The Black Halo (38 page)

In the picture he was laughing and his mother was standing just behind him, her right hand resting on his right shoulder. He must have been five or six when the photograph was taken. It
astonished him that the photograph should be there at all for he had thought she had forgotten all about him. There was not even a photograph of his stepfather in the room.

And then he heard again the voices coming out of the dark and it was as if he was his stepfather. ‘Sniffy the Poof, Sniffy the Poof.’ It was as if he was in that room listening to
them. You couldn’t be called anything worse than a poof. He heard again his mother telling him about his father. A recollection came back to him of a struggle one night between his mother and
father. She had pulled herself away and shouted, ‘I’m going to take the car and I’m going to kill myself. I know the place where I can do it.’ And he himself had said to his
father, ‘Did you hear that?’ But his father had simply smiled and said, ‘Your mother’s very theatrical.’ For some reason this had amused him.

She was now sleeping fairly peacefully, sometimes snorting, her hands spread out across the bed.

And his stepfather hadn’t come home. Where was he? Had something happened to him? At that moment he felt terror greater than he had ever known, as if he was about to fall down, as if he
was spinning in space. What if his mother died, if both of them died, and he was left alone?

He ran to the school as fast as he could. The janitor, who was standing outside his little office with a bunch of keys in his hand, watched him as he crossed the hall, but said nothing.

His stepfather was sitting at his desk on his tall gaunt chair staring across towards the seats. He was still wearing his gown and looked like a ghost inside its holed chalky armour. Even though
he must have heard Ralph coming in he didn’t turn his head. Ralph had never seen him like this before, so stunned, so helpless. Always, before, his stepfather appeared to have been in control
of things. Now he didn’t seem to know anything or to be able to do anything. He had wound down.

Ralph stood and looked at him from the doorway. If it weren’t for his mother he wouldn’t be there.

‘Should you not be coming home?’ he asked. His stepfather didn’t answer. It was as if he was asking a profound question of the desks, as if they had betrayed him. Ralph again
felt the floor spinning beneath him. Perhaps it was all too late. Perhaps it was all over. It might be that his stepfather would never come home again, had given everything up. His gaze
interrogated the room.

Ralph advanced a little more.

‘Should you not be coming home?’ he asked again. But still his stepfather retained his pose, a white chalky statue. It was his turn now to be on his own listening to his own
questions. Ralph had never thought of him like that before. Always he had been with his mother, always it was he himself who had been the forsaken one. On the blackboard were written the words,
‘A tragedy gives us a feeling of waste.’ Ralph stayed where he was for a long time. He didn’t know what to do, how to get through to this man whom he had never understood. The
empty desks frightened him. The room was like an empty theatre. Once his father had taken him to one in the afternoon. ‘You wait there,’ he said, ‘I have to see someone.’
And then he had seen his father talking to a girl who was standing face to face with him, wearing a belted raincoat. They had talked earnestly to each other, his father laughing, the girl looking
at him adoringly.

No, it could not be true. His father hadn’t been at all like that, his father had been the one who adored him, his son. What was this ghost like when compared to his father?

He couldn’t bring himself to move, it was as if he was fixed to the floor. There was no word he could think of that would break this silence, this deathly enchantment.

He felt curiously awkward as if his body was something he carried about with him but which was distinct from his mind. It was as if in its heaviness and oddness it belonged to someone else. He
thought of his mother outstretched on the bed, her hair floating down her face, stirring in the weak movement of her breath. Something must be done, he couldn’t leave this man here and his
mother there.

Slowly his stepfather got down from his desk, then placed the jotters which were stacked beside him in a cupboard. Then he locked the cupboard. He had finished marking them after all and would
be able to return them. Then he began to walk past Ralph as if he wasn’t there, his gaze fixed straight ahead of him. He was walking almost like a mechanical toy, clumsily, his gown fixed
about him but becalmed.

