The Black Halo (10 page)

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘You’re thinking that I’ve lost my faith. It’s not as simple as that. For, as I said, what is a minister without
a voice, without words? If silence descended on a minister what would he be? Nothing. Nothing at all. Do you understand?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

‘Well, I’ll tell you what happened,’ he said. ‘I wrote my sermon and then I tried to speak it. Aloud in my room, standing up, as if I were talking to the congregation. I
was talking about God and Christ and the fact that the Son of Man was born in a stable. Well,’ he said looking at me with horror, ‘I tried to speak the words and no words would come out
of my mouth. It was as if I had gone dumb. I thought at first that I was suffering from some sickness, some disease, but no, for I am speaking to you now, am I not? And I could speak to my wife and
children. But whenever I tried to speak the words of that sermon it was as if I had gone dumb.’

‘This sermon about God and Christ?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘about the blessings of God.’

‘And did you mention in it,’ I asked ironically, ‘the blessing of pain which has been granted to us?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mention that.’

I was silent for a long time. The stable and the hut. The dumbness and the hermit.

The wings ascending to the sky.

The words written on paper.

Was I going out of my mind? The minister paced about my house like an animal in a cage. Understanding nothing.

First there was Kenneth John and now there was the minister.

It was like a plague, a language dying.

The big stones in the mouth.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you should tell the congregation that you’ve got a cold, that you’re hoarse, and maybe the words will come back to you later.’

‘But it might happen to me again,’ he said.

‘It won’t,’ I said. ‘It won’t. You just tell them that you’re hoarse.’

The soul of the village dying. Not that I cared about the minister but it was as if I owed a debt to the village. Truth moving restlessly about my room, dumb.

The white Greek moon in the sky like a stone screaming. And its dumbness lying on the earth. The veins and tentacles dead and finished.

‘Everything will be all right,’ I said. ‘It’s just a momentary crisis. It happens to all of us at some time or another. Sometimes when I was teaching I felt the same, as
if I didn’t want to say anything, as if for that time I had nothing to say.’

His eyes pleaded with me.

‘Is that true?’ he asked.

‘Of course it’s true,’ I said. ‘It happens to all of us at some time or another. The dark night of the soul.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I feel much better. I’m glad I came.’

‘That’s because you talked about it,’ I said. From the closed grave the soul rose fluttering. When the stone moved.

After some time he left looking much happier. But he left me thinking hard.

The hermit would have to leave the village, that was certain. I would have to save the village. And no one else could save it except me. No one else knew the extent of the threat, the potential
damage. It wasn’t that I was concerned with the minister. Much of what he said seemed to me false and irrelevant. But what if this happened to others? If the silence of the dead descended on
the village? If people grew too tired even to speak to each other, if language, that necessity of the human being, failed? No village, no society, could survive that. I didn’t need the
minister but others did. His words for them were significant and important. And what if they failed? It was as if the influence of the hermit extended outwards like a cold ray without his knowing
it. Or perhaps he did know it.

Truth lay perhaps in silence but it was not a human truth. Human truth lay in lying speech. And who in the village knew this except me? Who would be able to deal with this but me? Only I saw
what was happening because it was what I mistakenly wished to happen. Dougie didn’t understand it with his talk about democracy. This had nothing to do with democracy, this was a fight to the
death. The silence of death. Snow falling over the village dulling its traffic. The roads that joined us together slowly being throttled.

After the minister had gone I sat for a long time thinking. I couldn’t think what to do but I knew that something must be done. And I would have to do it myself. Even if I passed the
limits of morality, even if I struck deep at my own image. The monster of silence would have to be driven out of the village, even by corrupt means. Later perhaps someone might understand why it
had been necessary but more probably no one would: there would be no biographer to tell of my achievement since the people for whom I was acting as benefactor didn’t themselves understand the
problem. This was a metaphysical question, and they lived in the physical world of stone and corn and hay and houses.

But no solution came to me. The hermit had apparently harmed no one. I couldn’t hire the policeman to drive out a metaphysical criminal. I thought of that opening chapter in Frazer’s
book where one prince hunts another one in the dark wood, the new god taking over from the old, while the moon poured down its equal rays.

But I felt so tired. And there was no one I could talk to. Not to Murdo, not to Kenneth John, not to Dougie. Not even to Kirsty. Her narrow brutal mind would be of no use here. This needed much
greater fineness, much deeper cunning.

And I thought too, Why shouldn’t I leave him where he was? After all when he left what would I have to think of? That black silence of his, so attractive to me, would perish with his
disappearance and I would be alone. The moon was now rising in the sky. O my Greek volumes, why don’t you bring me an answer to this unanswerable question, with your brimming knowledge, your
endless fertility? Why don’t you bring me your manifold gifts? But this question went beyond those texts. There was a deep loch and there was a thought which needed to take the bait but the
thought wasn’t rising to the surface clear and strong. Still, it might come to the surface eventually.

It would have to. I stared directly into the face of the moon which was as pure and direct and strong as Janet’s face and that was the last vision I had before I fell asleep, still
searching for that thought, that solution which would permit me to rid the village of the hermit who was to a great extent myself, and yet more dangerous and much stronger than me.

18

And as I slept I dreamed of my childhood. It returned to me in all its clarity and fullness. I saw again my father and my mother, my father so silent and large and my mother so
quick and busy and demanding. She seemed always to be running about the house with a duster, or washing, or drying dishes, or sweeping the floor. A vivid insect presence in her blue gown with the
white flowers printed on it. And always saying to me, Keep at your books. You have to get on in the world. What is there here for you? Look at all those other boys. What are they doing but wasting
their lives fishing and crofting? You keep at your books.

