The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  Perhaps in fact he was one of those airmen returned again to the huts out of nostalgia. But I knew this wasn’t true. I knew that he had nothing to do with planes or the war. His war was a different one. He had perhaps been wounded in some irretrievable way and that was why he didn’t speak. It would be so easy to take a plane up from that hut and set off into the illimitable blue, it would be too easy. All the time I stood there I didn’t hear a sound. For all I knew there was no one there at all. For all I knew the hermit was sleeping outside and watching me at that very moment.

  I turned away from the door and made my way home quickly as if someone was after me, as if I was being hunted. I actually began to run, looking behind me to see if anyone was following me, but I didn’t see anyone. All there was was the moon high in the sky like a big stone and the shadows and yellowness. When I got to my room I was panting as if I had committed some terrible crime. I lay in my bed sleeplessly thinking of him lying in bed, not realising that a stranger had been looking at him through the window, listening at his door. I was ashamed of myself. I was frightened of something that was happening to me that I did not understand.

  9

  I don’t think I have yet mentioned Kenneth John, though I did intend to, since he becomes important later. Kenneth John is older than me and has been married in the village for many years to a woman he met after he had given up sailing, late in life. He says himself that he has been everywhere, China, Australia, New Zealand, South America. ‘In China,’ he once told me, ‘they leave food for the dead people. They think they will rise again and eat it.’ And he looked at me with his small wrinkled face. ‘That’s right,’ he would add, ‘they do that. And they leave drink for them as well at the graves. Would you believe that?’ And I would pretend that I hadn’t heard any of this, since he clearly enjoyed telling an ‘educated’ man something new.

  ‘Women,’ he would say, ‘they’re no use on board ship. What use are they to any man? Wasn’t it a woman who ate the apple? Doesn’t it say that in the Bible? And it was because of them that sin came into the world.’ At other times he would tell me that Edgar Wallace was the best writer in the world. According to him, he had read all his books.

  ‘But there’s nothing in the world like being on a ship on a fine day with the water stretching away from you on all sides, no land to be seen anywhere. In my youth I used to climb up into the sails. Up the masts. And I would look up and the sea was miles below. And sometimes you would see porpoises playing in the water.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ he would say earnestly, looking into my face, his thin red nose almost quivering and his teeth, discoloured by tobacco, clearly visible. ‘Have you noticed,’ he would say, ‘that women never play? They’re so serious all the time. That’s the thing I have against them. Women,’ and he would spit on the ground, ‘what use are they to man or beast?

  ‘When I came home first I wouldn’t have anything to do with the land. I would go up to the town and I would watch the ships coming in and going away. I would stand there for hours and think of all the places the ships might be going to. And it took me all my time not to go on board one of them and sail away in it. But I was married then and I couldn’t do that.’

  He had pictures of sailing ships in his house and he and his wife would sit by the fire and he would tell me stories and his wife would say nothing much except that at intervals she might sigh heavily and murmur, ‘He could have been a captain. He could have been a captain.’ They said that she was very hard on him and made sure that he kept the house clean. One day I went in and found that all the pictures of sailing ships had been taken down and new wallpaper put up. I never saw them again. In the East, he would say, the women went about with veils on their faces and they would look down at the ground. They would never look up at you at all. They were very obedient in the East. ‘But when I got married first I didn’t want to stay in the house at all. I would walk about the village and sometimes I would go out fishing on a boat that I had. But it was like being on a pond and I gave it up. There was no excitement at all, no excitement.

  ‘But I’ll tell you about women. They have no humour in them. The things they worry about, like whether you are wearing a good suit or not, things like that, and whether the floor is clean. And one day I broke an ornament and she went on about it for months.

  ‘And why do we settle down? Let me ask you that. You’re an educated man. You tell me that.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ he said, his little rusty moustache quivering. ‘It’s because we’re frightened. That’s the reason. And don’t let anyone tell you different. That’s the reason and the only one. There was a boy once who went up to the top of the mast and he started screaming. He was frightened, you see, looking down into the water. That’s the way we are. But I was never frightened up in the mast. Never.

  ‘We’re frightened, that’s why we take up with women. I used to go into port and enjoy myself and get drunk. There was a lot of fighting and drinking in those days. But I would have ended up as a drunkard, you see. But in those days I didn’t care. And so, I thought to myself, do I want my freedom so that I’ll be a drunkard? And what do you think is the best thing?’ he asked.