Now he was near the door and soon he would be out in the hall. In those seconds, which seemed eternal, Ralph knew that he was facing the disintegration of his whole life. He knew that it was
right there, in front of him, if he couldn’t think of the magic word. He knew what tragedy was, knew it to its bitter bones, that it was the time that life continued, having gone beyond
communication. He knew that tragedy was the thing you couldn’t do anything about, that at that point all things are transformed, they enter another dimension, that it is not acting but the
very centre of despair itself. He knew it was pitiful, yet the turning point of a life. And in its light, its languageless light, his father’s negligent cheerful face burned, the moustache
was like straw on fire. He was moving away from him, winking, perhaps deceitful. He saw the burden on this man’s shoulders, he saw the desperate loneliness, so like his own. He felt akin to
this being who was moving towards the door. And at that moment he found the word and it was as if it had been torn bleeding from his mouth.

‘Come on home,’ he said. ‘Jim.’

Nothing seemed to be happening. Then suddenly the figure came to a halt and stood there at the door as if thinking. It thought like this for a long time. Then it turned to face him. And
something in its face seemed to crack as if chalk were cracking and a human face were showing through. Without a word being said the ghost removed its gown and laid it on a desk, then the two of
them were walking across the now empty hall towards the main door.

Such a frail beginning, and yet a beginning. Such a small hope, and yet a hope. Almost but not quite side by side, they crossed the playground together and it echoed with their footsteps,
shining, too, with a blatant blankness after the rain.

In my secondary school in those years long ago, when I wore shorts and could feel the wind on my knees, the main romance was that between Mr MacColl (whom we called Frothy) and
Miss Simpson. Mr MacColl taught mathematics and the reason we called him Frothy was that when he got into a rage, which he often used to do because for instance we couldn’t understand the (to
him) pristine obviousness of Pythagoras’ Theorem, he foamed at the mouth so that if you were sitting in the front seat spittle beaded and bubbled on the desk. His face would become a bright
red, like a cockerel’s, and then after a while white as chalk. Strangely enough, for all his angry outbursts, we rather liked him, for we knew that his rage was not directed at us personally
but rather at the abstract beings who had failed to learn that which was so evident to him; but who could however still be saved. And indeed on good days, he would be quite cheerful and even
joking, and we would feel protected and secure in his world of triangles and circles and parallelograms. At the same time we thought of him as a comic figure whose trousers were always above his
ankles; and sometimes he would say ludicrous things like,

‘Watch this blackboard while I go through it again,’ and we would smile and giggle behind our hands; and I could swear now, looking back, that these clumsinesses were intended, or if
not intended, that he himself saw them as being as funny as we did. All in all, we liked him as much as we liked any teacher in the school, though he belted us quite often, for we knew that in his
own way he loved us. Yes, I think I could put it as high as that.

Miss Simpson on the other hand I was never taught by, for I didn’t take science, but I remember her as being short, rather squat, and yellow-faced. I have a vague memory that she was also
splay-footed.

The romance between the two of them, for they must have been well over forty when I first knew them, had been a source of gossip and merriment in the school for many years, and indeed I had
heard even my older brother talking about it. Sometimes a boy or girl would come into Frothy’s room with a note: Frothy would study it for a while and then write an answer making sure that it
was well sealed. We could tell from his later behaviour whether the note had contained good news or bad. The messenger would smile significantly at us while Frothy was reading the note, and then we
knew it had come from Miss Simpson.

I don’t know where Frothy stayed (some teachers stayed in the Hostel, but I don’t think he was one of them). I think he would have lodged with a landlady in the town: he certainly
didn’t own a car, or a bicycle, and I think he walked home from school to where his home was.

I myself had a great love for geometry in those days. I adored the inflexible order of the proofs, the fact that parallel lines never met, that triangles were always composed of 180 degrees. One
knew where one was with geometry, it was a world of security and happiness, which sprang no surprises, and I always associated it with summer and the warm sun shining on the desk. That such a
settled world should exist beyond the tangle and whirl of adolescence was an unexpected gift. It was as if when one had finished a geometry problem one was locking a safe, hearing a satisfactory
click.

