The Solid Mandala

by Patrick White

  In any case, it was time. It was time to return to Terminus Road. So frustrating. If only he could have retired — but they needed him more than ever, Mrs Allwright and Mrs Mutton, since Mr Allwright died — he would have been able to give all that extra time to his reading.

  To The Brothers Karamazov. Wonder what Dad would have said!

  But there were days, whole weeks, Arthur couldn’t help feeling, when he remained congealed, possessed by Terminus Road, and Waldo — it was Waldo. When the great basalt clouds were piled up over their heads, the fragments of shale restlessly flying, the yellow loops of wet grass setting traps for ankles, Waldo had to be comforted. Arthur accepted his duty. Their life was led down Terminus Road. Of course they went to their jobs, they had been so regulated they couldn’t have helped going. But their actual life was the one which continued knotting itself behind the classical weatherboard façade. Sometimes Arthur wished Dad hadn’t burnt his copy of The Brothers Karamazov, so that he could have got on with it at home. Then he realized it mightn’t have been desirable: to introduce all those additional devils into their shaky wooden house.

  Once, at the height of a storm, when the rain was coming down aslant, in slate-pencils, against the roof, the water coming through the rusty iron, in that same place, into the basin, in the scullery, and the quince-twigs squeaking against, the rose-thorns scratching on, the panes, Waldo shouted:

  “I wonder what you damn well think about, Arthur!”

  “Well,” said Arthur slowly, because it was a difficult one to answer, “what most people think about, I suppose.”

  “Nothing!” Waldo shouted back. “That’s the answer!”

  “Or everything,” Arthur only mumbled, because Waldo seemed so put out.

  “You think about nothing!” Waldo had begun to cry. “No worries on your mind!”

  “If you want to know, I was thinking about Tiresias,” Arthur said to interest him. “How he was changed into a woman for a short time. That sort of thing would be different, wouldn’t it, from the hermaphroditic Adam who carries his wife about with him inside?”

  Then Waldo took him by the wrists.

  “Shut up!” he ordered. “Do you understand? If you think thoughts like these, keep them to yourself, Arthur. I don’t want to hear. Any such filth. Or madness.”

  Waldo might have wrenched Arthur’s hands off at the wrists if only he had been strong enough. But he wasn’t.

  Instead he sat down rather hard, and Arthur went to him, to comfort him, because they only had each other. Waldo knew this. He put his head on the table, under the falling rain, and cried.

  Waldo was such a terrible problem to Arthur, their love for each other, that there were whole visits to the Library when he couldn’t bring himself to take down The Brothers Karamazov. He preferred Alice.

  But he had to return to what had become, if not his study, his obsession. There was all this Christ jazz. Something of which Mrs Poulter had explained. But he couldn’t exactly relate it to men, except to the cruelty some men practise, in spite of themselves, as a religion they are brought up in. Reading The Brothers Karamazov he wished he could understand whose side anyone was on.

  Who was the Grand Inquisitor?

  Then quite suddenly one morning at the Library Waldo was sitting at the same table, opposite him, making that scene. Afterwards Arthur could not remember in detail what was said. You couldn’t exactly say they were speaking, because the remarks were being torn out of them helter skelter, between tears and gusts of breathlessness, like handfuls of flesh. The raw, bleeding remarks were such that Waldo kept looking round to see who might be noticing. As for Arthur, he did not care. Their relationship was the only fact of importance, and such an overwhelming one.

  “I shan’t ask if you’ve come here, if you’re making this scene, to humiliate me,” Waldo was saying, “because the answer is too obvious. That has been your chief object in life. If you would be truthful.”

  “Why hurt yourself, Waldo?” Arthur was given the strength to reply. “Kick a dog, and hurt yourself. That’s you all over.”

  “For God’s sake don’t drag in the dogs! And who, I’d like to know, wanted the miserable animals? And why?”

  “We both did,” said Arthur, “so that we could have something additional — reliable — to love. Because we didn’t have faith in each other. Because we are — didn’t you say yourself, Waldo? — abnormal people and selfish narcissyists.”

