On the Edge of Darkness

by Barbara Erskine

  For a moment there was total silence in the room. Brid stared at her with eyes of flint and Jeannie felt a jolt of real fear. She swallowed hard. The minister was actually not in his study. She wasn’t sure where he was. Visiting someone in the parish, perhaps, or in the kirk. She straightened her shoulders. Brid was only a slim wee thing. Why should she feel so afraid?

  She read the fatal message in Brid’s eyes for just one second before Brid put her hand to her leather belt and calmly drew her knife. She tried to run, but it was too late. The beaten and polished iron weapon caught her between the shoulderblades before she had taken more than one step and she fell awkwardly, clutching the bag to her chest as the blood slowly welled out over her pale blue cardigan. The only sound she made was a small gasp.

  Brid stood still, amazed at the incredible surge of energy and excitement which had shot through her. Then, expressionless, she wrestled the bag from Jeannie’s clutch and opened it, tipping the contents on the floor. She surveyed the items with interest. There was a little round mother-of-pearl powder compact, given to Jeannie by Adam’s mother when she realised that the minister would not allow her to keep such a frivolity. A comb. A handkerchief. A small diary. A purse and a wallet. She ignored the wallet, which contained a large white five-pound note, not recognising it as money. The compact she took and examined. She pushed the small catch on the side and gasped as it opened to reveal a mirror. For a moment she stared at herself, rapt in wonder, then, hastily, she tucked it inside her dress. Then she reached for the purse. Inside were nine shillings, three sixpences, four pennies and a ha’penny. She hoped it was enough to go to Edinburgh.

  Adam met Liza when she was drawing his corpse. Dissection fascinated him. It was meticulous, delicate and the structures of skin and muscle and organ that he uncovered were beautiful beyond anything he had ever imagined. The young men who shared his class joked and complained about the smell of formalin and messed about to cover their unease at what they were doing, but Adam was completely enchanted. They thought he was mad; a bit of a swot. Only Liza understood. She arrived one morning, a large portfolio under her arm, her bright clothes and long, flame-coloured scarf a shocking contrast to the dark walls and the sober overalls of the young men.

  She smiled at them from huge, amber-coloured eyes and tossed her long auburn hair back over her shoulders. ‘Do you mind if I draw your body?’ She was already setting up her easel just behind Adam’s elbow. Their supervisor was ostentatiously looking in the other direction. ‘I won’t get in your way, I promise.’

  Adam was astonished. The women’s dissection room was separate from the men’s across the corridor. His surprise turned to irritation. She must have bribed a servitor or one of the lecturers to get in and she was a distraction. She made his colleagues, never serious at the best of times, behave in an even more silly fashion than usual. She herself though was as serious as he was, scowling with concentration as she sharpened her pencils and drew with meticulous detail the facial structures beneath the skin.

  It was she who suggested that Adam have a cup of tea with her after the session. ‘You take your work seriously. Much more than the other boys.’ She smiled at him gravely. ‘Are you planning to be a surgeon?’ There was a faint accent there, attractive, lilting. He could not place it.

  He shrugged. ‘I’ve always assumed I’ll be a GP. I like people. When you’re a surgeon they’re always asleep. Or so you hope.’ He gave a slow smile. He had grown up a great deal in the first months of his new life.

  She responded dazzlingly. ‘In a way it’s a pity. You’ve got wonderful hands.’ She reached across the table and took one, opening it palm up and looking at it through narrowed eyes. ‘Your life line is very strong.’ She traced it with her fingertip. ‘And look, there will be three women in your life.’ She glanced up at him under her eyelashes, laughing. ‘Lucky women!’

  Embarrassed, he pulled his hand away, feeling the colour rising in his cheeks. ‘Where did you learn to hand read?’ His father would have had fifty fits.