  ‘To have your freedom and not be a drunkard,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t have the two of them,’ he said. ‘Not at all. You can’t have the two of them. Women. They’ve caused all the trouble in the world. We’re frightened and we don’t know what the world is about. That’s the truth. No one knows what’s right and what’s wrong. You read books and you find that out. When I came home first I didn’t want to have anything to do with the land. I was like a man in a cage. I used to go up and down the village as if I was on the deck of the ship. Why can’t we have a house on water, on the sea? They have that in some countries. That’s what I would like, a house on the sea. They have that in China and some places.’ And he would spit in the fire. And then he would say, for his stories were always the same, ‘Do you know the strangest thing that ever happened to me? One night I went into this bar in Australia. Myself and some of the boys from the ship. And do you know who I saw there sitting in the bar? It was Squinty. You remember Squinty, he had a squint eye. Well, he saw me and I was going over to speak to him but he turned away from me. He wouldn’t even recognise me. He was playing dominoes with some people and he was wearing an old ragged coat. And he came from the same village as me. He didn’t want the people at home to know what he had become. He had gone to the dogs, you see. To the dogs. He must have been drinking hard. A lot of these boys never write home, you know. No one hears of them, they go to the dogs and they drink. Well, he didn’t speak to me and he had been brought up with me. And he was drinking wine. Imagine. He was like a Frenchman, drinking wine. And he just turned away from me. It was a queer thing.

  ‘Well, that night, I went into the lavatory in that pub and I looked in the mirror that was there. I had been drinking, you see, and my face was red and my eyes were red. And I said to myself, “Where are you heading for, boy? Where are you sailing your ship?” That was what I said, “Where are you heading for, boy?” And that was why I got married. My wife is older than me and she had been looking after her parents, that was why she didn’t marry before. She was very sweet to me at first, she wouldn’t say anything about my suit then. Nothing but, “You do what you like, Kenneth John, you always do that anyway.” That’s what she used to say. But then she began to buy things for me, handkerchiefs and things like that. Then she would buy shirts and at last she bought me a suit. And ever since then I’ve been in a cage. Women. What can you say about them? They brought sin into the world. The Bible teaches you that. But you’ve never seen a woman on board ship, have you? They would be no good. They would be putting on their lipstick while water was coming in in a storm. You have to have some give and take on board a ship if you don’t want a fight. That’s what I say.’

  And his wife would murmur, as she sat by the fire, ‘He could have been
a captain, you know. He could have been a captain.’

  10

  On a fine day our village looks very peaceful and lovely. The blue sea is in the distance, with perhaps a ship passing by, smoke coming out of its funnel, and behind us there is the moor which is wine-red with heather. In the early morning you can hear cockerels crowing from here and there, their red claws sunk in the earth, their coloured brassy heads extended. Sometimes too you hear a dog barking. The Clamhan, in front of the house, may be hammering a post into the ground or mending a net in front of his door. Or at this time of year you may see people going down to the corn which is yellow in the sunlight. As the sun comes up, small boys start running about. As the day passes and it gets hotter, you may see them building tents. I don’t know why they do it, but on the very hottest days you will find them sitting inside these tents and trying to make fires just like Red Indians.

  And beside me Murdo sits regarding his unfinished house.

  Practically every morning I go over and talk to him after I have got up and have had my breakfast (which usually consists of a cup of tea and a slice of bread). I don’t eat much for breakfast. I offer as usual to help him but he says as usual that he doesn’t need any help. His two daughters who have now left school are usually going about the outside of the house with pails and pans. They are not pretty, are in fact spotty with very thin legs.

  Today he tells me about a big stone that he has taken home on his barrow the day before.

  ‘There were hundreds of worms below it,’ he tells me. ‘Hundreds of them. All so red. I could have killed them all but I left them for the birds.’

  I thought: the birds will make songs from them. There are in fact few animals to be found around here. No foxes, rabbits, weasels. Hardly any wild life at all. And no trees. I miss the trees. That is why I often think of Edinburgh. For some reason I specially associate trees with university days. But this is a bare bleak island especially in winter when it’s wet and misty.

  ‘What are you doing today?’ Murdo asks.

  ‘Oh, I’ve got a few letters to answer,’ I say. I have no croft and this means that time passes very slowly for me. I am driven to reading and writing, since I don’t visit many houses in the village apart from Dougie’s. As I’m talking to Murdo the idea comes to me that I could buy milk from Janet’s parents. They sell milk and are one of the few families in the village that have a cow. It strikes me as a good idea. In the distance I see a cow eating some clothes on a clothes line at the far end of the village: that was what brought the idea into my mind. I can’t make out whether it is Stork’s house or that of the two sisters Maclean, one of whom has been lame all her life, practically, from polio. Sometimes I find the mornings here exhilarating and most beautiful; other times I find them boring. There is a rhythm about the place, a slow deep sometimes exasperating rhythm. People talk slowly, chewing every word and releasing it as if it were a precious possession whose extinction in air is to be mourned. Language almost becomes like tobacco which is as much chewed as smoked.

  ‘Ah, well,’ says Murdo, ‘it’s going to be another fine day.’ And I say that in my opinion it probably almost certainly will be. And I know that all we are doing is making sounds, that silence embarrasses us after a while, and we are not using language at all but making comforting motions. I look down at Murdo as he sits on his stone: there are red hairs in his nostrils. He looks like a large plump red animal. He is, as I have said before, like a man surrounded by tombstones. And I try to penetrate his mind but I often feel that he has no mind to penetrate. He has never thought about the world, about its meaning. He is, it seems to me, perfectly suited to his environment in a way that I shall never be. His environment makes on him the few demands that he can easily cope with. Day after day he rises from his bed and day after day he takes out his barrow and brings his stones home. It is almost as if he has forgotten what the stones are for, as if the house itself which is his ultimate aim has receded into the distance and it is only now and again that he recalls that the purpose of gathering the stones is for building the house. A slight breeze ruffles his canvas jersey which moves slightly about his big belly.

