The Black Halo (30 page)

He was going back to his own hut, to Banga’s bequeathed home, the only one he now had and by his side he carried the gun, dumb, absurd, without meaning.

‘Why have you come back?’ Miraga asked him. ‘What’s wrong?’

He didn’t answer her directly but said, ‘If I leave this place will you come with me?’

‘Leave this place?’ and her voice was an incredulous echo of his own. It was clear that the idea had never occurred to her in her whole life, that the thought was inconceivable,
beyond the limits of her imagination.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘leave this place.’ And there was anger in his voice. Why couldn’t everything be simpler than it was?

‘I can’t,’ she repeated. ‘Why are you back?’

‘I came home alone.’

‘Why?’

‘Why, why why,’ he shouted. ‘Why are you always asking questions.’ And there was an enormous barrier between them, they belonged to two worlds. She was going out of the
door when he stopped her. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m leaving.’

‘You won’t leave here,’ he shouted and threw her on the bed. He was screaming, his voice high and trembling like the voice of a boy. He would have liked to put his hands around
her throat and throttle her. The only connection between her and him was violence. She lay on the bed like a stranded fish, her eyes wide with fear.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Are you coming or aren’t you?’

‘No. I can’t. No one has ever left the village. It has never happened.’

‘You stupid bitch,’ he shouted silently, his throat choked with fear and rage and shame. He was out of his mind with terror.

And all the time he was thinking how beautiful she looked, lying there on the bed, her breast rising and falling.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I will find another man.’

He raised the gun to his eye and saw her clearly through the sights. He was trembling with anger and frustration. For a long time he looked at her and then threw the gun down on the floor and
scrambled out of the hut.

He didn’t know where he was going and he only looked back once to see if she was at the door but she wasn’t. The place where she should have been was empty. He walked past the church
and then, as if a memory had struck him, returned and stood gazing at it, white in the sunlight. He thought of the pulpit, the seats, the cross on the pulpit cloth, large and blue; it was not an
oasis but a mirage in the desert of his mind. He noticed that the leaves were growing luxuriously round the windows, almost hiding them from view. Then he began to run into the forest where he felt
cool and sheltered. There was no destination in his mind, he felt neither hunger nor thirst. He was a ghost drifting about the day. He ran and walked and finally found himself standing in front of
the waterfall.

He stood and looked at it as if he were asking it a question in the hot dumb day. It was like an eel that twists and turns, a white fraying rope, foaming and torrential. He sat in front of it as
if he were a pupil in front of a teacher waiting for the latter to tell him the meaning of the world. He thought of his youth, of his father with his flowing white beard. He thought of his home, of
the journey on which he had come.

The waterfall was pouring and pouring and giving him no answer, a white snake in the day. Its senseless music was all around him. What have I done to my life, he thought, this unrepeatable life?
But the waterfall continued its rotation. The soul, the soul, the white soul where has it gone? This land has destroyed me. It has maddened me. And the waterfall poured down and he looked deeply
into it. He would have liked to have sat there forever, fallen asleep there. He thought of the chief and knew that he had been his enemy from the beginning, all he had wanted to do was keep his
tribe together. He had played on the previous missionary’s sense of uselessness, it was all so natural.

He heard a voice in his mind and it kept saying over and over, everything is natural. Rage, hatred, malice, death, they are all natural. Even love is natural, and a ray of pain stabbed him, as
deep as a spear. Natural, natural, natural, the birds were twittering, the waterfall was saying. That waterfall had been there from the beginning of the world, it had been there before he had been
born or had thought of coming to Africa. It had been there in his days of the natural man and then after his conversion. The waterfall had in a strange way been waiting for him, confronting him
with its absurd question. All the time that he had been talking about the Sabbath – and where were the Sabbaths now? They were all intertwined into one long tedious day – the waterfall
had been waiting and laughing. That senseless froth and foam had been rotating.