  ‘From my mother. I inherited my art from my father.’ She pulled the sugar bowl towards her and drew patterns in the crystals with the spoon. ‘I’m studying to be a portrait painter. But I need to know how the whole body works. However much you observe and notice the colour and the texture and the shadows of the skin, unless you know about the musculature and bones underneath, you’re not going to get the depiction strong enough.’ She paused and a shadow crossed her face. ‘It’s still hard for women, you know. They made an awful fuss about me wanting to come and draw your corpse this morning.’

  ‘Did they?’ He was beginning to fall under her spell. ‘I expect they thought you would distract us.’ He grinned. ‘You did. Why didn’t you go to the women’s class?’

  She smiled. ‘I tried. They were much stricter. No outsiders. I didn’t distract you though. You were the serious one.’

  ‘I think I’m a serious person.’ He shrugged self-deprecatingly. ‘But I’ve one or two chums who are working very hard to reform me.’

  ‘Good. Let me help. Do you want to come round to see my studio?’

  He nodded. He was beginning to feel extremely happy.

  She did not reappear in the dissecting room but it was arranged that he would go to visit her the following Saturday.

  It was on the day before that he received a letter from his father telling him about Jeannie Barron’s death.

  The police can find no motive. It is completely senseless. Her handbag was rifled, but the blaggard left her wallet. He took her purse and her powder compact as far as we can guess. From what Ken says she used to keep them in there. They haven’t found the weapon. No one saw anything or heard anything …

  The minister’s anguish poured off the page but Adam had stopped reading. He was crying like a child.

  He almost didn’t go to Liza’s, but he had no way of getting in touch with her and in the end he was glad to get out of his rooms. Robbie’s shocked anger at what had happened – he too had known Jeannie since he was a little boy – didn’t help, nor did his way of dealing with it, which was to go out and get very drunk.

  The studio was in an old loft overlooking the Water of Leith. Adam climbed the narrow dark stairway and knocked on the door, completely unprepared for the assault on his senses which the opening of the door provoked. The huge single room where Liza lived and worked was flooded with light from two floor-length windows. More than three-quarters of the floor space was given over to a studio, the bare boards splashed with paint, two easels in place, one with a picture, covered with a cloth, the other bearing a half-finished portrait of an old man. A large refectory table was barely visible under paints and pencils and palettes, knives and brushes and on a plate in one corner, Adam couldn’t help but notice with a slight shudder, there was a sandwich liberally sprouting a rather pretty green mould.

  Liza’s living corner in contrast was far from spartan. The divan bed was covered in a scarlet bedspread; there were cushions and Victorian silk shawls, bright rag rugs, and an old hatstand where hung her supply of long gypsy skirts and shirts and jumpers. On the other side of the space was a small gas ring and a large chipped enamel sink. ‘Home!’ She welcomed him with outflung arms. ‘What do you think of it?’

  Adam was stunned into silence. He had never seen a place like this before, never met anyone quite like Liza. He was intrigued, and enchanted and shocked to the roots of his Presbyterian soul. She fed him hot buttered toast and jam and huge chunks of crumbly cheese and pots of strong tea and showed him her paintings, which were in themselves deeply shocking to him. They were powerful, vibrant evocations of personality, ugly in their reality, uncomfortable to look at and, he decided, rightly, probably very good indeed. He wandered round, toast dripping jam in his hand, speechless as he turned canvas after canvas to face him. There were landscapes as well – rugged, moody landscapes which he didn’t recognise, but more than anything he liked the portraits.

  She looked over his shoulder at a dark
stormy scene of rocky mountains and torn, tortured clouds. ‘Wales,’ she said. ‘I’m Welsh. Or at least half of me is. My Da was Italian, but I never knew him.’ She began to wind up the gramophone. ‘Do you like music? I love it. Especially opera.’ She slid a record out of its paper sleeve and put it on the turntable. ‘Listen.’

  It was another assault on his senses. He had never heard anything like it before. It was loud and sensuous and strident and wild. He could feel his blood beginning to race, emotions he never knew he possessed swirling up through him. Then the music stilled and grew sad and, overwhelmed by it all, to his intense embarrassment he found there were tears in his eyes. He couldn’t control them and frantically he turned away from her to stare out of the window across the rocky stream towards the huddled buildings on the opposite bank.

