The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  ‘Oh, just an old woman with a black shawl. She looked a bit hunchbacked. That was all. I don’t know what you’re going on about her for. The curious thing was that she looked vaguely familiar. Maybe I caught a glimpse of her in the hotel tonight without realising that I’d seen her.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ he said.

  Now that the door was locked he felt quite secure. He turned over on his side and almost immediately fell asleep.

  He was awakened by the sunlight falling across the bed and into his eyes. Sheila was already up and sitting in front of the mirror tidying herself. He himself felt joyful and light hearted as he often did on a sunny morning, aware of a new unused world opening before him, alive with hope and cheerfulness. When he got up he went behind her and put his arms around her. She shrank away from him, not much, but enough for him to notice.

  ‘Don’t be a clown,’ she said, ‘put on your clothes. You’ll be cold.’

  He did his Groucho Marx walk across the room as he had often done on the island while walking along the street, wondering if anyone would notice. But in fact no one had looked at him: perhaps they really thought he was a cripple.

  ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ he sighed heavily, imitating her father and glancing at her mischievously. But she didn’t react in any way and only looked into the mirror searching for signs of approaching age. That, he thought, was good: at least she hadn’t forgotten she was a woman. He padded round her, the sex fiend of the Highlands. ‘An inconspicuous elderly man with a wooden leg and a mask has been taken into custody,’ he intoned, ‘for the murder of an old woman who had inflicted psalms on him for fifty years. Pleading justification the man said that she had a rotten voice anyway.’ She didn’t smile at first but then gradually did. He was happy again.

  ‘I think,’ he said in his normal voice, ‘that we should take our cases down with us. Save us coming back to the room again after breakfast.’

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  So they packed their night-clothes in their cases and walked along the corridor, he behind her.

  He didn’t know what made him turn as he was leaving the door of the bedroom behind him but in any event he did turn.

  He stared directly towards the glass door at the end of the corridor and saw with horror, quite clearly, himself and his case, and she slightly ahead of him with her own case also reflected in it. As he moved and looked backwards the image moved with him.

  With horror such as he had never known he realised that what he was looking at was not a glass door at all but a mirror.

  His head spun but he had enough presence of mind to nudge her forward as she was about to turn and look at him. In that case (his spinning brain was telling him) what she had seen was not an old woman in black at the far end of a glass door but herself walking towards the mirror. And the vague sense she had of the woman turning away was herself turning in at the bedroom door.

  She went into the bathroom on her way downstairs and he waited outside it, ready to prevent her for any reason from walking back along that corridor towards what she had thought was a glass door but what was in actual fact a mirror.

  And as he sat there on a chair conveniently provided outside the bathroom the world turned round and round and finally came to a stop and he saw her as she would be in the future, old and clad in black exactly like that woman whom he had thought of painting as she breasted the sharp island wind. He stared straight ahead of him at a painting on the wall which showed a hill and a loch and a boat and its amateurishness seemed to gather about it like a black shadow descending from the badly drawn sky.

  When she came out of the bathroom he picked up the case and walked down the stairs, she ahead of him. When the tweedy man asked them if they had slept well he said that they had. He wished to be away as soon as possible, ate little, and when his wife was about to ask about an old woman who might or might not live in the hotel he quickly sent the man off to make out the account for bed and breakfast.

  Behind the wheel of the car, later, he drove at seventy miles an hour for mile on mile. Disapprovingly she sat beside him but said nothing. For a good part of the way he found himself looking in the mirror to see if there was anything following them but all he could see was a small yellow car with a small man in glasses at the wheel who was staring ahead of him unsmilingly. Beside him was his taller wife and behind both of them there sat upright a tall black dog which gazed ahead of it with an air of tranquil ownership.

  The True Story of Sir Hector Macdonald

  He became Major General Hector Macdonald, he who had been brought up in the Black Isle in the Highlands of Scotland. Apprenticed at an early age to a shopkeeper in Inverness he ran away to join the army in Aberdeen. Sent to Afghanistan he was promoted rapidly, reaching the rank of Colour Sergeant: and after two episodes where he showed conspicuous bravery he was sent for by General Roberts who gave him the choice of a VC or a commission in the Gordon Highlanders.

