The Black Halo (80 page)

He wandered aimlessly along the street, and glanced at a head set in a wall, its mouth open in stone. You could see many of these heads, ancient and flaking, sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful.
He saw in one of the souvenir shops which was still open an old woman, dressed in black, who seemed to be arguing with a patient shopkeeper about money while two other women looked in laughing.

He walked down to the shore. There were lights in the harbour and people walking up and down the promenade. A boy and a girl strolled past, arm in arm. Outside a hotel a violinist and a pianist
were playing to customers seated at tables in the open air. Now and again the pianist would raise his head and smile and then lower his eyes to the keyboard again. Ralph felt the shell shifting
slowly and inexorably from his back, and he shivered. He wanted a big stone under which he could crawl but whenever he saw such a stone he also saw a tiny man underneath it reading a book. And
towards this man a mermaid was swimming but the man ignored her even though she had green scales and long fair hair.

Ralph didn’t want to go back to the hotel at any price. He didn’t want to climb the stair and listen to the voices of his father and mother in one of their fierce quarrels. He
didn’t want to see his mother sitting with the Scandinavians drinking and laughing. He didn’t want to see his father reading. He didn’t want to go back at all. He wondered why
this had never occurred to him before. How could he have been so stupid? It was all quite simple really, he wouldn’t go back.

He sat on a bench in the cool of the evening beside a man who had a head as red as a tomato. The man turned towards him and Ralph rose quickly from the bench for he hadn’t liked the
expression on the man’s face. He walked along the promenade and it seemed to him that he was tired of the life he was leading. It seemed to him that he had been in this holiday resort for
centuries and that he didn’t like it at all. Nobody had really asked him whether he had wanted to come here in the first place.

But most of all he was tired of the quarrels and the rages. He was so tired that he couldn’t tell how tired he was. He was tired of seeing his father’s white face, he was tired of
his mother’s laughter. Wherever they went it was always the same, his mother laughing and talking with other men, his father reading a book: he was tired of it all. He despised his father and
thought that his mother was a stupid woman. As well as that he didn’t like the food in the hotel. It was giving him stomach ache.

He looked up at the sky and there was the moon with rays streaming from it like his mother’s hair, and there was a chair formed by stars where his father sat. Then he thought of the moon
as a stone on the end of a sling.

On a sudden impulse he pulled a postcard from his pocket. On it he wrote, ‘Wish you were here’, and addressed it to himself. Then he put it back into his pocket again.

After he had done this he walked away from the town in the direction of the rocks which were now deserted. The night was calm and still and warm. Very slowly he peeled off his clothes, and got
into the water. Out there somewhere was the yacht. As he was removing his clothes he was imagining the yacht: it was beyond the range of people, their noise and hubbub, and he knew that if there
were people on it it would be ones who had chosen to stay on the edge of things, at the far horizon. And perhaps there weren’t any people on it at all. He eased himself into the warm water
and began to swim. Slowly the town distanced itself from him with all its twinkling lights. He was sure that once from the hotel he could hear his mother’s laughter. But he kept on swimming.
He was learning to be a butterfly but first he had to be an ant.

All during the war with Hitler Mr George Collins, MA, kept his Record of Work. Others might say, It may be that we will not be here next year, it may be that the Nazis will
have got us, but Mr Collins didn’t seem to listen to them. ‘In spite of Hitler the earth turns around the sun and the crops grow,’ he would say. ‘You wait and
see.’

He was an English teacher and had been so for years and years. The pupils quite liked him because when Macbeth killed Duncan in the play he would take out his ruler and stab the desk with it
over and over.

He always had chalk on his gown which was holed with mysterious fissures, possibly made by nails which had caught in it. He went to all the school dances and sat patiently by the wall, dressed
in what appeared to be his Sunday best. He had however never married.

He wrote meticulously in his Record of Work:

and drew a red line neatly below every entry.

Nobody knew what he did with himself when he was not in school but it was said that he read a lot, and was very learned. To his first year he gave out books by Henty and to his third year the
novels of Sir Walter Scott.

‘Old Mortality, there’s a novel for you,’ he would say. His favourite poem was ‘Kilmeny’ by Hogg.

But the high spot of the year was his murder of the desk with his ruler. On that particular day he would stab and stab with the ruler while the class was in ecstasies.

‘In his sleep he was murdered,’ he would say. ‘A man should not be murdered in his sleep.’

His best recitation was,

‘But it’s not a petty pace,’ he would add. ‘Not at all a petty pace.’

Sometimes he would tell his classes stories. ‘I remember,’ he would say, ‘we had a teacher once and he would punch you if you gave the wrong answer. Imagine that. Punch you in
the stomach. He was a mathematics teacher. Everyone knew his theorems, I can tell you.’ But he himself would never dream of punching anyone in the stomach. As a matter of fact he looked
rather frail.

He spent a lot of time on his Record of Work book as if when he died this would be an important elegant memorial to him. His writing was beautiful, his entries orderly with no errors in them,
and his register was just as neat.

‘A man who keeps his register tidy can’t go far wrong,’ he would say. When other teachers at the end of the session couldn’t bring their additions into harmony with each
other, he was openly derisive. He insisted on knowing the full exact name of every pupil. ‘After all we must have identification,’ he would say. ‘We must know who everyone
is.’

He was perhaps the only teacher in the school who could distinguish between the Morrison twins who were so alike it was quite frightening. Why, they even wore the same kinds of clothes and
combed their hair in exactly the same way.

But he could not be deceived.

Even in the darkest days of the war when it seemed that Hitler’s triumph was inevitable he would continue his patient entries. Even during Dunkirk, Stalingrad, Rommel’s victories in
the desert, he never deviated from this routine.

