The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  ‘I thought you knew all I’ve been talking about without being told,’ she said. ‘I thought you knew about artists. You said you knew about paintings. I don’t suppose you think they come out of the sky. That was why I was attracted to you. I thought you would have enough maturity to give me my freedom. You must know that artists are like gipsies. I haven’t got proper work to do. Art isn’t a trade. I need to be open to everything.’

  I looked at her for a long time and much passed through my mind then. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘have your freedom, provided that you don’t betray me.’ I felt that the word ‘betray’ sounded old fashioned but I didn’t withdraw it. ‘Go about the street and pick up your inspiration. No one is stopping you from doing that. But don’t fall in love with Rank, that is all I ask.’ I didn’t know as I spoke whether I would have the strength to give her all the freedom she wanted.

  ‘I didn’t go to bed with Rank,’ she said. ‘All I did was talk to him. I felt low and he gave me some ideas and conversation. Surely I can do that. Look at all the women you meet at your job, I don’t feel jealous of them.’

  I nearly said, ‘But you can trust me,’ but I didn’t say so. I felt myself slipping into a marsh full of strange flowers and evil odours. The world was slipping away from me, the abstract world which has nothing to do with painting or sensuousness.

  ‘Look at these rolls,’ she said, ‘how white they are, how beautiful. I could make a still life of this breakfast table.’

  The thing was she looked as wild and attractive as ever and as unselfconscious. ‘That colour,’ she said. ‘What colour would you say marmalade is? Have you ever thought about that? And its taste. It’s like nothing else on earth. Nothing at all.’

  She illuminated the world for me, she was a series of detonations, she was my fate and my doom. She was halfway between my child and my wife, it was as if I could be seeing her off to school.

  ‘I tell you what,’ she said. ‘In return for the party you took me to, I’ll take you to another one. What do you think of that?’

  ‘Will Rank be there?’ I asked.

  ‘He might be,’ she said. In spite of her protestations I thought she had been to bed with him. I didn’t believe what she was saying to me now. His large presence dominated the house, it was as if he was a huge gigantic being shouldering his way through its order. When I thought of his body lying on top of hers, drilling into it, its power and its savagery, I was almost screaming with rage. I was a long silent scream. Her buttocks entranced me, her round firm breasts, to have allowed anyone else near them was like having a needle stuck in my loins. How far I had come from the cool world of Vermeer with its maidservants and milk jugs and its laughing soldiers. How far I was from the domestic Dutch world of his paintings.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll go,’ thinking again of Wilson. I wondered where he had spent his weekend, what animals he had shot, in what woods and fastnesses he had stalked. What animals he had spied on till they had been delivered to his gun.

  When I drove to the office I watched the policemen directing the traffic and thought that they were spies giving incomprehensible signals in code. Eyes and hands were agents of change and direction. Even my patients were spying on me. They were laughing at me secretly behind their hands, behind their bland, masked large faces. And no one more so than Wilson who seemed to be saying to me, ‘I am the true real person. The rest of you are hypocrites. You falsely believe that you are keeping the world together but deep down you are starving to be like me. You are killers. One day I shall be a killer in reality; I shall drink blood. Now it’s animals I kill, later it will be people. The rest of you are sick to death fighting your instincts. I am going to give way to them. Soon now. Soon. Now I shoot foxes and rabbits. Later I shall kill men.’

  And I knew that in one way he spoke the truth. The previous night I might have killed her. We all have an adamantine selfishness at the core. Think of Keats watching sparrows and musing at their purpose. They were hunting for worms or building their nests; he was writing his poetry. On the ladder of creation how were they different? We are all out to save ourselves, to keep our comfort and our pride. We may talk about civilisation but that is because it happens to be convenient to us at the moment.

