Had it all been like the stone and Sisyphus then? Certainly, perhaps, the last years had been, though not the middle ones. In the last years it seemed that he had lost his love for his work, it seemed that the teachings of the classics had fallen heavy from his lips. But before that it had been different.
The horror of it all, this Sisyphus and the stone! And then Mr Trill did a strange thing. He leapt down from where he was and began to help Sisyphus to push the boulder. Side by side they pushed, side by side they puffed and panted, and almost they had reached the top. Next time, thought Mr Trill, surely next time will do it. Nor was he afraid that he would be attacked for what he was doing. All he thought of was that he could not bear to see this useless toil. We will do it next time, we really will, he told the silent Sisyphus: and then you can stop your work and you will be happy.
This time a really big push will do it.
Damn you, he shouted at the stone, while Sisyphus grunted and puffed, a gigantic yet curiously insubstantial figure in the mist. Damn you, damn you, we’ll get you this time, bald senseless thing. Push push push till the veins stand up on your forehead. Work work work till all the examinations appear easy. Amo amas amat . . . mensa mensam mensae mensae mensa . . . O table, O chair, O stone . . . let life enter you, let you wing your way about Hades, fly about squeaking like a bat. Run about in the park, sing, dance . . . And he pushed as hard as he could and he shouted as he pushed and then, glory of glories, the two of them were up on the sunshine of the hill with the stone and it was lying there on the summit as if it was where it had always wanted to be. They stood there amazed, Sisyphus still in silence, his arms hanging at his side, the veins on them swollen and blue. Ah, ha, we got you at last, said Mr Trill, giving the stone a kick and only succeeding in hurting himself. You big, stupid, senseless dolt, you ignorant, inanimate lump. As Mr Trill triumphed over the stone and made as if to shake hands with the weary shade the latter looked at him with infinite sadness and then very slowly and carefully pushed the stone downhill again and Mr Trill heard it thundering and banging till at last it came to rest though echoing still with a loud thunderous sound. Then still without a word, Sisyphus descended the hill and prepared to begin his endless task again, while above him Mr Trill sat and thought.
On his green bench Mr Trill sat and thought. At first when he had retired from school he used to sit in his room reading but then as time passed he realised that Mrs Begg was growing more and more irritable when she saw him there (and sometimes he would have to leave it so that she would be able to bring her hoover and clean the floor).
It was strange how Mrs Begg’s attitude to him had changed. In the beginning she perhaps thought that there was a possibility of marriage, and for this reason she would tell him fragments of the story of her life. (Her marriage to a train-driver who had died of a heart attack: she, still, according to herself, could get free railway passes to any part of the country that she wished to go to. However she never went anywhere, not even to her nieces and nephews in Surrey.) Mr Trill hardly ever listened to any of her stories or if he did it was only with half an ear and even now after thirty years with Mrs Begg he didn’t know the names of any of her relations, or what they did, though he had been given the information often enough in the moments between soup and mince or while he was drinking his tea. Nor did he really know much about Mrs Begg herself. She existed for him in a vague world as a being which as far as he was concerned had no emotions of its own, no ambitions or destinations, merely a servant who was there to give him, in return for money, the little food that he required.
He never for a moment realised that even in Mrs Begg’s heart there beat storms of rancour as when for instance he ate absentmindedly without comment or even left half finished on his plate a particularly fine pie that she had specially made for him: nor did he notice that some days she had tidied the room particularly well, or even left a vase of flowers in it. On the contrary she was like a slave belonging to Greece, a manual worker who allowed him, the lord, to conduct his silent speculations.
Thus it was when he left the school he found for the time a cold wind blowing around him as if Mrs Begg had decided that he would never leave and therefore she could treat him as she liked. She sometimes grunted when he spoke to her and made references to the sunniness of the weather, and would howl about his legs with her hoover when he was deep in Homer. Therefore Mr Trill took it into his head to leave the house in the mornings and only come back at dinner time: and as he was a creature of habit he always departed at half past nine.
The park was a large one with plots of flowers scattered here and there. In the middle of it there was a fountain in which a Cupid composed of white alabaster hovered, bow and arrow in hand, while waters poured endlessly out of its mouth. Here Mr Trill would sit on a green bench and watch the world go by. Sometimes an old man would come and sit beside him and the two of them would discuss questions of the day or rather the other man would talk and Mr Trill would half listen for he had no interest in politics and rarely read a newspaper.
‘The country is going to the dogs,’ successive old men would tell him. ‘Even the young people aren’t frightened of the police nowadays. They throw stones at you and shout names and what does anybody do about it? Nothing. It wasn’t like that in the old days.’
