The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  When I returned from Paris and that conference of old spectacled idealistic confused murderous colleagues, I drove up to the house which was in darkness. I switched on the lights and went systematically through the house but she wasn’t there. Her clothes were still there, she hadn’t flitted in the night, that at least was true. I picked up the phone and put it down again. Then I dialled Bell and asked him if he knew Rank’s address. He told it to me. I felt that he knew exactly what was happening, that almost alcoholic logical genius, that ghostly passenger in a world which had almost gone. He was like an insect whose wings were fading away because there was no need for them any longer.

  I drove to Rank’s house in a fury of rage and possessiveness. I rang the bell and Rank came to the door gigantic and red-haired. I said, ‘Is my wife here?’

  He looked at me mockingly for a long time as if I had said something unutterably bourgeois. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Brenda is here.’

  I followed him into the room. She was sitting on the floor by the fire as she had so often sat with me. She looked up when I came in and then down at the floor again. Her face seemed paler than usual and there were black shadows below her eyes. There was about her an air of the corrupt schoolgirl.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ said Rank.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Are you coming home?’ I said to Brenda.

  For some time she said nothing and then she got up and made for the door.

  ‘You’re frightened again,’ said Rank to her. ‘You’re frightened of being left alone.’

  But she wasn’t that at all. I knew her. She was stronger than Rank, than me.

  I took her arm and I said to Rank, ‘Would you kindly leave my wife alone?’

  He looked at me mockingly. ‘My wife,’ he said, scornfully. ‘My wife! The old possessive thing. Why don’t you leave her alone? If you left her alone she might learn to grow. She might even learn to become a good painter.’

  She stood watching the two of us as if waiting to see the issue of our battle. My mind felt clear as crystal.

  ‘And what will you put in place of possessiveness?’ I asked.

  ‘In its place?’ he said, seeming to look at me directly for the first time. ‘I’ll tell you. Freedom to live as we are. You aren’t trying to build a prison, are you?’

  ‘And you,’ I said, ‘do you never feel possessiveness, jealousy, envy? Or are you a god?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t feel jealousy, and I’m not a god.’

  ‘Then,’ I said, ‘you aren’t poor and human like the rest of us. And those who aren’t human are gods or animals.’

  ‘Good old Plato,’ he said. ‘The phantom saint of the West. The man who wanted artists out of his republic.’

  ‘I give you that,’ I said. ‘Nevertheless, what do you want? A race of gipsies?’

  ‘Shall I tell you what I think?’ he said. ‘Since you wish to know. I think we are about to enter an era of Darwinism. I think that in this era men will have to fight for their wives as they did many years ago. I think the light of reason is going out. I think that you will have to fight for her. Are you willing to do that? Otherwise marriage will not protect you.’

  I thought he was quite evil, but I wouldn’t fight him. It was too great a loss of dignity. I wasn’t afraid of him but I didn’t want to appear silly.

  ‘Well,’ I said to Brenda, ‘what do you think of all that?’

  She looked at me without speaking and then she laughed and I knew that her laughter was a comment on my world. I knew that I had sold my world out to her because of my weakness. Well, I thought, it may be that. I may side with your world in ways that you won’t understand. She laughed a pure innocent evil laugh in that room with its paintings all round the walls. Her laughter was joyous and free, like the laugh of a gipsy. It knew nothing of the real complications of the world or the mind. I had betrayed my world to her and I was being punished for it.

  I went out and later she came home. She stayed with me for that week. She said she would do that and then she would leave.

