The Black Halo (93 page)

Alastair couldn’t feel himself settled now in Hugh’s company.

He felt that Hugh was superior to him, that he knew things that he himself didn’t; he felt that Hugh had deserted him, was trying to be better than him. What did his poetry matter? In the
old days he would have shown his poem to Hugh and listened to his criticisms of it, but now he didn’t want to in case Hugh mocked him. No, he wouldn’t show Hugh his poem. After all,
Hugh had kept his television on when he was visiting him. He had told him that the programme was in connection with an assignment he was doing, but there was nothing more inhospitable than leaving
your television on in front of a visitor. Also he missed his conversations about genealogies. And damn him if he would show him his poem.

What is his poem to me anyway, thought Hugh. It’s very thin poor stuff. How could one expect good poetry or bardachd from Alastair who had hardly ever left the village in his life. Look at
his stringy neck, his jersey, his dungarees. It seemed to him that he had had a poor opinion of Alastair for a long time, but had refused to admit it to himself. Now he was admitting it.

‘If you don’t want to show it to me,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to see it.’

‘That’s that then,’ said Alastair. ‘I’d better be putting the dinner on.’ And he went back into the house. As Hugh was returning to his own house, he saw
little Colin coming towards him. Colin was the son of a fisherman called Angus Macleod, and his mother was the daughter of Iain MacFarlane from another part of the island.

Colin was wearing a black magician’s robe.

‘And how are you today, Colin?’ Hugh asked him.

Colin stood and looked at him, not speaking, very shy. Finally he said in a burst of words, ‘I’ve got a magic kit.’

‘I can see that,’ said Hugh, ‘and what tricks can you do?’

‘I’ve got a magic coin,’ said Colin, in another burst of words. ‘Abacadabra,’ he shouted, jumping up and down. ‘You have to say abacadabra,’ he said
seriously. ‘What hand have I got my coin in?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Hugh, ‘I’m not sure that I know that.’

‘It’s this one, it’s this one,’ Colin shouted, and held his hand out, showing the coin. Then he was dashing away, shouting, the triumphant magician.

Hugh stood staring after him. At one time he himself must have been like Colin, but he couldn’t remember. He could remember very little of his early childhood except that on his first day
in school a small woman with grey hair had told him to use some plasticine, which he did. He couldn’t even remember how he had learned English, but he must have done so. In the distance he
could see Colin jumping up and down spreading out his black wings. How small this village had become, how strange, he felt; maybe it would have been better for him if he had never left the village
in the first place.

The village drowsed in time. The houses seemed sunk, each in its own hollow. At night their television sets told the villagers of other countries, of violence, of foreign
streets. Why, they had even stopped cutting peat and were now burning coal, though it was very dear: one or two of the houses were all-electric. In winter there was snow and rain. In autumn one
felt the nostalgia of the past; the sea was both shield and stimulus and unimaginable depth, a ring around the village, a blue salty ring. There was an air of despair and weariness everywhere.
Alastair himself felt the change in his bones and wished that his sister were still alive so that he could torment her. At least Hugh had his Open University. Tears of rage and self-pity filled his
eyes.

Alastair worked away at his poem, which was called the ‘Song of the Open University.’

Alastair walked up and down his room, listening to the rhymes. He always composed his poem aloud, not on paper, and some time soon he would recite it to some of the villagers. He should be able
to make a good poem, for all his ancestors had been fine bards, and many of his poems were already well known, especially the one about the original coming of the electricity to the village. In
fact one or two of them had been sung on the wireless and he had strutted about like a peacock after that. But there were a few verses to be added yet.

Imagine the Renaissance, thought Hugh, as he sat down at his oil-clothed table. The sea that stretched outwards into unimaginable distances, the paintings, the cathedrals. The village seemed to
be inhabited by Virgin Marys with their holy children. Its colours were marvellous blues and velvet reds and indigos.

Then he read about the Claude glass in the eighteenth century which was designed to convert an ordinary landscape into a formal picture. Imagine that, he thought. Imagine the sky above
Constable, so huge, so vast.

Imagine the crazy cornfields of Van Gogh which seemed to echo his thin shrunken whiskers.

All through the night Hugh worked.

And Alastair continued with his poem.

Hugh’s father had been in fact the very first person to have a car in the village. It was more a van than a car, for in those days he had a butcher’s shop, and he
travelled through all the villages selling meat. He had been a good businessman, and his shop was a successful one till one night his car had been hit by a bus, and he had been killed outright.
Hugh and his mother were left alone, the shop had to be sold, and the memory of the first van faded. However, in his lonely nights, Hugh thought, My father was a clever man, everyone said that, and
I must have inherited his cleverness. It’s not everyone who would be doing what I am doing at my age. This thought sustained him, as he read and worked under the light of the electric
bulb.

In the village there was an incomer called Stella Simpson who kept pigs. She had tried to learn Gaelic, but Alastair made fun of it.

‘Do you know,’ he had once said to Hugh, ‘that woman said to me “Is latha math ann” instead of “Tha latha math ann”.’

In spite of that, however, she continued to learn Gaelic.

The villagers didn’t like her pigs. They were like big pink submarines in a sea of mud. They were alien beings; in any case, pigs would eat anything, even each other.

Stella slopped about in yellow wellingtons and tried to learn how to cook oatcakes and scones. But these were not successful. When she went to the Post Office, which was also the local shop, she
often wore a long red coat and black glasses. No one could make out what her age was, but it was considered that she must be about fifty. Her face was often dead white like a vampire’s and at
other times well-rouged.

