The Black Halo (33 page)

She watched them as they got into their seats, and then from her position on the ground below she saw them soaring up into the sky, descending and then soaring again. She waved to them as they
turned on the large red wheel. And Hugh waved to her in return but Sheila was staring straight ahead of her, cool and self-possessed as ever. Up they went and down they came and something in the
movement made her frightened. It was as if the motion of the wheel was significant amidst the loud beat of the music, the crooked guns and darts. As she saw the two outlined against the sun she
knew that they belonged to her, they were her only connection with reality, with the music and the colour of the fair. If something were to happen to them now what would her own life be like? She
almost ran screaming towards the wheel as if she were going to ask the operator to stop it lest an accident should happen and the two of them, Hugh and Sheila, would plummet to the ground, broken
and finished. But she waited and when they came down to earth again she clutched them both, one hand in one hand of theirs.

‘That’s enough,’ she said, ‘that’s enough.’

The three of them walked to the car. She unlocked the door and got into the driver’s seat, Hugh beside her wearing his safety belt, and Sheila in the back.

Sheila suddenly began to become talkative.

‘Mummy,’ she said, ‘you were fat in the mirror. You were a fat lady. You had fat legs.’

Ruth looked at Hugh and he smiled without rancour. They were sitting happily in the car and she thought of them as a family.

‘Did you think of anything to write about?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said but he didn’t say what it was he had thought of till they had reached the council estate on which they lived.

He then asked her, ‘Do you remember when we were at the shooting stall?’

‘Yes,’ she said eagerly.

‘Did you notice that the woman who was giving out the tickets had a glass eye?’

‘No, I didn’t notice that.’

‘I thought it was funny at the time,’ Hugh said slowly. ‘To put a woman in charge of the shooting stall who had a glass eye.’

He didn’t say anything more. She knew however that he had been making a deliberate effort to tell her something, and she also realised that what he had seen was in some way of great
importance to him.

What she herself remembered most powerfully was the gross woman who had filled the tent with her smell of sweat, and whose small eyes seemed cruel when she had gazed into them.

She also remembered the two boys with the green and white football scarves who had gone marching past, singing and shouting.

She clutched Hugh’s hand suddenly, and held it. Then the two of them got out of the car and walked together to the council house, Sheila running along ahead of them.

He came back in the night when the castle was dark and he could not make out the blaze of rhododendrons, azaleas, roses, and the blue haze of bluebells. He knew the place of
old: he knew where the lily pond was and the two green seats on which the visitors would sit. The general and his daughters would be in bed, for the rooms were unlighted. In the darkness his
uniform was invisible and he felt as if it were flowing with blood. He had grown up not far from this castle; he had on one summer’s day, rank and shadowy, played with the two girls when his
gamekeeper father had taken him round the grounds. O salmon that I am not allowed to taste . . . But that had been a long time ago and his father was dead. ‘They’re no’
bad,’ he would say about the general and his daughters, ‘But they dinna understand.’ Didn’t understand what? In those days he himself didn’t understand what his father
had meant but now he knew. In those early days the general would come out with his field-glasses and look around the land which he owned and controlled. He would stand there in front of the door
under the stone towers, with his white moustache and bullet head glinting in the sun. The daughters were white and ghostly like figures from Greek legend.

He stood there in the darkness while the leaves of the trees moved and the stars made a little light in the spaces that the wind made. It was almost but not quite dark. He felt the scent of the
flowers all round him but they did not calm his mind. Nothing calmed his mind now not even the quotations from his favourite Latin authors when as a second lieutenant he had suffered the infamy of
the trenches. ‘O Palinurus too easily trusting clear sky and calm sea you will lie on a foreign sand, mere jetsam, none to bury you . . . ’ Even now in the darkness under the moving
leaves a quotation came to him: ‘Come praise Colonus’ horses and come praise
the windy dark of the woods’ intricacies
. . . ’ He himself couldn’t afford a
horse: he had never been in the cavalry, only in the infantry. What had that fool general said: ‘A cavalry charge will soon put a stop to their machine guns.’ And the horses had gone
flying into the mouths of the cannon, graceful, doomed, their heads raised in a classical perfection. O woods of Colonus . . .