  Liza had noticed. Silently she followed him and took his hand. ‘What is it, Adam? What’s wrong?’

  It all came out. Jeannie. The manse. His father. His mother. The man she lived with in sin, but who made her so very, very happy.

  Liza was appalled. Quietly she held him against her shoulder as though he were a child and let him cry. The record came to an end and hissed quietly on the turntable, waiting for the needle to be lifted off. They ignored it. He could feel a quiet sense of peace and security engulfing him, slowly healing his pain. When at last Liza moved the tears were gone. And so was his embarrassment.

  She put another record on, Chopin this time, and they listened to it together thoughtfully, sitting relaxed near each other but not touching, as the light faded from the sky. Later they went for a pie and mash at a pub in Leith Walk and they laughed and they chattered and he learned about her family – an eccentric mother, kindly, warm, much-loved farming grandparents, but nothing about her exotic father – and then at last he saw her home before taking the tram back to the High Street. By the time he got back to his digs he thought he was probably in love.

  In the end Brid had not needed the money in the purse to go to Edinburgh. As she walked south along the road from Pittenross in the pouring rain a car pulled up beside her. ‘Do you want a lift?’ A woman was at the wheel.

  Brid was dropped in Princes Street as it grew dark. Staring at the crowds, the cars, the trams, she turned slowly round, afraid and very lost. ‘A-dam?’ She murmured his name out loud against the shouts of a newsboy calling the evening edition of the paper from a stand by the side of the road. ‘A-dam, where are you?’

  Somehow she had to find somewhere quiet, then she could use her art to find him. As long as he had her silver pendant on him, it would be easy.

  Adam did not go back to the manse for Christmas. He and Robbie packed their rucksacks and hitched a lift with one of their fellow students down to Newcastle for the winter break. They drank a lot of beer and walked some way along Hadrian’s Wall and talked about the likelihood of war.

  Back in Edinburgh Adam saw as much of Liza as he could, though they were both working hard. Her dedication to her art was total, he learned, and it took precedence over everything. It was just as well, as his own chosen career did not leave a lot of time spare for a social life. Much to Robbie’s disgust, he was spending more and more time at his studies with only the occasional respite.

  One evening he did spare for Liza. It was her birthday. Poverty stricken as usual, he agonised for a long time over what to give her, then providence pointed the way. He had been rummaging through some boxes in his untidy room and under some books and notes he found an old cigarette carton. Shaking it hopefully he heard something rattle. Brid’s pendant had fallen out of the tissue paper he had wrapped it in and lay in the palm of his hand, tarnished but very beautiful. He looked down at the intricate, interwoven pattern, the tiny links in the chain, and just for a moment he felt a twinge of guilt at the idea which had leaped into his mind. He put the guilt aside at once. Brid would never know; he doubted if he would ever see her again anyway, and he had made it clear to her, hadn’t he, that men did not wear such things. And the beauty and craftsmanship would appeal enormously to Liza. Smiling to himself, he set about polishing it up.

  Liza held it for a long time in her hand, gazing at it. Then at last she looked up at Adam and smiled. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips, then she let him hang it round her neck.

  It was the next day after taking Liza out to a quick lunch between lectures that Adam thought he saw Brid. Hand in hand he and Liza were walking up the Mound past the National Gallery, Liza wearing the pendant at the neck of her blouse, when Adam happened to glance across the road towards the Castle. A group of people were walking fast down the other pavement, laughing, some of the young men in uniform. The road was busy, full of traffic, and he could not see them clearly, but a figure walking slowly behind them caught his eye.

  He stopped, shocked. The dark hair, the pale skin; something about the walk, the angle of the head …

  ‘What is it, Adam? What’s wrong?’ Liza caught his arm. ‘You’ve gone white as a sheet. What’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He took a deep breath, astonished to feel how shaken he was. ‘I thought I saw someone I knew from home, that’s all. But it couldn’t have been.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Liza studied him for a moment and he looked away uncomfortably. Why did he sometimes get the feeling that she could read his very soul?