  I am sitting here drunk. She has gone out the door. We are living in a spy story. And what is she? She is a double agent. She has left my country for that other country. I look at my watch: soon she will be at his house. I pick up the phone and dial Bell’s house. He will be drunk as usual but he belongs to my world. Wilson with his gun is perched at the window of an empty house opposite Rank’s. I think it will be a good idea to have her shot just as she is about to seek asylum at Rank’s embassy. Wilson is happy to do it. I shall be talking to Bell when the shot is fired. In any case they will never have any reason to suspect Wilson. He will get away all right. I am dialling now. I hear Bell’s phone ringing and ringing but there is no answer. Well, in that case I shall have to phone somewhere else. I think I shall phone the Professor and he will tell me about Byzantium. Ah, he is answering. As he answers and I put some inane questions, I can hear the shot ring out in my mind. She staggers just as she is about to enter the embassy. I keep him talking and steady my voice. No, I say, I don’t know much about the Byzantine Empire. Wilson will have left by now, carrying his long narrow case. No, I say, I don’t know about the Byzantine Empire, but I’m willing to learn.

  The Brothers

  First of all, I should like to say that I don’t believe in ghosts, and yet some strange things have been happening to me recently. And you won’t understand them unless I tell you something about myself. I am a writer, and I was born and brought up in the Highlands of Scotland where, I may tell you, you can hear plenty of ghost stories. For instance, there was the man who used to get up from the ceilidh in the middle of the night and who would come back much later, his shoes and trousers dripping: he had been carrying the coffin of someone who had not yet died and who perhaps was telling a story at that very ceilidh. Imagine what it must have been like to be such a man. Anyway, I myself don’t believe in these stories, though I have heard them often. My father told me once that he nearly turned back one night when passing a cemetery after seeing a green light there, but he carried on, and found that it was the phosphorescence from fish lying in a cart which had been put in the ditch by the drunken driver. I believe that, but I don’t believe in ghosts.

  However, let me say that when I was old enough I left the Highlands and came to Edinburgh and began to write stories and novels in English. I left the Gaelic world wholly behind me, because I suppose I despised it. If you ask me why I despise it it is partly because of these silly ghost stories and partly because of the simple unsophisticated mode of life of those people whom I have little affection for. In fact when I was growing up they seemed to laugh at me. I have even written articles attacking that placid unchanging world which knows nothing of Kafka or Proust or the other great writers of the world. I would never go back there now, so I live in my untidy flat in Edinburgh seeing very few people and working at my books, some of which have been published. I have set none of them, I may say, in the Highlands. After all, what important insight could I get from there, from people and a culture which have not moved into the twentieth century?

  All was going well until recently when one night, working on a book about Joseph and his brothers – after all, I don’t see why Thomas Mann should be the only person who is allowed to write about the Bible – I came down to the living-room where I had left my typewriter. I remembered quite clearly at which point I had stopped writing. Joseph was standing in astonishment gazing at the pyramids and comparing them to the hills of home and, exiled in a strange land, feeling very small against that hewn stone. The moonlight was shining on my typewriter making it look like a yellow skeleton against the window. I switched on the light and picked up the pages which I had typed. I began to read them, remembering in my mind, insomniac and restless, the cadences which I had aimed for and which I thought I had achieved. However, with an astonishment as great as Joseph’s when he was regarding the pyramids, I suddenly found that I was reading Gaelic.

  Now there is absolutely no question but
these pages had been written in English. I had spent too long over the words not to know that. However, as I read these Gaelic sentences, rougher and more passionate than my English ones, I had a strange feeling that I had read them before somewhere. I stood there astonished in the silence. There was no sound in any of the other flats or on the street outside. I looked carefully round my now brightly-lit room but it seemed exactly the same as when I had gone to bed. My Penguins were arranged carefully round the walls, and my typewriter was on the table. I stared at the pages knowing that I must be going out of my mind. But I was absolutely certain that though these pages were familiar I had not written them. They seemed to be saying in Gaelic that Joseph had abandoned his land for another land and that in doing so he had betrayed his own. Someone must have typed these pages but who could that someone have been?

  No living human being could have entered the flat and certainly no one could have typed the pages without my hearing them. On the other hand, no one could have typed them and brought them into the flat as a practical joke. I am very fearful and I lock the windows, and the door is always locked. But not only that, my English pages had disappeared. Whoever had done this had not simply translated the original pages, but had rather substituted his Gaelic pages for my English ones. And yet since that person was not me it must have been some spiritual being; in other words a ghost. I felt for the first time a draught as of cold air all round me even in the bright electric light. I went to the door but it was still locked. I switched on all the lights in every room but they were undisturbed and the windows were all locked as I had left them.

