The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  ‘You’d better tell,’ said John Smith.

  But, no, he would not tell. He had made this mistake before and he would not do it again. No, he would not do it again. It was his secret. And the very telling might be the death blow.

  ‘If you don’t tell,’ said Shonachan, ‘you will have to leave and that’s the end of it. We will not have you in the village.’ The phantom taste of cigarettes bothered him.

  So this was it happening again. It always happened. Always. And up to now he had never learnt. No one wanted a death-dealer in their village.

  He stared at Cum, the bag over his shoulder. His red face shone in the day from the effort of carrying his letters and parcels.

  Now he must make a new effort. He did not wish to leave. Not again. It was too late. He was getting old and he wanted to stay where he was. But to give birth to the monster, that was bad, for he knew that it might be the monster that killed.

  The three of them stood in front of him: Shonachan with his slightly greying hair, John Smith like a civil servant, with his clever eyes, Cum, huge as the side of a house in his fisherman’s jersey. It was a moment of tremendous silence.

  He laid his bag down gently on the ground. If he told, what would happen? Would they attack him, would they drive him out just the same into the other villages. But he did not wish to go. All that was over for him. He would face them out this time, it was his own life that he was saving.

  He thought for a long time and then he pointed at Cum, and he saw Cum’s face disintegrating in front of him. ‘You forced me to tell,’ he shouted. Cum seemed to fall apart like the house he had never completed. His face quivered like a child’s.

  And then amazingly he saw the other two withdrawing from Cum, as if in horror, and turning ever so slightly towards himself.

  The moment passed, he was safe.

  The hostility had left the faces of Shonachan and John Smith. Indeed it was as if the three of them, these two and Pat himself, formed a new ring.

  And they watched as Cum stumbled away from them like a wounded sheep.

  ‘It’s terrible,’ said Shonachan, searching for his cigarettes.

  ‘Awful,’ said John Smith. And then to Pat, ‘You saw him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pat, ‘as clearly as I see you.’ Much more clearly than anyone had seen the Pharaoh’s mummy.

  And yet and yet . . . In the service of death itself what could one do? To defend oneself? Knowing all of them . . .

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I saw him as clearly as I see you.’

  The land around them became fresh and beautiful again. Shonachan saw it through the smoke of his cigarette. For Pat it was his joy and his triumph resurrected. No one would ever again drive him from it. He had done with his exile.

  And in front of him as it were he saw Cum like the Pharaoh travelling through the sky like a god, huge and eternal, while John Smith was writing. Thank you for yours of the 14th inst. I have to tell you that after due consideration and much thought I have come to the conclusion that . . . The pen hung over the page. His clever eyes would never tire. But above him travelled the heavy, wounded, puzzled Pharaoh, his unfinished pyramid below him in the desert.

  The Ghost

  1

  It was a bleak windy evening when they arrived at the hotel, situated by itself at the roadside with the bare moor behind and around it, he the artist and she the wife. At first they weren’t sure whether the hotel was open, since it was still cold January, but in fact it was, and when through driving rain they ran to the door and pressed the bell a tall youngish man in tweeds appeared and told them that they could have bed and breakfast. They took the cases in from the car in silence and signed the register while the tweeded man who they thought was the owner agreed that the weather was grim, and, yes, he could provide them with a drink and, yes, they could have dinner.

  They went into the lounge where there was a paraffin heater, black leather seats, and on the walls a number of landscapes which the artist glanced at with some contempt, for he himself painted in the modern style, that is to say, abstractly. They sat in silence staring at the heater: there was no one but themselves in the lounge.

  Sheila the wife didn’t speak: she knew that the holiday had been a disaster but she was unwilling to take the blame. Her husband looked at her now and again as if about to say something and then changed his mind. Even after the stormy crossing on the boat her blonde hair was carefully combed, her suit impeccable. He looked out of the window at the sea which was still tempestuous and restless, white waves foaming round the rocks.

  They sipped their whiskies and sat in silence. Who would have thought that she would have turned out to be so religious and intolerant and dark? It was a part of her nature that hadn’t shown clearly in Edinburgh. And as for himself, he hadn’t realised that such places existed, such intolerant boring dull places where time oozed like treacle, where people would sit for hours staring into the fire, where the fear of death was everywhere, where life had been pared to the minimum, where his red velvet jacket blazed out of the grey monochrome like a scarlet sin. His head still felt as if it had been flayed.

  ‘It was a bit of a disaster,’ he said frankly, turning towards her.

  ‘I thought you would say that,’ she answered, and turned away again.

  To tell the truth she had been frightened by the sight of her own true nature, concealed for so long in Edinburgh. And yet it was her nature and it had to be reckoned with.

  ‘All those elders and ministers,’ he said, ‘those endless graces. I couldn’t even show them my paintings. Imagine that. They thought they were idols and the work of the devil, they really thought that.’ He truly didn’t understand them, not at all. His own upbringing - free and sophisticated - hadn’t prepared him for that darkness, that constriction.

