The Black Halo (15 page)

As I went along to the bedroom I was shaking with jealousy. I think that if I had gone in then I would have strangled her, but luckily for me or her I didn’t go in. I turned at the door
and went back to the living-room and began to drink steadily. I can’t describe the intensity of the jealousy I felt that night. It was as if my whole body were being pierced by knives, as if
I were in a fair delirious with lights and some gipsy were throwing blades at me. I drank and drank for my whole body was one raw nerve. If in the past I had been an Olympian studying people as
objects, I was paying for that now. I couldn’t sit still. I walked up and down the room all night shaking and trembling. I thought I would put her out of the house and throw her suitcase
after her, but I knew that I couldn’t live without her. She had infected my blood. She was making me into a gipsy suffering torments of passion. I tried to control myself, be the rational
person I thought I had always been, but it was no good. I didn’t even put the fire on but drank and drank. I was punishing myself for some terrible sin. Behind me stood the figure of my
father, righteous and unforgiving, an armour-plated ego. And beside him stood my mother who was to leave him one day. I felt as if I was on a treadmill which would repeat that experience over and
over. That was why I hadn’t married till late, but the repetition was beginning. She had come into my house to spy on me. God knows what she had been telling Rank about me. They had probably
had many a good laugh at my expense. She was a spy in my house. I was the country whose secrets she was selling to someone else, another country. Rank and I were two countries like Russia and
America, and between us went this spy, a gipsy carrying documents across shifting frontiers. I couldn’t stand it. My torment was appalling. My hands shook as dawn approached and she was lying
in her bed, probably sleeping like a child. I could have killed her but I waited. I waited and I bled to death.

I had thought that perhaps the two of us might reach some mode of compromise but I had been wrong. She had only married me for the experience and because she had been a bit depressed at that time, but now she was returning to her true self, the traveller and spy without
allegiance to anyone. Even Rank she might later desert when she had exhausted his knowledge. I thought very deeply that night as if I were in a hallucination. I knew that I would have to make
concessions. I had decided by the time the morning came, grey and sickly, that I would make these concessions. I was a territory weaker than hers. I had to make a treaty for the moment if that was
achievable. Later we would see, for deep inside me was the unforgiving voice of my father, hollow and echoing. He hadn’t taken to drink, he had simply worked harder. Perhaps the turning of
the knife in his patients was his therapy. As I sat in the armchair I found her Red Indian hairband beside me and wept like a child.

We are sitting at the table in the morning and I am putting marmalade on toast. Sunlight is buttering the table and Brenda is saying:

‘I can’t stay here all the time. Artists need their freedom, they need to work. I need to wander about. And you don’t need to set Mrs Gray to spy on me. I need to wander about
the streets, to look at colours, to walk in supermarkets, to stand at piles of fruit. I need the freshness.’

‘But you had his telephone number in your book,’ I said.

‘There you are, spying again,’ she said. ‘You still don’t understand. He’s my guru, I learn from him. It’s not sexual, at least not yet,’ she said
frankly.

‘How do you mean, not yet?’ I asked, my knife in mid-air about to descend on the butter.

‘What I said. You haven’t bought me, you know. You must let me be myself. I let you be yourself. I let you do your work. I don’t bother you. You must let me do the same. I know
it sounds like a cliché but artists aren’t like ordinary people. They need air, they don’t want to be disciplined. You like things to be in their places. I like disorder,
that’s the difference between us. And, by the way, why didn’t you come to bed?’

‘I didn’t feel like it,’ I said. It was such a beautiful morning and yet there were knives in my chest. I was like a bone case full of needles.

‘I thought you knew all I’ve been talking about without being told,’ she said. ‘I thought you knew about artists. You said you knew about paintings. I don’t suppose
you think they come out of the sky. That was why I was attracted to you. I thought you would have enough maturity to give me my freedom. You must know that artists are like gipsies. I haven’t
got proper work to do. Art isn’t a trade. I need to be open to everything.’

