The Black Halo Read online

  THE BLACK HALO

  Iain Crichton Smith was born in Glasgow in 1928 and raised by his widowed mother on the Isle of Lewis before going to Aberdeen to attend university. As a sensitive and complex poet in both English and Gaelic, he published more than twenty-five books of verse, from The Long River in 1955 to A Country for Old Men, posthumously published in 2000. In his 1986 collection, A Life, the poet looked back over his time in Lewis and Aberdeen, recalling a spell of National Service in the fifties, and then his years as an English teacher, working first in Clydebank and Dumbarton and then at Oban High School, where he taught until his retirement in 1977. Shortly afterwards he married, and lived contentedly with his wife, Donalda, in Taynuilt until his death in 1998. Crichton Smith was the recipient of many literary prizes, including Saltire and Scottish Arts Council Awards and fellowships, the Queen’s Jubilee Medal and, in 1980, an OBE.

  As well as a number of plays and stories in Gaelic, Iain Crichton Smith published several novels, including Consider the Lilies (1968), In the Middle of the Wood (1987) and An Honourable Death (1992). In total, he produced ten collections of stories, all of which feature in this two-volume collection, except the Murdo stories, which appear in a separate volume, Murdo: The Life and Works (2001).

  Kevin MacNeil was born and raised on the Isle of Lewis and educated at the Nicolson Institute and the University of Edinburgh. A widely published writer of poetry, prose and drama, his Gaelic and English works have been translated into eleven languages. His books include Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides (which won the prestigious Tivoli Europa Giovani International Poetry Prize), Be Wise Be Otherwise, Wish I Was Here and Baile Beag Gun Chrìochan. He was the first recipient of the Iain Crichton Smith Writing Fellowship (1999–2002).

  This eBook edition published in 2013 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  First published in 2001 by Birlinn Limited

  Stories copyright © The estate of Iain Crichton Smith, 1949–1976

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-84158-171-2

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-714-1

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Version 1.0

  Contents

  Editor’s Acknowledgements

  THE HERMIT AND OTHER STORIES

  The Hermit

  The Impulse

  Timoshenko

  The Spy

  The Brothers

  The Incident

  Listen to the Voice

  The Exorcism

  Macbeth

  Leaving the Cherries

  MURDO AND OTHER STORIES

  In the Castle

  The Missionary

  At the Fair

  The Listeners

  Mr Heine

  The Visit

  What to do about Ralph?

  The Ring

  Greater Love

  The Snowballs

  The Play

  In the School

  Mr Trill in Hades

  SELECTED STORIES

  By their Fruits

  Mac an t-Sronaich

  I do not Wish to Leave

  The Ghost

  The True Story of Sir Hector Macdonald

  Chagall’s Return

  Napoleon and I

  Christmas Day

  The Arena

  The Tour

  The Travelling Poet

  The Scream

  The Old Woman, the Baby and Terry

  On the Train

  The Survivor

  The Dead Man and the Children

  A Night with Kant

  The Maze

  On the Island

  The Button

  A September Day

  The Snow

  In the Corridor

  Christine

  The Kitten

  The Parade

  The Yacht

  Record of Work

  In the Asylum

  The Black Halo

  The Crossing

  The Beautiful Gown

  Do You Believe in Ghosts?

  At Jorvik Museum

  The Ship

  In the Silence

  The Ladder

  Tommy

  The Whale’s Way

  The Dawn

  The Red Coffin

  The Bridge

  The Tool Chest

  Murdo at the BBC

  The Wind

  The Blue Vase

  The Open University

  The Boy and the Rowan Tree

  At the Stones

  The Game

  Publication acknowledgements

  Editor’s Acknowledgements

  First of all, I would like to thank Donalda Smith, whose support during my period of tenure as inaugural Iain Crichton Smith Writing Fellow has given me some idea as to why she was such an inspiration to her late husband.

  I want to express my most sincere thanks to the following for their many, many efforts on behalf of this book: Neville Moir, Stewart Conn, Helen Templeton, Andrew Simmons, Hugh Andrew, Gavin Wallace, David Linton, David McClymont and Morna Maclaren.

  Grant F. Wilson’s A Bibliography of Iain Crichton Smith has been indispensable.

  I must also thank the staff of the National Museum of Scotland (Edinburgh), the Mitchell Library (Glasgow), and the Scottish Poetry Library (Edinburgh) for their helpfulness.

  Every effort has been made to track down all of Iain Crichton Smith’s English-language stories, but, given how phenomenally prolific Iain was, I must accept the possibility that these volumes are not quite complete. If any reader knows of a story by Iain Crichton Smith that is not included in these volumes (other than those stories in Stewart Conn’s recent edition of Murdo: the Life and Works) I would be most grateful if they would get in touch with me via the publisher, in order that any such story might be included in future editions.

