On the Edge of Darkness

by Barbara Erskine

  The kitchen door opened and a woman appeared, her anxious face clearly illuminated in the yard light.

  ‘Jenny? What are you doing here?’ Liza felt a cold lurch of terror deep in her stomach at the sight of her neighbour. ‘Where’s Phil?’

  Jenny shrugged. ‘I hoped that you were him. He went out a couple of hours ago. There was a phone call from Harry Evans up at Bryn Glas. He said there were some school children lost up on the mountain. They were getting a search party together. Phil rang me to come and sit with Beth and he went.’ She shrugged. ‘I rang Eleri an hour ago to see if there was any news and she said she didn’t know anything about any children and Harry was asleep in bed. Oh, Liza, love, I didn’t know what to make of it. I don’t know if it was some kind of practical joke, or what. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t leave Beth. I didn’t know whether I should ring the police?’

  Liza stood where she was. Her whole body had gone completely numb. She stared out into the darkness behind the barns at the great black shoulder of the mountain lying asleep under the stars.

  Brid.

  ‘Shall I ring the police, or what?’ She realised suddenly that Jenny was still talking.

  ‘I don’t know. Yes, I suppose so.’ Panic was sweeping over her in waves. ‘I’ll come in and have a word with Eleri myself. When did Phil get the phone call?’

  She was shaking so much she could scarcely lift the phone. This time it was Harry who answered. ‘Strange kind of a joke, Liza. I wonder if he misheard, or dreamed it or something?’ The deep voice was reassuring. ‘Look, if he turns up here I’ll ring you. Perhaps you’d better have a word with the police, just in case he’s gone off the road. It’s icy up here. Don’t worry, he’ll turn up.’

  The police were polite, reassuring and not inclined to take action for the time being. Liza slammed down the phone. ‘They are not going to do anything. They don’t care. He’s not been gone long enough, apparently. How long do you have to be?’ She turned towards the door. ‘Please, Jenny, will you stay a bit longer? I’m going up there myself.’

  ‘Are you sure? Do you want me to call Ken?’

  ‘No.’ Liza shook her head, pulling on her rubber boots and reaching for a jacket and scarf. ‘No, I’ll find him. He can only have gone up on the mountain road. He might have gone to Meryn or he might have driven on over the pass into Hay.’ Or he might have skidded and come off the road at any one of a number of places on the single track, some of which had sheer drops on one side.

  The car was still warm and welcoming. Slamming the door she gunned the engine and backed round, nosing out onto the lane again and turning up the hill.

  Meryn’s house was deserted. She stood in the garden outside, staring in dismay at the lean-to shed where he kept his car. It was empty. The chimney was cold and the living room, when she peered through the windows with their open curtains, had a deserted, unlived-in air.

  ‘Oh Meryn!’ Standing outside she burst into tears like a disappointed child. She had been relying on him, she realised suddenly, for comfort and advice and strength.

  ‘Phil!’ Her shout seemed to echo across vast distances under the stars and lose itself on the side of the mountain. There was no reply.

  She drove slowly, the main beam of her headlights picking up the twists and turns in the road. Ice sparkled over the gravelled tarmac, and she realised that in places where the skim of tar had been renewed and the ice was glassy smooth she could see the faint traces of another car ahead of her. ‘Phil?’ She braked a little, feeling the wheels slide on a corner as the headlights picked up the huddled shapes of some dozen wild ponies, standing with their backs to the wind, their long shaggy coats covered in mud as they watched her pass with uncurious eyes.

  The car engine laboured and she glanced in sudden terror at the petrol gauge. It showed the tank still a quarter full. She was nearing the top of the pass. Once there she could pull off onto a broad lay-by and view the countryside in the moonlight.

  Standing beside the car she could see the road ahead, a silver ribbon running up and down along the side of the hill almost as far as the eye could see, only here and there disappearing into a dip or behind an outcrop of rock. Forcing herself to be calm she let her eye travel slowly and carefully over each inch of the distant view, cursing herself for not bringing the binoculars from the peg by the back door.

