Dulcie stirred, and the springs in the sofa remonstrated anomalously.
“I was hoping you would come yesterday,” she said, in a private tone intended only for her lover.
Since his arrival, her throat was permanently raised, to whatever he might do to it.
“Saturdays are out of the question,” Leonard Saporta replied, sweating yellower round the nose, and explained with awful earnestness to Waldo: “I attend the synagogue Saturday.”
Both Dulcie and Saporta needed to explain a lot. They were both of them proud and shy to do so.
“Leonard is a carpet merchant. He inherited the business from his father.”
They were doing it all for hurt Waldo, who was not so hurt he couldn’t pity in turn. It was their illusion of strength which made their dependence pitiable.
With the fag-end of her intelligence Dulcie could have sensed this. She began to complain about humidity, while staring at her lover’s wrist; he was wearing a gun-metal wristlet watch. Finally, falling vaguer still, she sat removing a stray hair from her tongue.
“Well,” said Waldo, getting up, “I am not one to mow the lawn on Sunday, but,” he positively insisted, “know when I ought to make myself scarce.”
Having launched his joke, he laughed slightly.
Mr Saporta was easing the sleeves of this business suit down from where they had rucked up, over his rather muscular forearms.
“If you ever care to look me up. In the city, Waldo. My number, Waldo, is in the book.” He meant it, too — he was so earnest.
Waldo had never before heard his name repeated enough to grow ashamed of it.
He got out quickly after that. But Dulcie followed him into the garden.
“You see,” she said, “how unavoidable it was. I know, Waldo, you will understand.”
The Star of David, glinting from between her breasts, gave him the clue he should have followed in the beginning.
“We should all be ready,” he said, “to admit our mistakes.”
Not least his own: the many fragmentary impressions of Dulcie Feinstein, elbowing her way through the lashing rejoinders of ungovernable music, in loose embroidery of white hydrangeas, and flashes of gunpowdery flesh, merging only now into the mosaic of truth — of a rather coarse little thing the carpet merchant was leading back into his ghetto of ignorance and superstition.
In the convention of human intercourse he threw in automatically: “Mr Saporta, I’m sure, is a very reliable man.”
Dulcie winced, and tormented her upper lip.
“I would like to think you could come to us,” she said.
Lowering her head she groped her way out from under the hydrangeas to stand exposed at the top of the steps, and continued standing as he went slack-kneed down.
“That you could feel our door was open. However you may want to accuse me for what I was incapable of being. Don’t you think it better,” she finished, “for all of us, to accept the past out of which we’ve grown, out of which we’re still growing?”
He did look back just once at Mrs Saporta, increasing, bulging, the Goddess of a Thousand Breasts, standing at the top of her steps, in a cluster of unborn, ovoid children. This giant incubator hoped she was her own infallible investment. But she would not suck him in. Imagining to hatch him out.
“I’m past the incubation stage!” he called.
So much for Dulcie Feinstein Saporta and her lust for possession. He was tempted to look back again, to see whether his scorn had knocked her bleeding to the steps. He resisted, however.
And after he had turned the privet corner, which in theory chokes those who are susceptible, her eyes continued to follow him, to engulf in the light of conquest, or love, and he did then choke momentarily. He regretted not being years younger, when he might have run some of the distance home, churning up the dust for a disguise. Or cried less dry and secretly. For the tragedy of this ugly girl. Wiping his eyes with the back of his hand instead of his pince-nez with a handkerchief.
As soon as he got back, Mother said: “Your father is far from well, dear. You ought to go in and talk to him.”
“Oh, Mother,” he protested, “when did that do anybody any good?”
If, on hanging up his hat, his conscience twitched for his parents, he knew from experience that Dad would be listening intently to his own thoughts, nor did their mother always seem to hear since they had become the furniture of the house in which they had been placed.
Dad had retired a year or two early on account of his health. They were loyal about it at the bank. They presented him with an engraved watch. There were other considerations. But none of it seemed to compensate for some indignity of life which hung about haunting him.
George Brown had to suffer. The threads of his breath tangled in his chest, or visibly, smokily, smelling of saltpetre, in the room in which he spent his nights. He rarely succeeded in cutting the tangle. (Nor could Waldo use blotting-paper for years after his father’s death without the sensation of anxious distress.)
After his retirement George Brown mostly sat.
“Where is your book, dear?” Mother used to ask; it would have been pointless to name the book.
He cleared his throat before replying: “Thank you, I’m resting my eyes.”
In the beginning, faced with the luxury of years to spend, he had promised them jokily: “I’ll have time now to give Gibbon another run.”
He sat, at least, holding a volume or two. On a wet afternoon he opened the Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco, but complained that silverfish had eaten the introduction since he had been there last. If opening a book was an occupation, closing one became a relief.
Waldo fortunately did not have to wonder what he might do for this man who was also by accident his father, because so clearly he didn’t expect anything to be done. If passion stirred in George Brown, it was for the more unassuming manifestations of nature. On an expedition to Barranugli he bought a rain-gauge, which he set up on a patch where, for some reason, the grass refused to grow. The rainfall he noted down at the back of an old ledger. He would knock on the barometer beside the hat-stand, and read the thermometer nailed to the classical veranda. He collected seeds of all kinds, to put in paper bags, which he hung by the necks, and forgot. Though what appeared to be his favourite occupation was the watch he kept on the flux of light, which required him to do nothing about it.
Only sometimes in the gentle recurrences of light and dark, he seemed to gather hints of some larger, cataclysmic plan. Then his gothic shoulders would arch more acutely, and his already inactive hands turn to stone. He would cough the cough his family had come to recognize as having no outlet.
“Where is that Mrs Poulter?” he would ask between the coughing.
Arthur grew soft, and didn’t know.
“Haven’t clapped ear to her since Tuesday,” Dad used to say, making it sound contemptuous because he had developed a weakness for her.
He loved her because she paraded the minutiae of flesh and blood while always keeping them under control.
Mrs Poulter would come and say: “When we was at Mungindribble they allowed us the quarter of a sheep, and some of the offal if we was lucky. Bill got so as he couldn’t stand the sight of offal. From the regular killin’. Threw it to the dogs. Lovely fry. I like a nice lamb’s fry before it loses its shine on a slab.”
Mrs Poulter’s moist, young-woman’s lips would glow with no more assistance than she got from contemplating the desiderata of life.
Then there were the mysteries.
Mrs Poulter said: “There was a feller cut ’is own throat down the line beyond Numburra. We women went down to lay out the body. We all of us took something — scones, or a soda loaf, there was one person took a basin of brawn. All shared, like. There’s more what they call community spirit up country.” She sighed. “And we had to come down here. But we’re happy.”