The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  ‘Naturally we want it now.’

  And he gave her a quick secret husband’s smile, like a Belisha beacon flashing on and off for a moment.

  ‘She likes doing this, you know,’ he told the other two largely. ‘Don’t think you’re putting her out in any way. She likes nothing better than making and arranging food. Other people arrange flowers, Ruth arranges lettuce and beetroot. What about you, Helen?’

  ‘No, I don’t like making food particularly,’ said Helen smiling through her almost cracking mask. ‘Tom can tell you that if you ask him. There’s a lot that Tom can tell you.’

  Teddy gazed at her in surprise and then his face moved away from her into the distance, returning slowly so that she almost asked, ‘Have you come back from the party already?’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said laughingly. ‘But it must be the quality of the brain. I mean there’s Tom and he left school with O levels and I had four Highers. And look at him now. What do you think, Helen. Is it a special sort of brain?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Well, now, that’s interesting. A special kind of brain eh? I think what it is is this: you think of money all the time and then it comes to you. Your brain is a magnet for the money. Most people don’t think of money all the time, but Tom does and therefore money obeys him. It gravitates towards him as to its natural master. Ah, well, here’s Ruth with the nosh.’

  He busied himself with plates and cups and saucers till they had all been served with coffee or tea and food.

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘is egg sandwich. That is cheese sandwich and that, I think, is paté. Eat up and drink up for tomorrow we die and we all go to meet Mackinnon, the old bastard.’

  He doesn’t mean anything by it, thought Helen, as she helped herself to an egg sandwich. It’s all talk. Mackinnon could be anybody, anything, he is only a symbol for the frustration that is bothering him. It could be thistles, spikes, needles, sharp points of ordinary existence. People talk about substitutes for their real worries. We live in metaphors and that is all Mackinnon is, a metaphor – an inflamed monster who gathers about him like seaweed the destitutions and rancours and envies that we secretly bear with us all the time. We live in metaphors, as in the old days before I met Tom and I used to read poetry by myself in the attic. Before all this useless and aimless heat.

  ‘I think,’ said Teddy, ‘that I haven’t been ruthless enough. That’s what it is. I am too much a liberal at heart, I see too many sides to too many questions. And I talk too much. Have you noticed that Tom doesn’t talk much? He sits there and listens. He’s wondering what he can do with us. Isn’t that right, Tom? He studies and he considers. That’s why he’s rich and I’m poor. That’s all there is to it. The liberal brain is rotten to the core. Still, I’ve got to go on,’ putting his hands out towards Ruth and almost falling on to the sofa.

  ‘You watch it, Teddy, or I’ll belt you one,’ said his wife. ‘Poor brain or not.’

  ‘OK OK, you’re stronger than me. I’m weak. Everybody’s strong but me. How’s about me interviewing you, Tom? Like for instance, question one, where did you make your money? Second question . . . Oh, sorry, old pal, I think I’m just drunk. It’s just this money question. One can’t think about anything else nowadays. It’s like a cancer in your head. Watching every penny. Was it always like this? Shoes, toys, shirts, did one have to think about them all the time and how much they cost? I suppose one must have done – except in the Golden Sixties. Ah, the Golden Sixties when even Time magazine was interesting and you had great reporters. The Golden Sixties. Why, I used to leave the electric light on all the time and run hot water all day. We used to spend like drunkards, we were millionaires.’ His face became clear and tranquil as if he were looking back to that time and that place where all had been simple and no one worried about a tomorrow.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Helen asked suddenly.

  ‘Yes, I think so. I think I’m all right.’

  Tom looked at his wife but he didn’t say anything. His face was redder than usual and he seemed embarrassed by his brother’s outburst. She knew that the revelation of emotion upset him. I wish I was home, she thought, I didn’t really want to come. Ruth is watching me all the time and so too is Teddy with his unsleeping journalist’s eye, though he is very drunk. We’re all drunk, we had better not say too much, we must hide, hide. And at the moment Tom said,

  ‘It’s all a question of how you sell yourself, Teddy.’

