The Black Halo
Page 74
I turned to my rowan tree again, proud and beautiful with its natural grace and blood red berries. The rain was pouring down among the leaves. What do we do at certain times but search for the beautiful. Is that not the case. One does what one can. And the works of nature are often so lovely. So random and lovely.
I think the boy will find the driver of the white van. He will be taken down to Nottingham: the driver wouldn’t leave him here, I’m pretty sure of that. And very soon the blackbird will return to the rowan tree. And then the story will be complete.
At the Stones
She watched him as he bent down in the windy grass to study one of the stones. She felt cold but he didn’t seem to be cold at all.
If you’re looking for writing, she said, there won’t be any.
I wasn’t looking for writing, he said.
These stones, she thought, must be sunk deep in the ground. It was inconceivable how they had been transported.
It was Ronald’s idea to visit this island to have a look at the Callanish stones. Of course the islanders had a Norse background and Ronald had studied Norse.
He had studied Norse, as well as Old English and Middle English which comprised his ‘field’.
She looked wryly at the grass in front of her – her field.
As a matter of fact she rather liked the island, being used from her days in Wales to a rural community; indeed she remembered their days in Wales with untrammelled affection. If only they had remained there . . .
The brochure which told her about the stones shook in her hand.
They are not connected with the Druids according to this, she said.
No, they go back much further than that. Much much further than that.
In her mind she had a picture of robed Druids holding their hands up to the rising sun, though she couldn’t think where she had come by it. The rising sun, the Druids, sacrifice.
Much further than that, he repeated, thousands of years. There were Druids in Colomba’s time and that’s only thirteen hundred years ago.
His round red-cheeked face glowed in the cold day. Often he looked quite cherubic.
It is all to do with the position of the stones, he said, and the moon rising at midsummer. At least I read that somewhere.
A boy and a girl with rucksacks were sitting in the hollow at the centre of the stones. They were eating sandwiches and drinking tea or coffee from a flask. She took shelter by the side of one of the tall bare stones.
They had remained five years in Wales when Ronald had started his career. They were the happiest years of her life, she was sure. Neither the town nor the university was large and she knew a fair number of people and not only the ones connected with the university. And, of course, Ronald could speak Welsh after a fashion. She had tried to learn the language but failed.
There was a constellation of certain languages that Ronald knew, old Norse, Old and Middle English and old Welsh. And now he was having a look at Gaelic.
The names of villages ending in ‘bost’ are all Norse, he told her. There’s Garrabost, Shawbost, Melbost, etc.
Sometimes she hated him; he was like a little doll, twinkling and well-meaning.
There is some theory about the shape of the hills over there, he said. Taken together they have the form of a recumbent woman. Can you see it?
At first she didn’t and then she did.
That would be their goddess, he said. Imagine in midsummer the moon rising there. They would have worshipped a goddess, an Earth Mother.
Then they had left Wales for Cambridge. Cambridge was a much more complicated place. She had found it cold, over-intellectual though Ronald avoided as many functions as he could; he had little small talk and wasn’t witty.
The students too were different from the Welsh ones. They were more ‘superior’, more sophisticated, very bright.
The Welsh ones didn’t stretch me so much, said Ronald. They didn’t question much. And at seminars and tutorials they were less talkative.
And so he had to work much harder, wrote new lectures. Wales had made him lazy, he said.
The two young people sitting in the hollow looked like students, perhaps foreign ones, from Germany or France. She couldn’t actually make out their language.
She had disliked Cambridge intensely, to put it mildly. There was a sort of formality and impersonality that threatened her. And Ronald didn’t have time to talk to her. He was studying and writing harder than ever.
The calibre of student is much higher here, he said. And I have to keep up.
But I thought you knew your work already.
Yes, but you don’t know what some of the students will unearth. They are more . . . unexpected.
And so he tried to insure against the unexpected.
And it was then that she began . . . expecting.
When she told him, he had taken it absent-mindedly as if it was nothing to do with him at all. It seemed he was so busy that he did not exist in the present. She herself had done some Anglo-Saxon when she had attended Aberdeen University; it was there that they had met.
She remembered certain poems about wanderers and seafarers whose philosophy was to ‘endure’. To endure loss and masters, unemployment. To endure storms, blizzards, turbulent seas.
He was taking photographs now.
How would he cope, she wondered, if something happened to her. He was buoyed up by her, his existence hung from hers, he was a little twinkling satellite of hers. He couldn’t cook, or fix a plug. There were many quite simple things that he couldn’t do. But all this was permissible in him because he was a professor. It was as if people equated brilliance with academe and forgave professors who couldn’t change a lightbulb. How many Anglo-Saxon professors would it take to change a light-bulb? She smiled wryly.
