The Black Halo (90 page)

‘My mother and father died on the island when I had just come to South Africa,’ his father told him. ‘I couldn’t afford to go home at that time.’ And later Sheila
wouldn’t go home to her father’s funeral. She had despised him. He had never made anything of himself, and he boasted to the neighbours that she was married to a very rich man.
‘She’s never had to work since she got married,’ he would say, leaning on his stick. He was always whining about what the world had done to him. During the war he had been wounded
in both legs. She couldn’t forgive him his bad luck: he had wanted to visit them but she wouldn’t have it.

He looked at a picture hanging on a wall of the living-room. It showed a woman carrying peats in a creel: she was knitting as she walked along.

No, he couldn’t stay here. He would pay for the full three weeks, but he would leave the island as soon as possible. If he couldn’t get a plane he would stay in
London, among people.

All night the wind continued, and he could hardly sleep. Sometimes he thought it was a voice trying to speak to him in Gaelic: perhaps his father after his stroke. Sometimes he
thought it came from inside himself and that would be the worst of all; that would be madness.

The following day he locked everything carefully behind him and abandoned the white house. The sea was still turbulent and black. The houses crouched against the rocky ground like seashells. As
he drove away from the village in the blue car he had hired in Stornoway, he said, ‘Goodbye, Father.’ And, whistling, to keep out that whine, he headed towards the town from which he
would get the boat that would take him to the mainland and on the first stage of his homeward journey.

When the woman asked for the vase, I remembered the two vases that had been stolen from the wall of our house. It had happened about a month before in the middle of the night.
The vases were made of stone, and lion-shaped, and had been cemented to the wall. The thieves, whoever they were, had obviously had a van, and then had somehow cut the vases from the cement and
taken them away. Lord knew where they were now. They had belonged to my wife’s people originally and had been on the wall for years and years. She had been shocked when she had discovered the
loss two days after it had happened, because in fact she had been so used to their being on the wall that she hadn’t at first noticed their disappearance.

This came back to me when I was at the funeral of my poor brother, who had died on the island. He had lived alone and wouldn’t come to visit us because he had looked after our mother, and
I hadn’t. Neither my wife nor myself had liked my mother and so we never visited her, nor had we attended her funeral. My brother hadn’t communicated with me since. However, when he
died, we returned to the island, for, in spite of everything, he had made me his heir.

He had never married, and there was a fair amount of money, some of which he had left to the church. In his later years it appeared that he had been a constant church-goer, though I remembered
that in his youth he had been aesthetic and free-thinking.

I didn’t like going back to the island and neither did my wife. It was bare and treeless and when the weather was bad it looked like the end of the world. However, the funeral took place
on a day in June, and the sea was blue and sparkling. When we arrived my brother was already dead and his body was coffined in the house (on the island they don’t put the body in the church
overnight). This had been arranged by a cousin of ours whom I had not seen for a long time and who in fact had phoned to tell us that my brother had died. This cousin had often visited him and had
a key.

When we arrived at the house she was already there and had put on a fire, though it was June. She was a large plump woman, and when she talked of Norman her eyes brimmed with tears. Now and
again she would look at Sheila’s costume as if she was saying to herself, Imagine coming to a funeral in a blue costume.

‘I suppose you would like to see him,’ she said, opening the lid of the coffin, and we looked down at my brother’s calm, distant face.

‘What happens here with regard to funerals?’ I asked.

‘People will come along later and there will be prayers and psalms,’ she said. ‘And you’d better get in touch with the grave-digger. I’ve got his number. I thought
the funeral might take place tomorrow. Is that all right?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘You’ll know the procedure here.’ While I was dialling the grave-digger Sheila said, ‘The undertaker arranges all that, where we
are.’

‘Not here,’ said my cousin. ‘Here, the two people, the undertaker and the grave-digger, have to be contacted separately.’

When the grave-digger answered I could hardly hear him, as if his voice was coming from the depths of the earth. However, he agreed to carry out the digging and I think he made a ponderous note
of the date.

