The Black Halo (56 page)

The hoovering had ceased and the ward was silent. I am lying here like an effigy, thought Mr Trill. Should I try to get up or not? But he did not wish to get up. He wished to lie where he was,
resting, happy. The boy with the hole in his heart lay sleeping peacefully opposite him, his fair hair strewn over the pillows. It seemed unjust that he should suffer when he was so young.

Mr Trill looked out of the window which was open. He saw two boys throwing stones up into a tree so that the chestnuts would fall down. When they did so they put them in a bag which they were
carrying. A minister with long hurrying strides passed the window. The sky was perfectly blue without a cloud in it. Early November was exact and accurate and clear. I am dying, he thought, and I
have never loved anyone and there is no one who will grieve for me. My funeral will be bare and diminished.

Yet I am not frightened. Isn’t that odd? It is as if all the time I was thinking not about myself but about someone else. He felt his heart pattering, and listened to it as to an old
friend who was finally letting him down. Patter patter, hammer hammer, beat beat. They say that the heart is the centre of love, but I have never felt that. I never used to notice it much, it was
there when I needed it. Now when it is failing me I notice it. How much we take for granted in this world, that we shall live forever, that our bodies will remain our indefatigable servants. He
remembered the oxygen tent, the hard serious breathing, but again it was as if he was thinking of someone else, as sometimes one may look at an early photograph of oneself standing on a sideboard
and one may not for a moment recognise it. He felt his face which was stubbly and unshaven, like a field of autumn corn. He wondered what he looked like. His pyjamas felt larger than they had
previously done, so presumably he had lost weight. The watch had disappeared from his hand. None of his clothes were to be seen anywhere. It was as if he had arrived in the final place where all
must be confiscated, where the only values are physical, how much of flesh and bone and blood can still survive.

The ward was beginning to waken up. Now he could see a nurse examining a thermometer, thin and silver in the sunlight. Very faintly he could hear laughter from the lounge where the colour
television was. Soon perhaps they would get him out of bed and he would sit with the others staring at that oddly distant screen. The nurses would smile and laugh and joke, they would walk about
with such great energy and speed, as if they did not wish their patients to have any time to think.

The world would assume the noise and din of normality. Nevertheless his heart was beginning to hammer again, as if a blacksmith were forging some new iron thing on an anvil of deep black, as if
a train were accelerating steadily on an autumn day when the flowers are tall and red and wasteful beside the rusty rails. It was as if he was rocking from side to side down a forgotten siding. I
am feeling dizzy, he thought, something is happening to me. Is this it then? Is that unimaginable pain going to pierce me again?

He waved frantically as no words would come out. The nurse continued to regard the thermometer as if it were a tiny silver fish she had caught and which she was studying for size. The rackety
old train was bouncing up and down. Somewhere down there was a black tunnel which, when he entered it, would make the carriage dense and thick and dark so that he could no longer see the pictures
on the wall, the blossoming flowers in their sparkling vases.

He waved again and someone came. Then they were all about him. A face was bending over him, fresh and young and inquiring. His face and that other face were very close, close enough almost to
kiss. A hand was clutching at his own: he hung on as if he were clinging to the side of a raft. How marvellous, he thought, that we should help each other, that in spite of hatred and insult and
anger there are those who rush to one’s side when it is necessary. How marvellous that they are not simply professional people but that they expend their own precious store of love and pity
on perfect strangers. How truly amazing the world is, how bad and how good, and how, in spite of all, more good than bad. It was now as if he was seeing flashes as from a tall lighthouse searching
a dark sea. Steadily they came, then faster and faster.

At that moment it was as if he were a well full of water, of love, as if a full tide were rising inside him. I love you all, all you fallen ones, all you autumn ones. We are all in the same
boat, but the lighthouse is sending out its flashes, mortal meagre hands are blessing me, hands which have curved round the handle of a hoover, examined a thermometer, emptied bed pans. We do not
deserve such care, such love. In spite of their petty quarrels, their envies, the unambitious ones help one at the end. He felt tears slowly trickling down his face, and in front of him the young
stunned inquiring face was also wet with tears. He wanted to say, It’s not as bad as that. Though I’m dying I feel quite happy. Don’t worry. The eyes were so dear and so fresh and
so filled with light. They should not be seeing this, he thought. Then they were no longer there. There was nothing at all. And Mr Trill passed over into Hades.

