The Black Halo (50 page)

And then the slow walk home through the twilight as if one were swimming. He remembered standing with her – whoever she had been and whatever her name – under a blue light which
illuminated the porch of her house. Her face turned blue in the light and beyond the porch was the garden with its flowers wet with dew. The big house towered above him, it was late, and there were
no lights in the windows. It couldn’t have been lodgings, it must have been her own house. Was his own face as blue as hers? In the distance he could hear the noise of a bus fading. Otherwise
there was complete silence.

What had they spoken about?

‘Thank you for a lovely evening.’

‘Thank you for coming.’

Had they gazed into each other’s eyes with the infinite longing of the young? How blue her face was, with its alien blotches of light. That sight he could remember clearly. The wheel had
stopped turning and now they were standing on foreign earth again and facing each other in the silence where his heart beat. Had she put her face forward to be kissed? Had either he or she
prolonged the conversation trying to think of something new to say while the magical silence lasted, the silence which was teeming with possibilities as a quiet loch with fish.

Where did you learn to shoot?

But all the time he was thinking something else. Should I dare or not? Should I kiss her? Have I the courage? Who are you, dear youth, whom I can hardly recall? Where have you gone? You are so
clumsy, so hesitant, so pale. In your eyes there is an unfathomable hope, an innocence that will not return again. And you are standing there in the middle of the resonant silence. And if you kiss
her perhaps that will change everything.

And he hadn’t. He remembered that he had turned away, his feet making a rustling noise on the gravel just as, much later, they had done in the cemetery when his father had been buried and
he with the others turned away. The sound of the gravel was life beginning again.

So he had left her without turning back, without waving, and he had heard a door closing gently behind him. And so he had walked home to his lodgings, to that house in which the old man –
the landlady’s father – still waited, with his sharp inquisitive ratlike face, and his little hostile grunt, as if he were a small Cerberus, waiting though not barking, just grunting
feebly among the shadows.

And he had climbed the stairs and watched the moon through the windows of his attic room among the furniture which the spoilt cat sometimes scratched. He had lain on his back watching the moon
with its terrifying scrutinising eye moving stormily in and out of the clouds, creating coppery shapes, figures with ruffs hammered out of cloudy copper, faces, monstrous bodies, wings. Beautiful
moon, how long you have existed, moon of lovers, staring paralysing moon whose relentless eye seems to see into the heart of men, moon which Perseus swings on his arm as if it were a stone on the
end of a sling.

The bathroom chain was pulled and then there was silence. The old man had finally gone to bed and the house was at peace. The blue face hovered in front of his eyes, distinct, untouchable, and
he turned over, his head on the cold white pillow, a nocturnal monk. But in the morning he had forgotten all about it, and had gone to classes as usual as if nothing had happened, and he had turned
to his books again, even to Catullus, as if the fair had never existed, as if the haunted house, the tunnel of lovers, no long existed. As if the blue face did not exist.

But it had existed. It had been another decisive moment in his life, a vision of reality which had faded as the blue light and the moon had faded. For he had not made any move, he had remained
where he was, in the midst of his own existence.

He sensed a crowd of shades around him, and it seemed that they all had a definite destination in mind.

‘Where . . . ’ he began but nobody listened to him, as they pushed past him while he stood there hesitantly with his case in his hand.

Eventually he was able to ask a small wrinkled man what was happening.

‘It’s Agamemnon and Achilles,’ he said. ‘Every Friday they have a slanging match. Each one stands on his own hill and then they shout across at each other.’

‘Every Friday,’ said Trill in amazement.

‘That’s right,’ said the small man. ‘That’s what they do. It’s what you might call a tradition.’

Mr Trill followed him. Soon he found that a space of grass had been left vacant but that all round this area people were sitting or standing expectantly.

‘Excuse me,’ he said continually, as he tried to force himself towards the front. But there was no need for him to be so anxious for on both sides of the space there were two
gradually sloping hills, and as he watched he noticed that first from one side there came a warrior dressed in armour of complete black followed by his minions. Could this then be the great
Achilles? He was tall and towering and his presence felt like death itself, huge and invincible. It was as if there poured from him deep dark rays of menace and power which drained the life from
the spectators. He was still wearing his helmet, also black, and carrying at his side a huge spear.

