The Black Halo (64 page)

There were millions of peasants in the world and millions of paddy fields, and they all sang strange unintelligible songs. Some of them rode on bicycles through Hong Kong.

‘I love you,’ he had said at the end. Their hands had tightened on eternity. When she withdrew her hand the pulse was beating but his had stopped.

She wished to change her chair so that she could not see the waitresses, but she was naked and throbbing to their gaze.

When she had entered her room in the hotel for the first time she had switched on the television set. It showed peasants working in the fields in the East. She had picked up the phone and
wondered whom she could talk to. Perhaps to one of the peasants in their wide-brimmed hats. She had put the phone down.

There were twenty of them in the one house, children, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and they were all smiling as if their paddy fields generated light.

‘I am thin as a pencil,’ she thought. ‘Why did I wear this grey costume and this necklace?’

She finished the turkey soup. Then she tried to eat the turkey. For me it was killed, with its red comb, its splendid feathers, its small unperplexed head on the long and reptilian neck.
Nevertheless I must eat.

Wherever Tom had gone, he had gone. ‘Put me in a glass box,’ he used to say. ‘I want people to make sure that I am dead.’ But in fact he had been cremated. She heard that
the coffins swelled out with the heat, but he had laughed when she had told him. ‘Put me in an ashtray in the living-room.’

The smoke rose above the paddy fields and the peasants were crouched around it.

She left much of the turkey and then took ice-cream which was cold in her mouth. She was alone in the vast dining-room.

Christmas was the loneliest time of all. No one who had not experienced it could believe how lonely Christmas could be, how conspicuous the unaccompanied were.

From the paddy field the peasant raised his face smiling and it was Tom’s face.

‘Hi,’ he said in a fluting Korean voice.

The green paper hats above her swayed slightly in the draught which rippled the carpet below. It seemed quite natural that he should be sitting in front of her in his wide-brimmed hat.

‘The heat wasn’t at all unbearable,’ he said.

He took out a cracker and pulled it. He read out what was written on the little piece of paper. It said, ‘Destiny waits for us like a bus.’ Or a rickshaw.

The world was big and it pulsed with life. Dinosaurs walked about like green ladders and bowed gently to the ants who were carrying their burdens. The peasant sat in a ditch and played his
guitar and winked at her.

‘I remember,’ said Tom scratching his neck, ‘someone once saying that the world appears yellow to a canary. Even sorrow, even grief.’

And red to a turkey.

She got up and went to her room walking very straight and stiff so that the waitresses’ glances would bounce off her back. Who wanted pity when death was so common?

She sat on her bed and picked up the phone.

She dialled her own number and heard the phone ringing in an empty house.

‘If only he would answer it,’ she said. ‘If only he would answer it.’

Then she heard the voice. It said, ‘Who is that speaking, please?’

She knew it was Tom and that he was wearing a wide-brimmed hat.

‘I shall be home soon,’ she said.

She took off her clothes and went to bed. When she woke up she felt absolutely refreshed and her head was perfectly clear.

She packed up her case, paid her bill at the desk and went home.

When she went in she heard the guitar being played upstairs. She knew that they would all be there, all the happy peasants, and sitting among them, quite at home, Tom in his green paper hat with
the wine bottle in his hand.

It was at Pula that she had the vision that she would never forget. She had taken Paul there on the bus and he was rather tired as usual. Ever since his big operation he had
been tired and at the end of their holiday he was going back to another operation. According to himself his boss had been rather kind and had said, picking up the phone that lay in front of him on
the desk, ‘Paul has been with us for thirty years. There is no question of this half-pay nonsense.’ Paul worked as a clerk in the Civil Service and had never missed a day till his
operation. He had been in severe pain for a while and no one knew what was wrong with him till the specialist had finally diagnosed it as an aortic aneurism. He had lost a lot of weight and looked
thin and drawn.

