The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  But he could feel a coldness all around him. Who was he to do the Open University? Even when he went to the Post Office to send away his completed assignments, Seordag would hardly speak to him.

  ‘Special delivery,’ he would say, and she would look contemptuously at the address. She would purse her lips but would not give him the satisfaction of asking what was in the envelope.

  He also missed the human presence of Alastair.

  He often felt now that he was entirely alone, and at nights he would hear the wind moaning in the chimney. Once he had looked at an egg from which a chick was emerging. The shell shook and broke under the vehement restless assault of life and then the chick, bare and skinny, could be seen pushing and struggling. The crown of the shell fell off, the chick pushed, and sometimes it was entangled with the shell and sometimes it seemed to be clear of it. But it thrust and thrust with determined impatience and finally it was out in the open air, an explorer, a small, thin, skinny adventurer that had shed its armour.

  He had his first assignment back. It was only a D, but still a bare pass. Dang it, he thought. I must do better than this.

  But while he was reading about Constable and studying his paintings he soon forgot the village. How much richer the land in Constable’s paintings was, that river smooth and wide, those lush cornfields, and in the background an old mill. He raised his head from his book and wondered why no one had ever painted the village. Think of all those subtle lights that were everywhere, the pearly grey light that you sometimes saw over the sea. No one had ever painted the people who had left on the boats for Canada and Australia and New Zealand, no one had painted the roofless, once-thatched, houses that were to be found all over the village. No one had painted the disused ruined buses which had once carried children to school but which now lay rusting on their sides among the buttercups and the daisies: or even the blue hills which ringed the village and turned purple in the vague evenings.

  He scratched the back of his neck as he thought of these things. Then after a while he left his books and went outside and saw Alastair carrying vegetables into the house from his little wind-blown garden. He went over to him and at first Alastair pretended not to know that he was there. His face was red with the effort of bending down. Finally, he couldn’t ignore Hugh any longer and stood in front of him with a turnip and a clump of dirty roots dangling from his hand.

  ‘It’s a fine day,’ said Hugh.

  ‘It’s cold enough,’ said Alastair.

  ‘Are the turnips good this year?’

  ‘They’re not bad. They’re not too wet.’

  The breeze stirred Alastair’s jersey and he seemed somehow to have shrunken. Hugh felt a little panic quivering in his chest, a tiny mouse of fear. At his age he should be thinking about death, attending the church, reading religious books, and not studying the Renaissance, but he didn’t feel like confining himself to spirituality. Constable irradiated his mind.

  ‘Have you been composing any poems?’ he asked Alastair.

  ‘I have that,’ said Alastair, but he didn’t want to let Hugh see them.

  ‘What are they about?’ said Hugh.

  ‘Oh, there’s one about . . . but you won’t like it, it’s in Gaelic,’ said Alastair spitefully.

  ‘But why shouldn’t I want to see it?’ said Hugh. ‘I can read Gaelic as well as you.’

  Alastair however was stubbornly silent, and then he said grudgingly, ‘It’s about the sea.’

  Alastair couldn’t feel himself settled now in Hugh’s company.

  He felt that Hugh was superior to him, that he knew things that he himself didn’t; he felt that Hugh had deserted him, was trying to be better than him. What did his poetry matter? In the old days he would have shown his poem to Hugh and listened to his criticisms of it, but now he didn’t want to in case Hugh mocked him. No, he wouldn’t show Hugh his poem. After all, Hugh had kept his television on when he was visiting him. He had told him that the programme was in connection with an assignment he was doing, but there was nothing more inhospitable than leaving your television on in front of a visitor. Also he missed his conversations about genealogies. And damn him if he would show him his poem.

  What is his poem to me anyway, thought Hugh. It’s very thin poor stuff. How could one expect good poetry or bardachd from Alastair who had hardly ever left the village in his life. Look at his stringy neck, his jersey, his dungarees. It seemed to him that he had had a poor opinion of Alastair for a long time, but had refused to admit it to himself. Now he was admitting it.