  It was almost as light as day up here. Behind her, in the fold of the valley where the trees grew thick on either side of the brook, it was pitch dark. Somewhere down there, behind her, she could hear an owl calling, and in the distance the occasional conversational bleat from a sheep. They were huddled now down on the lower fields of the farm at the bottom of the mountain, but the sound carried up onto the hills where the summer grazing led up to the foot of the high black cliffs which were the haunt of buzzard and kite.

  The low growl from somewhere in the shadows of the rocks at the edge of the lay-by made her spin round, her eyes desperately trying to penetrate the darkness. Her heart was thumping audibly beneath her ribs. She turned a full circle trying to pinpoint the spot from which the sound had come, but she could hear nothing now in the immensity of the silence. Carefully she edged back towards the open door of the car and then in an instant she saw it. The cat was standing there in front of her – large, tabby markings, its ears set low and flat on the broad sweep of its forehead, its eyes glowing almost red in the moonlight, its lips curled back to reveal its teeth. Liza turned and dived into the car, slamming the lock down as hard as she could. Breathing hard she looked in the mirror, then craned round to see where it was. It was no longer there, but she thought she saw, just for a second, the figure of a woman standing in the shadow of the rocks.

  ‘You bitch!’

  Starting the engine, Liza manoeuvred the car round with shaking hands until the headlights were shining full on the spot where she had seen the figure. There was nothing there but a small stunted thorn tree, its trunk twisted and bent by the wind.

  She drove slowly right across the shoulder of the hill where the road clung to the solid ground between soft mountain mires with ice-rimmed waterholes and gorse-strewn grass, then followed it carefully, winding downwards towards the treeline. There, almost by the cattle grid, she saw the skid marks leading off the road and over into a small ravine. Pulling the car up she muttered a breathless prayer before forcing herself to open the door and climb out.

  The mountainside remained silent.

  Slipping and sliding she ran across the icy road onto the grass and began to make her way down the almost vertical hillside to where a small brook burbled along towards the forestry.

  Phil’s old Land-Rover had pitched bonnet first into the brook. At first she hadn’t recognised it, a patch of darker shadow in the deep shadows of the small valley. Then she saw the familiar outline of the vehicle, unfamiliar in its position.

  ‘Phil?’ Her voice sounded so small in the echoing quiet of the mountains. ‘Phil, are you all right?’

  She knew he wasn’t. She had known from the moment she had set out from the house half an hour before, but still she had hoped. Still she fought the door open and pulled at his hand; still she felt for a pulse in the ice-cold wrist; tried to ease the angle of the bruised, battered face. Still she fetched a blanket and wrapped it around him as tenderly as if he had been a sleeping child. Then she sat down on the frozen grass beside the Land-Rover and cried.

  She was discovered two hours later by a farmer driving up towards Capel-y-fin in the early hours of the morning after a drinking session with a friend at Glasbury. He was brought to a halt by Liza’s car standing in the middle of the road, the driver’s door still open, the lights by now dim.

  Only faintly aware that in her dreams she had slid from Adam’s warm bed and walked for a while on a cold, frost-covered mountain, Brid pressed her icy body against his warm one and heard his sharp, shocked intake of breath as one of pleasure. Closing her eyes she allowed herself to become one with her happiness, breathing in the scent
of his skin, tasting its salt with the tip of her tongue. He groaned in his sleep and turned away from her abruptly, reaching instead for his pillow and dragging it under his head. She sat up, angry at his rejection, her eyes narrowing in the dark. She fed on his strength; if he withheld it she could not stay with him. Without him she was lost. She glanced round into the darkness and at once sensed the prowling shadows. They were so close. Broichan had not given up. He was waiting for her at the boundaries of time.

  Neither Jane nor Adam came to the funeral. On the phone when Liza had rung them Jane was sympathetic but distant.

  Adam would not speak to her at all.

