The Black Halo (79 page)

She turned round as if to say something of this to Gerald and saw that his eyes were slowly filling with tears and she knew that as was the case with herself, they were tears of pride. That was
the closest she could get to it. Maybe they were tears dropped for the adventurous baby growing up to the sullen adolescent. Maybe they were an elegy for lost youth, or for a suddenly grasped ideal
world where everything moved like clockwork, co-ordinated and accurately ranked. Maybe the tears were for the shades of what she and Gerald had once been; and now she realised that there was much
about her husband, especially this, that she had never known. Maybe it was the cold wind that brought the tears out. But, no, she felt them as the salt fruit of shameless pride. And so when she
walked round the parade ground with Gerald, instead of taking the bus, she knew that he would welcome Trevor and make a fuss of him as he had used to do, but this time almost as an equal. And her
own tears were for that as well, that Trevor should suddenly be as old as Gerald, and also for the fact that the two of them inhabited a world which could be only truly known by experience: and
that indeed her own knowledge of what had taken place on that square had only been a partial one, and almost uncomprehending. Trevor in fact was waiting for them when they arrived in the building
for lunch: he looked respectful, slightly remote, astonishingly grown up. Gerald ordered two whiskies, for himself and Trevor, and a Cinzano and lemonade for her.

Ralph didn’t like it when his father began to sit alone on the balcony of his hotel reading his Greek poetry again, while his mother tanned herself among the rocks. So
rather than be with either of them he wandered along the promenade and the streets of the small Yugoslavian town. One morning he saw a man with a prong landing a small, purple squid on the stone,
and he studied the fish for a long time, for the man had walked away and left it there as if it was too small for him to bother about.

He spent a whole afternoon watching children playing on swings. One of them was a small but determined-looking girl who swung as high into the air as she could, giving herself stronger and
stronger pushes, while the boy tried to emulate her but failed to reach the heights she did, for it seemed as if her ambition was to be lost in the sky up above her. After a while the boy and the
girl got off their swings and began to chase each other and fight, throwing little stones and small branches and twigs at each other, while a bare-armed woman watched impassively from a balcony
above the street. Later, after the boy had been defeated by the girl, he climbed into a tree with a companion and they began to halloo like Tarzans in their own language which Ralph didn’t
understand. More children arrived and fought each other and formed a ring around a little boy who had begun to cry and then after being mocked ran away with tears streaming down his face.

Ralph no longer cried. There had been a time when he had cried when his father and mother had quarrelled most bitterly but he didn’t cry now. He had formed an armour around himself like
the shell of a sea animal. There had been so many of these quarrels between his mother and his father (his mother younger than his father who was a university lecturer). There were things that his
mother shouted at his father that he didn’t want to hear. Once she had frothed at the mouth with rage and had bitten his father like a beast. Now, every day, she lay in the sun, her blonde
hair gleaming, while his father read his Greek poems. Soon she would meet someone, she always did.

Ralph sat down among the rocks further away from the centre of the town than the ones his mother lay among, watching a yacht out in the bay, on the far rim of the horizon a white ghost. He
stared at it for a long time. It became confused in his mind with the white page of the Greek poetry book which his father was reading. It seemed different from the other nearer yachts, more
remote, less domestic, and he never saw anyone moving about on it, no one tending ropes or sails, it simply stayed there without moving, day after day.

He liked sitting doing nothing. Now and again an old woman in black would pass, a native of the place, and she would gaze past him as if he wasn’t there. ‘What they must have
suffered,’ his father had once said to his mother when they had seen one such old woman strolling along the promenade, wrinkled, ancient, as if sprung from another earlier world.

‘What do you mean, suffered?’ said his mother who was painting her toenails.

‘In the war,’ his father had said, and his mother had smiled secretly. Ralph preferred his father to his mother. He knew that deep down his mother didn’t care for him, and
thought only of herself, of her own appearance, was always tending to her body.

