The Black Halo

by Iain Crichton Smith

  He was so dull, always asking her if poetry was important. And what should she tell him? Why was he doing it if he doubted its value so much? The fair was important: one could sense it: its brash reality had all the confidence in the world, its music was dominating and without inhibition. It was doing a service to people, even though the prizes were cheap and without substance. The joy of existence animated it, colour, music.

  What’s wrong with me? she asked herself. What the hell is wrong with me? She watched a girl and a boy walk past, arm in arm, and she felt intense anguish like the pain of childbirth.

  She hated her husband at that moment, he looked so pale and anguished and out of place. If only he would hit her, say something spontaneous to her, but he looked so perpetually wounded as if he was always trudging home from a war he had lost. The only time she had seen a look of concentration on his face was when he had been firing at the ducks.

  She saw a great wheel circling against the sky with people on it, some of them shrieking.

  ‘I think I’d like some lemonade,’ she said aloud, and they walked in silence to the lemonade tent.

  While they were in the tent a drunk man pushed his way past them swaying on his feet and muttering some unintelligible words.

  ‘Hey,’ she shouted at him but he pretended not to hear.

  ‘Did you see that?’ she said to Hugh. ‘He pushed past. He had no right to do that.’ She was speaking in a very loud voice because she was so angry and Hugh looked at her in an embarrassed way. She wanted to stamp her heels into the man’s ankles: but she knew that Hugh wasn’t going to do anything about it and so she said, ‘I don’t think I want any lemonade at all.’

  ‘That bugger,’ she said, referring to the drunk man, hoping that he would hear her, but he seemed to be rocking happily in a muttering world of his own.

  Before she knew where she was – she was walking so fast because of her rage – she found herself away from the fairground altogether and in an adjacent park where she sat on a bench, seething furiously. When her husband finally caught up with her and sat beside her she felt as if she could pick up a stone and throw it at him, so great was her frustration and her loathing. Sheila sat down on the grass, cradling the teddy bear in her arms and saying into its ear, ‘Go to sleep now. Go to sleep.’ Its unblinking eyes with their cheap glitter stared back at her. She seemed to have forgotten about her parents altogether and was in a country of her own where the teddy bear was as real as or perhaps more real than her parents themselves.

  ‘Why didn’t you want lemonade?’ said Hugh.

  ‘If you must know,’ she replied angrily, ‘I didn’t take it because that man got ahead of us in the queue and you didn’t do anything about it.’

  ‘What was I supposed to do about it? Start a fight?’

  ‘I don’t know what you could have done. You could at least have said something instead of just standing there. You let people walk all over you.’

  ‘What people?’

  ‘Everybody.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘I should get a job then. It’s quite clear to me that you don’t want me to be writing.’

  ‘What on earth . . . ’ She gazed at him in amazement. ‘What on earth has that to do with what I’m talking about? I don’t care whether you write or not. You can carry on writing as long as you like. I don’t care about that. It doesn’t worry me.’

  ‘You think I’m a failure. Is that it?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know whether you’re a failure or not. You’re never happy. You’re always thinking about your writing. And yet you never seem to see anything that goes on around you. I don’t understand you.’

  ‘And what about you? Do you see everything?’

  ‘I see more than you. You don’t care about the real world. You really don’t. You didn’t really want to come to the fair, did you? You think it’s beneath you.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t anything like that at all. It’s just that . . . Oh, never mind . . . ’

  Sheila was still talking to the staring teddy bear, quiet and self-possessed as she sat on the grass in front of their bench.

  In the old days the two of them had gone out together and they would lie down beside the river that flowed through the glen and she would think that Hugh’s silence was very restful. But they would talk too.

  What did they talk about in those early days that passed so quickly? Days passed like hours then, now hours seemed as long as days. She didn’t even know what he did with himself when she was out working, and even when she came home at night with her fragments of news he didn’t seem to be listening or, if he was, it was to some inner voice of his own, and not to her. She knew that she was jealous of that inner voice that tormented and obsessed him, that it was a part of him that she would never know, deep and dark and distant. What inner voice was there anyway beyond the fair, beyond the passing people and the music? She stared down at the grass which was green in places and parched in others. If Sheila hadn’t been there she might have walked away but she was there and she couldn’t leave her.