  ‘Better a commission in the Gordon Highlanders than to be a Member of Parliament,’ said the impeccable soldier. Nor perhaps did he realise then that to hold a commission in peacetime in the army of that day was to expose himself to expense that only a private income could cope with. And that to rise from the ranks to a commission was further to expose himself to humiliation and jealousy and envy.

  And loneliness. Above all loneliness.

  After the mountains of Afghanistan, after the bodies of the rebels had twisted slowly in the wind, he was ordered to South Africa to take part in the Boer War, a very different kind of war where the enemy were like ghosts, sharpshooters, brilliant amateurs.

  At Majuba Rock he among others climbed at night to ensconce themselves above the Boer camp. Sliding about the rocks in hobnailed boots they entrenched themselves, digging wells for water. In the early morning one of the soldiers shouted to the sleeping Boers to come up and fight like men. There was a scrambling of Boers from their camp which became like a live anthill and then the rock became an inferno of heat and fire. As the British soldiers were picked off by the Boer sharpshooters the rock became a cauldron flowing with blood. Hector fought with his bare fists but was eventually overpowered, made prisoner, and had his sword taken from him. Later he was released and as a gesture of respect had his sword returned to him: the Boers recognised a brave enemy.

  The First Boer War had however been a disaster.

  Hector went to the Sudan to train native soldiers to fight the Dervishes. The Sirdar, called Kitchener, a hater of women, built a road along the Nile along which he sent his armour to avenge Khartoum. The desert was infested with flies but most beautiful at night with its millions of stars. From water-holes dead camels stared back at one. Kitchener’s iron road drove undeviatingly for Omdurman, as he made his bullish rush at the enemy. The Mahmud was dragged behind a horse to pay for Gordon’s death. Kitchener’s army marched relentlessly forward supported by ships and big artillery. At night one could see the searchlights from the ships dividing the sky into sections. One could also hear the sleepless drums of the enemy. Maxims cut the Dervishes down and they lay like black sheaves while Kitchener made for Omdurman, not realising that many more of the enemy were hidden behind sand dunes. Hector or Fighting Mac as he was called was surrounded by them. Cool as an icicle he told his men with the harsh fury of the ex-sergeant that they must wait till the enemy were close before they fired, and his trained Sudanese obeyed him. His army was outnumbered by ten to one and caught between two forces. At that moment he invented a spontaneous dance of march and countermarch, retreat, advance, retreat, advance, while sabres cut and drums beat till they heard the pipes of the Cameronians, and the Dervishes – thirty thousand of them at the beginning – began to break. Later it was said that it was Hector who by his coolness had given Kitchener his victory.

  Promoted to Brigadier General he was made Commander of the Bath and an ADC to the Queen, while Kitchener was voted thirty thousand pounds by Parliament. Hector who needed the money was instead given ceremonial swords, banque
ts, freedom of cities. Highland societies acclaimed him – ‘Pray silence for Colonel Macdonald.’ The Earl of Kincardine, the Duke of Atholl, were among the guests at these dinners. He had been promoted dizzily from private to the rank of a high officer but he was still lonely, perhaps more so now that envy became acute. After all had he not been just a leader of black troops? And was it not his training as a sergeant that had drilled his force sufficiently to save the hour at Omdurman?

  He begins to write to a young boy whom he had met in Aberdeen. Again he is sent to fight the Boers in charge of the Highland Brigade who were in disgrace because they had run away at Magersfontein after they had been propelled in darkness to make a frontal charge on entrenched Boers who picked them off like ducks. Six hundred men had been killed in a few minutes. Lord Methuen stood on a platform and told them, ‘Your primary duty is to the Queen, then to your country, lastly to yourselves.’

