The Black Halo (65 page)

Of course he would have read about it, of course he would know its history. If he had nothing else he had information.

As they paid and entered, the heat was appalling.

‘Do you know the story about it?’ Paul asked. ‘Why it doesn’t have a roof ?’

‘No,’ she said.

His gaunt face softened. ‘It’s a charming story. It is said that fairies built the amphitheatre with big stones they carted from all over Istria. They began building it at night.
However at cockcrow the fairies ran away and left the building without a roof on it.’

‘How beautiful,’ she said. In her mind’s eye she saw bronze cocks crowing, pulsing throats outstretched, wings clapping. Paul had become animated for a moment: he was like a
pupil showing off to a teacher. The cocks crew and the fairies flew away and there was no roof on the amphitheatre. The fairies like gipsies departed in the night, in their irresponsible glamour.
If it had been Paul he would definitely have completed the roof, for he always finished what he began.

The stone around her was intensely hot. In front of her she saw the young men and women from all over Asia and Europe with their vibrant fragrant impudent bodies. The throbbing heat pulsed from
the stone, from her body.

‘Listen,’ said Paul, ‘to the right and left there were areas where wild animals were kept. They were released into the arena.’

‘Did they fight each other?’

‘They fought with the gladiators and the slaves. The front seats in the gallery were reserved for the important people, the patricians. There used to be a lot of women spectators. Some of
them were the worst.’

‘The worst?’ she said.

‘The most cruel.’

And the Civil Servants, she thought, where were they? And the cool umpires? She had a dim memory that there used to be someone important who raised or lowered his thumb, as the gladiator turned
and looked up into the blinding sunlight, foreshortened, waiting for his doom to be signalled, his fortune to be told.

And at that moment she felt a storm of sound around her. The arena was a writhing medley of legs, arms, torsos, swords: the lithe lions eeled forward like cats stalking birds. Then they leaped
in an arc of claws and teeth. She saw a gladiator on the ground and another one standing above him, his legs spread wide in an arrogant posture.

The one on the ground was Paul and his face was throbbing in the sun, especially a big blue vein in his forehead, and there were rays of blood across his cheek. The other one – but who was
the other one? She couldn’t see his face but his private parts were massive, his penis throbbed like a hammer between the two big bells, the colour of flesh. Far away was the green field and
the cloudy sky. There was a man in a white uniform in the middle of the arena turning his thumb down over Paul. There was a chaos of gnawing beasts, jaws, teeth, and in the centre of it all a
cockerel crowing. Her whole body throbbed with fire: she was a womb that burned and flamed. Her eyes were blind and hollow and made of stone, as she turned them on Paul. She was an empress, a sleek
lioness. Somewhere in a stony room underground a man was scribbling furiously with a stony pen forever and forever, his brow wrinkled as if with puzzlement. He was bent over, keeping records of all
the animals, he was making sure that the timetable of furious deaths was adhered to. Then she saw him rising slowly and ascending into the arena. A lioness, tawny and almost loving, was waiting for
him. She sniffed and her eyes were golden and lazy and calm. Her mane was like a circlet of fire around her. She trotted towards him easily and he waited there quite tranquilly, his hands loose at
his sides. He was scrutinising the lioness silently as if asking her a question.

Do you want me? Do you love me?

And the lioness trotted towards him. The empress was standing up. In a short while she would turn her thumb down or up. The crowd was roaring, itself like a wild beast, and the sun was a torrent
of fire.

The man was looking into the eyes of the lioness. He was wearing a white coat, he was standing in the middle of the stone field.

Her loins shuddered and dampened.

Paul was leaning out of the sun and was saying to her, ‘Are you all right? Are you frightened or something?’

She felt the tears streaming down her face.

‘What’s the matter?’ he was saying over and over in a concerned voice. The lioness had shrunk back to its den. The fairies had flown away. The cockerel had started flapping its
wings.

‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s go.’

It was too late. It was not a question of loving or being loved. The last blood had been and gone. This had been a country of the sun, merciless and hot, and she had missed it. In this country
one didn’t ask about love, one either loved or one didn’t. The ring of stone which encircled her wasn’t hers.