He was a small boy again in those grounds, watching the general so superbly confident among his regimented flowing acres. And the girls who were like pictures of Greek heroines on those fabled
vases. But the blood rose in his mouth again, his soul was a pheasant blundering about the woods. He could feel the blood flowing down his uniform, darkening his trousers, it was as if he had been
shot on the wing. I am Palinurus, I trusted too much in that clear sky, that calm sea, that blaze of rhododendrons, azaleas, hyacinths. That garden which though I did not own it I left behind.

My rage is so great that my teeth are tightening on my tongue through which my blood is flowing.

I was never happy in the mess, I didn’t have enough money. Their loud-mouthed bluster was too much for me, their red faces. I felt only hatred when I thought of those soldiers who were my
friends pierced, beaten, lashed, starving, dying, thirsty. The general was only one among many with a stone head like a stone ball on a gatepost.

He stood at the big door, heavy, unyielding. Above him a tree creaked as if it were a soul in torment, as if it were trying to speak. Why had he come? Surely he didn’t want to speak to
them, especially when the castle was dark and they were all in their beds. Underfoot, the grass was thick and rich. O lord I could lie there, I am so tired, the blood has been flowing out of my
body, my bones are insubstantial. My blood is flowing away like water, like the river in which I used to fish for salmon when I was a boy in spite of my father’s gamekeeping. That too was a
game, the hooked salmon, landing on the bank twisting and pale, the blood draining from it. The water flowed through him among the cool shadows under the trees. Of course they had shown him some
respect for he had turned out to be a good classical student. His father had gazed at him in surprise and perplexity but they had tried to make up to him: not that they cared about the classics or
about anything else, but they had thought that that was the thing to do. They had spread their net, they had laid down their snare. He knew that now though he didn’t know it then. At the time
he had been flattered by their interest: the girls too had been deferent. ‘And this is Hugh, the great classical scholar.’ Though he was only the son of a gamekeeper, old and bent, not
understanding either his son or his masters and who now lay dead under his grey stone in the churchyard. ‘O Palinurus too easily trusting clear sky and calm sea . . . ’ It was his
father whom his love focussed on, caught between himself and them, uncomprehending but knowing all there was to know about wind direction, shadow, leaf motion, prints of animals. Even now he could
almost feel his presence in the wood guarding it for his masters from his own kind. Betrayer and guardian, hunter in Hades on behalf of his corrupted clients. There they were, upright, stony,
eternal, shooting the pheasants on the wing . . . Father father you too were in your war and I thought of you often in the trenches, poor principled man who could get no other job than the one you
had, guarding the acres that you yourself and your own kind ought to have had. But you never thought of that. All you would say was: ‘They’re no’ too bad but they dinna
understand.’ You, like me, would walk about this place in the dark. The only difference is that my blood is flowing and yours is not.

He stood at the big wooden door and listened, and he could hear the whispering, the nervous mocking whispering. Who were they laughing at? At him or his father? Setting down their snares in the
dark. As he stood at the door he could hear them whispering in what seemed to be a susurrant Latin, a deep dark language like black water in a river pool. What were they saying and whom were they
speaking to in their black watery language? ‘ . . . the windy dark of the woods’ intricacies . . . ’ He listened. Was it Latin they were speaking? Surely not. And yet again they
might be speaking Latin in order to mock him. Professor, they might be saying in Latin, how easily you were deceived, how easily you let us pull the wool over your eyes, bright though you thought
you were. Of course they had done it for centuries and they would do it for centuries more. How did he think they had gathered their acres in? How did he think they defended themselves but by the
deep cunning they had learned over the years, water spreading slowly, unnoticeably, leaving their pale salmon on the bank. Even his very Latin they would use against him, even the images of his
mind. They sent their daughters out dressed in their classical white as if they were flowing down a vale where Pan played his seductive pipes among the leaves and the flowers and the carved
fountains. They knew what they were doing all right. None could defeat them, they were water without shape, protean, adapting itself to the new ground. Didn’t he understand that? Would he
ever understand it?

