The Black Halo (92 page)

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘what about her?’

‘Well, immediately the coffin left the house she asked for the blue vase. She said she would like a memento of your brother. One moment she was weeping, the next she wanted the blue
vase.’

‘Did you give it to her?’ I said.

‘Yes, of course. We have no use for it.’

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ I shouted. ‘I wanted that blue vase myself as a memento. You had no right to give it to her.’

‘What?’

‘It was important to me, that blue vase,’ I shouted. ‘Do you know that I met a friend of my brother’s at the funeral. He said that I had sat in the same seat as him at
school. How can that have happened? How did I not know about it?’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Sheila. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘And then our vases were stolen from the wall. I liked that blue vase.’

‘But it wasn’t worth anything.’

‘I don’t care. It wasn’t because of its value that I wanted it. It was blue and it was lovely,’ I shouted, and I almost broke down in tears. There was my son who wanted
to be in Nicaragua and there was my school-friend whom I couldn’t remember, and my cousin who had brought us the groceries free. And above all, there was the blue vase.

‘I’ve a good mind to go and take it from her,’ I shouted. ‘She has no right to it.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ said Sheila. ‘I don’t understand any of this.’

‘Can you not see that it’s very important,’ I screamed. ‘It’s to do with everything. My son is an artist, and he doesn’t speak to me. I’ve tried my best
but I neglected my brother, and he died here, and he was a religious hermit.’

‘But what has all this to do with the blue vase?’ Sheila said.

‘It has,’ I said. ‘We were standing at the graveside and this man said that he and my brother had exchanged books and that Norman was off school a lot. And there he was in his
grave. I find that strange.’

‘I think you’re going off your head,’ said Sheila. ‘All this may be true, but what has it to do with the vase?’

And yet it had something to do with it. I was sure of that. The thieves had come and stolen the pair outside the house in the middle of the night. They were strangers, and I had felt vulnerable
for the first time in my life.

And now Sheila was asking me what the blue vase had to do with anything.

Of course it was all connected: the sea, the death of my brother, my cousin, the thieves, the farmer, my school-friend whom I hadn’t recognised. My school-friend had sat in the same wooden
desk as me a long time ago in another life. Norman and I were setting off for school, our leather bags over our shoulders, and the birds were singing, and my mother was watching him protectively as
she had always done so that he would die alone and friendless.

‘Can’t you see,’ I said, ‘that the blue vase is very important?’

‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Sheila distantly, ‘I didn’t realise it meant so much to you.’

‘It meant everything to me,’ I shouted. ‘Everything. Can’t you understand?’

And I suddenly began to weep and I couldn’t stop, and Sheila was looking at me in amazement. She put her arms around me and cradled my head on her breast as if I were a child again.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘it’s all right.’ But it wasn’t all right. I could see Gerald’s face as he looked at me mockingly, hatingly, from a
ring of starving children. He was holding out an empty plate. The sky above was mercilessly blue.

When I had stopped weeping I was suddenly quite calm.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘I’m glad you broke down,’ said Sheila. But she was staring at me as if she hadn’t known me before.

‘It’s just the responsibility for everything,’ I said. ‘I should have written to my brother. I should have been less proud.’

And all the time the blue vase revolved in front of me, distant, uninvolved with history or genealogy.

And my brother’s face was buried in my mother’s breast like a child’s in Nicaragua. Gerald’s starved face was gazing at me as well.

And the sky opened in front of me, and there was a strong perfume of flowers as the two of us ran along a dusty March road towards the school with its carved wooden desks.

When Hugh opened the big brown envelope which had fallen on to the mat below the letter-box, he saw that he had been accepted for the Open University. He knew it was a mistake
but said to himself after a while, ‘Why shouldn’t I do it? After all, I am not stupid.’ And immediately the world around him which was the world of the village became more real to
him, and his life more purposeful. He studied the papers for a while and decided that he would do the Foundation Course.

