The Black Halo (16 page)

I had the most curious sensation of staring at something that I could never hope to understand, something that I half envied and considered dangerous. I could hear myself discussing this later
with someone: ‘Of course this is where Hitlerism came from. D. H. Lawrence started it off. It’s the end of our tradition, Homer and the rest. It’s the Dionysiac frenzy, the
Bacchanalian syndrome which destroyed Greece.’ But I certainly didn’t feel Apollonian. I felt as if I were in some underground cavern thousands of years ago when people with rigid brows
populated the caves. I fixed my eyes on a girl’s long green belt which swayed in front of me and then I got up and sought the lavatory. When I came back they were all sitting on the floor
again and Rank was talking to Brenda. He had his right arm casually over her right shoulder.

There was a long silence which made my head ache even more than the noise. It was as if the savages had been transformed into monks, as if they were waiting now for some revelation. Brenda was
looking across at me and smiling secretly. It was as if she were saying, ‘Well, I went to your party and now you have to come to mine. What do you think of it? I left you on your own as you
did to me. What do you think of that?’ Suddenly I got up and stumbled out of the room, and down the stairs. I remember that they were unlit and I had to use my lighter a lot to light my way
in flashes. The last glimpse I had of them, Rank was stroking her hair. I wasn’t going to fight him. He would have won anyway. It would not have been rational.

I steered the car through the night blazing with its reds and yellows, like an emporium of the East. I half expected to see women in veils walking past and Arabs talking at street corners. The
night was a desert, lit by inane contingent lights. I managed to reach home safely, put the car in the garage, went upstairs, and climbed into bed. I went out like a light.

When I woke up the same stabbing pain returned as I remembered what had happened. Brenda, incredibly enough, was sleeping beside me like a child. I had no recollection of her coming to bed or
when she had returned or with whom. She was sleeping peacefully, an arm thrown across the yellow coverlet. I shook her awake and said, ‘When did you come home?’

She woke blinking, and said, ‘I was given a lift home. I came back at three.’

‘Who gave you a lift?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know his name,’ she said. ‘Anyway his girl friend was with him so it’s all right.’

‘It wasn’t Rank?’ I asked, shivering as if with fever.

‘It wasn’t Rank,’ she said. ‘You left early, didn’t you?’

‘There was no one to speak to,’ I said.

‘It was the same at your party,’ she replied. ‘It was incredible. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much. We had such discussions.’

Discussions. I wondered what she meant by ‘discussions’. I knew what I meant by the word. But I didn’t think that was what she meant by it.

‘I left you with Rank,’ I said accusingly.

‘I know,’ she answered, ‘but there were others there as well, you know.’ Suddenly she kissed me and said, ‘You mustn’t be so jealous. Jealousy is no good. You
must learn to trust me.’

But I couldn’t trust her. She was a gipsy who moved across frontiers, restlessly. I had a feeling deep within me that she had been with Rank and the knowledge was driving me insane.

‘What are we going to do?’ I said.

‘Going to do?’ she said in a surprised voice. ‘What do you mean, “going to do”?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘we can’t carry on like this. Are you going to be attending parties like that regularly? I don’t understand the people there. I have nothing in
common with any of them.’

‘You don’t try to have anything in common with them,’ she said. ‘You should try. You’ve led too sheltered an existence, that’s what’s wrong with you.
You think that because you talk to your patients you know everything, that you’ve seen everything. You don’t understand what creative people are like.’

And truly I didn’t. I didn’t understand these people and I was sure that most of them weren’t creative. They seemed to me like savages who had surrendered reason. They seemed
to be down and outs, drop-outs from society. I looked on them as exotic phenomena, who were turning and savaging the tree of light which had illuminated the ages.

‘Why did you marry me?’ I asked her at last.

‘It’s an experience,’ she said unhesitatingly. ‘Everything is an experience. Why do you always want a reason for everything? Why don’t you just live? You should
learn to live from day to day. Christ Himself said that, didn’t he?’

Perhaps Rank was her Christ and these hairy people with their sandals and long coats were his disciples.

She sat up in bed and said, ‘That’s what’s wrong with you. You’re always looking for reasons and purposes. Can’t you see that that’s ridiculous? Just live in
the moment, that’s what you need to do. Just enjoy.’ There were dark shadows under her eyes and her pale face was almost luminous.

