And it seemed as though the worst could only happen for the best. It was most important that his brother, shuffling his papers, looking for a sheet mislaid, or just looking — that Waldo, too, should know.
“If it would help I would give it to you, Waldo, to keep,” Arthur said.
Offering the knotted mandala.
While half sensing that Waldo would never untie the knot.
Even before Waldo gave one of his looks, which, when interpreted, meant: By offering me a glass marble you are trying to make me look a fool, I am not, and never shall be a fool, though I am your twin brother, so my reply, Arthur, is not shit, but shit!
As he shouted: “No, Arthur! Go, Arthur!”
But Arthur was rooted. His hand closed on the icy marble. If he had not been his twin brother, would Waldo have hated him?
There was too little time those days to nurse suspicion. Arthur was too busy playing cat’s-cradle with their mother, arranging the string round her fingers, since she was no longer able to work them into the required positions.
“Doesn’t this entertain you?” he asked.
“Infinitely,” Mother said.
It was important — Arthur was convinced she agreed with him — that Waldo shouldn’t know their mother was dying. That might have turned out unbearable.
When, suddenly, Mrs Poulter, the doctor, and the minister, had her removed.
When she was dead Arthur went to Mr Saporta, who, because he was in business, knew how to have her disposed of. Although the whole of him was racked by the part which had been amputated, Arthur was fascinated to watch the coffin jerking down the ramp towards the curtain. What if it, if they all, stuck?
However, he would be careful to hide from Waldo, who had not, of course, been to the funeral, any of his own fears and suspicions.
On one occasion Arthur did slip up.
“Do you approve of the Hindu custom of burning people who have died?”
Waldo’s hand was stiffening in his hand. They were walking up Terminus Road, up the last hill before Sarsaparilla.
“It’s hygienic, at least,” Waldo said.
“So is cremation, isn’t it?” said Arthur. “I was thinking of the smoke, only. It must be beautiful to watch the smoke. Don’t you think? Uncurling out of the fire?’
“Picturesque is perhaps the word,” Waldo said from between his teeth.
He sounded like somebody biting on a pipe, though he, for that matter neither of them had ever learnt to smoke.
After Mother’s death their twin lives would not have diverged all that much if Arthur hadn’t developed his sense of responsibility towards the Saportas. Of course Waldo could not be told about that. If Arthur usually got possession of what Waldo did not tell, it was because he had his sense of touch, and from lying beside Waldo in their parents’ bed, on nights when his brother needed comforting. Arthur’s spongy largeness, not to say, at some times, cloudiness of mind, became an asset then. To envelop the unclouded terrors of night.
So, it was not so much because he didn’t have the clothes, as out of sympathy for Waldo, that he didn’t go to the Saporta wedding. He had to control his disappointment. For he would have liked to watch Dulcic standing with Mr Saporta under the canopy-thing, he would have loved to experience the breaking of the glass.
That was already as far back as 1922, the year George Brown had died. Dulcie and Leonard got married, and on the occasions when Mrs Allwright sent Arthur to the city for something unobtainable in Barranugli, he would visit the Saportas in their house on the edge of the park. It was really Mr Feinstein’s house, where they had gone to live with him after he had his first stroke, after the death of his wife.
The Feinsteins’ house looked enormous because of the many flourishes it made — battlements and turrets, spires and balconies, bull’s-eyes and dormers, even a gargoyle or two, which the weather was cracking and chipping too soon. Although it looked like a partly fortified cement castle, with veins in it after the leaves of the Virginia creeper had fallen off, it was a fairly normal, human house inside. From the beginning Dulcie didn’t allow the inherited furniture to take over. It was she who pushed it around, often into unpremeditated groups. She was also a director of the music house, while Mr Saporta remained in rugs — as it should have been. The Saportas were pretty substantially established.
Arthur Brown visited them all through the two children and several miscarriages. Sometimes he sat in company with others, elderly Jewish ladies and uncles, who eventually overcame their surprise. They respected Arthur. Perhaps, for some obscure reason, they even valued his presence amongst them.
