The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  When we arrived at the house she was already there and had put on a fire, though it was June. She was a large plump woman, and when she talked of Norman her eyes brimmed with tears. Now and again she would look at Sheila’s costume as if she was saying to herself, Imagine coming to a funeral in a blue costume.

  ‘I suppose you would like to see him,’ she said, opening the lid of the coffin, and we looked down at my brother’s calm, distant face.

  ‘What happens here with regard to funerals?’ I asked.

  ‘People will come along later and there will be prayers and psalms,’ she said. ‘And you’d better get in touch with the grave-digger. I’ve got his number. I thought the funeral might take place tomorrow. Is that all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘You’ll know the procedure here.’ While I was dialling the grave-digger Sheila said, ‘The undertaker arranges all that, where we are.’

  ‘Not here,’ said my cousin. ‘Here, the two people, the undertaker and the grave-digger, have to be contacted separately.’

  When the grave-digger answered I could hardly hear him, as if his voice was coming from the depths of the earth. However, he agreed to carry out the digging and I think he made a ponderous note of the date.

  ‘I believe my brother was very religious latterly,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said my cousin, ‘he was a strong follower, ever since his mother died. Oh, by the way, I got some groceries for you.’

  I reached for my cheque book but she said, ‘No, I wouldn’t dream of taking money. It’s only for yourselves that I bought them. The visitors won’t take any food. There will be a lot of them.’

  ‘Where are they going to sit?’ said Sheila.

  ‘Oh, my husband’s arranging for chairs to be brought in. He will be along shortly. He will have help. Now I must run along and make the family’s tea. I will be back.’

  When she had gone, Sheila and I looked round the room. There was not much there of any value. There was however a really beautiful blue vase on the mantelpiece.

  ‘He must have decided that he didn’t want any material things,’ said Sheila. The tears suddenly brimmed her eyes.

  I thought of him. After all, we had been young together and had, as they say, ‘paidlt in the burn’. My mother had always preferred him to me and hadn’t wanted him to marry. I however had left for the mainland and was now a chartered accountant.

  Sheila went into the kitchen and looked around. She opened the fridge and found milk and butter there as well as some cheese. In a cupboard she found tea-bags, bread, marmalade and jam.

  ‘We don’t need much,’ I said, ‘as we shall be leaving after the funeral.’ I had decided that we would return to the island later and arrange for the sale of the house. However, I hoped to see the lawyer before we left.

  I went upstairs and saw a number of photographs of my mother and, surprisingly, one of myself when I was about nineteen. I looked young, happy and hopeful. I glanced out through the window towards the sea which sparkled in the sunlight.

  ‘It’ll be heavy going,’ said Sheila, ‘all these religious people coming.’

  She had removed her blue costume and was rummaging in our case for a darkish skirt and blouse.

  ‘You’ll have to wear a hat,’ I said. ‘I imagine it will be like a church service.’

  She didn’t say anything, but I knew that she didn’t like the religion on the island and wasn’t used to it. Her own religion was sunnier.

  ‘We might come and stay here,’ I said jokingly.

  At that moment I heard a knock on the door. My cousin’s husband, whom I vaguely remembered, and another man, were bringing chairs in from a van.

  I shook hands with them and helped place chairs in various rooms. ‘Where did you get them?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re from the Sunday school,’ said my cousin’s husband, whose name I didn’t know. He was a smallish man and he was wearing dungarees. His companion, who was taller, said nothing at all except that when I asked politely if there was any fresh news on the island he replied, ‘No, only the good news of the gospel.’ After that he remained silent.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to my cousin’s husband, ‘I can’t even offer you a dram.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ he said. The tall gaunt man stared at me as if I had laughed out loud in church.

  When they had gone Sheila and I began to rearrange the chairs in silence.

  While I was doing so, I was thinking of my brother and his life. Had it really been my fault that I hadn’t liked my mother any more than my wife had? She had been a very domineering woman who had certainly dominated my brother. He had tried to marry two or three times but each time she had taken to her bed, and also objected to the girls on various grounds, such as that one of them smoked and another one didn’t attend church, and so on.

  ‘What a lonely life he must have led,’ I said, looking round the room. On a table near the window there were four Bibles and a radio.

  ‘He would have died peacefully,’ said my wife. ‘He would have faith.’

  The doctor had told me that it was cancer of the stomach. Norman had been very bitter towards me and it was only his regard for family that had caused him to make me his heir.

  A picture flashed into my mind. The two of us were standing on the bank of a river. ‘Dare you to jump to the other side,’ I said. But he wouldn’t jump, though I did. In his youth he was very nervous and imaginative. Perhaps that was why he had become so religious, as if he was looking for a protective armour. I wandered about the room as if seeking evidence of what his later years had been like. I found a black hat hanging on a nail in the lobby and a number of coats in the wardrobe. In his bedroom there was a small library of spiritual books.

  ‘What happened to the picture I gave him?’ said Sheila. This was a picture which she had herself painted of the area in which we lived. It was not to be seen anywhere.