  Hector himself drills his troops in sections like a sergeant but is wounded in the foot at Modder River while his unprotected men advance, again under the overall charge of the unimaginative and bullish Kitchener. The war was a stinking abattoir, the enemy was a taunting lightning on the hills.

  Hector is given the charge of some gentlemen Volunteers and rages at them in pain and frustration: why can’t these Boers stand and fight like honest men? Kitchener invents his concentration camps and in spite of comparative failure caused by his wound and accumulated fatigue. Hector is knighted and sent to Australia, and New Zealand, and finally to Ceylon, a post suitable to tired old superannuated army horses. From the latter place he was ordered home after rumours of homosexual adventures, the sin of David and Jonathan.

  Roberts, himself happily married, didn’t understand the loneliness which led to the offence if offence it was. King Edward, bulbous-eyed womaniser, understood even less. Hector was ordered back to Ceylon to face a jury of his peers. On his way there he stopped off at Paris where he took lodgings. One morning he went to buy a morning paper and there in the New York Herald found that the story about him had broken. He walked back to his lodgings and shot himself. His body was rushed hugger mugger to London in a plain coffin and from King’s Cross was taken by train to Deans Graveyard where he was buried in a rainy grey dawn with only a few mourners present.

  These then are the facts about this famous soldier, of whom it was said by grieving admirers that he was not dead, his coffin had been filled with stones, and that he was the Mackensen who fought in the German army in the First World War.

  In such speculation I am not interested. I have a speculation of my own. It is Paris, city of culture, of books and poems and opera, in the early morning, and Hector Macdonald is walking along one of its streets in search of a newspaper. He is the simple flower of the British Empire, he has fought for it till he has grown weary, he has been a good linguist, but not a cultured man in the Parisian manner. He has committed the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah and his home village is biblical and puritanical.

  No, I am not concerned with any of that. On the contrary I am concerned to follow this man down the Parisian street in the early morning. I imagine it as early morning, pearly grey. There he walks, stiff-necked, ramrod-backed, this Highlander who has become a world figure: and I imagine, for one can imagine such things, passing him on the other side of the street a young painter called Picasso perhaps with a brush in his hand. And Hector does not notice him, and Picasso does not notice him either. And Picasso may be thinking of a collage of bits of newspaper stuck on a painting, and it may be that he will use the same newspaper which has just told of Hector’s disgrace. At any rate they pass each other on this pearly morning, the old soldier who has fought for the Empire, the flawed lonely man who has climbed into the sky only to be brought down like a pheasant by jealous guns: and the painter with the eyes as piercing as twin gun barrels.

  Two worlds let us imagine, one dying, one about to be born.

  And then as if the image has been frozen it begins to move again, and there is the crack of a gun in the very heart of the Empire, creating eddies of disturbance, spreading outwards. The coffin is hurried north in a weeping dawn – the initials HAM written on it – and Picasso returns to his studio. It is a day in March at the beginning of the twentieth century.

  Chagall’s Return

  When I came home the cat was smiling and the walls of the house were shaking. The door opened and there was my mother in front of me.

  ‘Who are you, my child?’ she asked, and her eyes were unfocused and mad. There were other old women in black with her and they nodded to me over and over. I went to see a neighbour who was ploughing, and afterwards I took buckets to the well and brought in water. But my mother was still gazing at me with unfocused eyes and she asked me again and again who I was. I told her about the skyscrapers and the man with the violin, but she could understand nothing.

  She kept saying, ‘In the old days there were cows, and we were children. We would take them to the grass and there they would make milk.’

  ‘I have brought you money,’ I said. ‘See, it is all green paper.’

  But she looked at the paper unseeingly. I didn’t like the look in her eyes. In the afternoon I took a walk round the graveyard near the house, and the tombstones were pink and engraved with names like conversation sweets.

  There is nothing in the world worse than madness. All other diseases are trivial compared to it, for the light of reason is what illuminates the world. All that day I shouted to her, ‘Come back to me’, but she wouldn’t. She wanted to stay in her cave of silence.