  Waldo was looking in every direction at once, and especially at that Miss Glasson, who, although standing at the far end of the room, might have been holding a telescope. She had that kind of eye.

  “Afraid,” Arthur was saying, and now he did begin to feel a kind of terror rising in him. “Like our father. I mean Dad. Not the one they pray to. But Dad putting Dostoevsky on the fire.”

  He knew the flames of argument must be colouring his face in the way which distressed strangers, even Waldo, most. But for the moment he was almost glad he couldn’t control himself.

  “Afraid of the blood and the nails, which as far as I can see, is what everyone is afraid of, but wants, and what Dostoevsky is partly going on about. Do you see, Waldo,” he was bursting with it, “what we must avoid?”

  Suddenly Arthur burst into tears because he saw that Waldo was what the books referred to as a lost soul. He, too, for that matter, was lost. Although he might hold Waldo in his arms, he could never give out from his own soul enough of that love which was there to give. So his brother remained cold and dry.

  Arthur stopped crying almost at once, because the reason for his beginning was so immense it made the act itself seem insignificant. He was ashamed.

  “But we’ve got to keep on trying, Waldo, just as we get up every morning and lace our boots up again.”

  I don’t know what you mean, Waldo could have been on the point of saying. At that moment he looked so lost, Arthur had to lean across the table and try to take him by the hands. He, the lost one, taking his lost brother by the hands.

  When Waldo started snatching back his property.

  “You’re drawing attention to us!”

  Arthur did not understand at first.

  “You will leave this place,” Waldo was commanding, and very loudly: “sir!”

  Indicating that he, Arthur, his brother, his flesh, his breath, was a total stranger.

  It was then Arthur began to tear the Grand Inquisitor out of The Brothers Karamazov, he was so confused. And Waldo shaking him like any old rag, which he was, he admitted, he was born so, but not to be bum-rushed against and through the swing-doors. As if you could get rid of your brother that way.

  He walked across the hall, steady enough, and out the main entrance, his shadow following him in the sun, as he carried away inside him — his brother.

  In the circumstances Arthur was glad they had the pups — or dogs they were by then — to return to, to cherish, though Waldo would never have admitted to cherishing anyone or anything. The dogs used to rush out on Arthur, their supple, flashing bodies, their strong white teeth revealed in pleasure, and he would go quite passive, though wobbly, allowing them to lick his hands. By the time their saliva had dried on his skin, he was usually restored. Then he would potter round a bit, talking, or grunting, to his dogs. Mostly in little pleased noises or phrases of gasps. Though on the evening of his scene with Waldo, he announced from the depths of him: “I got a proper flogging today.”

  Waldo never talked to a dog, and on his arriving home, they would prowl round him, lifting their pads as though they were sprung, and whining through their sharp-looking noses.

  “Those dogs of yours,” Mrs Allwright used to complain when they followed Arthur to the store, “I wouldn’t trust them an inch. Not on my heels. On a dark night. Not by day neether. Look, Arthur! Arrrrrrhh! Arthur?” she would call, stamping, her voice rising. “Dogs! Dogs!” she would moan. “Filthy brutes! Soiling the produce!”

  And the dogs would growl back, but make off across the paddocks, home.


  Mrs Allwright was not in a position to create about the dogs as much as she would have liked, because, on the death of her husband, she became too dependent on Arthur at the store. When Arthur needed a day at the Library, she didn’t even dock his wages. If she complained a certain amount, well, complaint was in her nature.

  “I shan’t let you down, Mrs Allwright,” Arthur promised. “Not in other ways. I owe it to Mr Allwright since he died.”

  “Mr Allwright didn’t die,” his widow used to maintain. “He is all around me.”

  Then Mrs Mutton her sister would suck her teeth, and ejaculate: “It’s a mercy you have your faith, Ivy.”

  It was fortunate Mrs Allwright had her faith in faith, for she hadn’t any in man or dog, and on her deciding to sell the store, and retire to Toowoomba with her sister and her Christian Science, Arthur’s only regret was that he had never got to know Mr Allwright; he had been saving it up for the future when his employer died. If he hadn’t got to know Mrs Mutton either, it was because there was nothing to know. Mrs Mutton was more a monument than a woman.