When she looked back over the years she realised that their life together had been on the whole a peaceful one. But she wondered if in fact the disease had come because Paul was tired of his
work though he used to tell her, ‘When I first started I was happy. I can’t tell you how happy I was. And then it all changed. We used to have a joke together in those days but now
it’s all different.’

He had many little anecdotes to tell her, such as the one about the day when quite young he had been doing an imitation of the manager, an imaginary pipe stuck in his mouth when the latter had
put his head round the door and caught him. ‘He was a man entirely without humour,’ he said. ‘And after that I beat him at billiards.’

But of course that had been a different manager from the one they now had. ‘Another time,’ he said, ‘he made an awful speech on the retiral of a lady member of staff and I was
the only one who clapped. He stared at me, I remember, as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether I was laughing at him or not. His speeches were terrible.’

According to himself he had been a ball of fire in those days, fiery with wit and inventiveness. And he had told her the same stories over and over so much that she sometimes wondered whether
her boredom was becoming unbearable. Still he had taken his illness with admirable stoicism, not complaining much, accepting his destiny with dignity.

But in a country like this one saw only the healthy ones, especially in summer and they all looked so beautiful and tanned beside Paul.

They bloomed with luminous health, they seemed to have the sheen of animals: while all the time the sun was a fierce bristly animal in a sky of unchanging blue.

As well as being a civil servant, Paul also umpired cricket matches on Sundays and she knew that he missed the cool green misty afternoons when in his white surgical coat he would stand there
making decisions. He himself believed that umpiring was his real vocation: it certainly gave him more scope for decision-making than the Civil Service did.

A youth walked along in front of her. He looked dark and Italian and had the most beautiful arrogant buttocks. How self-confident he was, how extraordinarily alive and lovely. At that very
moment she would have gone with him to a dance, a gipsy dance, to drink wine, to make love. She couldn’t imagine him in the Civil Service sitting down at a desk day after day, picking up a
phone and saying to a caller who perhaps had an upper-class accent:

‘I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t keep a record of that,’ and the man with the upper-class accent saying contemptuously:

‘But aren’t you a clerk or something? Shouldn’t you know that sort of thing?’

No, that youth would never be servile or slavish, he would never reach that stage in his life when he would become so depressingly proud and say, ‘And Spence took up the phone and said,
“No damn nonsense about half-pay. Mason’s been with us for thirty years.” ’

She could imagine Paul leaning forward obediently, subserviently, the manager swivelling arrogantly in his chair in a careless arc as if he were on a machine at a fairground.

So many of these youths, so beautiful, so young, and herself growing old, and into her menopause. She dragged Paul along like a chain behind her: he clanked in the hot day of her mind.

Conscience-stricken that she had almost thought of him like a slave she pointed out a wallet to him in a window that they were passing and asked him if he wanted it but he didn’t, he
considered it too cheap and tawdry. He seemed to evaluate it with agonising slowness as if deciding whether it was like a cricketer who should be given out.

Finally, he said, ‘It’s not worth the money.’ He was very good at converting lire and dinars into English money, far quicker than she was. But these days there was a faraway
look in his eyes as if he was staring at the green ring of a damp cricket field.

No, he had never been a flashing batsman or a demon bowler, only a very calm considering umpire, one who was weighty and careful in his decisions: and perhaps he would never be an umpire again.
Perhaps he would never stand in his white coat under an amateur sky.

Her body boiled with the heat and, she was ashamed to admit, desire. The two of them hadn’t had sex for the last three months. Funny expression that, ‘had sex’ or ‘made
love’ when what she really meant was what she imagined these foreigners as doing, devouring each other’s bodies in the sun. Images of bodies clawed and mated and fought in her mind.
They leaped ravenously out of dark secret corners into the arena of her sunlight. They were strong and powerful and had nothing at all to do with the calm fields over which her husband had presided
in the intervals of his dedicated work for the Civil Service.

‘Are you all right?’ said Paul curiously. ‘You seem to be sweating a lot.’

‘It’s very hot,’ she said.

