The Black Halo (24 page)

He looked at the deers’ skulls and then at Mary. When had the irretrievable damage happened? Was it some time in her lonely childhood – when she had been the old child of an ageing
doctor and his younger wife? Or was it after she had married him? Certainly her childish rages were a continual accompaniment to their marriage. That he himself was severe and unforgiving and
humourless he knew. That perhaps she thought she had come down in the world in marrying him he also thought he knew: after all, lecturers were not as rich as doctors. And then there had been the
tradition of alcoholism in her family: her mother had been in hospital for it once or twice. The doctor, her father, sat in his chair and smiled constantly as if he accepted the incurable world as
it was. And Mary had grown up in her secret world. He himself had three brothers and a sister, and so he considered that normality had been rubbed into him, as a pebble takes its shape from the
onslaughts of the waves.

They were now standing in a room in which there were a lot of eighteenth-century paintings. At what seemed to be open-air picnics women sat in long green or red dresses, with a cloth spread
before them on the ground. The trees around them had inherited the calm of that passionless age. The firescreens too showed eighteenth-century paintings in which similar women sat easily in their
composed worlds. On the mantelpiece was a clock of black marble which to his amazement told the right time as if the servants in the castle wound it up every day.

‘Isn’t that beautiful?’ he said, but she turned away. If only she would speak, make even the slightest comment. Her large famished eyes took everything in but at the same time
put it into secret drawers of her own with special locks. He almost felt like hitting her. And yet he had loved her and he still loved her. It was true she came from a different world, not a world
as palatial as this, but at least one higher than his own. But that was no excuse for her deep griefs. The historian in him was ticking off, date by date, the articles he saw, though not evaluating
them. He had never been interested in money and neither had she. How appalling her silences were, her frowning wrinkled brow. He had a wild vision that she would burst into a rage where they were
and shout and scream at the tourists who were so grave and correct and earnest, speaking their foreign languages.

My love, my love what has happened to you? Was it my fault? Have I left you too much alone?

Through a window he saw the proud peacocks staring, it seemed, towards him with their fathomless stupid eyes. Just like the dull aristocrats who had run this castle.

They stood in a room full of snuffboxes and packs of eighteenth-century cards larger than those he was familiar with. She stared down at one of them as if it were infinitely precious. On the
walls were portraits of young aristocratic girls, smiling arrogantly from within their gilt borders. What had they ever done but sew and play the harpsichord, rather badly. How wasted their lives
had been. And then he noticed that she was staring with particular interest at one painting. It showed a typically red-faced aristocrat in a kilt handing a pheasant he had just killed to his little
daughter, who was stretching her chubby hands towards it as if it were a new toy. Her mother smiled complacently from the far edge of the picture. At the other edge there was a stiff slightly
bowing servant, perhaps a gillie. Stupid buggers, he thought, what vulgarity, what stony-headed power.

And he hated these aristocrats and their families. It might have been better if he and Mary had had children but they hadn’t and that was it. He supposed that in a way it wasn’t a
bad thing, for it allowed him to concentrate on his researches. But imagine having a child like that with such greed on its face as it stretched its tiny hands towards the pheasant whose colours
seemed to be fading in the duke’s hand. Long thin laths of people, wooden-headed possessors of empire, with their horses and their dogs and their servants who ticked away like black clocks
till the time came to strike.

As he looked at Mary he thought that her face glowed, as if the picture belonged to a world she loved, a world of the masculine and the cruel and the fixed. He drew in his breath sharply and
apologised to an American who was trying to get past him.

He felt in need of a pee. He should have gone to the toilet (loo, as his wife said) before he started on the tour.

‘Come on,’ he said gently, and then as she made no move he repeated the words. It was only then that she stirred out of her dream, still staring at the picture as she left the room,
to enter another one in which there was a bed with matching chairs covered by a wine-red material. At the head of the bed and also on the chairs there was stitched or carved a yellow coronet. It
was as if for a moment he expected that someone would be lying on the bed, as if he had burst suddenly into a private room, and there, perfectly still, her golden hair strewn on the pillows, would
be a duchess fast asleep. Who had lain on that bed before, he wondered. It represented the sweat of history though now it looked so calm and familiar. The bed of sweaty bodies, of irrational sex,
the stews of the past. And that bitch Elizabeth flaunting her smallpoxed body to the ambassadors of so many nations. Sex used as politics and economy, in the service of diplomacy. He was shaken by
rage and rancour. His sister stood mockingly in front of a mirror in their crowded house.

Doctors, doctors, he thought, why didn’t you cure that too when you cured the plague?

The next room was full of books. He bent down and looked at them, as they lay against each other untouchably on their shelves. He studied the frail copy of the Solemn League and Covenant,
trapped in its case, trying to distinguish the familiar words in the ancient fading script. A letter from Charles I to his friend Lord George Murray wished him to supply him with men for the
defence of the kingdom. And there was a letter from Mary, Queen of Scots just before she had put her fair hair on the block with such unflinching nerve. She talked, of all things, about sewing. And
the letter was in French. His wife was looking at it now, with her frowning wrinkled brow. Of course she knew French just as he did himself, but the writing was so crabbed, so small . . . How could
one ever distinguish it? The headman stood behind her for a moment there with his axe and his black mask, and the black clock of history ticked on . . .

