The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  When we were having breakfast, I looked at the blue vase. It was plain and very clear with a sea-blue glaze. I thought it was very beautiful.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s lovely?’ I said to Sheila.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The vase,’ I said, ‘the vase on the mantelpiece.’

  She studied it for a while. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I suppose it is. It’s the most beautiful thing in the house.’

  ‘We won’t have time to go down town,’ I said.

  ‘Did you wish to go?’

  ‘Oh, just to see it again. I remember it from my youth as being very pretty. There were trees round the castle.’

  ‘It is very pretty here too,’ said Sheila.

  And indeed it was. It was going to be a fine day, though still rather hazy. I saw a white ship sailing into the bay. It looked foreign.

  Pictures floated into my head. Norman and I were at the pier climbing seaweed-entangled steps. He was trembling beside me, looking out at the brine where the almost transparent jelly fish floated.

  Abstractedly I arranged the chairs.

  There was a knock on the door and my cousin came in.

  ‘I thought I’d see if you were all right,’ she said.

  ‘We’re fine,’ I said.

  ‘One thing I forgot to mention,’ she said, ‘you as next of kin have to walk at the head of the coffin. The coffin is carried for about a hundred yards to the hearse. You don’t have to carry it though.’

  ‘Do they still carry the coffin?’ I said.

  ‘Here they do. My husband arranged the cord holders,’ she said. ‘You will be one of them yourself. But that will be arranged at the graveside. Is that all right?’

  ‘That will be fine,’ said Sheila, ‘and thanks for all your help. We want to do what’s right.’

  My cousin looked harassed, as if she had too much on her mind.

  ‘You visited him a lot?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘He was very happy since he was converted. He went to church regularly. It was his life.’

  There was something about a vase that returned to me. It was a poem I had once read in school and which Norman had been very fond of. I don’t remember much poetry but that poem stayed with me. It told of a vase which had pictures on it: I think one of the pictures had to do with a sacrifice. The details were very vague in my mind but I remember that Norman liked it. When he liked a poem he would go about the house reciting verses and lines from it for days. I recalled his thin animated face as if it belonged to a different world, a different person even.

  ‘That’s it then,’ said my cousin. ‘There will be a service before the funeral. The minister himself will be there.’

  She referred to the minister as if he were some god.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘for everything, and for the food.’ I saw her to the door. Her harassed face looked back at me.

  ‘He was a good man,’ she said, ‘a good man.’

  The service brought a large number of people as before. I noticed a little old woman in the corner near the fire who was weeping uncontrollably.

  ‘Who is that?’ I whispered to my cousin.

  ‘She is an old relative of your own. On your father’s side.’

  It was amazing how little I knew of my relatives: but then I hadn’t wanted to be involved in genealogy or history. The woman was weeping bitterly and I saw Sheila trying to comfort her.

  When the service was over the coffin was carried out of the house into the bright sunshine. The women remained behind: only the men went to the cemetery.

  I walked behind the coffin, at the head. Because of the weight of it the men had an intricate way of changing places, and then moving out from under the burden. I saw an eighty-year-old man bent under its considerable weight.

  When we arrived at the cemetery in the hearse, the coffin was taken up some steps. We all gathered round to listen to a short service. There was a slight breeze blowing from the sea as we took the cords in our hands and lowered the coffin slowly into the ground.

  This is my brother, I thought, this is the last I will ever see of him. I found myself weeping as I looked down at the coffin, and then I wiped my eyes shamefacedly.

  He who had been a vivid excited young man had declined into a religious hermit. I could hardly bear the thought.

  Again, however, when I looked out at the sea, the image of the vase, tall and slender and plain, rose up in front of me. What is happening to me, I thought. I am a chartered accountant, that is all I am. This that I see around me is all there is.

  There came into my mind the picture of an old farmer who was very rich and who had tried to persuade me to declare only a fraction of his true earnings. He was a fat red-faced gross man.

  ‘You can arrange this,’ he kept saying to me.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I can’t. You don’t seem to understand. I am not here to cheat the tax man.’

  ‘Why not?’ he said innocently, leaning back, his legs spread.

  ‘Because,’ I said, ‘that is not my job. My job is to tell you what you can legally claim. We must work within the rules.’

  The farmer’s face suddenly became swollen and enraged.

  ‘I bet you cheat the tax man yourself,’ he shouted, the veins on his neck standing out. ‘You’re no use to me.’

  And that was how I lost another customer.

  My son of course despised me for being a chartered accountant. He despised the fairly prosperous life I offered him. Maybe he would prefer living among the starving peasants in Nicaragua.

  Standing at the graveside I felt very confused.

  I had never been pierced by such pure pain as I felt then.

  When the funeral was over a small man came over to me hesitantly.

  ‘My name is Duncan Macleod,’ he said. ‘I was in the same class as you at school. Do you remember me?’

  ‘I can’t say that I do,’ I said pleasantly.

  ‘We sat in the same seat,’ he said. ‘Do you remember Miss Gracie?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ I said.