  17

  The pain of the loss did not lessen but as time passed it grew more bearable. No one ever questioned Phil’s skid on the ice and Liza had no proof – and never would have – that a beautiful young woman from a distant age had appeared on the road in front of him, just as she had in front of the car that carried Julie and Calum – the arbitrary, vicious act of an obsessed and violent spirit lost somehow in the corridors of time.

  Those first years after Phil’s death were unbelievably busy. She had to start work almost at once – neither of them had had the temperament or the inclination to save. Phil had been the one earning the money while she brought up Beth. That had been the agreement, and she had been surprised at how easily she had been able to put her career on hold. She was equally surprised at how relieved she was to have to start painting again – it helped to distract her from her loss – and how easily the commissions began to pour in. It was difficult to balance the needs of a lively youngster with the peace and space she needed to work, but she had managed it with the help of kind neighbours and tolerant sitters.

  Beth’s beauty as a small child and her sunny temperament had helped. As had the ease with which she had fitted into the way of life which evolved round them, the startling peace and silence of the Welsh countryside alternating with glamorous and bustling visits around Europe as Liza’s already brilliant reputation flourished.

  It had been a lonely life, though. At first Liza did not know how she would survive without Phil. Every corner of the house seemed empty without him, every action she performed seemed meaningless. Without the small girl to look after she would have lost the will to live. But Beth was there for her all the time, the small arms creeping round her neck, the comforting kisses, the first lisped words which, Liza guiltily remembered seemed to have been, ‘Don’t cry, Granny Liza,’ as the little fingers wiped away her tears.

  Meryn had been there too. For the first time ever he came down the hill and she found him one day sitting in her kitchen. His philosophy was simple. Phil had gone nowhere. He was still there with them, watching over them, expecting them to show him they could cope. He taught Liza how to talk to Phil, how to ask his advice and listen deep inside herself for his answers. He taught her that Phil would not want her to waste her life in tears, or let Beth’s childhood be full of unhappy memories. And he taught her at last to let Phil go, to allow him to move on so that his memory no longer filled the house, to visit the grave next to those of their daughter and her husband on the sun-warmed hillside with joy, not sadness, not every week but occasionally when there was a special memory she wanted to share. He also taught her to ring-fence their lives against Brid. There would be no more visitations at the farm from wildcats or from vengeful, jealous spirits. Then when he felt she was strong enough again to stand on her own he came less and less to the farm and, one day, when she turned off the lane to his cottage, she found him gone, the chimney cold, and realised that once more he had left her to manage alone.

  There were even, in the end, other men over the years. Not many and not seriously, except for one, an Italian count, an author, who lived in an ancient, half-ruined castle in the hills behind Fiesole whose portrait she had painted one glorious, never-to-be-forgotten summer. She had come near to marrying him but even with him, something held her back. It was not that her feelings were not strong enough. Without any sense of disloyalty to Phil she had allowed herself to adore him and would happily have spent the rest of her days at his side, but some inner sense of preservation stopped her. She did not want, now, to belong to someone as Michele would want her to belong to him. She was her own person. And she was her art. They were too independent and too precious and he had not understood. It was a long time now since she had been to the beautiful castello amongst the olive trees.

  From the very beginning Beth went with her on her painting trips, staying in hotel rooms, lying by swimming pools, whilst Liza sat in front of her easel with her latest celebrity sitter. If they stayed in the sitter’s house, as they had with Michele, that was better. It was more fun and the child had more freedom to wander around. From very young she had got into the habit of taking her own sketch pad and her colouring chalks. Later she had graduated to paints, but she never did portraits. That was Liza’s department. Instead she had concentrated on landscape, studying the differences of the places they went: the South of France, Italy, Switzerland. As the years went by, book after book of neat, meticulous sketches piled up at home in her small bedroom at the farm. She did O Level art, then A Level, then went to St Martin’s, and once or twice a year she and Liza met up with Granny Jane, who seemed twenty years older than Liza who was technically her granny too, although she always thought of her now just as Liza, and sometimes, secretly, in her innermost fantasies, as her mother.

