The Black Halo (55 page)

‘Who are you?’ said Mr Trill as the figure emerged from the mist about him. But it did not answer, as it shyly gazed across the dark water.

Mr Trill felt a strange awe and ardour as if he were in the presence of a famous, almost divine man such as he had never seen in his life before. Head bowed, as if it were a monk, the figure
studied the river with its fathomless modest eyes.

‘I think,’ said Mr Trill, ‘I think you are Vergil himself.’ And he went down on his knees as if to a god. The dark water, the swirling mist, were about the two of them as
they met in the faded light.

‘I think,’ said Mr Trill, ‘by your silence and your modesty that you are Vergil himself. I wish to tell you, I wish to tell you,’ he stammered, ‘that I think you
are the greatest of all poets.’

‘
Sunt lacrimae rerum mentem mortalia tangunt
,’ he said, ‘I think that is the greatest line of poetry that was ever written.

‘The tears of things,’ said Mr Trill as he gazed at the figure with love and respect.

‘That is all past,’ said Vergil. ‘That is all over now. My work was inadequate. In comparison with divine Homer my work was nothing.’

‘But the pity,’ said Mr Trill, ‘the pity, the divine pity.’

‘That too is over,’ said Vergil. ‘My trouble was that I could never write narrative. I should never have written of Rome. I was never a public poet. Better for me to have
written of my farm. I should never have written of great events. What were politics to me?’

Gazing sadly across the waters he said, ‘I should have destroyed all my verse. It was not good enough. I did not have the divine sunniness of Homer and his good temper. The best I could do
were set pieces. I substituted style for content. I was a decadent. All I wished was to be a private person.’

‘Did you not then get pleasure from writing?’ said Mr Trill.

‘Pleasure? It was the greatest labour that one can conceive of. Words slipped away from me. I could not keep them together. I was alone, polishing and polishing, refining and refining. How
tired I was of Aeneas. Was he perhaps myself? If he wasn’t myself who else could he be? Religious, correct, boring, what did I have to do with him? As one of your own poets has written, the
task made a stone of my heart, I was tired of him. How is the founding of a country worth a lost love? How? I betrayed myself. Is Rome worth one broken heart? Tell me that. That is the question
that has tormented me. Is the great task, the great hero, worth the lives of the innumerable dead?’

‘I do not know,’ said Mr Trill.

‘But is it? Think of it. Aeneas has to found Rome and what was Rome? Think of what it became, the games at which human beings were thrown to the lions while the emperors and the mob
cheered in their bronze and their rags. Was that worth the death of one woman, one soul? How could I have written the words, “But meanwhile Aeneas the True longed to allay her grief and
dispel her sufferings with kind words”?

‘I tell you, I grew tired of him. He should have forgotten about Rome. What was his duty but a terrible blindness? What are all our duties in the end but that? I betrayed myself as a poet.
What were these boring battles to me when I wished to write about the human heart? What is history but the deaths that we need not share? That is why I wished the
Aeneid
to be burned
because in it I had been false to myself. Do you understand? It wasn’t the labour that I regretted nor was it the technical revision that I needed another three years for. Not at all. It was
the central question that perplexed me and that I couldn’t solve. On the one hand there is the founding of a great nation, which I believe in, yes, to a certain extent I believed in it, for
after all what else was there to believe in? But I was seduced by the human and I understood that a great nation is built over the bones of men and women. Night after night I heard their cries as
if they were trying to get in. My heart trembled and shook with their cries and their pain and their tumult. How could I write poems, how could I? How could I fashion lines in the midst of all that
pain? Tell me that, whoever you are. Here at least however I have some peace. I do not wish to speak of my poems again, they shriek at me with their bleeding roots.’

‘No,’ said Mr Trill, ‘that isn’t all there is, surely. Discontent everywhere. Discontent and smallness where one had thought was greatness.’

‘I should not have stayed so long in my study,’ said Vergil. ‘I should have gone out into the world that Homer knew. I should have lived off the justice of the moment. Do you
understand?’

He was silent at the water, and then turned to Mr Trill.