  I left the house and went outside. There was still some coal in the bin, and the grass was long and uncut.

  When I returned to the house, I shouted to my wife, ‘It was good of my cousin to bring groceries.’ However, Sheila wasn’t in the kitchen or in the living-room. She was upstairs and when I went up she was sitting on the bed crying.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I’m all right. You go down.’

  I left her and descended the stairs. Had it been my fault that my brother had broken with me, I thought. Had I been too honest, too inflexible, in refusing to attend my mother’s funeral? To tell the truth, I think she ruined Norman, but no one could have told her that. He seemed bound to her by indissoluble ties. I think the main reason for that was that when he was young he had suffered from bronchitis and he had been off school a great deal. The other boys hadn’t liked him very much and I had often fought them to protect him.

  When Sheila came downstairs, I said, ‘We have got out of the habit of expressing simple feelings.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

  ‘Just that. We can’t express our feelings, though I suppose women can do so more than men.’

  ‘He was very lonely,’ she said. ‘I feel sorry for him. Look at this house. It feels cold and without character. Why all these Bibles too? Why four of them?’

  ‘Maybe he wanted to check their authenticity,’ I said jokingly.

  But what she had said was true. There was a bareness about the house in spite of the fire. On one of the walls there was a patch of damp like a section of a map.

  ‘And another thing,’ she said, ‘there don’t seem to be any ordinary books, or any newspapers for that matter.’

  ‘I’d noticed that,’ I said, ‘and yet when he was young he read far more than I did. Novels, history, poetry, and adventure stories.’

  ‘And yet he never left the island apart from the period of his teacher training.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘He couldn’t go to the war because of his weak chest.’

  I imagined him com
ing home to this bare house after his mother died. She must have been a presence there for him. In the photographs I had seen she sat calm and tranquil like a Buddha, her hands in her lap, staring peacefully at the camera.

  His coffin lay in the room and his face was cold and still. Tomorrow he would be buried in the churchyard that stood beside the sea, and the flowers would grow through his bones. Time had passed and this was not the boy I had once known. Sometimes I think there is a disjunction in our lives, and the older man is not a continuation of the boy at all.

  I think I became a chartered accountant because I didn’t wish to be involved in the history of the island. I wanted something material, and not at all spiritual. But at times I wondered if my job had made me unfeeling. My wife had more feeling for Norman than I had.

  ‘I’m sure they’ll be coming shortly,’ said Sheila, glancing at the clock.

  ‘I’m sure. I should have asked my cousin when they would be here.’

  The room with its chairs was like a room in a church.

  ‘I think we had better move some of these chairs,’ I said. ‘Some of them are too near the fire. The knees of the people will be burnt.’ And I laughed.

  ‘It was a terrible religion,’ said my wife. ‘I wonder if he was frightened.’

  ‘Of the cancer?’

  ‘No, I mean of hell.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ I said. I suddenly remembered Norman as young, his hair light brown, his eyes bright and argumentative. Because I had failed him he had been impelled towards the church. And yet the truth of feeling was important. Why should I have pretended to like my mother when I hadn’t in fact done so? When we were young she would prevent us from playing football whenever she could. Not that Norman had played much, but playing might have improved his chest. On the other hand she held him in subjection so long as he was ill.

  On the way over on the boat I had heard an English voice saying, ‘Soon we will be home in Bayble.’ I found this disconcerting since I thought of the island as my home, even though I hadn’t been there for years. I suddenly realised however that I was a stranger there.

  ‘I’d like to phone Gerald,’ said Sheila.

  Gerald was our son and was studying in art college in Edinburgh. He didn’t like me being a chartered accountant and he would go on about children in Ethiopia, and want us to send money. I used to say, ‘There is no guarantee that this will ever reach the right people.’ Gerald was very emotional, untidy, and kind-hearted. I couldn’t stand his untidiness since I myself am obsessively neat. I also found it very hard to talk to him. There would be long silences between us and for the life of me I couldn’t think of anything to say. I couldn’t understand his paintings, they were impenetrably abstract.

  ‘You’d better get yourself a teacher’s certificate,’ I would say to him. ‘If you don’t succeed as an artist you will always have teaching to fall back on.’ But he wouldn’t become a teacher, as all teachers in his judgement were middle-class. He hated us for being middle-class. At one time he had been rebellious.

  Once we had some friends in the house, and a woman had said, while were having drinks, ‘I suppose Gerald here will have Coca-Cola.’

  ‘Not at all,’ he had said, ‘Coca-Cola makes me fart.’

  Sheila had hidden her laughter, but I was really angry. In short, I don’t get on well with Gerald and I am sure he despises me.

  Sheila turned away from the phone. ‘I can’t get hold of him. He must be out.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ I said.

  Suddenly she burst out, ‘Why did you say that? You didn’t have to say that. I come all the way up here, but you don’t want to make any concessions, do you? I like his paintings.’