  ‘I felt,’ he said, ‘as if someone was squeezing me slowly to death.’

  ‘I was brought up there,’ she said, sipping her whisky very carefully as if she were already thinking of giving it up, and all this after a fortnight.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t realised . . . ’ And then he stopped.

  ‘Hadn’t realised what?’

  ‘How much of you belongs to that island. How you accepted it all, how clearly you are one of them.’

  ‘I hadn’t realised it myself,’ she said. Of course they had only been married six months but even so, not to have known . . .

  ‘But do you not see,’ she insisted, ‘that in a way they are right?’

  ‘Right!’

  ‘Their lives are ordered,’ she said. ‘They have order.’

  So that was what she was looking for. Order. Certainly he couldn’t give her that, not that sort of order. That sort of death.

  ‘I felt so secure,’ she said. ‘All the time I felt so secure.’

  After your chaotic life, she meant. After your terrifying disorder.

  ‘They know where they are going,’ she said. ‘Where we are all going.’

  Her blonde composed head turned towards him passionately. ‘Don’t you see? They are preparing. They are readying themselves.’

  ‘For death,’ he answered, seeing so clearly the black shawls around the breasts like black shields, the wind stropping the bare windy moor.

  ‘The lack of colour,’ he mused. ‘That was the worst of all. Nothing but black and white. Nothing but sorrow and sighing. Nothing but fear. They are frightened to live.’

  She was about to reply when the tweedy man came back in and said that they could have their food now. They followed him into the large deserted dining-room.

  ‘Would you like some wine?’ he asked her.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Well, I’ll take some,’ and he ordered a German wine that he had never heard of before.

  They sat facing each other alone in the dining-room which had more landscapes on the walls. The island had almost killed him, it was only now that he was beginning to waken up. He wanted a theatre of the body, music, joy, colour. But s
he didn’t want any of these things. It was as if she had returned to an aboriginal guilt on which she was feeding in silence as a trembling shorn Eve suddenly feels frightened of the apple in her hand, bitten and in such a short moment discoloured. He had a picture in his mind of the scoured streets of the island town, of the men and women in black, of the salt piercing wind, of the churches and cemeteries, of the barrenness and the blackness, of the psalms rising and falling like the sound of the sea.

  Of her father saying grace, of the truisms endlessly delivered as if they were revelations from God. ‘We are so hard-hearted,’ he would say, ‘there is no good in us.’ He had felt as if he must free Sheila from a demonic world. But she had lowered her head like a cow about to be axed, and surrendered herself to that world as if returning to her helpless childhood again.

  ‘Will steak do?’ said the tweedy man. Steak would do. They ate in silence.

  The two worlds – that bare one and the world of the artist – hung around them like contrary paintings. He felt as if he might never paint again. An old woman struggling against that eternal wind of death in her black clothes, that was what he might paint, nothing joyful. He felt tired to the bones and she was staring down at her plate. It was almost as if she expected him to say grace. The vanity. She had even stopped using perfume.

  ‘I’m not saying anything against your people,’ he said.

  She looked up questioningly.

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘God did not mean us to be like that. Surely he didn’t.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ she asked, her eyes very blue and cold and distant.

  ‘I felt as if I was being squeezed to death. It is not right to feel like that.’

  ‘Aren’t we all being squeezed to death?’ she said. And yet in earlier days she had been so gay and happy. Perhaps too much so, he thought now, perhaps with too much desperation.

  On their holiday they had met an alcoholic who lived alone and whose room was filled with empty bottles. But no one asked him why he had become an alcoholic. Everyone avoided him, they made no allowances for the temptations and the terrors. No one questioned himself, no one asked, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ He shuddered. And even now as he looked out of the window he could see the bareness and the storm and the rain lashing the ground, with its grey whips. Inside the house there was the wine on the table. He drank some more while she looked at him disapprovingly, though she said nothing.

  He felt his hands clench as if around a paint-brush that could no longer paint pictures.

  He felt as if he were fighting against some form of possession, possession by God. So many days they had sat by the fire, gazing into it as if into a mirror which showed scenes from the past, the dog asleep on the floor and now and again twitching in its sleep, the clock ticking, time devouring them. Ships on the stormy seas, bringing letters from America, from Australia, from the exiles.

  He was suffering from culture shock. He remembered his own upbringing, the playing of the piano in the large sunny drawing-room, the reading of novels, the endless simple unprincipled traffic of the world. The art galleries. On the island he was the stranger, the enemy. No one would look at his pictures.

  So much of what we do is vain, she said. And she was so beautiful, that was what was so heartbreaking. But the island would destroy her beauty, it would eat her alive, it would put shapeless clothes round her infernal breast. He drank some more wine. He wanted to get drunk, to forget about the cemeteries, the cold hard wind.

  They had some trifle after the steak and he drank some more wine.

  ‘This is quite an old hotel,’ she said, ‘really. They’ve modernised it. That’s all.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right. And we’re the only guests here.’