And so he would listen to the same story, repeated over and over in various guises and various accents, of a world that was always peaceful with calm blue skies and perfect behaviour. And he would grow tired of it all but he didn’t want to cause a disturbance, so he would agree wordlessly, now and then nodding his head, but in truth weary of it all.
‘I am becoming an old man,’ he would think. ‘And is this what I wanted from my life? Is this where I wanted to be?’ And sometimes he wished that he had married Grace and at other times he was glad that he hadn’t done so. But most of the time he simply felt lonely.
Once he had gone up to the school, and swore that he would never do so again. It wasn’t that anybody had been unkind to him – on the contrary everybody had been very gentle and considerate – but it was as if they were talking to an invalid, as if their voices echoed around him with hollow solicitude. While they were talking to him, he sensed that they thought of him as an intruder, a sort of ghost who was no longer involved in the heat and the smoke. And even while they were speaking he felt them, as it were, glancing at their watches as if they were thinking how much they had to do, and that this old buffer was preventing them from getting on with it. The staffroom was no longer his staffroom, he himself had been replaced by a new younger man with fresh ideas, and he felt that he was a posthumous being moving about the circumference of the field on which the war was being waged. Even his old room had changed, it was less tidy than it used to be, there were pictures on the walls, and the desks were carved with new names.
So he decided that he would stay in the park and watch the flowers and if necessary endure the stories of the old men who were so implacable, stubbly and envious.
One day a little girl came over to talk to him. She had been playing with a paper boat in a pond but after she had finished she stood in front of him gazing at him with wonder in her eyes as if waiting for him to speak to her. But he found that he couldn’t think of anything to say. If she had been older he might have offered to help her with her Latin – for that was all he could do – but as she was only four or five years old such an offer was out of the question.
Eventually she sat beside him on the bench swinging her legs and offering him her boat which he had looked at with surprise, unable to think of anything to say about it except that it was pretty.
‘What is your name?’ she asked him directly.
‘Mr Trill,’ he answered.
‘My name is Margaret and my mummy is coming to get me. She is at the shops.’ There was a long companionable silence while Mr Trill searched for some words to say to her but there was nothing at all that he could think of: not a single idea came into his head. In front of him the flowe
rs blossomed and the gardener gazed at them, rake in hand, while the white Cupid with bow and arrow leaned gracefully into the blue day.
The little girl swung her legs which were clad in white socks. And Mr Trill gave her some sweets.
The following day she came back and the following day again and Mr Trill finding nothing to say gave her more sweets and she seemed quite happy to sit there beside him. Sometimes she brought a doll and sometimes a teddy bear and there the two of them would sit, Mr Trill now old and greying, looking out at the park, and the little girl clutching her doll with the red dress and the startingly blue eyes which stared unblinkingly out of the polished glaze of the face. And all the time Mr Trill was silent. The world of children was forever closed to him for he hadn’t really understood them though he had taught them. To him they were beings who must be instructed in Latin, they didn’t have minds or will or souls of their own. Nevertheless for some unfathomable reason the little girl came and sat beside him in perfect peace though now and again she would abruptly leave him in order to float her boat on the pond and talk to the gardener who seemed to have more to say to her than Mr Trill had. Sometimes she would take him into her confidence and tell him little snatches of her worldly affairs, though they were so difficult to understand that Mr Trill would let his attention wander, and indeed once she had stood in front of him stamping her feet and saying how stupid he was. Mr Trill had accepted this verdict quite calmly and without rancour as if it had a perfect justice of its own.
Once he had made a great effort – as if speaking were like the lifting of a great stone – and asked her where she stayed but he couldn’t make out the answer and had left the question dangling where it was in the bright light.
She had even asked him whether he had a mummy or daddy but Mr Trill had pretended not to hear: it would have been too difficult for him to explain to her that they were both dead.
One morning when as usual he had sat down on the bench which happened to be rather damp as it had been raining the night before, a big man with an angry red face strode towards him. Mr Trill knew at once that he didn’t belong to the middle classes, but rather to the ranks of the labourers. For all he could tell he might have been a miner or a bus driver or a dustman but he certainly didn’t belong among those who work with paper and pen and ink.
‘You the fellow who’s always giving my daughter sweets,’ said this craggy-faced apparition standing threateningly in front of Mr Trill and clenching and unclenching his fists as if he was prepared to hit Mr Trill on the nose there and then.
