The Black Halo (11 page)

I didn’t tell Dougie, but I did remember his expression when he set off again, upright on his bicycle in his dark clothes with the belt of rope around his waist. And the villagers standing
watching him, hostile and threatening. The hermit’s eyes had turned for a moment to look at me as if by strange magic the hermit had recognised his true enemy. After all, really, he had done
nothing to me. And that perhaps accounted for his expression.

‘I must say again,’ said Dougie, ‘that I don’t believe it, that she was attacked. That man would never attack anyone. He has no possessions at all, did you notice? That
was the hellish thing. He had nothing. He set off again. With nothing. And where was he going? And if he goes somewhere else will the people there also put him out? And we never,’ he said,
‘found out anything about him. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him. He could be a fool or a genius – he could be anybody.’ And he looked at me with horror.

Well, I had used the corrupted to get rid of the corrupted, I thought. Sometimes such things are necessary, sometimes ethics themselves have to be poisoned in order to create health.

‘There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with Janet that I could see,’ Dougie repeated. ‘She seemed to me self-possessed enough.’

‘Why should she say she had been attacked unless she had been?’ I asked innocently.

‘I don’t know but I have an idea,’ he said. And there was the glitter of hate in his eyes.

The village would now be silent. It would now return to its ancient ways, it would not be disturbed. The mirror image of myself would have left it, expelled forever.

‘What the hell is he going to do?’ said Dougie again. ‘I can’t stand thinking about it. Wandering about forever on that bicycle.’ I thought for a moment that he
would weep.

But what in fact he did was to turn away.

‘I don’t think it would be a good idea if you came to the house again,’ he said.

I didn’t say anything but watched him go. Now I myself was truly alone, but then loneliness was something to be suffered in the service of one’s kind. I knew that Dougie would be
relentless and that his sense of fairness might not let him rest. But Janet wasn’t going to talk. After all she had plenty of money now.

I looked at Murdo’s unfinished house, I heard the music of the sea. I turned back into the house, feeling as if I didn’t wish to talk to anyone. I thought of my wife, then of Janet,
sitting in the chair by the fire, as I poured myself a whisky. No one understood what had happened. Not even Dougie understood that. It was true that like him I saw the figure of the hermit setting
off into nothingness on his old bicycle. But it was true that it was necessary to make a refugee. I had saved them from silence at the expense of my own silence. I laughed bitterly as I sat down by
the fireside. Even Kirsty would congratulate me. Even the minister. And yet I had a frightening feeling of emptiness as if I were suffering from a strange disease. What else could I think about
now, now that that hut had no inhabitant, now that questions of metaphysics had been removed from me?

As I sat there for what seemed to be hours the day became dusk and then slowly the moon rose in the sky. I looked at it. It was dazzlingly white and clear, a brilliant stone, it was the eye of a
Greek god or goddess. It was the stunning beauty of the mind, it had no physical beauty. It no longer reminded me of Janet, it was pure intellect. For Janet had been only an evanescent being, a
sparkle of moonlight on the water. It was the cold stony mind that illuminated its own dead world remorselessly, its own extinct craters. I imagined the hermit cycling along in its light
forever.

The house was extraordinarily peaceful as if by an act of will I had banished all the fertile ghosts. It had an unearthly calm as if I were floating on a dumb sea of solitude. I found myself
humming to myself as if I had come to the silence of myself. I went to the bookcase and took out a book and began to read. Strangely enough I didn’t realise at first what book it was. Then I
saw that it was the Bible. I turned to the New Testament and began to read,

‘In the beginning was the Word . . . ’

Yesterday morning a most odd thing happened to me. I was walking down one of the streets of our small town – which has a population of 7,000 or so – when just as I
approached the paper shop . . . or rather as I was about to approach the paper shop which is quite near the police station but on the other side of it, I saw on the window of the police station a
large notice which read,
Wanted for Murder
. Now this is the extraordinary thing. I stopped, and I was just about to walk into the police station to give myself up when I thought for some
reason that as it was Sunday the police station would not be open, and therefore I did not go into it. (I was in fact on my way to get the Sunday papers.) But the strange thing is that at that
moment when I saw the notice I thought it applied to me, and, as I said, I nearly went into the police station to give myself up as a murderer, though I didn’t know what sort of murder it was
or who had murdered whom.

And I have been thinking about this for a whole day and night while my wife has been doing what she always does on a Sunday, that is, cooking the dinner and resting and sometimes reading a paper
or a book.

And my problem is: whom am I supposed to have murdered? Now I consider this not only an interesting question but more deeply an alarming question. For I have never murdered anyone, that is to
say, I have not shot or strangled or poisoned or in any way physically attacked any human being in my life. And yet I nearly surrended myself to the police as a murderer. How is this to be
explained?

It was a fine warm spring day – one of the best spring days we have had yet this year – and I was in fact perfectly happy and I was whistling as I walked down the street, and then I
came to the police station and what I said happened happened.

