The Black Halo (52 page)

‘One day I lost control of myself and I told her all this. And who took her side? I will tell you. It was Hector. One day I said to her, “Why don’t you go and give yourself to
Menelaus, and the Greeks can go home?” But she only looked up from her mirror and smiled for though she was beautiful she was stupid. I could have torn her eyes out. I could have scratched
her face to make her less lovely than she was. But who was it who stopped me? It was Hector, my own husband. It was the same Hector who must go and die for her, for a girl – I cannot even
call her a woman – who didn’t care. What was it to her that I would be without a husband? She had seen many husbands die and one more wouldn’t make any difference. And as she was
the most beautiful girl in the world so Hector was the greatest soldier. And he loved her. O I know that he loved her. He told me that he didn’t, he insisted that he didn’t, but I knew
that he did. A woman cannot be deceived. He saw me as old and wrinkled, and he saw her in the dew and blossom of her youth. How could he not love her? I have no proof that he slept with her, that I
do not know. But I do know that he loved her. When he didn’t think that I was looking at him, his eyes would follow her about the palace and she would walk with her swaying woman’s
walk. I knew what she was doing but Hector did not know. One night I accused him of being in love with her. I said that if he wished to leave me he could do so. If he thought me old he should find
someone younger. “I am not keeping you back,” I told him. For I was insane with jealousy. And why should I not be? I knew that he loved her though he refused to admit this to himself,
and yet he was going out to die for her, leaving me alone to take all the responsibility. Who would blame me for my jealousy?

‘I remember the morning he left and went out of the gate of the palace for the last time. Though he was trembling he looked heroic. The palace and the people depended on him. He knew that
and everyone knew it. Only Priam and Hecuba and I were sure that he would not live, for who could survive an encounter with Achilles? His armour suited him, he looked handsome and radiant. Only I
was aware of the fact that he had been trembling, for of course being his wife I knew everything. And then as he was leaving he kissed us all. He kissed me first and then Hecuba and Helen. Lightly,
as it seemed to me, on the lip as if she were his sister. But that was only what he wished us all to think. I on the other hand knew that the kiss was a more meaningful one than that. I knew that
she was the only one among us whom he would have wished to kiss with passion though he restrained himself. I knew that it was she alone whom he loved. And she too realised it and turned to me with
her blazing triumphant eyes and at that moment I could have killed her. But being who I was I had to remain silent. I had to preserve my dignity to the end as Hector had to preserve his courage,
the image of the great soldier and hero, even though he was going to his death and knew it. Never have I suffered so much in my life before or since, seeing my husband setting out to fight a great
soldier and a god, for a woman younger and more beautiful than me, and knowing that he was setting out with a lie in his heart. How beautiful that day was, how blue, how calm, and how terrible was
the beating of my heart. It was Helen who waved gaily to him as he turned for the last time with his puzzled face and his brow which I knew would be wrinkling under his helmet.

‘My love my love I cried to him. And then I heard the scream, like the scream of an animal in agony, and when I turned and looked it was as if Helen was trembling with ecstasy as she might
have done in the marriage bed. Her eyes were large and very clear and yet at the same time turned inwards on themselves and her lips were large and full and soft and her whole body was trembling as
if at the height of love. I cannot tell you what I felt at that moment for I knew that she was an animal in heat and that she wished to go out and give herself to the victor Achilles in the prime
of his courage and his triumph.

‘I could have slapped her face, I could have bitten her ear off, but in spite of all my rage, I had to maintain my dignity, for there was much to be done, Priam and Hecuba to be looked
after, and my child to be pacified. I could have turned into a stone that morning but I didn’t.

‘I could have dropped down dead where I was, but I could not afford even that, there was too much to do.

‘And that is what broke my heart, that Hector loved Helen and he had gone out from me with a lie in his heart. Perhaps he had never slept with her but nevertheless the lie was in his mind.
His love had passed from me to her, from age to youth.’

