After about a quarter of an hour they went into the bus and were taken to the square. There was in fact a fleet of buses, each painted air force grey. When she got off the bus, she felt the wind cold and bitter, though luckily it wasn’t raining. If it had been raining, the parade would have been held in a hangar. ‘Oh, look,’ she said excitedly to Gerald, ‘I can seen them. Do you see them over there? They must be rehearsing.’ But Gerald didn’t look. They sat beside each other in the front row and she took out her camera. There was a cheer when a young girl, possibly the girl friend of one of the aircraftsmen, crossed the square in a slit skirt which was practically blowing around her carefully coiffured hair. An officer stood on the dais and tested the microphone. ‘I am the chap who’s been bringing early morning tea to your son,’ he said. They all laughed dutifully. A corporal took his place and also tested the microphone. ‘One two,’ he said. ‘Can’t you count to three?’ the officer shouted. ‘Three,’ said the corporal, stony-faced. Why, they were all comedians. The officer looked nice and relaxed and young. She thought he might be a flight lieutenant, but she didn’t really know. Another man, with a crown at his sleeve, marched extravagantly across the square, as if he were flapping wings and trying to get off the ground. The young officer stood on the wooden dais again, and told them, ‘The reviewing officer will arrive in a blue car whose headlights will be on. You are expected to stand. You are also expected to stand when he leaves.’ Gerald’s face twitched and she turned back to the square again. Maybe the training hadn’t been so harsh after all: these officers and NCOs looked quite human. She checked that her camera was ready.
Then she saw them, led by the band, all in grey, arms swinging very high, boots shining, buttons glittering. There were four flights, and they took up their position by their markers making quick scurrying movements as they got into line. An officer with a sword stood in front of them, and they stood easy after being at attention. They were facing her but she couldn’t see Trevor at all. At first she thought it was the spectacled one at the extreme right of the front rank, but, no, it wasn’t, though he looked very like him.
People were standing up and peering and wondering where their own sons were. She felt part of a group, united by common preoccupations, though she had never seen the other parents in her life before. Now and again Gerald would shiver in the cold. Then the reviewing officer was driven to the dais, the car arriving in an arrogant curve round the perimeter of the square. The driver opened the door for him, and his assistant, whatever rank he was, accompanied his superior to the platform. They both stood there, still and proud. The reviewing officer had a sword dangling at his side. Indeed, all the officers had swords.
The one who had been in charge of things marched briskly up to the reviewing officer, came to attention and said in a loud voice, ‘Permission to carry on, SIR.’ She couldn’t make out what the reviewing officer said but assumed that he had agreed. The flights came to attention and the reviewing officer descended the dais, his assistant discreetly accompanying him, and moved between the ranks, pretty quickly, only stopping to speak to some recruit. As he left a flight behind, it stood easy. The reviewing officer, whose rank she could see from her programme was Group Captain, also apparently had a degree from Cambridge. He moved briskly and competently and with a natural air of authority. Gerald’s brother had gone to Cambridge and was now on television in Canada: she didn’t like him much. The reviewing officer returned to the dais. She saw that Gerald’s knuckles were white.
Then the flights began to march to the music. They were all carrying rifles, with bayonets attached, and they all seemed to have become automatons in weeks. Where are you, Trevor, she thought, frantically searching for him. But all the recruits looked alike, each with his ominous peaked cap, pale, distant, almost aloof, listening to commands from other people who had swords in their hands. It was frightening how tidy and proficient they had become. They presented arms and ordered arms and everyone was supernaturally precise, even Trevor whom she had at last identified. And the proudest moment of all was when two planes (limited perhaps by the Thatcher budget) flew overhead in a sudden roar and then were gone as quickly as they had come. Trevor looked like all the others. She didn’t like his tidy unshadowed poise.
After a while the reviewing officer spoke to them. He told them that he and the officers and NCOs were all proud of what they had accomplished: they could all hear from the cheering how proud their parents were of them as well. They had now joined a great family in which every job was important, from cook to pilot. They were a credit to everyone, a future full of possibilities was ahead of them, he himself was proud of them.
Then they marched off, eyes turned towards the reviewing officer. I don’t like this, she thought, I don’t like this. Seven weeks ago my son was telling me where I could get off, earning money not a fraction of which he gave me, coming in late, leaving lights burning through the night even though he knows that we don’t have much money, keeping the volume of his record player high even though he knows his father doesn’t like it. And now here he is, entirely transformed, cold, disciplined, remote, in a world of his own which I have never entered and never will.
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.
The Yacht
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 h
ad 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.
The Black Halo Page 61
