When someone came to visit them, which was rare, they spoke to the visitor but wouldn’t speak directly to each other. The visitors noticed this and stayed away in order not to embarrass them. They didn’t know what to make of it all since they themselves couldn’t imagine a world without speech. Who could imagine it?
It was a most peculiar situation and yet after a while it became natural to the two of them. They would brush past each other on their way to a room and ignore each other as if each were a wardrobe or a chair or a table. They had in fact become like pieces of walking breathing furniture. And they did not feel this as an emptiness or a tragedy. The world had long become opaque to them. It had gone past the stage of significance or even of being a game. It simply was and they simply were. Perhaps after all they were closer to being plants. They almost ceased being aware of each other. And in a sense they gained a kind of freedom from this silence, though it was not a fruitful or creative silence. It was a silence of surrender. Speech had made them tired and they simply ceased being tired. This silence would have gone on for a long time except for a strange trivial accident, if accident it was. The old man always wore a jacket with three buttons on it. It was a grey jacket and he had worn it for thirty years. It was frayed in places and it had been repaired here and there. One day the old woman noticed that one of the buttons was hanging by a thread. For some reason this disturbed her and she wished to sew the button on again. The trouble was however that her husband wore the woollen jacket to bed as it was winter time and he never took it off. He even left his shirt on and sometimes his tie. Every day and every night she would see this button which was a black one hanging by the single thread and it became an obsession with her. She was afraid that the button would fall off and she would never be able to find it again. She would follow him about looking down at the floor or at the ground to make sure that it hadn’t fallen. She almost spoke to him in order to point out the danger to the button. But in fact he seemed completely unconscious that the button was about to fall off. He had always been like that, not caring what condition his clothes were in. Often in the past she had to tell him to wear a fresh suit when he went out visiting. For he really genuinely didn’t care how he was dressed. The button, black and round, became an obsession. She could see it in her dreams. It expanded and filled her consciousness. And sublimely ignorant of her thoughts he went about, not caring what happened to the button. She grew angry and simmered quietly. Why on earth couldn’t he pay attention to important things like that? If he had only two buttons instead of three he would look untidy and people would think that she wasn’t looking after him. But even that was not what bothered her. What really bothered her like a toothache was the lack of symmetry. It was the lowest of the three buttons and he would look silly walking about with the lower part of his jacket spread wide. The black button became as large as a globe. It became a whole earth, round and fatal and trivial. It hung from a single thread and at any moment the thread might snap. The button would fall to the ground and she would never see it again. There would never again be found a button exactly like that one. Also, her sight wasn’t very good and if the button fell she would probably never find it again. Sometimes she had the greatest difficulty in not stretching forward and seizing hold of the button and tearing it off so that she could keep it and sew it on later in the summer months when he might shed the jacket. In the morning she would look for the button in case it had fallen off in the bed at night. And sublimely indifferent to what was happening to him, her husband would continue in his sloppiness, making the silence untidy and incomplete. What could one say about him except that he was insensitive, that he did not understand her feelings, that no matter how hard she looked at the button he didn’t seem to notice, that he didn’t appreciate the importance of the button in the universe but carried on reading his newspaper? Of what importance was the newspaper in comparison with the button? It was like an aching tooth whose pain could not be relieved. The world went by as an accident without speech but the button belonged to the past, it had a position in space, it demanded this position in space, it agonised and throbbed in this position. It was more important to her than anything in the whole world. She watched it as she might watch a sick child, she thought about it sleeplessly all night as her husband slept, or turned so extravagantly and thoughtlessly in his bed. She hung on the button as on the speech of a lover. No, it was no good, it would drive her mad.
One morning when she saw that the thread was about to snap she said to him, breaking the silence, ‘I think that button needs to be sewn again or you’ll lose it.’
He looked at her in surprise and then, like her, returned from the world of silence with regret and sorrow as if he had come home from a holiday in the unknown. After that they talked to each other as before. The button was sewn close to his woollen jacket. She no longer even noticed it, it had become part of the world of things. But they never again went back to their world of silence. They had come home again.
A September Day
It was a day in autumn when I came home from school in Stornoway, a town which was seven miles from the village. The sky was a perfect blue, and the corn was yellow and as yet uncut. I left the bus at the bottom of the road and walked the rest of the way home. I was eleven years old, and I wore short trousers and a woollen jersey both of which my mother had made for me. Even as I write, the movement of the fresh air on my legs returns to me, and the red radiance of the heather all about me. Every day I went to Stornoway on the bus and every day I came back. I began to think of myself as more sophisticated than the villagers. Didn’t I know all about Pythagoras’s Theorem and was I not immersed in the history of other nations as well as my own?
As I walked along the road I looked down at the thatched house where old Meg stayed. Sometimes one would see her coming from the shop with her red bloomers down about her big red fat legs. She went home to a house full of cats, hungry, ragged, vicious. Today there was no smoke from her chimney: perhaps she was lying in her bed. Her breath was much shorter than it used to be.
