Poor Crankshaw, he was almost obliterated by brisket and a jutting forehead. He had the hands of one who had felled timber, without having known the feel of an axe, except the one he used, by law of gravity, on those beneath him. He had read several books, and was personally acquainted with that priest who wrote Around the Boree Log. Crankshaw’s pet subject, however, was Numbers of Readers. Poor Turnstile Crankshaw! Would receive an obituary, anyway, as a public servant in an unassailable position. He had a wife who reeked of the dry-cleaner’s, and three or four girls in white hats, who gave shower teas for their friends, without ever being showered upon themselves. Poor Crankshaw.
Waldo might have felt magnanimous if he had not been persecuted. But one of the juniors would come tapping on his desk:
“Mr Crankshaw, Mr Brown.”
Crankshaw would heave himself creakingly round in his bucket chair. He was so heavy.
“Mr Brown,” he began, on the first of several progressively intensifying occasions, “we are starting a welfare drive. Do you find you have time enough to digest your sandwich?”
There was a catch in this, for Waldo bought nuts from the Health Food in the arcade, and chose a banana, very carefully — just on the turn — at Agostino’s.
“I would not,” he replied, looking at Crankshaw with that degree of steeliness he had forgotten practising as a little boy, on the advice of a booklet on How to Succeed, “I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t given up sandwiches years ago, the quality of Sydney bread being what it is.”
Crankshaw lowered his eyes to look at the folder he was holding.
“Any draughts?” he asked peculiarly.
Was this some obscure reference to the mistake he had made in that report on damage to The Golden Bough? That was years ago, and Waldo hoped, forgotten.
Contempt might in time have transferred itself to his mouth in sounds, but Crankshaw was not interested to wait.
“Very well, Mr Brown,” he said.
Then looked up. That jutting forehead, split down the centre of its louring bone, the cleft hinted at again in the chin, which, it was said, is the sign of a lover. Waldo almost sneeze-laughed. Love me, Cranko, in a white hat!
And Crankshaw looking.
“Are you a Catholic?” the Librarian asked very gently.
If it had not been so subtle, if Waldo had not been keyed up to match his wits against Crankshaw’s question, he might simply have turned and gone out of the room. Instead, he modified his disapproval.
“Technically, I think, Mr Crankshaw, I am not required to answer,” Waldo said, and added, by inspiration, he congratulated himself afterwards: “I prefer not to confirm what you have already in your folder.”
Crankshaw looked so wry-mouthed. He could only end the silence with a laugh, and dismiss his superior subordinate.
So much — this time — for Crankshaw, said Waldo, brushing a few nuts off his own table. He was relieved to return to his corner. He had the trimmest collection of pencils. Was sweating under his collar, though. And knew that his spectacles would have left those white marks, where the metal had eaten into his skin, during a distressing incident. The odder part was: Crankshaw himself must have been a Catholic, considering his intimate friendship with the priest who had written Around the Boree Log.
Priests in white hats. You never could tell.
This Was the year Waldo Brown began what became a considerable fragment of his novel Tiresias a Youngish Man. He was invited, too, in a roundabout way, to address the Beecroft Literary Society, and did, or rather, he read a paper on Barron Field. Afterwards over coffee and Petit Beurre a solicitor congratulated him on the thoroughness of his research. Modesty forced Waldo to admit that the subject was a minor one, but he hoped and felt he had left no stone unturned. Finally, a lady novelist of the Fellowship, had asked him to an evening at her home, to which he hadn’t gone, for scenting sexual motives behind her insistence.
With all this, it was incredible to think a second war had broken out, though of a different kind. For men were tearing one another to pieces in a changed ritual. Mother would not have been in the race with Cousin Mollie’s Japanese doll.
Waldo couldn’t help noticing a certain ferment in the streets. Arthur wouldn’t have let him ignore it.
Arthur said: “Over in Europe they’re dragging the fingernails out of all those Feinstein relatives. They’re sticking whole families in ovens.”
“What’s that to do with us? We don’t put people in ovens here.”
“We didn’t think of it,” Arthur said.
Arthur had a pen friend who was a soldier. He sent his friend a comb, short enough to fit inside the envelope. It began haunting Waldo, the young corporal combing his hair in a desert, singing Yours to a red sunset. The wretched Arthur would not leave anyone alone. Though of course the censor would never allow the comb to arrive.
Waldo was relieved to think that not everybody was irresponsible. Only at night his doubts would return, when the waves of yellowing grass thundered down Terminus Road, to break against what, in spite of the classical pediment, was a disintegrating wooden box, and the great clouds rolled down out of Sarsaparilla to collide in electric upheaval over his undeserving head. Thus pinpointed, he stood accused of every atrocity over and above the few minor ones he had committed unavoidably himself. If it had not been for the insufferable mental climate occasioned by the War, and his incidental, though demanding public career — to say nothing of his ever present family problem — he might have committed to paper that metaphysical statement for which he felt himself almost prepared. One great work, no longer question of an oeuvre. As it was, the War killed Tiresias a Youngish Man. Its substance was bound to return, of course; creative regurgitation would see to that. But in the meantime, in this state of perpetual night and frustration, Waldo would throw himself on the knife-edge of his body in the bed in which they slept, or his twin Arthur did — he himself was more often than not incapable of sleep for dreaming.
Not long after Dad died Mother had said: There is no reason why you boys shouldn’t have this larger bed, after all you are men, and I shall take the bed and room you have outgrown. So they moved into what had been their parents’ bed, where Waldo gradually overcame his distaste. It was not for Arthur, Arthur was inescapable. It was their father’s limp disjointing his thoughts, it was even more, the great baroque mess of their Quantrell heritage, which Waldo loved to distraction, its crimson rooms and stone corridors extending through the terrors of sleep and war. By comparison, their own immediate Tudor imbroglio was a mere bucket of blood.
On one occasion, during the night, during the despair, Arthur had comforted Waldo.
“You had the blues last night,” Arthur yawned.
You never knew what distortion of fact he might come out with. But Waldo could not feel concerned on such a clear morning, himself a man of responsibility and discretion, almost of action, as he dashed at his hair with a touch of brilliantine. His hair lost that dusty look. He settled the expanding arm-bands on purposeful arms.