‘It is not that I wish to be impolite. How could I wish that? You too have had your life. Perhaps you have lived off the justice of the moment more than me though perhaps you aren’t
a poet. So few of us have the nerve and the power to do what I have just said we should do. A line a day, that is all I wrote, perfecting, perfecting. And all the time I had a vision that I should
follow the curve of the human heart. All my work was but a feeble approximation to my ideal. As we stand here, by this dark water, what are empire and bronze to me? I have thought about this for a
long time while I have been here. Up above, the empire no longer exists and when it did exist it was only a shade. My greatest terror is that I shall meet Dido. What should I say to her? Tell me,
whose side was I on? I betrayed myself because I made a case for Aeneas when there was no case for him at all. None. What has the king to do with the poet, what has the empire to do with him?
Nothing. What has power to do with him? I tell you I should have burned that book with my own hands.’

As Mr Trill sat side by side with Vergil and gazed into the dark water it was as if he saw that all effort is vain, that all endeavour is without sense, that beyond statues and paintings and
books there is the shadow of the dark stream which reflects nothing, thinks nothing and only is it itself.

‘No,’ he shouted, ‘it is not true. Not true.’ And his eyes flashed as they had once used to do when he had entered the classroom with a copy of the
Aeneid
open
in his hand while outside the window the traffic roared by. ‘No,’ he shouted, ‘there is something left. Something remains.’

‘What is it that remains?’ said Vergil turning towards him his pale tormented face. ‘All that can remain is the human heart and how have we treated it? How have we written of
it? We set up systems and so we avoid writing of it. We do not attend to the trembling, the fear, the music of the human heart. I was seduced by armour and war because I myself was unwarlike, and I
did not see the trap into which I had been led. I forgot about the terrors of the living. Rome was a curtain that hid the truth I should have seen. The human soul, that is what is important, the
infinite tenderness.’

‘And that you had,’ said Mr Trill. ‘Of all the poets that is what you had. The tears of things.’

And he thought that in one way he at least was like Vergil, he had never married, he had suffered the silence and the dispossession, like a tree that stands by itself without leaves, bare to the
wind.

‘No,’ he shouted, ‘you have not failed. How could you have failed when so many centuries later I still read your works?’

But the figure, fatigued and insubstantial, had faded away into the mist and Mr Trill could no longer see it. ‘Dear God,’ he said, ‘what now is there left to me when even the
author whom I loved best thinks that he has failed, when the heroes of my childhood turn out to be simple and egotistical men, when the monsters abuse the heroes for being hateful and aggressive.
What is there left for me to do or say?’

And he sat with his case beside him on the bank of the river gazing deep into the dark water where no reflections were visible. Is the dark water the end of everything, he asked himself. Is that
really true? The dark water where no fish lives, where no wave moves, where there is only motionlessness without end.

He gazed deep into the dark water and it changed as he looked, and he was lying in his bed again.

Mr Trill lay in his bed in the hospital staring at nothing. An old woman with a hoover was humming like a hornet round the ward. After a while Mr Trill began to study her. She had a scarf
wrapped round her head and she wore a blue uniform and her nose was narrow and long. Where have you come from, thought Mr Trill, do you have children? When did you begin to work here? For some
strange reason she reminded him of his mother, busy, distant, forever creating noise among the silence. Across the floor lay bands of sunlight, which streamed in through the window and among them
the dust sparkled and moved as if it were alive. Through the windows he could see trees with golden leaves, and in the distance a moor which was turning brown. He lay in his bed knowing that he was
going to die.

It all happened very suddenly. One moment he was reading in his room, the next his chest was a battlefield of pain which threatened to kill him. He had enough energy to knock on the wall before
he fell. The next thing he knew he was in an ambulance and the next thing after that he was being operated on. A doctor was bending over him while he gazed upward at the ceiling. In a short while
he was asleep.

The woman had now passed his bed and was hoovering the space in front of the next one. Mr Trill stared at the red blanket, at the man with the gaunt face who was lying under it, at the black
grapes which lay beside him on the table. The man got visitors regularly, and Mr Trill got none except that his landlady came now and again. He would have liked visitors, even some of the pupils he
had taught, even some of the teachers who had once been his colleagues, but no one came. It was as if he had already dropped into a big hole from which he could see no one, through which light
would never again escape as the ring of gravity tightened.

