The Black Halo (6 page)

After a while he says, ‘Isn’t that Kirsty there setting off to the shop?’ It is indeed. Then he says, ‘I hear that her daughter is in London.’ He looks at me slyly.
‘I hear she’s on the streets there. Someone from the village saw her.’

I was in London myself once. I remember it as a vast place glittering with cinemas and theatres and people with braziers selling nuts late at night on the streets. That was a long time ago when
I was at a Conference.

A long time ago too Murdo was in the War, in the Fusiliers he says himself. He says that he didn’t like the French, that they were tricky and lazy, not like the Germans. I can’t
imagine him ever having done anything that required rapid movement but I suppose that he must have been young once as we all were.

‘Well,’ he says at last, ‘this won’t do,’ and he levers himself slowly to his feet and goes to his barrow. His hands must now be cracked and broken with the weight
of the vast stones that he brings home.

‘And I’d better be going too,’ I say. At least he has something definite to do every day: I don’t even have that. He spits on his hands and then takes the handles of the
barrow and sets off to the moor again. I watch him as he plods steadily along. Then I turn back into the house.

After a while I take out my writing pad and my pen and write to my brother. The phrases flow easily. They are always the same phrases. My brother is a salesman in New Zealand and I really
don’t know him very well. Even when we were young I didn’t know him: he was much more active than me and though younger he always beat me in fights. I was amazed at times by his
aggressiveness and frightened by his mad possessiveness for property. We used to play sometimes in the attic of my parents’ house and he would turn somersaults over the rafters which I
couldn’t do.

Now I have little to say to him but I feel a certain obligation to write. ‘Everything here is as usual,’ I write, feeling at the same time that the phrase is perhaps slightly too
literary, too stilted. I have no gossip to give him. I merely tell him that all is well, that I hope his children and wife are well, that I am sure he is busy and so on. We don’t communicate
more than I communicate with Murdo and his work appears to me to be precisely as useful as Murdo’s.

The only event that has happened is the arrival of the hermit but for some reason I don’t tell him about it. I don’t tell him how much I hate that mirror image of myself, which is
yet stronger than me, at the end of the road. I don’t tell him of my obsession with that being, because I have so little to do. I don’t tell him that the reason I hate the hermit is
because I am frightened I will become like him, for at the moment at least I still hold on to language, though it is possible that that too may go. I don’t however want the New Zealand
papers, I tell him. Rugby is the very least of my interests in life, it is certainly far on the periphery.

My brother was always far better at sport than me. I was never any good at any sport, neither football nor shinty, nor any other game that the boys used to play. I was never any good at rock
climbing or jumping across streams. Perhaps that is why I became a schoolmaster in the end. I can’t at any rate imagine myself as ever having been a salesman. That would be the final
indignity of all.

I seal the letter slowly and after I have done that I turn to one of my paintings. The painting shows a thin Van Gogh-like figure sitting on a thin gaunt chair while above it as if about to jump
on it a picture of a wild cat. On the wall which is red there is a framed picture of a violin.

11

I went to see Janet’s parents to ask them about the milk. When I went in, the mother and father stood up from the table where they had been eating but Janet remained
where she was. She continued eating, her head downcast, concentrated on her plate. O, my dear, chewing your bacon and eggs, so shy and sweet. Her father said, ‘Come in, come in. What a
stranger you are!’ And he held out his hand. His wife, flurried and red-checked, was wiping her hands in her apron.

It wasn’t often that they saw the ex-headmaster of the school in their house. I didn’t know them very well – they lived at the far end of the village – all I knew was a
story about her husband who used to go about selling fish that they found him one night drunk in a ditch, his horse and cart at the side of the road, the horse patiently cropping the grass. Now of
course he had a van.

‘Would you like something to eat?’ he asked me.

‘Yes, something to eat,’ said the mother, as if she had just thought of it.

‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact I came to ask a favour.’

All this time Janet was eating her bacon and eggs and drinking her tea. They had put a chair out for me and I sat down and they sat down but of course they wouldn’t continue with their
food. I shouldn’t have come at that time, I thought, they took their meal later than me.

‘And what favour is that?’ said her father. ‘I’m sure if we can help you we will.’