I looked at her for a long time and much passed through my mind then. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘have your freedom, provided that you don’t betray me.’ I felt that the
word ‘betray’ sounded old fashioned but I didn’t withdraw it. ‘Go about the street and pick up your inspiration. No one is stopping you from doing that. But don’t fall
in love with Rank, that is all I ask.’ I didn’t know as I spoke whether I would have the strength to give her all the freedom she wanted.

‘I didn’t go to bed with Rank,’ she said. ‘All I did was talk to him. I felt low and he gave me some ideas and conversation. Surely I can do that. Look at all the women
you meet at your job, I don’t feel jealous of them.’

I nearly said, ‘But you can trust me,’ but I didn’t say so. I felt myself slipping into a marsh full of strange flowers and evil odours. The world was slipping away from me,
the abstract world which has nothing to do with painting or sensuousness.

‘Look at these rolls,’ she said, ‘how white they are, how beautiful. I could make a still life of this breakfast table.’

The thing was she looked as wild and attractive as ever and as unselfconscious. ‘That colour,’ she said. ‘What colour would you say marmalade is? Have you ever thought about
that? And its taste. It’s like nothing else on earth. Nothing at all.’

She illuminated the world for me, she was a series of detonations, she was my fate and my doom. She was halfway between my child and my wife, it was as if I could be seeing her off to
school.

‘I tell you what,’ she said. ‘In return for the party you took me to, I’ll take you to another one. What do you think of that?’

‘Will Rank be there?’ I asked.

‘He might be,’ she said. In spite of her protestations I thought she had been to bed with him. I didn’t believe what she was saying to me now. His large presence dominated the
house, it was as if he was a huge gigantic being shouldering his way through its order. When I thought of his body lying on top of hers, drilling into it, its power and its savagery, I was almost
screaming with rage. I was a long silent scream. Her buttocks entranced me, her round firm breasts, to have allowed anyone else near them was like having a needle stuck in my loins. How far I had
come from the cool world of Vermeer with its maidservants and milk jugs and its laughing soldiers. How far I was from the domestic Dutch world of his paintings.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll go,’ thinking again of Wilson. I wondered where he had spent his weekend, what animals he had shot, in what woods and fastnesses he had
stalked. What animals he had spied on till they had been delivered to his gun.

When I drove to the office I watched the policemen directing the traffic and thought that they were spies giving incomprehensible signals in code. Eyes and hands were agents of change and
direction. Even my patients were spying on me. They were laughing at me secretly behind their hands, behind their bland, masked large faces. And no one more so than Wilson who seemed to be saying
to me, ‘I am the true real person. The rest of you are hypocrites. You falsely believe that you are keeping the world together but deep down you are starving to be like me. You are killers.
One day I shall be a killer in reality; I shall drink blood. Now it’s animals I kill, later it will be people. The rest of you are sick to death fighting your instincts. I am going to give
way to them. Soon now. Soon. Now I shoot foxes and rabbits. Later I shall kill men.’

And I knew that in one way he spoke the truth. The previous night I might have killed her. We all have an adamantine selfishness at the core. Think of Keats watching sparrows and musing at their
purpose. They were hunting for worms or building their nests; he was writing his poetry. On the ladder of creation how were they different? We are all out to save ourselves, to keep our comfort and
our pride. We may talk about civilisation but that is because it happens to be convenient to us at the moment.

Wilson told me of a weasel he had seen. ‘The weasel,’ he said, ‘is the fiercest killer of all. Did you know that he will attack a human being? He is like a flash of fire.
Dynamite. I saw him spring on a rabbit and I waited till he had killed it. Then I shot him. A very fine shot if I say it myself. Then I squeezed his body with my bare hands. It’s so thin and
small and yet so vicious. A weasel will defy you. I squeezed it to death.’

