The Black Halo (87 page)

She looked deep into his eyes which were candid and clear. Something strange stirred within her. Something uncomfortable, eerie. Her own child appeared strange to her. Perhaps he had the second
sight. But even if he had, who had ever heard of a red coffin?

She looked down at her hands which were white with flour. This puzzling boy who always seemed to be dreaming.

She tried to imagine a red coffin and couldn’t.

‘There was something else,’ he said.

‘What was that?’ she said absentmindedly.

‘There was a picture on the coffin.’

What was this? A Catholic funeral. Was that what he had seen?

‘Of the man in the coffin, maybe. He was wearing the same kind of clothes as the others. He was winking at me. He looked like . . . ’

‘Like who?’

‘Like Calum Macrae.’

‘It couldn’t be Calum Macrae.’ Calum Macrae was an elder of the church. He would never wink at anyone, never. He was a big heavy man and looked solemn and important . . .
‘No, it couldn’t have been Calum Macrae.’

This was really the height of nonsense. Why should she be listening to this?

‘Hadn’t you better go and bring in some peats,’ she said.

‘Right,’ he said. He was always very obedient. After a while he came in with the pail and stood in the door again, the sun behind him. And suddenly she saw it, that extraordinary
picture. He was wearing a tunic, red and blue, perpendicular colours. And on his head was a pointed hat. And he was laughing hilariously. She made as if to walk towards him in her black dress but
he kept moving on and she followed him out into the sunlight. There he was, a good distance from her, and he was waving to her and she was following him. It was so strange, she seemed to be
dancing, and he was dancing as well. And there were flowers all round them, red and white and yellow. How extraordinary.

And in his hand he was carrying a little red box, a beautiful red box like a jewellery box which she had once seen and never had.

And the sun poured down reflecting back from the box while he danced away with it. And she felt so happy, never, never had she felt so happy.

And when she looked down at her dress, it was no longer black but green. And his eyes were candid like water. And in them she saw a picture of herself. And the two of them danced onwards
together.

My wife and I met them in Israel. They were considerably younger than us and newly married. They came from Devon and they had a farm which they often talked about. For some
reason they took a fancy to us, and were with us a fair amount of the time, sometimes on coach trips, sometimes at dinner in the evenings. They were called Mark and Elaine.

I didn’t like Israel as much as I had expected I would. I read the
Jerusalem Post
regularly, and was disturbed by some of the stories I found there, though the paper itself was
liberal enough. There were accounts of the beatings of Palestinians, and pictures of Israeli soldiers who looked like Nazis.

Certainly it was interesting to see Bethlehem, Nazareth, the Garden of Gethsemane, and they reminded me of the security of my childhood: but at the same time seemed physically tatty, and without
romance. Also we were often followed, especially in Jerusalem, by Arab schoolchildren who tried to sell us postcards: the schools were in fact shut by official order.

Though this was the first time Mark and Elaine were abroad they were brighter than us with regard to money. Mark had a gift for finding out the best time for exchanging sterling and was, I
thought, rather mean. Sometimes we had coffee in a foursome during the day or at night, and he would pull his purse out very carefully and count out the money: he never gave a tip. He was also very
careful about buying for us exactly what we had bought for him on a previous occasion. On the other hand he bought his wife fairly expensive rings which she flourished expansively. They walked hand
in hand. They were both tall and looked very handsome.

One day the coach took us to the Golan Heights. There were red flowers growing there, and some abandoned tanks were lying in a glade. The guide, who was a Jew originally from Iraq, told us that
a few tanks had held off the attacks till the reservists had been called up. ‘They can be called up very quickly,’ he said. It was very peaceful, looking across the valley to the other
side but there were notices about unexploded mines.

Often we met young boys and girls on the buses. They hitched rides from place to place in their olive-green uniforms. They were of the age of schoolboys and schoolgirls. One morning on a bus I
heard a girl listening to a pop song on a radio that she carried with her. It seemed very poignant and sad.

