On the Edge of Darkness. Barbara Erskine

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 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