  ‘She taught French,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I thought I’d introduce myself.’

  ‘That was very nice of you,’ I said.

  And then suddenly I did remember Miss Gracie.

  ‘Was Miss Gracie a thin grey-haired woman?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, that’s her.’

  For some reason I had hated French in school, but I loved mathematics and its indisputable naked logic. In French we concentrated eternally on grammar, and the thin grey-haired woman became the emblem for boredom. I don’t think she had been married. I couldn’t remember the boy who had turned into this small stout man.

  ‘How are you doing now?’ I said.

  ‘I’m a headmaster,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact I took the afternoon off to come to your brother’s funeral. We used to exchange books and he would show me some of his poems. He loved spy stories. He was off school a lot as I remember.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. This person in the coffin had been off school a lot. I remembered the two of us putting on our bags as we left for school. The smell of the leather returned to me agonisingly fresh. It was so clear and distinct that I nearly fainted with the unutterable pathos of it. I felt naked and vulnerable in the sea air.

  ‘Glad to have met you,’ the small stout man said.

  When I returned to the house, Sheila was there alone.

  ‘Listen,’ she said eagerly, ‘do you remember that woman who was weeping all the time? Someone said she was a relative of yours.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘what about her?’

  ‘Well, immediately the coffin left the house she asked for the blue vase. She said she would like a memento of your brother. One moment she was weeping, the next she wanted the blue vase.’

  ‘Did you give it to her?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, of course. We have no use for it.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ I shouted. ‘I wante
d that blue vase myself as a memento. You had no right to give it to her.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was important to me, that blue vase,’ I shouted. ‘Do you know that I met a friend of my brother’s at the funeral. He said that I had sat in the same seat as him at school. How can that have happened? How did I not know about it?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Sheila. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘And then our vases were stolen from the wall. I liked that blue vase.’

  ‘But it wasn’t worth anything.’

  ‘I don’t care. It wasn’t because of its value that I wanted it. It was blue and it was lovely,’ I shouted, and I almost broke down in tears. There was my son who wanted to be in Nicaragua and there was my school-friend whom I couldn’t remember, and my cousin who had brought us the groceries free. And above all, there was the blue vase.

  ‘I’ve a good mind to go and take it from her,’ I shouted. ‘She has no right to it.’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Sheila. ‘I don’t understand any of this.’

  ‘Can you not see that it’s very important,’ I screamed. ‘It’s to do with everything. My son is an artist, and he doesn’t speak to me. I’ve tried my best but I neglected my brother, and he died here, and he was a religious hermit.’

  ‘But what has all this to do with the blue vase?’ Sheila said.

  ‘It has,’ I said. ‘We were standing at the graveside and this man said that he and my brother had exchanged books and that Norman was off school a lot. And there he was in his grave. I find that strange.’

  ‘I think you’re going off your head,’ said Sheila. ‘All this may be true, but what has it to do with the vase?’

  And yet it had something to do with it. I was sure of that. The thieves had come and stolen the pair outside the house in the middle of the night. They were strangers, and I had felt vulnerable for the first time in my life.

  And now Sheila was asking me what the blue vase had to do with anything.

  Of course it was all connected: the sea, the death of my brother, my cousin, the thieves, the farmer, my school-friend whom I hadn’t recognised. My school-friend had sat in the same wooden desk as me a long time ago in another life. Norman and I were setting off for school, our leather bags over our shoulders, and the birds were singing, and my mother was watching him protectively as she had always done so that he would die alone and friendless.

  ‘Can’t you see,’ I said, ‘that the blue vase is very important?’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Sheila distantly, ‘I didn’t realise it meant so much to you.’

  ‘It meant everything to me,’ I shouted. ‘Everything. Can’t you understand?’

  And I suddenly began to weep and I couldn’t stop, and Sheila was looking at me in amazement. She put her arms around me and cradled my head on her breast as if I were a child again.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘it’s all right.’ But it wasn’t all right. I could see Gerald’s face as he looked at me mockingly, hatingly, from a ring of starving children. He was holding out an empty plate. The sky above was mercilessly blue.

  When I had stopped weeping I was suddenly quite calm.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘I’m glad you broke down,’ said Sheila. But she was staring at me as if she hadn’t known me before.

  ‘It’s just the responsibility for everything,’ I said. ‘I should have written to my brother. I should have been less proud.’

  And all the time the blue vase revolved in front of me, distant, uninvolved with history or genealogy.

  And my brother’s face was buried in my mother’s breast like a child’s in Nicaragua. Gerald’s starved face was gazing at me as well.

  And the sky opened in front of me, and there was a strong perfume of flowers as the two of us ran along a dusty March road towards the school with its carved wooden desks.

  The Open University

  When Hugh opened the big brown envelope which had fallen on to the mat below the letter-box, he saw that he had been accepted for the Open University. He knew it was a mistake but said to himself after a while, ‘Why shouldn’t I do it? After all, I am not stupid.’ And immediately the world around him which was the world of the village became more real to him, and his life more purposeful. He studied the papers for a while and decided that he would do the Foundation Course.