She was, however, from England: everyone knew that, though no one had discovered anything about her background. When she had arrived first she had asked for buttock steak at the butcher’s
van instead of rump steak.

In the summertime she sat on the headland, painting the sea. ‘I told her once,’ said Alastair gleefully, ‘that there was a man who went out fishing one night and a storm blew
up, and he had to shelter in a cave which was full of rats. “How did he survive?” she asked me. “Well,” I said, “he fed them on fish till the morning came and he
escaped.” ’

One morning Hugh was passing her house, looking askance at the pigs which wallowed in the sea of mud, pink and obscene and naked, when she came out in her yellow wellingtons, carrying a
bucket.

‘I hear you’re doing the Open University,’ she said to Hugh.

‘I am that,’ said Hugh.

‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘I might be able to help you. I have paintings. And I have some records. I believe you have to study music as well.’

The pigs attacked the bucket. Her scarf blew in the wind.

‘Yes, I have to do music,’ said Hugh. ‘That’s the worst part of it. You see, I never learned about music.’

What am I doing talking to this woman, he asked himself. In the old days I wouldn’t have. If the villagers see me talking to her they’ll think I’m courting her. On the other
hand, he was beginning to feel lonely, to miss the company of Alastair who had become inflexible and distant, especially since the night he had seen pictures of the Virgin Mary in a book Hugh
had.

‘So you’re becoming a Catholic now,’ he said contemptuously to Hugh.

‘Not at all, I’m studying,’ said Hugh. But Alastair went away, snorting incredulously.

‘I shall come over and bring you some records. Have you a record player?’ Stella asked.

‘No.’

‘In that case I shall bring my record player as well.’

What an odd-looking woman, thought Hugh. She tries to be like one of us, but she isn’t really. She cannot disguise the fact that she is an alien. Even her red coat flung a strange radiance
on the landscape. And as for her pigs, who ever saw pigs in a village? With their horrible snouts and their vivid fleshy nakedness.

By talking to this woman, by allowing her to come to his house with her records, he felt that he had crossed another frontier which was taking him further and further away from Alastair. And yet
at the same time the logic was inevitable. It was true that he didn’t know about classical music, and this woman might teach him or at least give him an insight into it. His work was not
enough, knowledge was also essential.

When Stella arrived at his house under cover of darkness, she was carrying a torch, a record player, and some records. Hugh ushered her into the living-room where a bright fire was burning. He
had put away the dishes, and the room was tidy and warm.

‘What a nice little place you have,’ said Stella, putting down her burden. She took off her coat without asking Hugh to help her. She looked much prettier, her face composed and
relaxed, with a certain amount of colour in it. She was wearing a yellow blouse and skirt.

Well, well, said Hugh to himself, well, well. How women can change.

‘Your mother’s dead?’ said Stella, looking at him keenly.

‘Yes, I’m on my own here,’ said Hugh. ‘She died some years ago.’

‘I see you have a picture of her on the wall,’ said Stella. ‘It is her, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Hugh.

‘A strong-looking woman,’ said Stella. And indeed his mother did look formidable in her white blouse staring at the camera and not smiling at all.

‘I have brought you some Mozart,’ said Stella. ‘I presume you have a plug?’

‘Oh, yes, I have that,’ said Hugh awkwardly. Electrical things were not what he was best at. But this woman seemed to have no trouble with them.

The room, which at times appeared austere and cold, had become humanised. He wondered what his mother would have thought of this woman. ‘Not for you, Hugh,’ she would have said.
‘You don’t know anything about her. And she might even smoke.’

And sure enough, before sitting down, she did ask for an ashtray, which she laid on the table beside her. It was one which Hugh had brought home from Australia and which showed Sydney Opera
House.

Hugh sat down beside the fire and smoked his pipe, first asking permission.

‘My late husband smoked,’ said Stella, ‘when he was well. He was ill for a long time,’ she added. ‘Mental trouble. He became very bitter in argument. I find this
place very good for me. I needed the rest. He was a very clever scientist and therefore very ingenious at devising torments for me.’

‘Oh,’ said Hugh.

‘You don’t want to know about that,’ she said, stubbing out her first cigarette. ‘And now we will listen to Mozart.’

That night she told him a great deal about classical music and especially about Mozart, whom she idolised. She and her husband, before he became ill, had often gone to concerts in Bath, where in
fact she came from. Music was later the only thing that could soothe her husband’s savage breast.

As they listened to the music, she would ask him questions.

Why had he wanted to do the Open University? Did he do a lot of studying? When had he left school? Had he read a lot?

Of course, he told her, he had always been reading even when he was in the Merchant Navy. He had read Conrad, Stevenson, Melville. She seemed surprised at this.

‘Is that right,’ she said, staring at him, her cigarette in a long holder. It was as if she was seeing a strange specimen in the village, as alien to her as pigs were to him.

‘Mozart is pure intuitive genius,’ she told him. ‘Better even than Beethoven.’ He listened, and as he did so he seemed to hear what she was talking about, but shortly
afterwards he was lost again. He had had no training in that kind of music, no previous understanding of it.

‘I see I shall have to teach you a great deal,’ she said. ‘And now perhaps you could give me a cup of tea.’

The request astonished him, and at first he thought her bad-mannered, but then realised that her blunt demand was quite natural for her. In fact, when he showed her the kitchen, she made the tea
herself.