The Black Halo (95 page)

Shall I lead you away with a mention of Robin Hood country so that you won’t see the boy among the green leaves. Shall I bring to your mind stories of your schooldays about Friar Tuck,
Maid Marian, etc.: and the warm companionship of those days, even in the dripping wood. If of course there was warm companionship. We tend to romanticise these antique adventures. But I suppose in
some sense Robin Hood was victorious, we remember his name, but not that of the sheriff. He is victorious in our imagination.

But the boy is not in our imagination. He is here shivering by the fire, hair dripping. He is quite a tall boy and he is clinging to his bag of rubbishy brushes, heavily overpriced incidentally.
For instance, a yellow duster costs a pound. Where shall I get warmth from? I mean for my imagination. In a short while the boy will have to leave. And go out into the pouring rain again.

We have given him some tea and some fig biscuits. It is the case that he has probably been luckier than the others, though one cannot be quite sure of that. He picks at the jersey with pride. It
is yellow and quite thick.

I don’t see the blackbird about the rowan tree today. It may be that blackbirds shelter somewhere when there is heavy rain. Yet the rowan tree does appear beautiful with its wide presence
of berries. How can one tell the dancer from the dance as one poet wrote.

What sort of man is this boy’s boss? I think that he has a moustache. I imagine him in the dry van seeing his workers off into the rain. He is supposed to collect them at the side of the
road. Will some of them arrive in time or will they forget? But of course, he can’t drive into England without them. This boy doesn’t seem to know the value of money. That is what their
boss is counting on among other things. It is all so sad.

And yet, when I look at the rowan tree I do not feel sad. It is so brave with its red berries. It is so naturally beautiful. I cannot tell you how much I love the rowan tree.

We tell the boy that he should stand in our doorway rather than out at the side of the road. The van is already overdue according to the boy but he is confident that it will come. It is a white
van, he tells us. There goes a white van at this moment but it is not his white van. Even in the shelter of the doorway there is rain blowing in.

What did they do in the green wood on such a day of relentless rain? It must have been difficult to keep themselves dry, they too must have shivered, and yet Robin Hood surmounted all that. He
is present on sunny glades. He appears in a guise of green leaves, sun and shadow, and a feather in his cap. Always jaunty. Merry, merry Robin.

We stand in the doorway looking for a white van, the correct white van. Surely his boss wouldn’t have set off without him. No, no, he hasn’t the boy says. The boss will come.

And then quite suddenly I say to myself, I wish he would leave. I feel cold standing in the doorway and the rain is driving in on me. I don’t like this at all. Then, this boy really
isn’t very interesting, he can’t articulate correctly. I imagine the rain as going on forever.

My rowan tree, I cry to myself despairingly. And it does not fail me. It flares outwards with such abandon, almost waste-fully. All the time the boy is muttering angrily to himself, ‘Why
is the driver late? He obviously doesn’t care.’ The boy however seems to know the time. In front of us, on the other side of the road, the sheep are cowering hopelessly in the rain.

My rowan tree with red berries is brave. It protects houses from witches, from evil. And there is the girl who always walks past exercising her two black shiny dogs, who always seem to be
leading her rather than she leading them.

Still the white van has not appeared. The driver is now twenty minutes late.

The boy turns to say to me, maybe he has stopped in the village. I make out his words with difficulty. Maybe he should walk to the village, he says. I remain silent though I think I should
advise that he shouldn’t go to the village in this rain. He picks up his bag and sets off. I feel quite relieved. Suddenly I think of a tinker who had once come to our cottage door in my
island home in the north west. My mother gave her a jersey belonging to my younger brother. It happened that the tinker woman’s son was in the same class in the village school, and when my
brother saw the boy wearing his jersey he began to fight with him. This happened a long time ago when my brother was perhaps eight years old. He is now in Australia and we haven’t heard from
him for years. He has been an unsuccessful exile: he is not even married.