‘I believe my brother was very religious latterly,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said my cousin, ‘he was a strong follower, ever since his mother died. Oh, by the way, I got some groceries for you.’

I reached for my cheque book but she said, ‘No, I wouldn’t dream of taking money. It’s only for yourselves that I bought them. The visitors won’t take any food. There
will be a lot of them.’

‘Where are they going to sit?’ said Sheila.

‘Oh, my husband’s arranging for chairs to be brought in. He will be along shortly. He will have help. Now I must run along and make the family’s tea. I will be back.’

When she had gone, Sheila and I looked round the room. There was not much there of any value. There was however a really beautiful blue vase on the mantelpiece.

‘He must have decided that he didn’t want any material things,’ said Sheila. The tears suddenly brimmed her eyes.

I thought of him. After all, we had been young together and had, as they say, ‘paidlt in the burn’. My mother had always preferred him to me and hadn’t wanted him to marry. I
however had left for the mainland and was now a chartered accountant.

Sheila went into the kitchen and looked around. She opened the fridge and found milk and butter there as well as some cheese. In a cupboard she found tea-bags, bread, marmalade and jam.

‘We don’t need much,’ I said, ‘as we shall be leaving after the funeral.’ I had decided that we would return to the island later and arrange for the sale of the
house. However, I hoped to see the lawyer before we left.

I went upstairs and saw a number of photographs of my mother and, surprisingly, one of myself when I was about nineteen. I looked young, happy and hopeful. I glanced out through the window
towards the sea which sparkled in the sunlight.

‘It’ll be heavy going,’ said Sheila, ‘all these religious people coming.’

She had removed her blue costume and was rummaging in our case for a darkish skirt and blouse.

‘You’ll have to wear a hat,’ I said. ‘I imagine it will be like a church service.’

She didn’t say anything, but I knew that she didn’t like the religion on the island and wasn’t used to it. Her own religion was sunnier.

‘We might come and stay here,’ I said jokingly.

At that moment I heard a knock on the door. My cousin’s husband, whom I vaguely remembered, and another man, were bringing chairs in from a van.

I shook hands with them and helped place chairs in various rooms. ‘Where did you get them?’ I asked.

‘They’re from the Sunday school,’ said my cousin’s husband, whose name I didn’t know. He was a smallish man and he was wearing dungarees. His companion, who was
taller, said nothing at all except that when I asked politely if there was any fresh news on the island he replied, ‘No, only the good news of the gospel.’ After that he remained
silent.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to my cousin’s husband, ‘I can’t even offer you a dram.’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ he said. The tall gaunt man stared at me as if I had laughed out loud in church.

When they had gone Sheila and I began to rearrange the chairs in silence.

While I was doing so, I was thinking of my brother and his life. Had it really been my fault that I hadn’t liked my mother any more than my wife had? She had been a very domineering woman
who had certainly dominated my brother. He had tried to marry two or three times but each time she had taken to her bed, and also objected to the girls on various grounds, such as that one of them
smoked and another one didn’t attend church, and so on.

‘What a lonely life he must have led,’ I said, looking round the room. On a table near the window there were four Bibles and a radio.

‘He would have died peacefully,’ said my wife. ‘He would have faith.’

The doctor had told me that it was cancer of the stomach. Norman had been very bitter towards me and it was only his regard for family that had caused him to make me his heir.

A picture flashed into my mind. The two of us were standing on the bank of a river. ‘Dare you to jump to the other side,’ I said. But he wouldn’t jump, though I did. In his
youth he was very nervous and imaginative. Perhaps that was why he had become so religious, as if he was looking for a protective armour. I wandered about the room as if seeking evidence of what
his later years had been like. I found a black hat hanging on a nail in the lobby and a number of coats in the wardrobe. In his bedroom there was a small library of spiritual books.

‘What happened to the picture I gave him?’ said Sheila. This was a picture which she had herself painted of the area in which we lived. It was not to be seen anywhere.

I left the house and went outside. There was still some coal in the bin, and the grass was long and uncut.

