The Black Halo (21 page)

Nor did his transformation stop there. The essays he wrote for me became lighter and what I can only call flippant, and he developed a gift for the superficial epigram such as when in one of
them he said that the church was no longer even the opium of the masses, it wasn’t even their cup of tea. I was brought up short by this statement because its style didn’t seem to be
his at all. It was rather as if a dandyish imagination, brittle and heartless, was beginning to speak through him. Even his writing blossomed into flowery ornamentation, which had once been gaunt
and rigid and vertical. He began to introduce quotations from poets and novelists and to my surprise I learned that he had been reading Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. But more surprising than that was
that he suddenly began to take part in plays, favouring world-weary sophisticated parts. He would typically be standing in corners of the stage, letting fall witticisms as he languidly smoked a
cigarette. He even joined the Debating Society and would deliver short startling brittle speeches which often contained attacks on the contemporary church. At one which I attended I heard him
remark that if, as Eliot had written, the whole world was a hospital endowed by a ruined millionaire, inflation had certainly made things worse. It was this kind of remark both arresting and
shallow that antagonised and puzzled me. I couldn’t understand how one who had come from his environment could effect such a transformation in his personality. I gathered that he had ceased
to write home and that he even spoke of the islanders in a mocking manner. His father too had, according to him, been an atheist. My impression had been that he was just a drunkard. In class
however he remained silent when he condescended to come. A lot of the time he didn’t appear to be listening at all, at other times he listened but smiled in a world-weary manner, as if he was
contemptuous of the quality of my mind. I found this rather irritating since I knew that my own mind was much more powerful than his (though still mediocre) but as I have sometimes encountered
students of this kind, that did not in itself worry me. What began to worry me was that he would talk of his acting – this information I got from his fellow lodger again – as if he were
a second Olivier and of his debating as if he were a second Demosthenes. In fact, I must admit that I was rather confused.

However, for the second time, something happened which encouraged me. Apparently he had started going out with a girl. As a matter of fact, the girl was a student and I happened to know her
because her father was a Councillor, a man affable enough but not, one would say, imaginative. She was what one would call a nice girl (she was in fact studying Arts with a view to becoming a
teacher) when one means that she is quiet and undistinguished. Her talent wasn’t really for scholarship but rather for domestic and more mundane affairs. As her mother was dead she looked
after the house and sometimes had to arrange dinners for her father’s guests. She was a dark-haired girl who nevertheless looked presentable enough but who was rather silent in company, and
the social functions must have been agonising for her. She played the piano rather well but in a sentimental manner, and was very good at arranging flowers in vases. In another century she would
have married young and made a good wife and mother, but in this one it was decreed that she should study Latin and History in order to teach children. She was, I think, fond of her father who was a
rather pompous vacuous man with a loud booming voice but kind enough in his way, and fond of his daughter. They lived in a large house set in an extensive area of ground in an exclusive area of the
town, that is to say, not far from where I live myself.

Naturally I don’t know very much of what went on between her and Norman and much of what I shall say will be guesswork though part will be information which I gained one way or another. If
one wonders first of all where he met her, then, as far as I could find out, it was at the dramatic society where she acted as a maid in one of the more sophisticated plays that was staged. If one
wonders what she saw in him, then it must be that at this stage she may have been attracted by his dandyish negligent manner and by that slightly alien sensitivity which one often finds in
islanders. If one wonders what he saw in her then it must be that she was the type of girl who would listen uncritically to him, admire him, and be easily deceived by the plumage without seeing to
the bone underneath. I cannot imagine what they would talk about but I am sure that the talk would have mostly come from him, for he had grown to like the sound of his own voice. As I say, my
knowledge of the girl was not very deep. I had occasion to see her father because I am on a committee which has been set up to preserve the area in which I live from the erection of a particularly
horrible office block. I had talked to her a few times and then as the office block became more threatening I had visited him oftener and seen her more frequently. I must say that she blossomed as
time passed, there was more purpose about her motion, she talked to me once about the future in a more involved way than usual and she even asked me some questions about ministers’ wives. (I
assumed that this had something to do with Norman MacEwan.) She had a very earnest nature and one felt that where she gave her heart there would be no disloyalty and no shadow of treachery. One day
we talked briefly in the garden of her house; her hands were folded in her lap while on a branch in front of us a bird’s breast vibrated with the intensity of its singing; and as she talked
and I looked at her, I felt less tranquillity than fear. (By this time of course she knew that I was Norman’s teacher and whatever he had said to her about me, probably unfavourable, she knew
that I was at least close to him.) I don’t know why I felt such fear. I knew that MacEwan wouldn’t have visited the house much if at all, and that he would not have impressed the
father, for I was sure that he would be rather gauche, rebellious in a half-baked manner or superciliously showing off his learning. Still, MacEwan had looked much happier recently in class, and
more human. He had even spontaneously thanked me for the loan of some books and the ironical note was no longer so evident in his essays which seemed to have a more pervasive warmth than in the
past. Indeed they began to show signs that he was thinking in terms of a possible future and of the real world and his responsibilities in that world. He would discuss more mundane matters such as
one might imagine a minister being involved with. Thus on the whole I was encouraged.

