The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  ‘Oh, I think that could be arranged,’ said her father. ‘I’m sure we could do that. Couldn’t we do that?’ he asked his wife.

  ‘Oh, surely, surely,’ she said. ‘Surely,’ she repeated. She was about the same size as her daughter but her jowls had begun to grow fat and gross and there were lines round her eyes.

  ‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘that Janet could leave the milk at the foot of the path when she was on her way to school.’

  Janet gave me another piercing glance and then looked down at her plate again.

  ‘I’m sure Janet would do that,’ said her father. ‘I don’t see why she shouldn’t do that. She’s passing the house every day anyway. You’ll do that, Janet, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, that will be all right,’ said Janet speaking for the first time.

  ‘Well, that’s fine then,’ said her father. ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘Well then . . . ’ I prepared to get to my feet and leave.

  ‘You can’t go without a wee one, eh?’ he said looking at his wife and then away from her. She pursed her lips but said nothing.

  He poured me out a large dram and one for himself.

  ‘Since you won’t take anything to eat,’ he explained. ‘Your good health then. It’s better than milk anyway.’ His wife glanced at him for a moment and then glanced away again.

  ‘Your health,’ I said and drank.

  Janet was still eating, her small composed head with the black hair bent over the plate.

  Her father said laughingly, ‘She’ll bring the milk all right if she can stop thinking of Dolly.’

  ‘Dolly?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, he works on the fishing boats,’ said her father. ‘They’re thinking of getting married. He’s a nice boy.’

  ‘But the young ones nowadays,’ said her mother in a sudden rush of nervous words, ‘look for a house and washing machine and TV straight away.’ It sounded as if she spoke that short speech often.

  Dolly, dark and threatening, on the fishing boat.

  ‘That’s right enough,’ said the father as if placating his wife for having taken the whisky. ‘It’s not like in our day. They want everything at once nowadays. And they marry so young. Still, maybe it keeps them out of mischief.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure she’ll remember the milk all right,’ I said. Janet looked at me again quickly and directly as if she had discovered some hidden meaning in my words.

  ‘Yes,’ said her mother, ‘that’s what they all do. They marry without thinking. And then they find themselves without a house or furniture. But Dolly is a nice enough boy.’

  ‘I’m sure he is,’ I said.

  I put down the glass and got to my feet. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘thank you for the dram. I didn’t expect it and as you say it’s better than the milk. Janet will bring the milk then?’

  ‘Oh, you can be sure of that,’ said her father. ‘You can be sure of that.’

  I went out of the house wishing in a way that I hadn’t visited them. But as I had sat there in their kitchen while they ate their food a thought had hovered around the depths of my mind, a vague shape, a fish from the shadows, and it had something to do with Janet and her approaching marriage. But I couldn’t think exactly what it was. It was a phantom thought without substance. But I felt that I knew Janet. I felt I knew her utterly and completely. And the thought had something to do with that feeling.

  But I had been shaken by the news of her approaching marriage, if it were true, though after all it was natural enough that a girl like her in the ripeness of her youth, a fruit on the tree, would soon marry. And Dolly, this boy without a shape or a face, this enemy from the sea, would enjoy her. Well, youth must go its own way though it was bitter to think of it. How bitter it was to think of it.

  And her parents looked so ordinary too, so ordinary and covetous. For even I could not miss the fact that they had jumped at the chance of selling the milk to me. And all her mother could think about was washing machines, houses and TV sets. Perhaps Janet was like that too. I was sure she was. In the mornings when she got up she probably switched on Radio Luxembourg, listening to the disc jockey with his false voice introducing songs about Love to people who lived in streets that he didn’t know but pretended that he cared for. Ah, I thought, the whole world is a cemetery and among the gravestones there walk the young ones with their Japanese transistors, small as diamonds, while a voice which could be the voice of anyone tells them that love is a song, that it consists of flowers and furs, that disease and cancer are for the old, that the young lovers walk armoured in crystal and carrying boxes of chocolates to the world’s end. And that always waiting for the young girls are boys like Dolly, ordinary and loveable and uncomplicated and faithful, thinking only about fish and TV sets, huge dark oceans and washing machines.

