The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  And these thoughts and wishes brought me to the house and to my own door. I have to say at this point, if I have not said it already, that when I go out I always leave the door unlocked: there is no history of stealing in the village. I switched on the light and there sitting in my chair was my wife. She had always sat there and for a moment in my slightly drunk state I didn’t find it wholly odd that she should be there. She always used to sit by the fire knitting or sewing in that very chair with the blue cover on it.

  Then the whole world turned over again and it wasn’t my wife, it was Janet.

  I looked at her in amazement, almost buckling at the knees. She had clearly been waiting there patiently for me in the chair by the unlit fire, her legs crossed perhaps as they were now.

  ‘My parents think I’m at the dance,’ she said.

  I looked from her to the window and then I walked over and drew the curtains. What would happen to me if anyone saw her there. She was wearing a white dress and her long black hair flowed down behind her back.

  ‘I haven’t much time,’ she said.

  I went over to the cupboard and poured myself a whisky.

  ‘Would you like one?’ I asked.

  ‘No thanks,’ she said.

  I now knew why she had come. With my whisky in my hand I walked over to the bureau in the corner of the room and took out my money. I didn’t care how much I was giving her and I poured the notes in her lap. It was the two hundred pounds for the red suite, that was what she wanted. She counted the money carefully and put it in her handbag which lay on the floor beside the chair.

  I drank the whisky quickly and she said: ‘Where do we go?’

  I put the glass down on the table, my lips dry. It was impossible that she should be there and yet she was there in her white dress with the pure glow of youth on her face.

  I went into the bedroom and she followed me, shining palely in the darkness. I drew the curtains in this room too, shutting out the light of the moon, though I could still hear the dancing.

  I undressed and climbed into bed. My legs seemed scrawnier than usual, my skin unhealthy looking. She stood over at the dressing table looking briefly in the mirror in front of which my wife had used to sit in the mornings and at night. This was the bed the two of us had shared for so many years.

  She climbed into bed and her flesh felt cool and marbly. I put my arms around her in the darkness. The desert had blossomed with water.

  ‘I haven’t got much time,’ she whispered again.

  She had come out of the darkness for two hundred pounds for a red suite, for its cheap rays. I had plenty of money. I didn’t grudge that. I grudged the torment of my soul that had led to this.

  It took only fifteen minutes, that was all. When it was over she got up and dressed again in front of the mirror. There was a comb there which she used: in it were still a few grey hairs. I looked at her while she was dressing. She was like a fish, lively and cool. She seemed to have forgotten about me. After a while she was completely dressed again, this child, this cool child.

  ‘Shall I close the door after me?’ she asked as I lay there.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She pulled the door behind her and then I heard the main door close.

  I felt corrupted and yet light as if some great weight had been lifted from me. Forgive us our sins . . . I imagined her making her way home like a thief through the night while the dance continued. I nearly got up to take some more whisky but after the door had closed I stayed where I was. I knew that would be the last time, the only time, that she would never come again, but my heart was humming with joy. After a while I fell asleep still hearing, before I dropped off, the music of the accordion and the sound of the dancers’ feet.

  16

  The following evening Kenneth John came back to the village on the bus.

  I didn’t talk to him that night but the following day I was able to. He was sitting in front of his house on a chair which his wife had set out for him and he looked diminished and shorn as if some vital part had been removed from him. As I came over his wife looked at me and for the first time I realised that she didn’t like me very much. There was a hard hostile gleam in her eye which however she masked immediately. She brought me out a chair as well and I sat beside Kenneth John: she had given him a pillow to lean against but hadn’t brought one for me. After a long while he began to talk, at first almost to himself and then later to me.

  ‘I tried to get a job on a ship but I couldn’t get one. I went down to the quay and there were some men there but when I told them what I wanted they just laughed. I told them I had been to Hong Kong and Valparaiso and that I had been on the big sailing ships up in the rigging. They said that they didn’t have sails on ships nowadays. They called me “old man” and told me that I should go home. And I’m sure none of them had ever been to Australia or New Zealand or any of those places. “You can’t go to Valparaiso, old man,” they said, “you’re too old.” They didn’t realise,’ he said, turning to me at last, ‘the thirst I felt. The day we went to San Francisco, years ago, I saw the bridge shining in the sun and I couldn’t believe that the world could be so beautiful. There was a slight haze too, a slight blue haze. But the bridge was shining. They didn’t understand the thirst I had to see that place again. And every day I saw them and they said the same thing. They used to call me Valparaiso Jim. And I used to see them loading and unloading the ship and in the evening I would see it setting out. It was so big and white. But they just laughed at me.

  ‘At first I walked about the town but I didn’t see anybody I knew. Nobody at all. It was like being in a new country. People just going to the shops and walking along the pavements and their eyes looking into themselves and they were all so gloomy.