  Finally, I want to acknowledge that working on these volumes has been a genuine labour of love and I wish to dedicate my own efforts to the late Iain Crichton Smith.

  from

  THE HERMIT

  and other stories

  For Donalda

  with love

  The Hermit

  One day a hermit came to live in or rather on the edge of our village. The first we knew about it was when we saw the smoke rising from one of the huts that the RAF had left there after the war. (There is a cluster of them just outside the village, tin corrugated huts that had never been pulled down, though the war was long over and their inhabitants had returned to their ordinary lives in England and other parts of Scotland.)

  Shortly afterwards, Dougie who owns the only shop in the village told me about the hermit. The shop of course is the usual kind that you’ll find in any village in the Highlands and sells anything from paraffin to bread, from newspapers to cheese. Dougie is one of the few people in the village that I visit. He served in Italy in the last war and has strange stories about the Italians and the time when he was riding about in tanks. He’s married but drinks quite a lot: he doesn’t have a car but goes to town every Saturday night and enjoys himself in his own way. However, he has a cheerful nature and his shop is always full: one might say it is the centre of gossip in the village.

  ‘He’s an odd looking fellow,’ he told me. ‘He wears a long coat which is almost black and there’s a belt of rope around him. You’d think in this warm weather that he’d be wearing something lighter. And
he rides a bicycle. He sits very upright on his bicycle. His coat comes down practically to his feet. He’s got a very long nose and very bright blue eyes. Well, he came into the shop and of course I was at the counter but he didn’t ask for his messages at all. He gave me a piece of paper with the message written on it. I thought at first he was dumb – sometimes you get dumb people though I’ve never seen one in the village – but he wasn’t at all dumb for I heard him speaking to himself. But he didn’t speak to me. He just gave me the paper with the messages written on it. Cheese, bread, jam and so on but no newspapers. And when he got the messages and paid me he took them and put them in a bag and then he put the bag over the handlebars and he went away again. Just like that. It was very funny.

  ‘At first I was offended – why, after all, shouldn’t he speak to me? – but then I thought about it and I considered, Well, as long as he can pay for the messages why shouldn’t I give them to him? After all he’s not a Russian spy or a German.’ He laughed. ‘Though for all he said he might as well be. But I don’t think he is. He wasn’t at all aggressive or anything like that. In fact I would say he looked a very mild gentle sort of man. The other people in the shop thought he was a bit funny. But I must say that after you have travelled you see all sorts of people and you’re not surprised. Still, it was funny him giving me the paper. He wore this long coat almost down to his feet and a piece of rope for a belt. I don’t know whether his coat was dirty or not. He looked a very contented sort of man. He didn’t ask for a newspaper at all, or whisky. Some people who are alone are always asking for whisky but he didn’t ask for any. All he wanted was the food. He had a purse too and he took the money out of the purse and he gave it to me. And all this time he didn’t say anything at all. That has never happened to me before but I wasn’t surprised. No, I’m telling a lie. I was surprised but I wasn’t angry. They say he’s living in one of the RAF huts and he doesn’t bother anybody. But it’s strange really. No one knows where he’s come from. And when he had got his messages he got on to this old bicycle and he went away again. He sits very upright on his bicycle and he rides along very slowly. I never saw anyone like him before. It’s as if he doesn’t want to speak. No, it’s as if he’s too tired or too uninterested to speak. Most people in the shop speak all the time – especially the women – but he wasn’t like that at all. Still if he can pay for his messages he can be a Russian for all I care.’ And he laughed again. ‘There are some people in the village who don’t pay for their messages but I can’t say that about him. He paid on the nail. And after all, in my opinion, people talk too much anyway.’

  2

  That evening, a warm, fine evening, I was out at a moorland loch with my fishing rod, pretending to fish. I do this quite often, I mean I pretend to fish, so that I can get away from the village which I often find claustrophobic. I don’t really like killing things, and all I do is hold the rod in my hand and leave it lying in the water while I think of other things and enjoy the evening. Out on the moor it is very quiet and there is a fragrance of plants whose names I do not know. I might mention here that I was once the local headmaster till I retired from school a few years ago, and I live alone since my wife died.

  I was born and brought up in the village but in spite of that I sometimes find it, as I have said, claustrophobic and I like to get away from it and fishing is the pretext I use. When people see you sitting down dangling a rod in the water they think you are quite respectable and sensible whereas if you sat there and simply thought and brooded they would think you eccentric. It’s amazing the difference a long piece of wood makes to your reputation among your fellow-men. After all if I never catch anything they merely think I am a poor fisherman and this is more acceptable than to think me silly.

  So I sit there by the loch with the rod dangling from my hand and I watch the sun go down and I smell the fragrance of the plants and flowers and I watch the circles the fish make in the water as they plop about the loch. Sometimes if there are midges I am rather uncomfortable but one can’t have everything and quite a lot of the time there are no midges. And I really do like to see the sun setting, as the mountains ahead of me become blue and then purple and then quite dark. The sunsets are quite spectacular and probably I am the only person in the village who ever notices them.