  After a while he says, ‘Isn’t that Kirsty there setting off to the shop?’ It is indeed. Then he says, ‘I hear that her daughter is in London.’ He looks at me slyly. ‘I hear she’s on the streets there. Someone from the village saw her.’

  I was in London myself once. I remember it as a vast place glittering with cinemas and theatres and people with braziers selling nuts late at night on the streets. That was a long time ago when I was at a Conference.

  A long time ago too Murdo was in the War, in the Fusiliers he says himself. He says that he didn’t like the French, that they were tricky and lazy, not like the Germans. I can’t imagine him ever having done anything that required rapid movement but I suppose that he must have been young once as we all were.

  ‘Well,’ he says at last, ‘this won’t do,’ and he levers himself slowly to his feet and goes to his barrow. His hands must now be cracked and broken with the weight of the vast stones that he brings home.

  ‘And I’d better be going too,’ I say. At least he has something definite to do every day: I don’t even have that. He spits on his hands and then takes the handles of the barrow and sets off to the moor again. I watch him as he plods steadily along. Then I turn back into the house.

  After a while I take out my writing pad and my pen and write to my brother. The phrases flow easily. They are always the same phrases. My brother is a salesman in New Zealand and I really don’t know him very well. Even when we were young I didn’t know him: he was much more active than me and though younger he always beat me in fights. I was amazed at times by his aggressiveness and frightened by his mad possessiveness for property. We used to play sometimes in the attic of my parents’ house and he would turn somersaults over the rafters which I couldn’t do.

  Now I have little to say to him but I feel a certain obligation to write. ‘Everything here is as usual,’ I write, feeling at the same time that the phrase is perhaps slightly too literary, too stilted. I have no gossip to give him. I merely tell him that all is well, that I hope his children and wife are well, that I am sure he is busy and so on. We don’t communicate more than I communicate with Murdo and his work appears to me to be precisely as useful as Murdo’s.

  The only event that has happened is the arrival of the hermit but for some reason I don’t tell him about it. I don’t tell him how much I hate that mirror image of myself, which is yet stronger than me, at the end of the road. I don’t tell him of my obsession with that being, because I have so little to do. I don’t tell him that the reason I hate the hermit is because I am frightened I will become like him, for at the moment at least I still hold on to language, though it is possible that that too may go. I don’t however want the New Zealand papers, I tell him. Rugby is the very least of my interests in life, it is certainly far on the periphery.

  My brother was always far better at sport than me. I was never any good at any sport, neither football nor shinty, nor any other game that the boys used to play. I was never any good at rock climbing or jumping across streams. Perhaps that is why I became a schoolmaster in the end. I can’t at any rate imagine myself as ever having been a salesman. That would be the final indignity of all.

  I seal the letter slowly and after I have done that I turn to one of my paintings. The painting shows a thin Van Gogh-like figure sitting on a thin gaunt chair while above it as if about to jump on it a picture of a wild cat. On the wall which is red there is a framed picture of a violin.

  11

  I went to see Janet’s parents to ask them about the milk. When I went in, the mother and father stood up from the table where they had been eating but Janet remained where she was. She continued eating, her head downcast, concentrated on her plate. O, my dear, chewing your bacon and eggs, so shy and sweet. Her father said, ‘Come in, come in. What a stranger you are!’ And he held out his hand. His wife, flurried a
nd red-checked, was wiping her hands in her apron.

  It wasn’t often that they saw the ex-headmaster of the school in their house. I didn’t know them very well – they lived at the far end of the village – all I knew was a story about her husband who used to go about selling fish that they found him one night drunk in a ditch, his horse and cart at the side of the road, the horse patiently cropping the grass. Now of course he had a van.

  ‘Would you like something to eat?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yes, something to eat,’ said the mother, as if she had just thought of it.

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact I came to ask a favour.’

  All this time Janet was eating her bacon and eggs and drinking her tea. They had put a chair out for me and I sat down and they sat down but of course they wouldn’t continue with their food. I shouldn’t have come at that time, I thought, they took their meal later than me.

  ‘And what favour is that?’ said her father. ‘I’m sure if we can help you we will.’

  ‘Surely, surely,’ said his wife, mumbling downwards at the table.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it occurred to me the other night that you sell milk. And I would like to buy some. I’m getting tired of the milk I have. I would like really fresh milk.’

  They both smiled now that they knew that the favour didn’t make a great demand on them. Janet looked up at me for the first time, her fork and knife still in her hand. I suppose I thought even Juliet had to eat sometimes, while the tragedy raged around her. There was a spot of yellow egg on her lip.