The Black Halo (49 page)

Damn you, he shouted at the stone, while Sisyphus grunted and puffed, a gigantic yet curiously insubstantial figure in the mist. Damn you, damn you, we’ll get you this time, bald senseless
thing. Push push push till the veins stand up on your forehead. Work work work till all the examinations appear easy.
Amo amas amat
. . .
mensa mensam mensae mensae mensa
. . . O
table, O chair, O stone . . . let life enter you, let you wing your way about Hades, fly about squeaking like a bat. Run about in the park, sing, dance . . . And he pushed as hard as he could and
he shouted as he pushed and then, glory of glories, the two of them were up on the sunshine of the hill with the stone and it was lying there on the summit as if it was where it had always wanted
to be. They stood there amazed, Sisyphus still in silence, his arms hanging at his side, the veins on them swollen and blue. Ah, ha, we got you at last, said Mr Trill, giving the stone a kick and
only succeeding in hurting himself. You big, stupid, senseless dolt, you ignorant, inanimate lump. As Mr Trill triumphed over the stone and made as if to shake hands with the weary shade the latter
looked at him with infinite sadness and then very slowly and carefully pushed the stone downhill again and Mr Trill heard it thundering and banging till at last it came to rest though echoing still
with a loud thunderous sound. Then still without a word, Sisyphus descended the hill and prepared to begin his endless task again, while above him Mr Trill sat and thought.

On his green bench Mr Trill sat and thought. At first when he had retired from school he used to sit in his room reading but then as time passed he realised that Mrs Begg was
growing more and more irritable when she saw him there (and sometimes he would have to leave it so that she would be able to bring her hoover and clean the floor).

It was strange how Mrs Begg’s attitude to him had changed. In the beginning she perhaps thought that there was a possibility of marriage, and for this reason she would tell him fragments
of the story of her life. (Her marriage to a train-driver who had died of a heart attack: she, still, according to herself, could get free railway passes to any part of the country that she wished
to go to. However she never went anywhere, not even to her nieces and nephews in Surrey.) Mr Trill hardly ever listened to any of her stories or if he did it was only with half an ear and even now
after thirty years with Mrs Begg he didn’t know the names of any of her relations, or what they did, though he had been given the information often enough in the moments between soup and
mince or while he was drinking his tea. Nor did he really know much about Mrs Begg herself. She existed for him in a vague world as a being which as far as he was concerned had no emotions of its
own, no ambitions or destinations, merely a servant who was there to give him, in return for money, the little food that he required.

He never for a moment realised that even in Mrs Begg’s heart there beat storms of rancour as when for instance he ate absentmindedly without comment or even left half finished on his plate
a particularly fine pie that she had specially made for him: nor did he notice that some days she had tidied the room particularly well, or even left a vase of flowers in it. On the contrary she
was like a slave belonging to Greece, a manual worker who allowed him, the lord, to conduct his silent speculations.

Thus it was when he left the school he found for the time a cold wind blowing around him as if Mrs Begg had decided that he would never leave and therefore she could treat him as she liked. She
sometimes grunted when he spoke to her and made references to the sunniness of the weather, and would howl about his legs with her hoover when he was deep in Homer. Therefore Mr Trill took it into
his head to leave the house in the mornings and only come back at dinner time: and as he was a creature of habit he always departed at half past nine.

The park was a large one with plots of flowers scattered here and there. In the middle of it there was a fountain in which a Cupid composed of white alabaster hovered, bow and arrow in hand,
while waters poured endlessly out of its mouth. Here Mr Trill would sit on a green bench and watch the world go by. Sometimes an old man would come and sit beside him and the two of them would
discuss questions of the day or rather the other man would talk and Mr Trill would half listen for he had no interest in politics and rarely read a newspaper.

‘The country is going to the dogs,’ successive old men would tell him. ‘Even the young people aren’t frightened of the police nowadays. They throw stones at you and shout
names and what does anybody do about it? Nothing. It wasn’t like that in the old days.’

And so he would listen to the same story, repeated over and over in various guises and various accents, of a world that was always peaceful with calm blue skies and perfect behaviour. And he
would grow tired of it all but he didn’t want to cause a disturbance, so he would agree wordlessly, now and then nodding his head, but in truth weary of it all.

‘I am becoming an old man,’ he would think. ‘And is this what I wanted from my life? Is this where I wanted to be?’ And sometimes he wished that he had married Grace and
at other times he was glad that he hadn’t done so. But most of the time he simply felt lonely.

