He barely noticed the War even, the second one which was going on. In the First War Arthur Brown had been all fireworks and singing. He wore a patient gravity for the Second. Too much had happened down Terminus Road and in other parts. Although still a boy he went more slowly, nursing his jammed fingers, expecting the next kick in the pants.
On the night of the Peace, when the singing was let loose, the vomit, the piss, the gobs, and the little girls with their wicked bums and flouncing hair, Arthur couldn’t make up a song, until at last a couple of lines — or three:
“No more dying only the dead
love is lying in the parks
and lying and lying …”
He smiled, though, for all those pairs of twins, and no word between them to express the truth.
When a lady approached him, violet over grey, and fetched out a screech from away back near her uvula:
“You big man, where have you bin?”
He replied, simply, sadly: “Madam, I am not your cup of tea.”
He wondered where Waldo was. He was glad it was he, not his brother, involved in such a tasteless incident.
Related in more than flesh Waldo had become by then the first of his two preoccupations. Since his discovery of the spirit, Arthur could not go too softly, offering, as it were, this other thing, where his body might repel. He realized he could not run the risk of Waldo’s refusing something less material than glass. Glass was shattering enough. In his left pocket, certainly, he continued to carry Waldo’s mandala, though for the most part he avoided taking it out. He preferred to contemplate his own, in which the double spiral knit and unknit so reasonably.
This solid mandala he held in his hand as he sat, whenever possible, in the reading room at the Library. For the Books became his second obsession. To storm his way, however late, however dark the obscurer corners of his mind. So he sat twirling the solid mandala, and by shuffling the words together, he made many if not all of the permutations of sense. Admittedly, in flashes of desperation, crushed grass and his own palpitating lump of flesh convinced him more.
Arthur wrestled with the Books. He wrestled with his obstreperous mind, which disgusted far too many by its fleshly lumbering round their thoughts. He knew he must look a real old faggot in the raincoat he wore, not so much for the weather as to cover up his shortcomings. Perhaps, after all, Hindu smoke was the only true and total solution. As for the lotus, he crushed it just by thinking on it.
On one occasion, in some book, he came across a message. Pinned to the back of his mind, it rattled and twitched, painfully, hopefully, if obscure:
As the shadow continually follows the body of one who walks in the sun, so our hermaphroditic Adam, though he appears in the form of a male, nevertheless always carries about with him Eve, or his wife, hidden in his body.
He warmed to that repeatedly after he had recovered from the shock. And if one wife, why not two? Or three? He could not have chosen between them. He could not sacrifice his first, his fruitful darling, whose mourning even streamed with a white light. Nor the burnt flower-pots, the russet apples of his second. Or did the message in the book refer, rather, to his third, his veiled bride? Heavy with alternatives and hoarded wealth, he sat back on the heels of the creaking library chair, opened his raincoat, scratched through his flies, rubbed at his rather cushiony chest.
When the chair collapsed under Arthur Brown he wasn’t hurt. It was such a joke.
“You must take care!” It was the young lady, that Miss Glasson. “At your age. Once you start falling. Public property, too!”
When Arthur had got himself another chair he went and took Alice Through the Looking Glass. He loved that. His mouth still watered for sweets of any kind. He would shake back his hair before entering.
Or he would glance up. And sometimes Miss Glasson was hovering over her hermaphroditic Adam. If she only knew. On one occasion he decided to tell. And decided not to. Although Miss Glasson was good for a smile, she mightn’t have been on for a laugh.
In any case, it was time. It was time to return to Terminus Road. So frustrating. If only he could have retired — but they needed him more than ever, Mrs Allwright and Mrs Mutton, since Mr Allwright died — he would have been able to give all that extra time to his reading.
To The Brothers Karamazov. Wonder what Dad would have said!
But there were days, whole weeks, Arthur couldn’t help feeling, when he remained congealed, possessed by Terminus Road, and Waldo — it was Waldo. When the great basalt clouds were piled up over their heads, the fragments of shale restlessly flying, the yellow loops of wet grass setting traps for ankles, Waldo had to be comforted. Arthur accepted his duty. Their life was led down Terminus Road. Of course they went to their jobs, they had been so regulated they couldn’t have helped going. But their actual life was the one which continued knotting itself behind the classical weatherboard façade. Sometimes Arthur wished Dad hadn’t burnt his copy of The Brothers Karamazov, so that he could have got on with it at home. Then he realized it mightn’t have been desirable: to introduce all those additional devils into their shaky wooden house.
Once, at the height of a storm, when the rain was coming down aslant, in slate-pencils, against the roof, the water coming through the rusty iron, in that same place, into the basin, in the scullery, and the quince-twigs squeaking against, the rose-thorns scratching on, the panes, Waldo shouted:
“I wonder what you damn well think about, Arthur!”
“Well,” said Arthur slowly, because it was a difficult one to answer, “what most people think about, I suppose.”
“Nothing!” Waldo shouted back. “That’s the answer!”
“Or everything,” Arthur only mumbled, because Waldo seemed so put out.
“You think about nothing!” Waldo had begun to cry. “No worries on your mind!”
“If you want to know, I was thinking about Tiresias,” Arthur said to interest him. “How he was changed into a woman for a short time. That sort of thing would be different, wouldn’t it, from the hermaphroditic Adam who carries his wife about with him inside?”
Then Waldo took him by the wrists.
“Shut up!” he ordered. “Do you understand? If you think thoughts like these, keep them to yourself, Arthur. I don’t want to hear. Any such filth. Or madness.”
Waldo might have wrenched Arthur’s hands off at the wrists if only he had been strong enough. But he wasn’t.
Instead he sat down rather hard, and Arthur went to him, to comfort him, because they only had each other. Waldo knew this. He put his head on the table, under the falling rain, and cried.
Waldo was such a terrible problem to Arthur, their love for each other, that there were whole visits to the Library when he couldn’t bring himself to take down The Brothers Karamazov. He preferred Alice.
But he had to return to what had become, if not his study, his obsession. There was all this Christ jazz. Something of which Mrs Poulter had explained. But he couldn’t exactly relate it to men, except to the cruelty some men practise, in spite of themselves, as a religion they are brought up in. Reading The Brothers Karamazov he wished he could understand whose side anyone was on.