So this is what death will be like, thought Mr Trill, and he was not frightened, only tired as if all the work he had done during his life had at last caught up with him. In fact sometimes he
felt peaceful and content as if what was happening was happening to someone else, and not to him at all. Sometimes it was as if he was gazing down at himself from a position above the bed, and
wondering what he was doing there. At night he could hear coughing, and nurses moved quietly through the dim light. Sometimes he would hear a man talking in his sleep, as if arguing with his wife
or his employer.

There were bowls of flowers everywhere, not brought by visitors but donated by gardeners. There they stood brilliantly blossoming from the sparkling crystal, among the reds and white of the
blankets and sheets. Now and again a nurse would pass with a trolley, and he would see her as a saviour among all the spit, blood, urine. At nights the nurses would laugh and shout as they entered
a taxi on their way to a dance. Well, why shouldn’t they enjoy themselves, how else could they remain sane, in a world of death and dying.

But now at this particular moment on this serene morning Mr Trill didn’t feel at all frightened. It was as if like the season itself he was poised between growth and decline, blossoming
and withering, as if his mind and soul were in balance, calmly accepting the justice that was about to come. I am about to die, he thought to himself, and this woman with the hoover will live, not
forever, but perhaps for a long time yet. Perhaps her whole life has been spent like this, cleaning and hoovering. She has never aspired to anything else. I on the other hand wanted more, I aspired
to train minds in the great poetry of the ages. And what use was it after all? Now I am alone and no one comes to see me. Of all those thousands I have trained no one comes to visit me. Well, let
it be, let it be. The sunlight is indifferent to us all. We are who we are and that is all that can be said about us. He watched an old man, slightly healthier than himself, being helped by two
nurses out of his bed to sit in the lounge and watch the colour television. He would sit there all morning, sometimes dozing off, sometimes staring ahead of him.

The old man tried to push the nurses away from him as if he thought that he could manage quite well on his own. His face was stern and bitter, as if he had not accepted what had happened to him,
even though he was old. Shall I be a coward, thought Mr Trill, when I am about to die? Shall I thresh about on the bed? He had never seen anyone die, not even his father or his mother, and he
didn’t know what to expect. He wanted to die quietly and tranquilly, like a Greek or Roman hero who dispensed with life as if with a sword for which he no longer had any use.

Steadily the hoover hummed and brightly the sun shone on the floor. I never had time to notice this before, thought Mr Trill. How did I not notice how the dust moves like insects, how even the
clearest sun contains a proliferation of dark grains? Perhaps this very day will be my last, this serene autumn day whose calmness is like that of great art, when all passion falls away and only
the essential fullness of things is left behind. On this morning there was no ‘tears of things’, no ‘
lacrimae rerum
’, there was only an almost holy calm.

I have never made a will, he thought. What will happen to my money? I have no one to leave it to. But he didn’t care, the survival of his money after him didn’t seem to matter. And
he had saved a lot of money for he hardly ever spent any. There it lay, symbols and signs in his bankbook, and he didn’t care. It was almost a joke, to leave all that complication behind. He
felt like an exile who was looking back at the world as at a strange distant shore. The woman was now at the far end of the ward, the flex of the hoover trailing behind her like a black snake.

Mr Trill looked at the bed opposite. Above and behind it on the wall there was a brass plate which said that the bed had been donated by William Mason. Who now remembered him, whoever he had
been? Perhaps he had once been a rich man, enthusiastic, competitive, red-faced, but now all that was left of him was the name, read by an ignorant man. Our ignorance is total, thought Mr Trill,
our achievements minimal. We move about the world as if we were important, we fight and squabble over trivial things, we feel slighted when we are seated at the wrong table, and yet in the end all
these things are unimportant. The universe is a huge, unimaginably huge, organism, in which we are as important as the dust in the sunbeam, flickering slightly and then fading from sight.