The noise was shattering, my ear-drums seemed to be bursting. There was a strange sickly smell in the air, and I wondered if it was drugs. Instead of standing about as people
had done at Drew’s party they were sitting or lying on the floor and in corners under the red lights some couples were embracing and as far as I could see having sexual intercourse. The room
seemed to be full of savages – buttocks, breasts, hairy pale faces everywhere. It was like a Cubist painting, like
Guernica
. No one paid me the slightest attention though they must
have wondered what someone like me, dressed so decorously, was doing there. I looked at Brenda and she was gazing around her with parted lips. She had clearly come home. She threw her long coat
into a corner of the room and sat like the others on the floor. I did the same though I felt uncomfortable. Lights were flashing all around me, the banging noise of the record player was tearing me
apart. The tenement room itself was perched high up, in a poor area of the city, and we noticed that the walls as we came in had been chalked with gang slogans. Beside me a girl with incredibly
blonde hair like corn and blank eyes like stones was squatting.

I didn’t know what I was doing there and no one spoke to me though Brenda had left me and was talking to a tall fellow who was wearing a long brown ravaged fur coat. In the middle of the
group was a small fat man who was staring straight ahead of him into space as if he were looking at a screen. On a table there were some drinks. We had brought some ourselves – apparently we
had been expected to – and it had been placed with the rest. I felt completely out of it, and all I could think to do was crawl over and get myself a whisky while the tremendous music beat at
me.

For a while there seemed to be talking and chatter. I could hardly make out the words though I gathered that many of the people there were students. Brenda was waving her hands animatedly as she
talked to the fellow in the fur coat who looked distant and bored. But this didn’t seem to worry her at all; in fact she looked perfectly happy. It was a long time since I had seen her face
so purely radiant. She also was drinking what I took to be gin or vodka and I remembered what she had once told me about drinking two bottles of gin in one day. ‘I was absolutely stoned out
of my mind,’ she had said. ‘It was heaven. I couldn’t paint, of course. I wonder what other painters do when they can’t paint.’

Suddenly as if they were all responding to a signal all of the tribe – I could only think of them as that – got to their feet and began to sway and dance to the music, their faces
pale and cool and dreamy. They were incredibly beautiful and mindless, like long stalks on which the faces were set like flowers, utterly abstracted, immune to the mind. They didn’t exactly
dance, they swayed and thrust to the sound of the music. It was pure experience I was seeing, it was beyond thought. And among them was Brenda. She too was swaying to the music and I could have
sworn that she looked straight into my eyes without recognising me.

This swaying and thrusting went on for a long time and then suddenly it accelerated, with the movement of an orgasm. I looked at Brenda in horror. She was thrusting her pelvis forward as if she
were engaged in sexual intercourse and all the time her face was a dreamy mask as if she were drugged. She was living totally in the body which she accepted not as mortal and subject to death and
disease but as a precious and living possession which would allow her to enter her own heaven. There was something obscenely automatic about her movements as if she were copulating during sleep and
it terrified me more than the horrors of my mind. She had gone away like the others to another world which my mind wouldn’t allow me to enter or experience.

Even though I was drinking there was a part of my mind which was ticking away like a watch, cataloguing, remembering. I was looking at a painting composed of images which was alive like an
organism. Everything was fragmentary and no longer narrative as the man had said. And then, just as I thought this, there was the man himself – having just come in – standing beside me
on his way towards the dancing.

‘Well, what do you think of it, then?’

He was staring at the dancers with an almost mad smile on the whitish face below the red hair. He towered over me, pure brutal energy equipped with a high-powered brain as well, and I knew that
I couldn’t compete.

‘It’s strange,’ I said, and my words seemed to fall hollowly at my feet.

‘You would say that,’ he said mockingly. ‘I could have sworn that you would use that word.’ And then he was gone, shouldering his way into the group and standing in front
of Brenda, the two of them then swaying towards each other, thrusting their bodies forward, twisting like snakes. If this is the Garden of Eden, I thought, then the snakes are the correct occupants
and I am the alien devil looking on. I drank more and more as the rhythm of the music deepened and quickened and became more and more loud. The room with its red light swayed about me, the sickly
smell increased. I felt as if I was going to vomit. I was the only person not dancing except the fat man who was still staring into space, squatting on the floor like a Buddha.