One day quite by accident I happened to meet the two of them in the College grounds. MacEwan had taken her along to show her over the college. He was I thought rather startled when he saw that I
knew her, and he looked at me in a considering manner after he had found this out. I asked her what she thought of the college and I noticed her turning to him as if she expected him to tell her
what to say. He mentioned something about Cambridge in a large manner and I said diplomatically that MacEwan was promising enough before he met her but that now I was sure his promise would be
fulfilled. She smiled at me gratefully. I was rather worried at the way in which she responded so naively to his rather florid pronouncements (for he was acting the lord of the manor a bit) and
wondered if it was perhaps the authoritarianism of the islands that she was responding to as indeed she responded to her overbearing father. I asked in an indirect way whether he had been at their
house yet but apparently he had not. I thought he was going to say something contemptuous about councillors but wisely he didn’t. On the whole I got the impression that he liked her and
perhaps even loved her, that he liked showing off before her (he had a long monologue about his performance in a play by Wycherley), and that she looked on him with a certain reverence. That was
the last time I saw them together. I remember I looked back as I was leaving and I saw him bending over her as she sat on a bench. It was almost as if he was whispering in her ear and I was
disturbed by an image which sprang out startingly in front of my eyes in that place of leaves and shadows. It occurred to me that I knew little about either of them but what little I knew did not
dispose me to augur a confident future for either of them, or both of them together.

I didn’t see her again till she came to see me on an autumn day. She seemed agitated and looked as if she had been crying. In her hand, screwed up, she was carrying a piece of paper which
after she had given it to me I discovered was a letter from MacEwan. I don’t know why she came to me, unless it was that perhaps I might know something more profound about the writer than
others did. It was a very abrupt letter but the handwriting was rather shaky. When I say that it was abrupt I don’t mean that it was short but the tone of it seemed abrupt. I noticed that the
handwriting had changed again and was what I can only call a compromise between the tall stiff calligraphy he had affected at the beginning and the flowery ornamental script he had been using more
recently.

It read as follows:

At that moment I knew what I must do. I took the almost weeping girl out to my house in my car and left her with my wife. As we drove along I would look sideways at her and
notice how now and again tears would brim her eyes and deep in my heart I cursed MacEwan. When I had left her in the house after explaining the situation to my wife in a few words, I got into my
car and went in search of my student. I remember staring bleakly at the autumn trees that lined the side of the avenue and wondering whether I had the strength for the confrontation that was
necessary. I had never before been called to such a task and perhaps my resources were not equal to it.

I found his flat in a crowded part of the city and rang the doorbell. A large woman with a Roman nose came to the door and when I asked her if MacEwan was at home admitted that he was. I asked
her if I could see him. She said she would get him but added that he might be working as he had come in late the previous night. I waited stubbornly, feeling the tides of anger rising steadily in
me, far away from my own quiet avenue in the centre of the turbulent city.

After an almost insulting interval, Norman appeared at the door. We stared at each other in a hostile manner but I was pleased to see that he looked haggard and unshaven.

‘I should like to see you on a matter of some urgency,’ I said and my voice sounded pompous even to myself. ‘Not here,’ I added. ‘I should be glad if you would come
for a drive in my car.’

‘If you like,’ he said quite casually, his ill face sullen and bristly.

In silence we got into the car. I said nothing at all and neither did he as we drove out from the centre of the city and headed towards a quiet area where there was a wood in which I often
walked when I wished to think. He stared rigidly ahead of him and I with gritted teeth concentrated on my driving, trying to think how I might open our conversation later.

Finally we reached the wood and I got out and he followed me. The trees were in glorious golden foliage and now and again I could hear twitterings from the trees. Once I saw a grey squirrel
scampering up a trunk half in shadow and half in sunshine.

I stopped and thrust the letter at him. He glanced at it knowing what it was, and handed it back without speaking.

‘What does that letter mean?’ I said to him, my anger rising again.

‘It means what it says,’ he said in a voice which was almost impertinent.

We came to a bench in the middle of the wood where there was a sunny clearing and I said to him, ‘I would be grateful if you would sit there for a moment while I talk to you. I think
better when I’m walking up and down.’

I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts and then I said to him, ‘First of all, I should like you to tell me what you think of me.’

He looked startled for a moment and then said quite finally, ‘I believe that you are interested in comfort. I believe that you have betrayed the church.’

‘And what then do you believe the church should be doing?’ I asked him.

‘I believe,’ he said in the same positive voice, ‘that the church should be much more extreme than it is. I believe in sin, I believe in hell. I do not believe in fatness and
port.’

‘And now do you mind if I tell you what I think of you?’ I told him, catching at that moment a glimpse of a pheasant of the most incredibly complicated stained glass colours walking
through the wood.