  ‘What do you mean, how I sell myself?’

  ‘What I said. If you put a high value on yourself then other people will put a high value on you as well. You would get on better with Mackinnon if you thought more of yourself.’

  ‘More of myself,’ said Teddy. ‘What do you think I am, a diamond? A car? By God, I muck about the garbage and I can’t find any gold dust, that’s for sure. You go on as if people were objects.’

  ‘He always talks like that,’ said Helen in a conciliatory voice though her head was tight and hot.

  ‘Well, aren’t they?’ Tom asked drunkenly. ‘Aren’t they? Isn’t that what they are? They sell their labour on the market. Some sell themselves better than others, that’s all I say. You’ve got to face up to reality, Teddy. If someone comes to inquire about my chalets I don’t take the first person I get. I look at their shoes, their clothes, I listen to them. I watch how they sell themselves, how confident they are. Some are more successful than others at selling themselves, that’s what I think.’ His smile succeeded in being pleasant and embarrassed at the same time.

  Ruth also smiled, looking from Tom to Helen and then back again. She’s studying us, thought Helen, she’s wondering what our marriage is like. And she never opens her mouth. How can she keep it shut for so long? Has she nothing to say, or is it something else? I hate people like that, they are like stones with no mouths. And yet her children obey her without question. How odd. Or perhaps how right. I think I am feeling sick, she thought, I think I am going to be sick.

  ‘Like Watergate,’ she heard Teddy say. Talk talk talk. Nothing but open mouths and people talking. They spoke because they had to speak, because they were there. I talk because I am here. She wanted desperately to put her insight into words but could find no break in the conversation.

  Did Teddy fantasise that he might have dug the Watergate story out of the secret recesses of Washington?

  There he sat so sleek and careful though he was pretending to be revealing his innermost thoughts all the time. Yes, we are like objects, we manipulate each other all the time.

  ‘I . . . ’ she got up.

  ‘What is it?’ said Ruth.

  ‘The bathroom. I’m just going to the bathroom.’ Teddy and Tom mistily swathed in the Watergate story didn’t seem to notice that she was leaving the room.

  ‘I don’t see what was wrong with it,’ Tom was saying. ‘They made a mountain out of a molehill.’

  ‘A mountain out of a molehill?’ she heard Teddy saying and then was out of the room with such a feeling of relief, as if she were leaving a ship that was going on the rocks. But she didn’t go to the bathroom. She went out by the back door and there she saw a field of daffodils spring out at her in yellow. The children were playing with a red ball and they came running over.

  ‘The daffodils,’ she told them, ‘let’s hide in the daffodils.’

  ‘Let’s, let’s,’ shouted Miriam, but William stood staring at her, foursquare like a workman.

  ‘So that they won’t see us,’ said Helen. ‘They won’t see us if we really lie down and hide.’ She lay down and pressed her face against the tall daffodils. From the midst of all that scent and colour the house looked dark, almost black.

  Somewhere they are walking, free and tall, the queens without worries about money. No one can see them among the daffodils with their yellow flags. She crouched down and felt moisture on her face.

  In our old age we are safe, in the cage of our old age no one will get at us.

  She felt as if she were dimi
nishing and withering, into the safe country of the daffodils. Down down with the children among the yellow flowers, safe in her shrunken old age.

  She saw the adults coming and she hid more and more deeply. They were coming from Washington, from Watergate, from the city of cherry trees and corruption, they were walking across the lawn, weighing the problems of the world. There was Teddy with his journalist’s eyes gazing down at her, wicked and sharp. There was Ruth, her face flat and expressionless as a stone. And there was Tom, red-faced and impatient. He can drive home, she giggled, he can drive home. I am staying here.

  Boo, she shouted at them, boo, boo boo. And the daffodils pale and tall were about her. She was the queen and they were the black square people coming from their eternal conferences trying to keep the world going till she was old enough to be rich and without care.

  from

  MR TRILL IN HADES

  What to do about Ralph?