He never found out exactly how the mistake had occurred, but knew that there was another Hugh MacCallum in the village next to his own and it occurred to him that this was how the error had been
made.

Hugh was sixty-five years old and very good at genealogies, derivations of names of places, and the meanings of old words. He had left school at the age of thirteen and had later served in the
Merchant Navy: he had seen Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, among many other countries. Why shouldn’t he do the Open University? He was no fool, and after all he might have letters
after his name, and that would put a spoke in Alastair’s wheel. Alastair thought that Mary Maclachlan was the best Gold Medallist there had ever been, though she was so drunk that she had to
be supported on to the stage, but Hugh knew better. Hugh knew that the best medallist who had ever been was Anna MacDougall, who had died with cancer of the throat. But you couldn’t tell
Alastair anything.

Hugh was a bachelor and so was Alastair. Hugh’s mother had died when he was forty-eight years old, and now he lived alone. Alastair too lived alone after his sister had died. Once when she
was on the train to Yarmouth to the fishing she had pulled the communication cord out of curiosity, and it was only when the other two girls who were with her had pointed to their foreheads that
the little man with the moustache, who had run along to the carriage with a notebook, had been placated.

Hugh decided that he would do the Open University. After all, he had a television set and a radio and plenty of time on his hands.

When he told Alastair about it, Alastair was very angry. He knew at once that this represented a threat to their relationship, and said so. ‘Anyway,’ he said, his moustache
bristling, ‘what do you want to go to the university for at your age?’

‘I am not going to the university,’ said Hugh. ‘You do this at home. There are what are called assignments.’

‘Assignments? What’s that?’

‘Compositions,’ said Hugh, whose left eye blinked compulsively. He also had a habit of twisting his neck around inside his collar when he was nervous or embarrassed.

‘And what will you get at the end of it?’

‘I will get a degree,’ said Hugh. Already he seemed to be moving away from Alastair and from the village, which was in any case dying. There were hardly any children left, and the
buses which had once taken them to school were lying rusting in the fields.

‘I see what you are at,’ said Alastair.

Hugh didn’t say anything to this: he knew that Alastair was angry and that this was his method of getting his own back on him. Maybe, he thought, we shall never discuss genealogies again,
and the idea bothered him, for these discussions which had gone on endlessly and inconclusively had passed the time for both of them.

‘Think of it, Alastair, we shall soon be dead and I might as well spend my time studying. Don’t you want to do it yourself?’

‘Not at all,’ said Alastair bristling. ‘Not at all.’

They were silent for a long while and then Alastair excused himself and went home. It seemed to Hugh that he was saying goodbye to him forever and he didn’t like the feeling. He considered
that he was doing something very striking and original by studying for the Open University and maybe cutting himself off from the village. But on the other hand why shouldn’t he do it? There
was nothing wrong with the quality of his mind. He stared out at the sea which he could see through the window. Its horizon stretched into the distance, blue and infinite.

A strange thing happened to Hugh after a while. He was seeing the people of the village as not really people at all. At first he was puzzled about this but then he realised that it must be
something to do with the Open University. Also he seemed to be losing his sense of smell, and one day he ate rancid butter without realising it till a long time afterwards. As well as that, he
thought that the mountains that he could see from his bedroom were growing smaller. In the old days he would admire the sunset flaring over the hills, but he no longer did so. It was as if the
village was becoming a toy to him and in its place there was building up inside his head another place larger than the village which was inhabited by philosophies, paintings, novels, great cities,
open seas. It was as if he had renewed his youth and saw the oceans sparkling as they had been then. Dang it, he thought, this is a fine big world I’ve got myself into. This is a big sky that
I’m seeing.

When he looked at Alastair pottering around his house, he saw him as a little fellow with a blue jersey and a moustache. Alastair, he knew, had a history of high blood pressure in his family:
this was because they were all abrupt and irascible. Of course his father had been a bard, like Alastair himself, but what were their poems compared to the ones he was reading now. Childish, that
was what they were.