When I returned to the house, I shouted to my wife, ‘It was good of my cousin to bring groceries.’ However, Sheila wasn’t in the kitchen or in the living-room. She was upstairs
and when I went up she was sitting on the bed crying.

‘Are you all right?’ I said.

‘Yes, I’m all right. You go down.’

I left her and descended the stairs. Had it been my fault that my brother had broken with me, I thought. Had I been too honest, too inflexible, in refusing to attend my mother’s funeral?
To tell the truth, I think she ruined Norman, but no one could have told her that. He seemed bound to her by indissoluble ties. I think the main reason for that was that when he was young he had
suffered from bronchitis and he had been off school a great deal. The other boys hadn’t liked him very much and I had often fought them to protect him.

When Sheila came downstairs, I said, ‘We have got out of the habit of expressing simple feelings.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said.

‘Just that. We can’t express our feelings, though I suppose women can do so more than men.’

‘He was very lonely,’ she said. ‘I feel sorry for him. Look at this house. It feels cold and without character. Why all these Bibles too? Why four of them?’

‘Maybe he wanted to check their authenticity,’ I said jokingly.

But what she had said was true. There was a bareness about the house in spite of the fire. On one of the walls there was a patch of damp like a section of a map.

‘And another thing,’ she said, ‘there don’t seem to be any ordinary books, or any newspapers for that matter.’

‘I’d noticed that,’ I said, ‘and yet when he was young he read far more than I did. Novels, history, poetry, and adventure stories.’

‘And yet he never left the island apart from the period of his teacher training.’

‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘He couldn’t go to the war because of his weak chest.’

I imagined him coming home to this bare house after his mother died. She must have been a presence there for him. In the photographs I had seen she sat calm and tranquil like a Buddha, her hands
in her lap, staring peacefully at the camera.

His coffin lay in the room and his face was cold and still. Tomorrow he would be buried in the churchyard that stood beside the sea, and the flowers would grow through his bones. Time had passed
and this was not the boy I had once known. Sometimes I think there is a disjunction in our lives, and the older man is not a continuation of the boy at all.

I think I became a chartered accountant because I didn’t wish to be involved in the history of the island. I wanted something material, and not at all spiritual. But at times I wondered if
my job had made me unfeeling. My wife had more feeling for Norman than I had.

‘I’m sure they’ll be coming shortly,’ said Sheila, glancing at the clock.

‘I’m sure. I should have asked my cousin when they would be here.’

The room with its chairs was like a room in a church.

‘I think we had better move some of these chairs,’ I said. ‘Some of them are too near the fire. The knees of the people will be burnt.’ And I laughed.

‘It was a terrible religion,’ said my wife. ‘I wonder if he was frightened.’

‘Of the cancer?’

‘No, I mean of hell.’

‘It’s possible,’ I said. I suddenly remembered Norman as young, his hair light brown, his eyes bright and argumentative. Because I had failed him he had been impelled towards
the church. And yet the truth of feeling was important. Why should I have pretended to like my mother when I hadn’t in fact done so? When we were young she would prevent us from playing
football whenever she could. Not that Norman had played much, but playing might have improved his chest. On the other hand she held him in subjection so long as he was ill.

On the way over on the boat I had heard an English voice saying, ‘Soon we will be home in Bayble.’ I found this disconcerting since I thought of the island as my home, even though I
hadn’t been there for years. I suddenly realised however that I was a stranger there.

‘I’d like to phone Gerald,’ said Sheila.

Gerald was our son and was studying in art college in Edinburgh. He didn’t like me being a chartered accountant and he would go on about children in Ethiopia, and want us to send money. I
used to say, ‘There is no guarantee that this will ever reach the right people.’ Gerald was very emotional, untidy, and kind-hearted. I couldn’t stand his untidiness since I
myself am obsessively neat. I also found it very hard to talk to him. There would be long silences between us and for the life of me I couldn’t think of anything to say. I couldn’t
understand his paintings, they were impenetrably abstract.