The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  Suddenly she said to me, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Without thinking I said ‘Yes,’ as if it was the most natural remark in the world while the body lay on the floor between us. I was amazed at how calmly I had accepted the presence of the body, though I had always thought of myself as sensitive and delicate. But on the other hand it was as if the body was not real, as if, as I have said, it would get to its feet, place its sticks under its arms, and walk towards me asking me riddles. Naturally however this didn’t happen. And so we drank the tea out of neat cups with thin blue stripes at the rim.

  ‘I had to give him all my saccharins,’ she said, ‘because he liked sweet things. It’s a long time since I’ve had such a sweet cup of tea.’ I noticed then that she had put saccharins in my tea and I realised that this was the first time that I had had tea in her house. She was in a strange way savouring her transient freedom.

  ‘I remember now,’ she said. ‘It was the Germans and Timoshenko. The Germans had been trying to destroy Russia. I knew that, I’m not daft. And now the Russians were killing them. I heard that on the six o’clock news. And Timoshenko, he was doing that, he was winning. It was then that I . . . ’ She stopped then, the cup at her lips. ‘I remember now. It was when it said about Timoshenko and he said the tea wasn’t sweet enough. That was when I . . . I must have been cutting bread. I must . . . ’

  She looked at me in amazement as if it was just at that moment that she realised she had killed him. As she began to tremble I took the cup from her hands – it was spilling over – and put my arm around her and comforted her while she cried.

  The Spy

  She has just left me, she has taken her case and gone, and I am sitting here drinking whisky and thinking for the hundredth time that we are living in a spy story, all of us. I know I’m drunk but I see this quite clearly. When I look back on it all I see it with the clarity of the insane, though I’m certainly not that. As a psychiatrist I’ve seen something of the way the minds of the insane – and especially those of schizophrenics – work, and I know that sometimes they have visions. I have visions myself. Perhaps it is the whisky but I think not, perhaps it is what is about to happen, but no, I have thought of this for some time now. She turned at the door with her small case in her hand, for the last time. She was about to say something but decided against it after all. She is going to that large painter Rank, whom she met at a party some months ago. I wish I had never taken her there. He is so much larger than me, more flamboyant, more vibrant, so much a filler of space and he is so positive about his work. And I think it is probably very good. I think I know something about painting, though Vermeer is my favourite painter. I don’t on the whole like modern stuff, my mind is too orderly for that. Anyway I suppose that, like her, he paints abstract paintings, colourful and fragmentary, and he has such belief in himself and such a loud voice that he makes me feel weak.

  She is of course much younger than I am. I met her first when she was one of my patients for a while, though there was really nothing wrong with her. She was recovering from a love affair that had gone wrong and she said she wanted to be straightened out. These were her very words. At first I didn’t think a great deal about her. She seemed smallish and dark and rather untidy and I should say clumsy. She looked a bit odd and was at the time working in one of those ridiculous Health Shops where they have copies of the works of Herman Hesse, and stuff in bins which looks like bran. She also for a while wore beads and a long brown coat which trailed the floor. She had run away from home some years before and had kept herself alive somehow or other in London: I gathered that she had found it difficult.

  She was the sort of girl that grows on one. One day she didn’t turn up at all and I felt a certain emptiness which I couldn’t account for. I suppose really the reason why she has been attracted to Rank is that she has something of the same quality that he has, that is, the idea that the future will take care of itself, a spendthrift bravado. She had read in an undisciplined manner; and indeed I thought her mind was a mess, full of the most extraordinary mixture of Salvador Dali and silly Eastern philosophies. She herself of course painted. She talked incessantly and asked about the Vermeer reproductions I had on the wall. She said she had drunk a lot after her break with a student, who had been studying law and who had given her the push.

  ‘I find your place so restful,’ she would say and lie down on the couch and close her eyes. Indeed once or twice she went to sleep and I would look down at her and feel a deep pathos as if she were a waif of the storm and needed protection. There was, as I have said, nothing obviously wrong with her. It was just the fact that she had been jilted that had caused her symptoms of sleeplessness, etc. ‘He had these dull parents,’ she said, ‘and they wanted him to marry someone respectable. Deep down, that was what he wanted to do himself. I could see it happening but at the end I didn’t care. You know.’ As a matter of fact I didn’t know. Not at all. But she thought I did, and that was flattering. At that time I had never felt mental anguish. I thought of myself as a god ministering to the incomprehensibly sick. I couldn’t understand why a jilting should have done all that to her. ‘I cried for two whole days,’ she said once, ‘and then I went out and got absolutely sloshed. I drank two bottles of gin. I nearly killed myself.’ And I would look at her not knowing what she was talking about.

  I am not very good at describing people so I can’t give you any good idea of what she looked like or the way she would bounce into a room in her slacks – she always wore slacks – and plump herself down on the sofa, her hands supporting her head, and look at me like a schoolgirl. She seemed absolutely open and helpless. Even her eyes were like that. They looked large and innocent and questioning and ready for experience.