The boy headed off into the still heavy rain, an arrowfall of rain. He would surely find the white van eventually. I should really wait and take its number and report its driver for exploiting
young handicapped people. But then who would I write to or phone. But did I want to wait till the white van passed. And maybe it wouldn’t be the correct white van after all.

I turned to my rowan tree again, proud and beautiful with its natural grace and blood red berries. The rain was pouring down among the leaves. What do we do at certain times but search for the
beautiful. Is that not the case. One does what one can. And the works of nature are often so lovely. So random and lovely.

I think the boy will find the driver of the white van. He will be taken down to Nottingham: the driver wouldn’t leave him here, I’m pretty sure of that. And very soon the blackbird
will return to the rowan tree. And then the story will be complete.

She watched him as he bent down in the windy grass to study one of the stones. She felt cold but he didn’t seem to be cold at all.

If you’re looking for writing, she said, there won’t be any.

I wasn’t looking for writing, he said.

These stones, she thought, must be sunk deep in the ground. It was inconceivable how they had been transported.

It was Ronald’s idea to visit this island to have a look at the Callanish stones. Of course the islanders had a Norse background and Ronald had studied Norse.

He had studied Norse, as well as Old English and Middle English which comprised his ‘field’.

She looked wryly at the grass in front of her – her field.

As a matter of fact she rather liked the island, being used from her days in Wales to a rural community; indeed she remembered their days in Wales with untrammelled affection. If only they had
remained there . . .

The brochure which told her about the stones shook in her hand.

They are not connected with the Druids according to this, she said.

No, they go back much further than that. Much much further than that.

In her mind she had a picture of robed Druids holding their hands up to the rising sun, though she couldn’t think where she had come by it. The rising sun, the Druids, sacrifice.

Much further than that, he repeated, thousands of years. There were Druids in Colomba’s time and that’s only thirteen hundred years ago.

His round red-cheeked face glowed in the cold day. Often he looked quite cherubic.

It is all to do with the position of the stones, he said, and the moon rising at midsummer. At least I read that somewhere.

A boy and a girl with rucksacks were sitting in the hollow at the centre of the stones. They were eating sandwiches and drinking tea or coffee from a flask. She took shelter by the side of one
of the tall bare stones.

They had remained five years in Wales when Ronald had started his career. They were the happiest years of her life, she was sure. Neither the town nor the university was large and she knew a
fair number of people and not only the ones connected with the university. And, of course, Ronald could speak Welsh after a fashion. She had tried to learn the language but failed.

There was a constellation of certain languages that Ronald knew, old Norse, Old and Middle English and old Welsh. And now he was having a look at Gaelic.

The names of villages ending in ‘bost’ are all Norse, he told her. There’s Garrabost, Shawbost, Melbost, etc.

Sometimes she hated him; he was like a little doll, twinkling and well-meaning.

There is some theory about the shape of the hills over there, he said. Taken together they have the form of a recumbent woman. Can you see it?

At first she didn’t and then she did.

That would be their goddess, he said. Imagine in midsummer the moon rising there. They would have worshipped a goddess, an Earth Mother.

Then they had left Wales for Cambridge. Cambridge was a much more complicated place. She had found it cold, over-intellectual though Ronald avoided as many functions as he could; he had little
small talk and wasn’t witty.

The students too were different from the Welsh ones. They were more ‘superior’, more sophisticated, very bright.

The Welsh ones didn’t stretch me so much, said Ronald. They didn’t question much. And at seminars and tutorials they were less talkative.

And so he had to work much harder, wrote new lectures. Wales had made him lazy, he said.

The two young people sitting in the hollow looked like students, perhaps foreign ones, from Germany or France. She couldn’t actually make out their language.

She had disliked Cambridge intensely, to put it mildly. There was a sort of formality and impersonality that threatened her. And Ronald didn’t have time to talk to her. He was studying and
writing harder than ever.

The calibre of student is much higher here, he said. And I have to keep up.

But I thought you knew your work already.

Yes, but you don’t know what some of the students will unearth. They are more . . . unexpected.