I used to talk quite a lot about articles I had read in the
Jerusalem Post
, which was my Bible because it was the only paper written in English. But neither Mark nor Elaine read much,
not even the fat blockbusters that passengers on the coach sometimes carried with them. They told us a great deal about their farm, and what hard work it was. Then there was also a lot of paper
work, including VAT. They were very fond of each other, and, as I have said, often walked hand in hand. He was very handsome: she was pretty enough in a healthy sort of way.

We were told by the guide a great deal about the history of Israel, about the Assyrians, about the Crusaders, about the Philistines. I especially remember a beautiful little simple Catholic
church above Jerusalem. Then in Jerusalem we were shown the Via Dolorosa. At intervals along the route, young Jewish soldiers with guns were posted. ‘Here is where Christ’s hand
rested,’ said the guide, pointing to the wall. He himself had emigrated to Israel from Iraq. ‘They took everything from us, even our clothes,’ he said; ‘for years we lived
in a tent.’ He had served in the paratroopers and was still liable for call-up.

We saw Masada, which was very impressive. Here the Jews had committed suicide
en masse
rather than surrender to the Romans. At one time the Israeli soldiers had been initiated into the
army at a ceremony held at Masada, but that had been discontinued because of its passive associations. Thoughts of suicide were not useful against the Arabs.

I found it difficult to talk to the young couple about farming since I didn’t know much about it. My wife, however, who had been brought up on a farm, chattered away about sheep, cattle,
and hay. For myself I was more interested in the information I was getting from the
Jerusalem Post
. For instance, an American rabbi had said that the reason for the stone-throwing which
had started was that the cinemas at Tel Aviv had been opened on a Saturday night.

We often saw Orthodox Jews wearing black hats, and beards. They sometimes read books while they were walking along the street. Also we saw many of them chanting at the Wailing Wall, where the
men were separated from the women. My wife wrote a message and left it in the Wall as if it were a secret assignation. There was one comic touch: some of the Orthodox Jews covered their hats with
polythene if it was raining, as the hats were very expensive.

I read diligently in the
Jerusalem Post
. Apparently in the past there has been stone-throwing against Jews. This was in mediaeval times and when they were living in Arab countries. But
though Jews complained nothing was done about it. It was considered a reasonable sport.

My wife often used to wonder why Mark and Elaine had picked us for friends since they were so much younger. Did we look cosmopolitan, seasoned travellers, or did they simply like us? Sometimes
Elaine talked to my wife as if she were talking to her mother. I found it hard to talk to Mark when the women were in the shops. He often spoke about money, I noticed, and was very exact with it. I
sometimes thought that it was he who looked like the seasoned traveller, since he was always totally at ease and was excellent with maps.

The two of them didn’t take so many coach trips as we did. Often they went away on their own, and we only met them in the evening.

They didn’t go to the Holocaust Museum with us the day we went there. The place was very quiet apart from some French schoolchildren who scampered about. My wife hissed at them to be
quiet, but they only grinned insolently. There were piles of children’s shoes on the floor: these had been worn by victims of the Holocaust. There were many photographs, and a film that ran
all the time.

There was also a room which was in complete darkness apart from thousands of candles reflected from a range of mirrors, so that it seemed that we were under a sky of stars. A voice repeated over
and over again the names of the children who had been killed. The Jews had suffered terribly, but were now in turn inflicting terror themselves.

We met a woman who had come to Israel from South Africa. She opposed the Jewish attitude to the Palestinians, though she was a Jew herself. She said that mothers everywhere were against the
continued war. She herself had driven her son in her own car to the front, not during the Seven Days War but the one after it.

We were in Israel on Independence Day. Jewish planes, streaming blue and white lines of smoke behind them, formed the Jewish flag. It was very impressive and colourful but also rather
aggressive.

The coach took us to a kibbutz where we were to stay for two nights. Immediately we arrived, Mark and Elaine found that there were cattle there, and they left us in order to find out about the
price of milk, etc.