And all the time that he himself was sitting there, the battle was going on elsewhere: two tribes were fighting, one to retain its food, the other to capture it. The lion was killing the deer.
And then at that very moment as if it had stepped out of his mind on dainty natural feet a white deer descended from a hill above, went into the waterfall and began to drink from it. Now and again
it would raise its head meditatively and look at Donald. It didn’t seem at all frightened. How beautiful you are, thought Donald, how beautiful and elegant and calm. Perhaps I shall sit here
forever like a Saint Columba in Africa. Perhaps people will come to me and be blessed from my corruption that will never again be washed clean. Perhaps the deer will come and lick the hand that
carried the gun. But the deer suddenly turned away and was no longer there.

Donald looked after it and then saw a figure coming towards him. His heart leaped with joy for he thought it was Miraga. He began to wave and shout, ‘I’m here, I’m here.’
And the echo shouted among the rocks above the noise of the waterfall, ‘I am here.’ The figure was steadily approaching and then he saw with a sinking of the heart that it was not
Miraga. In a short while Tobbuta was standing beside him.

‘I saw you,’ he said.

Are we going to fight now, Donald asked himself, tiredly. Is this what we are going to do? Will this never end, this wheel of water?

But Tobbuta began to pour a torrent of words out of his lips.

‘I can’t sleep,’ he was saying. ‘I can’t rest. I am going mad. I came to speak to you,’ and he went on his knees in front of him. ‘Ever since Banga
killed my sweetheart I can’t sleep.’ Tears were pouring out of his eyes. ‘I want your God to help me. I want to be a Christian. I tried to kill myself, but I couldn’t. I
tried to become a Christian before but my nature was too fierce.’ He showed Donald a carving that he had made. And then Donald knew that this was the carving he had been working on when he
met him first. ‘She didn’t want me to become a Christian because of what happened to Banga. But now I know that I have sinned. Your God is punishing me.’

Donald looked down at him, and heard behind him the music of the waterfall and he laughed. His laughter was a repeated echo among the rocks. His vast laughter resonated among the hollow rocks.
He went down on his knees while still laughing. And in that strange moment when the whole world came to a stop and he could no longer hear the waterfall at all, he knew that it wasn’t the
chief who had won, that it wasn’t he who had woven the rope around him. He knew that it was God who had done that. Murder and death had been a plague around him simply in order that Tobbuta
would be saved.

‘Who are you,’ he asked, ‘that deserved all this?’ But the face in front of him was expressionless and black.

On his knees he began to pray. ‘I am in Thy hands,’ he said, ‘in Thy hands. You are here even in Africa, even in the darkness. Your voice is deeper and more mysterious than
that of the waters.’ And the words came smoothly without hesitation from his mouth.

And the sound of the waterfall was becoming stronger and louder. He rose from his knees and felt on his back a heavy joyful burden. He put his hand out to Tobbuta. ‘Come,’ he
said.

He turned and looked for a long time at the village from which he had come. ‘Come,’ he repeated. ‘Everything is natural. Everything is forgiven.’

The day was very hot as had been most of the days of that torrid summer and when they arrived at the park where the fair was being held she found that there was no space for
her car: so she had to cruise around the town till she found one, cursing and sweating. It was at times like these, when she felt hot and prickly and obscurely aggressive, that she wished Hugh
could drive, but he had tried a few times to do so and he couldn’t and that was that. It wasn’t a big car, it was only a Mini, but even so there didn’t seem to be any space for it
anywhere, and policemen were everywhere waving drivers on and sometimes flagging them down to give them information. However after half an hour of circling and backtracking, she did manage to find
a place, a good bit away from the fair, and after she had locked the doors the three of them set off towards it. In the early days, before she had got married, she hadn’t bothered to lock the
car at all. Even if a handle fell off a door, like the one for instance that wound down the window, she didn’t bother having it repaired, and the back seat used to be full of old newspapers
and magazines which she had bought but never read. Now, however, it was tidy, as Hugh (though, or because, he didn’t drive) kept it so. He also polished it regularly every Sunday, since he
didn’t do any writing on Sundays, finding that three hours a day for five days in the week satisfied whatever demon possessed him. She herself worked full-time in an office while he stayed at
home writing and making sure that their little daughter who was not yet of school age didn’t burn herself or fall down the stairs or do anything that endangered her welfare.

