The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  It was the usual sort of cocktail party which is a high hum of noise where people hold drinks in their hands and look superior, imagining brilliant things they might say except that they can’t think of them. I talked for some considerable time to Bell and his wife. Bell is said to be the most brilliant exponent of his own esoteric branch of logic in the Western world but he is also a very nice, quiet man who has a very nice, quiet wife. Strangely enough I had forgotten about Brenda as we discussed whether logic itself is emotionally based and whether even in logic we find the things we are looking for. Bell agreed with me, though I had the feeling, as always with him, that he was talking most of the time at a level which I couldn’t follow. I enjoyed the discussion and it was only afterwards I realised that I had been starved of intellectual conversation. After a while he said to me, ‘I think your wife is over there,’ and his voice sounded very considerate as if he were talking to a sick man.

  At that time I was so sure of Brenda that I ignored what he had just said and continued with my remarks. Still looking at me in that quiet, almost pitying way, he said, ‘I was once shown an article by a friend of mine on logic and I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. Yet I knew that it was wrong just the same. I just knew.’

  ‘How can that be?’ I said.

  He shrugged his shoulders and didn’t speak. And I knew that I had missed the point of what he had been telling me. I turned away, saying goodbye politely, and almost bumped into Professor Train who was bumbling along in his usual shambling manner. I didn’t want to speak to him and made my way over to where Brenda was supposed to be. On the way I met my hosts again, James Drew and his wife. Drew is a surgeon who knew and admired my father, and his wife is also a doctor. He is a smallish, red-faced man and he said,

  ‘Glad you could come. We haven’t seen you for ages.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ said his wife. ‘We are so glad to meet Brenda at last. Why, you’ve been hermits.’

  I couldn’t see Bell any longer. He would be listening patiently to the inane chatter of some woman with a long cigarette-holder in her hand. The funny thing was that I couldn’t get out of my mind the idea that when he was talking about logic he really was talking about my wife. I had heard rumours over the years that he and his wife were on the point of separation but that this hadn’t happened so far. I could see that he had been drinking heavily.

  Drew was saying that we must come and see them soon and his wife was nodding agreement. At that moment I had a terrible feeling that Brenda had left me and had gone home. I felt utterly unnerved and lost as if I saw the party for the first time from her point of view. All these people were old, they did not belong to her generation. They were all intellectuals. What could she say to Professor Train if she came across him leaning towards her with his old-world courtesy and talking about the Byzantine Empire?

  What could she say to Bell, reserved, taciturn and desperate? Or even to Drew and his wife who had set this jiggling affair going to mitigate their own boredom? She was like a child in the woods, with the Red Indian hairband that she insisted on wearing.

  I felt oppressed as if I had made a major mistake. Spies everywhere. Bell and Drew spying on me, wondering what I was doing. Eyes following me. Looking at eyes. Eyes devouring eyes. The whole room was infested with eyes. I thought that perhaps a painting could be made in which there would be a forest of eyes, eyes ravenously searching for some miraculous advent. Eyes weary and red, eyes glittering and cold, eyes starved of experience.

  And people who believed in nothing but were looking for belief. Even Bell believed in nothing. That logic itself was emotionally based, to believe such a thing . . . And his wife hovering around him, not sure of what he was talking about. Having an IQ of that level. What torture it must be! Imagine being a professor of that most obscure branch of logic! Why? Why should a man confine himself to that? But at least I had Brenda. I needed her.

  And finally I saw her. She was sitting on the floor at the feet of a big man with flaming red hair who was holding forth to a group around him. She looked rather drunk and there was a globular glass beside her on the floor.

  The man was saying: ‘The day of the narrative is over. What we have now is not a logic of thought but a logic of images. You see it everywhere, in literature, in music, and in art. And in the cinema. Go out into the city and see that. I mean all the lights flickering on and off. They don’t constitute a narrative as perhaps the village did in olden times. What we see are flashes. We connect them quickly. Even driving a car you can see the same sort of thing. You react to flashes of signals, from everywhere around you. You haven’t got the time to connect them into a continuous narrative. In the old days perhaps you might have the time but not now. You had leisure and you could stroll down the street or wherever, but not in the city. In the city you realise your knowledge is partial, you only know fragments, you react to these. And that is what modern painting is about, it is about the city. It is about these signals that we live by . . . ’

  As if aware that I was there, Brenda looked round and then turned away again. I knew that she was angry but at the same time that she was interested. I didn’t want to sit beside her on the floor so I stood where I was and listened to this red-haired man, this demon, who went on and on and on, exhausting everyone around him except apparently Brenda. He had the look of a man who believed in what he was saying and people reacted positively to this because they themselves believed in nothing. A primitive force emanated from him. I knew that he was a painter and I knew why Brenda was listening to him. He was putting into words for her what she had sensed herself, the fragmentary isolation of painting, the sense of travelling without destination.

