For he sensed that Mrs Feinstein was about to invite him to take his turn at showing off.
“Don’t you in any way perform, Waldo?” she asked in what he heard to be a disbelieving voice.
So the moment had arrived. He said he would sing a few songs.
“Though I warn you, I accompany myself very badly, with little more than one finger!”
“Oh,” said Dulcie, “perhaps I can help.”
And did when she heard the titles. He sang them In the Gloaming, The Tide Will Turn, and Singing Voices, Marching Feet. At once he regretted denying his own skill at the piano, for as he glanced down Dulcie’s neck, and at her dexterous hands, he realized he was putting, not so much no expression, as the wrong one, into the words he was singing. Because how could Dulcie have learnt the accompaniments, if not at some sing-song for the Boys? Thumping out worse, no doubt, in a vulgar low-cut blouse, as the bacon-faced men, smelling of khaki and old pennies, propped themselves up on the piano. Anyone coarsening so early as Dulcie, in both arms and figure, could only have acted openly. The authentic AIF brooch she must have worn would barely have held her breasts together.
After this discovery he confessed his voice was dry.
“You will tire yourself, giving so much.” Mrs Feinstein sighed.
And Dulcie said: “I never realized you had such a charming tenor voice.”
With the result that it almost rose again, silkily, in his injured throat.
But the afternoon, like the lolling Arthur, had just about exhausted itself. As the others sat nibbling at a few last crumbs of conversation, his head rolled without waking, and for a moment Waldo noticed with repulsion the whites of his brother’s upturned eyes.
If he had not been making other discoveries he would have woken Arthur. Instead he noticed Dulcie was wearing, not the AIF brooch, but a Star of David on a gold chain.
“Are you religious?” he asked, as brittlely as the question demanded.
She pulled an equally brittle face. He might have teased her some more if Mrs Feinstein hadn’t wandered off at a tangent.
“I am so sorry,” she said, “You will not have had the opportunity of meeting Leonard Saporta. On another occasion he was to have come, but he had the grippe or something, I seem to remember. This time he has been too impulsive. He slammed a door, and cut his hand on the glass knob.”
“Is he a relative?” Waldo asked.
Mrs Feinstein said: “No.”
The mention of relatives set her off sighing again, and he hardly dared, though did finally enquire after the Signora Terni of Milan.
“Old, old.” Mrs Feinstein protested against it. “Very aged.”
Then Waldo grew more daring.
“And Madame Hochapfel?”
Mrs Feinstein was desolated. She emulated Arthur in showing the whites of her eyes.
“Before we have reached Europe,” Mrs Feinstein replied in a voice from beyond the grave.
“Aunt Gaby had lived, Mummy,” Dulcie suggested.
Her idea was to staunch the ’cello music, but it sounded, rather, as though she had turned her mother’s lament into a duet.
When Mrs Feinstein began to take herself in hand.
“I don’t know what Daddy would have to say to so much Jewish emotionalism. I was thankful we did not have him with us, either in Paris or Milan. Poor things, they are devout.” Mrs Feinstein smiled for the sick, though it could have been she enjoyed the sickness. “Of course we did whatever was expected of us while we were there. We did not have the heart to tell them we have given up all such middle-aged ideas, to conform,” she said, “to conform with the spirit of progress. Daddy, I am afraid, who is more forceful in his expression, would have offended.”
After that she disappeared, trailing the outdoor coat she was wearing. It was so out of place. It was also so shapeless it might have been inherited.
Waldo would have woken Arthur, only he saw that Dulcie, in some distraction, had thrown open the glass doors, and was holding her handkerchief to her upper lip, while breathing the rather foetid air of their wartime garden.
“Aren’t you well?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I am well! Didn’t you gather I am very healthy?”
Suddenly he knew he would like to say: Dearest, dearest Dulcie — taking her hands in his hands with a suppleness not peculiar to them.
Instead he continued standing stiffly, against the prospect of staggy hydrangeas, their leaves yellow and speckled from neglect.
Dulcie, he realized, had begun to cry. Very softly. Which made it worse.
“What is it?” he asked, in a tone to match — worse and worse.
“There is so much I don’t, I shall never be able to grasp,” she said abruptly, in a comparatively loud and shocking voice.
At the same time she held out her arms, not to him, but in one of the ugly gestures with which she had fought Beethoven, again in an attempt to embrace some recalcitrant vastness.
Fortunately Arthur woke, and it was clearly time to go.
“Then you can have a proper cry,” Arthur advised through a yawn.
“I’ve done all the crying, proper or improper, I intend to do,” Dulcie said.
She sounded so very practical.
“Give my regards, Arthur,” she said, “to your mother. I hope one day we shall meet.”
Arthur was dawdling his way through the garden. He could have been feeling depressed.
“Oh. My mother,” he murmured, then: “You mightn’t like each other,” he called back.
As it was too probable to answer, Dulcie went inside, closing the door, against the glass panels of which Waldo saw her figure pressed, very lightly, fleetingly. He remembered seeing a fern pressed under glass, the ribs more clearly visible.
Then he and Arthur were going away. Arthur was holding him by the hand.
Anything so unassessable, and in a way he did not wish to assess their relationship with the Feinsteins, was liable to suffer from the more positive occurrences. The Poulters, for instance. The Poulters arrived in Terminus Road perhaps about 1920, anyway, Dad had retired, but had not died. Waldo remembered with difficulty the occasion of his first setting eyes on the Poulters. All too soon there were the heap of bricks, the matchsticks of timber, but before that, yes, he could remember the day the man and woman trampled round and round in the grass, more like cattle let loose on fresh pasture. Then the man appeared to be pacing out dimensions. Mother went inside saying she had heartburn, but Waldo stayed to watch, in spite of the felted chug-chug from somewhere in the region of his throat or heart. The man was a thin one. The woman, more noticeably fleshed, had stupid-looking calves, which Waldo thought he would have liked to slap if he had been following her up a flight of stairs. Slap slap. To make her hop. After a bit the strangers went away, driving in a sulky with a sweaty horse, lowering their eyes to avoid the glances of those who had the advantage over them by being there already.
“They hired that horse and trap for the day,” Arthur informed the family as they sat at tea eating the salmon loaf.
No one any longer asked how Arthur knew. (He had, in fact, gone across the road, to look closer, and ask.)
“They’re from up country,” he said. “Mr Poulter was a rouseabout, Mrs Poulter helped at the homestead.”
“But why have they come down here?” Mother wondered.
“To be more independent,” Arthur explained at once.
Waldo laughed. He had begun to feel gratifyingly superior.