  ‘And I stayed in this house run by a Mrs Malloy, a small greedy woman. She wouldn’t even let me watch the TV. And the house inside was all dark and there was a smell of polish and cabbage. And there were pots with shiny plants in them and big leaves. I used to sit in my room every night and watch the walls, there was nothing else to do. And I’m sure she didn’t clean the dishes properly. I’m sure the dishes were dirty. She wouldn’t even wash my clothes unless I gave her extra money. I just had forty pounds altogether, I didn’t have much money. It was funny, wasn’t it, after leaving here, I ended up in a room watching the walls. On the wall there was a painting showing three deer on a mountain side and it looked like a painting I had seen on a train a long time ago. I think she must have stolen it from the train, that’s what I thought. She was a small sour-looking woman and I didn’t like her at all. The furniture was very dark and the house was dark. She didn’t seem to draw the curtains aside and there was a smell of cooking. She wouldn’t even darn my socks for me. I didn’t like her at all. Not at all. And there was no one in the town I knew. I was used to a hot water bottle every night and she wouldn’t even let me put the fire on. She said I could go to the lounge but there was no one in the lounge and it was full of old furniture.

  ‘And, in the mornings, I would go down to the quay. The weather was so beautiful, there’s never been a summer like it, and there were boats in the bay and I would ask these people if I could get a job. In the early morning I was full of hope. But they still laughed at me. And they told others about me and they laughed at me as well. Valparaiso Jim they called me. They had no pity for me at all. I said I didn’t want any pay while I was on the ship. All I wanted was bed and board but they had no pity on me at all. I thought that everybody had been at San Francisco at some time or another. But no, they hadn’t, not one of them had been, and it didn’t worry them. They were happy where they were and all they thought about was making their money for the day and then going home at night. They said I should go home and put my feet up at the fire. You’re too old, they said. You’re too old for San Francisco. But one of them seemed to understand and he took me in for coffee one day and he said that he had a family and three children. You should go home, he told me. Look at me, he said, I’v
e never been to San Francisco, not even once. And you’re better off than me. You’ve been at least once. And that was true too. I hadn’t thought of that before. What he said was right enough. But I still had this thirst. That’s what they don’t understand, the thirst. I didn’t want to lie down and die and that’s what they wanted me to do. But they didn’t have any pity.

  ‘And when I went back to the house at night there was no TV and there was no fire and this woman wouldn’t even wash my clothes. And sometimes in the morning there would be a queue at the bathroom. And there was a man who never spoke to me, he read the paper all the time, even at his breakfast. And there was a smell from the house, a smell of polish and cabbages and some other smell that I have never smelt before. It was an old smell, it almost made me sick.

  ‘And at night I used to look at the picture with the three deer on it. They were green deer and they were on this brown mountain and there was an old gold frame to the picture. And in the lounge there was an old piano and no one ever played it. You had to be at your breakfast at a certain time and if you weren’t there you didn’t get any. I didn’t like the place at all and I didn’t like the woman. She also asked me for my money in advance. I couldn’t help thinking of the old days when you had somewhere to go. When you’re young there’s always somewhere to go. I didn’t have anywhere to go there, I couldn’t even walk the street because I didn’t know anybody. I never met anybody all the time I was in town, nobody at all. They were all strangers and they were looking ahead of them and they looked so worried and so old. It wasn’t like that in San Francisco.

  ‘You know, I always thought that everybody had been in San Francisco at some time or another and there were these people and they hadn’t been and they didn’t want to go.

  ‘So one morning I got up and I looked out the window at the bay where the ships were and I knew that I would never get to San Francisco again. I would never be on board a ship again. So I put all my clothes in my case and I told the woman I was leaving and I left the house and I went down to the bus. I didn’t even go to the quay in case I changed my mind when I saw the ships.

  ‘So I came back home and I knew all the time as I was sitting in the bus that I would never leave the village again. But I’ll tell you something, I can get a hot water bottle now and I can watch the TV and I don’t have to sit in a lounge. It’s funny how those things mean so much to you. I knew that I was old and that all my youth had gone. Sometimes you don’t realise that till it’s very late in life. I’ve realised it now.’

  He turned and looked me full in the face. ‘I’m home now,’ he said, ‘for the last time.’ A wisp of sand blew about us and I thought of the little girl who had come from school and said that she had gone to the window of the hermit’s hut and she had heard him singing.

  He was altering things because he was there, his existence was an affront.

  ‘I’m sure you did the right thing,’ I told Kenneth John. ‘I’m sure you did the right thing.’ But my heart felt empty as I said it. How could the knowledge of the right thing make one feel so shorn and diminished, so totally void?

  17

  When the minister, the Rev. Murdo Mackenzie, came to see me I thought at first that he was looking for money. I never of course go to church and haven’t done so for many years now. The minister is a very thin man with a cadaverous face, one of those faces that Highland ministers have, grained and deeply trenched so that they look like portraits of Dante in his old age. When he came in I asked him to sit down but he gazed vacantly at the chair and didn’t sit on it. He paced about the room nervously, sometimes passing his hand across his eyes as if he were dazzled by an enormous problem.