  12

  Shortly after this a strange thing happened. Kenneth John, whom I have already mentioned, left home. It was just before five o’clock in the evening, about the time that the bus passes through our part of the village on its way to town that I saw him walking down the path from his house, carrying what I was sure was a kitbag and wearing a dark well-pressed suit and a jaunty dark hat. He seemed for the moment much younger and spryer than I had ever seen him. As he walked down the path his wife shouted after him, ‘Come back, Kenneth, come back.’ It must have been her voice penetrating my room through the open window that brought me in turn to my own door to find other villagers at their own doors watching. It was an almost Victorian scene, for by this time there were two women against whom Kenneth’s wife was leaning in a state of collapse while at the same time she was shouting and crying. I had never seen anything like it in the village in my whole life. But the crying and shouting seemed to have no effect upon Kenneth John who proceeded on his way with a youthful jauntiness, without looking back, presenting an adamantine back to those behind him involved in the Victorian scene.

  For some reason that I didn’t understand till afterwards I took it on myself to run down to the road to try and reason with him. Perhaps deep in the back of my mind was the envious thought that he should not be allowed to leave behind him all that made life precious and poisonous to him, especially at an age when all confidence in himself should have long ago been burned out in the ashes of defeat. So I half ran along beside him as he made his way to the bus-stop, trying to keep up with him as in the past I had tried to keep up with bigger boys when we were on our way to school. The large red sun was shining dead ahead of us as we walked along, Kenneth John silent, his hat tipped back slightly on his head as in the days of his youth when he had set off for Hong Kong, San Francisco and Valparaiso. He didn’t speak to me at all. And behind me his wife was shouting and crying while the two women, one on each side of her, sustained her.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked him. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ But he didn’t answer.

  ‘Have you any idea where you’re going?’

  Still he didn’t answer.

  A white handkerchief flowered from the pocket of his jacket and he looked very spruce and composed as if he had come to a definite conclusion about his life.

  ‘You can’t leave your wife like this,’ I insisted. ‘She has always done her best, hasn’t she? She has done what every wife in the village does. She has looked after you all these years.’ My voice sounded hollow and false as if I were creating for the moment opportunist reasons for him to return to his world.

  ‘You don’t have anywhere to go,’ I said. ‘You’ll regret it.’ But he remained silent as if he knew he was listening to lies or as if he did not recognise my right to speak at all. In a short time the bus would be coming and it would be too late.

  ‘You’re too old,’ I said, ‘you can’t go away now.’ And all the time I was talking to him I was thinking perhaps of myself, that what he was doing was what I should have done, and I was afraid that he would succeed in doing what I myself had failed to do. We walked on steadily side by side till finally we reached the bus stop, where we h
alted. He turned away from me and looked back to see if the bus was coming.

  ‘Think what will happen to your wife,’ I continued unashamedly. ‘Think what her life will be like without you. She has always done her best. You can’t deny that. It’s an illusion,’ I said, ‘you’re not young any more. San Francisco and Hong Kong are in the past. You can’t go back there. They won’t take you.’

  And as I spoke I heard the bus coming. His wife was now rushing towards us, large and fat. She was standing beside us, tears streaming down her fat decaying face, while she looked at him, spruce and jaunty, with longing and amazement. As the bus stopped and the driver leaned down, Kenneth John, still in silence, climbed the steps and walked to the back of the bus and sat down. The driver gazed from me to his wife and back again in astonishment and seemed to be about to say something but then he put his foot on the accelerator and drove off leaving the two of us standing in the middle of the road watching the bus, red and lumbering, make its way to town. Kenneth John didn’t even look back to wave.