  Wilson told me of a weasel he had seen. ‘The weasel,’ he said, ‘is the fiercest killer of all. Did you know that he will attack a human being? He is like a flash of fire. Dynamite. I saw him spring on a rabbit and I waited till he had killed it. Then I shot him. A very fine shot if I say it myself. Then I squeezed his body with my bare hands. It’s so thin and small and yet so vicious. A weasel will defy you. I squeezed it to death.’

  The noise was shattering, my ear-drums seemed to be bursting. There was a strange sickly smell in the air, and I wondered if it was drugs. Instead of standing about as people had done at Drew’s party they were sitting or lying on the floor and in corners under the red lights some couples were embracing and as far as I could see having sexual intercourse. The room seemed to be full of savages – buttocks, breasts, hairy pale faces everywhere. It was like a Cubist painting, like Guernica. No one paid me the slightest attention though they must have wondered what someone like me, dressed so decorously, was doing there. I looked at Brenda and she was gazing around her with parted lips. She had clearly come home. She threw her long coat into a corner of the room and sat like the others on the floor. I did the same though I felt uncomfortable. Lights were flashing all around me, the banging noise of the record player was tearing me apart. The tenement room itself was perched high up, in a poor area of the city, and we noticed that the walls as we came in had been chalked with gang slogans. Beside me a girl with incredibly blonde hair like corn and blank eyes like stones was squatting.

  I didn’t know what I was doing there and no one spoke to me though Brenda had left me and was talking to a tall fellow who was wearing a long brown ravaged fur coat. In the middle of the group was a small fat man who was staring straight ahead of him into space as if he were looking at a screen. On a table there were some drinks. We had brought some ourselves – apparently we had been expected to – and it had been placed with the rest. I felt completely out of it, and all I could think to do was crawl over and get myself a whisky while the tremendous music beat at me.

  For a while there seemed to be talking and chatter. I could hardly make out the words though I gathered that many of the people there were students. Brenda was waving her hands animatedly as she talked to the fellow in the fur coat who looked distant and bored. But this didn’t seem to worry her at all; in fact she looked perfectly happy. It was a long time since I had seen her face so purely radiant. She also was drinking what I took to be gin or vodka and I remembered what she had once told me about drinking two bottles of gin in one day. ‘I was absolutely stoned out of my mind,’ she had said. ‘It was heaven. I couldn’t paint, of course. I wonder what other painters do when they can’t paint.’

  Suddenly as if they were all responding to a signal all of the tribe – I could only think of them as that – got to their feet and began to sway and dance to the music, their faces pale and cool and dreamy. They were incredibly beautiful and mindless, like long stalks on which the faces were set like flowers, utterly abstracted, immune to the mind. They didn’t exactly dance, they swayed and thrust to the sound of the music. It was pure experience I was seeing, it was beyond thought. And among them was Brenda. She too was swaying to the music and I could have sworn that she looked straight into my eyes without recognising me.

  This swaying and thrusting went on for a long time and then suddenly it accelerated, with the movement of an orgasm. I looked at Brenda in horror. She was thrusting her pelvis forward as if she were engaged in sexual intercourse and all the time her face was a dreamy mask as if she were drugged. She was living totally in the body which she accepted not as mortal and subject to death and disease but as a precious and living possession which would allow her to enter her own heaven. There was something obscenely automatic about
her movements as if she were copulating during sleep and it terrified me more than the horrors of my mind. She had gone away like the others to another world which my mind wouldn’t allow me to enter or experience.

  Even though I was drinking there was a part of my mind which was ticking away like a watch, cataloguing, remembering. I was looking at a painting composed of images which was alive like an organism. Everything was fragmentary and no longer narrative as the man had said. And then, just as I thought this, there was the man himself – having just come in – standing beside me on his way towards the dancing.

  ‘Well, what do you think of it, then?’

  He was staring at the dancers with an almost mad smile on the whitish face below the red hair. He towered over me, pure brutal energy equipped with a high-powered brain as well, and I knew that I couldn’t compete.

