Arthur told quietly after that, but told: “When I was over there Sunday afternoon she was washing her hair. In a kero tin. She makes a lotion out of bay leaves. She showed me the leaves. You never saw such lovely hair. But it’s not what it was. It used to reach down below her waist.”
“You have your job, son,” said Dad in some difficulty — he had begun by those years to gasp. “Why don’t you concentrate on that?”
Arthur kept quiet.
And Mrs Poulter remained the same young woman, of firm flesh and high complexion, her hair glistening in certain lights. There was nothing you could have accused her of. Nothing. Except perhaps her living in the boat-shaped erection immediately opposite, with the fowl-sheds and wire-netting behind.
Arthur began to go very carefully, to speak very softly.
“She took me over the hill,” he no more than breathed. “We saw the Chinese woman standing under the wheel-tree. You ought to see a wheel-tree flowering. I would never have seen without she took me.”
Waldo shuddered.
He used to feel relieved starting for the Library while the greeny-yellow light reflected off the arching grass was still too weak to paralyze. He was glad of his job on the catalogue. At least Dad had retired, and buses had replaced the train which used to run between Sarsaparilla and Barranugli, so Waldo could give himself to the more pneumatic bus, and reflect bitterly on his relationship with his father. His mother too. She who might have conceived him in more appropriate circumstances must expect to share the blame.
On several occasions, when she was old and preparing to die, Waldo tempted his mother by asking:
“Why did you marry Dad?”
Her teeth were giving her difficulty, and she would not always answer at first.
“Because, I suppose,” she once replied, managing her old and complicated teeth, “we were members of the Fabian Society. And your father was a good man. Oh, yes, I loved him. I loved him. The way one does.”
She was determined not to be caught out.
But Dad. In that dark street. With the Baptist chapel at one end.
After he retired, Dad would sometimes recall, in the spasmodic phrasing which came with the asthma, his escape by way of Intellectual Enlightenment, and the voyage to Australia, from what had threatened to become a permanence in black and brown, but in the telling, he would grow darker rather than enlightened, his breathing thicker, clogged with the recurring suspicion that he might be chained still. Waldo was not sure, but had an idea his father had turned against him because he, of all the gang, had escaped.
Dad would look at him and say: “Anyway, Waldo, you have had the opportunity — I gave it to you at the start.” (As if he had, but that was what the poor devil liked to think.) “Nothing ought to hold you back. Although, I admit, your brother will be a handicap.”
You could see that behind the words their father was really hoping his son Waldo might be re-captured, to remain chained to the rest of them. Waldo had to have a quiet laugh. As if he were the one a shingle short! He wouldn’t stay chained to Arthur, or anyone else. He was only marking time, and would create the work of art he was intended to create, perhaps even out of that impasto of nonconformist guilt from which Dad had never struggled free and was so desperately longing to unload on someone else. The irony of it would be that Dad should inspire something memorable, something perfect. But first Waldo must cultivate detachment.
In the meantime it amused him to see his colleagues at the Library remain unconscious of what was hatching. Unquenchable mediocrities, their only experience of genius was on paper.
Not the least subtle and satisfying moments of his life at that period were those of his return to Sarsaparilla, by exhausted summer light, or breath-taking winter dark, his thought so lucid, so pointed, so independent, he could have started — if he had had a pencil and notebook, which he never had — there and then at the Barranugli bus stop to rough out something really important.
It came as a shock on such an evening when the voices of two men cut in.
He knew the men by sight, one of them a Council employee, a fellow called Holmes, of bad reputation, generally pretty far gone in drink, the other a stooge to his companion of the moment.
Holmes was saying: “Sawney bugger!” He laughed without mirth. “Now don’t tell me Bill Poulter isn’t a sawney. Because I know. Know why ’e went sick last week?”
“No. Why?” his companion asked because it was expected of him.
“It’s ’is missus. ’Is missus is leading ’im by the nose.”
“Go on!” said the other, smaller, beadier, perking up. “A fine class of woman if it’s the one I think.”
“I dunno which you think,” Holmes continued, “but I could do with a slice of Bill Poulter’s missus meself. Not that she’d come at me. Seems to got pretty funny ideas.”
“Ah?” His companion was again only formally interested.
The man Holmes, rocking on his heels, had lowered his chin to resist the intensity of an experience.
“Seen ’er making through the scrub with that bluey nut Arthur Brown.”
“Go on!” said the other, soaring to astonishment.
“Even in the street. Seen ’er ’olding ’im by the hand.”
The little beady person had whipped his head around, the better to visualize a situation, or actually to watch it happening on the screen of Holmes’s face.
“Mind you,” said Holmes, “for all they say, that Arthur Brown, I don’t think, could do more harm than a cut cat.”
The little one nearly peed himself.
“You can’t be all that sure,” he said, “the knife ’as done its job. Sometimes they slip up on it, eh?”
“Yer might be right,” Holmes answered. “And a woman like that, married to such a sawney bastard, she wouldn’t wait for ’em to put the acid on ’er.”
Then he looked round, and stopped, not because he noticed, let alone recognized Waldo Brown, but because his story was finished except in his thoughts.
All the way in the Sarsaparilla bus Waldo could have thrown up. And at tea. He pushed his knife and fork to the side. The pickled onions had never smelt more metallic.
Later on, he decided to have it out with Arthur, though he couldn’t think how he would put it.
Arthur was in the kitchen mixing dough for a batch of bread. His shoulders rounded over the bowl. His hair alight. The tatters of dough with which his hands were hung made them look dreadful — webbed, or leprous.
Then it all came out of Waldo, not in vomit, but in words.
“I want to talk to you,” he gasped. “This woman, this Mrs Poulter business, if you knew what you were up to, but it’s us, it’s us too, ought to be considered, if you did you wouldn’t traipse through the scrub, or in the street, the street, holding hands with Mrs Poulter!”
Arthur had never looked emptier. His face was as clear as spring-water.
“She takes my hand,” he said, “if I’m having difficulty. If I can’t keep up, for instance. If I tire.”
The bread, which was his vocation, had begun to grow difficult. The long, stringy dough was knotting at the ends of his fingers.
“Then,” he added, “Mrs Poulter is my friend.”
Waldo laughed out loud through the sweat which was bouncing off his face.
“Oh yes!” he laughed. “So they’re saying! That’s the point. Whatever the truth, that’s beside it. Don’t you see? And you’re degrading us! Even if you’re too thickwitted to be hurt by what other people think and say.”
When suddenly the bread grew simpler. Arthur had freed his fingers.
“Mrs Poulter,” he said, “says we mustn’t go together any more. Her husband got offended.”