From the other side there appeared another tall man but less tall than Achilles. His armour was bluish and his shield flashed and glittered in the dim light. His face also appeared commanding
but not with the inner authority that blazed contemptuously from the eyes of Achilles, rather with a power that had been bestowed on him by others.

They came to a halt each on his own hill.

‘Ha ha,’ said Achilles, ‘so she killed you when you didn’t expect it.’

And he laughed hugely while his minions echoed his laughter, some of them doubled over and slapping their knees.

‘It’s none of your business,’ said Agamemnon but looking embarrassed as if he had been caught in a shameful act.

‘Well, you deserved it,’ said Achilles. ‘You were pretty useless as a commander anyway.’

‘I had to keep the army together and you were too temperamental to be of much help. You only helped when we were already winning.’

‘That’s a lie,’ shouted Achilles angrily, ‘and you know it. But then you were always a liar. You were being beaten back to the ships when I came to your assistance. And
did you not send a messenger to me pleading with me to come back?’

‘I only did that because the army asked me to do so.’

‘Your army asked you!
Your
army!’ said Achilles mockingly. ‘And if it hadn’t been for your pettiness in taking my concubine away from me I would have fought from
the very beginning. The trouble about you is that you can’t handle men.’

‘And the trouble about you is that all you care about is your own vanity,’ shouted Agamemnon. ‘You only think about yourself. You the great “star” who must be
humoured like a child.’

‘Yes, and you spoke to me as if I was a child.’

‘So you were, a child.’

‘I wasn’t a child. I was the one who killed Hector if you remember. I cut his head off and threw a dozen Trojans on the pyre to keep Patroclus company.’

‘That may be but you sulked like a girl for years while we bore the brunt of the fight. Wasn’t it Ajax who was the great warrior in those days?’

‘Ajax! You were glad enough to send me presents and my concubine back when you needed me and when Hector was causing havoc at the ships. You were frightened that you would lose the war and
go back home with your tail between your legs. You the great commander! But it was I who saved you and don’t you forget it.’

‘The fact is,’ said Agamemnon, ‘if Patroclus hadn’t been killed you wouldn’t have come out of your tent. He was your real concubine.’

Achilles’s terrible eyes seemed to dilate and his whole body in his black armour swelled with rage as he shouted.

‘Why, you pathetic little man, if it wasn’t for me you would have lost the war and you know it. The whole army knows it. What did you or your famous brother Menelaus do when Helen
was stolen from him? No, it was left to me to save your reputation. You may look terrifying to others but not to me.’

‘My brother Menelaus fought as well as any man and later he enjoyed Helen when he took her back to Greece.’

‘And what about your own wife? Did you enjoy her? What about her lover who held a dagger behind his back for you as they unrolled the red carpet? Why, you are nothing but a
fool.’

And again the minions of Achilles laughed out loud clapping each other on the back and slapping their knees while the noise of their mockery was like that of a big stone rolling downhill.

‘You may laugh,’ said Agamemnon, ‘but even you yourself had your weakness. You were not immortal as you thought you were. And after all what was your bravery but that which the
goddess gave you?’

This thrust went down well with Agamemnon’s followers who like those of the other side began to laugh immoderately. When Trill looked around him into the dimness he saw the spectators
laughing too, some taking Agamemnon’s side, some Achilles’. Their starved bored faces were twisted with hate and rancour.

‘You were being cuckolded while you were away in the army wearing your campaign ribbons,’ shouted Achilles. ‘Your wife’s lover served your wife as if she was a
cow.’

‘It’s hotting up now,’ said the small man with the bitter sharp eyes. ‘Now they’ll go at each other.’

‘And what will happen then?’ said Mr Trill.

‘Nothing. They will just go back with their followers to where they were before. That’s all.’

‘You mean that they don’t fight,’ said Mr Trill.

‘No. Not at all. Sh,’ said the small man impatiently.