  As the night wore on and we all sat there and some eventually left, he still went on and on, forceful, brutal. By half past eleven he had got on to psychology and its relation to painting. He was saying:

  ‘Freud of course tried to analyse painters.’ (Was it my imagination that he was looking at me in a challenging manner?) ‘He had the temerity to try his ideas out on Leonardo da Vinci. He worked out from one painting that da Vinci’s allegiance was divided between two mothers and from his continual swirling drawings like women’s hair that he was a homosexual. The point is however that he knew things about da Vinci before he started. But what if he had known nothing about da Vinci?’ By this time people were beginning to leave. Eventually I was still waiting for Brenda and the painter who were both getting steadily drunker. Suddenly Brenda stood up and said,

  ‘This is Trevor Rank, the painter. This is my husband. He’s a psychiatrist.’

  We looked at each other and disliked what we saw. I hadn’t intervened in what he had been saying about psychology at all. I don’t like speaking in public. I’m a private person. And I recognised that Rank was a totally irrational person who would not be interested in reasonable discussion but in brutal swiping at an opponent. I nodded curtly in acknowledgement, and so did he.

  Brenda walked beside me in silence to the car and we both got in. As she settled down, I heard her say very loudly, ‘Thank Christ that’s over.’

  I didn’t say anything. We drove in silence through the streets of fragmentary lights. It was true enough what the man had said. Reds and yellows made patterns against the rain. The traffic lights flashed on and off. I felt we had come to some sort of crisis. We spent the rest of the journey in silence but I felt Brenda seething beside me. And I myself was angry as well. I should never have taken her there. These people were too old for her. And I wished to God that she hadn’t met Rank. I felt there would be trouble from that direction. Her pose of the disciple sitting at his feet affected me strongly. I sensed that I had lost some control over her. Or rather I felt that our period of idyllic happiness was over. As I manoeuvred my way through the coloured streets which might very well turn into a painting I knew that the next few months or weeks would be decisive. She had stopped painting and her inspiration had run out, and she was looking for fresh inspiration. Rank had provided her with
an ethic which might help her but she might need to see him again.

  When we finally reached the living-room she poured out a whisky and drank it quickly. She had taken off her coat in a frozen silence.

  ‘These people,’ she said at last, ‘are mummies.’

  ‘I thought they were quite pleasant,’ I said peaceably. ‘They liked you.’

  ‘Like me,’ she said, ‘like me? Who cares whether they like me or not? And you went off and discussed some abstruse point or other and left me to take care of myself.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have done that. But you seem to have found someone interesting.’

  ‘You’re dead right,’ she said, ‘he’s interesting. All your friends seem to be dead from the waist up. They wouldn’t even speak to me. Just because I was wearing my hairband, I suppose. If I hadn’t heard of some creep called Wittgenstein or somebody like that I wasn’t quoted.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, ‘but you must admit that your friend Rank is a bit boring too. At least, I found him boring. He went on and on, didn’t he?’

  ‘But I noticed that you didn’t interrupt him,’ she said viciously. ‘He was taking your psychology apart and you just stood there and took it. You didn’t open your mouth.’

  ‘I knew he would be irrational,’ I said. ‘I knew he wouldn’t be interested in argument for argument’s sake. He’s only interested in winning, not discussing.’

  ‘That’s because he believes in what he’s saying,’ Brenda snapped. ‘That’s the difference between him and the rest of the creeps there. He is creative and he actually has ideas. These other people whisper all the time. They know so much they’re dead. I felt I was in a mortuary.’

  ‘Some of them,’ I said, ‘happen to be the best in the world in their own field.’

  ‘What fucking field?’ she said. And she laughed. I realised that she was a little drunk and tried to be reasonable but I too was tired and needled. After all I hadn’t liked the adoring looks she had cast at Rank. And even now as she threw herself back in the chair, her usually pale face even paler, I knew that she was necessary to me. But I also knew that that would not be enough.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated, ‘I should have looked after you.’

  ‘I didn’t need to be looked after,’ she shouted. ‘And don’t keep saying you’re sorry all the time. You sound Japanese. It’s the smug class-consciousness of these people I can’t stand. There they are, drinking and eating and whispering their stories and theories about some bloody philosopher or other and they don’t know what’s going on in the world. They haven’t any guts.’

  ‘You’re a bit drunk,’ I said. ‘You’ll see more in perspective in the morning. And perhaps you’ll see my side of it. After all, they’re my friends too. And you did stay with that fellow all the time, didn’t you? It didn’t look nice.’

  ‘Nice?’ she said scornfully. ‘And that fellow, I may tell you, is one of the best painters in London. I don’t understand what the hell he was doing there in the first place.’

  ‘In a morgue,’ I said sarcastically. ‘Are you coming to bed?’

  ‘You go,’ she said.

  ‘All right,’ I said. And I did go. I waited for a long time but she didn’t come. It must have been over an hour before she did come to bed and she turned her back on me and went to sleep immediately. I stayed awake most of the night thinking of Wilson, my psychopath, and his terrifying mind. If she had spoken to him as she had spoken to me she would have been dead by now. She was relying on my gentlemanliness, that was it. I was the Kennedy to her Krushchev. We were poles apart and did not recognise each other. Nevertheless I loved her. I could not bear the thought of Rank speaking to her. But what could I do? I would be working in my office and she would be free, without any painting to do at the moment. Things were going to be bleak, if not totally black. I’d better ask the housekeeper in future what she had been doing during the day. Spying. Spying on each other. That’s what we all did. Rank’s hot angry eyes drilled into me as I lay on my bed watching the darkness turn into dawn, lighting up the innocent, heavy furniture.