  ‘If you don’t want to show it to me,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to see it.’

  ‘That’s that then,’ said Alastair. ‘I’d better be putting the dinner on.’ And he went back into the house. As Hugh was returning to his own house, he saw little Colin coming towards him. Colin was the son of a fisherman called Angus Macleod, and his mother was the daughter of Iain MacFarlane from another part of the island.

  Colin was wearing a black magician’s robe.

  ‘And how are you today, Colin?’ Hugh asked him.

  Colin stood and looked at him, not speaking, very shy. Finally he said in a burst of words, ‘I’ve got a magic kit.’

  ‘I can see that,’ said Hugh, ‘and what tricks can you do?’

  ‘I’ve got a magic coin,’ said Colin, in another burst of words. ‘Abacadabra,’ he shouted, jumping up and down. ‘You have to say abacadabra,’ he said seriously. ‘What hand have I got my coin in?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Hugh, ‘I’m not sure that I know that.’

  ‘It’s this one, it’s this one,’ Colin shouted, and held his hand out, showing the coin. Then he was dashing away, shouting, the triumphant magician.

  Hugh stood staring after him. At one time he himself must have been like Colin, but he couldn’t remember. He could remember very little of his early childhood except that on his first day in school a small woman with grey hair had told him to use some plasticine, which he did. He couldn’t even remember how he had learned English, but he must have done so. In the distance he could see Colin jumping up and down spreading out his black wings. How small this village had become, how strange, he felt; maybe it would have been better for him if he had never left the village in the first place.

  The village drowsed in time. The houses seemed sunk, each in its own hollow. At night their television sets told the villagers of other countries, of violence, of foreign streets. Why, they had even stopped cutting peat and were now burning coal, though it was very dear: one or two of the houses were all-electric. In winter there was snow and rain. In autumn one felt the nostalgia of the past; the sea was both shield and stimulus and unimaginable depth, a ring around the village, a blue salty ring. There was an air of despair and weariness everywhere. Alastair himself felt the change in his bones and wished that his sister were still alive so that he could torment her. At least Hugh had his Open University. Tears of rage and self-pity filled his eyes.

  Alastair worked away at his poem, which was called the ‘Song of the Open University.’

  Bha fear againn anns a’ bhaile

  a bha aosd is pròiseil,

  smaoinich esan air an oilthigh,

  chuireadh e air dòigh e.

  Nach robh esan cheart cho math ri

  fear sam bith na b’òige,

  oir ’na mo bheachd’sa ’s na mo bharail

  chan eil an t-àit’ s gu leòr dhomh.’

  We had a man in the village

  who was old and proud.

  He thought of the university

  and how he would put it right.

  Wasn’t he as good as anyone

  who was even younger

  for, ‘In my opinion and judgment

  this place is not good enough for me.’

  Alastair walked up and down his room, listening to the rhymes. He always composed his poem aloud, not on paper, and some time soon he would recite it to some of the villagers. He should be able to make a good poem, for all his ancestors had
been fine bards, and many of his poems were already well known, especially the one about the original coming of the electricity to the village. In fact one or two of them had been sung on the wireless and he had strutted about like a peacock after that. But there were a few verses to be added yet.

  Imagine the Renaissance, thought Hugh, as he sat down at his oil-clothed table. The sea that stretched outwards into unimaginable distances, the paintings, the cathedrals. The village seemed to be inhabited by Virgin Marys with their holy children. Its colours were marvellous blues and velvet reds and indigos.

  Then he read about the Claude glass in the eighteenth century which was designed to convert an ordinary landscape into a formal picture. Imagine that, he thought. Imagine the sky above Constable, so huge, so vast.

  Imagine the crazy cornfields of Van Gogh which seemed to echo his thin shrunken whiskers.

  All through the night Hugh worked.

  And Alastair continued with his poem.