  So I was sitting by the lochside when I saw the hermit at a good distance away sitting by himself. I knew it was the hermit since there was no loch where he was and no other person from the village would sit by himself on the moor staring at nothing as the hermit was doing. He was exactly like a statue – perhaps like Rodin’s ‘Thinker’ – and as Dougie had said he looked quite happy. I nearly went over to talk to him but for some reason I didn’t do so. If it had been anyone from the village I would have felt obliged to do so but as I didn’t know the hermit I felt it would be all right if I stayed where I was. Sometimes I watched him and sometimes I didn’t. But I noticed that he held the same pose all the time, that statue-like pose of which I have just spoken. I myself tend to be a little restless after a while. Sometimes I will get up from the lochside and walk about, and sometimes I will take out a cigarette and light it (especially if there are midges), but I don’t have the ability to stay perfectly still for a long period as he obviously had. I envied him for that. And I wondered about him. Perhaps he was some kind of monk or religious person. Perhaps he had made a vow of silence which he was strictly adhering to. But at the same time I didn’t think that that was the case.

  At any rate I sat there looking at him and sometimes at the loch which bubbled with the rings made by the fish, and I felt about him a queer sense of destiny. It was as if he had always been sitting where he was sitting now, as if he was rooted to the moor like one of the Standing Stones behind him whose purpose no one knew and which had been there forever. (There are in fact Standing Stones on the moor though no one knows what they signify or where they came from. In the summer time you see tourists standing among them with cameras but it was too late in the evening to see any there now.) I thought of what Dougie had said, that the hermit was not in the habit of buying whisky, and I considered this a perceptive observation. After all, lonely people do drink a lot and the fact that he didn’t drink showed that he was exceptional in his own way. It might also of course show that he didn’t have much money. Perhaps he was not a monk at all, but a new kind of man who was able to live happily on his own without speaking to anyone at all. Like a god, or an animal.

  All the time that I had been looking at him he hadn’t moved. And behind him the sun was setting, large and red. Soon the stars would come out and the pale moon. I wondered how long he would stay there. The night certainly was mild enough and he could probably stay out there all night if he wished to. And as he obviously didn’t care for other people’s opinions he might very well do that. I on the other hand wasn’t like that. Before I could leave the village and sit out by myself I had to have a fishing rod even though I didn’t fish. And people in the village knew very well that I didn’t fish, or at least that I never brought any fish home with me. Still, the charade between me and the villagers had to be played out, a charade that he was clearly too inferior or superior to care about. In any case there were no new events happening in the village apart from his arrival there and therefore I thought about him a lot. It was almost as if I knew him already though I hadn’t spoken to him. It was as if he were a figment of my imagination that had taken shape in front of me. I even felt emotions about him, a mixture of love and hate. I felt these even though I had only seen him once. Which was very odd as I had always thought myself above such petty feelings.

  Sometimes I thought that I would take a book out with me and read it in the clear evening light, but that too would have made me appear odd. Fishing didn’t matter but reading books did, so I had never done that. The hermit wasn’t reading a book but I knew that if he had thought about it and were a book reader he would have taken his book out with him and not cared what people thought of him. He wasn’t a prisoner of
convention. I on the other hand had been a headmaster here and I could only do what I thought they expected of me. So I could dangle a rod uselessly in the water – which I thought absurd – and I couldn’t read a book among that fragrance, which was what would have suited me better. After a while – the hermit still sitting throughout without moving – I rose, took my rod, and made my way home across the moor which was red with heather.

  When I arrived back at the house Murdo Murray was as usual sitting on a big stone beside the house he was building. He has been building this house for five years and all that he has finished is one wall. Day after day he goes out with his barrow to the moor and gathers big solid stones which he lays down beside the partially finished house. As usual too he was wearing his yellow canvas jersey.

  ‘Did you catch anything?’ he asked and smiled fatly.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘nothing.’

  He smiled again. Sometimes I dislike intensely his big red fat face and despise him for his idleness. How could a man start on a project like building a house and take such a long time to do it and not even care what people thought of him or what they were saying about him? Did he have no idea what excellence and efficiency were? But no, he lived in a dream of idleness and large stones, that was his whole life. Most of the time he sat on a stone and watched the world go by. He would say, ‘One day there will be a bathroom here and a bedroom there,’ and he would point lazily at spaces above the ground around him. Then he would sigh, ‘My wife and daughters are always after me, but I can’t do more than it is possible for me to do, isn’t that right?’

  After a while he would repeat, ‘No man can do more than it is possible for him to do.’

  As a matter of fact, we often wondered what he would do with himself if he ever finished the house. It looked as if he didn’t want to finish it. The children of the village would often gather round him, and help him, and he would tell them stories as he sat on a big stone, large and fat. No, he would never finish the house, that was clear, and for some reason that bothered me. I hated to see these big useless stones lying about, as if they were the remnants of some gigantic purpose of the past.