When he played with his glass marbles, and explained: “These are my two remaining mandalas,” they sat forward, expressing the greatest interest and pleasure, and on one occasion, one of the elderly uncles remarked: “There, Magdi, I told you this young man is in some way phenomenal.”
Naturally Arthur was pleased. Though not deceived. He waited to be alone with Dulcie, when they might resume that life which they alone were permitted to enjoy. His thighs would quiver in anticipation of blissfully joyful union with his love.
For Dulcie’s beauty had increased with marriage, was more out-flowing, her eyes more lustrous in communication. She would often put her hand in Arthur’s, particularly during pregnancy.
“You know,” she would say, and laugh, looking down at her swollen figure, “I am a slave to all this.”
He noticed she failed to blush, although he realized it embarrassed her to take her belly outside the family circle, and that she would blush more often than not at the comments made by aunts. With him alone she was composed, as though in their common mind, they could contemplate in peace the child curled and sprouting like a bean.
Once, before the birth of their first, Dulcie said: “Today, I think, when he comes in, Leonard is going to tell you something.”
“Why Leonard?” Arthur asked, and began to sweat.
He was afraid something might be spoilt.
“It’s the kind of important thing,” said Dulcie, “which I think the man ought to tell.”
Then she smiled, and Arthur saw it was because her husband had entered the room and was making his way amongst the mounds of inherited furniture.
“I shall leave you together,” said Dulcie, heartlessly, Arthur felt. “I shall go up to Father.”
She went out from them in full sail.
Arthur was horrified and disturbed.
Thickened by marriage and good sauces, huskier of voice from the many excellent cigars he had smoked, Mr Saporta was prepared to tell.
He said: “Arthur, when this kid is born — this boy,” because that was what they had decided it would be, “we want, both of us, to call him ‘Arthur’.”
“Why?” said Arthur.
He was more than ever disturbed.
“Because of all you mean to Dulcie,” Mr Saporta said.
Arthur sat tingling in his thighs. He realized his watery mouth was hanging open, but knowing did not help him close it.
“What about when this boy gets to know whose name he’s saddled with?” he asked.
“It will not be his only name,” Mr Saporta said, and his glance hoped he had found an acceptable solution. “We shall also call him ‘Aaron’. That will be his Jewish name. But for everyday purposes — ‘Arthur’.”
Arthur was relieved to think he might be blamed less bitterly.
“Aaron.”
After trying it out he was tolerably content.
Though he would not wait for Dulcie to return. Taking Mr Saporta by the wrist — the latter no longer wore the little gun-metal wristlet-watch, but a large golden disc which showed practically everything — Arthur confirmed that it was time for him to leave. Even though Dulcie was coming down the stairs, though he was close enough to hear the sound of her skirt after she had finished calling to him, he neither looked back nor answered, but hurried throbbing spongily along the street.
Sometimes on arrival at the house he woul
d go up unannounced to old Mr Feinstein, who had chosen to live in a narrow, maid’s room, or attic, when his daughter and son-in-law moved in. There he was spending his last days, between newspapers and tobacco, taking refuge from what he referred to as the Jewish Reaction. Although his speech had not been made unintelligible by his first attack — that happened only with the third — his tongue was noticeably clumsier, and his right arm had withered on its trunk.
“I will not deny they thrive on superstition,” Mr Feinstein referred to his children, “but it could also be the extra food. Because Jews, Arthur, use their religion as an excuse to overeat.”
Mr Feinstein continued going to the store until the third stroke prevented it.
On the last occasion Arthur saw his friend, the old gentleman had been sat up in one of those arm-chairs which continue to survive their owners.
“I shall leave you to talk to him,” Dulcie said practically.
“Why?” asked Arthur.
“Because the baby is singing for his supper.”
Old Mr Feinstein appeared fairly satisfied by now with everything which was done for him. To the centre of his chest they had pinned a card, with the words, the phrases, and the names he was most likely to need, and he would make his rather suffocated sounds, and scratch at the card with the less withered of his hands.