  Dh’ fhàg e chompanaich a’ gearain,

  shuidh e aig a leabhrain

  or b’e iadsan a chuid arain;

  cha robh fiù di-domhnaich

  nach robh e ann an solus an dealain

  a’ sgrìobhadh is a’ sgròbadh,

  mar chat a tha air tòir air ealain

  le peann an àite spògan.

  He left his companions to complain,

  he sat at his booklets

  for they were now his bread.

  There wasn’t even a Sunday

  that he wasn’t in the light of the electricity

  writing and scraping

  like a cat that is in search of science

  with a pen instead of claws

  Hugh’s father had been in fact the very first person to have a car in the village. It was more a van than a car, for in those days he had a butcher’s shop, and he travelled through all the villages selling meat. He had been a good businessman, and his shop was a successful one till one night his car had been hit by a bus, and he had been killed outright. Hugh and his mother were left alone, the shop had to be sold, and the memory of the first van faded. However, in his lonely nights, Hugh thought, My father was a clever man, everyone said that, and I must have inherited his cleverness. It’s not everyone who would be doing what I am doing at my age. This thought sustained him, as he read and worked under the light of the electric bulb.

  In the village there was an incomer called Stella Simpson who kept pigs. She had tried to learn Gaelic, but Alastair made fun of it.

  ‘Do you know,’ he had once said to Hugh, ‘that woman said to me “Is latha math ann” instead of “Tha latha math ann”.’

  In spite of that, however, she continued to learn Gaelic.

  The villagers didn’t like her pigs. They were like big pink submarines in a sea of mud. They were alien beings; in any case, pigs would eat anything, even each other.

  Stella slopped about in yellow wellingtons and tried to learn how to cook oatcakes and scones. But these were not successful. When she went to the Post Office, which was also the local shop, she often wore a long red coat and black glasses. No one could make out what her age was, but it was considered that she must be about fifty. Her face was often dead white like a vampire’s and at other times well-rouged.

  She was, however, from England: everyone knew that, though no one had discovered anything about her background. When she had arrived first she had asked for buttock steak at the butcher’s van instead of rump steak.

  In the summertime she sat on the headland, painting the sea. ‘I told her once,’ said Alastair gleefully, ‘that there was a man who went out fishing one night and a storm blew up, and he had to shelter in a cave which was full of rats. “How did he survive?” she asked me. “Well,” I said, “he fed them on fish till the morning came and he escaped.” ’

  One morning Hugh was passing her house, looking askance at the pigs which wallowed in the sea of mud, pink and obscene and naked, when she came out in her yellow wellingtons, carrying a bucket.

  ‘I hear you’re doing the Open University,’ she said to Hugh.

  ‘I am that,’ said Hugh.

  ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘I might be able to help you. I have paintings. And I have some records. I believe you have to study music as well.’

  The pigs attacked the bucket. Her scarf blew in the wind.

  ‘Yes, I have to do music,’ said Hugh. ‘That’s the worst part of it. You see, I never learned about music.’

  What am I doing talking to this woman, he asked himself. In the old days I wouldn’t have. If the villagers see me talking to her they’ll think I’m courting her. On the other hand, he was beginning to feel lonely, to miss the company of Alastair who had become inflexible and distant, especially since the night he had seen pictures of the Virgin Mary in a book Hugh had.

  ‘So you’re becoming a Catholic now,’ he said contemptuously to Hugh.

  ‘Not at all, I’m studying,’ said Hugh. But Alastair went away, snorting incredulously.

  ‘I shall come over and bring you some records. Have you a record player?’ Stella asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘In that case I shall bring my record player as well.’

  What an odd-looking woman, thought Hugh. She tries to be like one of us, but she isn’t really. She cannot disguise the fact that she is an alien. Even her red coat flung a strange radiance on the landscape. And as for her pigs, who ever saw pigs in a village? With their horrible snouts and their vivid fleshy nakedness.

  By talking to this woman, by allowing her to come to his house with her records, he felt that he had crossed another frontier which was taking him further and further away from Alastair. And yet at the same time the logic was inevitable. It was true that he didn’t know about classical music, and this woman might teach him or at least give him an insight into it. His work was not enough, knowledge was also essential.