  ‘I suppose you are wondering why I came to see you,’ he said at last. For one frightening moment I thought it might have something to do with Janet and that he was going to warn me about the terrible moral consequences my sin might involve me in. But it wasn’t about that at all. As a matter of fact I had nothing against this particular minister. He had never pestered me to come to church as some of them do and as far as I knew he was a very competent minister, visiting the sick regularly and making no distinction between the rich and the poor.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I came to you simply because you do not attend church. I couldn’t tell my congregation or my elders because they wouldn’t understand.’ He paused for a long moment staring into vacancy then sat down in a chair and almost immediately got up again.

  ‘It’s difficult to tell you this,’ he said. ‘Very difficult. I don’t know where to begin. It’s so strange. So strange. Nothing like it has ever happened to me before.’

  I waited patiently. I knew now that whatever it was it had nothing to do with Janet or me. I wondered, if he had known about that, whether he would have come to consult me. Almost certainly not.

  ‘Well,’ he said at last, as if preparing to take the brunt of a large cold wave, ‘I suppose I’d better tell you. You’ll probably think I’m mad, utterly mad, and perhaps I am. You see, I always prepare my sermons in advance of the Sunday. I like writing them out, I get a great amount of pleasure out of my little efforts. I feel that I am creating something, you understand.’ I nodded. I was sure he must feel like that about his trivial orations.

  ‘I spend quite a lot of time preparing them,’ he continued. ‘I write them down in longhand and sometimes after that if I have time I type them. I don’t just use headings for my sermons. No, I write the whole sermon out. The sermon I was preparing this week was on God and His gift of His son to us and how, sinful though we are, God has thought it expedient to save us out of His great mercy. There is nothing unusual about the sermon. In fact I have often used a similar kind of sermon before. O I believe in God and in Christ. When I was in the pulpit the words would pour out of me like a fountain. For what after all is a minister unless he has the gift of words? I don’t mean the gift of language, for few have that, but the gift of eloquence, the gift of words. It would certainly be odd if you had a minister who couldn’t speak, who couldn’t use words. A minister needs words and he needs hope. What would his congregation think of him if he had no hope and he couldn’t preach? He would be like a thorn without sap, he would be a useless plant in the desert. He would be nothing.’ He looked at me keenly and I thought I knew what had happened. He had lost his faith. I had often wondered what would happen to a minister if he lost his faith. Most of us at some time or another lose our faith in what we do, we find our work absurd, we feel that our motions and operations in the world are meaningless and dispensable. But what if this happened to a minister whose business after all is faith, and who must rest in it or be without function?

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘You’re thinking that I’ve lost my faith. It’s not as simple as that. For, as I said, what is a minister without a voice, without words? If silence descended on a minister what would he be? Nothing. Nothing at all. Do you understand?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what happened,’ he said. ‘I wrote my sermon and then I tried to speak it. Aloud in my room, standing up, as if I were talking to the congregation. I was talking about God and Christ and the fact that the Son of Man was born in a stable. Well,’ he said looking at me with horror, ‘I tried to speak the words and no words would come out of my mouth. It was as if I had gone dumb. I thought at first that I was suffering from some sickness, some disease, but no, for I am speaking to you now, am I not? And I could speak to my wife and children. But whenever I tried to speak the words of that sermon it was as if I had gone dumb.’

  ‘This sermon about God and Christ?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘about the blessings of God.’

  ‘And did you mention in it,’ I asked ironically, ‘the blessing of pain which has been granted to us?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mention that.’

  I was silent for a long time. The stable and the hut. The dumbness and the hermit.

  The wi
ngs ascending to the sky.

  The words written on paper.

  Was I going out of my mind? The minister paced about my house like an animal in a cage. Understanding nothing.

  First there was Kenneth John and now there was the minister.

  It was like a plague, a language dying.

  The big stones in the mouth.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you should tell the congregation that you’ve got a cold, that you’re hoarse, and maybe the words will come back to you later.’

  ‘But it might happen to me again,’ he said.

  ‘It won’t,’ I said. ‘It won’t. You just tell them that you’re hoarse.’

  The soul of the village dying. Not that I cared about the minister but it was as if I owed a debt to the village. Truth moving restlessly about my room, dumb.

  The white Greek moon in the sky like a stone screaming. And its dumbness lying on the earth. The veins and tentacles dead and finished.

  ‘Everything will be all right,’ I said. ‘It’s just a momentary crisis. It happens to all of us at some time or another. Sometimes when I was teaching I felt the same, as if I didn’t want to say anything, as if for that time I had nothing to say.’

  His eyes pleaded with me.

  ‘Is that true?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course it’s true,’ I said. ‘It happens to all of us at some time or another. The dark night of the soul.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I feel much better. I’m glad I came.’