The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  ‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard so much about you.’ And she crossed her long beautiful black legs. Christ in his blue heavens. So it happened with her after the Macbeth run began and I was being hailed as the greatest, squat and poetic, a doomed Scot blundering among lights and shadows. The lights and shadows of London. And I swear that one night after coming out of a restaurant I saw the three witches standing at a corner and laughing at me. How could I imagine that I deserved her? My doom and my queen.

  Question: ‘And I believe that he had helped you in your career.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Question: ‘Would you say that you were jealous of him?’

  Jealous? I burned. I was on fire. I couldn’t stand the two of them in bed together. ‘No,’ she said, ‘he doesn’t have the energy left over.’ But how was I to know that she wasn’t lying? I dozed in an inferno beside my pale wife, my children coughing in the next room. Where are they now? Maybe with Butler. He liked her, I don’t know. I don’t know any longer the difference between the real and the unreal. I know nothing. I waited for Macduff to behead me and I didn’t care, at the head of my ruined army. And for her, her suicide was always unreal. How could she ever commit suicide even in a play?

  And that night . . .

  Question: ‘You stab him usually in that scene, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And this time I really did. For I thought that the time had really come for us to be together. Especially as Charles was setting off for America taking her with him. He was going to do Iago and she would be Desdemona. Didn’t I say that he was a genius? Perhaps he had married her so that some day she might be Desdemona and he might be Iago. He was entirely capable of it. A genius lives in a world of his own, he is already deep in the future anyway. And I was deep in the past. I looked at her. She was dressing. ‘America,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Perhaps she would be more at home there, I thought. After all she is African. I wept and I raged. ‘Come with me,’ I said. ‘We will go anywhere you like. The country. We two alone will sing like birds in a cage.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘After all, look what he has done for me. I have given so little in return.’ And after she left I drank and drank and Duncan arose in front of me swaying like a snake. If only the dagger were a real dagger. If only . . . And again I saw Butler and he said, ‘Of course, old boy, it was all set up.’

  ‘Set up?’ I said as he towered above me, all six feet four of him. How sure of oneself one must be when one is six feet four.

  ‘Set up?’ I said.

  ‘Of course, old boy. Charles’s interpretation of the play was that it was basically sexual. Right? Now he had to get a highly sexed performance from you two. So he let you make his wife your mistress and she played along. He knew all the time, of course. You gave the performance of your life. It almost made us uncomfortable, you know. You knew her so well, I mean in the biblical sense.’

  The world opened beneath my simple Scottish mind. How could it be possible that a man could do this, a husband, with his own wife? I couldn’t see beyond that border. To give his own wife for a performance, greater love hath no man than this. I think I must almost have spun on my stool.

  ‘Are you all right, old man? No, of course an ordinary man wouldn’t do it, but a genius might.’

  I staggered into the lights of London. I walked through the desert for what seemed to be twenty years, that is, the period since I had met Charles first. And I knew that it was true. His head towered from posters. What would a woman, even a black beautiful woman, supply him with that could assuage that divine hunger? Night waxed and waned. I found myself, a jongleur, a jester, among dustbins on which the moon shone theatrically.

  And it was then that I decided to kill him. But that morning I asked him about America and he said, ‘I’m sorry, Ralph, but there’s no part for you. I’ve got another fellow for Othello. I would say that fresh blood is needed, wouldn’t you? I think your innocence would be out of place there.’

  And that night, Inspector or whatever you are, I killed him. I didn’t even ask how a black Desdemona would fit into his play: but that’s genius for you. He didn’t smile. No, that night he didn’t smile. From Scotland I plunged my direct simple dagger into his heart.

  Question: ‘And you tried to kill her as well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But Butler saved her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Of course they don’t behead one now, I know that. They put you in prison.

  Well, let America receive her. The sere and yellow leaf, Inspector, waves at my window.

  Leaving the Cherries

  All that morning she picked cherries from her cherry tree. She dropped them in a pail which she had hooked to a branch of the tree and when she had filled the pail she put the cherries in little green baskets ready to be given to her friends. She only took the really ripe cherries, leaving the unripe ones till later. She did this every year and she got plums in exchange or sometimes cakes and scones. She and her friends would phone each other quite often though they didn’t visit. And she was even cutting down on the phoning since the telephone costs had gone up again recently. Quite a lot of her friends were widows like herself but some had their children living near them either in the city or on the outskirts. When she was standing on the ladder she looked over the wall of her garden at the road where the cars streamed ceaselessly past, going to America and coming from America; there seemed no end to their passionless purpose. Some had trailers behind them, some boats. They were nearly all big cars and some stopped at the garage opposite, near which men with red helmets were working on the road. She imagined Canada as a country inhabited as much by cars as by people. When her husband was alive the two of them used to go up-country quite a lot at weekends. They nearly bought a place out there on the way to the canyon but the lots were expensive and growing more so every day. She looked up into the sky and saw a red breasted and red winged plane looping the loop. It would turn over and over and just when it seemed as if it was out of control it would start climbing again. Its red was brighter than that of the cherries which were now turning a tan colour as they ripened. Below her she could see the lawn parched by the monotonous sunlight but she could not use her hose as the water was rationed. She did not like to see the ground as parched as that, it made her body ache. Below the tree where she was working there were cherries which the birds had dropped, some half eaten and some with only the kernel left.