If you had been umpire here, she nearly said to him, if you had been umpire here what would you have done? This was no amateurish play on a Sunday, this had been an affair of life and death, of
real claws, real teeth.

She looked down at her damp green dress, and nearly wept with the pity of it. She would stay with him till morning, till the roof of stone went on. She would not leave at cockcrow or in the
middle of the night. She would not fly away on negligent wings.

The apples that moved ahead of her, these round buttocks were distant and belonged to another country. She dare not touch them, not in this ring of stone, in this arena from which the blood had
departed.

Daphne hadn’t thought that she would enjoy herself so much, though at first she had been rather stiff and formal, finding it difficult to break the shell of her English
private school upbringing, which had been followed by her marriage to Geoffrey, a captain in the British army who was now in Australia, posted there for a year. But as the bus tour progressed she
found that it was impossible to keep herself apart from the rest of the passengers, however she might try to do so. And it really wasn’t arrogance that was the armour that stood between her
and the others, not at all, it was, she knew, her accent that separated them and made them suspicious of her. Her martial stiffness was odd and imperial and very British and they resented it in
their inner being.

Yet it was odd how, unlike Geoffrey, she had liked Australia from the beginning, though it was in its dusty acreages so different from the green fields of England. She belonged, she thought,
with a wry smile, to the world of that school in the film
Picnic at Hanging Rock
with its iron grey mistresses.

Geoffrey didn’t like Australia, he thought of it as a country of beer-swilling yobs, of undisciplined soldiers. He had once related to her a story of what had happened during the war to an
officer much older than himself, who had told him of it.

‘He was standing at this railway station,’ he said, ‘waiting for a train, and he saw this mob of Australian soldiers walking up and down. None of them saluted him. So he gave
them a bollocking. And do you know what they did? They marched up and down for the rest of the time, very stiff and proper, saluting him every time they passed him.’

She had tried not to laugh but she couldn’t help it.

‘What the hell are you laughing at?’ Geoffrey had said in his stiff upright manner.

‘Nothing, nothing,’ she had replied between giggles. ‘Nothing at all.’ And Geoffrey had fumed at her, angry as if she were a green silly schoolgirl.

But she loved Australia. She loved its mystery, she imagined it as a childish book illustrated with pictures of dingoes, kookaburras, emus. The centre of it was an echo that wished to become a
voice, that wished to say, ‘I am me.’ It had no ranks, no orders, it was an efflorescence of wild spiky flowers, and lonely marvellous deserts.

It was the retired schoolmistress whom she liked best of all. Whenever the bus stopped at a hotel she was the first to rush to the gambling machines – the one-armed bandits – that
were to be found everywhere: and with the curious careless innocence of a seventy-year-old who no longer cared for convention, she would plunge her hand in among a cascade of coins. Her name was
Casey and she belonged originally to Sydney where she had taught for forty years.

‘Didn’t you know that we Australians are a nation of gamblers?’ she said to Daphne. ‘Everywhere you go there are these machines.’ Her hair was cropped and grey and
she moved with great rapidity and animation like a little very positive animal.

‘No, I didn’t know,’ said Daphne. Neither she nor Geoffrey had gambled in their lives. She knew that in any battle, if there was a battle, he would prepare for every
contingency, he wouldn’t make a move without checking and cross checking; she thought of him as a machine in a tight uniform, like one of those early redcoats.

And so she watched Miss Casey, who had never married, plunging her hands among the coins as if she were a virgin immersing herself in a waterfall in a land that was brilliant with sunshine.

‘Luck is everything,’ said Miss Casey, ‘I have been lucky all my life. I loved my children,’ as she called her pupils, ‘and now I am enjoying myself. What is the
point of not?’ And she gazed at Daphne with a bland guileless eye, the eye of one who has transcended it with inward bubbling joy. She was the first to get up in the morning and was to be
found exploring among the woods and the dew.

At first the hare-lipped Miss Cowan didn’t speak to them at all. She sat by herself in the bus, staring out of the window, clutching her handbag. When she did at last speak it was on their
tour of the wineries when they were all tasting different wines.