And so he tried to insure against the unexpected.

And it was then that she began . . . expecting.

When she told him, he had taken it absent-mindedly as if it was nothing to do with him at all. It seemed he was so busy that he did not exist in the present. She herself had done some
Anglo-Saxon when she had attended Aberdeen University; it was there that they had met.

She remembered certain poems about wanderers and seafarers whose philosophy was to ‘endure’. To endure loss and masters, unemployment. To endure storms, blizzards, turbulent
seas.

He was taking photographs now.

How would he cope, she wondered, if something happened to her. He was buoyed up by her, his existence hung from hers, he was a little twinkling satellite of hers. He couldn’t cook, or fix
a plug. There were many quite simple things that he couldn’t do. But all this was permissible in him because he was a professor. It was as if people equated brilliance with academe and
forgave professors who couldn’t change a lightbulb. How many Anglo-Saxon professors would it take to change a light-bulb? She smiled wryly.

The child was much more to her than it was to him. Now she had a reason to look after herself. Now she had a future. She felt happy, at times elated. For the life of her she couldn’t
imagine him as a father. And neither, she was sure, could he. She couldn’t imagine him playing with a child, be it son or daughter. If the child spoke Middle English that might be
different.

She looked at the configuration of the hills again. They did in fact look like a recumbent woman and she imagined a mild midsummer moon above them, a moon that would in autumn appear red.

The two young people stood up, put their rucksacks on, and walked towards the exit.

She had imagined the child in her womb as a tiny helmeted Anglo-Saxon. Her great trouble was that neither Ronald nor she had made any friends in Cambridge. She thought that Ron was boring, and
she knew that in this environment she herself was boring. She was intimidated. But perhaps the child would not be boring, it might spring fully-armed from this hard bright Cambridge world. This
world of quiet streets, bicycles, secondhand bookshops. Oh Cambridge so lovely in summer . . . but no place for a child.

Those big blank stones in front of her. Surely there should be writing on them. But then again they had been planted here before writing was invented. When people communicated in grunts perhaps
as Ronald absent-mindedly did. Though he spoke more to her since his retirement. But he really was quite useless in the house, quite, quite useless . . .

Quite, quite useless.

Could you come in here, please, he shouted to her from his study. The four walls were lined with books, and some were piled on the floor.

There’s a book I want to get from the top shelf, he said, and told her the title. I haven’t used it for a while but I believe it’s there. I tried to stand on the step ladder
but I felt dizzy.

He left her everything to do; he had surrendered the motions of his outward life to her. It was true that he sometimes felt dizzy, perhaps because of his intense study. Or perhaps he had only
said that he felt dizzy. No, that was unfair; it would be wrong for an Anglo-Saxon scholar to tell a lie. On the other hand, he often evaded the ‘shield wall’.

She should have tidied away the books on the floor, she should have been more careful where she had placed the ladders, he should have held the ladder more tightly . . . In her fall she knew
immediately that the child had gone. As she tumbled on the books, as she lay recumbent among them, she knew that it was somehow fitting that she should find herself among books. In the blood. Later
he looked at her, white-faced.

I’m sorry, he bumbled.

Sorry, sorry, sorry. She opened her eyes and then closed them. Her small helmeted Anglo-Saxon had gone. Yes, there was perhaps satisfaction to be discovered behind the sorrow. Who knew the
intricacies of the human mind?

Now she saw him wearing his university gown and holding his knife up as he slit the child’s throat while the red sun rose over the horizon. University gown, doctor’s gown.

He walked to the car and waited helplessly for her to unlock the door. Her child, her only child, her twinkly-faced child, the one who endured to the end. The fresh-faced one who fussed about
the stones on which nothing was written, whose origin was unintelligible, inconceivable, in the field, in the windy grassy field.

We were playing football with a fishing cork, Daial and myself, on a full-sized football pitch. We were both wearing shirts; mine was green, his was blue. He looked very thin.
Of course, he had been ill and some said it was TB: everyone was frightened of TB.