She would flare up on the edge of a room in which he was thinking, or making notes. At night, by lamplight, her hair was terrible. It got out of control. It looked like an old grey gooseberry bush. More often than not, she was dangling a bottle by its neck.
She would barge in, shouting: “Waldo, it’s time you decided to marry. What about the little Jewess? That Miss Finkelstein. We were all Jews, weren’t we, before we stopped to think? Or was that somebody else?”
Waldo hunched himself over his papers.
“Miss Feinstein? She’s probably a mother.”
“All to the good. What would you have done without your mother?”
“Dulcie has a little boy,” said Arthur, “and a little girl some years younger. That was what they wanted.”
His mother and brother had come in on purpose to add to the litter of his room, the desperate untidiness of his thoughts, which blew at times like old newspapers or straw round packing-cases which never got packed. They had come in deliberately to conjure up Dulcie. He knew that if he spoke he would deflect nobody from their pre-determined actions. He alone was free to choose. The one choice he would never be free to make was that of his relationship with other people. So he ground his fists into his ears, he hunched his shoulders, and squirmed on the needle-points of his buttocks. He must cling to his gift.
Mother would go presently. He heard her opening other doors. She would walk as far as, and no farther than, the house allowed her, before sitting down to finish the bottle. She would end up cold on the bed, the old blue gown parted on her jutting legs, the long lovely Quantrell legs in which the varicose veins had come. And he would draw the curtains of her skirt, shivering for the hour, or an offence against taste.
Mother could be relied on to drop off. But Arthur stuck. Standing by the lamp, head inclined, staring into one of those glass marbles. Watching the revolutions of a glass marble on the palm of his hand.
“If you have to stay, don’t fidget, at least!” Waldo ordered.
Arthur raised his head.
“Mother is real sick. Didn’t you know?”
“Is it necessary to speak like that? It doesn’t come naturally to you.”
“It comes natural to me to speak natural in a natural situation,” Arthur said.
The porcelain lampshade was jiggling, Waldo heard. He could feel the frail old kitchen chair reacting badly to the stress of emotion.
“Mother is not sick!” he shouted. “We know her weakness. I will not be bullied into thinking that what isn’t is!”
“Ssshhe’s asleep! You might wake her, Waldo, if you shout.”
Arthur had turned, and was towering, flaming above him, the wick smoking through the glass chimney.
But his skin, remaining white and porous, attempted to soothe. Arthur put out one of the hands which disgusted Waldo if he ever stopped to think about them, which, normally, he didn’t.
Arthur said: “If it would help I’d give it to you, Waldo, to keep.”
Holding in his great velvetty hand the glass marble with the knot inside.
“No!” Waldo shouted. “Go!”
“Where?”
There was, in fact, nowhere.
And the Poulter woman kept nagging at him. She appeared one evening, out of the waves of grass, and said: “Waldo — Mr Brown, I’ve come to have a word with you. It’s time we saw things realistic.” From Mrs Poulter! “It’s no business of mine, I know. I would think twice if I was a friend, but I’m worse than that, only a neighbour.”
He looked at this woman who had aged across the road from them. It was terrifying to see the way other people aged.
“Your mother lying in bed all these months,” Mrs Poulter said, “and nothing to do for her.”
“She’s comfortable enough.”
“Oh yes, I’m comfortable,” Mother called, whose hearing would reach farther, through doors and windows, the longer she lay living. “Since I didn’t have to think about the salmon loaf I’m comfortable.”
Mrs Poulter lowered her voice. “She’s used right up. Eaten up. It’s the poison’s got into her veins.”
Then Waldo invited their neighbour to leave.
“Who helped pour it into them?” he shouted at her down the path.
“Whoever you kill, Mr Brown,” she turned and shouted back, “it won’t be me! I’ll only die by the hand of God!”
She saw immediately, however, that she had cause to feel ashamed.
“I’m always here as you know,” she said in her usual voice, “and can telephone the doctor — the minister,” she said, “if you can’t come at doing it yourself.”
The minister made his flesh creep.
How long now, he tried to calculate, had their mother kept to her room? He used to go in to her at night and read her The Pick-wick Papers, which she didn’t much care for, but was used to.
“It’s stuck to us, hasn’t it?” she said. “That makes it all the better as a plaster.”
With so much reading, and the kind of conversation they made, time passed.
Then suddenly he noticed, or the inexorable Mrs Poulter had, the eyeballs were lolling, the long yellow teeth were protruding from their mother’s skull, her fingers, to which Arthur would attach the figures of cat’s-cradle, stuck out like sticks at the ends of her arms.
Noticing him stare at her, Mother said: “At least we have our health, whatever else is taken from us.”
Waldo Brown blundered out, the grass catching at his ankles, the moths and one of his father’s paper bags hitting him in the face. Crossing the road he heard to his surprise its foreign surface under his feet — of the road beside which they had lived their lives.
“Yes, Mr Brown,” Mrs Poulter said. “I’ll be only too happy.”
Mrs Poulter brought the doctor. And the minister, as she had threatened. Amongst them they arranged for Mrs Brown to be removed to something called a Home of Peace. They sent for Waldo, but before he could arrive his mother was gone, fortunately too drugged to realize the damage to her principles.
Waldo said he wouldn’t go in. He did not care to look at her, because what was the point. Dead, he said, is dead. One had to be realistic about it.
Arthur, whom he hadn’t allowed to accompany him, dreading the almost inevitable scene, murmured that he would speak to somebody who’d know what ought to be done about their mother. In the special circumstances, it did not seem improbable, and Waldo let him.
So Anne Quantrell — never a Brown in spite of her love for that sallow little man with the gammy leg — was cremated by arrangement.
Waldo was surprised to hear Arthur had been present.
“Who arranged it all?” Waldo asked somewhat cagily.
“Mr Saporta.”
Nothing more was said. Arthur’s incomplete mind must have included compartments in which delicacy predominated. Or he may have sensed intuitively something of the hurt Dulcie had done Waldo by not respecting his intentions, by refusing to accept his sacrifice, and devouring instead that vulgar commercial Jew, Saporta. So at least dotty old Arthur kept quiet, until a couple of years later when, perhaps through no fault of his, though seemingly by somebody’s pre-arrangement, the ghastly meeting between Waldo and the whole Saporta family was staged on a corner of King and Pitt. After the accident, in which Waldo lost his pince-nez, and decided it would be more practical to replace it with spectacles, Arthur did recapitulate, inevitably, the whole Feinstein-Saporta history. Waldo forgave him. There was too much else to disturb Waldo, then, and over many years.
There was Crankshaw first and continuously.
It was difficult exactly to put a finger on what difference in mediocrity distinguished the Librarian from the mediocre. Mr Crankshaw was several years his junior when appointed the superior of Mr Brown. For anyone so heavy, such a bear in pinstripes, Crankshaw trod remarkably gently round the sensibilities of those who were officially inferiors, without ever, but ever, failing to bruise. From time to time Waldo considered opening a special notebook in which to analyze the character of Crankshaw, working up his observations into a portrait, a detail eventually of some vast corrosive satire on the public services. (Fortunately such victims were always too vain or too obtuse to recognize themselves.)