  ‘It’s strange,’ I said, and my words seemed to fall hollowly at my feet.

  ‘You would say that,’ he said mockingly. ‘I could have sworn that you would use that word.’ And then he was gone, shouldering his way into the group and standing in front of Brenda, the two of them then swaying towards each other, thrusting their bodies forward, twisting like snakes. If this is the Garden of Eden, I thought, then the snakes are the correct occupants and I am the alien devil looking on. I drank more and more as the rhythm of the music deepened and quickened and became more and more loud. The room with its red light swayed about me, the sickly smell increased. I felt as if I was going to vomit. I was the only person not dancing except the fat man who was still staring into space, squatting on the floor like a Buddha.

  I had the most curious sensation of staring at something that I could never hope to understand, something that I half envied and considered dangerous. I could hear myself discussing this later with someone: ‘Of course this is where Hitlerism came from. D. H. Lawrence started it off. It’s the end of our tradition, Homer and the rest. It’s the Dionysiac frenzy, the Bacchanalian syndrome which destroyed Greece.’ But I certainly didn’t feel Apollonian. I felt as if I were in some underground cavern thousands of years ago when people with rigid brows populated the caves. I fixed my eyes on a girl’s long green belt which swayed in front of me and then I got up and sought the lavatory. When I came back they were all sitting on the floor again and Rank was talking to Brenda. He had his right arm casually over her right shoulder.

  There was a long silence which made my head ache even more than the noise. It was as if the savages had been transformed into monks, as if they were waiting now for some revelation. Brenda was looking across at me and smiling secretly. It was as if she were saying, ‘Well, I went to your party and now you have to come to mine. What do you think of it? I left you on your own as you did to me. What do you think of that?’ Suddenly I got up and stumbled out of the room, and down the stairs. I remember that they were unlit and I had to use my lighter a lot to light my way in flashes. The last glimpse I had of them, Rank was stroking her hair. I wasn’t going to fight him. He would have won anyway. It would not have been rational.

  I steered the car through the night blazing with its reds and yellows, like an emporium of the East. I half expected to see women in veils walking past and Arabs talking at street corners. The night was a desert, lit by inane contingent lights. I managed to reach home safely, put the car in the garage, went upstairs, and climbed into bed. I went out like a light.

  When I woke up the same stabbing pain returned as I remembered what had happened. Brenda, incredibly enough, was sleeping beside me like a child. I had no recollection of her coming to bed or when she had returned or with whom. She was sleeping peacefully, an arm thrown across the yellow coverlet. I shook her awake and said, ‘When did you come home?’

  She woke blinking, and said, ‘I was given a lift home. I came back at three.’

  ‘Who gave you a lift?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know his name,’ she said. ‘Anyway his girl friend was with him so it’s all right.’

  ‘It wasn’t Rank?’ I asked, shivering as if with fever.

  ‘It wasn’t Rank,’ she said. ‘You left early, didn’t you?’

  ‘There was no one to speak to,’ I said.

  ‘It was the same at your party,’ she replied. ‘It was incredible. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much. We had such discussions.’

  Discussions. I wondered what she meant by ‘discussions’. I knew what I meant by the word. But I didn’t think that was what she meant by it.

  ‘I left you with Rank,’ I said accusingly.

  ‘I know,’ she answered, ‘but there were others there as well, you know.’ Suddenly she kissed me and said, ‘You mustn’t be so jealous. Jealousy is no good. You must learn to trust me.’

  But I couldn’t trust her. She was a gipsy who moved across frontiers, restlessly. I had a feeling deep within me that she had been with Rank and the knowledge was driving me insane.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I said.

  ‘Going to do?’ she said in a surprised voice. ‘What do you mean, “going to do”?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘we can’t carry on like this. Are you going to be attending parties like that regularly? I don’t understand the people there. I have nothing in common with any of them.’