  She knew she had a grandfather who was a doctor in St Albans, but he was never mentioned by either woman when they were together, and when she asked Liza about him she was greeted with a shrug and a look of intense sadness which put her off any further enquiries. She sort of knew there was Another Woman. It sounded Victorian and romantic and very sad, and it accounted for Granny Jane’s white hair and wrinkled, sunken face, but Liza never talked about her, which was strange because in every other department Liza was very modern and broad-minded and you could talk to her about anything. And considering there were so many vital gaps in Beth’s life – her parents, Grandfather Phil whom she didn’t really remember apart from a pair of huge huggy arms – she didn’t think one could afford to waste a perfectly serviceable grandfather. She was intrigued.

  The last time the three women had met was at Christmas, when Liza had delivered a painting to a flat in Eaton Terrace. She and Beth had arranged to meet Jane at Harvey Nichols and the three of them ensconced themselves at a table near the window in the restaurant. Liza stared at Jane for a moment, unable to hide her shock at how the other woman had aged. She said nothing until Beth had disappeared to find the loo, then she reached across the table and touched Jane’s hand.

  ‘Why do you stay after all this time?’

  Jane shrugged. ‘Someone has to look after him. He drinks, you know.’

  Horrified, Liza stared at her. ‘Adam?’

  ‘Who else? She has sucked him dry. There is nothing left. He works one day a week, and that is only because Robert can’t think of a way of getting rid of him. He’s only got to make one more mistake and he’s out. They’ve got another partner now, so he wouldn’t be missed.’

  ‘Oh, Jane. What a mess.’ Liza’s eyes filled with tears. ‘When I look back he had so much promise. So much enthusiasm.’

  Jane nodded. ‘I’m winning, you know. Just by being there.’ She gave a strange smile. ‘She can’t stand me being in the house. I still have the rowan cross, that’s probably why I’m still alive! She can’t understand why I am still there. She tried to kill me again the other day.’

  Liza stared at her in horror. ‘What happened?’ she breathed.

  Jane shrugged almost nonchalantly. ‘I’m always careful. I know what she’s like. I don’t turn my back. Usually she’s not there when Adam’s out. The day he goes to the surgery I can go upstairs. I clean their room. It’s pitiful. An old man’s room. I was carrying the Hoover downstairs and she pushed me. I saw her out of the corner of my eye. She hasn’t changed, you know. Still all that long hair which keeps him so
besotted. I can’t think what she sees in him. He’s like a raddled old man!’ Her voice took on a tone of extreme disgust. ‘If I wasn’t there he wouldn’t eat or have clean clothes, or someone to throw away his bottles. As it is he knows I won’t let him go to the surgery if he’s drunk. He did it once. It was nearly the end. That was when Robert said there had to be a new partner. No one stays in the same practice for forty years any more, you know, they all move around. When Robert retires, Adam will have to as well.’ She reached for the gin and tonic she had ordered as soon as they sat down at the table. ‘Beth is looking very pretty,’ she added abruptly.

  ‘She is.’ Liza nodded, glad to change the subject. She was watching Jane’s hand, which was shaking as it gripped the glass. ‘Don’t say anything in front of her. She has this romantic image of Adam – I don’t know where it’s come from!’

  ‘From you.’ Jane fixed her with a disconcertingly steady eye. ‘You always were besotted with him. But you had the sense to stay out of reach once you knew you couldn’t win.’ They were both silent for a moment, thinking of Phil. Jane snapped out of her reverie and smiled as she saw Beth making her way between the tables towards them. She had indeed grown up to be very pretty, with her father’s dark hair and her mother’s delicate features. She was a little plump perhaps, but she turned heads. Her vivacity and charm ensured that.

  For the rest of the lunch Liza and Beth regaled Jane with stories of their latest trip which had been to New York, where Liza had painted the wife of a Wall Street tycoon and then amused herself by agreeing to paint a portrait of his favourite dog.

  ‘And now,’ Liza went on, ‘Beth has a commission to illustrate a book about our mountains. So, when I go to Italy next month, she is staying behind at the farm to start her first serious job. You’ve heard of Giles Campbell, the travel writer?’