  ‘No. It wasn’t.’ The pavement was empty now. The crowd had hurried on. The slowly moving traffic threaded its way down the hill and whoever the woman had been, he could no longer see her.

  That night he dreamed about Brid. He dreamed they made love and then he dreamed that she tried to drown him in the fairy pool. He woke screaming and lay there, sweating, waiting for Robbie to come in swearing at being woken up. But Robbie, who a month before had signed up to join the RAFVR, was not there. He was three miles away fast asleep in the arms of a student nurse Adam had introduced him to only the previous day.

  Adam lay staring at the ceiling for the rest of the night, watching for the meagre grey dawn to creep into the close and fight its way through his window before he got up at last and began wearily to shave with a kettleful of hot water.

  He saw his first death that day. He was visiting a fellow student who had fallen down the twisting stair to his digs after imbibing several pints and broken his leg. At the end of the ward there was a young man who had been taken to the Infirmary after an accident in the factory where he was working. He had fallen into unprotected machinery and his leg had been severed just below the hip. As he left the ward, Adam lingered a moment to look at the white face on the white pillow and the young man had opened his eyes and looked straight at him. Reading the pain and terror and loneliness in the bright blue gaze Adam went across to the bed and put a gentle hand on the young man’s shoulder. It was only minutes later that he realised the young man was dead. To his surprise for a while after life had gone the eyes stayed just as bright. He stood staring down, unable to take in the moment he had witnessed. Then the ward sister who had been escorting the doctor and his train of third-year students turned back and saw him. She touched Adam’s arm. ‘You all right?’ Her smile was kind. ‘It was nice of you to stay with him.’ She pulled up the sheet with calm professionalism. ‘On your way now, young man. Forget what you have seen.’

  ‘I saw him die.’ Sitting on the floor of Liza’s studio, his arms round his legs, his chin on his knees, Adam was still trying to come to terms with it. ‘And yet for a minute I couldn’t see any difference. He was white, but he was white before he died. He just stopped breathing. That’s all.’

  She came and sat down beside him. They were listening to some Mozart. ‘Perhaps his spirit was still there. It didn’t want to go.’ She smiled. ‘You did the right thing, Adam, to be with him. It must be very frightening to die alone.’

  He shook his head. ‘Somehow I always saw myself as a doctor saving lives. Stepping in heroically and working miracles. I didn’t think about the ones we can’t save.’
They were silent for a few minutes. ‘War is coming, Liza. I’ll be staying on as a student because they’ll need doctors. Robbie will be in the RAF. What will you do?’

  She shrugged. ‘I want to go on painting. I’ll do it as long as I can. It’s my whole life. I don’t want to do anything else.’ She paused. ‘I suppose the folks might want me to go home and help with the farm.’

  ‘Back to Wales?’

  She nodded. ‘It hasn’t happened yet, Adam. Perhaps it won’t. Perhaps Hitler will change his mind.’ She shook her head violently. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t bear the thought of him interfering in all our lives. I want everything to stay the same. I want to paint sunsets and flowers and happiness. I can’t think about war. I won’t.’

  Adam gave a rueful smile. ‘We won’t have any choice. It’s in the air everywhere. Besides,’ he nodded over his shoulder at her shrouded easel, ‘you never paint sunsets and flowers and happiness. You wouldn’t know how.’

  She let out a shout of laughter. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

  The first time they made love was after they had been to a concert together at the Usher Hall. As they walked through the darkened streets he put his arm round her shoulders and drew her to him.

  ‘Liza – ’

  She put her finger to his lips to silence him and then gently kissed him. They climbed the stairs to her studio and in the soft darkness she led him across to her bed.

  They spent the summer together, and by the time the new term began they were inseparable. Liza was not like Brid in any way. Her loving was warm. In spite of her sometimes acerbic manner, with Liza he felt safe and secure and welcomed. All thoughts of the manse and the unhappiness there vanished. He had found someone in whom he could confide all his fears and hopes.