Mr Trill was aware that the baying of the dogs across the other side of the water had ceased, and that a small boat was being rowed towards him across the water. When the boat
had reached his bank, a figure signed to him to enter it. Mr Trill looked around him to see if the invitation was to someone else, out the figure, still without speaking, signalled to him more
impatiently and, with his case in his hand, Mr Trill stepped into the boat. It did not take long to cross to the other side, and when they arrived the figure, unspeaking as before, led the way to
the large building that Mr Trill could see crouched in the vague prevailing mist. They passed a quadrangle and entered the building by a large creaking door. As Mr Trill stood in the hall where the
notice-boards were covered with notices, the figure silently slipped away.

As if knowing where he was, Mr Trill climbed the stair to the door of an office on which he knocked, hearing from an adjacent room the sound of typewriters. After a long pause a voice asked him
to come in, and when he did so he saw that seated behind a desk there was a small harried man in a black coat.

‘Ah, Mr Trill,’ said this man, ‘my name is Dubbins. I’m very glad to see you.’

Mr Dubbins rose from his seat and strode forward, putting out his hand. Mr Trill laid his case down and shook the hand extended to him.

‘You may go along to the staff-room in a minute,’ said Dubbins. ‘We are happy to have you. Very happy.’

I have been here before, thought Mr Trill, or if I haven’t it is very like a place which I have visited.

‘You are surprised,’ said Dubbins, ‘but you need not be. We have various alternatives to offer you.’

‘Alternatives?’

‘Naturally. You may stay with us which is one alternative.’

‘And the others?’

‘Another is to go back to your earlier life and continue your work there.’

‘And?’

‘The other is to go back where you came from.’

‘I see.’

‘There seems to have been a flaw in our organisation. We should have picked you up earlier. Still, that can’t be helped.’

‘What did the others do?’

‘Most chose to stay.’

‘And what is done here?’

‘Done? My dear fellow, nothing much is
done
. We read and discuss.’

‘I see.’

‘I think the best thing would be if I took you along. Do you not think so?’

‘I don’t mind.’

The headmaster looked round the office as if to make sure that he had forgotten nothing, and then the two of them walked along a corridor till they came to another door on which the headmaster
knocked. When they entered, the occupants of the room stood up as if they were flustered by the unexpected honour of the headmaster’s visit.

‘This is Simmons,’ said Dubbins, ‘and this Morrison, this is Andrews and this Burbridge.’ The names followed each other like a roll call, and finally Mr Trill ceased to
listen. All of them had been reading books when he entered and he noticed that all the books were classics such as
The Iliad
or Catullus’ poems.

Suddenly a small bald man began to speak. ‘Headmaster, I don’t think this is right. The place is becoming overcrowded already. Why are we bringing in another candidate? Soon we shall
not have enough room for ourselves and our books.’

‘This is Carter,’ said the headmaster, ‘and he is always complaining.’

In a corner by himself there sat another man whose face twitched continually.

‘That’s Harris,’ said Dubbins, ‘his nerves are bad.’

‘Now,’ he said, ‘if you wish to stay with the rest you can do so. All you require is a seat. You will be able to get any books you like from the library, and read them and
comment on them. Little discussions are held regularly. What’s that? Ah, another of our storms.’

Mr Trill could hear what seemed like hail beating against the window, and beyond it the howling of the dogs. Beyond both of these there was the weird distorted cry of many voices.

‘What is that noise?’ he asked.

‘It is the hail,’ said Dubbins.

‘And beyond that?’

‘That will be the cry of the dogs.’

‘And beyond that again?’

‘I do not hear anything.’

Dubbins’s bland composed face, turned towards him, seemed closed and distant.

‘Am I to leave you here then?’ he asked. ‘We feel that we should all be together and that we should look after our own kind.’