‘I know,’ I said, ‘but human beings can’t live like that. Animals live like that. But not human beings. In any case there are moments when one is bored. One must endure
these times.’

‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why can’t one go out and get lost in something else? You could retire now if you wanted to. You’ve got plenty of money. Why don’t you? Are
you frightened or something?’

I was indeed frightened. I would miss those voyeuristic glimpses into the satanic depths and she knew it. She could probe more deeply in her apparently innocent, sleep-walking way, than anyone I
knew.

‘Everything could be all right if you let it,’ she said. ‘Why are you so angry just because I enjoyed myself? How can you love me and be so angry?’

I got up from the bed and pulled the curtains aside. It was autumn again. It wouldn’t be long till our year would be past. I could feel the tang of autumn in the air, I could see the trees
losing their crowns and the leaves turning brown. I could feel my crown leaving me.

‘All right,’ I said, but I couldn’t tell her about the pain that was pricking me continually. I couldn’t tell her how I felt about Rank, invader of my private realm, I
couldn’t tell her how I was being flayed alive.

‘Where are you going today?’ I said.

‘Oh, I’ll walk around,’ she said carelessly. ‘I have a few ideas.’

‘I’m glad,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I got some ideas last night. I didn’t realise you had gone till much later.’

I didn’t want to go to my work but I felt that I ought to. I didn’t want to lie down in my bed and drop out like those others. That wasn’t my nature. I hated staying late in
bed. Perhaps, I thought, in the world that is to come and is almost upon us, the congenitally idle who are able to bear the ravages of time will be the masters and those who need routine will be
the slaves.

I thought of an experiment which had been done with rats, how if you put three rats in a cage with a machine which will release food if a lever is pressed, one rat will do all the work while the
other two will sit back and eat. And this has nothing to do with class structure or the worker rat being terrorised by the other two. It is just that this particular rat seems to need to work, it
is the responsible one.

I felt old and lost as I put on my clothes. I was one of the workers, one of the slaves, one of the inferiors. She was the master or mistress. She could live in the world in a way that I
couldn’t. I was trying to master the world, she ignored it.

When I turned away to go down and make my breakfast she was already asleep.

And so time passed. Autumn was resplendent in its marvellous colours. The year was going out in a blaze of colour and again I had to go to Paris but this time I didn’t
tell her when I would be back. More and more I felt the world as a spying machine.

She had married me to spy on me. What was she saying about me to her friends? She was learning that my world was as frail as she had thought. Reason was disintegrating, was
being eaten alive by jealousy. Ideas were becoming pale and tired. I was betraying that world to her. I was a traitor to my own kind. Why else had she married me? I had surrendered to her because
she was careless and unpredictable and irrational, but she hadn’t surrendered to me. She had no weakness that I could see. She would move on with the secrets stolen from my house, built so
flimsily on reason and principle. I was the weak one, she was the strong one.

When I returned from Paris and that conference of old spectacled idealistic confused murderous colleagues, I drove up to the house which was in darkness. I switched on the lights and went
systematically through the house but she wasn’t there. Her clothes were still there, she hadn’t flitted in the night, that at least was true. I picked up the phone and put it down
again. Then I dialled Bell and asked him if he knew Rank’s address. He told it to me. I felt that he knew exactly what was happening, that almost alcoholic logical genius, that ghostly
passenger in a world which had almost gone. He was like an insect whose wings were fading away because there was no need for them any longer.

I drove to Rank’s house in a fury of rage and possessiveness. I rang the bell and Rank came to the door gigantic and red-haired. I said, ‘Is my wife here?’

He looked at me mockingly for a long time as if I had said something unutterably bourgeois. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Brenda is here.’

I followed him into the room. She was sitting on the floor by the fire as she had so often sat with me. She looked up when I came in and then down at the floor again. Her face seemed paler than
usual and there were black shadows below her eyes. There was about her an air of the corrupt schoolgirl.

‘Would you like a drink?’ said Rank.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Are you coming home?’ I said to Brenda.

For some time she said nothing and then she got up and made for the door.

