On the Edge of Darkness. Barbara Erskine

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СКАЧАТЬ spite of himself, when he was alone in the building, as now, he could feel the special sacredness of the place. He was shocked to find this superstition in himself but could do nothing to rid himself of it. Enough light filtered in through the windows for him to see clearly as he walked halfway along the aisle and sat slowly down. In his right hand he carried the strap with which he had beaten his son.

      He sat for a long time upright, rigid, his hands clenched, his eyes shut in prayer to the Lord. But he knew the Lord wanted more than this. He wanted punishment for Thomas’s weakness. As the last rays of light died in the sky outside, throwing pale streaks through the windows onto the ancient stone of the walls and floor, he stood up. He walked to the front of the lines of chairs and slowly he began to remove his jacket and then his tie and his shirt. He folded them neatly, shivering as the cold air played over his pale shoulders. He hesitated for a minute, then he went on: shoes, socks, trousers, all meticulously stowed on the pile. He wondered for a minute if he should remove his long woollen underpants but the male body naked, like the female, was an abomination before the Lord.

      Then he picked up the leather belt.

      The pain of the first self-inflicted welt took his breath away. He hesitated, but only for a second. Again and again he raised his arm and felt the merciless strap curling round his ribs. He lost count after a while, glorying in the pain, feeling it cleansing him, feeling it wipe out all trace of his own vile sin.

      Slowly the strokes grew weaker. He collapsed to his knees on the stone floor and the strap fell out of his hand. He heard the sound of a sob and realised it had come from his own throat. In despair he slid down until he was lying full length on the floor, his head buried in his arms.

      When Adam woke he was curled face down on his own bed. He tried to move and cried out with pain, clutching at the sheet beneath his face.

      ‘Mummy!’

      He had forgotten. In the past when his father had beaten him she had crept upstairs later, secretly, and put iodine on his cuts and given him a sweetie to comfort him. But she wasn’t here, and this time the pain was worse than it had ever been before. He tried to move and stopped, sobbing silently into the pillow.

      The house was very quiet. He lay still for a long time as the blood congealed and dried and his clothes stuck to his back. After a while he dozed. Once he awoke with a start when a door banged somewhere downstairs. He held his breath, frightened his father would appear, then when he didn’t he slowly relaxed again and once more sleep numbed his pain.

      The need to urinate drove him at last from his bed. Moving stiffly, biting his lip to stop himself from crying out loud he made his way to the lavatory and, locking himself in, he unbuttoned his shorts. He was too stiff to twist round to look at his buttocks, but he could see the bruises on his legs, the blood on the cotton of his clothes. The sight frightened him. He didn’t know what to do.

      Creeping back into his bedroom he crawled back into the bed. When he woke again it was almost dark. Pulling himself up he crept to the top of the stairs and looked down. No lamps had been lit. Stiffly he tiptoed down. His father’s study door was open. There was no one there and he stood for a moment, staring in.

      He pulled an old raincoat from the line of hooks in the tiled vestibule and draped it round his shoulders, afraid he might meet someone, afraid that they would see what his father had done to him and afraid they would know that he had been bad.

      He almost did not dare knock at Jeannie’s door again, but he didn’t know what else to do. As he stumbled up her front path his head was spinning. His feet felt as though they belonged to someone else a long way away. He raised his hand to the door knocker and grasped at the air, falling forward so his fingers clawed at the boards.

      The dog heard him.

      ‘That man should be locked up!’ Ken Barron was pouring water from the pans on the range into the hip bath before the fire. ‘He ought to be reported.’

      Jeannie shook her head. Her lips were tight. ‘No, Ken. Let be. I shall deal with this myself.’ She had had to fight back the tears when she saw the state of the boy.

      The bath had been the only way. He couldn’t sit down in it, but she had him kneel in his clothes whilst she poured jugs of water over the thin shoulders and slowly worked first the shirt and then the shorts free of the dried blood.

      When at last the wounds were clean and she had soothed them with Germolene she put one of her husband’s clean shirts on the boy, cursing the roughness of the linen as she saw him wince, then she gave him some broth and put him in the press-bed in the corner of the room.

      What she had to say to the minister would keep until morning. He was not going to get away with what he had done this time.

      ‘Don’t be a fool, Jeannie.’ Ken was only half-hearted in his effort to dissuade his wife from visiting the manse the next morning. He had enormous respect for Jeannie’s towering rages.

      Her blue eyes were blazing. ‘Just try and stop me!’ Her hands were on her hips as she faced him and he moved back hastily and stood in the doorway, watching as his wife sailed off down the street, clutching Adam’s hand.

      The front door of the manse was open. She dragged Adam in with her and stood in the hall looking round. She could smell the unhappiness in the house, the lack of fresh air and flowers, and she shivered, thinking of the beautiful young English woman Thomas Craig had somehow won when he was training for the ministry and brought back to this house fifteen years ago. Susan had been full of the love of life, her hair bright, her clothes pretty and the high-ceilinged rooms of the two-hundred-year-old house had resounded for a while to the sound of her singing, to the piano she played so beautifully, to her laughter. But slowly, bit by bit, he had destroyed her. He forbade the singing, frowned at the laughter. One day when she had gone into Perth on the bus he had someone take the piano out into the garden and he had burned it as an abomination in the eyes of God, for was not all music frivolous and shocking if it was not played in the kirk? Susan had cried that evening in the kitchen like a child, and Jeannie, young herself then too, had put her hand on the bright hair, now tied back in a tight styleless bun, and tried in vain to comfort her.

      Adam had been born ten months after Thomas Craig brought Susan to the manse. There had been no more children.

      Her whole life was bound up with the little boy, but Thomas had views on his son’s upbringing too; children should be seen and not heard; spare the rod and spoil the child.

      Jeannie sighed. Adam was a bright child. He went to the local school and was now at the Academy in Perth. He made friends easily but, too afraid and ashamed to ask them home, became more and more engrossed in his books and his hobbies alone. The only love and happiness he had experienced in his home life had been sneaked behind the closed door of the kitchen, where his mother and the manse’s warm-hearted housekeeper had in a conspiracy of silence tried to make the boy’s life happy out of the sight of his father.

      At the private life of the minister and his wife, Jeannie could only guess. She sniffed as she thought about it. A man who could order the shooting of a dog for covering a bitch in a country lane just because it was outside the kirk on the Sabbath, a man who ordered the village girls to wear their sleeves to their wrists even in the summer, was not a man at ease with sensual needs.

      Thomas had seen them walking in through the courtyard from the window in the cold empty dining room. His clothes were immaculate, his shirt white and starched. There was no sign in his face of the pain he was feeling as he appeared in the doorway and confronted them. His eyes went from Jeannie’s belligerent, tightly controlled expression to that of his son, white, exhausted and afraid. СКАЧАТЬ