  I helped his wife up the path to her house and left her there with the two women who had been helping her before. Then I returned to my own house as empty-hearted as if I had suffered a defeat. For a long time I seemed to hear Kenneth John’s wife crying. She didn’t really understand what had happened. I knew it was the hermit’s fault. I knew that it was his apparently free life, brooded upon by Kenneth John, which had caused this dash for an illusory freedom. She didn’t know this because she lived in the flesh but I who lived in the spirit knew what was happening. I knew what illusory flag he was following on his way to his youth and Hong Kong. I knew what danger the hermit represented to the village. That poor penniless man would find himself haunting the shops and streets of the town as well as the quays and the ships, and would discover to his cost that he was now not a figure of the future but rather a figure of comedy and pathos in a world which had left him behind.

  And the poor woman he had abandoned didn’t even know what had happened to her. She didn’t know the true significance of the event. Soon she would waken up and find herself alone by the fireside and as if stunned would mope and moan, comforted by women who were secretly laughing at her. In fact the whole village would turn on her a face of apparently comprehending sorrow while there would be another face beneath that one, of revengeful laughter. A Janus Hallowe’en mask.

  And yet I couldn’t help admiring Kenneth John, if he was in his right mind and not sleepwalking into the past. But perhaps he hadn’t been in his right mind. Perhaps his apparent composure, his hat set at a cocky angle, his spotless suit, were all disguises for a final desperation which was almost suicidal in its deeper meaning. He had stepped out of the village into nothingness. He was hanging over the water, high in the swaying mast.

  13

  After some time the Clamhan who stays opposite me came up to the house. Most of the time he sits at the door wearing spectacles and mending a green net so that he looks like a spider intently weaving, his spectacles glittering.

  ‘What did you think of that, eh? Eh?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know what to think of it,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘no.’ And then, ‘He was never interested in the land, you know. Never. Or in the peats. He didn’t care for them. Imagine him going away like that though. He had some spunk, eh? Some spunk.’ As if pleased with the word, like a girl with a new necklace, he repeated it. As if he had found a new shining word. And this was not my imagination, for the Clamhan was the local bard who composed songs about any event, unusual or comic, that happened in the village. Such as, for instance, his song about the cart that had fallen down, loaded with peats, while the horse broke one of its legs. Perhaps he was thinking of composing a song now. Perhaps this was what he did, immersed in his green net all day.

  His small eyes peered at me.

  ‘Nothing’s gone right since that hermit came,’ he said. ‘I wonder what he does with himself all day. Do you know anything about him?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I wonder what he eats. Do you think he’s got the Pension? They say that he goes to the well for water since there is no water in the house. And there’s Murdo. He’ll never finish his house.’ And he glanced over at the pile of chaotic stones. ‘He was in the army with me, you know. Always idle. He never finished anything. And what do you think of Kenneth John, eh? Who would have believed it?’ His little eyes darted about all the time, as if he were a bird perched on an invisible twig.

  ‘What is happening to the village at all?’ he said. No one was coming out of Kenneth John’s house. Already it had taken on the appearance of a grave.

  ‘I’ll tell you something,’ he said. ‘She had him on a tether. Maybe I would have left her as well.’ His own wife was large and heavy and submissive. ‘Maybe,’ he repeated, ‘I would have left her years ago. But I don’t know. I don’t know if I would have the courage. The strength. I don’t know.’ And he gazed down at the ground and following his eyes I too gazed down at the ground to see his large shapeless boots with the dust of the road on them.

  ‘He mentioned the hermit to me, you know,’ he said. ‘He mentioned him to me once. He said that he would like to stay in the house by himself just like that. He never settled down, you know. He always wanted to be sailing. He had no time for the land. I don’t understand that. I don’t understand that at all. Still,’ he said, ‘I was never away from the island like him. The ones who were away from the island never settled down. Think of Kirsty’s daughter. She never settles down.’ And he looked at me askance with his small glittering eyes.

  And I was thinking, I never ran away. In spite of everything I never ran away: that must count for something surely. In our mortal accounts that must count for something. Perhaps what lay between us was love after all, in spite of the cancer, in spite of the pain.

  ‘Did he say anything to you while you were talking to him?’ he asked.

  I looked up startled, as if I had forgotten that he was still there. ‘No,’ I said, ‘he didn’t say anything. Nothing at all.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ he said, ‘that he shouldn’t have said anything. It’s funny, that. You would think he would have said something.’