Her body seethed with the heat, she almost fainted with the savagery of the images that leaped about in her mind, no, not in her mind, in the secret caverns and hollows of her body. And she was
ashamed of them as Paul slowly paced beside her.

No, she must confront the question: what would she do if Paul died? Would she marry again? Could she bear to be alone? She had never been alone in her life, she had come from a large noisy
family, animated with anecdote and discussion, and she didn’t really know what solitude was. Also, she had never been a reader, she had always been happier with physical things, the confused
chatter of kids in the school canteen where she served. But the question nevertheless had to be faced. When they returned to England and he had his operation he might die and what would she do
then? Could she stay alone in the house after the day’s work was over, could she watch television endlessly? Not that she had anyone in mind to replace Paul, nor had she ever been intimate
with anyone but him. She smiled to herself at the archaic oddity of the expression.

Could she perhaps fling up her job and do what she had always wanted to do, that is wander about like a gipsy? But that would be impossible, an idle dream. Even gipsies didn’t live on air,
they too needed food, drink, a bed. No she couldn’t leave the little terraced house bought with Paul’s blood and the garden which he kept so tidy. Nor could she abandon her job. Paul
wouldn’t have much money to leave, though he had now stopped drinking and smoking.

Did she love him? Did she truly love him? The question struck at her like a blow from the sun. She thought she loved him and was sure that he loved her. But what was real love like? Had she ever
truly experienced it? Was love involved with sex? Could she love someone without having sex with them?

It was odd how grey his hair was becoming, she hadn’t noticed the greyness so clearly before. And how dependent he was growing on her, he who had always planned the details of their
holidays so meticulously, taking a pride in doing so. She did not like his new passiveness: it was significant and ominous. In the past he used to love working out itineraries, even keeping a
diary. And now he had given all that up. It was as if he was sensing an eternity which had no need of notes.

And another thing, he never told her what happened in the office. In the old days he used to bring home a hoard of stories like the one for instance about the tramp who used to come to the
office to collect his social security and say, ‘You think I’m going to die and save you money but I’m not.’ And he would glare fiercely around him, unshaven, gaunt,
indomitable. She could imagine him, obstinate in his determination to stay alive.

Or he might tell her about Miss Collins and Mr White who hadn’t spoken to each other for years because Miss Collins had arranged the chairs for a meeting without telling him about it
beforehand.

Oh God, this tremendous heat, this desire, this unfocused lust. Did others suffer from this? Did others appear to walk calmly along while raging inwardly like beasts within their pale pelts? And
why was she feeling that desire now, was it the heat that was causing it, or the threat of death, or was it that she was simply ageing?

‘Are you feeling all right?’ she asked. She was always asking the same question as if out of a sense of profound guilt that followed both of them like shadows. Paul was sweating, not
her brimming natural sweat but a grey chilly sweat. Her sweat on the other hand was the bloom on the fruit about to burst, before it hangs and shrivels like a rag on a tree.

When Paul wore his umpire’s coat he looked like a doctor or a waiter. Not that she had seen him umpiring for many years. He stood there in the green light and a man would be out - his
wickets sent flying – or a catch would be granted. As an umpire, Paul had a certain power. But she didn’t like cricket, it was very slow, it was so slow that it felt like an eternity
happening in front of her eyes. All you could hear was sporadic clapping as if from a grave and then silence.

But that didn’t disguise the question she had to face. Did she love Paul? And the most tremendous question of all was, would she be glad when he died? Would she be glad when she heard no
more about the Civil Service or cricket? Would she be glad when she was no longer in the presence of his greyness?

‘There it is,’ said Paul suddenly.

‘What?’ she asked as if emerging from a dream.

‘The amphitheatre,’ he said.

And she saw it then, a big circular stone building with rows of arches and window spaces.

‘Do you want to go in?’ he asked.

Seeing that he was tired she was not sure what she should say, but he added, ‘I think we should see it. It’s the only worthwhile thing in Pula.’