‘Surely, surely,’ said his wife, mumbling downwards at the table.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘it occurred to me the other night that you sell milk. And I would like to buy some. I’m getting tired of the milk I have. I would like really fresh
milk.’

They both smiled now that they knew that the favour didn’t make a great demand on them. Janet looked up at me for the first time, her fork and knife still in her hand. I suppose I thought
even Juliet had to eat sometimes, while the tragedy raged around her. There was a spot of yellow egg on her lip.

‘Oh, I think that could be arranged,’ said her father. ‘I’m sure we could do that. Couldn’t we do that?’ he asked his wife.

‘Oh, surely, surely,’ she said. ‘Surely,’ she repeated. She was about the same size as her daughter but her jowls had begun to grow fat and gross and there were lines
round her eyes.

‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘that Janet could leave the milk at the foot of the path when she was on her way to school.’

Janet gave me another piercing glance and then looked down at her plate again.

‘I’m sure Janet would do that,’ said her father. ‘I don’t see why she shouldn’t do that. She’s passing the house every day anyway. You’ll do that,
Janet, won’t you?’

‘Yes, that will be all right,’ said Janet speaking for the first time.

‘Well, that’s fine then,’ said her father. ‘That’s fine.’

‘Well then . . . ’ I prepared to get to my feet and leave.

‘You can’t go without a wee one, eh?’ he said looking at his wife and then away from her. She pursed her lips but said nothing.

He poured me out a large dram and one for himself.

‘Since you won’t take anything to eat,’ he explained. ‘Your good health then. It’s better than milk anyway.’ His wife glanced at him for a moment and then
glanced away again.

‘Your health,’ I said and drank.

Janet was still eating, her small composed head with the black hair bent over the plate.

Her father said laughingly, ‘She’ll bring the milk all right if she can stop thinking of Dolly.’

‘Dolly?’ I said.

‘Oh, he works on the fishing boats,’ said her father. ‘They’re thinking of getting married. He’s a nice boy.’

‘But the young ones nowadays,’ said her mother in a sudden rush of nervous words, ‘look for a house and washing machine and TV straight away.’ It sounded as if she spoke
that short speech often.

Dolly, dark and threatening, on the fishing boat.

‘That’s right enough,’ said the father as if placating his wife for having taken the whisky. ‘It’s not like in our day. They want everything at once nowadays. And
they marry so young. Still, maybe it keeps them out of mischief.’

‘Oh, I’m sure she’ll remember the milk all right,’ I said. Janet looked at me again quickly and directly as if she had discovered some hidden meaning in my words.

‘Yes,’ said her mother, ‘that’s what they all do. They marry without thinking. And then they find themselves without a house or furniture. But Dolly is a nice enough
boy.’

‘I’m sure he is,’ I said.

I put down the glass and got to my feet. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘thank you for the dram. I didn’t expect it and as you say it’s better than the milk. Janet will bring the
milk then?’

‘Oh, you can be sure of that,’ said her father. ‘You can be sure of that.’

I went out of the house wishing in a way that I hadn’t visited them. But as I had sat there in their kitchen while they ate their food a thought had hovered around the depths of my mind, a
vague shape, a fish from the shadows, and it had something to do with Janet and her approaching marriage. But I couldn’t think exactly what it was. It was a phantom thought without substance.
But I felt that I knew Janet. I felt I knew her utterly and completely. And the thought had something to do with that feeling.

But I had been shaken by the news of her approaching marriage, if it were true, though after all it was natural enough that a girl like her in the ripeness of her youth, a fruit on the tree,
would soon marry. And Dolly, this boy without a shape or a face, this enemy from the sea, would enjoy her. Well, youth must go its own way though it was bitter to think of it. How bitter it was to
think of it.