She became silent under the shadow of the leaves and Mr Trill felt a desolation in his heart as if it had been pierced. He wanted to say something but there was nothing that he could say. All he
could do was bow his head in front of that suffering, while the woman’s silence swelled and swelled as if it would overwhelm him totally. And there together they sat in the dark shade of the
trees, each thinking his thoughts till finally with a deep sigh the woman rose and left him.

At the age of thirty-four Mr Trill had fallen in love with one of his pupils, a girl called Thelma who had long blond hair worn in a pigtail. At first Mr Trill did not know
that he was in love for he had never been in love before. It was only when he realised that he was extremely sad when Thelma was absent from his class that he finally knew that he was in love. The
only problem was that Thelma was at the most seventeen. Mr Trill began to re-read Catullus in his room at night but could find in that famous Latin poet only salacity and not the pure true language
that he craved. For his love was agonisingly sweet and weighted with youth and mortality. It was as if Thelma’s youth, its imagined pains and terrors and exquisite joys, was a sign of
eternity that concerned itself only with the soul.

As he bent over her jotter to see how she had translated a passage from Livy that he had set, it seemed to him that a faint perfume wafted from her that did not belong to her as such but to a
kingdom of which she was simply an emanation. And this was especially so on summer mornings when the mist had not yet been dispersed, and he saw her enter the room in her blue blazer and skirt as
if she were not a woman at all, but the spirit of eternal youth, a youth that had forever passed from Mr Trill and which he could hardly remember.

In all the time however that Mr Trill was in love with Thelma he in no way made any advances to her since to him youth was sacred, and especially so as he was a teacher. Thus he sighed in secret
and his heart bled in private. At night when he lay in bed he thought of Thelma as of some unattainable star which shone straight into his bedroom from unimaginable distances, a kind of Diana, a
huntress connected with spring woods and delicate waters.

How happy Mr Trill was in those days and how well, in his opinion, he taught. It was as if he was inspired and his happiness in the presence of Thelma reflected on to her fortunate class. She
was the daughter of a man who worked in the local agricultural office, though Mr Trill of course could not believe this. She was no more his daughter than she was Persephone. She was flesh and
blood but she was more than that. Her perfume was that of the Muses as they disported themselves around Helicon.

He found ways of lending her books which in fact she did not read – books with titles like
The Greek Mind
or
The Thought of Greece
– but she was not interested in
the classics, and her brightness was not in any case exceptional. Nevertheless Mr Trill saw signs in her exercises of a budding brilliance. In her presence words like ‘mensa’ and
‘insula’ had a music of their own, and, once gaunt and antique, became vernal and tender. Sometimes he would sit on his tall barren chair wondering how he could get through the day
without seeing her again.

At times he would dream that he might some day marry her, but these times occurred only rarely for to him she was not a being of flesh and blood such that he could imagine her as a wife,
whatever that might be like, but as an inspiration and guide through the banality of the days, a sort of Beatrice. If only she would remain as she always was, in that breathless moment when beauty
is poised at its height before it begins to tremble and waver and finally fall like a dewdrop from a branch in the early morning when the gossamer webs are drifting in the breeze.

Not a sign however did Thelma give that she loved him in return or was at all occupied with these omens and portents of eternity. Not a sign did she give that his scholarship was devoted to her,
that all he was and all he possessed he was willing to lay in a moment at her feet. If Mr Trill had been in the habit of going to school dances he would have attended them for her sake alone but he
could not bring himself to do that, for his mirror, as he thought, taught him his unworthiness. Why, he had seen too much of the world for her to love him. He was soiled with knowledge and irony
and rancour. And he was too old for her.

He existed in what only could be called a mist of love since his love had no reality in the world around him, was not anchored in it, and could not issue in any fruition. If she was spring he
was autumn, and if she had suddenly said to him at some moment charged with significance that she was his forever he would probably have run away, his gown floating behind him. For he craved the
pure and impossible which he saw only in her.

