On the Edge of Darkness. Barbara Erskine

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СКАЧАТЬ would never tell anyone, never mind the boy, the vile, furious words the distraught man had flung at her when she had tried to defend and then excuse his wife’s decision to leave. She put her hands on Adam’s shoulders, her heart aching for the boy. With her own family long gone and scattered round Scotland and one of them in Canada she had always thought of Adam privately as the child of her middle years. ‘Listen, Adam. I want you to remember I’m here if you need me. You can come to me any time.’ She held his gaze firmly. ‘Any time, Adam.’

      She had a shrewd idea what the boy was going back to and she didn’t envy him. But he had courage, she had always admired him for that.

      When he turned into the gate and approached the house this time the front door was open. He hesitated in the hall. The door to his father’s study was shut and he glanced at the stairs, wondering if he could reach them in time on his silent rubber soles. He was almost there when he heard the door behind him open. Panic flooded into his throat. For a moment he thought, as he turned to face his father, that he was going to be sick.

      Thomas Craig stood back, gesturing the boy into his study with a sharp jerk of his head. The man’s face was grey and he was unshaven. As he closed the door behind his son, he reached up to the hook on the back of it and brought down the broad leather belt which hung there.

      Adam whimpered, the ice of fear pouring over his shoulders and down his back, his skin already taut with terror at the beating that was coming. ‘Father –’

      ‘Where were you last night?’

      ‘On the hill, Father. I’m sorry. I got lost in the mist.’

      ‘You disobeyed me. I told you to go to your room. I had to look for you. I searched the village. And the riverbank, I didn’t know what had happened to you!’

      ‘I’m sorry, Father.’ He was ashamed of himself for being so afraid but he couldn’t help it. ‘I was upset.’ His words were very quiet.

      ‘Upset?’ His father echoed them. He pulled the leather strap through his hand and doubled it into his fist. ‘You think that excuses disobedience?’

      ‘No, Father.’ Adam clutched his hands together to stop them shaking.

      ‘And you accept that God would want you punished?’

      No, he was screaming inside himself. No. Mummy says God is the God of love. He forgives. He wouldn’t want me beaten.

      ‘Well?’ Thomas’s voice came out as a hiss.

      ‘Yes, Father,’ Adam whispered.

      His father stood for a moment in silence, looking at him, then he pulled an upright wooden chair out from the wall and placing it in front of his desk he pointed at it.

      Adam was trembling. ‘Please, Father –’

      ‘Not another word.’

      ‘Father –’

      ‘God is waiting, Adam!’ The minister’s voice roared suddenly above his son’s whispered plea.

      Adam gave up. His legs shaking so much he could hardly move he went to the chair and bent over it, stuffing one fist miserably into his mouth.

      Thomas Craig was a just man in his way, sincere in the austere, hard religion which he preached. He knew in some part of himself that the boy’s misery at losing his mother must be as great, perhaps greater, than his own at losing his wife, but as he started to swing the leather strap down onto the child’s defenceless back something inside him snapped. Again and again he swung the belt, seeing, not the narrow hips and scruffy shirt and shorts of a fourteen-year-old boy, but the figure of his beautiful, provocative, unruly wife. It was not until the boy slid into an ungainly heap at his feet that he stopped, appalled, staring down in disbelief.

      ‘Adam?’ He dropped the belt. He knelt beside the boy and stared in horror at the oozing welts which were appearing on the back of the boy’s thighs, the long bloody stains soaking through his shorts.

      ‘Adam?’ He reached out his hand to his son’s awkwardly angled head and drew back, afraid suddenly to touch him. ‘What have I done?’

      Swallowing hard, he backed away and moving blindly to his desk he sat down at it and picked up his Bible. Clutching it to his chest he sat without moving for a long time. On the blotter before him, torn into small pieces, lay the note Susan Craig had left for her son, a note Adam would never see.

      In the hall outside, the long case clock ticked slowly on. It struck the half hour and then the hour and as the long sonorous notes echoed into silence Thomas stirred at last.

      Lifting the unconscious boy he carried him upstairs and laid him tenderly on the bed and only then did he find the strength to walk into his own bedroom for the first time since Susan had left him. He stood looking round. Her brushes and comb lay on the table in the window. Otherwise there was no sign of her in the room. But there never had been. He had always discouraged ornaments and fripperies. He did not permit flowers in the house.

      He hesitated for a moment then he walked over to the huge old mahogany wardrobe. The righthand door concealed his own meagre selection of black suits; the lefthand door her clothes. More than his, but not many more: the two suits, one navy and one black, the two black hats which sat on the shelf above them and the three cotton dresses, washed and ironed again and again, with the high necks and the long sleeves and sober autumnal colours which he considered suitable for her summer wear. She had two pairs of black lace-up shoes. He pulled open the door, steeling himself to find the clothes gone, but they were there. All of them. He was not prepared to see them, not prepared for his own reaction. The wave of grief and love and loss which swept over him shook him to the core. Unable to stop himself he pulled one of the dresses from its wooden hanger and, hugging it in his arms, he buried his face in it and wept.

      It was a long time before he stopped crying.

      He looked down at the dress in his arms in disgust. It smelled of her. It smelled of woman, of sweat, of lust. He did not immediately recognise the lust as his own. Throwing the dress on the floor he pulled the rest of the clothes out of the cupboard into a heap, then he descended on the bed. He tore off one of the heavy linen sheets and bundled it around her clothes and shoes and even the two hats. He pulled open the drawers which contained her meagre collection of much-darned underwear and threw them in the pile, then he carried it all out of the room. The tangle of rusty wires and the iron frame which was all that was left of Susan Craig’s beloved piano was still there in the garden behind the neat lines of vegetables. Her clothes were thrown down there and Thomas poured paraffin all over them before setting them alight. He waited until the last thick lisle stocking had turned to ash, then he walked back into the house.

      He did not climb the stairs to see how Adam was. Instead he walked into his study and stood looking down at the chair over which the boy had bent. He was full of self-loathing. The anger, the misery, the love which he mistook for lust which he had felt for his wife, were evil. They were sins. The most terrible sins. How could he tend his flock and rebuke them for their backsliding when he could not control his own? Walking blindly to the desk he picked up the strap which he had dropped there after he had given the boy the thrashing and he stood looking down at it as it lay across his hand. He knew what he must do.

      He locked the door of the old kirk behind him and stepped down into the shadowy nave, looking round the grey stone building with its neat lines of chairs and the bare table at the east end. A church had stood on this site for over СКАЧАТЬ