  If only she would dance as she had used to do. But now he could see that her former frenzy had been an escape from herself, from the darkness. From that incessant flaying wind, from that devilish music.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ she said eagerly. ‘They have adapted. They have adapted to the bareness. There’s no protection. Not even in art. Nothing protects us from mortality.’

  ‘And all your – their – lives,’ he said, ‘they are preparing for death.’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘It is another way of seeing the world. Perhaps it is the true way, without deception.’

  ‘No,’ he said, flushed with the wine. ‘I won’t allow it to be. It can’t be. I want the vanity, the unpredictability, the perfumes, the mirrors.’

  She flinched as if he had struck her. He drank some more wine. The tweedy man came in and asked if they would have tea or coffee. They would have coffee. He paused for a moment and told them that it was worthwhile keeping the hotel open in the winter because of the bar trade, that life here was very different from life in the south, that he hadn’t begun to live till he came here. He shot and fished and boated. The artist fancied that he looked now and again at Sheila who, however, stared straight ahead of her. Her faithfulness mirrored his own. For a moment he thought that religion would make her even more loyal, more predictable and he felt contentment but not joy. A large dog came into the room and gazed at them with large tranquil eyes. Fidelity. Peace.

  When they had had their coffee they sat a little longer and then Sheila said that she wished to go to bed, though it was still quite early. They climbed the stairs together and he fitted the key in the lock of the door. As he went in he had an impression of glass, another door perhaps at the end of the corridor. In the room itself there were twin beds, an oldish dressing table with a large spotty mirror, a wardrobe, and an electric fire which looked broken. He tried to fit some coins into the slot but failed. They undressed in silence, took their chill night-clothes from their cases and went to bed. He noticed that she was wearing a long chaste nightgown which he couldn’t remember having seen before: perhaps it was an heirloom which had been given her when she was home. He stayed awake for some time staring up at the ceiling and then, feeling quite tired, fell asleep.

  2

  He woke up in the middle of the night and groped for the light to see what time it was. It was three o’clock.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Sheila.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t realise you were awake. It’s three o’clock. Didn’t you sleep?’

  ‘Yes, I slept,’ she said irritably. For some reason he had an impulse to be teasing and provocative and he said, ‘Imagine. Suppose there’s a ghost in the hotel.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A ghost.’ And then more daringly. ‘Suppose we two are ghosts. Suppose the real you has gone out while I was sleeping and you are a ghost.’

  ‘What nonsense.’

  ‘But think of it,’ he said. ‘How do I know that you’re not a ghost? How do you know that I’m not a ghost? How do you know that the real me hasn’t gone out and that only my spirit is here?’

  But he wasn’t able to frighten her though he was almost frightening himself. All round the hotel on that desolate moor there might be ghosts shimmering in their long white chaste nightgowns. For a moment he really thought that perhaps she was a ghost as he listened to her breathing, a bed away in the darkness. If the two of them were ghosts, if time had changed during their sleep, in this room so old and dim with the ancient furniture!

  What women had sat at that mirror who were now in all corners of the world or dead? What women or men had slept in these very beds and had wakened perhaps at three in the morning and had spoken to each other as they were speaking now? He felt himself sweating and wanted to put the light on again. Perhaps if he did so he would only see a skull lying on the bed next to him. But he was too frightened to switch it on and lay awake staring at the ceiling which he couldn’t see. Hotels, how strange they were. Transients of all kinds passed through them, the old and the young, the sane and the insane, the crippled and the healthy. They all lay down in those beds and slept in them. They woke in the early hours of the morning and lit cigarettes and thought about their lives, wasted or fruitful.


  ‘It’s true,’ he said in a whisper across the dark space, ‘we could be spirits.’

  ‘Oh shut up,’ she said. And then she got up and switched the light on. ‘I have to go to the bathroom.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, grateful for the light.

  He watched her as she walked across the floor to the door. She was really very beautiful with her blonde hair streaming down her back. One would never have suspected that she had succumbed to the powers of darkness – or the powers of light. She pulled the door behind her and he was left alone again. All round him was absolute silence, the silence, he thought fearfully, of the grave itself. What if she never came back? What if she disappeared forever? What evidence would there be that she had ever been with him, if the tweedy fellow was involved in some ghostly complicated plot.

  But she did come back, shutting the door behind her and saying excitedly: ‘What an extraordinary thing.’

  ‘What’s so extraordinary?’ he said.

  ‘You know that glass door down at the end of the corridor,’ she said, ‘well, there was a woman standing behind it. She wore a black shawl and she looked quite old. Must be the owner’s mother.’

  ‘Funny,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘perhaps she can’t sleep. She didn’t look spooky or anything. I only had a glimpse of her. Maybe there’s another bathroom over there, the family quarters perhaps, and she was going to or coming back from the bathroom.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure she can’t sleep,’ said Sheila. ‘That’s what it is. She was looking at me and then I had an impression of her turning away.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d better lock the door anyway,’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘is that better?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Well in that case,’ said Sheila, ‘I’d better get to sleep and so had you. You’ve a lot of driving to do tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What did she look like?’