Once Waldo Brown, in one of his less oblique moments — he was quite a bit younger, cruder of course — was tempted to cross the road. How tempted, he had never been sure. It was so dark. It was by that time night, eloquent with leaves and crackling sticks. Waldo heard himself crunch a flowerpot. But he felt he had to walk around a while. He could hear his heart. He could hear the bandicoots, their thrrt thrrt. It was so dark, it was understandable he should have been drawn to the square of light. He couldn’t resist it. And there stood Mrs Poulter, normally so high of colour, turned waxen by the yellow light inside the room. Her breasts two golden puddings, stirred to gentle activity. For Mrs Poulter was washing her armpits at the white porcelain washstand basin. As she returned it again and again the flannel dribbled the water sleepily back, over the porcelain rim, of white, frozen cabbage-leaves. Mrs Poulter dipped, and the tendrils of black hair which had strayed from the yawning armpits were plastered to the yellow, waxy flesh, Waldo observed. He saw the draggle of jet in the secret part of her thighs.
He had never felt guiltier, but guilt will sometimes solidify; he could not have moved for a shotgun. There was no question of that, however, for the door was opening, and Bill Poulter was entering their room. Ohhhh, his wife seemed to be saying, dropping the flannel into the white porcelain cabbage. Mrs Poulter, too, it seemed, was overcome by guilt for her offence against modesty. Her fingers were almost sprouting webs in their efforts to uphold decency, which was exactly what, in fact, they did, for her surprised nipples were perking up over her honestly-intentioned hands. While Bill Poulter advanced, into the room, into the lamplight. Waldo had never seen Mr Poulter look less scraggy, less glum. Because he was wanting something apparently unexpected, a straggly smile had begun to fit itself to the face so unaccustomed to it.
Then the room was consumed by darkness — and was it mirth? was it Mrs Poulter’s? In that direction at least, the darkness seemed intensified in a concentrated fuzziness. Then there was the sound of what was probably Bill Poulter’s belt slapping the end of the iron bedstead, followed by the jingle of brass balls and dislocated iron.
Waldo went home, not without crunching two more flowerpots.
Trudging along the Barranugli Road Waldo Brown was tempted to glance, if only obliquely, at Arthur.
Arthur’s lips were slightly open, if anything slightly purpler than before.
He said: “Those chrysanths will get crushed in a full bus. They’ll have had it by the time she arrives.”
“Who?” said Waldo.
“Mrs Poulter.”
Then they were walking somewhat quicker, because Waldo had to defend himself from the kind of conversation he had been making with his brother ever since speech had come to them. Or rather he must withdraw his mind from his mind’s mirror.
Altogether they were rocking a bit, in an effort to gather speed, or avoid reflexions. The blue dogs, who had settled down to a steady trot just ahead, barrels rolling, tails at work like handles, pinned back their ears on sensing a threat to their heels. One of the dogs looked back over his shoulder to see what the men could be getting up to. His splather of tongue hung, palpitating suspiciously, against the yellow stumps and bleeding gums.
When Arthur, as though in sympathy with the dog, held up his thick white muzzle and began to howl.
“Aohhhhh!” — actually it was a man — “I never went on such a walk! What’s it leading to?”
The two dogs were terrified. Their tongues thinned, till exhaustion forced them to spread them again. They would have liked to continue looking straight ahead, but their slitted eyes were drawn perpetually towards the corners of the slits. Their ears had become the ears of crouching hares. Their necks wore staring ruffs.
Waldo Brown simply jerked at his brother.
“It’s nothing,” he said, “but exercise.”
And jerked again, so that Arthur was trotting like a dog, while Waldo strode on longer legs, the loosened sheets of his iron oilskin chattering in the surrounding wind, his shod heels gashing the stones. The cryptomerias the retinosperas the golden cypresses were running together by now. At times the brothers reeled.
When the flap of Waldo’s oilskin struck the driver’s door of the semi-trailer lurching past, it brought a man rushing out of the garden of one of the homes.
“Steady on!” cried their protector. “You’ll get hit, if that’s what you’re after, and I’ll have to call the ambulance.”
“The ambulance? Oh, no!” Arthur began to shout.
Waldo was forced to stop.
“Thank you,” he said. “We’re in full control of ourselves.”
It was his glasses made him look colder. The rimless glass might have been an emanation of the rather pale eyes.
“Okay,” replied the man, and laughed — he was bald, the big pursy type, with a joggle of belly. “I don’t wanter interfere. Only thought,” he dwindled.
Waldo continued dragging his brother in his course, though he had already decided they would turn when the helpful man was out of sight.
Arthur was lagging.
“But the ambulance,” he blubbered. “And you were hit, Waldo! That other time. Remember?”
Yes, Waldo Brown had been hit somewhere in the middle stretch of Pitt Street, it must have been 1934. He did not like to think about it now, not only because it was connected with complete loss of dignity, his broken pince-nez, the herd of human beasts halted in their trampling surge only by the skin of his body, then Arthur at the hospital, but because the accident had taken place soon after, you might have said because of, the Encounter. Waldo had been too angry, too upset after running into the last people he wanted to see, their children too, a memorial to all those who had contributed towards their embodiment. Waldo recognized for instance in her grand-daughter Mrs Feinstein’s ridiculous nose, in Mr Saporta’s son the promise of the father’s manly shoulders, and in both her children Dulcie’s eyes, Dulcie’s eyes, in less commanding, more supplicatory mood. More nostalgic still was the absence of those qualities with which Waldo might have endowed the children he had not got with Dulcie.
Dulcie herself was quick to destroy nostalgia.
“If I met a ghost in Pitt Street I’d be more inclined to believe! But it’s you, Waldo — or isn’t it?”
She did not touch him, but looked as though she would have liked to, as she started to break up into laughter. Dulcie fizzed. It came spluttering unconvincingly out of her middle-aged body, dressed in what he remembered afterwards as affluent black, in no way remarkable except that it made her look hotter. Out of the dress her neck, thicker than before, rose reddening and congesting. She was embarrassed no doubt by the presence of the ox her husband.
Saporta stood smiling in the manner of those men who will never have anything of importance to say and in its absence hopefully allow good-will to ooze out of the pores of their faces. He had despised Saporta from the beginning, but what Waldo was now ashamed to realize was that he, too, had nothing to say. He was smiling wider than any boy inescapably face to face with kind friends of his parents.
Then he said: “Oh, I’m real enough — Dulcie.” It made him cough, his smile teetered, and it was most fortunate he saved himself in his arrested state, from adding: Touch me and see.
In any case the Saportas would have been too stupid to grasp the full extent of any such banality. He was glad. Because everything about him was temporarily so unlike him.
“Are you well, Waldo? I hope you are well. At least you look well,” Dulcie babbled with the greatest ease. She had become, evidently, one of those women.