“But if you could have seen us dancing! And dancing on the lawns, amongst the topiary, on the mist which was pouring out of the lake. That,” she said, sinking her mouth in the glass, “was before I married your father. It was all utterly rotten. But how deliriously memorable” — working her mouth around it — “after the mutton fat has dragged one down. Do you know, Arthur,” she said, looking at him, “I believe you inherited your love of dancing from your mother.”
“What dancing?”
“Let me see,” she said. “I don’t know what dancing. At least,” she said, “nothing formal. Movement, though. Dancing,” she said, “can compensate. Cure, in some cases. Victims of infantile paralysis recover, they say, the use of their limbs by dancing. Or swimming.”
He would have liked to give her his third mandala, but realized in time their mother could not have used it.
Against his better judgement Arthur offered Waldo the mandala during their mother’s last illness.
“Mother is real sick,” he said.
The lamplight seemed to draw them into its circle.
“Mother is not sick!” Waldo shouted.
All this sickness, of their mother’s, of the old weatherboard house, with its dry-rotten tremors and wooden tick tick, seemed to concentrate itself in Arthur’s stomach, till from looking at his own hands, soothing, rather than soothed by, the revolving marble, he realized that the knot at the heart of the mandala, at most times so tortuously inwoven, would dissolve, if only temporarily, in light.
And it seemed as though the worst could only happen for the best. It was most important that his brother, shuffling his papers, looking for a sheet mislaid, or just looking — that Waldo, too, should know.
“If it would help I would give it to you, Waldo, to keep,” Arthur said.
Offering the knotted mandala.
While half sensing that Waldo would never untie the knot.
Even before Waldo gave one of his looks, which, when interpreted, meant: By offering me a glass marble you are trying to make me look a fool, I am not, and never shall be a fool, though I am your twin brother, so my reply, Arthur, is not shit, but shit!
As he shouted: “No, Arthur! Go, Arthur!”
But Arthur was rooted. His hand closed on the icy marble. If he had not been his twin brother, would Waldo have hated him?
There was too little time those days to nurse suspicion. Arthur was too busy playing cat’s-cradle with their mother, arranging the string round her fingers, since she was no longer able to work them into the required positions.
“Doesn’t this entertain you?” he asked.
“Infinitely,” Mother said.
It was important — Arthur was convinced she agreed with him — that Waldo shouldn’t know their mother was dying. That might have turned out unbearable.
When, suddenly, Mrs Poulter, the doctor, and the minister, had her removed.
When she was dead Arthur went to Mr Saporta, who, because he was in business, knew how to have her disposed of. Although the whole of him was racked by the part which had been amputated, Arthur was fascinated to watch the coffin jerking down the ramp towards the curtain. What if it, if they all, stuck?
However, he would be careful to hide from Waldo, who had not, of course, been to the funeral, any of his own fears and suspicions.
On one occasion Arthur did slip up.
“Do you approve of the Hindu custom of burning people who have died?”
Waldo’s hand was stiffening in his hand. They were walking up Terminus Road, up the last hill before Sarsaparilla.
“It’s hygienic, at least,” Waldo said.
“So is cremation, isn’t it?” said Arthur. “I was thinking of the smoke, only. It must be beautiful to watch the smoke. Don’t you think? Uncurling out of the fire?’
“Picturesque is perhaps the word,” Waldo said from between his teeth.
He sounded like somebody biting on a pipe, though he, for that matter neither of them had ever learnt to smoke.
After Mother’s death their twin lives would not have diverged all that much if Arthur hadn’t developed his sense of responsibility towards the Saportas. Of course Waldo could not be told about that. If Arthur usually got possession of what Waldo did not tell, it was because he had his sense of touch, and from lying beside Waldo in their parents’ bed, on nights when his brother needed comforting. Arthur’s spongy largeness, not to say, at some times, cloudiness of mind, became an asset then. To envelop the unclouded terrors of night.
So, it was not so much because he didn’t have the clothes, as out of sympathy for Waldo, that he didn’t go to the Saporta wedding. He had to control his disappointment. For he would have liked to watch Dulcic standing with Mr Saporta under the canopy-thing, he would have loved to experience the breaking of the glass.
That was already as far back as 1922, the year George Brown had died. Dulcie and Leonard got married, and on the occasions when Mrs Allwright sent Arthur to the city for something unobtainable in Barranugli, he would visit the Saportas in their house on the edge of the park. It was really Mr Feinstein’s house, where they had gone to live with him after he had his first stroke, after the death of his wife.
The Feinsteins’ house looked enormous because of the many flourishes it made — battlements and turrets, spires and balconies, bull’s-eyes and dormers, even a gargoyle or two, which the weather was cracking and chipping too soon. Although it looked like a partly fortified cement castle, with veins in it after the leaves of the Virginia creeper had fallen off, it was a fairly normal, human house inside. From the beginning Dulcie didn’t allow the inherited furniture to take over. It was she who pushed it around, often into unpremeditated groups. She was also a director of the music house, while Mr Saporta remained in rugs — as it should have been. The Saportas were pretty substantially established.
Arthur Brown visited them all through the two children and several miscarriages. Sometimes he sat in company with others, elderly Jewish ladies and uncles, who eventually overcame their surprise. They respected Arthur. Perhaps, for some obscure reason, they even valued his presence amongst them.
When he played with his glass marbles, and explained: “These are my two remaining mandalas,” they sat forward, expressing the greatest interest and pleasure, and on one occasion, one of the elderly uncles remarked: “There, Magdi, I told you this young man is in some way phenomenal.”
Naturally Arthur was pleased. Though not deceived. He waited to be alone with Dulcie, when they might resume that life which they alone were permitted to enjoy. His thighs would quiver in anticipation of blissfully joyful union with his love.
For Dulcie’s beauty had increased with marriage, was more out-flowing, her eyes more lustrous in communication. She would often put her hand in Arthur’s, particularly during pregnancy.
“You know,” she would say, and laugh, looking down at her swollen figure, “I am a slave to all this.”
He noticed she failed to blush, although he realized it embarrassed her to take her belly outside the family circle, and that she would blush more often than not at the comments made by aunts. With him alone she was composed, as though in their common mind, they could contemplate in peace the child curled and sprouting like a bean.
Once, before the birth of their first, Dulcie said: “Today, I think, when he comes in, Leonard is going to tell you something.”
“Why Leonard?” Arthur asked, and began to sweat.
He was afraid something might be spoilt.
“It’s the kind of important thing,” said Dulcie, “which I think the man ought to tell.”
Then she smiled, and Arthur saw it was because her husband had entered the room and was making his way amongst the mounds of inherited furniture.