‘You could spend all your days doing this,’ said Miss Casey delightedly. ‘I’m sure there must be some people who do it.’ She sipped appreciatively. ‘What do
you think of this one?’ she asked Miss Cowan, and Miss Cowan in words that one could hardly understand because of her harelip, answered, ‘It’s sweet.’

As a matter of fact Daphne disliked deformity of any kind; but that had been a hilarious day, seven wineries in one day, and the driver had smiled when they had asked him, ‘Are you sure
you can drive after all this?’ Imagine it though, seven wineries in one day, it wasn’t the sort of thing that Geoffrey would have approved of. Bad organisation he would have said,
surely they could have organised the trip better than that! A whole day wasted at wineries! But even Miss Cowan blossomed and was in fact slightly tipsy on that blue marvellous day, and Miss Casey
had been very animated.

Daphne enjoyed herself immensely though she was sorry for Miss Cowan. To think that she could hardly be understood by anyone! No wonder she kept silent, no wonder she withdrew from them all. It
must be awful to try and speak and come out with these awful strangulated sounds.

Eventually there were five of them that went about together, herself, Miss Casey, Miss Cowan, and that ex-policeman from Glasgow, Mr Wilson, and his wife. He was a squat energetic interesting
man who had served so he had said in Borneo before coming to Australia; his wife was quiet, slim, fair-haired. He was determined to enjoy his trip.

And so they sailed on the Murray River, and had a look in the museum at Echuca where Prince Philip in upright glassy splendour was to be seen among more macabre exhibits. Echuca was slummier
than she had expected, the rag-end of a once prosperous town, though the paddle steamers were quaint and romantic and ponderous.

‘Did you hear this one?’ said Mr Wilson. ‘There were these two Glasgow football supporters and they went to Italy and they went into a pub and one of them said,

‘ “What do you sell here?”

‘And the barman said, “Chianti.”

‘ “Whit’s that?” said one of them. “We’ll take a pint.”

‘ And they took a pint each and they got very drunk and as they were staggering along one of them said to the other,

‘ “No wonder they carry the Pope about in a chair.” ’

They had all laughed, Miss Casey in short concentrated bursts like machine-gun fire, Daphne more decorously. Then she felt constrained to tell some of her own stories, for she felt that the
Wilsons weren’t sure of her, thought of her as a Southern English type.

She felt awkward beginning her story. ‘It was one day,’ she said, and then casually, ‘My husband Geoff is an officer. And this general’s wife came to visit us. This was
in Australia. I had tried to talk to her, usual stuff I thought you should talk about to generals’ wives, and she sat there, a big woman, and then after a while she got up and said,

‘ “See you later.”

‘ And I thought,’ she began to laugh, ‘and I thought she was going to come back that same day. And when Geoff came home I was in a panic. I told him that I had gone out to buy
a new dress because I didn’t want the general’s wife to see me in the same dress twice in the one day. And Geoff said,

‘ “Don’t you know that saying, ‘See you later’ is like saying ‘Cheerio’.”

‘But I had actually gone out to buy a new dress. Actually.’

And Miss Casey laughed and said, ‘Of course you were not expected to know that.’ She herself went on to cap the story with another one.

‘There was this friend of mine who was staying in London. And she caught a cold and stayed in bed. A friend of hers, English, phoned her up and asked her to come and visit her.
“No,” she said, “I can’t, I’m in bed with a wog.” You see “wog” in Australia means a “germ”.’

They had all dissolved in hysterical laughter though it seemed to Daphne that some of the others had heard the story before. Miss Cowan making odd guttural noises, her moustache trembling at her
lip.

‘What she must have thought,’ said Daphne, ‘what she must have thought.’ And she saw this proper woman in bed in a London hotel with a wog stretched at her side.
‘Wog’ was the very word that Geoffrey might have used about the Australians.

The bus crossed the border into Victoria which was much greener than the area from which they had come. It looked exactly like England, with its green fertile land; she could imagine a private
school set here among the fruit trees.

And then there was the day they stopped at the Chinese cemetery. There was Chinese writing on the tombstones, indecipherable among the wild grass.