  When she had put the cherries in their small green baskets she took the car out and drove to Woodwards. She had some difficulty in parking but eventually found a place among the acres of other cars whose glass was sparkling in the sun. The roads were packed with cars, some honking at her as she drove along carefully and slowly. Once a merging truck came straight at her and she had to move quickly out of the way. She drove over the long flagged bridge from which according to the radio a man had thrown himself the previous night into the water below. They had found no identification on him. What a way to die, she thought, diving from a bridge. But people died in all sorts of ways. Think for instance of all those drug addicts who haunted the parks and gardens and sometimes came out at dusk and killed people.

  When she got into Woodwards she walked around for a long time looking at hats, jewellery, dresses. She couldn’t afford any of them but she liked looking. Soon she might have to sell her house and move into a flat as many of the other widows had done. She wouldn’t like a flat on the ground floor; many of them were broken into. She would probably get quite a high price for her house if she sold it, for it had five rooms altogether as well as a bathroom and kitchen and she had looked after it carefully though she was on her own. Once she saw a woman in a large green hat who bought lots of hats and dresses and she wondered whether she was some sort of film star. But even film stars had their troubles, their marriages were always breaking up, and many of them became alcoholics. Thank God that had never happened to her. She never
drank anything apart from Seven-up and coffee, not even if she was invited out. There was nothing really that she wanted to buy in Woodwards even if she could have afforded to. In the middle of the store she suddenly stopped, wondering when her friends would get the cherries, for they were at their very ripest. Not everybody could grow good cherries. Of course she didn’t mind if they came and collected the cherries themselves. Some of them often did that. If she was away they would come with their pails and fill them and sometimes leave a note, sometimes not. And sometimes other people, who had no right to, came and collected cherries. They seemed to know when she was away from home. And recently she had an argument with the man next door about one of her trees.

  For weeks now the weather had been very hot. Every morning it was misty - so that the cars had to use their headlights - and then the mist cleared away and the sun came out like a sword. Her son and daughter who had been visiting her for three weeks had gone back to Los Angeles where water was left at the doors in cartons just like milk, because it was so scarce. Her daughter had made a funny remark about the house and there was mention of a will but she had ignored that, not that it was emphasised in any way. Not at all. In fact it might have been her imagination. They seemed to plan years ahead, these young ones. The children had liked the cherry tree, sometimes it seemed to her that the tree represented the only reason for her existence, that that was all she was good at, providing cherries. If she didn’t have cherries to give people in baskets, what would her life be like? People had told her that she should sell the cherries, put a sign up outside her house saying that there were cherries for sale, but she wouldn’t dream of doing that though she had seen cherries being sold at the roadside and in the stores and they weren’t so good as hers. No, not even if she got two dollars for them would she do that. It would be like picking money from the trees. Sometimes she would take a book out and sit in a chair in the shade of the cherry tree and read it, though not so often recently.

  She looked up at the sign in the store which told her where everything was and went down to the next floor on the escalator though she didn’t like escalators very much. There was that funny jump you had to take at the end after the smoothness of the descent. She thought of the other Woodwards the gunmen had robbed recently, stripping the cash from all eight tills and disappearing. Strange how they could get away with that. She wondered if she had left the money for the milk on the mantelpiece as usual but she definitely remembered locking all the doors including the door of the basement where she had left the cherries in their little green baskets. But she had left the ladder still standing against the tree. She went over to the counter and bought her purchase, then made her way to the rest-room. She felt sweaty. She wished she had taken a bath. Driving through the intense hot traffic took a lot out of her but then on the other hand if she didn’t have a car what would happen to her? And she wasn’t getting any younger.

  When she got into the wash-room she was relieved there was no one else there. She felt quite cool. She went to the mirror and tidied her hair and washed her face. Then she opened the parcel, took out the shotgun, put it to her mouth and shot herself.

  from

  MURDO

  and other stories

  In the Castle

  The road seemed to last for miles as it headed towards the castle with the green sweeping lawns around it on which there strutted peacocks with blazing colours and small crowned heads.

  Trevor thought that Mary looked a bit better and calmer. He drew the car to a halt and they got out, she as usual clinging to her handbag in which as he knew there was a mess of disordered stuff. She looked pale and hunted, almost haunted, in her yellow dress which he noticed was creased at the back. In the old days she wouldn’t have been so untidy.

  ‘Tickets first,’ he said in his artificially cheerful voice, and they queued in a room whose walls were covered with lances, swords and guns, arranged in orderly array.