‘I . . . ’ began Mr Trill. But before he could say any more the man – whatever his occupation was – had said,
‘Well, I want it stopped. Right? Stopped. You understand.’ And his stony head came quite close to Mr Trill’s. ‘Stopped you understand. Right. Kaput.’ And Mr Trill had nodded his head violently whereupon the man had also nodded two or three times saying,
‘I know your sort, mate,’ and then had marched away leaving Mr Trill in a stunned silence. From that day on the little girl came no longer to the park and Mr Trill had to listen to more nostalgic commentaries on the age from old men – and sometimes old women with shopping baskets – and felt more and more lost and weary. It occurred to him that perhaps he ought to have been more combative when faced by the stony-headed man, perhaps he should have said that he wasn’t going to be pushed around by the likes of him, but Mr Trill knew that he wasn’t the sort who would ever say any such words and so he declined into melancholy and despair. He had never fought back when he was in school and he would never do so in his old age. But what terrified him most of all and prevented him for a while from returning to the park was that the stony-faced man had simply seen him as a dirty old fellow who was quite prepared to make a sexual assault on his daughter, even though he was wearing a good suit and perfectly good shoes and was a scholar who knew about Homer and Vergil.
The unfairness and injustice of life! Could the man not have seen that he wasn’t like that at all but was on the contrary a person of refined tastes who knew Latin and Greek and would never have lifted a finger to touch his child? Was that not entirely visible to him as Mr Trill sat there on the bench. But evidently it hadn’t been, evidently he had been assigned to a room in the man’s mind in which old men, whoever they were and no matter what their occupation or past history, behaved like sexual maniacs whenever they saw a little girl.
How unfair, how unjust.
I am growing old, thought Mr Trill, I am growing old and tired. Autumn with its chill airs is gathering round me and its breezes are about to waft me to the place to which all men and women go in the end.
And so Mr Trill ceased to visit the park and was never quite the same again. When he went out it was to sit in the library among the other old men and stare with blank wonder at the busts of the big-nosed Romans that were perched on top of the shelves, while a newspaper lay neglected in front of him on the sloping table. And finally he never left the house at all.
As Mr Trill walked along it seemed to him that he did not feel at all tired. The air was mild, though not invigorating, and he felt as if he was strolling in the twilight through a fair, though here there were no bright lights. What had happened to that other girl whose name he could not now remember, whom he had once walked with in just such a balmy twilight when he was in university so long ago? Where had he met her? It must have been at one of the Greek or Latin classes. She was the first girl he had ever taken out. Or had he simply met her at the fair? She had, he thought he remembered, blond hair, and she had turned out to be a good shot with the crooked rifles that they supplied there. What had she won again? A plate was it, or a little doll? Something cheap anyway. They had gone on to the big wheel, he, Mr Trill, erect and dignified, turning over and over, spinning like a top, his heart in his mouth, while she had looked at him with a joyful triumphant smile. How difficult it was to grasp the past, and remember oneself as one had been. Continually one lifted photographs from dusty tables and the faces were like ghosts, inquiring, young, hopeful, belonging to an irretrievable world that one would never see again.
No, he could not remember her name, but she had been a student, that much was clear to him. He remembered her eye squinting along the rifle, the ducks marching placidly in line, and she picking them off one by one till they had dropped and fallen away. And all the time there had been that tremendous vulgar music, the rotation of clusters of coloured bulbs, the stands decorated with classical motifs, faces of wolves like those which had been involved in the foundation of Rome. The wheels turned dizzily in the twilight and the girls and boys passed by with vaguely white flowery faces, as if they were blossoms set on invisible stems. Had he been happy that night? Was that why he remembered it? He had rolled pennies across boards but they had never come to rest on the proper numbers: he had tried the darts but they had missed their targets. And all the time she had been at his side, laughing and happy. How long ago it all was. Had he ever really been at the fair or was it all part of his imagination? As the days darkened so the lights brightened, so the sharp-eyed women behind the stalls came into clearer focus as they handed out their fixed and corrupt guns. And even when she had won her prize how cheap it was. Yet the crooked rifles were raised to eternally hopeful eyes, the big wheel rose brilliantly over the horizon, the coins spun across the slanted board. The fattest woman in the world, the haunted house, the train-ride through the tunnel. How carelessly people spent their money as if it would last forever while the voices shrieked with happy laughter. In spite of the fact that one knew at every moment that one was being cheated, that the odds were stacked against one, that every gun was crooked, every dart was the wrong weight, that it was only by a colossal fluke that one won even the tawdry presents that stared so cheaply out at one – nevertheless one spent money like water, like a king, for a sordid little cardboard plate, or a picture of an unreal spring.
And then the slow walk home through the twilight as if one were swimming. He remembered standing wi
th 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.
The Black Halo Page 38