“I know you won’t be angry, Waldo, but the self-raising had arrived, and I took Mrs Poulter the couple of pound she wanted. Mrs Allwright asked me to. And what do you know, I found her dressing up a big doll! Mrs Poulter! And she began to rouse on me, as if I was to blame. She said she was going to throw the silly thing away, but I told her better not. Not a valuable doll of that size.”
Waldo went outside to the laundry, to the big copper, behind which nobody had ever cleaned, because it was too difficult to reach. He threw the dress behind the copper, and there it stayed.
Now at least he was free, in fact, if not in fact.
When he returned he said: “It serves you right, Arthur. It must have embarrassed you to intrude like that on someone else’s privacy.”
But Arthur didn’t answer. He was mooning about, polishing one of those glass marbles. Arthur seemed content, though of course he couldn’t possibly be.
Waldo was relieved tomorrow was another week-day, and he would return to the safety of the Library. He inhaled the smell of polished varnish. And Miss Glasson, Miss Glasson had promised to lend him the unexpurgated edition of something, he couldn’t for the moment remember what.
His public life became an assurance. Nobody of his group would be expected to strip in public, unless in a purely intellectual sense. (He had to admit that recently they had caught him out over Finnegan’s Wake, but Parslow, he knew for certain, hadn’t got beyond page 10, and Miss Glasson, for all her scruples, sometimes forgot she had skipped the middle volumes of Proust.) Nakedness was not encouraged, or eyes were decently averted whenever it occurred. All the necessary or compulsive exhibitions were reserved for Terminus Road, which he loved because of Memory’s skin, and where he could always ignore Arthur’s burrowing through the long grass in search of that vicious ferret, the other truth.
Waldo had sat down one evening in the corner he would have reserved for himself if choice had been possible, at the little table of knife-knicked limping legs, on the surface of which his boyhood had spilled its blobs of scalding sealing-wax, and was as usual collating and correcting in the Japanese ink he preferred to ordinary blue-black — it had always seemed to him that black-black would perpetuate where blue-black might fail — when Arthur came and dumped himself on the edge of the lamplight, hunching and mumbling playing with one of the glass marbles. As usual Waldo erected his hand as a wall in front of what he was working at.
Even so, he remained unprotected. For he soon noticed Arthur poring over a sheet of paper, one of the private papers, moreover, which he must have picked up from the floor.
“Tennyson wrote some pretty good poetry,” Arthur said.
“What of Tennyson?” Waldo asked.
“This about the silver wire. The one you copied out, Waldo.”
The paper in Arthur’s hand was making a scratching noise on the air.
Waldo could tell his lips were draining. He watched the wall of his hand, which he had raised uselessly in front of his work, grow transparent and unstable. He was trembling.
“How do you know about Tennyson?” he asked.
“I learned to read, didn’t I? I read some bits in that old book of Dad’s, the one the wadding’s bursting out of.”
It was too brutal for Waldo.
“Tennyson,” he said, “is, I suppose, everybody’s property. Tennyson,” he added, “wrote so much he must have had difficulty, in the end, remembering what he had written.”
“Oh, I’m not saying I’ve read all of Tennyson. I wouldn’t want to. Anyway, I couldn’t — could I?”
Waldo continued his automatic writing. Wasn’t most of anybody’s? After all.
“What else do you read, Arthur?” he asked dreading to hear.
“Shakespeare.”
“But you can’t understand Shakespeare?”
“The stories. Anyone can understand people killing one another. It’s in the papers every day.”
“That’s only the bare bones. The blood and thunder. It’s the language that matters.”
“Yes. Language is difficult. But a word will suddenly flash out, won’t it, Waldo? — for somebody who doesn’t always understand.”
Indeed! He was blinded by them. So much so, his eyes were dropping tears of Japanese ink, whether for himself or Arthur he decided not to ask.
Just then Arthur dropped the marble with which he had been playing, and began looking for it crawling about the room, snuffling in dark corners.
His brother! This obscene old man!
More than ever it was necessary for Waldo to leave for the Public Library, in which, for all he knew, other obscenities sat hunching over the tables, but clothed.
One day, after he had had time to forget, at least enough, Miss Glasson was standing at his elbow.
She said: “I’d love to show you an old bloke who’s catching up on his reading. He asks for the most extraordinary things. Sometimes at the desk they nearly split themselves. The Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads! He’s interested in Japanese Zen. Oh, and erotological works! Of course there’s a lot they don’t allow him. Mr Hayter vets him very carefully. He might over-excite himself. Some old men, you know!”
Miss Glasson of Neutral Bay sniggered, and it did not fit her face.
Waldo stared frowning down at his sheet of addenda. He would have liked to plug his ears with stones, when he only had his fists.
“What’s so very funny?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “It was wrong of me.” She could sound rather wistful. “But I thought it might have appealed to your sense of the grotesque. Such a funny old man.”
In Miss Glasson’s more unguarded moments there was a lot which appeared “funny old” and “quaint”.
Waldo hoped she would leave him, but she wouldn’t, goaded on an empty morning, it seemed, by a longing to witness rape.
“Today his tastes are comparatively simple,” she persisted. “He’s back on The Brothers Karamazov and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Oh, I do wish,” this time Miss Glasson only half-giggled, “I do wish you’d let me point him out. I’m sure you’d find it rewarding. Just a peep. I shan’t show myself. I sometimes talk to him, and it would be such a shame if he felt he could no longer trust me.”
Waldo did not want, but knew he had to.
On reaching the reading room Miss Glasson led him about a third of the way down, through the law students and the cut lunches in waxed-paper. Waldo was deafened by his own squelching heart and the sound of other people’s catarrh.
“There!” hissed Miss Glasson, nudging, half-pointing at the figure in a raincoat at the other end.
Waldo was relieved to feel she was preparing to abandon him to his fate.
He went on. Long before it was possible, he identified the smell of the old man, which was that of the overloaded stacks in his youth at the Municipal Library. He went on, into the remembered smell, but before arriving at the form Miss Glasson had conjured up to disgust his curiosity, and which he was planning to skirt discreetly round, he became convinced he would recognize the heart pulsing like a squeezed football bladder under the old man’s dirty raincoat. Still some way distant from the climax of disgust, Waldo was listening to his own breathing stretched beside him in the bed at night.
Rage shot up through his drought, not only at Miss Glasson, but all those human beings who were conspiring against him with his brother. But he went on.
Coming level with the raincoat he confirmed that Arthur was inside it in the flesh. On such a fine warm day it was not surprising he was glittering with white sweat. The reason his brother had worn the raincoat could only have been to deceive his brother.