As the old man snuffled and gasped Arthur leaned forward to read what was printed there, but could not decide which of it all might suit what his friend wanted to say.
ARTHUR, he saw, and: AARON. GOOD FOR BUSINESS, I WANT THE CHAMBER PLEASE. The word TORAH puzzled Arthur.
“What’s this TORAH?” he had to ask, though without the greatest expectations.
Then Mr Feinstein scratched at his chest, at the print which hardly served to explain.
CHANGEABLE WEATHER, Arthur read.
He would have liked to do something for this old man whose strings had tangled and trussed him. But he himself could only shamble round the narrow room, looking for help from the old gentleman’s possessions. It was a relief to discover on a cluttered shelf the little Star of David he had seen Dulcie wearing round her neck.
“See this, Mr Feinstein,” he said, “this, this thing,” he said, “this is just another mandala.”
This time Mr Feinstein did not attempt to scratch a reply, but sat still, looking at Arthur. Waiting, it seemed.
Then Arthur knew he could never explain what was too big, an enormous marble, filling, rolling round intolerably inside his speechless mouth.
He had sat down opposite the old man, so that they were knee to knee. He was holding Mr Feinstein’s cold claws in his own warmer, spongy hands. Otherwise there was nothing he could do.
“The mandala,” he was trying to say, and did, but mouthing it so idiotically, he too might have had a stroke.
Then they sat looking at each other from opposite ends of the tunnel, in a light of such momentary intensity, Arthur at least was too confused to know exactly what he saw.
On the next occasion when he visited the Feinstein-Saporta castle he found Dulcie in their big square living-room seated without her shoes, on a mattress, on the floor. She was wearing a dress in flowing black, the folds of which, together with the lights in her neck and her rounded limbs, made her into something of a statue.
“My father died, Arthur,” she explained, as though the old man had tottered out only a moment before, into the park. The only unusual part of it was: they couldn’t expect him back.
Then, when she had gathered up her knees inside her arms, and laid her face against her shoulder, she began dreaming, as she rocked:
“Oh yes, I’ve mourned for him, and shall continue to mourn. But my father was always embarrassed by what he used to call ‘Jewesses indulging themselves by tearing their clothes and emotions to tatters’. We were only ever allowed to love him on his own terms. I think on the whole that made him unhappy, but any other behaviour would have offended against his principles. A complete surrender to love might have let in God. Of course, in the end, he did. When they were shut up together in a room, he couldn’t avoid it. I saw. My father died peacefully.”
Dulcie raised her head.
“You, Arthur,” she said, “are you, I wonder, the instrument we feel you are?”
Whatever she intended to convey he was glad not to grasp it, and lowered his eyes to the level of her breast, from which the milk had trickled, through the black dress. She noticed at once, and covered herself with her scarf. With the same slow but natural motion, she covered her head.
As he continued to visit the Saportas over the years with some regularity, Arthur did not particularly notice Dulcie’s greyness or her glasses, nor that Mr Saporta was setting in fat, because friends and lovers enjoy a greater freedom than their bodies: they are at liberty to move out of them, and by special dispensation, communicate with one another through far-sighted eyes.
It was Waldo who suffered, Arthur regretted, from his meeting with the whole Saporta family in Pitt Street, in middle age. The shock of recognition had sent Waldo temporarily off his rocker, with the result that he was knocked down farther along, his pince-nez damaged beyond repair. It was not Arthur who had arranged the meeting, though Waldo seemed to think it was.
All the way to his brother’s bedside Arthur had suffered for Waldo’s suffering, more particularly for Waldo’s fear of death. The crisp perfection of the sister colliding with the weakness of his stricken brother sent him almost frantic. It put him in a most difficult position: to pacify the bossy sister by keeping quiet, while convincing Waldo he couldn’t afford to let him die. Careful regulation of his conduct at last persuaded her they might be left, and at once Waldo sounded less afraid. Though Arthur continued to blub a little to show his brother he needed him. Love, he had found, is more acceptable to some when twisted out of its true shape.
