The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  I would say, I think, that I have been a good father. My children are of course away from me now. One is an engineer and the other, less bright perhaps, is a salesman. We see very little of them now since they are both in England but when they were growing up I was kind though strict. For instance, if James (the engineer) misbehaved I would patiently explain to him why misbehaviour was wrong and what the consequences might be; for example, that if God exists, as He does, He might punish him either by day or by night or at any time when he least expected it. I would say the same to Colin though in fact he did not listen so patiently. In his case, I would sometimes be forced to use direct punishment such as sending him to bed in the dark for I have never believed in physical chastisement.

  My wife and I therefore live together on our own for most of the time.

  We still work hard, even though we are old, and are respected by the townspeople. Sometimes, indeed, we are invited to dinners, though we are not seated in the most prominent places. My wife, I think, does not like this, though she does not complain at great length as so many wives do. For instance, she might wear a new black velvet dress which she has just bought and find that very few people speak to her and that she is at the lowest end of the table. Nor can she talk, therefore, on subjects that interest her for she is in fact much more intelligent than me and the only reason why she doesn’t do the paper-work is that it bores her. I, on the contrary, am not bored by paper-work and in fact I quite like doing it for I have, as I myself recognise, a plodding but steady mind.

  Thus we are, on the whole, contented.

  Naturally we do not speak to each other as much as we used to. When she talks to me I grunt a lot, especially if I am reading the paper. But I understand and I think she understands that we are no longer young and that therefore some magic which we once had will not return. After all we are mature people. It would not be natural for us to be hugging each other all day or murmuring endearments to each other. These things are for youth, not for old age. And quite apart from that I feel tired when I come home from the shop and nothing suits me better than putting my feet up and smoking my pipe.

  It is true that my wife does not appear so beautiful to me as she once did. But then I myself am not very handsome and have never been so. I often wonder why she married me in the first place but when I ask her, all she will say is, ‘You cannot explain these things.’ And indeed one cannot. For I myself cannot explain why I married her except that it seemed inevitable at the time. And of course she was very pretty and others were after her. I consider myself lucky that she married me.

  Our life has been a struggle but whose life has not been? There have been weeks and months when we had to work very hard and when we talked endlessly in bed about how we would survive at all. Sometimes she would tell me that I must buy more exotic delicacies for the shop such as cheeses and small tins of caviare and at times I have been persuaded to do so but in general I have relied on customers who do not have much money. There have been times when they have let me down and not paid me for months, sometimes even years: some of them have not paid me at all.

  Also in the early years of our marriage, my wife would say to me, ‘Why don’t you advertise in a better way? Do something surprising to draw attention to the shop.’ Or at other times she would say, ‘Why don’t we emigrate?’ But the children were growing up and I could neither take risks nor emigrate and on summer nights the strange names of her dreams would become more and more numerous and mysterious and unintelligible. And on summer mornings I would catch her looking in the mirror as if she were watching her beauty passing.

  Thus I would say that we have led an ordinary life, not very different from the lives of most other people, and perhaps more secure and more stable.

  We are both now well over sixty and when I look at my wife I see little sign of what she once was and when she looks at me I am sure she sees little of what I once used to be. In a few years we shall both be dead, and no one will remember us for we cannot write poetry or music or make speeches. Then they will take us to the local cemetery and bury us beside each other for I have already bought the ground in which we will both lie.

  It is also true that five years ago my wife began to sleepwalk for a number of nights but ceased to do so as abruptly as she had begun. It was a great joke between us, for one of the things she did was to take flowers from a vase which we have in the living-room and take them quite gravely to bed with her, while water dripped across the floor as she blindly carried them along. Neither she nor I understood why she did this but as I say she stopped doing it when she realised that because of my anxiety about her I was hardly getting any sleep.

  Thus it is not clear to me why I should nearly have walked into the police station yesterday morning.

  However, I shall not tell my wife about it for I feel that she is settling down quite happily now for our last few years together. She has become much quieter and to tell the truth I can read my books in peace. She no longer tells me stories of people she has met at whist drives, and their strange ways. Nor is she liable to flash out in sudden bursts of rage as she sometimes has done in the past after a particularly tiring day with some of our more harassing customers. She no longer wishes to go out much, nor is she in the habit of buying new dresses designed to impress other men’s wives. I myself have never felt that I needed to impress anybody. I was brought up to be well-mannered and quiet and to know my station in life.

  I shall simply have to forget that impulse which came over me yesterday on that fine spring morning when I was whistling as I walked down the street. I think it would never have occurred if it had been a wet dismal day or if it had been any other day except a Sunday. Nevertheless I do not understand it. It would certainly have been embarrassing if I had gone in and met Inspector Munro whom I know very well and whose wife is a regular customer. I don’t know what I would have done but I would probably have invented a story to account for my presence. I suppose however he would have considered it odd just the same, as he must be a trained observer since after all he is a policeman.

  The only thing I can think of is that it must have been a slight aberration such as old people are prone to. None of our family has ever been a murderer or a thief.