His wife’s fair hair streamed over the ancient page, her pale narrow neck exposed, showing the blonde hairs at the back. We are perpetual students, he thought, listening to a Frenchman
talking volubly to his son, explaining something to him. A costumed American woman leaned down with a pince-nez . . .

My love, my love, this is history and it has all to do with us. From this we have come, we were servants – or rather I was a servant – of these impermeably stupid people, dying and
fighting in their mess of blood. I don’t want that to happen to you. But secretively and profoundly we waited, we the servants, till the time came, and then we shoved them off their seats and
thrones with one big heave. Even your class, he thought, even yours.

He heard her voice from the past screaming at him. What is this business of class that you’re always on about. Can we not just be human beings?

And himself. It’s easy to say but we served them for centuries and what did we get? Their absent stupid stares like those of peacocks or pheasants.

Now they were standing in front of a portrait of Lord George Murray, dead at Loos, having fought bravely to the end at the head of his small company, with his chestful of medals dangling. There
he stood with his big moustache, his sword stiff at his side, while the new machine guns were ready to mow him down. But he had his horse, hadn’t he? And he had his sword and his invincible
belief in himself and in the lady who waited at home, sewing, sleeping beside her dressing table with the coroneted brushes. How the stupid unwinking eye of the moon stared down at her.

Oh they had courage, right enough. Certainly they had courage, the courage of the dinosaur. He glanced at the scorched bullet mark in a red uniform and admitted that at least about them. They
had taken the salmon and the deer, they had stared through their servants as if they were panes of glass, but they had certainly fought. One must give them that. They had been stupid and fearless
and masculine. They were big stones in the torrent of history. Even Claverhouse whose pitifully thin armour was on show had been that, daring, romantic, idiotic, irrational. Those petty quarrels,
those shrieks and screams, those terrible bleedings, how they had faded into the past. They were in the end trivial.

‘Mary,’ he said, ‘I have to go to the toilet. I’m bursting.’ She looked at him with her swimming blue eyes, saying nothing. ‘I won’t be long,’ he
said. ‘You’ll be all right.’ But on his way to the toilet he couldn’t resist going into one or two other rooms, feeling free now that he wasn’t with her. In one of the
rooms he examined a beautiful self-sufficient pistol of an earlier age, its perfect lines exciting him, well-preserved and oiled as most of the things in the castle were. Why, they must still have
an army of servants. He rushed into the next room and had a quick look round. Here there were fans with Chinese women bending towards each other in a sky of deep black, wide sleeves on their arms,
their hair black, their necks willowy and white.

He ran to the toilet pushing his way past the tourists. And there he was standing in front of the mirror, his face gaunt and haunted. Beside him standing above the white tile was a large
American whose camera banged against his side. They glanced at each other and then looked away. Trevor washed his hands carefully over and over and then dried them in the draught of warm air,
waiting till all the drops had faded and his hands were clean and fresh. Then he walked back the way he had come. He found the room with the documents in the glass cases but she wasn’t there,
though there were many foreigners – descendants of the duke’s enemies – leaning down to read the indecipherable script.

He turned back and went into all the other rooms between the one with the documents and the toilet, but she wasn’t in any of them either. She must have gone back then to see something she
hadn’t had time to study properly. What could it be? Her image became confused in his mind with that of Mary, Queen of Scots, that of the strutting peacocks on the lawn. O my God he thought
something must have happened to her. She may have fainted. Her voice echoed in his head, ‘You’re always going on about class. Nothing but class all the time. Can’t we live in
peace?’ In peace, in peace. Images of royalty, of aristocracy were all about him. The stupid heads gazed from their frames. The willowy necks bent over streams. The salmon bodies wriggled in
nets. Coronets everywhere, everywhere lances and swords and guns, evidence of death, of violence. If only she is safe, he thought, if only . . . Because I love her with my gaunt unforgiving face,
and my sharp weasel mind. The scorched bullet hole leaped in front of his eyes. So the thin armour had not been enough to keep the enemy out. It had worked its way through the aristocratic
trappings.

And then he entered the room where the bed and chairs were. He had to fight his way through a crowd of tourists, shouting and screaming inside his head, Get away, you bloody American, what are
you doing here anyway? Get back to your own country, to your pseudo-democracy and take your filthy pictures with you or take the castle with you stone by stone in your temporary luggage which has
crossed a million frontiers.

There seemed to be hundreds of people and they were all quiet. When he got to the front he saw her. She had crossed the rope and was lying on the bed, her head on the pillow, the coroneted
headboard above her, and she was clutching in her hand – what? A letter. Had she broken the glass cases as well? But when he looked he thought he recognised his own handwriting. Probably one
of his love letters to her from their courting days when each had written to the other, ‘I’ll never leave you,’ a sort of promise. There she was lying staring up at the ceiling,
perfectly at peace, the letter in her hand, as if she were an effigy in an untouchable armour, and the tourists stared at her in perfect silence as if she belonged to the bed, in her wrinkled
stockings (for she had thrown her shoes off) an image almost of the Sleeping Beauty. My God, he thought. My God what shall I do now? And he stared helplessly with the others at her who was so
beautiful and distant, almost as if she were a perfect stranger, a frozen historical woman. Only a pulse in her throat beat and her breast rose and fell quietly. That was all that told him she was
alive and that she was his wife.