It was a Saturday afternoon and it was excessively hot, but in spite of the heat Hugh was wearing a jacket and this irritated her. Why couldn’t he be like other men and go about in his
shirt sleeves; why must he always wear a jacket even when the sun was at its most glaring, and how could he in fact bear to do so? She herself was wearing a short yellow dress with short sleeves
which showed her attractive round arms, and the little girl was wearing a white frilly dress with a locket bouncing at her breast. She looked down at her tanned arms and was surprised to see them
so brown since she had been working all summer at her cards in the office catching up with work caused by Margaret’s long absence. But of course at weekends she and her husband and the little
girl went out quite a lot. They drove to their own secret glen and sometimes sat and picnicked listening to the noise of the river, which was a deep black, muttering unintelligibly among the
stones. The blackness and the noise reminded her for some strange reason of a telephone conversation which had somehow gone wrong, spoiling instead of creating communication. Sometimes they might
take a walk up the hill among the stones and the fallen gnarled branches and very rarely they might catch a glimpse at the very top, high above them, of a deer standing questioningly among trees.
She loved deer, their elegance and their containment, but her husband didn’t seem to bother much.

The little girl Sheila was taking large steps to keep up with the two of them, now and again taking her mother’s hand and gazing gravely up into her face as if she were silently
interrogating her, and then withdrawing her hand quickly and moving away. She talked hardly at all and was very serious and self-possessed. In fact it seemed to her mother that she was more like
what she imagined a writer ought to be than Hugh was, for he didn’t seem to notice anything but wandered about absent-mindedly, never listening to anything she was saying and never calling
her attention to any interesting sight in the world around him. His silence was profound. She had never seen anyone who paid so little attention to the world: she sometimes thought that if a woman
with green hair and a green face walked past him he wouldn’t notice. That surely was not the way a writer ought to be.

Anyway he wasn’t a very successful writer as far as sales went. He had had two small books of poetry published by printing presses no one had ever heard of except himself, and had sold one
short story to an equally unknown magazine. She had long ago given up trying to understand his poetry. He himself wavered between thinking that he was a good poet as yet unrecognised and a black
despair which made her impatient and often angry with him. In any case the people they lived among didn’t know about writing and certainly couldn’t have cared less about poetry: if you
didn’t appear on TV you weren’t quoted. They lived in a council house in a noisy neighbourhood which seemed to have more than the average share of large dogs and small grubby children
who stared at you as you went by.

The fair was really immense and she looked down at her small daughter now and again to make sure that she hadn’t got lost. She sometimes worried about her daughter’s silences,
thinking that perhaps they were a protection against the two of them.

Hugh said to her, ‘We could spend a lot of money here, do you know that? There are so many things.’

She was suddenly impatient. ‘Well, we only get out once in a while.’ She knew that Hugh worried about money because he himself hardly earned anything, and also because his nature was
fundamentally less generous than her own. He had given up working two years before, just to give himself a chance to see if he could succeed as a writer. Before that he had worked in a library, but
he complained that working in a library was too much like writing, and in any case he was bored by it and the ignorant people he met. As far as she could see nothing had in fact happened since he
gave up writing, for when he wasn’t writing he was reading, and he hardly ever went out. He would sit at his typewriter in the morning but most of the time he didn’t write anything or
if he did he threw it in the bucket. When she came home at five she would find the bucket full of small balls of paper. She herself knew very little about literature and couldn’t judge
whether such work as he completed was of the slightest value. She sometimes wondered whether she was losing her respect for him: his writing she often thought was a device for avoiding the problems
of the real world. On the other hand her own more passionate nature dominated his colder one. Before she met him she had gone out with other men but her resolute self-willed character had led to
quarrels of such intensity and fierceness that she knew they would eventually sour any permanent relationship.