  Sitting beside each other on the green bench they stared dully down at the ground. Eventually she got up. ‘We might as well go back and see the rest of the fair,’ she said. ‘After all that’s what we came for.’ Hugh got to his feet resignedly and followed her as did Sheila, cradling the teddy bear in her arms.

  When they returned to the fair, she asked Sheila if she would like to go on the swings. She paid for her and watched her settle herself on one of them, she herself standing on the ground and watching her from below, while Hugh was silent at her side. Sheila sat on the swing turning round and round with the same unnaturally quiet self-possessed air. Sheila terrified her. She wondered if, while she was away at work, Sheila was learning to be like her father, distant, without feeling. Maybe Hugh was taking her away into his own secret unhuman world. She wanted to rush up to the swing and stop it and take Sheila into her arms and say to her, ‘This is the real world. This is all the world there is. Don’t you smell it? Don’t you hear the music? Enjoy it while you can. This is your childhood and it won’t come again.’

  She turned and glanced at Hugh, but he was staring ahead of him, hurt and wounded, as if into a private dream of his own.

  God, she thought, what is happening to us? Maybe I should leave him. Maybe I should take Sheila with me and leave him. Maybe I should take her into the centre of the fair and teach her to dance.

  The swing had come to a halt and gravely as ever Sheila stepped off and walked over to her parents still clutching her teddy bear. She stopped beside them, staring down at her brown shoes, shy and serious.

  Ruth took her by the hand and in silence they moved forward.

  ‘Would you like to go into the Haunted House?’ she asked Hugh but he didn’t answer. She didn’t want to go by herself, as she was superstitious and believed firmly in ghosts.

  What had that Hall of Mirrors meant? What had been the significance of it? She had looked so squat and earthbound there. Was that what she was really like who once had danced with such abandon and joy?

  She thought, I’d like to go to a dance just once. Just once to a dance so that I would let myself go. But Hugh didn’t like dancing. I should like to listen to music, she thought, the music of my early days when I had my freedom, before that silence descended. He has done more harm to me than I have done to him with his tall thin spiritual body and his brooding mind. If I had only known before my marriage . . . If only . . . But it was too late.

  She was still alive but dying. The flesh – surely that was superior to the spirit, the soul.

  There must be dancing in the world, joyousness and music.

  But Hugh walking beside her was not speaking. She knew that he was hurt and angry, she could tell by the pallor of his face, by his compressed lips. What had he learned at the fair? Had he had any ideas for a poem? She didn’t like his poems anyway, she didn’t pretend to understand them, she was not a poseur as some people were. There were
lots of people who would say that they liked a poem even if they didn’t understand it, in order to be ‘with it’. She, on the other hand, was the sort of person who would speak out, who had definite opinions.

  She wasn’t enjoying the day one little bit, she knew that: everything was so hot and sticky. She wanted to be at the centre of things just once, she wanted to do something dramatic, something that she would remember in later years. She wanted to throw perfect darts, hit a perfect target . . . No, on second thoughts, she didn’t even want to do that, she merely wished to laugh and enjoy herself and have a happy untidy day so that she could go home and plump herself on the sofa and say, ‘Gosh, how tired I am.’ But that wasn’t likely to happen.

  The three of them walked together but she seemed as far away from the other two as she could possibly be. And all the time Hugh remained wrapped in his silence as in a dark mysterious cloak.

  They came to a tent outside which there was a notice saying SEE THE FATTEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD. She stopped and looked at the other two and said, ‘I want to see this. Even if you don’t,’ she added under her breath. She paid forty-five pence for the three of them and they entered the tent. Sitting on a chair – she thought it must be made of iron to sustain the weight – there was the fattest grossest woman she had ever seen in her whole life.

  The head was large and the cheeks were round and fat and there were big pouches under the treble chins. The breasts and the belly bulged out largely under a black shiny satiny dress. With her huge head resting on her vast shoulders the woman was like a mountain of flesh, and in close-up Ruth could see the beads of sweat on her moustached upper lip. The hands too were huge and red and fat and the fingers, with their cheap rings, as nakedly gross as sausages. Crowned with her grey hair and almost filling half the tent, the woman seemed to represent a challenge of flesh, almost as if one might wish to climb her. Ruth gazed at the immense tremendous freak with horror, as if she were seeing a magnification of some disease that was causing the flesh to run riot. Sunk deep in the head were small red-rimmed eyes, and in the vast lap rested the massive swollen hands. And yet out of this monstrous mountain, vulgar and sordid, there issued a tiny voice saying to Sheila:

  ‘Do you want to talk to me, little girl?’