While my father, slow and silent, said nothing and did nothing to protect me from this quick demanding presence which wouldn’t leave me alone, which would not let me ripen in my own
darkness but was always shining its sharp little torch on me. Always without cease. And my father was so slow and heavy and perhaps lazy and silent. It seemed to be an effort for him to speak, as
if he had allowed my mother to speak for both of them. It was she who was proud and small and quick, who was alert to insults, even imagined ones, from the villagers who didn’t like her
because of her ambition. He on the other hand seemed to have no sense of honour but he got on better with them than she did. In a way he was like Murdo Murray but deeper, more vulnerable. He
wasn’t at ease in his environment but perhaps more so than she was. She saw her environment as something hostile, she confronted it with her quick agile mind and her quick body: she was
always improving it, cleaning it up, tidying it. And my father would sit by the fireside reading the paper and he didn’t protect me at all. He would hardly touch me except that now and again
he might lay his hand on my head absently in passing, but he would say nothing.

Eventually he withdrew to a shed where he kept his loom and there he would play his ancient dark music among a smell of oil, his feet on the treadles, his hands busy. He was like a big composer
in the half darkness, a sort of Beethoven, heavy and silent and dull. I would go there and watch him and marvel at his quick skill as he made the cloth, but in the house he was so quiet.

And my mother would say, Keep at your books. And I wasn’t allowed out at night hardly at all in those years. All the other boys of the village including my brother whom she had given up as
far as education was concerned would play football and shinty and go bird nesting but I stayed in the house reading and writing. She didn’t understand what I was studying but had a
superstitious reverence for it all and made sure that I kept at it. And all the time my father would sit by the fireside sometimes sleeping, sometimes looking at a newspaper, or at other times he
would be down at the shed or sometimes he would stand at the door gazing outwards perhaps at the sky, perhaps at some imagined land of his own. And this quick insect hummed about me and would not
let me alone. It cleaned everything up and tidied my life and kept it on course. And I brought home all the prizes from school and she would place the cups on the sideboard and show them to
visitors till I grew tired of her as they did too. They disliked her for her ambition, they much preferred my father, he was much more like themselves than she was. She was like a sliver of wood in
a fingernail, never resting. And my father would play the music of his loom, dark and silent and dull, till one day he had a heart attack while he was in the shed. His body toppled off his seat and
he lay under it, his eyes sightless and gazing upwards and it was I who found him. And I remember the humming of the large black flies about the shed on that summer day with the door open to the
fragrance of flowers outside.

He was buried, and I was left to the mercies of my mother who became very religious. She would even look in the Bible for texts which would prove to me that study was important. It was as if my
father had never been, as if that dark music was buried forever in the dark earth.

And the world passed me by with its perfume for others but for me nothing but books. My mother’s small sharp beak was always probing at me. Till one day she also died. Before she died I
used to sit at her bedside listening to the business of her breath which was like an accelerating train. She was very brave. Even then she told me to keep at my books lest, I suppose, she should
feel betrayed in eternity. She told me that death dues were in a drawer in a dressing table and that there was money there for her coffin as well. She wasn’t afraid to die, she thought that
she had done her work in the world by bringing me up to study books which she did not understand, though her faith was great. ‘I am going to that place where there is rest and calm,’
she said.

And I thought that perhaps there too she would be going about dusting heavenly tables and making sure that the saints kept at their theology.

I was then twenty years old and in university. While home one Christmas I had taken a girl to the house but after she had left my mother said, ‘She won’t do for you. She
smokes.’ And after that I never brought anyone home. I cried when she died. I cried more than I had cried for my father. I hadn’t really known my father, that dark musician of the
flesh. My mother’s quick agile spirit had however sustained me, she had taught me the way to go though at times I hated it. And after all but for her would I ever have read the Greek authors?
Would I ever have listened to great music, would I ever have seen great works of art? And that, in spite of the pain, is something. And also in spite of the fact that she herself had never looked
at a painting in her life nor ever listened to Mozart or any other composer. Her favourite magazine was the
People’s Friend
where after a great struggle the nurse eventually married
the surgeon who had never noticed her till finally she had helped him in that Great Operation. But her will was indomitable and her ambition without end.

So I wept for her more than my brother did, for he knew that she had found him wanting and therefore he resented her.

And my mother is always clearer in my mind than my father is, he who had never shielded me from her remorseless light, who sat in his dumbness and his hopelessness. At least she had been
optimistic. She had looked into the future and made me a schoolmaster. But at least she had been conscious of a future. My father had only been conscious of a past.

Once in Edinburgh I went to the zoo and in it I saw in a corner of a cage a great hulking bear lying down in its dark stink. In another cage I saw a leopard or perhaps a panther pacing
restlessly up and down. And I wished to say to the bear, Why don’t you get up from there? Why do you accept the darkness and the stink and the servitude? And I far preferred the leopard with
its restless proud pacing. And also I liked the birds with their quick movements and their colourful plumage and their beaks that seemed to question the world around them. All that perhaps was
dreams. But I did not like the dark bear. I wished to be like the leopard, optimistic and angry and agile.

For the bear had never used its strength but the leopard used all its energy without surrender to the end.

When I woke up I knew perfectly well what I must do. The idea came to me in my sleep.

19

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Dougie.

‘You heard what she said, that she was . . . ’

‘Attacked. I heard her and I don’t believe it. The man is, was, quite harmless.’

‘We have to believe her,’ I said, ‘and anyway after that the villagers wouldn’t have allowed him to stay.’

‘I can see
that
,’ said Dougie. His eyes were cold and hard and hostile. ‘Did you see his eyes?’

‘His eyes?’

‘Yes. When he set off on that bicycle of his again. It was like watching a refugee that I’d once seen in Europe. The same expression on his face.’