  I kept silent. I didn’t want us to quarrel before these people came. I have, I think, much greater self-control than Sheila: it is only very rarely that I lose my temper.

  The posters on the walls of Gerald’s room are highly political.

  ‘What’s this one about Nicaragua?’ I once asked him.

  ‘What do you mean, what’s this one about Nicaragua?’

  ‘I just don’t understand what you have to do with Nicaragua,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’

  And when he’s at home he plays his music very loudly. I have often told him to turn the volume down but as soon as I leave his room he turns the volume up again. Also he has to help me with the video and he makes sarcastic comments about my intelligence.

  I wonder how Norman and he would have got on: he did at one time talk about him and suggest that he might take a croft on the island. I discouraged that.

  ‘I should have taken these curtains down and replaced them,’ Sheila said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, these people may be talking about them. They don’t look very clean.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said, ‘the house is fine and tidy.’

  ‘It’s tidy enough,’ she agreed. ‘I can’t understand why he didn’t buy some decent furniture.’

  ‘Perhaps he gave most of his money to the church.’

  ‘That’s possible,’ she said seriously.

  At least not to Nicaragua, I thought. If it was to the woman next door that would make sense, but why Nicaragua?

  And in any case Gerald never had any money. He had left a good job in a supermarket because it sold South African oranges.

  ‘Look,’ I told him, ‘in my youth we couldn’t pick and choose like that.’ I myself had once worked on a fishing boat. I remembered that Norman never took a job: he had spent his time studying. I supposed he had been a good teacher, though I had never met anyone who had been taught by him. If he had brought his religion into the classroom he would have been a conservative unimaginative one. Then again, since he hadn’t any children himself, how could he understand children.

  In the early days, for instance, he would never play with Gerald, or lift him up in his arms. He obviously felt uncomfortable with him, while Gerald stared at him, his thumb in his mouth.

  ‘Here they come,’ said my wife, and we saw the first visitors at the gate. I went to the door and shook hands with them and looked suitably grave. They seemed sad and said very little. They were in fact two women, and when they came into the house they sat down on chairs in the bedroom facing the sea. They wore coats even though the evening was warm. They also wore hats.

  My wife glanced at me, raising her eyebrows. She had offered them tea but they refused. They sat perfectly still on their chairs like polite children.

  After their arrival more and more people started to come. I shook hands with all of them. My cousin also came and told me that I should keep the front seats for the elders. However, one doddering old woman took one of them and I didn’t have the heart to move her.

  The rooms became very crowded. There were even people sitting on the beds of the upstairs bedrooms. They talked quietly among each other.

  The sturdy-looking elders introduced themselves, and one of them said, ‘Would you like the service in English or in Gaelic?’

  ‘English,’ I said.

  Suddenly Sheila said, ‘Could we have it in both English and Gaelic?’

  ‘Whatever you want.’ said the elder.

  He seemed pleased with the decision and visibly brightened.

  ‘I think he would have preferred that himself, if I may say so,’ he said.

  We all sat down.

  Many people stood up and prayed. I needn’t describe what they said since it was the usual thing. Then they began to sing the beautiful Gaelic psalms whose music rose and fell like the sea. I hadn’t realised how moving and aesthetically satisfying they were.

  When it was all over Sheila said to me, ‘Do you know that one of the elders winked at me?’

  ‘He was probably trying to put you at your ease,’ I said.

  The service had lasted about an hour and finished about nine o’clock. Then they all left and we were alone again.

  ‘We will leave the chairs here till tomorrow,’ my cousin had said.
‘There will be another service before the funeral.’ The house was quiet after the visitors had gone. I could hear the clock ticking.

  ‘They all look very strong physically,’ my wife suddenly said. ‘I mean the elders.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said absently.

  I wondered why my brother himself hadn’t become an elder. Perhaps he hadn’t felt holy enough: he had always been a bit hesitant about his own abilities.

  I remembered one night when I had come home late from town and he was lying in his bed wheezing because of his bronchitis. I had brought him a chocolate. I gave him some squares of it as I got into bed.

  ‘Did you enjoy yourself?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, but I didn’t tell him about red-haired Peggy whom I had kissed after the dance was over.

  ‘My mother is very angry that you were so late,’ he told me.

  ‘I know.’

  He wheezed heavily during the night and I was kept awake for a while, for we slept in the same bed. In the morning I would have to face my mother, and she would say to me, ‘after all I’ve done for you, you keep defying me.’

  When Sheila and I were in bed together I could hear the sound of the sea, and I could see the moonlight on the walls.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘he even left the electric flex bare. A lot will have to be done to the house.’

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘he would have slept in the bedroom downstairs.’

  Directly in front of me was a photograph of our mother. In my mind the music of the psalms rose and fell. Below us the coffin rested. His face had become stern as my mother’s had been, purified of emotion, severe and in a strange way beautiful.

  We slept well and did not get up till nine in the morning. I could hear the cries of the seagulls all around the house and felt suddenly at home.