The Black Halo (12 page)

The only thing I can think of is that it must have been a slight aberration such as old people are prone to. None of our family has ever been a murderer or a thief.

But I think that in future I must avoid the police station in case I succumb to that impulse which I nearly succumbed to yesterday. It might be better if I ceased to read the Sunday papers
altogether and confined myself to the books that are already in the house, most of which I have read over and over already. In any case, my wife seems quite happy that I should be with her most of
the time and I find her company more relaxing than I did when we were young and facing the storms of life.

When I went into the thatched house as I always did at nine o’clock at night, he was lying on the floor stabbed with a bread knife, his usually brick-red face pale and
his ginger moustache a dark wedge under his nose. His eyes were wide open like blue marbles. I wondered where she was. The radio was still on and I went over and switched it off. At the moment she
came down from the other room and sat on the bench. There was no point in going for a doctor; he was obviously dead: even I could tell that. She sat like a child, her knees close together, her
hands folded in her lap.

I had regarded the two of them as children. He had a very bad limp and sat day after day at the earthen wall which bordered the road, his glassy hands resting on his stick, talking to the
passers-by. Sometimes he would blow on his fingers, his cheeks red and globular. She on the other hand sat in the house most of the time, perhaps cooking a meal or washing clothes. Of the two I
considered her the simpler, though she had been away from the island a few times, in her youth, at the fishing, but had to be looked after by the other girls in case she did something silly.

‘Did you do that?’ I said, pointing to the body which seemed more eloquent than either of us. She nodded wordlessly. As a matter of fact I hadn’t liked him very much. He was
always asking me riddles to which I did not know the answer, and when I was bewildered he would nod his head and say, ‘I don’t understand what they are teaching at these schools
nowadays.’ He had an absolutely bald head which shone in the light and a sarcastic way of speaking. He would call his sister Timoshenko or Voroshilov, because the Russians at that time were
driving the Germans out of their country and these generals were always in the news. ‘Timoshenko will know about it,’ he would say and she would stand there smiling, a teapot in her
hands.

But of course I never thought what it was like for the two of them when I wasn’t there. Perhaps he persecuted her. Perhaps his sarcasm was a perpetual wound. Perhaps, lame as he was,
sitting at the wall all day, he was petrified by boredom and his tiny mind squirmed like the snail-like meat inside a whelk. He had never left the island in his whole life and I didn’t know
what had caused his limp which was so serious that he had to drag himself along by means of two sticks.

The blood had stopped flowing and the body lay on the floor like a log. The fire was out and the dishes on the dresser were clean and colourful rising in tier after tier. The floor which was
made of clay seemed to undulate slightly. I felt unreal as if at any moment the body would rise from the floor like a question mark and ask me another riddle, the moustache twitching like an
antenna. But this didn’t happen. It stayed there solid and heavy, the knife sticking from its breast.

I knew that soon I would have to get someone, perhaps the policeman or a doctor or perhaps a neighbour. But I was so fascinated by the woman that I stayed, wondering why she had done it.
Girlishly she sat on the bench, her hands in her lap, not even twisting them nervously.

Suddenly she said, ‘I don’t know why but I took the knife and I . . . I don’t know why.’

She looked past me, then added, ‘I can’t remember why I did it. I don’t understand.’

I waited for her to talk and after a while she went on.

‘Many years ago,’ she said, ‘I was going to be married. He made fun of me when Norman came into the house. He said I couldn’t cook and I couldn’t wash, and that was
wrong. That must have been twenty years ago. He was limping then too. He told Norman I was a bit daft. That was many years ago. But that wasn’t it. Anyway, he told Norman I was silly. Norman
had put on his best suit when he came to the house. He wasn’t rich or anything like that. You don’t know him. Anyway he’s dead now. He died last week in the next village. He was
on his own and they found him in the house dead. He had been dead for a week; of course he was quite old. He was older than me then. Anyway he came into the house and he was wearing his best suit
and he had polished his shoes and I thought that he looked very handsome. Well, Donald said that I wasn’t any good at cooking and that I was silly. He made fun of me and all the time he made
fun of me Norman looked at me, as if he wanted me to say something. I remember he had a white handkerchief in his pocket and it looked very clean. Norman didn’t have much to say for himself.
In those days he worked a croft and he was building a house. I was thirty years old then and he was forty-two. I was wearing a long brown skirt which I had got at the fishing and I was sitting as I
am sitting now with my hands in my lap as my mother taught me. Donald said that I smoked when I was away from home. That was wicked of him. Of course to him it was a joke but it wasn’t true.
I think Norman believed him and he didn’t like women smoking. My brother, you see, would make jokes all the time, they were like knives in my body, and my mind wasn’t quick enough to
say something back to him. Norman maybe didn’t love me but we would have been happy together. Donald believed that his jokes were very funny, that people looked up to him, and that he was a
clever man. But of course he . . . Maybe if it hadn’t been for his limp he might have carried on in school, so he said anyway. I left school at twelve. I had to look after him even when my
parents were alive.