For this reason I got on well with Frothy, and I liked him though in common with the other boys I considered him eccentric and comic: one could however never admit that one had any feelings at
all for a teacher. So there I would sit at my desk in my shorts and Frothy would glance at the proof I had so elegantly created, and find it good. In fact I think I must have entered that world of
geometry as a shelter against the difficulties which I had at home at the time, though these are irrelevant to my story. At any rate what I remember best is the safety of those days: Frothy pacing
about in his torn gown, the windows bright with light. In a strange way I felt that such days would never come again, and that I owed Frothy their harmony and richness.

There is one thing I forgot to say and that is that during his paroxysms Frothy would cough a lot, his face reddening, and then after the bout of coughing was over, he would pop a pill into his
mouth, though none of us knew what this pill was for.

However, one afternoon, he told me to come with him outside the room, and there with great secrecy asked me if I would go on a message for him to the chemist’s and get him some
Beecham’s Powders. It seemed to me odd that a teacher should ask a pupil to do this, it was a confession of bodily weakness that came queerly from a teacher who by definition was a being
without illness or frailty. After all, teachers were invincible beings who appeared at the beginning of a period and left at the end of it: in a sense their gowns suggested that they were not human
beings at all, like the rest of us. Nor did they ever ask if there was anything wrong with us. The flesh had nothing to do with teaching, one never saw a teacher who was really ill.

However I did go for the powders to the chemist’s and all the time I was walking along the street, now and again giving a sudden little skip, I giggled to myself. What a story I would have
to tell the others. Frothy sending me for Beecham’s Powders. What an extraordinary thing, how essentially funny it was. Nor did it occur to me to wonder why Frothy had sent me rather than
anybody else. Had he perhaps thought that I would be different from the other boys and keep my story to myself? If he had thought that he was very much mistaken. And also I took my time on the
errand, for I believed like all the other boys that one should never do anything for a teacher with any enthusiasm. I therefore walked slowly down the street, passing the shop where I used to buy
Titbits
and
Answers
. I waited outside the chemist’s for a while watching a yacht in the harbour riding up and down on the waves, tethered to its anchor.

When I had got the Beecham’s Powders, I put them in my pocket along with the change that I had received from the chemist, who wore a white gown and had an abstracted air like a busy
doctor. I didn’t have a watch in those days and I kept looking at the clock which was fixed on top of the Town Hall. I wanted to make sure that the period was up before I got back, not
because I didn’t like geometry, but rather because it was what the boys would have expected of me.

When I got back to the school, the period was over, as I had calculated, and Frothy had left the room. I walked along to the staff-room to find out where he was. All along the corridor the
windows were open and the fresh breeze was blowing in. And then I suddenly noticed that at the far end of the corridor, and just outside the staff-room, Frothy and Miss Simpson were standing. I
stopped and waited, for I didn’t want to intrude on them. As a matter of fact, Frothy’s back was turned to me and I could hear him talking in a low passionate voice to Miss Simpson.
They were so engaged in their conversation that they didn’t notice me. Miss Simpson, like Frothy, was wearing a gown which was white with chalk: she looked like an old splay-footed bat.
Frothy’s quick speech continued, but Miss Simpson didn’t appear to be listening. I couldn’t move and pretended to be looking out of one of the windows while at the same time I was
thinking that I could gain some information which I would tell the other boys from my class. Their voices were now raised and finally Miss Simpson strode away in the other direction, her gown
flying about her. Before she did so she flung something on the stone floor of the corridor, and it rolled along till it came to rest against the wall. I looked down. It was a ring, and it had a red
stone in it. It was not unlike those rings that I used to see in Woolworth’s when I visited it at the lunch break in order to see if there were any good books I could buy. The sun flashed
from the gold of the ring, from its circle.