  But I think that in future I must avoid the police station in case I succumb to that impulse which I nearly succumbed to yesterday. It might be better if I ceased to read the Sunday papers altogether and confined myself to the books that are already in the house, most of which I have read over and over already. In any case, my wife seems quite happy that I should be with her most of the time and I find her company more relaxing than I did when we were young and facing the storms of life.

  Timoshenko

  When I went into the thatched house as I always did at nine o’clock at night, he was lying on the floor stabbed with a bread knife, his usually brick-red face pale and his ginger moustache a dark wedge under his nose. His eyes were wide open like blue marbles. I wondered where she was. The radio was still on and I went over and switched it off. At the moment she came down from the other room and sat on the bench. There was no point in going for a doctor; he was obviously dead: even I could tell that. She sat like a child, her knees close together, her hands folded in her lap.

  I had regarded the two of them as children. He had a very bad limp and sat day after day at the earthen wall which bordered the road, his glassy hands resting on his stick, talking to the passers-by. Sometimes he would blow on his fingers, his cheeks red and globular. She on the other hand sat in the house most of the time, perhaps cooking a meal or washing clothes. Of the two I considered her the simpler, though she had been away from the island a few times, in her youth, at the fishing, but had to be looked after by the other girls in case she did something silly.

  ‘Did you do that?’ I said, pointing to the body which seemed more eloquent than either of us. She nodded wordlessly. As a matter of fact I hadn’t liked him very much. He was always asking me riddles to which I did not know the answer
, and when I was bewildered he would nod his head and say, ‘I don’t understand what they are teaching at these schools nowadays.’ He had an absolutely bald head which shone in the light and a sarcastic way of speaking. He would call his sister Timoshenko or Voroshilov, because the Russians at that time were driving the Germans out of their country and these generals were always in the news. ‘Timoshenko will know about it,’ he would say and she would stand there smiling, a teapot in her hands.

  But of course I never thought what it was like for the two of them when I wasn’t there. Perhaps he persecuted her. Perhaps his sarcasm was a perpetual wound. Perhaps, lame as he was, sitting at the wall all day, he was petrified by boredom and his tiny mind squirmed like the snail-like meat inside a whelk. He had never left the island in his whole life and I didn’t know what had caused his limp which was so serious that he had to drag himself along by means of two sticks.

  The blood had stopped flowing and the body lay on the floor like a log. The fire was out and the dishes on the dresser were clean and colourful rising in tier after tier. The floor which was made of clay seemed to undulate slightly. I felt unreal as if at any moment the body would rise from the floor like a question mark and ask me another riddle, the moustache twitching like an antenna. But this didn’t happen. It stayed there solid and heavy, the knife sticking from its breast.

  I knew that soon I would have to get someone, perhaps the policeman or a doctor or perhaps a neighbour. But I was so fascinated by the woman that I stayed, wondering why she had done it. Girlishly she sat on the bench, her hands in her lap, not even twisting them nervously.

  Suddenly she said, ‘I don’t know why but I took the knife and I . . . I don’t know why.’

  She looked past me, then added, ‘I can’t remember why I did it. I don’t understand.’

  I waited for her to talk and after a while she went on.

  ‘Many years ago,’ she said, ‘I was going to be married. He made fun of me when Norman came into the house. He said I couldn’t cook and I couldn’t wash, and that was wrong. That must have been twenty years ago. He was limping then too. He told Norman I was a bit daft. That was many years ago. But that wasn’t it. Anyway, he told Norman I was silly. Norman had put on his best suit when he came to the house. He wasn’t rich or anything like that. You don’t know him. Anyway he’s dead now. He died last week in the next village. He was on his own and they found him in the house dead. He had been dead for a week; of course he was quite old. He was older than me then. Anyway he came into the house and he was wearing his best suit and he had polished his shoes and I thought that he looked very handsome. Well, Donald said that I wasn’t any good at cooking and that I was silly. He made fun of me and all the time he made fun of me Norman looked at me, as if he wanted me to say something. I remember he had a white handkerchief in his pocket and it looked very clean. Norman didn’t have much to say for himself. In those days he worked a croft and he was building a house. I was thirty years old then and he was forty-two. I was wearing a long brown skirt which I had got at the fishing and I was sitting as I am sitting now with my hands in my lap as my mother taught me. Donald said that I smoked when I was away from home. That was wicked of him. Of course to him it was a joke but it wasn’t true. I think Norman believed him and he didn’t like women smoking. My brother, you see, would make jokes all the time, they were like knives in my body, and my mind wasn’t quick enough to say something back to him. Norman maybe didn’t love me but we would have been happy together. Donald believed that his jokes were very funny, that people looked up to him, and that he was a clever man. But of course he . . . Maybe if it hadn’t been for his limp he might have carried on in school, so he said anyway. I left school at twelve. I had to look after him even when my parents were alive.