The kibbutz itself had been raised out of a malarial swamp. Everyone had to work, and the place looked prosperous. It even had a beautiful theatre which the kibbutzers had built themselves. I
ordered coffee from an oldish waiter, and when I offered him a tip he wouldn’t accept it. I found out that he had been a lieutenant-colonel on Eisenhower’s staff.

The kibbutzers, we were told by the guide, had their own problems. Sometimes when the young ones who had been reared in a kibbutz were called up on national service they entered an enviable
world which they had not known of, and they left the kibbutz forever. Also some Jews had accepted compensation money from the Germans while others hadn’t, and so there was financial
inequality. Thus some could afford to take holidays while others couldn’t. This introduced envy into the kibbutz.

Mark and Elaine were pleased with the cattle they had seen and full of praise. Mark had brought a notebook with him and had jotted down numbers of cattle, type of feeding stuff, etc. They had
been given a tour of the farm with which they had been very happy.

One night they had told us that they recently had been in a place in England, it might have been Dorset, and they had come to a little bridge. There was a notice on the bridge that according to
legend a couple who walked across the bridge hand in hand would be together forever. They smiled tenderly as they told us the story. In fact they had been on a coach trip at the time, and the
passengers on the coach had clapped as the two of them volunteered to walk across the bridge. I thought it was a touching little story and I could imagine the scene; on the other hand I am not
superstitious. ‘How lovely,’ said my wife.

My wife and I had been to Devon once. One day quite by accident we arrived at a house which was said to be haunted, and which had been turned into a restaurant. The owner of the restaurant, who
made full use of the legend for commercial purposes, told us that many years before, there used to be criminals who used lanterns to direct ships onto the rocks. One man had done this only to find
that one of the passengers on the wrecked ship had been his own daughter coming home from America. He had locked the body up in a room in his house. Many years afterwards the farmer who now owned
the house noticed a mark on the wall which suggested the existence of an extra room. He knocked the wall down and found a skeleton there. An American tourist had said that she had seen the ghost of
the young girl in broad daylight, and so had been born the legend of the Haunted House. So romance and death fed money and tourism.

We told Mark and Elaine the story, which they hadn’t heard before. Suddenly there was a chill in the day as I imagined the father bending down to tear the jewellery from a woman’s
neck and finding that it was his own daughter.

‘Should you like a coffee?’ I said. I saw Mark fumbling with his purse. I thought of the Samaritan Inn which had been built at the presumed point where the Good Samaritan had helped
his enemy. And indeed in Israel much of the biblical story had been converted into money.

Nevertheless I couldn’t love Israel. There was too much evidence of Arab poverty. The dead bodies of Palestinian children were mixed up in my mind with the dead bodies of Jewish children.
The mound of worn shoes climbed higher and higher.

On the last night of the tour we exchanged addresses. Mark and Elaine said they would write and my wife and I said we would do the same. And in fact we did do that for a while.

Today, this morning in fact, my wife received a letter from Elaine saying that she and Mark had split up. She said little, but reading between the lines we gathered that he had met a richer
woman who was able to invest money in his farm.

We looked at each other for a long time, thinking of the young radiant couple who had walked hand in hand across the bridge.

Finally my wife said, ‘At least they didn’t have children. It would have been much worse if they had children.’

When Donald came from the island to visit us, he was at first very depressed, as he had had a hard lonely winter. We used to hear him praying in the middle of the night,
groaning and sighing and saying, ‘God have pity on me.’ He would sit for hours without speaking, or go to his room and read the Bible. We found his silences oppressive. We tried to take
him out on visits: at first he would say he was coming with us and then he would change his mind at the last minute.

He wore a black hat and a big black jacket, though the weather was sultry and close. His face was fixed and pale and strained, and he would often press his hand to his eyes as if he were
suffering from a headache. His arm too was swollen with some mysterious ailment.