  ‘You don’t try to have anything in common with them,’ she said. ‘You should try. You’ve led too sheltered an existence, that’s what’s wrong with you. You think that because you talk to your patients you know everything, that you’ve seen everything. You don’t understand what creative people are like.’

  And truly I didn’t. I didn’t understand these people and I was sure that most of them weren’t creative. They seemed to me like savages who had surrendered reason. They seemed to be down and outs, drop-outs from society. I looked on them as exotic phenomena, who were turning and savaging the tree of light which had illuminated the ages.

  ‘Why did you marry me?’ I asked her at last.

  ‘It’s an experience,’ she said unhesitatingly. ‘Everything is an experience. Why do you always want a reason for everything? Why don’t you just live? You should learn to live from day to day. Christ Himself said that, didn’t he?’

  Perhaps Rank was her Christ and these hairy people with their sandals and long coats were his disciples.

  She sat up in bed and said, ‘That’s what’s wrong with you. You’re always looking for reasons and purposes. Can’t you see that that’s ridiculous? Just live in the moment, that’s what you need to do. Just enjoy.’ There were dark shadows under her eyes and her pale face was almost luminous.

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘but human beings can’t live like that. Animals live like that. But not human beings. In any case there are moments when one is bored. One must endure these times.’

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why can’t one go out and get lost in something else? You could retire now if you wanted to. You’ve got plenty of money. Why don’t you? Are you frightened or something?’

  I was indeed frightened. I would miss those voyeuristic glimpses into the satanic depths and she knew it. She could probe more deeply in her apparently innocent, sleep-walking way, than anyone I knew.

  ‘Everything could be all right if you let it,’ she said. ‘Why are you so angry just because I enjoyed myself? How can you love me and be so angry?’

  I got up from the bed and pulled the curtains aside. It was autumn again. It wouldn’t be long till our year would be past. I could feel the tang of autumn in the air, I could see the trees losing their crowns and the leaves turning brown. I could feel my crown leaving me.

  ‘All right,’ I said, but I couldn’t tell her about the pain that was pricking me continually. I couldn’t tell her how I felt about Rank, invader of my private realm, I couldn’t tell her how I was being flayed alive.

  ‘Where are you going today?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I’ll walk around,’ she said carelessly. ‘I have a few ideas.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I got some
ideas last night. I didn’t realise you had gone till much later.’

  I didn’t want to go to my work but I felt that I ought to. I didn’t want to lie down in my bed and drop out like those others. That wasn’t my nature. I hated staying late in bed. Perhaps, I thought, in the world that is to come and is almost upon us, the congenitally idle who are able to bear the ravages of time will be the masters and those who need routine will be the slaves.

  I thought of an experiment which had been done with rats, how if you put three rats in a cage with a machine which will release food if a lever is pressed, one rat will do all the work while the other two will sit back and eat. And this has nothing to do with class structure or the worker rat being terrorised by the other two. It is just that this particular rat seems to need to work, it is the responsible one.

  I felt old and lost as I put on my clothes. I was one of the workers, one of the slaves, one of the inferiors. She was the master or mistress. She could live in the world in a way that I couldn’t. I was trying to master the world, she ignored it.

  When I turned away to go down and make my breakfast she was already asleep.

  And so time passed. Autumn was resplendent in its marvellous colours. The year was going out in a blaze of colour and again I had to go to Paris but this time I didn’t tell her when I would be back. More and more I felt the world as a spying machine.

  She had married me to spy on me. What was she saying about me to her friends? She was learning that my world was as frail as she had thought. Reason was disintegrating, was being eaten alive by jealousy. Ideas were becoming pale and tired. I was betraying that world to her. I was a traitor to my own kind. Why else had she married me? I had surrendered to her because she was careless and unpredictable and irrational, but she hadn’t surrendered to me. She had no weakness that I could see. She would move on with the secrets stolen from my house, built so flimsily on reason and principle. I was the weak one, she was the strong one.