No, it is not Latin they are speaking, he told himself, it is German. Inside their houses these are the secret spies. They didn’t really want us to win, the stone-headed generals, they
wanted the Germans to win, they wanted to echo their Prussian acres with their own. They have more in common with the Germans than they have with you, poor soldier. Both of them, the mirrored
generals, belong to the deep Prussian darkness, with their thorny helmets, they are both aristocrats to the bone, on their large deep dark horses. And the whispers became louder and louder, more
and more urgent. They were Germans whispering in a deep dark linguistic well, they were a writhing snake-pit of language. I can tell them by their square words, he thought, I can tell them by their
secret mockery. And he was again the wraith from which the blood was steadily leaking.

He banged on the door angrily. ‘Tell them I came,’ he shouted. ‘Tell them I came to bear witness to the dead. Tell them, all those aristocrats of Hades, that I have come from a
still lower place. Tell them that one day they will wake and their castles will be on fire, their minds will be burning. They will rush out into the rhododendrons burning. Tell them
that.’

But there was no sound, and the whispering had ceased. The general and his daughters were sleeping upstairs in their stony bedrooms and they had heard nothing. ‘Tell them,’ he
shouted again. And the whispers had ceased as if the beings who had made them were huddled together in the hallway in active secret venomous consultation. ‘Tell them that,’ he shouted
and then he turned away from the locked door into the wood. No lights had come on in the house. He went back into the darkness, almost floating as if his body had been drained by the shouting and
the banging. Into the darkness he went, his uniform pouring with blood, his father behind him. Ah, I found you, you were poaching, were you not? No no no I was only telling them. You were poaching,
said his father in his double voice. And then his father too was gone and there was only himself and his uniform peeling away like the bark of the tree and the last shine receiving him, like the
ghostly pallor of a dying salmon, and there was a voice speaking gently and faintly from a distance, from a lectern of green. ‘O Palinurus too easily trusting clear sky and calm sea you will
lie on a foreign sand, mere jetsam, none to bury you . . . ’ Aie Aie shouted the red-faced men raising their glasses of wine the colour of blood.

‘You wait you wait,’ he shouted. ‘You wait.’ And his soul for the moment hovered like an eagle’s, its angry beak extended over the acres, dark and bloodstained,
which might once have been his own but which now belonged to the secret-voiced Germans.

It was ten o’clock at night and Mr Bingham was talking to the mirror. He said ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ and then stopped, clearing his throat, before beginning
again, ‘Headmaster and colleagues, it is now forty years since I first entered the teaching profession. – Will that do as a start, dear?’

‘It will do well as a start, dear,’ said his wife Lorna.

‘Do you think I should perhaps put in a few jokes,’ said her husband anxiously. ‘When Mr Currie retired, his speech was well received because he had a number of jokes in it. My
speech will be delivered in one of the rooms of the Domestic Science Department where they will have tea and scones prepared. It will be after class hours.’

‘A few jokes would be acceptable,’ said his wife, ‘but I think that the general tone should be serious.’

Mr Bingham squared his shoulders, preparing to address the mirror again, but at that moment the doorbell rang.

‘Who can that be at this time of night?’ he said irritably.

‘I don’t know, dear. Shall I answer it?’

‘If you would, dear.’

His wife carefully laid down her knitting and went to the door. Mr Bingham heard a murmur of voices and after a while his wife came back into the living-room with a man of perhaps forty-five or
so who had a pale rather haunted face, but who seemed eager and enthusiastic and slightly jaunty.

‘You won’t know me,’ he said to Mr Bingham. ‘My name is Heine. I am in advertising. I compose little jingles such as the following: