“To think,” he said, “that the world is another mandala!”
“Another what, Arthur?” Mrs Feinstein asked.
But already she was thinking other thoughts.
Like poor old Waldo. It should have been Waldo’s afternoon, afterwards at least, under the dripping hydrangeas with Dulcie, while Arthur helped Mrs Feinstein clear away the things. Instead of Waldo’s afternoon, it would become Waldo’s tragedy, because he wouldn’t know how to act. Only Arthur and Dulcie in the end would know the parts they and others must act out.
Only Arthur knew that Mrs Feinstein was planning to take Dulcie overseas. On a cold day in early winter Mrs Allwright and Mrs Mutton had sent him to Sydney to execute some small commissions.
“Mummy and I are going to slip away,” Dulcie informed him, “without telling anybody. Leave-takings are rather painful when they are not absurd.”
Arthur began his stumbling. The cold light made the situation look so serious. He and Dulcie were walking together in the park, over the dead grass, along the edge of the wild lake. Dulcie was carrying a little muff, and wearing a collar of the same fur.
“But we decided we should tell you,” she added. “Because — ” she paused in thought, “in case you might fret.”
He was so moved as Dulcie spoke, and by the lights in her dark, shimmery fur, that his jaws were munching for every word.
“Don’t mind me, Dulcie!” he said. “After all.”
He could not hobble gratefully enough.
“Have you got a stone in your boot, perhaps?” Dulcie asked.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you want to look?”
“No,” he said, and laughed.
He was laughing at the swamp-hen strutting blue-enamelled through the reeds.
“Shall you send me picture post-cards?” he asked.
She would, of course. Written in coloured inks. In all the languages she proposed to learn.
Together they were making a joke of it.
“And Russian?” he asked.
“Too untidy for post-cards!” Dulcie laughed.
So they were happy together, rounding the empty shelter with its broken glass, and back the other side of the lake. Each moment was the happiest for their passing through it. They were the long-legged lovers, confidently offering their faces to receive each other’s gentleness as they moved in perfect time, in absolute agreement, against the flesh-coloured trunks of the paperbarks. Even when they were silentest, and he listened to Dulcie’s skirt dragging its hem through the wintry grass, and he could smell the smell of cold mud, he reckoned his face wouldn’t have collapsed yet into its normal shapelessness.
“Say a blind person married a blind person, do you think it would matter to them not to have seen each other?” Arthur asked.
“I’ve never thought about it,” Dulcie said.
She was walking with her head raised, looking so far into the distance, she had already left him.
She kept her promise and wrote him, if not several post-cards — you could not expect too much of people when you were not there to remind them of you — at least the card of the Italian lake, the name of which he was unable to read, nor did it matter, nor the foreign languages she had promised, and in which she did, in fact, write:
14th April 1914
Es ist hier sehr nett u. freundlich bei unserer kleinen Pension where we are staying the two of us after being suffocated amiably by relatives. It is so beautiful eating trout beside the water. Je ne peux croire qu’il y’aura guerre — as the know-alls promise — il y a trop de soleil. Mio caro Arturo, we visited a villa, or small castle, out on the lake, and the walls of one of the rooms were studded with rock-crystal! I thought of Arthur — e tutte nostre cosi chiare conversazioni. Affetti! — D.
The foreign languages failed to obscure Dulcie Feinstein focussed as she was in the crystal of his mind. Long after he had lost the card, he had only to revolve the marble in his pocket for Dulcie’s lake with the crystal-studded castle to re-appear.
When war broke out, which was important enough for those who became physically involved, it was more important that the Feinsteins should return, to the life which in fact they had never really left, in the house on the edge of the park. They came. And they appeared older. It continually amazed Arthur Brown that other people were growing older. Mrs Feinstein was older, and sadder, perhaps for this very fact of age. Dulcie was older, different, unexpected — for one thing she was unable to remember what she had written on the post-card.
“Shall we walk in the park,” he suggested, “like we did before you went away?”
“Not today,” she said, frowning slightly.
“Why?” he asked, though there was not much point, and his hopes had never been high.
“I have a headache.”
It must have been the airless room. The windows of the Feinsteins’ town house were more often than not sealed.
“I’ll open the window,” said Arthur.
But she did not seem to think it might help.
“It is not that. I am not in the mood. It is not a day for walking,” she added. “And besides, there are the railings. We should have to go so far along to get to a gate.”
The railings had existed before.
Soon after the remark, he went away, deciding not to admit to Waldo what could only be counted as defeat. In fact, he wouldn’t mention the return of Dulcie and Mrs Feinstein. For some reason, for the moment, he was less able to communicate with them, though if he hadn’t lost the art, he would not have known exactly what he wanted to say.
He happened to pass by the music store, where old Feinstein, who was following the War in the paper, received him more jovially than might have been expected. Normally it pleased Arthur to look through sheets of music, at the notes of music he would never be able to read.
Today he asked: “What are these?”
“Those are some songs which nobody will buy. Those songs were born to fly-specks and the remainder counter,” Mr Feinstein answered, gloomily turning back to the news.
The pierrot d’amour on the cover certainly conveyed less expectancy, less of the slightly scented breathlessness of the afternoon when Dulcie had explained about the pierrot on Mrs Musto’s bottle. So Arthur sat, and as the clanking tram flung the passengers together, composed his own version of a song, ignoring all those faces with which, in normal circumstances, he would have begun an intimate and, more likely than not, illuminating conversation.
When Waldo realized Feinsteins were back after meeting Dulcie at the gate one evening, and he and Arthur were invited up to “Mount Pleasant” on an afternoon which turned out not a bit as Arthur had hoped and expected — Waldo’s rather than Arthur’s, and instead of something squishy to eat, a few of Arnotts’ hard old biscuits — it was this rather fly-specked version of a pierrot song, composed to the clanking of a crowded tram, which Arthur rendered in Mrs Feinstein’s “salon”. It was really a song for Dulcie, which she alone would understand; she would see behind the words, and the deliberately ridiculous convulsions of his face.
Even though she said: “Oh, what a lovely song!” like some lady arriving for luncheon at Mrs Musto’s he thought Dulcie understood.
So he was able to flop down afterwards, and not exactly sleep, retire behind his eyelids, leaving the field to Waldo. This didn’t mean he didn’t experience Waldo’s torture of Dulcie when he provoked her to music, and all of that episode in the garden, first as Waldo, then as Dulcie, very intensely. He could smell the smell of rotting as they stirred up the dead hydrangea leaves. He could even smell the almond-essence smell of the vegetable-bugs on which they trod. Suffocating. Exhausting in the end. All the answers he could have foretold while the others were still looking for them.