Mr Trill looked down at the classics which were lying on the table and they seemed to him to be surrounded by storm and wind, shaking in the hail which beat on them. Otherwise there was silence
in the room and all the other occupants, retired into the world of their books, appeared to have already forgotten about him.

‘What did you say my choices were?’ he asked.

‘To stay here or go back to your life and teach there or go out into the place from which you came.’

‘Are there no other choices?’

‘There is one other, but no one has taken it so far.’

‘And what is that?’

‘To go back to life but not as a teacher. We allow this, but it is not a choice that we like anyone to take. That is why I did not mention it.’

‘Why don’t you like it to be taken?’

‘We think of it as an admission of failure.’

‘Failure?’

‘We feel that it is an admission that what we are doing is not considered important.’

‘I see.’

The man in the corner twitched uncontrollably.

Mr Trill looked down at a copy of Homer, then turned the pages idly. In the margin of the book there were pencilled comments. One said, ‘Ironical?’ Another said, ‘An example of
synecdoche?’ A third one said, ‘The hexameter as narrative technique.’

Suddenly as he was speaking an excited voice shouted, ‘I have found it. I have correctly dated the
Georgics
.’

Heads turned towards the speaker simultaneously. One man said, ‘The fool. Who does he think he is? That has already been done by Malonivitz.’ Another said, ‘I shall have to
rebut whatever he says.’

The headmaster gazed smilingly at Mr Trill and said, ‘See? Nothing but excitement.’

Mr Trill felt as if he was going to be sick. Even though the headmaster heard nothing he himself was hearing beyond the hail and the baying of the dogs the voices of many men shrieking in pain,
cursing, tormented.

His mother stood at the door.

‘Put that woman out at once,’ shrieked Carter. ‘She has no right to be here.’

But his mother stood stolidly there.

‘This is outrageous,’ shouted Carter. ‘What is this place coming to? Nothing but deterioration day after day. Standards failing, texts inadequate, and now we have women. I
shall, I shall . . . ’ But foaming at the mouth he subsided for he could not finish the sentence.

Mr Trill thought of an army of synecdoches meeting an army of metonymies on a battlefield where vivid green and blue scarves waved. Ah, the billowing bronze of my unlived life! The wind that
drives the similes before it.

But his mother had gone. She had lived among the little piercing needles of the day, stung, stinging.

‘I shall go back,’ he heard himself saying.

‘To Hades?’ said Dubbins.

‘No, to the world in which I once lived. I shall return as something else.’ There was a universal sigh of horror all over the room.

‘As something else?’ they sighed.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Trill.

‘Are you sure?’ said Dubbins.

‘Quite sure,’ said Mr Trill, ‘if it is possible, that is.’

‘But no one before has asked that he go back as someone else.’

‘In that case I shall be unique,’ said Mr Trill and he felt an odd pleasure.

‘I shall go back without shield.’

‘Without shield?’ They all gazed at each other as if he had said something incomprehensible.

‘That is so,’ said Mr Trill. ‘Naked and without shield. I shall watch the wheelbarrows.’

‘What is he talking about?’ they asked.

‘The wheelbarrow and the stone,’ said Mr Trill. ‘With rain on it, perhaps sunshine. The train that travels through the day. The man who collects the tickets in his dirty blue
jacket. The drunk in the restaurant. The Chinaman who dreams of Hong Kong. The lorry driver, the builder, the carpenter with the ruler in his breast pocket. The docker who heaves the cargo to the
quay. The cloud that has lost its way, and to which the child points. The bin man who lifts the grooved ash can on to his shoulders. The lady standing at the corner with the neon light on her
handbag. To all these things I pray, to the rain that falls, the sun that shines. To the temporary I give my allegiance.’

Suddenly there was no room there at all and Mr Trill found himself standing at a windy corner in a vast city selling newspapers.

‘
Evening News
,’ he was shouting. ‘
Evening News
.’ A man with a rolled umbrella took a paper, threw money on the ledge and then slanted quickly away into
the lights of the city.