‘You’re frightened again,’ said Rank to her. ‘You’re frightened of being left alone.’

But she wasn’t that at all. I knew her. She was stronger than Rank, than me.

I took her arm and I said to Rank, ‘Would you kindly leave my wife alone?’

He looked at me mockingly. ‘My wife,’ he said, scornfully. ‘My wife! The old possessive thing. Why don’t
you
leave her alone? If you left her alone she might
learn to grow. She might even learn to become a good painter.’

She stood watching the two of us as if waiting to see the issue of our battle. My mind felt clear as crystal.

‘And what will you put in place of possessiveness?’ I asked.

‘In its place?’ he said, seeming to look at me directly for the first time. ‘I’ll tell you. Freedom to live as we are. You aren’t trying to build a prison, are
you?’

‘And you,’ I said, ‘do you never feel possessiveness, jealousy, envy? Or are you a god?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t feel jealousy, and I’m not a god.’

‘Then,’ I said, ‘you aren’t poor and human like the rest of us. And those who aren’t human are gods or animals.’

‘Good old Plato,’ he said. ‘The phantom saint of the West. The man who wanted artists out of his republic.’

‘I give you that,’ I said. ‘Nevertheless, what do you want? A race of gipsies?’

‘Shall I tell you what I think?’ he said. ‘Since you wish to know. I think we are about to enter an era of Darwinism. I think that in this era men will have to fight for their
wives as they did many years ago. I think the light of reason is going out. I think that you will have to fight for her. Are you willing to do that? Otherwise marriage will not protect
you.’

I thought he was quite evil, but I wouldn’t fight him. It was too great a loss of dignity. I wasn’t afraid of him but I didn’t want to appear silly.

‘Well,’ I said to Brenda, ‘what do you think of all that?’

She looked at me without speaking and then she laughed and I knew that her laughter was a comment on my world. I knew that I had sold my world out to her because of my weakness. Well, I thought,
it may be that. I may side with your world in ways that you won’t understand. She laughed a pure innocent evil laugh in that room with its paintings all round the walls. Her laughter was
joyous and free, like the laugh of a gipsy. It knew nothing of the real complications of the world or the mind. I had betrayed my world to her and I was being punished for it.

I went out and later she came home. She stayed with me for that week. She said she would do that and then she would leave.

I am sitting here drunk. She has gone out the door. We are living in a spy story. And what is she? She is a double agent. She has left my country for that other country. I look
at my watch: soon she will be at his house. I pick up the phone and dial Bell’s house. He will be drunk as usual but he belongs to my world. Wilson with his gun is perched at the window of an
empty house opposite Rank’s. I think it will be a good idea to have her shot just as she is about to seek asylum at Rank’s embassy. Wilson is happy to do it. I shall be talking to Bell
when the shot is fired. In any case they will never have any reason to suspect Wilson. He will get away all right. I am dialling now. I hear Bell’s phone ringing and ringing but there is no
answer. Well, in that case I shall have to phone somewhere else. I think I shall phone the Professor and he will tell me about Byzantium. Ah, he is answering. As he answers and I put some inane
questions, I can hear the shot ring out in my mind. She staggers just as she is about to enter the embassy. I keep him talking and steady my voice. No, I say, I don’t know much about the
Byzantine Empire. Wilson will have left by now, carrying his long narrow case. No, I say, I don’t know about the Byzantine Empire, but I’m willing to learn.

First of all, I should like to say that I don’t believe in ghosts, and yet some strange things have been happening to me recently. And you won’t understand them
unless I tell you something about myself. I am a writer, and I was born and brought up in the Highlands of Scotland where, I may tell you, you can hear plenty of ghost stories. For instance, there
was the man who used to get up from the ceilidh in the middle of the night and who would come back much later, his shoes and trousers dripping: he had been carrying the coffin of someone who had
not yet died and who perhaps was telling a story at that very ceilidh. Imagine what it must have been like to be such a man. Anyway, I myself don’t believe in these stories, though I have
heard them often. My father told me once that he nearly turned back one night when passing a cemetery after seeing a green light there, but he carried on, and found that it was the phosphorescence
from fish lying in a cart which had been put in the ditch by the drunken driver. I believe that, but I don’t believe in ghosts.