  The quarrel couldn’t have come at a worse time as I had to go to Paris the following week to take part in a conference. I had to read a paper on Adler whose ideas I was beginning to take more seriously. Sex and power, I hovered between the two. The morning I left for Paris she was all right. It was almost as if she thought that her three days without me would help to stabilise her. She was loving enough the night before. I had, I thought, got her back.

  I phoned twice from Paris but she wasn’t in either time.

  I drove impatiently from the airport but she was at home when I arrived. She welcomed me lovingly enough, as if she were compensating for some guilt. I asked her what she had been doing but she was very vague. She hadn’t painted anything, I knew that, for her fingers were perfectly clean. There was an air of purpose and freshness about her and I knew that it was nothing to do with me. She was looking out of fresh windows and her excess of purpose was what she donated to me. The house seemed strange and she too seemed to be strange. I had a feeling that she had been seeing Rank when I was away but she didn’t mention his name. She didn’t ask me anything about Paris or my conference and I knew that she felt no jealousy. I didn’t like that for I felt jealous about her. After the people I had met at the conference she seemed young and alive and vibrant. She didn’t seem at all restless but I felt she wasn’t listening to me half the time. She went to bed early and after she had done so I went through her untidy handbag and found in her diary a phone number ringed in red. I rang the number and the voice at the other end was Rank’s. I put down the phone without speaking.

  As I went along to the bedroom I was shaking with jealousy. I think that if I had gone in then I would have strangled her, but luckily for me or her I didn’t go in. I turned at the door and went back to the living-room and began to drink steadily. I can’t describe the intensity of the jealousy I felt that night. It was as if my whole body were being pierced by knives, as if I were in a fair delirious with lights and some gipsy were throwing blades at me. I drank and drank for my whole body was one raw nerve. If in the past I had been an Olympian studying people as objects, I was paying for that now. I couldn’t sit still. I walked up and down the room all night shaking and trembling. I thought I would put her out of the house and throw her suitcase after her, but I knew that I couldn’t live without her. She had infected my blood. She was making me into a gipsy suffering torments of passion. I tried to control myself, be the rational person I thought I had always been, but it was no good. I didn’t even put the fire on but drank and drank. I was punishing myself for some terrible sin. Behind me stood the figure of my father, righteous and unforgiving, an armour-plated ego. And beside him stood my mother who was to leave him one day. I felt as if I was on a treadmill which would repeat that experience over and over. That was why I hadn’t married till late, but the repetition was beginning. She had come into my house to spy on me. God knows what she had been telling Rank about me. They had probably had many a good laugh at my expense. She was a spy in my house. I was the country whose secrets she was selling to someone else, another country. Rank and I were two countries like Russia and America, and between us went this spy, a gipsy carrying documents across shifting frontiers. I couldn’t stand it. My torment was appalling. My hands shook as dawn approached and she was lying in her bed, probably sleeping like a child. I could have killed her but I waited. I waited and I bled to death.

  I had thought that perhaps the two of us might reach some mode of compromise but I had been wrong. She had only married me for the experience and because she had been a bit depressed at that time, but now she was returning to her true self, the traveller and spy without allegiance to anyone. Even Rank she might later desert when she had exhausted his knowledge. I thought very deeply that night as if I were in a hallucination. I knew that I would have to make concessions. I had decided by the time the morning came, grey and sickly,
that I would make these concessions. I was a territory weaker than hers. I had to make a treaty for the moment if that was achievable. Later we would see, for deep inside me was the unforgiving voice of my father, hollow and echoing. He hadn’t taken to drink, he had simply worked harder. Perhaps the turning of the knife in his patients was his therapy. As I sat in the armchair I found her Red Indian hairband beside me and wept like a child.

  We are sitting at the table in the morning and I am putting marmalade on toast. Sunlight is buttering the table and Brenda is saying:

  ‘I can’t stay here all the time. Artists need their freedom, they need to work. I need to wander about. And you don’t need to set Mrs Gray to spy on me. I need to wander about the streets, to look at colours, to walk in supermarkets, to stand at piles of fruit. I need the freshness.’

  ‘But you had his telephone number in your book,’ I said.

  ‘There you are, spying again,’ she said. ‘You still don’t understand. He’s my guru, I learn from him. It’s not sexual, at least not yet,’ she said frankly.

  ‘How do you mean, not yet?’ I asked, my knife in mid-air about to descend on the butter.

  ‘What I said. You haven’t bought me, you know. You must let me be myself. I let you be yourself. I let you do your work. I don’t bother you. You must let me do the same. I know it sounds like a cliché but artists aren’t like ordinary people. They need air, they don’t want to be disciplined. You like things to be in their places. I like disorder, that’s the difference between us. And, by the way, why didn’t you come to bed?’

  ‘I didn’t feel like it,’ I said. It was such a beautiful morning and yet there were knives in my chest. I was like a bone case full of needles.