It gave her so much pleasure, Arthur could only share it. He lost his breath on the lemonade.
Once she let him pull a ship’s bell, and it clanged against the music with which the house was filled.
“Ssshhh!” she warned, holding a finger to her large nose.
If he was not encouraged to explore their house it was perhaps because of the young girl inside. Practising.
It added to the mystery of “Mount Pleasant”, and Arthur liked to leave by the other path, when he could look, at first carefully, then pressing his face against the glass, at Dulcie Feinstein’s back.
She never looked over her shoulder, although, considering the strength of his interest, it was difficult to believe she could not feel his presence outside. As she played and played — the prickly scales, or the etoods, the polkas and gavottes, which would never be for him — his flesh pressed against the pane must have been turning that sickly-plant tone of green, of faces forcing themselves behind glass. From time to time his stomach accepted a delicious thrust of misery. In the Feinsteins’ moist garden. In which music broke and scattered, or lashed back, tail to fang, like snakes or thoughts.
Once Mrs Feinstein came out and caught him, and looked the other way so as not to appear annoyed. She was determined, it seemed, though politely, to prevent him seeing more of her daughter. Though he had, he thought, once, at the store: a skinny girl with a dark shadow on her upper lip, standing probably having the sulks beside a bag of potatoes. But that was different. This would have been the real Dulcie swaying the music out of her body and shaking back her dark hair, if her mother hadn’t been determined to keep her a faceless mystery. She succeeded too. Dulcie Feinstein never turned round. Only the smell of lanoline drifted sometimes as far as Arthur.
Once in the course of his humdrum yet complicated relationship with Mrs Feinstein he dared mention his brother, and she said yes she knew of Waldo, but delicacy or something prevented Arthur encouraging her to add to her uncommunicative reply.
So he was able to keep the Feinsteins, and particularly Dulcie, as part of his own secret life, which was naturally so unsuspected nobody tried to enter it. What irritated some of them was when a withdrawal into himself drew attention to the luminous edges of his face, where at any time the skin was of a whiteness to suggest blue.
More than anyone Mrs Allwright would grow resentful if she could tell by his expression that he was absent without leave.
“That boy — ‘man’ I shall never hardly bring myself to say — is not logical from one minute to another,” Mrs Allwright remarked to Mrs Mutton over the pumpkin scones.
Leave alone someone else’s logic, Mrs Mutton had trouble in mastering her own wind.
“I hope the scones are good, Mrs Mutton, Mrs Allwright,” Arthur said, coming round alongside the glassed-in veranda. “Because it would be too bad if they weren’t.”
Then Mrs Allwright had to titter.
“You can’t help laughing!” she used to say.
Sometimes Arthur would do his best to give the old girls a real good laugh. On one occasion he had even begun to caper and sing:
“It’s my guess if the laugh
Is on the right side or the wrong side
Of my girlie’s face.
If it’s on the right side
It’s all all right,
If it’s on the wrong side
It’s too too bad to be true!”
At that point Mrs Allwright averted her face as if it had been too full of scone, and spoke sounding thick and soggy.
“You will hear more about this, Arthur, from Mr Allwright,” she glumphed, and swallowed.
While Mrs Mutton looked at the window, through and away, managing her teeth.
Arthur did not expect to hear any more, nor did he, on account of the understanding which existed unexpressed between himself and Mr Allwright on the subject of Mr Allwright’s wife.
And then there was his meeting, the first official, socially ratified meeting with Dulcie Feinstein, not that she needed to exist more completely than she did already in his mind. It was only that Dulcie, he knew, had to turn round and face whatever it was in Arthur Brown.
Arthur had the shakes by the time they reached the house. It was impossible to gather to what extent Waldo was already established at the Feinsteins’. Much as he admired his brother for his scholastic brilliance, his knowledge of the world, his self-sufficiency, he had begun to fear for Waldo, for some lack of suppleness in his relationships with other people. There were moments when Waldo was as rigid as a closed cupboard, which no one but his brother had learnt the trick of jerking open. So he trembled for Waldo on the way to Feinsteins’, for fear that Waldo had been there too often alone.
He was somewhat reassured, however, by the sight of Mr Feinstein gleaming in the doorway. Old Feinstein sometimes gave Arthur a bob or two. And then the appearance of Mrs Feinstein, in her rustling, metal-beaded dress.
“Why, Mrs Feinstein, you do look good! Like oil on water,” he was moved to say.
It was a good beginning, with all the indications of a love feast.
If only Dulcie would declare herself.
Then she came in. In that white, loosely-embroidered dress, a flurry of white hydrangea heads. If he was at all flustered it was because of her beauty and the movement of the flowery flowing dress. He was, in fact, so overcome he began to babble all that silly rot about her father’s old capple, a performance which Dulcie obviously found distasteful, it was showing so clearly on her face.
He continued babbling, he heard: “Now that I’ve seen your face. Even if you never want to see me again.”
At the same time he knew, of course, that this could not be true; Dulcie herself let him see it. When he went up to examine her more closely, by touch as well, he saw her suddenly closed face open out again as it must in response to music. In spite of the natural shyness of any young girl, she accepted his entry into her thoughts.
“Oh yes,” she seemed to be, and was in fact, saying, “we shall have so much to exchange, to share.”
More than anxiety, fear that something precious might escape her, was making her take him by the hand.
“Of course I shall teach you the piano!” Dulcie agreed, laughing with a joyful relief.
They couldn’t get down to it quick enough, regardless of anyone else present.
Dulcie would play a scale, or form the shapes of fully-fleshed music, or explain the theory of what she was doing. While in between Arthur was glad to splash around with his unmanageable hands, which, he now realized, she would never notice. Why should she? She understood his sudden splurges and sallies of music.
It was the most exquisite fulfilment Arthur Brown had experienced yet.
He hardly noticed when Waldo shot out of the room, nor did he more than half-see that his brother had returned looking pale.
For Dulcie was telling Arthur about the pierrot d’amour on the scent-bottle in Mrs Musto’s bathroom where, in spite of his familiarity with the house, he had never been.
“That’s interesting now, Dulcie,” he said. “Amour sounds different from love. Eh? Doesn’t it?”
“Oh yes,” she agreed. “The words are different. They have a different shape. Probably even a different meaning.”
He would have liked to give it further thought, but this was after all a social occasion.
When the tea came, and the rain, when they were all sitting round behind rain-pelted windows, eating the buttery cinnamon toast and exchanging anecdotes, Arthur knew how to retract what some people considered his aggressive personality. He knew how to lick his buttery fingers with the daintiness required. Most delicious of all, because most apparent, were the tales Mrs Feinstein had to tell of Europe. He could see the lights of the prescribed cities like the bottles in a chemist’s window. He could smell the forests of Russia which Mrs Feinstein had visited with an aunt.