Outside his house old Malcolm was sharpening his scythe. I shouted, ‘Hullo’ to him and the scythe momentarily glittered in the sun as he turned towards me. His wife like a small figure on a Dutch clock came out and threw a basinful of water on the grass. ‘Hullo,’ I shouted as I felt myself coming home. Old Malcolm shouted in Gaelic that it was a fine day, and then spat on his hands.
The village returned to me again, every house, every wall, every ditch. It was so very different from Stornoway whose houses were crowded together, whose sea was thickly populated with fishing boats. I knew practically every stone in the village. At the same time I knew so much that didn’t belong to the village at all.
Head bent over his scythe, Malcolm sharpened the blade, and I made my way home to the little house in which we lived. Very distantly I heard a cock crow in the middle of the afternoon, a traditional sign of bad luck. After it had crowed a dog barked and then another dog and then another one. Ahead of me stretched the sea, a big blue plate that swelled to the horizon on which a lone ship was moving.
‘Huh, so you’re home,’ said my mother, ‘you took your time.’
As my mother hardly ever went to town I came home to her as if from another land. She made me work at my books but the work I was doing was beyond her. Nevertheless she knew with a deep instinctive knowledge that learning was the road to the sort of reasonable life that she had never had.
‘You’re just in time to go out to the shop for me,’ she said. ‘You can have your tea when you come back. Get me some sugar and tea.’
I put my bag down on the oil-skinned table and took the money she gave me. I didn’t particularly like to go to the shop, but at the same time I didn’t strenuously object. As I was walking along the road I met Daial who had come home from the village school. Now that I had gone to the town school I was warier with him than I had been in the past. He asked me if I wanted a game of football and I said that I had to go on a message for my
mother. He snorted and went back into his house.
When I had passed him, I met old deaf Mrs Macleod. She shouted at me as if against a gale, in Gaelic, ‘And how is Iain today? You’re the clever one, aren’t you? Ask your mother if she wants to buy any milk. Anything going on in the town?’
I said I didn’t know of anything. She came up and said, ‘Your mother made that jersey, didn’t she? I wonder what kind of wool it is. Your mother is a very good knitter.’
I squirmed under her hands. ‘I’ll have to get the pattern from her sometime,’ she shouted into my ear. I almost felt my knees reddening with embarrassment.
When I left her I ran and ran, as if I wished to escape somewhere. Why were people always poking and probing? And yet I had been flattered when she said that I was the clever one.
I arrived at the shop and waited my turn. The shop sold everything from sugar to paraffin to methylated spirits for our Tilleys. Seonaid was talking to the woman who owned the shop and saying, ‘Did you hear if war is declared yet? I’ll take two loaves.’
‘No,’ said the other one.
I was gazing at the conversation sweets in the jars, and wished that I had money to buy some, but we were too poor.
‘Nugget, did you say?’ said the woman who owned the shop.
‘Black,’ said Seonaid. ‘They won’t wear brown shoes. Everything black or navy blue.’
‘That’s right,’ said the shop owner. ‘No, I never heard anything about the war.’
‘That man Chamberlain always carries an umbrella,’ said Seonaid. ‘You’d think it was raining all the time.’
She turned to me and said, ‘And how is Iain today? You’re getting taller every time I see you. And are you doing well at the school?’
I murmured something under my breath but she soon forgot about me. I went to the door of the shop and I saw Peggy, a girl of my own age who was wearing a yellow dress. She also went to the village school.
‘Hullo,’ I said to her
‘Hullo,’ she said, looking at me with a slant laughing eye.
She was wearing sandals and her legs were brown. It was a long time since I had seen her and now I couldn’t think of anything to say to her. She had used to sit beside me in Miss Taylor’s class. She was the prettiest girl in the school. Once I had even written notes to her which Miss Taylor had never seen.
‘Did you hear if war is declared?’ I asked her, trying to look very wise.
‘No,’ she said, staring at me as if I were mad. Then she began to rub one sandal against the other.
‘Are you liking the town school?’ she asked, looking at me aslant and half giggling.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. And then again. ‘It’s OK. We gamble with pennies,’ I added. ‘The school is ten times as big as the village school.’
Her eyes rounded with astonishment, but then she said, ‘I bet I wouldn’t like it.’
At that moment I looked up into the sky and saw a plane passing.
‘That’s an aeroplane,’ I said
‘I bet you don’t know what kind it is,’ said Peggy.
I was angry that I didn’t know.
Suddenly Peggy dashed away at full speed shouting at the top of her voice, ‘Townie, townie, townie.’
I went back into the shop lest anyone should see me. I was mad and ashamed, especially as I had loved Peggy so much in the past.
When I got home my mother said that I had taken my time, hadn’t I? She began to talk about her brother who had been in a war in Egypt. ‘He was a sergeant,’ she said. ‘But this time,’ she continued, ‘all the young ones will be in the war.’
I thought of myself as a pilot swooping from the sky on a German plane, my machine gun stuttering. I was the leader of a squadron of aeroplanes, and after I had shot the enemy pilot down I waggled the wings of my plane in final salute. He and I were chivalrous foes, though we would never recognise each other of because of the goggles.