Now most people would, I think, describe me as an ordinary person and I would call myself so. For instance, I am not very intelligent: I find the simplest crosswords and puzzles in the Sunday
papers difficult. I have an ordinary job, that is to say I own a small grocery shop, and my wife works there with me. We have run this shop for the past thirty-four years. Naturally we have felt
threatened by the new supermarket in the town but we have survived by working very hard. I met my wife at a dance many years ago and shortly after this we were married. She was then nineteen years
old and I was twenty-three but this was all right as I have always believed that the husband should be older than the wife and if possible wiser. I had never slept with anyone before I met her. I
thought her beautiful and sensible and this she has turned out to be. She is a good cook, she is extremely practical, she has brought the children up to be well-mannered and quiet in the presence
of strangers, she works hard in the shop though it is in fact I who do most of the paper-work. It is true that sometimes I have seen her standing behind a counter as if lost in a dream, such that I
have had to wake her up with a brisk word. When she falls into these dreams she seems to look younger and she is invariably looking out of the window at the time. Our window looks out on to the
bay. At nights too when she is in bed with me I have heard her murmur strange names which might be the names of people or of places. But when I mention them to her in the morning she does not
appear to know what I am talking about. Naturally this does not take place every night. It is very often during the summer that this happens, when the nights are warm, and the moon is shining
brightly and there are perfumes of flowers from the neighbouring park.

I would say, I think, that I have been a good father. My children are of course away from me now. One is an engineer and the other, less bright perhaps, is a salesman. We see very little of them
now since they are both in England but when they were growing up I was kind though strict. For instance, if James (the engineer) misbehaved I would patiently explain to him why misbehaviour was
wrong and what the consequences might be; for example, that if God exists, as He does, He might punish him either by day or by night or at any time when he least expected it. I would say the same
to Colin though in fact he did not listen so patiently. In his case, I would sometimes be forced to use direct punishment such as sending him to bed in the dark for I have never believed in
physical chastisement.

My wife and I therefore live together on our own for most of the time.

We still work hard, even though we are old, and are respected by the townspeople. Sometimes, indeed, we are invited to dinners, though we are not seated in the most prominent places. My wife, I
think, does not like this, though she does not complain at great length as so many wives do. For instance, she might wear a new black velvet dress which she has just bought and find that very few
people speak to her and that she is at the lowest end of the table. Nor can she talk, therefore, on subjects that interest her for she is in fact much more intelligent than me and the only reason
why she doesn’t do the paper-work is that it bores her. I, on the contrary, am not bored by paper-work and in fact I quite like doing it for I have, as I myself recognise, a plodding but
steady mind.

Thus we are, on the whole, contented.

Naturally we do not speak to each other as much as we used to. When she talks to me I grunt a lot, especially if I am reading the paper. But I understand and I think she understands that we are
no longer young and that therefore some magic which we once had will not return. After all we are mature people. It would not be natural for us to be hugging each other all day or murmuring
endearments to each other. These things are for youth, not for old age. And quite apart from that I feel tired when I come home from the shop and nothing suits me better than putting my feet up and
smoking my pipe.

It is true that my wife does not appear so beautiful to me as she once did. But then I myself am not very handsome and have never been so. I often wonder why she married me in the first place
but when I ask her, all she will say is, ‘You cannot explain these things.’ And indeed one cannot. For I myself cannot explain why I married her except that it seemed inevitable at the
time. And of course she was very pretty and others were after her. I consider myself lucky that she married me.

Our life has been a struggle but whose life has not been? There have been weeks and months when we had to work very hard and when we talked endlessly in bed about how we would survive at all.
Sometimes she would tell me that I must buy more exotic delicacies for the shop such as cheeses and small tins of caviare and at times I have been persuaded to do so but in general I have relied on
customers who do not have much money. There have been times when they have let me down and not paid me for months, sometimes even years: some of them have not paid me at all.

Also in the early years of our marriage, my wife would say to me, ‘Why don’t you advertise in a better way? Do something surprising to draw attention to the shop.’ Or at other
times she would say, ‘Why don’t we emigrate?’ But the children were growing up and I could neither take risks nor emigrate and on summer nights the strange names of her dreams
would become more and more numerous and mysterious and unintelligible. And on summer mornings I would catch her looking in the mirror as if she were watching her beauty passing.

Thus I would say that we have led an ordinary life, not very different from the lives of most other people, and perhaps more secure and more stable.

We are both now well over sixty and when I look at my wife I see little sign of what she once was and when she looks at me I am sure she sees little of what I once used to be. In a few years we
shall both be dead, and no one will remember us for we cannot write poetry or music or make speeches. Then they will take us to the local cemetery and bury us beside each other for I have already
bought the ground in which we will both lie.

It is also true that five years ago my wife began to sleepwalk for a number of nights but ceased to do so as abruptly as she had begun. It was a great joke between us, for one of the things she
did was to take flowers from a vase which we have in the living-room and take them quite gravely to bed with her, while water dripped across the floor as she blindly carried them along. Neither she
nor I understood why she did this but as I say she stopped doing it when she realised that because of my anxiety about her I was hardly getting any sleep.

Thus it is not clear to me why I should nearly have walked into the police station yesterday morning.

However, I shall not tell my wife about it for I feel that she is settling down quite happily now for our last few years together. She has become much quieter and to tell the truth I can read my
books in peace. She no longer tells me stories of people she has met at whist drives, and their strange ways. Nor is she liable to flash out in sudden bursts of rage as she sometimes has done in
the past after a particularly tiring day with some of our more harassing customers. She no longer wishes to go out much, nor is she in the habit of buying new dresses designed to impress other
men’s wives. I myself have never felt that I needed to impress anybody. I was brought up to be well-mannered and quiet and to know my station in life.

I shall simply have to forget that impulse which came over me yesterday on that fine spring morning when I was whistling as I walked down the street. I think it would never have occurred if it
had been a wet dismal day or if it had been any other day except a Sunday. Nevertheless I do not understand it. It would certainly have been embarrassing if I had gone in and met Inspector Munro
whom I know very well and whose wife is a regular customer. I don’t know what I would have done but I would probably have invented a story to account for my presence. I suppose however he
would have considered it odd just the same, as he must be a trained observer since after all he is a policeman.