  So Arthur retired, and the convenience of it was: his twin brother Waldo began his retirement at the same moment.

  If it had not been for the dogs they might have succumbed to the silence of their suddenly unfamiliar house. It seemed as though the house had grown elastic with time, and they would have to accustom themselves to its changing shapes. The rooms which they had used before, or not, according to their needs, began using them. So much of what they had forgotten, or never seen, rose up before their eyes: the dusty paper-bags still hanging by their necks as Dad had left them, rattling with husks when the wind blew or they hit you in the face; a simple, deal chair suddenly dominating the shadows; the smell of old milk rags, of turps, and rotted quinces, mingling and clotting so thick as to become visible in memory’s eye, a string of solid glossy days to chase the pong out of the present; dates of years ago turned to fly-shit on the calendars; a ball of Mother’s hair in the corner of a dressing-table drawer; a dress of Mother’s. For a long time Arthur had been afraid to touch the dress in case it stood up in a crash of remonstrative beads.

  So the dogs were a blessing. And the walks. Waldo did not take to walking till later, because at first his papers demanded too much of his time. He was putting them in order.

  “A disorderly life, a disorderly mind,” Waldo said. “You won’t understand, Arthur, the mental handicap physical disorder can become. You don’t need to. In my case an absence of method could undo the plans of a lifetime.”

  He continued fussing over the old cardboard box in which Mother’s dress used to be.

  Arthur went out. He liked to moon across the paddocks with the dogs. It was very soothing. On keener mornings he would put on that old coat in stained herring-bone tweed, which had belonged to Uncle Charlie, and which was still wearable in spite of moths. When he grew tired he would sit on a log and only at first wonder what he had come there for. The morning was reason enough — breaking into phrases of sound bursts of light threads of thought. He would sit in some sheltered bay of dripping blackberry bushes, the winter wire of which whipped him to greater appreciation of all he had experienced in the past. While in the present the dogs sat licking their pads or, jacked on their sterns, lavished respectful tongues on the blue perfection of their balls.

  Arthur laughed, for all roundnesses. He took out the marble and looked at it.

  One year he went up to look at the wheel-tree, again in the season of its second flowering, and as though by contrivance, the Chinese woman was standing beneath it. Only the crackle of her surface more pronounced, her bones more obviously breakable. On this occasion she turned even quicker, and went somewhat angrily behind the sheds. Perhaps seeing him on his own, without the benefit of Mrs Poulter. Well, he expected that sort of thing. But the wheel-tree fairly sizzled with fire, burning its way back through time to the other afternoon.

  He shivered remembering the feel of hair, skin smelling ever so faintly of struck flint.

  Waldo said: “If ever I catch you hanging round that woman.”

  He had not explained what he would do, but out of respect for Mrs Poulter, and to avoid any risk of her humiliation, Arthur did not see her again. That is, they no longer walked together along the unseen, the secret paths. For it was impossible to ignore the sight of Mrs Poulter, in this cardigan or that, pulling a weed, or wiping the pollard off her hands.

  He developed the habit of calling out across her picket fence: “How are we, Mrs Poulter? Eh?”

  And Mrs Poulter would reply: “Good, thanks, Mr Brown.”

  Looking, rather, at the weeds.

  “And Mr Poulter keeping good?”

  “Good enough, thanks. Yes.”

  Exploring the soil with the toe of her shoe.

  They lived opposite each other for many years without a change in the recognized climate.

  Then one evening he had gone in taking the two pounds of self-raising which Mrs Allwright said Mrs Poulter was enquiring for. He had barged right in the way it had been customary in their youth. Banging the gauze door. Had gone on into the house drunk with the scent of beeswax and overpowering cleanliness.

  “Mrs Poulter?” he called. “Where are we?”

  On that evening he was so happy.

  In the empty, half-darkened house he had come across her, through the bedroom door, standing over against a chest. Doing something of a private nature. Mrs Poulter, he realized, was dressing, or undressing, an enormous doll.