  And Sheila looked up at her and burst out laughing.

  ‘You’re just like Mummy in the tent,’ she shouted. And she ran over and clutched her mother’s hand, laughing with a real childish laughter. Pale and tall, Hugh was watching the woman and Ruth thought of the vast body seated on a lavatory pan in some immense lavatory of a size greater than she had ever seen, and as she imagined her sitting there she also saw her spitting, belching, blowing her enormous nose. She was sickened by her, by her acres of flesh, by the smell that exuded from her.

  She imagined the fat woman dying in a monstrous bed, people bending over her as she breathed stertorously, beads of sweat on her moustache.

  And Sheila was still laughing and shouting, ‘She’s just like you, Mummy,’ and tall, with egg-shaped head, Hugh gazed down at her, ultimate flesh seated on its throne.

  Ruth felt as if she was going to be sick; the image in the mirror had come true in the stench of reality; the legs like tree trunks, the large red hands, the sausage-like fingers were there before her. She ran out of the tent, the bile in her mouth, and Hugh followed her with Sheila. In the clean air she turned to Sheila and said, ‘There’s the Big Wheel. Do you want to go on it? Your father can go with you if you like.’

  ‘All right,’ said Hugh, as if some instinct had told him that she wanted to be alone.

  She watched them as they got into their seats, and then from her position on the ground below she saw them soaring up into the sky, descending and then soaring again. She waved to them as they turned on the large red wheel. And Hugh waved to her in return but Sheila was staring straight ahead of her, cool and self-possessed as ever. Up they went and down they came and something in the movement made her frightened. It was as if the motion of the wheel was significant amidst the loud beat of the music, the crooked guns and darts. As she saw the two outlined against the sun she knew that they belonged to her, they were her only connection with reality, with the music and the colour of the fair. If something were to happen to them now what would her own life be like? She almost ran screaming towards the wheel as if she were going to ask the operator to stop it lest an accident should happen and the two of them, Hugh and Sheila, would plummet to the ground, broken and finished. But she waited and when they came down to earth again she clutched them both, one hand in one hand of theirs.

  ‘That’s enough,’ she said, ‘that’s enough.’

  The three of them walked to the car. She unlocked the door and got into the driver’s seat, Hugh beside her wearing his safety belt, and Sheila in the back.

  Sheila suddenly began to become talkative.

  ‘Mummy,’ she said, ‘you were fat in the mirror. You were a fat lady. You had fat legs.’

  Ruth looked at Hugh and he smiled without rancour. They were sitting happily in the car and she thought of them as a family.

  ‘Did you think of anything to write about?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said but he didn’t say what it was he had thought of till they had reached the council estate on which they lived.

  He then asked her, ‘Do you remember when we were at the shooting stall?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said eagerly.

  ‘Did you notice that the woman who was giving out the tickets had a glass eye?’

  ‘No, I didn’t notice that.’

  ‘I thought it was funny at the time,’ Hugh said slowly. ‘To put a woman in charge of the shooting stall who had a glass eye.’

  He didn’t say anything more. She knew however that he had been making a deliberate effort to tell her something, and she also realised that what he had seen was in some way of great importance to him.

  What she herself remembered most powerfully was the gross woman who had filled the tent with her smell of sweat, and whose small eyes seemed cruel when she had gazed into them.

  She also remembered the two boys with the green and white football scarves who had gone marching past, singing and shouting.

  She clutched Hugh’s hand suddenly, and held it. Then the two of them got out of the car and walked together to the council house, Sheila running along ahead of them.