  ‘What should he have said?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he repeated. ‘You would think he would have said something.’

  ‘Well,’ I said decisively and almost angrily, ‘you can take it from me that he didn’t say anything.’

  What are you angling for, I was thinking. Are you trying to get hold of some saying that you can use for your poem when you can get round to composing it? His small bald head glittered in the light, like a small round stone.

  ‘I just thought,’ he said, ‘that he might have said something.’ I was too tired to repeat what I had already said and anyway we both stopped talking as we saw Kenneth John’s wife making her way to the peatstack. Her body was bent as if under a great weight. She stood for a moment at the peatstack as if wondering why she was there. Then she put out her hand slowly as if in a dream, and withdrew two peats. She stared down at them for a while and then still very slowly and with bent back she made her way back to the house. His gluttonous quick eyes followed her movements.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘well . . . ’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you now. I have things to do.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ he said. ‘Of course.’ I went into the house without looking at him and I poured out a very large whisky and drank it in one gulp. It was very bitter and raw. When I was finished I could have smashed the glass against the wall. For a long time I stood there thinking of many things. Then I went up to the room where the violin was and I got it down. I played a little, with joy and sorrow. I drew the bow rapidly across the strings and it was as if new confident feelings sprang up in me. I played as I watched the Clamhan make his way down to his house and his eternal green net. Then I laid the violin down on the table – heart-shaped, coffin-shaped violin
– and I almost wept for us all, for our strange hectic appalling lives. For poor Kenneth John’s wife who at that very moment was probably sitting next door staring into the fire which she had composed from her black peats.

  14

  The following morning as usual I went down to the foot of the path to collect the milk from Janet. She was as usual cool and lovely, wearing yellow, her black hair contrasting strongly with her dress. I held the bottle of milk in my hand as I said, ‘Another fine morning.’ She said it was.

  I continued, ‘I’ve been thinking about what your mother said when I was at your house.’

  She looked at me without speaking.

  ‘About marriage and so on,’ I said. ‘It’s true that people need money before they marry nowadays.’ I just wanted to talk to her and didn’t really know what I was talking about. Cool mornings, how I love you before the sun rises demanding decisions. ‘One needs a house,’ I went on. ‘It must be even worse now, more expensive. Furniture and so on. When are you thinking of getting married?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘We aren’t even engaged.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I thought . . . But still, it won’t be long, a girl like you.’ I thought I could see the cool wheels of her mind turning in the still early morning. After what seemed a long while she suddenly said in a hard cold voice, ‘There’s a suite I saw in the town. It’s a red suite. Two chairs and a sofa. I’ve never seen one like it anywhere. That’s what I would like to get.’

  ‘A suite,’ I said.

  ‘I saw it in the window of a shop in the town,’ she said. Dead ahead of her the sun was red and strong in the sky. A suite of clouds overhead.

  ‘How much does it cost?’ I asked.

  ‘Two hundred pounds,’ she said. And then she added, ‘I must be going or I’ll be late.’ And she set off at her brisk pace, her lovely cool body moving so freely. In the early cool morning. Towards the red sun. A suite at two hundred pounds. Why had she mentioned that? I considered it and as I was considering it the hermit rode past on his bicycle on his way to the shop for his messages. At least that was what I assumed. It was the first time I had seen him close to. He rode past me, his eyes fixed straight ahead, looking neither to right nor to left. Janet had turned her head to look at him but he hadn’t looked at her. He was sitting upright on his bicycle, the belt of rope around him. Coming out of the red sun he looked like Death in his dark dirty clothes. His face looked tanned and unlined. Was the brown complexion from the sun or was it that he was naturally dark-skinned? He was like a man I had once seen who cleaned chimneys and had a small black dog running after him as he rode along on his bicycle. And he looked so contented, so silent, so harmonious. As if he was happy enough to rest in his silence. His coat was very long, almost touching his shoes. ‘How do you live?’ I spoke to him in a whisper. He never bought whisky or beer, just bread and cheese and butter and so on. Maybe he was a monk or a holy man. He hadn’t looked at Janet at all. He was much stronger than me.