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 a thousand years, or so it was believed, and sometimes in 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 ch
ildren.
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. He did not allow himself to waver.
‘Adam, you may go to your room. I wish to talk to Mrs Barron alone.’
He moved stiffly in front of her into his study and turned to face her at once, before she had a chance even to open her mouth. ‘I would like you to take your old job back. There has to be someone to look after the boy.’
His words took her breath away. She had been ready for a fight. She clenched her fists. ‘I nearly had the doctor to him last night,’ she said defiantly.
She saw his jawline tighten, otherwise his face remained impassive. ‘It will not happen again, Mrs Barron.’
There was a moment’s silence between them, then she lifted her shoulders slightly. ‘I see.’ There was another pause. ‘Is Mrs Craig not coming back, then?’
‘No, Mrs Craig is not coming back.’ His knuckles went white on the desk as he leaned forward to ease his pain. The scattered pieces of Susan Craig’s note had disappeared.
Jeannie nodded in grim acknowledgement. ‘Very well then, Minister. I shall resume my position here. For the boy’s sake, you understand. But it must not happen again. Ever.’
Their eyes met and he inclined his head. ‘Thank you,’ he said humbly.
She stared at him in silence for a long moment, then she turned towards the door. ‘I’d best go and light the range.’
2
For Adam the days that followed were different. His father spoke to him seldom, and when he did he was distant, as though they were polite strangers. The boy had his breakfast and midday meal in the kitchen with Mrs Barron. Supper was always cold. Sometimes he and his father would sit opposite one another in silence in the dining room; sometimes, when Thomas was out, Adam would put his supper in a bag, stow it in his knapsack and escape onto the hill.
The holidays were drawing to an end. In a few days school would start again. He was glad. Something had happened between him and his friends which he didn’t understand. There was a new restraint between them – a slight embarrassment, almost an aloofness. He did not know that the news had sped round the district that Mrs Craig, the minister’s wife, had run away to Edinburgh with – the selection was varied – a travelling salesman, a university lecturer (he had been staying at the Bridge Hotel for two weeks over the summer), or the French wine importer who had been visiting the Forest Road Hotel along the river and who had left two days before Mrs Craig had disappeared. Nothing was said, but when he caught sight of Euan and Wee Mikey whispering behind the shop and heard their sniggers, hastily cut off as he approached, he felt himself colour sharply and he turned away. They had betrayed him. His best friend Robbie would have understood, perhaps (Robbie being one of the few friends to whose house he was allowed to go) but Robbie had not been at home all summer and a year ago, after his mother had died, had gone away to boarding school. So, instead of seeing his friends for the last precious days of the holidays, Adam amused himself and concentrated hard on the thought of school.
He had always enjoyed school and he enjoyed his work. He hadn’t told his father, yet, of his ambition to be a doctor, although he had no reason to believe the minister would object. In fact he would probably be pleased. Medicine was a respectable profession. Of one thing Adam was absolutely certain. He did not wish to go into the church. He hated the kirk. He hated the Sabbath. He hated the Bible and he hated the terrible guilt he felt about hating them all so much. Only one part of his duties as the minister’s child had ever appealed to him and that was visiting the poor and sick of the parish with his mother. It was something she had done extremely well and in spite of her English background they liked her. She did not condescend or patronise. She was cheerful, helpful and not afraid to roll up her sleeves. The people respected her and Adam had swiftly absorbed the fact that half an hour in her company clearly did more for an ailing woman or an injured man than hours of preaching from his father. Sometimes they met Dr Grogan on their rounds and Adam would, when permitted, or simply not noticed in the corner of the room, watch. He had been only ten when his medical ambition first began to take shape.
A week after his world had changed so abruptly Adam, a packed lunch in his bag as well as his supper because Mrs Barron had gone on the bus to Perth to see her sister as she did every week, set off up the hillside towards the carved stone.
He had thought often about Brid and her brother and her mother and their kindness, but he had told no one about them. His natural openness, his enthusiasm, his love of life had all gone. The beating and the loss of his mother had changed him. Jeannie Barron could see it and her heart bled for the boy. She mothered him as much as she could, but he shrank a little from her when she hugged him. He tolerated her affection courteously but no more. It was as though he had closed down some part of himself and surrounded it in a protective shell. And the new Adam was secretive. He could have told his mother about his new friends. Without her there, he would tell no one.
It was a blustery day with an exhilarating autumnal bite in the wind. Besides his food and his field glasses, which were hanging round his neck on a strap, he had his specimen boxes with him – to collect interesting things for his museum – his bird book and a notebook and pencil, and he had stolen four slices of chocolate cake from the pantry. The three extra pieces were for Brid and her family. He knew Mrs Barron would see but he knew she wouldn’t tell. His father didn’t know the cake was there. Almost certainly he would have disapproved of it.
He reached the stone, panting, and swung his bag off his shoulders. He already had three birds to put in his notebook. Grouse, of course, skylark and siskin. He pulled the battered volume out, his thin brown fingers fumbling with the buckle on the outside pocket of the green canvas knapsack and, sucking the pencil lead for a moment to make it write better, he began to make his notes.
He had planned to eat lunch, to watch birds, and then in the afternoon to make his way down the far side of the hill to Brid’s cottage.
The first part of the plan went well. He sat down on a slab of exposed rock, his back to the stone, facing the view down the heather-covered hill. It was growing brown in places now, the vibrant purple of the weeks before fading. He heard the lonely cry of an eagle, and putting down his wedge of pork pie he picked up his field glasses and squinted with them towards the distant cloud-hung peaks of the mountains behind the hill.
It wasn’t until he had finished the last of his food, drunk half his ginger beer and folded the remains of the greaseproof paper neatly into his knapsack beside the carefully preserved slices of cake that he stood up and decided to go and look for Brid.
The sun was out now. It blazed down on the heather f
rom a strangely cloudless sky. He sniffed. He had lived in this part of the world all his life and he could read the weather signs clearly. The wind had dropped. He would have an hour, maybe two, then he would see the mist beginning to collect in the folds of the hills and drift over the distant peaks, which would grow hazy and then disappear.
He stood for a moment, staring round, and then he lifted the glasses and began a systematic search beyond the stand of old Scots pine for the track which had led to the burn next to which Brid’s cottage stood.
Spotting the track at last he set off, trotting confidently down the north-facing slope of the ridge, leaving the carved cross-slab behind him. He reached the trees and paused. The shadow he had thought was the track was just that, a shadow thrown by a slight change in the contour of the hill. He frowned, wishing he had taken more notice of where he was going when he had followed her before.
‘Brid!’ He cupped his hands around his mouth and called. The shout sounded almost indecent in the quiet of the afternoon. Somewhere nearby a grouse flew up squawking the traditional warning ‘go-back’. He stood still. On the horizon the landmarks were disappearing one by one as the mist closed in.
‘Brid!’ He tried again, his voice echoing slightly across the valley. Disappointment hovered at the back of his mind. He hadn’t realised how much he had been looking forward to seeing her and her brother again.
On the Edge of Darkness Page 3