Ralph liked looking into the water where everything could be seen clearly and without equivocation. He liked the little coloured umbrellas of the jelly fish, the quick motions of the tiny
unnamed fish. He would watch them for hours. Sometimes too he would pick up smooth stones and stroke them.

Once he saw a group of youths – he thought they were German – jumping from the end of the pier into the sea. Then they left the pier and got hold of one of their companions whom they
carried struggling towards the end of the pier and threw over. They were laughing and the youth was struggling but after he had come out of the water he walked back to them, smoothing his hair, and
pretending that it was all a big joke. But Ralph knew that it wasn’t a big joke after all. He realised that the drenched youth was only pretending that it was a joke, that he was trying to
get back to his own kind. Ralph had often felt like that in the school he attended, a boarding school. When the youth returned to the group they had forgotten all about him and were listening to
their leader who was pointing something out to them on a map.

Ralph didn’t like going back to the hotel in the evening and above all he didn’t like the dining-room. His mother had taken to talking to two Scandinavian youths who sat at the next
table, while his father sat there with a fixed smile on his face. His mother laughed and chattered to the Scandinavians – she could always find something to talk about – and they
clearly admired her. She wore a low-cut dress and you could see her breasts. Even when she was asking for the key to the room she would talk for ages to the receptionist who was a German and had
corn-coloured hair. Later she and his father would walk in silence to the lift. Then his mother would ask his father if he wanted to come down to the bar but he didn’t want to and sometimes
she would go down on her own. Ralph would go into his own room and fiddle with the radio. He preferred it when he found some music to which he could listen.

One evening they all went to a classical concert in the local church which felt very cool after the heat outside. A young woman who was very beautiful sang German, Italian, French and English
songs, while a pianist, dark-haired and in evening dress, hammered the keyboard with relentless passion. While the woman was singing Ralph’s eyes wandered about the church studying the
paintings, one of which showed a shrunken Christ bleeding on the cross while a number of people stared up at him. The woman sang
Swing Low Sweet Chariot
with a strange foreign endearing
accent. She was very cool and almost remote but the pianist played with furious abandon, expressions of tenderness and agony chasing each other across his face. His father listened intently but his
mother left the church at the interval and didn’t come back. His father pretended that he knew she was going to do this but Ralph knew that her departure had been unexpected for his father
kept glancing behind him now and again in the middle of the music as if wondering whether she was going to come in. The church was cool and there were a number of Americans there: you could always
tell Americans.

An old woman in black entered the church during the performance, curtsied to the altar, waited for a while and then left. It was clear that she did not understand the music. Ralph imagined her
walking along the hot cobbled stones. When he and his father arrived back at the hotel his mother wasn’t there. Ralph didn’t say anything about this nor did he comment when his father
poured out some whisky for himself from the bottle he had bought in the duty-free shop on the way over.

Ralph couldn’t understand his father. He couldn’t understand how he could let his mother insult him as she did. Why didn’t he hit her? If a boy had insulted him as his mother
insulted his father he would have felt honour bound to try and fight him even if he lost. But his father accepted all the insults and had once said to Ralph, ‘You see, I love her.’

Once when the two of them were walking along together his mother had insisted on buying a small blue painting from a street artist whom she took a fancy to.

‘It’s rubbish,’ his father had said. ‘It’s not much better than a postcard. It’s certainly not worth six pounds.’ But she had given the street artist,
who was young and handsome and impudent, seven pounds and then kissed him dramatically on the cheek. His father had walked away.

Ralph would sit sometimes under a tree in the shade and watch the ants. There were thousands of them and they all rushed about at great speed as if on urgent errands. They would push little
twigs ahead of them and their quickness was beyond belief. It was as if you couldn’t use the word ‘speed’ about them, one second they were here and the next there. He would watch
them for hours and also the butterflies which swarmed about drunkenly in the warm air. It gave him a great feeling of power to watch the ants, and freedom, to watch the butterflies. He felt that
the ants were not conscious of his presence, though perhaps they were: perhaps they sensed him like a huge shadow above them.