Once he had gone up to the school, and swore that he would never do so again. It wasn’t that anybody had been unkind to him – on the contrary everybody had been very gentle and
considerate – but it was as if they were talking to an invalid, as if their voices echoed around him with hollow solicitude. While they were talking to him, he sensed that they thought of him
as an intruder, a sort of ghost who was no longer involved in the heat and the smoke. And even while they were speaking he felt them, as it were, glancing at their watches as if they were thinking
how much they had to do, and that this old buffer was preventing them from getting on with it. The staffroom was no longer his staffroom, he himself had been replaced by a new younger man with
fresh ideas, and he felt that he was a posthumous being moving about the circumference of the field on which the war was being waged. Even his old room had changed, it was less tidy than it used to
be, there were pictures on the walls, and the desks were carved with new names.

So he decided that he would stay in the park and watch the flowers and if necessary endure the stories of the old men who were so implacable, stubbly and envious.

One day a little girl came over to talk to him. She had been playing with a paper boat in a pond but after she had finished she stood in front of him gazing at him with wonder in her eyes as if
waiting for him to speak to her. But he found that he couldn’t think of anything to say. If she had been older he might have offered to help her with her Latin – for that was all he
could do – but as she was only four or five years old such an offer was out of the question.

Eventually she sat beside him on the bench swinging her legs and offering him her boat which he had looked at with surprise, unable to think of anything to say about it except that it was
pretty.

‘What is your name?’ she asked him directly.

‘Mr Trill,’ he answered.

‘My name is Margaret and my mummy is coming to get me. She is at the shops.’ There was a long companionable silence while Mr Trill searched for some words to say to her but there was
nothing at all that he could think of: not a single idea came into his head. In front of him the flowers blossomed and the gardener gazed at them, rake in hand, while the white Cupid with bow and
arrow leaned gracefully into the blue day.

The little girl swung her legs which were clad in white socks. And Mr Trill gave her some sweets.

The following day she came back and the following day again and Mr Trill finding nothing to say gave her more sweets and she seemed quite happy to sit there beside him. Sometimes she brought a
doll and sometimes a teddy bear and there the two of them would sit, Mr Trill now old and greying, looking out at the park, and the little girl clutching her doll with the red dress and the
startingly blue eyes which stared unblinkingly out of the polished glaze of the face. And all the time Mr Trill was silent. The world of children was forever closed to him for he hadn’t
really understood them though he had taught them. To him they were beings who must be instructed in Latin, they didn’t have minds or will or souls of their own. Nevertheless for some
unfathomable reason the little girl came and sat beside him in perfect peace though now and again she would abruptly leave him in order to float her boat on the pond and talk to the gardener who
seemed to have more to say to her than Mr Trill had. Sometimes she would take him into her confidence and tell him little snatches of her worldly affairs, though they were so difficult to
understand that Mr Trill would let his attention wander, and indeed once she had stood in front of him stamping her feet and saying how stupid he was. Mr Trill had accepted this verdict quite
calmly and without rancour as if it had a perfect justice of its own.

Once he had made a great effort – as if speaking were like the lifting of a great stone – and asked her where she stayed but he couldn’t make out the answer and had left the
question dangling where it was in the bright light.

She had even asked him whether he had a mummy or daddy but Mr Trill had pretended not to hear: it would have been too difficult for him to explain to her that they were both dead.

One morning when as usual he had sat down on the bench which happened to be rather damp as it had been raining the night before, a big man with an angry red face strode towards him. Mr Trill
knew at once that he didn’t belong to the middle classes, but rather to the ranks of the labourers. For all he could tell he might have been a miner or a bus driver or a dustman but he
certainly didn’t belong among those who work with paper and pen and ink.

‘You the fellow who’s always giving my daughter sweets,’ said this craggy-faced apparition standing threateningly in front of Mr Trill and clenching and unclenching his fists
as if he was prepared to hit Mr Trill on the nose there and then.