The bees hummed about the moor and when he put his feet down in the spongy moss it was not as it had been. The birds seemed different and so was the sea, and so was the cow which he saw staring
at him one day, a long blade of fresh green grass in its mouth.

He heard in a roundabout way that the schoolmistress, Miss Gibson, didn’t approve of what he was doing. The old sour bitch, he thought, she only has her Primary Teacher’s
Certificate, she doesn’t even have a university degree. He had actually been going to consult her about his English, for his greatest difficulty was not in understanding the material but in
setting down his answers in correct sentences. Old bitch, he thought, I won’t go and see her; if he ever met her he would casually mention the Renaissance and discover what she knew about it.
In any case she was rather mad and would scream at the children and throw chalk at them. Nevertheless, he had great difficulty with his sentence structure and would spend hour after hour struggling
to compose a version of his answer that would satisfy an examiner. His light could be seen burning at two o’clock in the morning.

But he could feel a coldness all around him. Who was he to do the Open University? Even when he went to the Post Office to send away his completed assignments, Seordag would hardly speak to
him.

‘Special delivery,’ he would say, and she would look contemptuously at the address. She would purse her lips but would not give him the satisfaction of asking what was in the
envelope.

He also missed the human presence of Alastair.

He often felt now that he was entirely alone, and at nights he would hear the wind moaning in the chimney. Once he had looked at an egg from which a chick was emerging. The shell shook and broke
under the vehement restless assault of life and then the chick, bare and skinny, could be seen pushing and struggling. The crown of the shell fell off, the chick pushed, and sometimes it was
entangled with the shell and sometimes it seemed to be clear of it. But it thrust and thrust with determined impatience and finally it was out in the open air, an explorer, a small, thin, skinny
adventurer that had shed its armour.

He had his first assignment back. It was only a D, but still a bare pass. Dang it, he thought. I must do better than this.

But while he was reading about Constable and studying his paintings he soon forgot the village. How much richer the land in Constable’s paintings was, that river smooth
and wide, those lush cornfields, and in the background an old mill. He raised his head from his book and wondered why no one had ever painted the village. Think of all those subtle lights that were
everywhere, the pearly grey light that you sometimes saw over the sea. No one had ever painted the people who had left on the boats for Canada and Australia and New Zealand, no one had painted the
roofless, once-thatched, houses that were to be found all over the village. No one had painted the disused ruined buses which had once carried children to school but which now lay rusting on their
sides among the buttercups and the daisies: or even the blue hills which ringed the village and turned purple in the vague evenings.

He scratched the back of his neck as he thought of these things. Then after a while he left his books and went outside and saw Alastair carrying vegetables into the house from his little
wind-blown garden. He went over to him and at first Alastair pretended not to know that he was there. His face was red with the effort of bending down. Finally, he couldn’t ignore Hugh any
longer and stood in front of him with a turnip and a clump of dirty roots dangling from his hand.

‘It’s a fine day,’ said Hugh.

‘It’s cold enough,’ said Alastair.

‘Are the turnips good this year?’

‘They’re not bad. They’re not too wet.’

The breeze stirred Alastair’s jersey and he seemed somehow to have shrunken. Hugh felt a little panic quivering in his chest, a tiny mouse of fear. At his age he should be thinking about
death, attending the church, reading religious books, and not studying the Renaissance, but he didn’t feel like confining himself to spirituality. Constable irradiated his mind.

‘Have you been composing any poems?’ he asked Alastair.

‘I have that,’ said Alastair, but he didn’t want to let Hugh see them.

‘What are they about?’ said Hugh.

‘Oh, there’s one about . . . but you won’t like it, it’s in Gaelic,’ said Alastair spitefully.

‘But why shouldn’t I want to see it?’ said Hugh. ‘I can read Gaelic as well as you.’

Alastair however was stubbornly silent, and then he said grudgingly, ‘It’s about the sea.’