  ‘I don’t know how you can do it,’ she would say to me. ‘I mean listen to all this and look so calm. Day after day. You must feel like a bin with people unloading stuff into you all the time.’ What she didn’t know was that the calm had become a kind of callousness. Nothing surprised me but nothing touched me. Once she brought me some of her paintings but I didn’t think much of them, though I pretended I did and in actual fact bought one. She would follow me with her eyes as I sometimes walked up and down the room thinking. She was very untidy, as I have said. She wore slacks and jerseys which always looked soiled with paint. She didn’t seem to care about her appearance and this was a great part of her attraction. She always seemed breathless as if she had been running somewhere. At the beginning she wore her Eastern gear but as she grew to know me better I noticed that she would come in the clothes in which she had been painting.

  ‘Have you ever looked at a red bus on a spring day?’ she would say as if she had made a great discovery. ‘That great red cube moving along the street. I should like to paint a red bus or a pillar box. That’s what it’s all about.’ And she would plump herself down and sometimes I would talk. I think at first she admired my mind though God knows it’s a pretty dull one in comparison with hers. I would talk to her about ideas of various kinds and she would listen or pretend to listen. She never gave the impression of being bored though I think she must have been. I didn’t know then her subconscious cruelty. On the surface she wasn’t at all cruel; she seemed, in fact, totally unaware of what impression she was making and this was what attracted me. I had seen enough of sophisticated ladies all beautifully dressed. The world – my world – is full of them. They don’t want to be cured of anything. My consulting-room is a place where they can pass the time and show off their knowledge of psychiatry.

  I think the first day I realised I loved her was on a particularly wet day in November when London looked very dark indeed. She was standing by the window and she seemed to be shivering and I looked down at the rain falling so heavily and I said, ‘I’ll drive you wherever you want to go.’ But as I was unlocking the door of the car I thought, ‘No, I don’t want to drive her to some godforsaken flat. I’ll take her home.’ I needed a drink after a heavy day and I suggested this to her. To my surprise she w
as delighted. She couldn’t drive herself and she snuggled into her seat, her small white face looking like that of a Madonna. After I had switched on the electric fire, and we had warmed ourselves (I need a lot of warmth in winter) she wandered about my large house commenting on this and that. ‘How on earth do you have time to read all these books?’ she said when she saw my library. ‘And where did you get these African masks? And these paintings – you must be filthy rich.’ I am, as a matter of fact, pretty rich. I am a good psychiatrist and I inherited money. My father was a surgeon and a stern abstemious man. He left me this house in which I’m now drinking. I cooked her some food and we drank some wine but we didn’t go to bed or anything like that. I remember that she curled up at my feet like a kitten and stared into the fire and said, ‘What space you’ve got. How easy it must be to work in this large house. Why, if there was someone living with you you wouldn’t need to see them at all. I suppose you have a housekeeper too?’ I said there was a woman who came in every day and did for me and that the house didn’t really need all that keeping up. I didn’t mess it up. I felt like the good fairy in a story showing off all my riches and clearly this house and my way of life were strange to her.

  The things she paid attention to were odd. For instance, there was a blue paperweight which attracted her: I gave her that. And there was a framed poem of Lorca’s on the wall about a gipsy, which she would recite over and over. It had of course been translated. She had never heard of Lorca and had only the vaguest idea of the Spanish Civil War. I realised that I was much older than her but I wondered whether I was wiser. Normally I would have been working on my critique of Alder in the light of recent ideas but I decided that I wouldn’t do any work that night. She left at ten o’clock and I drove her to her flat where she stayed with three other girls.

  After that I took her out quite a lot, mostly to restaurants. Once or twice I took her to the theatre but she preferred the cinema and she would take me to the most terrifying films where violence was shown in close-up, and the blood seemed more than just technicolour. She was especially fond of Scandinavian films infested with sex and nudity but I’m afraid that I couldn’t understand them. They always had an air of meaning more than they stated and of being more modern than they actually were. They all seemed to be about young people disporting themselves by lakes and stripping to the waist whenever the opportunity offered. I’m not sure whether she understood them either, but she liked them. In a strange way I thought of them as Rousseauistic back-to-nature tableaux which smelt strongly of corruption, not of innocence. I learned however that the theatre bored her and so did Shakespeare. She was totally truthful in her reactions to everything and I discovered that I myself was a bit of a hypocrite. Did I really like Shakespeare as much as I thought I did? Probably not. We also saw a memorable performance of The Spy who came in from the Cold. Saturdays we would drive out of the city and picnic.

  We were married a year ago yesterday. Even now I can hardly understand how it happened. I think one of the reasons was that one night we were in a restaurant and she smiled at the younger waiter who was pouring the wine. He was a glamorous young fellow with very fair hair and startlingly blue eyes. I think he must have been Nordic. At the moment for the first time in my life I felt the most intense pure pain of jealousy. I had never felt jealousy in my whole life before. I had been out with women but I hadn’t felt jealous of them; my feelings had not been committed. I hadn’t realised what she had meant when she told me about her jilting. Now I knew. Some being up there was taking revenge on me. I didn’t let her know what had happened but at that moment I asked her to marry me. I worked out that I would rather have her near me than have her wandering about without my knowing what was happening to her or whom she was with. Incredibly and almost casually she said she’d like that and continued to drink her wine.

