The Black Halo (61 page)

‘The lack of colour,’ he mused. ‘That was the worst of all. Nothing but black and white. Nothing but sorrow and sighing. Nothing but fear. They are frightened to
live.’

She was about to reply when the tweedy man came back in and said that they could have their food now. They followed him into the large deserted dining-room.

‘Would you like some wine?’ he asked her.

‘No, thanks.’

‘Well, I’ll take some,’ and he ordered a German wine that he had never heard of before.

They sat facing each other alone in the dining-room which had more landscapes on the walls. The island had almost killed him, it was only now that he was beginning to waken up. He wanted a
theatre of the body, music, joy, colour. But she didn’t want any of these things. It was as if she had returned to an aboriginal guilt on which she was feeding in silence as a trembling shorn
Eve suddenly feels frightened of the apple in her hand, bitten and in such a short moment discoloured. He had a picture in his mind of the scoured streets of the island town, of the men and women
in black, of the salt piercing wind, of the churches and cemeteries, of the barrenness and the blackness, of the psalms rising and falling like the sound of the sea.

Of her father saying grace, of the truisms endlessly delivered as if they were revelations from God. ‘We are so hard-hearted,’ he would say, ‘there is no good in us.’ He
had felt as if he must free Sheila from a demonic world. But she had lowered her head like a cow about to be axed, and surrendered herself to that world as if returning to her helpless childhood
again.

‘Will steak do?’ said the tweedy man. Steak would do. They ate in silence.

The two worlds – that bare one and the world of the artist – hung around them like contrary paintings. He felt as if he might never paint again. An old woman struggling against that
eternal wind of death in her black clothes, that was what he might paint, nothing joyful. He felt tired to the bones and she was staring down at her plate. It was almost as if she expected him to
say grace. The vanity. She had even stopped using perfume.

‘I’m not saying anything against your people,’ he said.

She looked up questioningly.

‘But,’ he said, ‘God did not mean us to be like that. Surely he didn’t.’

‘How do you mean?’ she asked, her eyes very blue and cold and distant.

‘I felt as if I was being squeezed to death. It is not right to feel like that.’

‘Aren’t we all being squeezed to death?’ she said. And yet in earlier days she had been so gay and happy. Perhaps too much so, he thought now, perhaps with too much
desperation.

On their holiday they had met an alcoholic who lived alone and whose room was filled with empty bottles. But no one asked him why he had become an alcoholic. Everyone avoided him, they made no
allowances for the temptations and the terrors. No one questioned himself, no one asked, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ He shuddered. And even now as he looked out of the window he
could see the bareness and the storm and the rain lashing the ground, with its grey whips. Inside the house there was the wine on the table. He drank some more while she looked at him
disapprovingly, though she said nothing.

He felt his hands clench as if around a paint-brush that could no longer paint pictures.

He felt as if he were fighting against some form of possession, possession by God. So many days they had sat by the fire, gazing into it as if into a mirror which showed scenes from the past,
the dog asleep on the floor and now and again twitching in its sleep, the clock ticking, time devouring them. Ships on the stormy seas, bringing letters from America, from Australia, from the
exiles.

He was suffering from culture shock. He remembered his own upbringing, the playing of the piano in the large sunny drawing-room, the reading of novels, the endless simple unprincipled traffic of
the world. The art galleries. On the island he was the stranger, the enemy. No one would look at his pictures.

So much of what we do is vain, she said. And she was so beautiful, that was what was so heartbreaking. But the island would destroy her beauty, it would eat her alive, it would put shapeless
clothes round her infernal breast. He drank some more wine. He wanted to get drunk, to forget about the cemeteries, the cold hard wind.

They had some trifle after the steak and he drank some more wine.

‘This is quite an old hotel,’ she said, ‘really. They’ve modernised it. That’s all.’

‘Yes, perhaps you’re right. And we’re the only guests here.’

If only she would dance as she had used to do. But now he could see that her former frenzy had been an escape from herself, from the darkness. From that incessant flaying wind, from that
devilish music.

