The Black Halo (75 page)

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.

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.

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.

We shouldn’t have come home, she thought, we should have stayed in the dream till the end. What is life after all but taking risks, and is it enough to have life if it is to be life in a
tenement?

Though in fact the people in the tenement, Mrs Smith, Mrs Bruce, Mrs Scott, all believed in the rightness of her cause. ‘The British people are behind you,’ they told her while
studying her bare rooms with satisfaction. ‘These blacks are getting too big for their boots.’ It was funny how it was the poor who supported them: they themselves were now the poor
after being the rich.