The child was much more to her than it was to him. Now she had a reason to look after herself. Now she had a future. She felt happy, at times elated. For the life of her she couldn’t imagine him as a father. And neither, she was sure, could he. She couldn’t imagine him playing with a child, be it son or daughter. If the child spoke Middle English that might be different.
She looked at the configuration of the hills again. They did in fact look like a recumbent woman and she imagined a mild midsummer moon above them, a moon that would in autumn appear red.
The two young people stood up, put their rucksacks on, and walked towards the exit.
She had imagined the child in her womb as a tiny helmeted Anglo-Saxon. Her great trouble was that neither Ronald nor she had made any friends in Cambridge. She thought that Ron was boring, and she knew that in this environment she herself was boring. She was intimidated. But perhaps the child would not be boring, it might spring fully-armed from this hard bright Cambridge world. This world of quiet streets, bicycles, secondhand bookshops. Oh Cambridge so lovely in summer . . . but no place for a child.
Those big blank stones in front of her. Surely there should be writing on them. But then again they had been planted here before writing was invented. When people communicated in grunts perhaps as Ronald absent-mindedly did. Though he spoke more to her since his retirement. But he really was quite useless in the house, quite, quite useless . . .
Quite, quite useless.
Could you come in here, please, he shouted to her from his study. The four walls were lined with books, and some were piled on the floor.
There’s a book I want to get from the top shelf, he said, and told her the title. I haven’t used it for a while but I believe it’s there. I tried to stand on the step ladder but I felt dizzy.
He left her everything to do; he had surrendered the motions of his outward life to her. It was true that he sometimes felt dizzy, perhaps because of his intense study. Or perhaps he had only said that he felt dizzy. No, that was unfair; it would be wrong for an Anglo-Saxon scholar to tell a lie. On the other hand, he often evaded the ‘shield wall’.
She should have tidied away the books on the floor, she should have been more carefu
l where she had placed the ladders, he should have held the ladder more tightly . . . In her fall she knew immediately that the child had gone. As she tumbled on the books, as she lay recumbent among them, she knew that it was somehow fitting that she should find herself among books. In the blood. Later he looked at her, white-faced.
I’m sorry, he bumbled.
Sorry, sorry, sorry. She opened her eyes and then closed them. Her small helmeted Anglo-Saxon had gone. Yes, there was perhaps satisfaction to be discovered behind the sorrow. Who knew the intricacies of the human mind?
Now she saw him wearing his university gown and holding his knife up as he slit the child’s throat while the red sun rose over the horizon. University gown, doctor’s gown.
He walked to the car and waited helplessly for her to unlock the door. Her child, her only child, her twinkly-faced child, the one who endured to the end. The fresh-faced one who fussed about the stones on which nothing was written, whose origin was unintelligible, inconceivable, in the field, in the windy grassy field.
The Game
We were playing football with a fishing cork, Daial and myself, on a full-sized football pitch. We were both wearing shirts; mine was green, his was blue. He looked very thin. Of course, he had been ill and some said it was TB: everyone was frightened of TB.
What a beautiful summer’s day it was. No smoke rose from the chimneys for no fires were required. We played in silence for the pitch was a big one, and very demanding. Also the cork screwed sideways when you hit it with your shoe. Normally in summer we didn’t wear shoes but we couldn’t play ‘football’ without them.
Neither of us was winning: in fact, no goals at all had been scored. This was our favourite pastime and we had many heroes among the adult footballers, including Stoodie and Hoddan. One was a centre-forward, the other a centre-half: both strongly-built and adventurous. Maybe some day we would play for the district too.
A good distance away from the pitch, Strang passed with his dog. He didn’t notice us: he always strode forward in a great hurry. Tall and red-faced, he was one of the healthiest among us and we couldn’t work out why he wasn’t in the war. We liked his collie dog Patch very much.
I must be getting better, I thought, I’m not sweating as much as usual. Daial wasn’t sweating so much either. It was wonderful to be out in the fresh air: as we ran we felt it streaming around our necks. I dribbled past Daial but lost the cork at the corner flag. We were really very poor; we used to have a proper ball but since it burst, we couldn’t afford another one. Indeed, I don’t know who was the poorer, Daial or myself. Though our poverty didn’t usually bother us, except when we couldn’t afford a ball.
The cork was of course one that would normally be found attached to a fishing net. When he grew up Daial was going to be a fisherman: I didn’t want to be one. I was more ambitious, I wanted to go to university or college though it was hard to see how I could afford to do that unless I won a bursary.
At half-time we lay on our backs gazing up at the white clouds. I was quire tired though pleasantly so. I nibbled a blade of grass at the side of the pitch. In the distance I could hear Strang shouting to his dog; also I could see Maggie hanging out her washing: her legs were very red and fat. I wondered what Janet would be doing. Once, playing draughts with her father and she sitting between us, I placed my hand on her thigh under the table: she didn’t move a muscle. What an extraordinary sensation that was.