Not that Waldo would accept much. He was too busy with his problems, of libraries, and Mr Crankshaw. Arthur realized he had a problem of his own when Waldo joined the staff of the big new Public Library, where Arthur himself was inclined to read. Fortunately Waldo, in occasional flight through the reading room, was too preoccupied to notice anyone beyond the outskirts of his mind.
He barely noticed the War even, the second one which was going on. In the First War Arthur Brown had been all fireworks and singing. He wore a patient gravity for the Second. Too much had happened down Terminus Road and in other parts. Although still a boy he went more slowly, nursing his jammed fingers, expecting the next kick in the pants.
On the night of the Peace, when the singing was let loose, the vomit, the piss, the gobs, and the little girls with their wicked bums and flouncing hair, Arthur couldn’t make up a song, until at last a couple of lines — or three:
“No more dying only the dead
love is lying in the parks
and lying and lying …”
He smiled, though, for all those pairs of twins, and no word between them to express the truth.
When a lady approached him, violet over grey, and fetched out a screech from away back near her uvula:
“You big man, where have you bin?”
He replied, simply, sadly: “Madam, I am not your cup of tea.”
He wondered where Waldo was. He was glad it was he, not his brother, involved in such a tasteless incident.
Related in more than flesh Waldo had become by then the first of his two preoccupations. Since his discovery of the spirit, Arthur could not go too softly, offering, as it were, this other thing, where his body might repel. He realized he could not run the risk of Waldo’s refusing something less material than glass. Glass was shattering enough. In his left pocket, certainly, he continued to carry Waldo’s mandala, though for the most part he avoided taking it out. He preferred to contemplate his own, in which the double spiral knit and unknit so reasonably.
This solid mandala he held in his hand as he sat, whenever possible, in the reading room at the Library. For the Books became his second obsession. To stor
m his way, however late, however dark the obscurer corners of his mind. So he sat twirling the solid mandala, and by shuffling the words together, he made many if not all of the permutations of sense. Admittedly, in flashes of desperation, crushed grass and his own palpitating lump of flesh convinced him more.
Arthur wrestled with the Books. He wrestled with his obstreperous mind, which disgusted far too many by its fleshly lumbering round their thoughts. He knew he must look a real old faggot in the raincoat he wore, not so much for the weather as to cover up his shortcomings. Perhaps, after all, Hindu smoke was the only true and total solution. As for the lotus, he crushed it just by thinking on it.
On one occasion, in some book, he came across a message. Pinned to the back of his mind, it rattled and twitched, painfully, hopefully, if obscure:
As the shadow continually follows the body of one who walks in the sun, so our hermaphroditic Adam, though he appears in the form of a male, nevertheless always carries about with him Eve, or his wife, hidden in his body.
He warmed to that repeatedly after he had recovered from the shock. And if one wife, why not two? Or three? He could not have chosen between them. He could not sacrifice his first, his fruitful darling, whose mourning even streamed with a white light. Nor the burnt flower-pots, the russet apples of his second. Or did the message in the book refer, rather, to his third, his veiled bride? Heavy with alternatives and hoarded wealth, he sat back on the heels of the creaking library chair, opened his raincoat, scratched through his flies, rubbed at his rather cushiony chest.
When the chair collapsed under Arthur Brown he wasn’t hurt. It was such a joke.
“You must take care!” It was the young lady, that Miss Glasson. “At your age. Once you start falling. Public property, too!”
When Arthur had got himself another chair he went and took Alice Through the Looking Glass. He loved that. His mouth still watered for sweets of any kind. He would shake back his hair before entering.
Or he would glance up. And sometimes Miss Glasson was hovering over her hermaphroditic Adam. If she only knew. On one occasion he decided to tell. And decided not to. Although Miss Glasson was good for a smile, she mightn’t have been on for a laugh.
The Solid Mandala Page 30