“What ideas!” protested her mother, breathing heavily. “My husband is particularly fond of the Mohntorte,” Mrs Feinstein added, turning to consult a gold clock with a partly naked woman reclining beside it under a glass dome.
Waldo bit into the black, tobacco-y cake. As he wasn’t sure how he felt about it, he wondered what to tell them if they asked. But they didn’t.
“There is mint tea for Dulcie,” murmured Mrs Feinstein, pouring out.
The scented steam added to the slightly dreamy atmosphere, of colds and poppies. Dulcie’s frizzy, animal hair had undergone a transformation. Now it flowed, particularly along one of her white-embroidered shoulders where it happened to have arranged itself. And there were her eyes. As she sipped her mint tea, they brimmed and shimmered through the steamy curtain, infused with some virtue he still had to understand. Waldo had no experience of girls, except girls giggling or turning away on trains, or girls leading boys up side streets, to perform acts he knew about at second hand from Johnnny Haynes. But Dulcie Feinstein seemed to fit into none of the known categories of girlhood. Perhaps in the end her eyes would give away their secret and all would be explained.
They might have continued in this agreeable state of surmise and abstraction if Mr Feinstein hadn’t come in. At once the gauze was lifted. It was as though a game of billiards were taking place in the wrong room.
“So this is Waldo Brown,” said Mr Feinstein. “How are we doing, Waldo?” Mr Feinstein asked.
He spoke with a fairly strong Australian accent, to make up perhaps for anything foreign about him. His hand was cold, dry, and firm. His bald head looked as though it might have felt of billiard balls, the click of which was suggested not so much by the words against his teeth, as the ideas he kept on coming out with.
“I have heard about you, Waldo,” Mr Feinstein clicked. “I have heard about your father. He is, they say, a fine man.”
It surprised Waldo that anyone should have heard of somebody so unimportant as his father, let alone imagine him a “fine man”.
“A man of independent ideas,” said Mr Feinstein. “The courage of his own convictions. No man today, of any intellectual honesty, could adopt any but a rationalist stand in view of politico-economic developments and the advances in scientific discovery.”
Now it was Waldo who had begun to feel important, thanks to Mr Feinstein’s vocabulary and confidences, though he was frightened to think he mightn’t be able to live up to them.
“Don’t you agree?” Mr Feinstein asked.
Waldo made what he hoped might sound an acceptable noise. No one else, he saw, could help him. Mrs Feinstein sat smiling up at her husband. She had ceased to exist, except as a smile and a dress covered with little steel beads. Dulcie had sucked her lips in. She was looking down at something, probably a crumb, so that he was no longer able to see her eyes.
“We Jews,” said Mr Feinstein, and he attached an almost visible weight to it, “we Jews are not always all that enlightened. But when we are, then we are. Take my old father — who founded the firm — another independent mind for you — my old father had seen the light before reaching these to-some-extent,” Mr Feinstein cleared his throat, “enlightened shores.”
The lights cannoned off his head onto his daring, curved nose.
Dulcie sighed. She was looking out, though respectfully, into the garden, where a gloom had gathered. She felt the need to dab her soggy nose.
“You will notice I said ‘to-some-extent’ enlightened,” continued Mr Feinstein, performing a balancing trick on the tips of the upturned fingers of his right hand. “That is because I don’t like to be carried away into dishonest over-emphasis in either direction.”
Bloody old bore, Waldo decided. If he continued half-listening it was only because of the impression of solidity Mr Feinstein created.
“Take this little cap, Waldo,” said Mr Feinstein, taking a very strange one off the knob of a chair, “this capple. Perhaps you haven’t met one before. Well,” he said, “it is part of the big circus act. But if I wear it — which I do,” and he popped it gravely on his head, “it is not that I am allowing myself to be put through any reactionary hoop. It is because this capple happens to protect my nut from draughts.”
Here Mr Feinstein flopped into one of the over-stuffed chairs. For a moment the cap seemed to have extinguished some of his conviction. Then he began to shine again, and laugh.
“Eh?” he laughed. “There couldn’t be a more practical use!”
And his wife laughed to keep him company.
It was better when old Feinstein showed off some of his other possessions: a walking-stick made from rhinoceros hide, the signed photo of Sarah Bernhardt, a ship in a bottle, and the gold clock on the mantelpiece.
“This nude lady,” he explained, and winked, “represents Reason keeping an eye on Time. Because of course Time becomes unbearable if you don’t approach it rationally.”
Waldo looked at the clock, then realized how late it was. Supposing Feinsteins thought he was trying to cadge another meal?
He began to grunt, and redden, and grind a foot into the roses on the carpet. At last he said he ought to go. They did not stop him.
But suddenly Mrs Feinstein remembered. She was one who smiled almost habitually, it seemed. Mrs Feinstein smiled and said:
“You will come again, Waldo. When Dulcie is recovered. And then you will see the garden.”
“There’s nothing in the garden,” said Dulcie, “but old hydrangeas. And agapanthus.”
“Ohhh!” roared her father. “When we pay a man to keep the beds filled with flowers?”
Dulcie put her arm through her father’s, and automatically rested her head against his shoulder, but did not answer. Looking at them, Waldo grew guilty for his own foreignness.
When normally you didn’t think about her, it was Mrs Feinstein who appeared to be trying to put him at his ease. Mrs Feinstein, hovering and smiling, had taken over from her steel dress.
“There is one thing, Waldo,” she said, “I would like you to promise. Next time you come I want you to bring your brother.”
“Arthur? But you don’t know,” he started quickly.
“Oh yes, I do,” Mrs Feinstein answered in an everyday voice. “He has been here. He so enjoyed ringing the bell.”
Waldo looked at Dulcie, who at least on that occasion had been inside practising the piano. Now she did not look up, except for a moment to say: “Good-bye,” when her eyes expressed nothing but the return of her cold. He could not be sure whether she had already made his brother’s acquaintance.
At the prospect of Arthur’s introduction into his relationship with the Feinsteins, Waldo found he cherished that relationship more than he was prepared to admit. It was not the Feinsteins themselves who interested him particularly. Old Feinstein, with more or less his own parents’ ideas, was frankly a bore, but it was at least something to have become a target for the theories of somebody not his parent, and in another way Mrs Feinstein, of doubtful syntax, and skin with the peculiar uncovered look, confirmed his individual existence as comfortingly as cake. As for their daughter, he was not yet sure of Dulcie, of what part she was intended to play, or whether she despised and rejected him. But he had received her, jealously, expectantly, into his mind, and allowed her to drift there passively, along with the musty flavour of poppy seeds and the dense little tune on the walnut piano. The Feinsteins were too private an experience, then, to resist Arthur. Arthur would explode into, and perhaps shatter, something which could not be repaired.