‘I . . . ’ began Mr Trill. But before he could say any more the man – whatever his occupation was – had said,

‘Well, I want it stopped. Right? Stopped. You understand.’ And his stony head came quite close to Mr Trill’s. ‘Stopped you understand. Right. Kaput.’ And Mr Trill
had nodded his head violently whereupon the man had also nodded two or three times saying,

‘I know your sort, mate,’ and then had marched away leaving Mr Trill in a stunned silence. From that day on the little girl came no longer to the park and Mr Trill had to listen to
more nostalgic commentaries on the age from old men – and sometimes old women with shopping baskets – and felt more and more lost and weary. It occurred to him that perhaps he ought to
have been more combative when faced by the stony-headed man, perhaps he should have said that he wasn’t going to be pushed around by the likes of him, but Mr Trill knew that he wasn’t
the sort who would ever say any such words and so he declined into melancholy and despair. He had never fought back when he was in school and he would never do so in his old age. But what terrified
him most of all and prevented him for a while from returning to the park was that the stony-faced man had simply seen him as a dirty old fellow who was quite prepared to make a sexual assault on
his daughter, even though he was wearing a good suit and perfectly good shoes and was a scholar who knew about Homer and Vergil.

The unfairness and injustice of life! Could the man not have seen that he wasn’t like that at all but was on the contrary a person of refined tastes who knew Latin and Greek and would
never have lifted a finger to touch his child? Was that not entirely visible to him as Mr Trill sat there on the bench. But evidently it hadn’t been, evidently he had been assigned to a room
in the man’s mind in which old men, whoever they were and no matter what their occupation or past history, behaved like sexual maniacs whenever they saw a little girl.

How unfair, how unjust.

I am growing old, thought Mr Trill, I am growing old and tired. Autumn with its chill airs is gathering round me and its breezes are about to waft me to the place to which all men and women go
in the end.

And so Mr Trill ceased to visit the park and was never quite the same again. When he went out it was to sit in the library among the other old men and stare with blank wonder at the busts of the
big-nosed Romans that were perched on top of the shelves, while a newspaper lay neglected in front of him on the sloping table. And finally he never left the house at all.

As Mr Trill walked along it seemed to him that he did not feel at all tired. The air was mild, though not invigorating, and he felt as if he was strolling in the twilight
through a fair, though here there were no bright lights. What had happened to that other girl whose name he could not now remember, whom he had once walked with in just such a balmy twilight when
he was in university so long ago? Where had he met her? It must have been at one of the Greek or Latin classes. She was the first girl he had ever taken out. Or had he simply met her at the fair?
She had, he thought he remembered, blond hair, and she had turned out to be a good shot with the crooked rifles that they supplied there. What had she won again? A plate was it, or a little doll?
Something cheap anyway. They had gone on to the big wheel, he, Mr Trill, erect and dignified, turning over and over, spinning like a top, his heart in his mouth, while she had looked at him with a
joyful triumphant smile. How difficult it was to grasp the past, and remember oneself as one had been. Continually one lifted photographs from dusty tables and the faces were like ghosts,
inquiring, young, hopeful, belonging to an irretrievable world that one would never see again.

No, he could not remember her name, but she had been a student, that much was clear to him. He remembered her eye squinting along the rifle, the ducks marching placidly in line, and she picking
them off one by one till they had dropped and fallen away. And all the time there had been that tremendous vulgar music, the rotation of clusters of coloured bulbs, the stands decorated with
classical motifs, faces of wolves like those which had been involved in the foundation of Rome. The wheels turned dizzily in the twilight and the girls and boys passed by with vaguely white flowery
faces, as if they were blossoms set on invisible stems. Had he been happy that night? Was that why he remembered it? He had rolled pennies across boards but they had never come to rest on the
proper numbers: he had tried the darts but they had missed their targets. And all the time she had been at his side, laughing and happy. How long ago it all was. Had he ever really been at the fair
or was it all part of his imagination? As the days darkened so the lights brightened, so the sharp-eyed women behind the stalls came into clearer focus as they handed out their fixed and corrupt
guns. And even when she had won her prize how cheap it was. Yet the crooked rifles were raised to eternally hopeful eyes, the big wheel rose brilliantly over the horizon, the coins spun across the
slanted board. The fattest woman in the world, the haunted house, the train-ride through the tunnel. How carelessly people spent their money as if it would last forever while the voices shrieked
with happy laughter. In spite of the fact that one knew at every moment that one was being cheated, that the odds were stacked against one, that every gun was crooked, every dart was the wrong
weight, that it was only by a colossal fluke that one won even the tawdry presents that stared so cheaply out at one – nevertheless one spent money like water, like a king, for a sordid
little cardboard plate, or a picture of an unreal spring.