  I came back to the room and stood looking down at the Gaelic pages. They were even written on the same kind of quarto paper as I had used myself and the typing was not unlike mine. But it was slightly different, the touch was lighter and surer. There were fewer erasures. The cold wind did not go away. I felt threatened as if some being whose name and form I did not know understood all about me and was determined to destroy me.

  I made coffee and stayed up all night, I was too frightened to go to bed. I went and got my red and green dressing gown and sat by the electric fire, though I could ill afford to waste all that electricity. But there was nothing else that I could do. I listened to the silence, terrified that that ghostly being would return and type while I sat there. What was I going to do? Carefully I put the case back on the typewriter and stared at it as if hypnotised. I was afraid that I would fall asleep and that the ghost would type more while I sat transfixed there like a mummy. But nothing happened and when morning dawned sickly and pale I looked again at the pages. They were still in Gaelic. My English ones had irretrievably disappeared.

  The following day I summoned up enough courage to burn the Gaelic pages and start again on my English version. I re-typed as far as I could remember what I had already done and went on to describe the sophisticated world of Egypt. I knew little about the country but imagined the kind of civilisation that would have produced those vast inhuman monuments. I invented a slave market at which Joseph was sold, I wrote about himself and Potiphar’s wife. I may say that I had difficulty here since my sexual experiences have been limited and I know whom to blame for that. At five o’clock, satisfied with my work, I made some coffee and at that moment I heard it.

  The sound was coming from the next room where I keep my record player. It was the voice of a well-known Gaelic singer and she was singing a song about the murder of a younger brother by an older one. I rushed into the room, spilling my coffee as I went. There was the record player plugged in and there was the record which I’d never seen in my life spinning on its black circuit. I switched the machine off and removed the record. Though I had never seen it, I had of course understood the words. I passed my hand across my brow and put the record down on the floor. I closed the cover of the record player and sat there dismally in the dull afternoon whose light was already fading from the sky. I didn’t know what to do. I could have gone out to see a film or a play but I didn’t fancy coming back to my flat in the middle of the night. I switched on all the lights again. I heard no one moving about the room. My jazz and classical records were still in their places. I trembled with fear and anguish.

  Suddenly I rushed back into the room where I had left my latest English pages. I picked them up. They were all in Gaelic and without erasure. I read them with horror. They said that Joseph had been condemned to death and was lying in prison waiting for the end. This too, of course, was in the story. After all, it is one of the great stories of the world. My mother had told it to me many years before in a voice of rigour and appalling judgment. But since then I had read Thomas Mann.

  I saw him quite clearly sitting in prison, the light about him dim and grey and his face quite blank. It was as if he was a white page waiting to be written on. All around him was Egypt which he had learned to love and whose language he spoke. I saw the walls of the prison and written on them were graffiti in a language which might have been Egyptian since they did not appear to be composed of any language that I had ever seen. He was dressed in his coat of many colours.

  I sat dully at the typewriter with these pages in my hand. They were strong, powerful pages, in fact better than mine, simpler and perhaps cruder. It’s difficult to explain why they were so much better, but I think it must have been because their language was less abstract. They seemed to have caught the intonation of a language that Joseph might have used, perhaps Hebrew, perhaps Egyptian. They even incorporated the words of the song I had heard on the record player. If I had had somewhere to go I would have rushed out that moment on to the street. But I had no friends in Edinburgh. Its vast stony houses were anonymous enough for me to be able to write among them in privacy, but they were not places for friendship. I stared at the light draining out of the sky and I was more frightened than I had ever been in my whole life, or rather I was frightened in a different way from that in which I had been frightened before. I felt like a statue which was also trembling. I made more coffee and kept all the lights on but I was on edge, as if waiting for a fresh incursion into my life which I had thought orderly. I waited there helplessly, as a cow waits to be poleaxed. I remembered seeing that once back in the Highlands and I had hated it. Now I was the victim myself in all that bright light. I knew I would have to stay up again all night. I would be frightened to lie in my bed among the cold stiff blankets, waiting for the dawn to appear. And as I waited I knew that some spirit was moving about me, determined to destroy me. I put the last page of the Gaelic script in the typewriter as if I was propitiating an angry god. And I sat there like that for a long time, shivering though the fire was warm.