  ‘It didn’t matter what I did, it was wrong. The tea was too hot or too cold. The potatoes weren’t cooked right or the herring wasn’t salt enough. “Who would marry you?” he would say to me. But I think Norman would have married me. Norman was a big man but he was slow and honest. He wasn’t sarcastic at all and he couldn’t think like my brother. “She was in Yarmouth,” Donald told him, “but they won’t have her back, she’s too stupid. Aren’t you, Mary?” he asked me. That wasn’t true. The reason I couldn’t go to Yarmouth was because I had to stay at home and look after him. I was going to go but he made me stop. He got very ill the night before I was due to leave and I had to stay behind. Anyway Norman went away that night and he never came back. I can still see him going out the door in his new suit back to the new house he was building. I found out afterwards that my brother had seen him and told him that I used to have fits at the time of the new moon, and that wasn’t true.

  ‘So I never married, and Donald would say to me, if I did something that he didn’t like, “That’s why Norman never married you, you’re too stupid. And you shouldn’t be going about with your stockings hanging down to your ankles. It doesn’t look ladylike.” ’

  I remembered how I used to come and listen to the News in this very house and it would tell of the German armies being inexorably strangled by the Russians. I would have visions of myself like Timoshenko standing up in my tank with dark goggles over my eyes as the Germans cowered in the snow and the rope of cold was drawn tighter and tighter. And he would say to me, ‘Now then, tell me how many mackerel there are in a barrel. Go on now, tell me that.’ And he would put his bald head on one side and look at me, his ginger moustache bristling. Or he would say, ‘Tell me, then, what is the Gaelic for a compass. Eh? The proper Gaelic, I mean. Timoshenko will tell you that. Won’t you, Timoshenko? She was at the fishing, weren’t you, Timoshenko?’

  And he would shift his aching legs, sighing heavily, his face becoming redder and redder.

  ‘He thought I knew nothing,’ she said. ‘Other times he would threaten to put me out of the house because it belongs to him, you see.’ She looked down at the body as if he were still alive and he were liable to stand up and throw her out of the house, crowing like a cockerel, his red cheeks inflated, and his red wings beating.

  ‘He would say, “I’ll get a housekeeper in. There’s plenty who would make a good housekeeper. You’re so stupid you don’t know anything. And you leave everthing so dirty. Look at this shirt you’re supposed to have washed!” ’

  Was all this really true, I wondered. Had this woman lived in this village for so many years without anyone knowing anything about her suffering? It seemed so strange and unreal. All the time we had thought of the two as likeable comedians and one was cruel and vicious and the other was tormented and resentful. We had thought of them as nice, pleasant people, characters in the village. We didn’t think of them as people at all, human beings who were locked in a death struggle. When people talked about her she became a sunny figure out of a comic, blundering about in a strange English world when she left the island, but happy all the same. We hadn’t imagined that she was suffering like this in her dim world. And when we saw him sitting by the wall we thought of him as a fixture and we would shout greetings to him and he would shout back some quaint witticism. How odd it all was.

  ‘But I knew what was going on all the time,’ she continued. ‘I could follow the news too. I knew what the Germans were doing, and the Russians. But he made me out to be a fool. And the thing was even after I heard of Norman’s death I didn’t say anything, though he said a few things himself. He told me one day, “You should have been his housekeeper and he wouldn’t have been found dead like that on his own. But you weren’t good enough for him. Poor man.” And he would look at me with those small eyes of his. They had found Norman, you see, by the fire. He had fallen into it, he was ill and old. He hadn’t been well for years. I often thought of taking him food but Donald wouldn’t let me. After all we’re all human and a little food wouldn’t have been missed. I used to think of when we were young so many years ago. And when I was young I wasn’t ugly. I wasn’t beautiful but I wasn’t ugly. I used to go to the dances when I was young, like the othe
rs. And of course I was at Yarmouth. He had never been out of the island though he was a man and I was only a woman and we used to bring presents home at the end of the season. I bought him a pipe once and another time I got him a melodeon but he wouldn’t play it. So you see, there was that.’

  There was another longish silence. Outside, it was pitch black and there was ice on the roads. In fact coming over from my own house I nearly slipped and fell but I had a torch so that was all right.

  I wasn’t at all afraid of her. I was in a strange way enjoying our conversation or rather her monologue. It was as if I was listening to an important story about life, a warning and a disaster. I remembered how as children we would be frightened by her brother waving his sticks from the wall where he was sitting. And we would run away full tilt as if we were running away from a monster. Our parents would say, ‘It’s only his joking,’ and think how kind he was to go out of his way to entertain the children, but I wondered now whether in fact it might not be that he hated children and it wasn’t acting at all, that cockerel clapping his sticks at us as we scattered across the moor.

  Maybe too he had been more in pain than we had thought.

  The trouble was that we didn’t visit the two of them much at all. I did so, but only because I wished to listen to their radio to hear the news. Also, I was a quiet, reserved person who was happier in the company of people older than myself. But I hadn’t actually looked at either of them with a clear hard look. To me she was a simple creature who smiled when her brother made some joke about Timoshenko, for his jokes tended to be remorselessly repetitive. It didn’t occur to me that she was perhaps being pierced to the core by his primitive witticisms and it didn’t occur to me either that they were meant to be cruel and were in fact outcrops from a perpetual war.