‘It didn’t matter what I did, it was wrong. The tea was too hot or too cold. The potatoes weren’t cooked right or the herring wasn’t salt enough. “Who would marry
you?” he would say to me. But I think Norman would have married me. Norman was a big man but he was slow and honest. He wasn’t sarcastic at all and he couldn’t think like my
brother. “She was in Yarmouth,” Donald told him, “but they won’t have her back, she’s too stupid. Aren’t you, Mary?” he asked me. That wasn’t true.
The reason I couldn’t go to Yarmouth was because I had to stay at home and look after him. I was going to go but he made me stop. He got very ill the night before I was due to leave and I had
to stay behind. Anyway Norman went away that night and he never came back. I can still see him going out the door in his new suit back to the new house he was building. I found out afterwards that
my brother had seen him and told him that I used to have fits at the time of the new moon, and that wasn’t true.

‘So I never married, and Donald would say to me, if I did something that he didn’t like, “That’s why Norman never married you, you’re too stupid. And you
shouldn’t be going about with your stockings hanging down to your ankles. It doesn’t look ladylike.” ’

I remembered how I used to come and listen to the News in this very house and it would tell of the German armies being inexorably strangled by the Russians. I would have visions of myself like
Timoshenko standing up in my tank with dark goggles over my eyes as the Germans cowered in the snow and the rope of cold was drawn tighter and tighter. And he would say to me, ‘Now then, tell
me how many mackerel there are in a barrel. Go on now, tell me that.’ And he would put his bald head on one side and look at me, his ginger moustache bristling. Or he would say, ‘Tell
me, then, what is the Gaelic for a compass. Eh? The proper Gaelic, I mean. Timoshenko will tell you that. Won’t you, Timoshenko? She was at the fishing, weren’t you,
Timoshenko?’

And he would shift his aching legs, sighing heavily, his face becoming redder and redder.

‘He thought I knew nothing,’ she said. ‘Other times he would threaten to put me out of the house because it belongs to him, you see.’ She looked down at the body as if he
were still alive and he were liable to stand up and throw her out of the house, crowing like a cockerel, his red cheeks inflated, and his red wings beating.

‘He would say, “I’ll get a housekeeper in. There’s plenty who would make a good housekeeper. You’re so stupid you don’t know anything. And you leave everthing
so dirty. Look at this shirt you’re supposed to have washed!” ’

Was all this really true, I wondered. Had this woman lived in this village for so many years without anyone knowing anything about her suffering? It seemed so strange and unreal. All the time we
had thought of the two as likeable comedians and one was cruel and vicious and the other was tormented and resentful. We had thought of them as nice, pleasant people, characters in the village. We
didn’t think of them as people at all, human beings who were locked in a death struggle. When people talked about her she became a sunny figure out of a comic, blundering about in a strange
English world when she left the island, but happy all the same. We hadn’t imagined that she was suffering like this in her dim world. And when we saw him sitting by the wall we thought of him
as a fixture and we would shout greetings to him and he would shout back some quaint witticism. How odd it all was.

‘But I knew what was going on all the time,’ she continued. ‘I could follow the news too. I knew what the Germans were doing, and the Russians. But he made me out to be a fool.
And the thing was even after I heard of Norman’s death I didn’t say anything, though he said a few things himself. He told me one day, “You should have been his housekeeper and he
wouldn’t have been found dead like that on his own. But you weren’t good enough for him. Poor man.” And he would look at me with those small eyes of his. They had found Norman,
you see, by the fire. He had fallen into it, he was ill and old. He hadn’t been well for years. I often thought of taking him food but Donald wouldn’t let me. After all we’re all
human and a little food wouldn’t have been missed. I used to think of when we were young so many years ago. And when I was young I wasn’t ugly. I wasn’t beautiful but I
wasn’t ugly. I used to go to the dances when I was young, like the others. And of course I was at Yarmouth. He had never been out of the island though he was a man and I was only a woman and
we used to bring presents home at the end of the season. I bought him a pipe once and another time I got him a melodeon but he wouldn’t play it. So you see, there was that.’

