancing. At least,” she said, “nothing formal. Movement, though. Dancing,” she said, “can compensate. Cure, in some cases. Victims of infantile paralysis recover, they say, the use of their limbs by dancing. Or swimming.”
He would have liked to give her his third mandala, but realized in time their mother could not have used it.
Against his better judgement Arthur offered Waldo the mandala during their mother’s last illness.
“Mother is real sick,” he said.
The lamplight seemed to draw them into its circle.
“Mother is not sick!” Waldo shouted.
All this sickness, of their mother’s, of the old weatherboard house, with its dry-rotten tremors and wooden tick tick, seemed to concentrate itself in Arthur’s stomach, till from looking at his own hands, soothing, rather than soothed by, the revolving marble, he realized that the knot at the heart of the mandala, at most times so tortuously inwoven, would dissolve, if only temporarily, in light.
The Solid Mandala Page 29