‘Don’t you see?’ she said eagerly. ‘They have adapted. They have adapted to the bareness. There’s no protection. Not even in art. Nothing protects us from
mortality.’

‘And all your – their – lives,’ he said, ‘they are preparing for death.’

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘It is another way of seeing the world. Perhaps it is the true way, without deception.’

‘No,’ he said, flushed with the wine. ‘I won’t allow it to be. It can’t be. I want the vanity, the unpredictability, the perfumes, the mirrors.’

She flinched as if he had struck her. He drank some more wine. The tweedy man came in and asked if they would have tea or coffee. They would have coffee. He paused for a moment and told them
that it was worthwhile keeping the hotel open in the winter because of the bar trade, that life here was very different from life in the south, that he hadn’t begun to live till he came here.
He shot and fished and boated. The artist fancied that he looked now and again at Sheila who, however, stared straight ahead of her. Her faithfulness mirrored his own. For a moment he thought that
religion would make her even more loyal, more predictable and he felt contentment but not joy. A large dog came into the room and gazed at them with large tranquil eyes. Fidelity. Peace.

When they had had their coffee they sat a little longer and then Sheila said that she wished to go to bed, though it was still quite early. They climbed the stairs together and he fitted the key
in the lock of the door. As he went in he had an impression of glass, another door perhaps at the end of the corridor. In the room itself there were twin beds, an oldish dressing table with a large
spotty mirror, a wardrobe, and an electric fire which looked broken. He tried to fit some coins into the slot but failed. They undressed in silence, took their chill night-clothes from their cases
and went to bed. He noticed that she was wearing a long chaste nightgown which he couldn’t remember having seen before: perhaps it was an heirloom which had been given her when she was home.
He stayed awake for some time staring up at the ceiling and then, feeling quite tired, fell asleep.

2

He woke up in the middle of the night and groped for the light to see what time it was. It was three o’clock.

‘What are you doing?’ said Sheila.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t realise you were awake. It’s three o’clock. Didn’t you sleep?’

‘Yes, I slept,’ she said irritably. For some reason he had an impulse to be teasing and provocative and he said, ‘Imagine. Suppose there’s a ghost in the
hotel.’

‘What?’

‘A ghost.’ And then more daringly. ‘Suppose we two are ghosts. Suppose the real you has gone out while I was sleeping and you are a ghost.’

‘What nonsense.’

‘But think of it,’ he said. ‘How do I know that you’re not a ghost? How do you know that I’m not a ghost? How do you know that the real me hasn’t gone out and
that only my spirit is here?’

But he wasn’t able to frighten her though he was almost frightening himself. All round the hotel on that desolate moor there might be ghosts shimmering in their long white chaste
nightgowns. For a moment he really thought that perhaps she was a ghost as he listened to her breathing, a bed away in the darkness. If the two of them were ghosts, if time had changed during their
sleep, in this room so old and dim with the ancient furniture!

What women had sat at that mirror who were now in all corners of the world or dead? What women or men had slept in these very beds and had wakened perhaps at three in the morning and had spoken
to each other as they were speaking now? He felt himself sweating and wanted to put the light on again. Perhaps if he did so he would only see a skull lying on the bed next to him. But he was too
frightened to switch it on and lay awake staring at the ceiling which he couldn’t see. Hotels, how strange they were. Transients of all kinds passed through them, the old and the young, the
sane and the insane, the crippled and the healthy. They all lay down in those beds and slept in them. They woke in the early hours of the morning and lit cigarettes and thought about their lives,
wasted or fruitful.

‘It’s true,’ he said in a whisper across the dark space, ‘we could be spirits.’

‘Oh shut up,’ she said. And then she got up and switched the light on. ‘I have to go to the bathroom.’

‘All right,’ he said, grateful for the light.

He watched her as she walked across the floor to the door. She was really very beautiful with her blonde hair streaming down her back. One would never have suspected that she had succumbed to
the powers of darkness – or the powers of light. She pulled the door behind her and he was left alone again. All round him was absolute silence, the silence, he thought fearfully, of the
grave itself. What if she never came back? What if she disappeared forever? What evidence would there be that she had ever been with him, if the tweedy fellow was involved in some ghostly
complicated plot.