There was another longish silence. Outside, it was pitch black and there was ice on the roads. In fact coming over from my own house I nearly slipped and fell but I had a torch so that was all
right.

I wasn’t at all afraid of her. I was in a strange way enjoying our conversation or rather her monologue. It was as if I was listening to an important story about life, a warning and a
disaster. I remembered how as children we would be frightened by her brother waving his sticks from the wall where he was sitting. And we would run away full tilt as if we were running away from a
monster. Our parents would say, ‘It’s only his joking,’ and think how kind he was to go out of his way to entertain the children, but I wondered now whether in fact it might not
be that he hated children and it wasn’t acting at all, that cockerel clapping his sticks at us as we scattered across the moor.

Maybe too he had been more in pain than we had thought.

The trouble was that we didn’t visit the two of them much at all. I did so, but only because I wished to listen to their radio to hear the news. Also, I was a quiet, reserved person who
was happier in the company of people older than myself. But I hadn’t actually looked at either of them with a clear hard look. To me she was a simple creature who smiled when her brother made
some joke about Timoshenko, for his jokes tended to be remorselessly repetitive. It didn’t occur to me that she was perhaps being pierced to the core by his primitive witticisms and it
didn’t occur to me either that they were meant to be cruel and were in fact outcrops from a perpetual war.

Suddenly she said to me, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Without thinking I said ‘Yes,’ as if it was the most natural remark in the world while the body lay on the floor
between us. I was amazed at how calmly I had accepted the presence of the body, though I had always thought of myself as sensitive and delicate. But on the other hand it was as if the body was not
real, as if, as I have said, it would get to its feet, place its sticks under its arms, and walk towards me asking me riddles. Naturally however this didn’t happen. And so we drank the tea
out of neat cups with thin blue stripes at the rim.

‘I had to give him all my saccharins,’ she said, ‘because he liked sweet things. It’s a long time since I’ve had such a sweet cup of tea.’ I noticed then that
she had put saccharins in my tea and I realised that this was the first time that I had had tea in her house. She was in a strange way savouring her transient freedom.

‘I remember now,’ she said. ‘It was the Germans and Timoshenko. The Germans had been trying to destroy Russia. I knew that, I’m not daft. And now the Russians were
killing them. I heard that on the six o’clock news. And Timoshenko, he was doing that, he was winning. It was then that I . . . ’ She stopped then, the cup at her lips. ‘I
remember now. It was when it said about Timoshenko and he said the tea wasn’t sweet enough. That was when I . . . I must have been cutting bread. I must . . . ’

She looked at me in amazement as if it was just at that moment that she realised she had killed him. As she began to tremble I took the cup from her hands – it was spilling over –
and put my arm around her and comforted her while she cried.

She has just left me, she has taken her case and gone, and I am sitting here drinking whisky and thinking for the hundredth time that we are living in a spy story, all of us. I
know I’m drunk but I see this quite clearly. When I look back on it all I see it with the clarity of the insane, though I’m certainly not that. As a psychiatrist I’ve seen
something of the way the minds of the insane – and especially those of schizophrenics – work, and I know that sometimes they have visions. I have visions myself. Perhaps it is the
whisky but I think not, perhaps it is what is about to happen, but no, I have thought of this for some time now. She turned at the door with her small case in her hand, for the last time. She was
about to say something but decided against it after all. She is going to that large painter Rank, whom she met at a party some months ago. I wish I had never taken her there. He is so much larger
than me, more flamboyant, more vibrant, so much a filler of space and he is so positive about his work. And I think it is probably very good. I think I know something about painting, though Vermeer
is my favourite painter. I don’t on the whole like modern stuff, my mind is too orderly for that. Anyway I suppose that, like her, he paints abstract paintings, colourful and fragmentary, and
he has such belief in himself and such a loud voice that he makes me feel weak.