  ‘What on earth has happened to you?’ said his mother. ‘These marks are getting worse and worse. I thought with your father teaching you English you might have done better.’

  ‘He is not my father,’ Ralph shouted, ‘he is not my father.’

  ‘Of course, having you in class is rather awkward but you should be more helpful than you are. After all, you are seventeen. I shall have to speak to him about these marks.’

  ‘It won’t do any good.’

  How sullen and stormy he always was these days, she thought, it’s such a constant strain. Maybe if he went away to university there might be some peace.

  ‘He has been good to you, you know; he has tried,’ she continued. But Ralph wasn’t giving an inch. ‘He bought you all that football stuff and the hi-fi and the portable TV.’

  ‘So I could keep out of his road, that’s why.’

  ‘You know perfectly well that’s not true.’

  ‘It is true. And anyway, I didn’t want him here. We could have been all right on our own.’

  How could she tell him that to be on your own was not easy? She had jumped at the chance of getting out of teaching and, in any case, they were cutting down on Latin teachers nowadays. Furthermore, the pupils, even the academic ones, were becoming more difficult. She had been very lucky to have had the chance of marrying again, after the hard years with Tommy. But you couldn’t tell Ralph the truth about Tommy, he wouldn’t listen. Most people, including Ralph, had seen Tommy as cheerful, humorous, generous, only she knew what he had been really like. Only she knew, as well, the incredible jealousy that had existed between Jim and Tommy from their youth. Almost pathological, especially on Tommy’s side. It was as if they had never had any love from their professor father who had been cold and remote, hating the noise of children in the house. They had competed for what few scraps of love he had been able to throw to them now and again.

  She couldn’t very well tell Ralph that the night his father had crashed his car he had been coming from another woman, on Christmas Eve. She had been told that in the wrecked car the radio was playing “Silent Night”.

  Of course, in his own field Tommy had been quite good, at least at the beginning. He had been given a fair number of parts in the theatre and later some minor ones on TV. But then he had started drinking as the depression gripped and the parts became smaller and less frequent. His downfall had been his golden days at school when he had been editor of the magazine, captain of the rugby team, actor. What a hero he had been in those days, how invisible Jim had been. And even now invisible in Ralph’s eyes. And he had been invisible to her as well, though she often recalled the night when Tommy had gate crashed Jim’s birthday party and had got drunk and shouted that he would stab him. But he had been very drunk that night. ‘I’ll kill you,’ he had shouted. Why had he hated Jim so much even though on the surface he himself had been the more successful of the two? At least at the beginning?

  She should have married Jim in the first place; she could see that he was much kinder than Tommy, less glamorous, less loved by his father, insofar as there had been much of that. But she had been blinded by Tommy’s apparent brilliance and humour, and, to tell the truth, by his more blatant sexiness.

  Of course he had never had any deep talent, his handsomeness had been a sort of compensatory glow, but when that faded everything else faded too. She herself had been too complaisant, declining to take the hard decision of leaving him, still teaching in those days, and tired always.

  To Ralph, however, his father had appeared different. He had been the one who carried him about on his shoulders, taught him how to ride a motor bike, how to play snooker (had even bought a snooker table for him), taken him to the theatre to see him perform. Even now his photograph was prominent in his son’s room. She had been foolish to hide from him the true facts about his father’s death, his drunken crash when returning home from one of his one-night stands. She should have told him the truth, but she hadn’t. She had always taken the easy way out, though in fact it wasn’t in the end the easy way at all.

  And then Jim had started to visit her, he now a promoted teacher, although in the days when Tommy had been alive not often seen except casually at teachers’ conferences, but very correct, stiffly lonely, and certainly not trying to come between her and his brother, though she knew that he had always liked her. She had learned in the interval that kindness was more important than glamour, for glamour meant that others demanded some of your light, that you belonged as much to the public as to your wife. Or so Tommy had used to say.