  When Stella arrived at his house under cover of darkness, she was carrying a torch, a record player, and some records. Hugh ushered her into the living-room where a bright fire was burning. He had put away the dishes, and the room was tidy and warm.

  ‘What a nice little place you have,’ said Stella, putting down her burden. She took off her coat without asking Hugh to help her. She looked much prettier, her face composed and relaxed, with a certain amount of colour in it. She was wearing a yellow blouse and skirt.

  Well, well, said Hugh to himself, well, well. How women can change.

  ‘Your mother’s dead?’ said Stella, looking at him keenly.

  ‘Yes, I’m on my own here,’ said Hugh. ‘She died some years ago.’

  ‘I see you have a picture of her on the wall,’ said Stella. ‘It is her, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hugh.

  ‘A strong-looking woman,’ said Stella. And indeed his mother did look formidable in her white blouse staring at the camera and not smiling at all.

  ‘I have brought you some Mozart,’ said Stella. ‘I presume you have a plug?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I have that,’ said Hugh awkwardly. Electrical things were not what he was best at. But this woman seemed to have no trouble with them.

  The room, which at times appeared austere and cold, had become humanised. He wondered what his mother would have thought of this woman. ‘Not for you, Hugh,’ she would have said. ‘You don’t know anything about her. And she might even smoke.’

  And sure enough, before sitting down, she did ask for an ashtray, which she laid on the table beside her. It was one which Hugh had brought home from Australia and which showed Sydney Opera House.

  Hugh sat down beside the fire and smoked his pipe, first asking permission.

  ‘My late husband smoked,’ said Stella, ‘when he was well. He was ill for a long time,’ she added. ‘Mental trouble. He became very bitter in argument. I find this place very good for me. I needed the rest. He was a very clever scientist and therefore very ingenious at devising torments for me.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Hugh.
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  ‘You don’t want to know about that,’ she said, stubbing out her first cigarette. ‘And now we will listen to Mozart.’

  That night she told him a great deal about classical music and especially about Mozart, whom she idolised. She and her husband, before he became ill, had often gone to concerts in Bath, where in fact she came from. Music was later the only thing that could soothe her husband’s savage breast.

  As they listened to the music, she would ask him questions.

  Why had he wanted to do the Open University? Did he do a lot of studying? When had he left school? Had he read a lot?

  Of course, he told her, he had always been reading even when he was in the Merchant Navy. He had read Conrad, Stevenson, Melville. She seemed surprised at this.

  ‘Is that right,’ she said, staring at him, her cigarette in a long holder. It was as if she was seeing a strange specimen in the village, as alien to her as pigs were to him.

  ‘Mozart is pure intuitive genius,’ she told him. ‘Better even than Beethoven.’ He listened, and as he did so he seemed to hear what she was talking about, but shortly afterwards he was lost again. He had had no training in that kind of music, no previous understanding of it.

  ‘I see I shall have to teach you a great deal,’ she said. ‘And now perhaps you could give me a cup of tea.’

  The request astonished him, and at first he thought her bad-mannered, but then realised that her blunt demand was quite natural for her. In fact, when he showed her the kitchen, she made the tea herself.

  ‘Have you any biscuits or anything?’ she asked him.

  ‘I think so,’ he said. He found some digestives, and they ate and drank together in front of the bright fire.

  He became aware of the steady ticking of the old grandfather clock which he had inherited. He couldn’t understand how this woman was here at all, nor why he was entertaining her, nor why he was listening to classical music. It was like a dream.

  ‘I’ll tell you why I came to live in this village,’ she told him. ‘My husband and I were on holiday here years ago. He was interested in bird-watching, you see. And we enjoyed our visit so much that I decided that I would come and stay. Of course the village was healthier then than it is now. I know what people are saying about me. They think I’m odd and that my oatcakes are appalling, which they are. And so is my Gaelic. But these things don’t matter.’