  In this place I walk like a giant. My legs straddle the wardrobe, and the midgets around me speak with little mouths. My hands are too big for the table and my back for the chairs. I look into the water which I brought home from the well and it is still and motionless. But my mother’s eyes are slant and the old women whisper to her. I nearly chase them out of the house but my mother needs them, I think, for they tell old stories to each other. I think they are talking about the days when things were better than they are now.

  The cat’s mouth is wide open and he smiles all the time as if his mouth were fixed like that.

  ‘Who are you?’ says my mother, over and over. She doesn’t remember the day she stood at the door watching me leave, a bag over my shoulder, her eyes shining with tears. I used to see her in the walls of skyscrapers, a transparency on stone. My young days were happy, I think, before she went crazy. Now and again she says things that I don’t understand. She speaks the words, ‘Who is the man with the black wings?’ over and over. But when I ask her what she means she refuses to answer me.

  Night falls, and there is a star like a silver coin in the sky. I hear the music of violins, and the black women have left. But my mother’s eyes remain distant and hard, and she stares at me as if I were a stone. A dog with a plasticine body is barking from somewhere and in an attic a man is washing himself with soap over and over.

  One day in New York I saw that the sun had a pair of moustaches like a soldier home from the wars, and he began to tell me a story.

  ‘I went to the war,’ he said, ‘and I was eighteen years old. For no reason that I could think of, people began to fire at me trying to kill me. I stood by a tree that had red berries and prayed. I stayed there for a long time till the sun had gone down, counting the berries. After that I went home and I was hidden by my sister behind a large canvas for the rest of the war. When the war was over there were no trees to be seen.’

  Still my mother stares at me with her unfocused eyes. I see the whites of them like the white of an egg. She has terrible dreams. In her dreams she is being chased by a vampire, and just at the moment when he is about to clutch her she wakens up.

  ‘Where are you, my son?’ she cries. I rush in, but she doesn’t recognise me. The greatest gift in my life would be if she recognised me, if the light of reason would come back to her eyes.

  I wonder now if it will ever happen.

  ‘I shall put tap-water in the house for you,’
I say to her. But she doesn’t answer. She only picks at her embroidery.

  ‘And heating,’ I say. ‘And an electric samovar.’

  ‘My father,’ she says, ‘was a kind man who had a beard. He was often drunk but he would give you his last penny.’

  I remember him. He wasn’t kind at all. He was drunk and violent, and he had red eyes, and he played the violin all night. Sometimes I see him flying through the sky and his beard is a white cloud streaming behind him. But he was violent, gigantic and unpredictable.

  Where the sky is greenest I can see him. I go to the cemetery with the pink tombstones, and his name isn’t on any of them.

  What am I to do with my mother, for she shouts at the policemen in the streets? ‘Get out of here,’ she screams at them; ‘this was a road for cows in the old days.’ The policemen smile and nod, and their tolerance is immense for she cannot harm them.

  The bitterest tears I shed was when she told them that when her son came home he would show them that she wasn’t to be treated like a tramp. The old, black women come back and are always whispering stories about her, but if I go near them they stop talking.

  ‘Is your seed not growing yet?’ I ask my next-door neighbour.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘it is going to be a hard year. How is your mother?’

  ‘Not well,’ I say, ‘she lives in a world of her own.’

  He smiles, but says nothing. He was ten years old when I left this place with my bag on my shoulder. That day the birds were singing from the hedges and they each had one green eye and one blue.

  I begin to draw my mother to see if her reason will come back to her. I see her as a path that has been overgrown with weeds. Her apron is a red phantom which one can hardly see and the chickens to which she threw meal have big ferocious beaks. Nevertheless, she does take an interest in what I am doing, though she cannot stay still, and her eyes are beginning to focus.

  One day – the happiest of my life – she speaks to me again and recognises me. ‘You are my son,’ she says, ‘and you left me. Why did you leave me?’ I try to tell her, but I cannot. The necessity for it is beyond her understanding, and this is the worst of all to bear.