  She remembered with distaste the night of the school play when she had played the virginal Ophelia to his dominating Hamlet, off-hand, negligent, hurtful, almost as if he really believed what he was saying to her. But the dazzled audience had clapped and clapped, and even the professor father had turned up to see the theatrical life and death of his son.

  But how to tell Ralph all this?

  That night she said to Jim in bed,

  ‘What are we going to do about Ralph?’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘You’ve seen his report card? He used to be a bright boy. I’m not just saying that. His marks are quite ridiculous. Can’t you give him some help in the evenings? English used to be his best subject. In primary school he was always top.’

  ‘I can help him if he’ll take it. But he won’t take it. His English is ludicrous.’

  ‘Ludicrous? What do you mean?’

  ‘What I said. Ludicrous.’ And then, of course, she had defended Ralph. No one was going to say to her that her son’s intellect was ludicrous which she knew it wasn’t. And so it all began again, the argument that never ended, that wasn’t the fault of anyone in particular, but only of the situation that seemed to be insoluble, for Ralph was the thorn at their side, sullen, implacable, unreachable.

  ‘I’m afraid he hates me and that’s it,’ said Jim. ‘To tell you the truth, I think he has been very ungrateful.’

  She could see that herself, but at the same time she could see Ralph’s side of it too.

  ‘Ungrateful?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Ungrateful. You remember the time I got so angry that I told him I had after all brought him a television set and he shouted, “You’re a bloody fool then.” ’

  ‘You have to try and understand him,’ she said.

  ‘It’s always the same. He won’t make the effort to understand. His father’s the demi-god, the hero. If he only knew what a bastard he really was.’ Always making fun of him with his quick tongue, always taking girls away from him, always lying to his distant father about him, always making him appear the slow resentful one.

  That night she slept fitfully. She had the feeling that something terrible was happening, that something even more terrible was about to happen. And always Ralph sat in his room playing his barbarous music very loudly. His stepfather would mark his eternal essays in his meticulous red writing, she would sew, and together they sat in the living-room hearing the music till eventually he would tell her to go and ask Ralph to turn it down. She it was who was
always the messenger between them, the ambassador trying hopelessly to reconcile but never succeeding. For Ralph resented her now as much as he resented Jim.

  She couldn’t believe that this could go on.

  Ralph sat at the back of his stepfather’s class, contemptuous, remote, miserable. Quite apart from the fact that he thought him boring, he was always being teased by the other pupils about him. His nickname was Sniffy, for he had a curious habit of sniffing now and again as if there was a bad smell in the room. But, to be fair to him, he was a good, conscientious teacher: he set homework and marked it and it really seemed as if he wanted them all to pass. But there was a curious remoteness to him, as if he loved his subject more than he loved them. Nevertheless, he was diligent and he loved literature.

  ‘This, of course, was the worst of crimes,’ he was saying, sitting at his desk in his chalky gown. ‘We have to remember that this was a brother who killed another one, like Cain killing Abel. Then again there is the murder in the Garden, as if it were the garden of Eden. There is so much religion in the play. Hamlet himself was religious; that, after all, was the reason he didn’t commit suicide. Now, there is a very curious question posed by the play, and it is this’ (he sniffed again),

  ‘What was going on between Gertrude and Claudius even while the latter’s brother Hamlet was alive? This king about whom we know so little. Here’s the relevant speech:

  ‘Aye that incestuous, that adulterate beast,

  with witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts,

  won to his shameful lust

  the will of a most seeming virtuous queen . . . ’

  The point was, had any of this happened in Hamlet’s lifetime? He meant, of course, King Hamlet’s. Had there been a liaison between Gertrude and Claudius even then? One got the impression of Claudius being a ladies’ man, while Hamlet perhaps was the soldier who blossomed in action, and who was not much concerned with the boudoir. After all, he was a public figure, he perhaps took Gertrude for granted. On their answer to that question would depend their attitude to Gertrude.