  He never found out exactly how the mistake had occurred, but knew that there was another Hugh MacCallum in the village next to his own and it occurred to him that this was how the error had been made.

  Hugh was sixty-five years old and very good at genealogies, derivations of names of places, and the meanings of old words. He had left school at the age of thirteen and had later served in the Merchant Navy: he had seen Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, among many other countries. Why shouldn’t he do the Open University? He was no fool, and after all he might have letters after his name, and that would put a spoke in Alastair’s wheel. Alastair thought that Mary Maclachlan was the best Gold Medallist there had ever been, though she was so drunk that she had to be supported on to the stage, but Hugh knew better. Hugh knew that the best medallist who had ever been was Anna MacDougall, who had died with cancer of the throat. But you couldn’t tell Alastair anything.

  Hugh was a bachelor and so was Alastair. Hugh’s mother had died when he was forty-eight years old, and now he lived alone. Alastair too lived alone after his sister had died. Once when she was on the train to Yarmouth to the fishing she had pulled the communication cord out of curiosity, and it was only when the other two girls who were with her had pointed to their foreheads that the little man with the moustache, who had run along to the carriage with a notebook, had been placated.

  Hugh decided that he would do the Open University. After all, he had a television set and a radio and plenty of time on his hands.

  When he told Alastair about it, Alastair was very angry. He knew at once that this represented a threat to their relationship, and said so. ‘Anyway,’ he said, his moustache bristling, ‘what do you want to go to the university for at your age?’

  ‘I am not going to the university,’ said Hugh. ‘You do this at home. There are what are called assignments.’

  ‘Assignments? What’s that?’

  ‘Compositions,’ said Hugh, whose left eye blinked compulsively. He also had a habit of twisting his neck around inside his collar when he was nervous or embarrassed.

  ‘And what will you get at the end of it?’

  ‘I will get a degree,’ said Hugh. Already he seemed to be moving away from Alastair and from the village, which was in any case dying. There were hardly any children left, and the buses which had once taken them to school were lying rusting in the fields.

  ‘I see what you are at,’ said Alastair.

  Hugh didn’t say anything to this: he knew that Alastair was angry and that this was his method of getting his own back on him. Maybe, he thought, we shall never discuss genealogies again, and the idea bothered him, for these discussions which had gone on endlessly and inconclusively had passed the time for both of them.

  ‘Think of it, Alastair, we shall soon be dead and I might as well spend my time studying. Don’t you want to do it yourself?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Alastair bristling. ‘Not at all.’

  They were silent for a long while and then Alastair excused himself and went home. It seemed to Hugh that he was saying goodbye to him forever and he didn’t like the feeling. He considered that he was doing something very striking and original by studying for the Open University and maybe cutting himself off from the village. But on the other hand why shouldn’t he do it? There was nothing wrong with the quality of his mind. He stared out at the sea which he could see through the window. Its horizon stretched into the distance, blue and infinite.

  A strange thing happened to Hugh after a while. He was seeing the people of the village as not really people at all. At first he was puzzled about
this but then he realised that it must be something to do with the Open University. Also he seemed to be losing his sense of smell, and one day he ate rancid butter without realising it till a long time afterwards. As well as that, he thought that the mountains that he could see from his bedroom were growing smaller. In the old days he would admire the sunset flaring over the hills, but he no longer did so. It was as if the village was becoming a toy to him and in its place there was building up inside his head another place larger than the village which was inhabited by philosophies, paintings, novels, great cities, open seas. It was as if he had renewed his youth and saw the oceans sparkling as they had been then. Dang it, he thought, this is a fine big world I’ve got myself into. This is a big sky that I’m seeing.

  When he looked at Alastair pottering around his house, he saw him as a little fellow with a blue jersey and a moustache. Alastair, he knew, had a history of high blood pressure in his family: this was because they were all abrupt and irascible. Of course his father had been a bard, like Alastair himself, but what were their poems compared to the ones he was reading now. Childish, that was what they were.

  The bees hummed about the moor and when he put his feet down in the spongy moss it was not as it had been. The birds seemed different and so was the sea, and so was the cow which he saw staring at him one day, a long blade of fresh green grass in its mouth.

  He heard in a roundabout way that the schoolmistress, Miss Gibson, didn’t approve of what he was doing. The old sour bitch, he thought, she only has her Primary Teacher’s Certificate, she doesn’t even have a university degree. He had actually been going to consult her about his English, for his greatest difficulty was not in understanding the material but in setting down his answers in correct sentences. Old bitch, he thought, I won’t go and see her; if he ever met her he would casually mention the Renaissance and discover what she knew about it. In any case she was rather mad and would scream at the children and throw chalk at them. Nevertheless, he had great difficulty with his sentence structure and would spend hour after hour struggling to compose a version of his answer that would satisfy an examiner. His light could be seen burning at two o’clock in the morning.