  It must have been about seven o’clock at night that I suddenly felt a terrible anger with whatever malevolent being was about me. The curtains were drawn, the electric fire was on, there was lots of light. Suddenly I took the Gaelic pages out of the typewriter, screwed them up and threw them into the wastepaper basket. I knew exactly why I had done this. I knew that I must not surrender at this point or I would surrender forever. Why should I allow this being, whatever it was, to tell me what I ought to do, how I ought to write? I was only doing what I thought I ought to be doing. Did I not have free will? What law stated that some ghost or other from another world should command my mind? The anger I felt was pure and ardent and innocent. If I wished to abandon my homeland, if that was what I was doing, why should I not do so? Indeed, in doing so was I not being an exception? Was I not in fact setting out to create a new being? That is, the exile who is able to speak from another land and in another language? I had been betrayed by my own land. What therefore did I owe it? I too had been mocked by my own brothers, if I could call them that. Well then, let me stay in my Egypt. Let me adopt it as my promised land. Let my ambitions be fructified there. After all, wasn’t Egypt the pinnacle of achievement? And in Egypt could I not gather my corn together and feed my rustic brothers who came down there from my own lost land? What was wrong with that? Wasn’t that what the Joseph story taught, that the
murderous brothers were dependent after all on the dreamer who lived in another and more powerful country?

  So, out of my pure anger, I tore the Gaelic pages out of the typewriter and threw them into the wastepaper basket. And I waited. That’s precisely what I did. I waited. I knew that something would happen though I did not know what it would be. I was frightened, yes, but I was angry too and the clean wash of my anger anaesthetised for a while my fear, at least as long as I could hear people passing on the street in my adopted city. I listened to those feet passing and I felt in my own country. I even summoned up enough strength to start typing again in English. I wrote how Joseph left the prison because he was able to interpret the dreams of the baker and the butler. I thought of myself as Joseph, the dreamer who had such great powers.

  And the night passed and became more silent. Once I had to leave the room where my typewriter was and go to the bathroom. For a second, as I opened the door, I thought I saw a figure in white flashing past me, but I decided that it probably was an illusion. It seemed to me that the figure was dressed in a white robe which had an oriental look about it. But, as I have said, I decided that it must have been an illusion. Not an illusion however was the intense cold I felt as I left the room and all the time I was in the bathroom. And worse was when leaving the bathroom I looked in the mirror and saw my own face there. It seemed demonic and lined and white. I could hardly recognise myself. It was as if I was waiting for something to happen, something devilish and horrifying. I went back to the room, trembling again, and when I did so I saw that the pages in the typewriter were written once more in Gaelic.

  I withdrew my eyes from the pages as if afraid that they contained sentences which would destroy me. My English pages had again disappeared. I looked down at my hands, wondering perhaps if I myself was the author of what was happening to me. But I could learn nothing from them. They looked innocent and bland. I looked at the clock. It said eleven. The noises on the street seemed to have stopped and there was an oppressive air of waiting about the flat. I went right through it and checked that every light was switched on. I waited as if listening for songs but I heard nothing. I went back and sat down again in my chair which seemed to have turned into a gaunt throne. Was I indeed Joseph, sitting in that alien chair? The wood on which I sat seemed to be rotting as if small animals were eating into it. There were the marks of teeth. I saw in my hand cows eating each other, cornstacks devouring one another. I was afloat on the river of time. I can’t tell the visions I saw that night. It was as if I was in the centre of Egypt and there were snakes and cats all round me. They opened their mouths, and their teeth and fangs snapped at me. The throne or chair tottered. The furniture swayed. The pages seemed to turn into tablets, solid and white.