  ‘But I won’t wear a ring,’ she said. ‘I have a thing against rings.’ Again I was stabbed by jealousy but I said that that would be all right. It wouldn’t be a church wedding anyway. Looking back now I can see that from that moment I was glancing round the restaurant wondering if anyone was spying on us, if anyone wanted to take her away from me. Human eyes became important to me. I had been walking before that moment casually through a wood, now I was aware of the other animals. Now there was something of mine that I wanted to keep. Before, I hadn’t felt like that at all. My house was full of valuable things but it had never occurred to me that anyone would steal them. And not being alive they weren’t unpredictable, they wouldn’t walk away to another house. Now, however, I was afraid. I sensed the eyes all around me. I sensed that they were avaricious and watchful, searching for my weakness. The world, I thought, is full of spies. They want to drain us of our secrets and strengthen themselves at our expense. They want to enlarge their territories. But her eyes at any rate appeared innocent.

  I didn’t know what I expected when I got married, but certainly the word ‘idyllic’ could on the whole be applied to the first few months of it. I continued with my work during the day and my writing at night, and Brenda painted. It was almost as if she had been looking for space in which to paint. She would, as far as I understand it, paint all day without eating much at all. By this time I had got a permanent housekeeper in and I told her to make sure that Brenda ate something after she had spoken to me about her lack of interest in food. ‘She gets into an old smock and paints all day, sir,’ she said. But Brenda assured me that she never ate anything much and her health did not seem to suffer. I would look at her paintings and certainly they seemed to be gaining in some sort of power, though as I have told you they were mostly abstracts and I don’t understand them much. This fever of painting went on for about six months and we were happy. We were sexually happy and we had much to tell each other. She would talk to me about her paintings and I would tell her about my patients, especially a potential psychopath called Wilson who I felt sure would have been quite happy if there was a war on but, as there wasn’t, he was extremely miserable. However, he spent most of his weekends with a gun shooting rabbits and, for all I know, sheep. She seemed particularly interested in him and asked me questions about him and I told her about psychopaths, that they had no moral sense at all, that they had never developed a proper public persona, that they were like outsized children with a young child’s intense egotism and capacity for hatred.

  We didn’t go out much in those days at all, we seemed to be sufficient for each other. I hadn’t realised that this was possible but I found myself incredibly happy. The only way I can describe it is by saying that everything seemed to taste better, the food, the air, everything. It was as if whole areas of me had come alive. I would get up in the morning and actually sing in the bathroom and I had a new zest for my work. Everything that I did turned to gold. I was a sensuous Midas. Not that I was interested so much in money but it was as if Brenda had opened me out like a new country, with new trees growing there and birds singing on the branches. It was almost as if I had taken a strange new drug. Even the furniture seemed sparkling and new. And yet Brenda most of the time was untidy in her painter’s smock, her hands stained with paint. She talked incessantly about what painting was, how it must be sensuous, how the mind was not important to it. Even my article on Adler began to take shape though at that time it was more of a critique than a rhapsody. I didn’t at that time believe that people tried to gain power over each other, certainly it didn’t seem to be so with us. In short, I was in love, and I would recommend the experience to anyone. For though as I said we didn’t go out at all, we seemed to live in a world that we had made ourselves. We explored each other. She explored my abstract mind and I explored her personality, sensuous and rich. I think now that at that time she found something useful to her in the abstraction of my mind. Perhaps it gave her work a discipline, a backbone.

  But of course such an existence couldn’t last. It isn’t in the nature of things to do so. Life overtakes us again when we are least ready for it. Now and again I could see signs of
a waning. Once she said to me, ‘I don’t understand how you can be so interested in such boring authors.’ And she would point at my row of books. I didn’t at the time really understand that she in fact did find these people boring and I took the remark as a joke. But she had no intellectual curiosity at all, I mean she wasn’t interested in ideas. She was interested in people such as Wilson and she was interested in flowers and plants – I had a rather neglected garden – and she was interested in strange odds and ends lying about the house, even pieces of wood which had been found on the seashore. But ideas immediately, as she said, turned her off. In fact sometimes I couldn’t understand how she could be interested in me at all. She also would remark that I didn’t know anything about painting, that if I thought Vermeer was good I had no taste. ‘He’s so cold,’ she would say. But it was Vermeer’s intellect and logical space that had drawn me to him in the first place. I realised that, but I didn’t realise that this meant that the two of us were unalterably opposed.

  After six months were over, I sensed that she was growing restless. She wasn’t painting at all now but according to Mrs Gray prowled about the house picking things up and putting them down again, glancing at a book and laying it down, smoking and drinking. There was no sign of a child on the way and I had a feeling that perhaps there wouldn’t be, not that I myself was particularly interested. I knew that we had entered a second phase, especially when she referred more and more often to Lorca’s poem about the gipsy. We had our first serious quarrel after I had taken her to a party which a married couple whom I knew were giving. This was the first time we had visited anyone since our marriage. This may sound incredible but it’s true. We simply didn’t have time and we were so preoccupied with each other and with our work which seemed to flower so naturally.