Not that some of the other pupils were not sharp-eyed and malicious enough to see what was happening. They all said that old Trill was in love with Thelma and teased her with their knowledge.
And Thelma was in one way proud and in another embarrassed. For it could not be said that Mr Trill was handsome nor that his teaching though enthusiastic was interesting. Her own interests were in
romantic books and horoscopes. Mr Trill, whose knowledge of classics was devoted and pure, would have been horrified if he had known the quality of the magazines that she devoured every weekend and
how firmly she believed that the stars controlled her every action. If in fact she had been in love with Mr Trill she would have searched her horoscopes for signs and omens, she would have asked
her aunt to read her tea leaves for her, she would have seen the whole world as an open book trembling with apparitions. The slightest action such as breaking a cup would have been prodigal of
supernatural signals and her diary would have been as important to her as Vergil was to him. But Mr Trill remained in ignorance of that world of possible commotions and storms, pullings of hair and
jealousies, for to Mr Trill the universe was an ordered place which now and again throbbed with lines from the great poets who had never felt in their whole lives despairs and terrors but had been
inspired to their highest flights by the gods themselves.

Was it perhaps that Mr Trill, sensing that his youth was leaving him, committed all his feelings to that one girl representative to him of all youth, or was it that he was truly in love? Who can
tell? It is certain that if she had been ill he would have been able – if he had been asked – to wait patiently at her bedside for hours and days on end. But as for her days of health
what could he do during them? She was certainly pretty with her fair pigtail, her pale face with very blue eyes, her long slender neck, her blue blazer and her blue skirt. She was like a ship that
is ready to leave harbour and enter the mist that shrouds all youth when it sets off on its journey. How he would have protected her in his imagination from that hollow journey from which he could
see great suffering and difficulties springing, similar in fact to the ones that he had endured himself.

If he had only known her as she really was, her hurried glances at unfinished homework, her concern with hockey, her wish that one day she would have a pretty house, nice clothes and crystal
vases, and her total attention to the banalities emitted by disc jockeys in the early hours of the morning before she went to school. If he had only seen her mind that was totally ordinary, and
realised that never once did she think of Vergil after she had finished her set work for the day and that she panicked totally when she was faced by a difficult problem in mathematics. If he had
seen her when she was dressing for a school dance pirouetting in front of the long mirror in the corridor. If he had seen her when she was quarrelling with her younger brother at breakfast every
morning while she grabbed at the last minute the thin slice of toast that was her only sustenance at that time of day since she was looking after her figure. If he had seen her mind which was a
storehouse of miscellaneous information and feelings, like an antique shop which is cluttered with all sorts of goods leaning crazily against each other, mirrors, mattresses, wardrobes, pillows and
hundreds of other articles which have settled there as naturally as snow.

But he did not see this, he only saw her in his classroom when the sun shone through the window on to her hair, making it radiant and pure, flawless and perfect. If he had seen the treachery of
which she was capable, the tantrums, the jealousies, but, no, he saw none of these.

Sometimes he tried to catch her eye, but she always looked away. Was it perhaps that she had not seen him? Was it that she was dreaming some impossible dream of youth? Was it, dreadful thought,
that she did not really like him? But at least he could test that by marking her jotter, by being close to her, by, most daring action of all, sitting beside her at the same desk.

And soon she would be leaving the school altogether, soon she would be setting out on her temporal voyage after her eternity of dreaming, and he would never see her again. The days were passing
and the end of the session was approaching. How his heart beat as if it wished to squeeze a value out of every passing moment. Soon the last bell would toll and she would walk out of the gates with
her school bag over her shoulder, over her arm, among all the other ex-prefects and ordinary scholars. Soon she would enter the summer after her spring. And for these months, these weeks, these
days, the desks glittered as if with a supernatural radiance, and Mr Trill spent himself on poetry and rhetoric. The days passed, the bells rang, the hours were devoured. Soon the school would be a
dark place again without illumination. My youth, my youth, is going, thought Mr Trill.