To the rest of us it was all rather ridiculous. Why, some day his Record of Work would be dust and ashes while the shape of the world would have been changed in the interval.

He never missed a day’s school during the war years. He never joined the Home Guard, or the LDV as it was originally called, saying that he was not a military man, that war was not his
forte.

His writing on the blackboard was invariably neat and legible and he was always in his room before his class came in. ‘That is very important,’ he would say. ‘You must show
diligence. Otherwise what can you expect of the children?’

One day when he came into the room some children had written his nickname on the blackboard. He asked a few members of the class if they knew who it was but when they could not tell him he
smiled. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Don’t you tell on your friends.’ In actual fact the boy who had written his nickname on the blackboard was a newcomer who had
been ticked off for not being able to give an example of an Adverbial Clause of Time.

‘What I will do,’ said Mr Collins, ‘is write all your nicknames on the board,’ and this he proceeded to do.

When the war ended he was sixty-four years of age and quite frail. Unlike the others he did not celebrate. It was as if he had known all the time that Hitler would be defeated. On the day of his
retirement from the school he read some of the entries from his Record of Work book:

and so on. It made an interesting impression on the other teachers who thought he was quite crazy. It was odd to think that grammar could be synchronised with Hitler’s
advances and retreats.

By that time education in English literature had changed. There was a new emphasis on the imagination, even though spelling declined. ‘I’m glad I am leaving,’ said Mr Collins.
‘I have seen the golden age of teaching. Anything else would be an anticlimax.’

I see them through the window. There are two of them and they have crewcuts and they are bending down in the cold autumn day, gathering leaves and putting them in a
wheelbarrow. They look alien as if they have not quite graduated to humanity. Whenever their faces are turned towards me they look white and blank like loaves.

This is the end of the world: there can be nothing worse, nothing further on. I am frightened that one of these days I shall be where they are, in that other ward of which I have heard so much,
in that other room where there is noise, din, bedlam. I don’t think I can bear that thought, though I can bear being here, just.

Here in my ward the faces aren’t so grossly blank, here at least there is the glimmer of intelligence. And sometimes here too we have discussions: we had one the other day about the soul,
about consciousness. It is true that Simmons thinks he is the incarnation of Heydrich and says we should put the canteen staff up against the wall and shoot them because of their bad cooking and
their obvious Jewishness. And there is old trembling Mason who endlessly paces his room, counting each step meticulously. And the woman I call Lady Macbeth with the white disordered hair who is
always silent, always expressionless.

Then there is Wilson who is writing his history of the world. This is his second time in here, perhaps because there is too much history for him to master, especially as his wife is not
interested in it and is liable to put important documents in bins. His house, he tells me, is awash with cuttings from newspapers, books, magazines. He tried to kill himself with aspirins since
naturally the doctor won’t give him large supplies of sleeping tablets any more.

Then there is young Briggs, noisy, arrogant, negligent, whom the nurses can never get up in the morning. He rolls over on his bed away from the light. He has a record called ‘The
Mindbenders’ and he refuses to take his pills because he maintains they make him impotent.

As for me I believed that my wife was spying on me, that she displaced the pages of my novel, that she tore up the phone book, that she disliked me for my perceptiveness and intelligence. Of
course, like the others here, I tried to kill myself. I took a handful of sleeping tablets in a wood on an autumn day. I lay down as if to sleep but I was wakened again. And here I am.

I am rather better than I was. When I came in here first I thought that the nurses and the doctors were all in the pay of my wife: I thought they were hired actors, theatrical people. I admired
their professionalism in a remote way. Now I no longer believe that they are fakes. I am sane and soon I shall be allowed out. I am now being permitted to leave the hospital for an hour or so at a
time.

Today in the cold autumn weather, as I watch these two men collecting the leaves, I am bothered by an enigma, a question. It is like an itch that I can’t get at. I haven’t suffered
enough. That is what I feel. We sit about so much, sometimes on our beds, sometimes on hard wooden chairs, we drink coffee, we talk. But we are not really alive. I do not feel authentic.

I sometimes have visitors, my brother and his wife often, but they seem so unhelpful. How can they possibly understand what I feel? They talk to me as if I were a child, I who have waves of
infernal fire around me. They are so innocent, they tell me that I will be out in another week, they bring me cigarettes and sweets. We talk about gardening, about the restful paintings on the
walls. Sometimes I catch them looking at me with an intent seriousness, but most of the time they chat about trivial things. I tell them straight out that I have been mad, but they do not really
understand what that means. They have never felt reality bending in front of them like plasticine.

If it is my brother I will say to him, ‘How is my wife? How is Diana?’

‘Fine,’ he will say. ‘She will come and see you tomorrow.’ But she doesn’t come as often as I would wish. Why should she? I would have killed her if I had had the
chance. She is frightened of me and with good reason.

And soon I will be out of here and I will see her again, perhaps in a week’s time. I think the psychiatrist is pleased with me. I have stopped insulting Diana over the phone. I know that
she has done nothing to me, that she has tried to help me. I now know that it must have been myself who tore the phone book in two, with the strength of a maniac. Which is what she told me, which
is what the psychiatrist told me as well. Of course I must have done it, only I can’t remember.

What I think now is this. I was bored, so my subconscious invented a plot. I built a story of a treacherous wife, of hired nurses, of false doctors, of inauthentic psychiatrists. Soon I shall
have to fashion new inventions.

Yesterday when I was walking back to the hospital from the newsagents I stopped and looked at it for the first time. Architecturally it resembles a college or a church with its twin towers
flanking the grey entrance. Every day now I pass that other section of the hospital where the worse cases are, as for instance those two who are bending down to pick up the leaves, the loaf-shaped
ones and yet I have heard no din from those wards.