And her parents looked so ordinary too, so ordinary and covetous. For even I could not miss the fact that they had jumped at the chance of selling the milk to me. And all her mother could think
about was washing machines, houses and TV sets. Perhaps Janet was like that too. I was sure she was. In the mornings when she got up she probably switched on Radio Luxembourg, listening to the disc
jockey with his false voice introducing songs about Love to people who lived in streets that he didn’t know but pretended that he cared for. Ah, I thought, the whole world is a cemetery and
among the gravestones there walk the young ones with their Japanese transistors, small as diamonds, while a voice which could be the voice of anyone tells them that love is a song, that it consists
of flowers and furs, that disease and cancer are for the old, that the young lovers walk armoured in crystal and carrying boxes of chocolates to the world’s end. And that always waiting for
the young girls are boys like Dolly, ordinary and loveable and uncomplicated and faithful, thinking only about fish and TV sets, huge dark oceans and washing machines.

12

Shortly after this a strange thing happened. Kenneth John, whom I have already mentioned, left home. It was just before five o’clock in the evening, about the time that
the bus passes through our part of the village on its way to town that I saw him walking down the path from his house, carrying what I was sure was a kitbag and wearing a dark well-pressed suit and
a jaunty dark hat. He seemed for the moment much younger and spryer than I had ever seen him. As he walked down the path his wife shouted after him, ‘Come back, Kenneth, come back.’ It
must have been her voice penetrating my room through the open window that brought me in turn to my own door to find other villagers at their own doors watching. It was an almost Victorian scene,
for by this time there were two women against whom Kenneth’s wife was leaning in a state of collapse while at the same time she was shouting and crying. I had never seen anything like it in
the village in my whole life. But the crying and shouting seemed to have no effect upon Kenneth John who proceeded on his way with a youthful jauntiness, without looking back, presenting an
adamantine back to those behind him involved in the Victorian scene.

For some reason that I didn’t understand till afterwards I took it on myself to run down to the road to try and reason with him. Perhaps deep in the back of my mind was the envious thought
that he should not be allowed to leave behind him all that made life precious and poisonous to him, especially at an age when all confidence in himself should have long ago been burned out in the
ashes of defeat. So I half ran along beside him as he made his way to the bus-stop, trying to keep up with him as in the past I had tried to keep up with bigger boys when we were on our way to
school. The large red sun was shining dead ahead of us as we walked along, Kenneth John silent, his hat tipped back slightly on his head as in the days of his youth when he had set off for Hong
Kong, San Francisco and Valparaiso. He didn’t speak to me at all. And behind me his wife was shouting and crying while the two women, one on each side of her, sustained her.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked him. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ But he didn’t answer.

‘Have you any idea where you’re going?’

Still he didn’t answer.

A white handkerchief flowered from the pocket of his jacket and he looked very spruce and composed as if he had come to a definite conclusion about his life.

‘You can’t leave your wife like this,’ I insisted. ‘She has always done her best, hasn’t she? She has done what every wife in the village does. She has looked after
you all these years.’ My voice sounded hollow and false as if I were creating for the moment opportunist reasons for him to return to his world.

‘You don’t have anywhere to go,’ I said. ‘You’ll regret it.’ But he remained silent as if he knew he was listening to lies or as if he did not recognise my
right to speak at all. In a short time the bus would be coming and it would be too late.

‘You’re too old,’ I said, ‘you can’t go away now.’ And all the time I was talking to him I was thinking perhaps of myself, that what he was doing was what I
should have done, and I was afraid that he would succeed in doing what I myself had failed to do. We walked on steadily side by side till finally we reached the bus stop, where we halted. He turned
away from me and looked back to see if the bus was coming.

‘Think what will happen to your wife,’ I continued unashamedly. ‘Think what her life will be like without you. She has always done her best. You can’t deny that.
It’s an illusion,’ I said, ‘you’re not young any more. San Francisco and Hong Kong are in the past. You can’t go back there. They won’t take you.’

And as I spoke I heard the bus coming. His wife was now rushing towards us, large and fat. She was standing beside us, tears streaming down her fat decaying face, while she looked at him, spruce
and jaunty, with longing and amazement. As the bus stopped and the driver leaned down, Kenneth John, still in silence, climbed the steps and walked to the back of the bus and sat down. The driver
gazed from me to his wife and back again in astonishment and seemed to be about to say something but then he put his foot on the accelerator and drove off leaving the two of us standing in the
middle of the road watching the bus, red and lumbering, make its way to town. Kenneth John didn’t even look back to wave.