But she did come back, shutting the door behind her and saying excitedly: ‘What an extraordinary thing.’

‘What’s so extraordinary?’ he said.

‘You know that glass door down at the end of the corridor,’ she said, ‘well, there was a woman standing behind it. She wore a black shawl and she looked quite old. Must be the
owner’s mother.’

‘Funny,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘perhaps she can’t sleep. She didn’t look spooky or anything. I only had a glimpse of her. Maybe there’s another bathroom over there, the
family quarters perhaps, and she was going to or coming back from the bathroom.’

‘I suppose so,’ he said.

‘I’m sure she can’t sleep,’ said Sheila. ‘That’s what it is. She was looking at me and then I had an impression of her turning away.’

‘Perhaps you’d better lock the door anyway,’ he said.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘is that better?’

‘Fine.’

‘Well in that case,’ said Sheila, ‘I’d better get to sleep and so had you. You’ve a lot of driving to do tomorrow morning.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What did she look like?’

‘Oh, just an old woman with a black shawl. She looked a bit hunchbacked. That was all. I don’t know what you’re going on about her for. The curious thing was that she looked
vaguely familiar. Maybe I caught a glimpse of her in the hotel tonight without realising that I’d seen her.’

‘It’s possible,’ he said.

Now that the door was locked he felt quite secure. He turned over on his side and almost immediately fell asleep.

He was awakened by the sunlight falling across the bed and into his eyes. Sheila was already up and sitting in front of the mirror tidying herself. He himself felt joyful and light hearted as he
often did on a sunny morning, aware of a new unused world opening before him, alive with hope and cheerfulness. When he got up he went behind her and put his arms around her. She shrank away from
him, not much, but enough for him to notice.

‘Don’t be a clown,’ she said, ‘put on your clothes. You’ll be cold.’

He did his Groucho Marx walk across the room as he had often done on the island while walking along the street, wondering if anyone would notice. But in fact no one had looked at him: perhaps
they really thought he was a cripple.

‘Oh, oh, oh,’ he sighed heavily, imitating her father and glancing at her mischievously. But she didn’t react in any way and only looked into the mirror searching for signs of
approaching age. That, he thought, was good: at least she hadn’t forgotten she was a woman. He padded round her, the sex fiend of the Highlands. ‘An inconspicuous elderly man with a
wooden leg and a mask has been taken into custody,’ he intoned, ‘for the murder of an old woman who had inflicted psalms on him for fifty years. Pleading justification the man said that
she had a rotten voice anyway.’ She didn’t smile at first but then gradually did. He was happy again.

‘I think,’ he said in his normal voice, ‘that we should take our cases down with us. Save us coming back to the room again after breakfast.’

‘All right,’ she said.

So they packed their night-clothes in their cases and walked along the corridor, he behind her.

He didn’t know what made him turn as he was leaving the door of the bedroom behind him but in any event he did turn.

He stared directly towards the glass door at the end of the corridor and saw with horror, quite clearly, himself and his case, and she slightly ahead of him with her own case also reflected in
it. As he moved and looked backwards the image moved with him.

With horror such as he had never known he realised that what he was looking at was not a glass door at all but a mirror.

His head spun but he had enough presence of mind to nudge her forward as she was about to turn and look at him. In that case (his spinning brain was telling him) what she had seen was not an old
woman in black at the far end of a glass door but herself walking towards the mirror. And the vague sense she had of the woman turning away was herself turning in at the bedroom door.

She went into the bathroom on her way downstairs and he waited outside it, ready to prevent her for any reason from walking back along that corridor towards what she had thought was a glass door
but what was in actual fact a mirror.

And as he sat there on a chair conveniently provided outside the bathroom the world turned round and round and finally came to a stop and he saw her as she would be in the future, old and clad
in black exactly like that woman whom he had thought of painting as she breasted the sharp island wind. He stared straight ahead of him at a painting on the wall which showed a hill and a loch and
a boat and its amateurishness seemed to gather about it like a black shadow descending from the badly drawn sky.