  “Go on!” he almost shouted. “Where did you get that beaut doll?”

  He would have trampled farther into the bedroom, but saw he had caught her out cruelly in what she was doing. She stood there holding the naked doll against her bosom, half looking as though the plastic was turning molten in her arms and she wanted to shoot it out across the carpet.

  “You’ve no right,” she began to stutter, “barging in. Into people’s houses. A lady’s bed — bedroom. They should of learnt you that, Mr Brown!”

  “Okay,” he said, “Mrs Poulter.”

  They might never have known each other. For he too was becoming a stranger, in the forbidden doorway, holding a packet of flour in his arms.

  But she continued creating.

  “Ugly thing!”

  She flung the doll into a drawer, where it made the sound of a body thudding, and gave out a cry of mechanical anguish.

  “Nobody,” she panted, “ever wants half of what they’re given!”

  Crumpling into a ball the doll’s dress and knickers which, in her hurry, she had overlooked.

  “Okay, Mrs Poulter,” Arthur said, “you can give it away to some kiddy.”

  Then Mrs Poulter, who was standing by now in the centre of the room, said something, something surprising, still squeezing up the doll’s clothes.

  “I wouldn’t contaminate any kiddy,” she said. “I mean, I’d encourage her to think most kiddies can expect better than dolls.”

  And he could see the knots forming in Mrs Poulter’s throat, like a goitre. Age had made her fat and rather purple. He would have liked to comfort the stout woman.

  Instead he said: “I brought the flour.”

  “Thank you, Arthur,” she said coming forward, and leading the way into the kitchen.

  “You ought to switch on the light,” he advised. “For company. That way you won’t get morbid.”

  “It’s more economical to go without the light,” she said. “I’ll switch it on when Bill comes in and I give him his tea.”

  By now Mrs Poulter was quite restored, and they stood together, just a moment, unconfessed, over the packet of flour. He was surprised how their hands had swollen since he had been forced to dance his mandala, on an afternoon flowing with fire.

  Never again had he danced out of fullness, though sometimes on winter mornings, after the grass had been released, and the sunlight was dripping through the steel mesh of blackberry bushes, he would execute one or two movements. He would hang his he
ad to one side, he would extend his herring-bone arms, the fingers dangling in bundles of thawed flesh, and the dogs would stop their licking to watch.

  Never did any of them feel that these were amongst the inspired moments. He would go off home, followed neatly by the blue dogs.

  In the beginning he had wondered how to fill the time. Of course there was the bread and milk they ate, and on Sundays the salmon-loaf habit which they had inherited from Mother. They ate mostly boiled stuff, because Waldo had ordained.

  “Boiled food prevents ulcers,” he said, “and as much as anything else helps ensure longevity.”

  And there was the butter-making besides, and bread. Arthur used to clean the lamps, an activity he associated with that of churning or baking, the outcome so lucid.

  He wrote his poems too, on mornings full of sun and blue dogs scratching at their fleas. Though why he wrote, or for whom, he could not have told, nor would he have shown. But sat with the pencil, the paper on his knee. He wrote the poem of the daughter he had never had, and of the wives he carried inside him. The writing of the poems was the guiltiest act he had performed since starting to look up the dictionaries, to read the books, his mind venturing through the darkened theatre in which the gods had died in the beginning.

  Until Waldo would stick his head out the window and shout: “Can’t you do something, Arthur? Haven’t you an occupation? Take those dogs for a walk at least. I can’t think for having you around.”

  Poor Waldo, his neck stuck out like that of a hen about to be decapitated.

  “Good God, Arthur,” he used to shout, “do I have to think for you as well?”

  Poor Waldo, in spite of himself, called on God more often as time went on.

  Thus dismissed, Arthur would shuffle off — it was all the same, and nothing could hurt — taking with him his papers, his dogs, and his mandalas. He would wander for hours.

  He only first realized how old he was when he caught sight of his reflection nose-picking in Woolworths’ plate-glass window. He might have come home ashamed if he hadn’t remembered halfway down Terminus Road moments of other people’s shame: Mrs Poulter for her doll, his brother for his brother.