Behind all this he could hear the voice of his mother saying, ‘But you must admit his hair is beautiful.’ His father was almost bald and had hardly tanned at all. He had a thin face
which was as white as paper. He pretended not to see his wife sunning herself on the rocks, he pretended not to see the casual way in which she turned on her back when a particularly attractive man
passed.

The pages of his book were white in the dazzling day, as white as the sails of the yacht on the far horizon.

Once Ralph saw his mother dancing with a man who had climbed onto the pier from a boat. The man was wearing a pirate cap, he was fat and flabby, and he was singing. His mother danced with him
while some of the other men and women also in pirate caps watched and clapped.

Then she suddenly turned and waved to his father who was sitting on the balcony reading. But he did not raise his eyes from his book and did not wave back.

Sometimes Ralph would follow one of the old women dressed in black to the church. He would watch her as she curtsied and bent her head to pray, he would sit quietly at the back of the church and
study the painting of the bleeding Christ. Then just as quietly as he had entered he would leave. Even quite late there were swarms of people on the cobbled street, and once four youths shouted
after him in a language that he didn’t understand. There were two girls with them and they laughed at something the boys said. The boys were older than Ralph, perhaps seventeen: he was
fourteen.

As he was coming back to the hotel he saw on the seats outside, under the trees, his mother sitting with the two Scandinavians. They were all laughing and drinking. He knew that his father would
be sitting on the balcony reading, exactly like one of those white statues he had seen in the museum.

He had a dream. In the dream he dreamt that he was a girl and that he was on a swing and that he was swinging so high that he eventually disappeared into the sky. A boy was flinging stones up at
him but he was so high up that they could not touch him. In the middle of the dream he heard a book being thrown against a wall and his mother’s voice shouting, ‘You and your
f—— books.’ His mother while beautiful was also very lively. Everyone in the hotel seemed to like her, even the waiters who hardly smiled at the tourists but laughed and joked
among themselves in small secret groups. Once at dinner time while he was sitting in a park he had seen an old woman approaching one of the waitresses with a child and the waitress had kissed it,
had swung it over her head, had bought an ice-cream for it, had walked it carefully along a low wall, and taken it to the swings. All this time the old woman sat on a bench knitting. Then after a
quarter of an hour or so the waitress had given the child back to the old woman but the child had cried a great deal and while he was doing so the waitress had hurried back to her work in the
hotel, not looking back.

All these things Ralph saw because he was on his own. He was used to being on his own even in school. He didn’t like Greek but he was good at literature and mathematics. There were boys in
the school especially in classes higher than his own who seemed to him to be at least as handsome and godlike as the Scandinavians.

One night he followed a young girl who looked back at him and waved. She was tanned like a gipsy, then quite suddenly she disappeared: one moment she was there and the next she was not to be
seen at all. He wondered if she had gone into the church but when he did enter the church there was no one there. He stared up towards the roof and there seemed to be a man there, bent over,
reading a book. It was odd how he had not noticed him before.

His father got up that evening from his seat in the dining-room and left his mother talking to the Scandinavians. He had stalked towards the door. Later, from his parents’ room, he had
heard his mother shouting at his father, ‘Bad mannered bastard. Can’t I talk to anyone now?’

He didn’t hear his father speak at all. Then he had heard the door slam and the sound of his father crying. He had never heard a grown man crying before. It was a terrible sound, it was
like cloth tearing. He didn’t want to see his father, so he left his room and crept down the stairs. He heard laughter from the bar and saw beneath a television screen, where a man was
reading from a newspaper, his mother and the Scandinavians sitting at the one table. As he made his way outside she saw him and the laughter froze, her mouth open in astonishment. But he ran away
and as he was running he heard another man saying to another man, ‘The
Canberra
has been sunk,’ and he knew that this was something to do with the Falklands.