‘You compare me to a girl in a tent,’ said Achilles. ‘It’s you who were the girl fighting for ten years for a woman’s tits. A whore like all the others.’

‘And why then were you so fond of your own whore that you wouldn’t fight because I took her away from you.’

‘
You
took her away from me! Why you streak of dog’s spit I could have killed you if I’d wanted to. In the end it was only by a trick that you won the war.’

‘You were too stupid to think of a trick.’

‘I wasn’t as stupid as you. Walking around the camp with your staff and your papers. You were always jealous of me. You didn’t want another soldier in the army as great as
yourself unless it was Ajax who was as stupid as you. And at the end you got what you deserved, you self-important staff officer. You and your brother were both tricked by women. Ha ha ha.’
And his laughter rolled like big stones among the phantom crowd.

‘You are a laughing stock,’ he shouted. ‘Anyone who wears beautiful armour like you must be a laughing stock.’

‘And you didn’t want to serve under anyone else, isn’t that right?’ said Agamemnon. ‘You didn’t want to take the responsibility. You are nothing but a
blockhead descended from a goddess as you say you are. Isn’t that right?’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘Will they go on like this for a long time?’ asked Mr Trill who was reminded of himself picking the petals of a flower in his youth and repeating the same monosyllables as these two
great antique captains.

‘Yes, they will go on like this till one of them gives up.’

‘And which one gives up?’

‘I never wait to see.’

‘Do the others wait?’

‘Some do, some don’t.’

‘I see.’

And Mr Trill got to his feet and wandered away till he could no longer hear the voices of the two soldiers. So this was what Achilles and Agamemnon had been like, shouting at each other like two
bad-tempered boys.

What an extraordinary thing. Fighting each other over trivialities while the war raged around them. And yet perhaps that was how all wars were, life itself, even. He sat and thought about it for
a long time. Was that really the substance of honour, fighting for the slightest thing, for a feather, for a rag of insult?

And all the time he had been thinking of them as two great invincible heroes who had fought for their country with complete dedication.

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

The words echoed back from his own childhood, from his schooldays, conkers on an autumn day.

He sighed heavily. What word, what picture, was now sacred, when all ideals were tumbling about him like a pack of cards.

He could hear the voice of his mother. ‘What are you doing reading those books all the time? Why can’t you look around you? There’s a garden to be done and the shed to be
painted. But no, you spend all your time reading. Idleness, if you ask me.’

And Mr Trill sat by himself in the dim shade, almost weeping, for it seemed to him that he had misspent his whole life, which had been a phantom one, far from the immediacies of the day. If
only, he thought, if only I had enjoyed myself instead of locking myself away with my books. If only I had fought for my rights in the glare and heat of a life that after all only came once. His
mother went out helmeted towards the street, to fight her little daily war against the headmaster’s wife, who wouldn’t speak to her. Her bony face thrust itself forward into the
sunlight, and her knuckles whitened with rage, for the honour of the woman who had served in the canteen, with the scarf wound round her head like a flag among the dishes and the tables wet with
tea and soup.

‘O my God,’ thought Mr Trill putting his head in his hands.

‘I think,’ said Mr Watt the new headmaster, the man whom Mr Trill called the Bingo Caesar, ‘that it would be a good idea if that boy Anderson were not to be
given seven periods of your time for Greek this year. What do you say?’

He’s only been here for six months, said Mr Trill to himself. I don’t like him, and I think he’s an inadequate fraud, not in any way to be compared with the great Roman
headmasters we had before him, but nevertheless I must try to make things easier for him. After all he must feel this himself, that in scholarship, gentlemanliness, elegance of thought, he is
inferior, and so I must help him.

‘What do you suggest then, headmaster?’ he asked him. What a comedian this man was, how could he ever have believed that he would fill the shoes of those who had gone before him and
who had emerged from the Graeco-Roman world as civilised and liberal beings. Why, this man had emerged from the world of – chemistry. He was large and bear-like, blunt and tactless,
scholarship had not mellowed him nor made him humble. Perhaps his wife had pushed him to where he was now. Perhaps the undeviating road of ambition had showed him at last this post which was
clearly too big for him.