When Waldo returned at last he was emptied out. He had washed his face, and might have felt better if he hadn’t heard a sound of tea-spoons somewhere, from kitchen or pantry. Which meant that Mrs Feinstein was getting the tea. Which meant that Arthur was alone with Dulcie.
The music had stopped now.
As he hurried he was not afraid Arthur would behave in any way violently, oh no, it was rather the violence of what his twin might say.
Entering the room, Waldo made himself appear, he imagined, dry and correct. At least they would not see how he felt. Only he would know.
Arthur and Dulcie were sitting on the twin music-stool which held the music underneath. They were turned so that they faced each other. Their foreheads appeared almost to be touching.
“What, a peerrot sitting on the moon? On the bottle?”
“A pierrot painted on the bottle,” Dulcie confirmed.
Arthur was entranced by what he was hearing and seeing, and Dulcie had changed. When he came into the room Waldo felt for the first time this is Dulcie being herself. You couldn’t say she was exactly ugly. Or perhaps he was just used to her by now.
“You are right,” she was saying, in reply to some remark of Arthur’s, though speaking rather to herself. “Amour is not the same as love. Amour has a different shape — a different meaning.”
Waldo was so horrified he might have expressed his feelings, but fortunately Mrs Feinstein brought the tea things, and at the same time rain was beginning.
“Oh dear, I do hate thunder!” Mrs Feinstein admitted, and the things on the tray rattled. “It makes me so afraid! Shut the window, Dulcie, do, please! They say lightning strikes through open windows.”
“We shan’t be able to breathe,” said Dulcie, but did as she was told.
“Arthur and I shall exchange anecdotes to drown the thunder,” Mrs Feinstein promised.
“Is this real cinnamon toast?” Arthur asked, helping himself to two or three fingers and stuffing them buttery into his mouth.
He looked perfectly happy, sitting in a chair shaped like a toast-rack, while Mrs Feinstein told about her aunt Madame Hochapfel who had sometimes been mistaken for the Empress Eugénie, and whose salon used to be frequented by people of artistic inclinations.
“Every Sunday. Only a minor salon,” Mrs Feinstein added out of modesty.
“But to be in business in a small way is better than not being in it at all,” Arthur said through his mouthful of toast. “I mean, to have your own. To be independent.”
Mrs Feinstein agreed that her aunt Madame Hochapfel had kept an independent salon.
Dulcie apparently had her thoughts. Waldo couldn’t sink into his. He felt as brittle as a dry sponge. Other people had their anecdotes, or the obvious riches of their thoughts. The big drops of rain and fleshy leaves plastering the windows accentuated his unfortunate drought, his embarrassing superficiality.
Yet he knew the theory of it all. It was only a question of time. It was the mean time which weighed so heavily. It made the palms of his hands sweat.
“And Russia.” Mrs Feinstein sighed. “I can only remember the pine forests.”
“That’s something,” said Arthur. “I bet they smelled.”
Mrs Feinstein breathed deep.
“On a visit when I have been a litde girl. To another branch. With another aunt — Signora Terni of Milan.”
The branch of a shrub, or perhaps an unpruned hydrangea, was scratching the window. They realized the rain was over. Mrs Feinstein put on her skittish act. Her private-flesh-coloured face appeared less grey.
“Arthur,” she decided, “will help me clear the things.”
So Waldo saw the garden, as he had been promised, with Dulcie, because she had him on her hands. The leaves were still dripping with moisture. An air of cold showers above had more or less dislodged the green gloom from underneath.
“These are the hydrangeas you told about,” said Waldo, although they did not interest him at all.
“Yes,” said Dulcie, dully. “And the agapanthus.”
From this occasion he would remember her breaking up into the crumbly fragments of greeny-white hydrangeas. Her dress, at any rate. Because she herself was dark brown, and ugly.
“Arthur and Mummy are enjoying themselves immensely,” she said. “I think it will take me some time to understand Arthur.”
“What is there to understand?” Waldo tried not to shout.
His voice sounded horribly dry and cracked under the dripping hydrangeas.
“Though for that matter,” she said, “I don’t understand myself.”
She had come out in a pimple on one side of her large nose. Which made the dog-silliness of her eyes look more obscene.
He wished he had been taught to do or say something he hadn’t been. He could blame his parents, of course. But it didn’t help matters.
And soon he and Arthur were walking down the steps, between the painted phlox, out of this Feinstein world which in the end had no connexion with them. However sickening and personal the longing, however convincing Madame Hochapfel’s features at the moment of introduction, however close the wet mops of white hydrangeas, parting ridiculed them.
Arthur at least knew what to say.
“Good-bye,” he was trumpeting. “I had a great time. I’ll come back, Dulcie, for the rest of the piano lessons. I’m not going to worry about the theory. I’m going to begin with one of those frilly pieces.”
They were walking down the red concrete steps, which had been painted shiny to please Mr Feinstein no doubt.
Arthur called back then, as though he had been giving it thought: “I’ll have to come back anyway, to tell you what I’ve worked out.”
Waldo was furious, who in the end had not known how to say a thing. Of course those who are sensitive don’t.
“What do you mean,” he began choking, after they had gone some way, “what you have worked out?”
“Well,” said Arthur, “you’ve got to work out something if you’re not happy.”
“But you’re happy, Dulcie’s happy! It would only be asking for sympathy to say you weren’t.”
“She mightn’t be,” Arthur said.
He wouldn’t say any more. He started snorting, and grunting, and finally picking his nose for comfort.
They got home.
And then there were the exams. Waldo passed with Flying Colours, even managed to scrape through Maths — where Johnny Haynes failed.
Then there was the letter summoning to the interview. (What price the Feinsteins now?) It turned out Waldo was accepted by Sydney Municipal Library on the strength of his scholastic career at Barranugli High, his suitable appearance — and a favour asked.
In the end the Influential Client forgot to speak. It was Mrs Musto who got Waldo the job, through Alderman Caldicott, son of her former gardener. Then Mrs Musto retired, to her house, her shrubs, and her servants. She did not venture very far into other people’s lives, because she had been bitten once, no, twice, in the course of human relations, and did not want to risk her hand again.