We rose to our feet at the end of ten minutes or what we thought was ten minutes for neither of us had a watch. Some day I might have a watch but not yet. Janet had a thin gold watch which her father had given her but he owned the village shop. I thought I heard my mother’s voice calling me but that must have been an error for I didn’t see her about the house. She didn’t like me playing football in case I became ill again. I was often ill with bronchitis: TB however was more dangerous and my father had died of it. He used to give me rides on his shoulders and at one time he would smoke a pipe. He was also less strict than my mother.
As I dribbled past Daial I was looking straight at the sea and what seemed to be a becalmed ship. All day, though often we were not aware of it, there was the sound of the sea. Indeed, one of my favourite Gaelic poems was entitled in English, ‘The High Swelling of the Sea’. It was about an exile who wanted to be buried beside the sea; it was a sad, beautiful song.
Looking at the sea I had forgotten about the cork and now Daial was in a good position to score. A few months ago we had gathered scrap iron for the War Effort. We had found an old wreck of a car which we were pretending to drive; there were hardly any cars in the village.
Daial screwed the cork past the post so it was still nil-nil. Since this was wartime, we could see many ships passing and wondered whether any of the village boys was on any of them. Daial had two brothers in the navy: I had one. The last we heard from him he was in New York. The money he sent my mother arrived late, and this caused us problems, for we were absolutely dependent on it. I couldn’t imagine New York at all: our only town, Stornoway, was large enough for me. Whenever I thought of Stornoway I felt the intensely cold ice-cream on my teeth, or I smelt apples. Red apples nesting among straw; though I hadn’t seen many recently. I hadn’t seen many oranges either, or sweets. Once I had eaten whale meat but didn’t like it.
I could hear the barking of a dog: Strang must be coming back. And what was very strange, he was crossing the pitch. I shouted at him because he was coming between me and the ‘ball’. His face looked very red and healthy and smooth-shaven. He didn’t see me at all nor did he see the ‘ball’ though it was at his feet. He strode forward relentlessly towards the smokeless village.
Publication Acknowledgements
from The Hermit and other stories (1977),
first published by Victor Gollancz Ltd, London:
The Hermit; The Impulse; Timoshenko; The Spy; The Brothers; The Incident; Listen to the Voice; The Exorcism; Macbeth; Leaving the Cherries
from Murdo and other stories (1981),
first published by Victor Gollancz Ltd, London:
In the Castle; The Missionary; At the Fair; The Listeners; Mr Heine; The Visit.
from Mr Trill in Hades (1984),
first published by Victor Gollancz Ltd, London
What to do About Ralph?; The Ring; Greater Love; The Snowballs; The Play; In the School; Mr Trill in Hades.
from Selected Stories (1990),
first published by Carcarnet Press Ltd, Manchester:
By their Fruits; Mac an t-Sronaich; I Do Not Wish to Leave; The Ghost; The True Story of Sir Hector Macdonald; Chagall’s Return; Napoleon and I; Christmas Day; The Arena; The Tour; The Travelling Poet; The Scream; The Old Woman, the Baby and Terry; On the Train; The Survivor; The Dead Man and the Children; A Night with Kant; The Maze
Uncollected Stories
On the Island first published in The Scotsman, July 1978;The Button first published in Helix 2, August 1978; A September Day first published in North 7, March/April 1979 The Snow first published in New Edinburgh Review, May 1979; In the Corridor first published in Words 5 1979/80; Christine Words 9, 1980/81; The Kitten first published in The Scotsman July 1982; The Parade first published in New Edinburgh Review, Autumn 1982; The Yacht first published in New Edinburgh Review, Autumn 1983; Record of Work first published in Stand 25, no. 3, Summer 1984; In the Asylum first published in Chapman 42, 1985; The Black Halo and The Crossing first published in Chapman 42, 1985; The Beautiful Gown first published in Tales to Tell, Edinburgh, 1986; Do You Believe in Ghosts? first published in The Wild Ride and Other Scottish Stories, Harmondsworth, 1986; At Jorvik Museum first published in PN Review 55, 1987; The Ship first published in Chapman 54, 1988; In the Silence first published in Chapman 54, 1988; The Ladder first published in Chapman 54, 1988; Tommy first published in Cencrastus, Winter 1989; The Whale’s Way first published in Cencrastus, Winter 1989; The Dawn first published in Cencrastus, Winter 1989; The Bridge first published in New Writing Scotland 10: Pig Squealing A
.S.L.S., Autumn 1992; The Tool Chest, and The Wind first published in Chapman 73, 1993; The Boy and the Rowan Tree first published on the Internet in 1996; At the Stones first published in New Writing Scotland 14: Full Strength Angels, A.S.L.S., Autumn 1996; The Game first published in New Writing Scotland 15: Some Sort of Embrace, A.S.L.S., Autumn 1997.