‘There’s Tormod who’ll have to go and Murchadh and Iain Beag.’ She reeled off a list of names. ‘There won’t be anyone left in the village except old men and old women. I was in the First World War myself, at the munitions. Peggy was with me, and one time she pulled the communication cord of the train,’ and she began to laugh, remembering it all, so that she suddenly looked very young and girlish instead of stern and unsmiling.
‘The ones here will all go to the navy,’ she said.
I hoped that the war wouldn’t stop before I was old enough to join the RAF, or perhaps the army.
When I had finished my tea I went out. Daial was waiting and we went and played a game of football. Daial was winning and I said that one of the goals he claimed he had scored shouldn’t be counted because the ball wasn’t over the line. We glared at each other and were about to fight when he said he wouldn’t count it after all. After we had stopped playing we began to wrestle and he had me pinned to the ground shouting, ‘Surrender.’ But I managed to roll away and then I had his arms locked and I was staring into his face while my legs rested on his stomach. Our two faces glared at each other, very close, so that I could see his reddening, and I could hear his breathing, Eventually I let him up and we ran a race, which he won.
I felt restless as if something was about to happen. It was as if the whole village was waiting for some frightening news. Now and again I would see two women talking earnestly together, their mouths going click, click, click.
I tried to do some homework but ships and planes came between me and my geometry. I was standing on the deck of a ship which was slowly capsising, looking at the boats which were pulling away. Not far from me there was a German U-boat. I remained on the deck for I knew that a captain always went down with his ship. The U-boat commander saluted me and I saluted him back. The water began to climb over my sandals, and my teeth chattered with the cold. I knew that the rest of the British Navy would avenge my death and that my heroic resistance would appear in the story books.
I looked up and my mother was standing looking at me with an odd expression on her face. However, all she said was, ‘Get on with your lessons.’
‘You wait,’ I thought, ‘you will read about me someday. Your sergeant brother won’t be in it.’
I went out to the door, and saw Tinkan hammering a post into the ground. The hammer rose and fell and it looked as if he had been hammering for ever, his head bald as a stone bent down so that he didn’t see me. In the distance I heard someone whistling. Why had Peggy called me a townie: there was no reason for that. But I would show her. Some day she would hear that I had died bravely winning the Victoria Cross or perhaps the Distinguished Conduct Medal. She would regret calling me a townie and in fact she might even show some of our notes to the man who came to write about me. Displacing the adverts on the front page of the local paper would be massive headlines: ‘Local Hero Goes Down Fighting.’
I went over to the house next door and talked to Big Donald who as usual was wearing a blue jersey. He told me, ‘There’s no doubt of it. There will be a war in a day or two. No doubt of it,’ he said, spitting into the fire. The globs of tobacco spit sizzled for a moment and then died. ‘No doubt of it,’ he said. ‘And you’ll see this village bare.’
‘Thank God I don’t have to go,’ he said. ‘But if I had been younger . . . ’ and he made a sign as if he were cutting someone’s throat with a knife. ‘The Boche,’ he said, ‘were all right. But I didn’t like the Frenchies. You couldn’t trust a Frenchie. The Boche were good soldiers.’ And he sighed heavily. ‘Sometimes,’ he added, ‘we called him Fritz. But there’s no doubt. We’ll be at war in two or three days.’
I left him and stood at the door of our house before going in. I felt that something strange was about to happen, as if some disturbance was about to take place. Another plane crossed the sky and I stared up at it. It looked free and glittering in the sky, a quaint insect that buzzed up there by itself.
‘Why aren’t you coming in?’ said my mother.
‘I’m coming,’ I shouted
back, and as I shouted a dog barked.
I felt obscurely that the village would never be the same again, and it seemed to me that the standing stones which stood out in silhouette against the sky a mile behind our house had moved in the gathering twilight, with a stony purposeful motion.
‘I’m coming,’ I shouted again.
I went in and my mother arose from the table at which she had been sitting. She suddenly looked helpless and old and I thought she had been crying. ‘Bloody Germans,’ I thought viciously.
Suddenly my mother clutched me desperately in her arms and said, ‘You’ll have to carry on with your studying just the same.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
I trembled in her arms like the needle on a gauge. I was rocking in her arms like a ship in the waves. Ahead of me through the window I could see the red sun setting like a cannon ball.
The Snow
On the first day that snow fell Lorna ran in and told her mother, who was washing clothes in the sink of the tenement kitchen.
‘Come and see, mother,’ she said in her flat Rhodesian voice.
‘I haven’t the time just now,’ said her mother, who thought, So this is what we’ve come back down to, after that other dream. I can’t even afford a washing machine.
‘But, mother, I’ve never seen it before.’
‘You go and look at it then.’
Lorna ran out and left her, and her mother was left alone, squeezing water out of the socks. John would be selling insurance at that very moment, lucky to have got a job at all. To start again wasn’t easy, on a thousand pounds, all they could take out. Her heart was almost breaking, and if it was not for John and Lorna she would not have been able to go on. For it was from a tenement that she had started, and to a tenement she had now returned.
Those who had determined to stay would be still living in their big houses, or strolling under the jacaranda trees, singing their new Rhodesian songs which blossomed more strongly as the fighting came closer.
The Black Halo Page 58