  The Listeners

  He came back in the night when the castle was dark and he could not make out the blaze of rhododendrons, azaleas, roses, and the blue haze of bluebells. He knew the place of old: he knew where the lily pond was and the two green seats on which the visitors would sit. The general and his daughters would be in bed, for the rooms were unlighted. In the darkness his uniform was invisible and he felt as if it were flowing with blood. He had grown up not far from this castle; he had on one summer’s day, rank and shadowy, played with the two girls when his gamekeeper father had taken him round the grounds. O salmon that I am not allowed to taste . . . But that had been a long time ago and his father was dead. ‘They’re no’ bad,’ he would say about the general and his daughters, ‘But they dinna understand.’ Didn’t understand what? In those days he himself didn’t understand what his father had meant but now he knew. In those early days the general would come out with his field-glasses and look around the land which he owned and controlled. He would stand there in front of the door under the stone towers, with his white moustache and bullet head glinting in the sun. The daughters were white and ghostly like figures from Greek legend.

  He stood there in the darkness while the leaves of the trees moved and the stars made a little light in the spaces that the wind made. It was almost but not quite dark. He felt the scent of the flowers all round him but they did not calm his mind. Nothing calmed his mind now not even the quotations from his favourite Latin authors when as a second lieutenant he had suffered the infamy of the trenches. ‘O Palinurus too easily trusting clear sky and calm sea you will lie on a foreign sand, mere jetsam, none to
bury you . . . ’ Even now in the darkness under the moving leaves a quotation came to him: ‘Come praise Colonus’ horses and come praise the windy dark of the woods’ intricacies . . . ’ He himself couldn’t afford a horse: he had never been in the cavalry, only in the infantry. What had that fool general said: ‘A cavalry charge will soon put a stop to their machine guns.’ And the horses had gone flying into the mouths of the cannon, graceful, doomed, their heads raised in a classical perfection. O woods of Colonus . . .

  He was a small boy again in those grounds, watching the general so superbly confident among his regimented flowing acres. And the girls who were like pictures of Greek heroines on those fabled vases. But the blood rose in his mouth again, his soul was a pheasant blundering about the woods. He could feel the blood flowing down his uniform, darkening his trousers, it was as if he had been shot on the wing. I am Palinurus, I trusted too much in that clear sky, that calm sea, that blaze of rhododendrons, azaleas, hyacinths. That garden which though I did not own it I left behind.

  My rage is so great that my teeth are tightening on my tongue through which my blood is flowing.

  I was never happy in the mess, I didn’t have enough money. Their loud-mouthed bluster was too much for me, their red faces. I felt only hatred when I thought of those soldiers who were my friends pierced, beaten, lashed, starving, dying, thirsty. The general was only one among many with a stone head like a stone ball on a gatepost.

  He stood at the big door, heavy, unyielding. Above him a tree creaked as if it were a soul in torment, as if it were trying to speak. Why had he come? Surely he didn’t want to speak to them, especially when the castle was dark and they were all in their beds. Underfoot, the grass was thick and rich. O lord I could lie there, I am so tired, the blood has been flowing out of my body, my bones are insubstantial. My blood is flowing away like water, like the river in which I used to fish for salmon when I was a boy in spite of my father’s gamekeeping. That too was a game, the hooked salmon, landing on the bank twisting and pale, the blood draining from it. The water flowed through him among the cool shadows under the trees. Of course they had shown him some respect for he had turned out to be a good classical student. His father had gazed at him in surprise and perplexity but they had tried to make up to him: not that they cared about the classics or about anything else, but they had thought that that was the thing to do. They had spread their net, they had laid down their snare. He knew that now though he didn’t know it then. At the time he had been flattered by their interest: the girls too had been deferent. ‘And this is Hugh, the great classical scholar.’ Though he was only the son of a gamekeeper, old and bent, not understanding either his son or his masters and who now lay dead under his grey stone in the churchyard. ‘O Palinurus too easily trusting clear sky and calm sea . . . ’ It was his father whom his love focussed on, caught between himself and them, uncomprehending but knowing all there was to know about wind direction, shadow, leaf motion, prints of animals. Even now he could almost feel his presence in the wood guarding it for his masters from his own kind. Betrayer and guardian, hunter in Hades on behalf of his corrupted clients. There they were, upright, stony, eternal, shooting the pheasants on the wing . . . Father father you too were in your war and I thought of you often in the trenches, poor principled man who could get no other job than the one you had, guarding the acres that you yourself and your own kind ought to have had. But you never thought of that. All you would say was: ‘They’re no’ too bad but they dinna understand.’ You, like me, would walk about this place in the dark. The only difference is that my blood is flowing and yours is not.