  Having got the tickets he led her into the first room, passing Americans in their white suits carrying cameras slung over their shoulders. He heard the continuous murmur of mixed languages, French, German, and, he thought, Swedish. A little Jap with a creased face stood by himself. Nowadays Mary didn’t speak much: their frightening screaming quarrels had passed. She seemed to have retreated into a world of her own and this worried him just as much as the quarrels.

  ‘Well then,’ he said cheerfully, ‘this is the first room.’ She gazed up at the deers’ skulls and antlers on the wall. They looked so frail that they might at any moment break into powder and fall on the floor.

  He looked at the deers’ skulls and then at Mary. When had the irretrievable damage happened? Was it some time in her lonely childhood – when she had been the old child of an ageing doctor and his younger wife? Or was it after she had married him? Certainly her childish rages were a continual accompaniment to their marriage. That he himself was severe and unforgiving and humourless he knew. That perhaps she thought she had come down in the world in marrying him he also thought he knew: after all, lecturers were not as rich as doctors. And then there had been the tradition of alcoholism in her family: her mother had been in hospital for it once or twice. The doctor, her father, sat in his chair and smiled constantly as if he accepted the incurable world as it was. And Mary had grown up in her secret world. He himself had three brothers and a sister, and so he considered that normality had been rubbed into him, as a pebble takes its shape from the onslaughts of the waves.

  They were now standing in a room in which there were a lot of eighteenth-century paintings. At what seemed to be open-air picnics women sat in long green or red dresses, with a cloth spread before them on the ground. The trees around them had inherited the calm of that passionless age. The firescreens too showed eighteenth-century paintings in which similar women sat easily in their composed worlds. On the mantelpiece was a clock of black marble which to his amazement told the right time as if the servants in the castle wound it up every day.

  ‘Isn’t that beautiful?’ he said, but she turned away. If only she would speak, make even the slightest comment. Her large famished eyes took everything in but at the same time put it into secret drawers of her own with special locks. He almost felt like hitting her. And yet he had loved her and he still loved her. It was true she came from a different world, not a world as palatial as this, but at least one higher than his own. But that was no excuse for her deep griefs. The historian in him was ticking off, date by date, the articles he saw, though not evaluating them. He had never been interested in money and neither had she. How appalling her silences were, her frowning wrinkled brow. He had a wild vision that she would burst into a rage where they were and shout and scream at the tourists who were so grave and correct and earnest, speaking their foreign languages.

  My love, my love what has happened to you? Was it my fault? Have I left you too much alone?

  Through a window he saw the proud peacocks staring, it seemed, towards him with their fathomless stupid eyes. Just like the dull aristocrats who had run this castle.

  They stood in a room full of snuffboxes and packs of eighteenth-century cards larger than those he was familiar with. She stared down at one of them as if it were infinitely precious. On the walls were portraits of young aristocratic girls, smiling arrogantly from within their gilt borders. What had they ever done but sew and play the harpsichord, rather badly. How wasted their lives had been. And then he noticed that she was staring with particular interest at one painting. It showed a typically red-faced aristocrat in a kilt handing a pheasant he had just killed to his little daughter, who was stretching her chubby hands towards it as if it were a new toy. Her mother smiled complacently from the far edge of the picture. At the other edge there was a stiff slightly bowing servant, perhaps a gillie. Stupid buggers, he thought, what vulgarity, what stony-headed power.

  And he hated these aristocrats and their families. It might have been better if he and Mary had had children but they hadn’t and that was it. He suppose
d that in a way it wasn’t a bad thing, for it allowed him to concentrate on his researches. But imagine having a child like that with such greed on its face as it stretched its tiny hands towards the pheasant whose colours seemed to be fading in the duke’s hand. Long thin laths of people, wooden-headed possessors of empire, with their horses and their dogs and their servants who ticked away like black clocks till the time came to strike.

  As he looked at Mary he thought that her face glowed, as if the picture belonged to a world she loved, a world of the masculine and the cruel and the fixed. He drew in his breath sharply and apologised to an American who was trying to get past him.

  He felt in need of a pee. He should have gone to the toilet (loo, as his wife said) before he started on the tour.

  ‘Come on,’ he said gently, and then as she made no move he repeated the words. It was only then that she stirred out of her dream, still staring at the picture as she left the room, to enter another one in which there was a bed with matching chairs covered by a wine-red material. At the head of the bed and also on the chairs there was stitched or carved a yellow coronet. It was as if for a moment he expected that someone would be lying on the bed, as if he had burst suddenly into a private room, and there, perfectly still, her golden hair strewn on the pillows, would be a duchess fast asleep. Who had lain on that bed before, he wondered. It represented the sweat of history though now it looked so calm and familiar. The bed of sweaty bodies, of irrational sex, the stews of the past. And that bitch Elizabeth flaunting her smallpoxed body to the ambassadors of so many nations. Sex used as politics and economy, in the service of diplomacy. He was shaken by rage and rancour. His sister stood mockingly in front of a mirror in their crowded house.