On the Edge of Darkness

‘Good. She was looking very pretty.’

‘Pretty?’ Adam picked up on the word sharply.

Robbie nodded. ‘She had a blue dress. And pearls round her neck. And her hair was kind of long and curly. Not like it used to be here.’

Adam bit his lip. The description did not fit the repressed, meek minister’s wife who had been his mother. Perhaps his father was right. She had become a whore.

Miserably he stared at the narrow tumbling glitter of the water in front of him. He said nothing.

‘Are you still planning to be a doctor?’ Robbie threw his own stone at the water, angling it so it skittered over the rocks and disappeared over the edge into the whirling brown pools.

Adam nodded bleakly.

‘Are you going to Aberdeen medical school or Edinburgh next year? Tell your father you want to go to Edinburgh. We could have some wizard fun together. It’s great there, Adam. I’m going to read Classics.’ The boy’s face had lit up with enthusiasm. ‘And I’m going to fly. They all say war is coming. If it does I want to be in the RAF.’

Adam shook his head. Talk at the Academy was all of war too. ‘Then I hope they see you coming. You can’t even ride a bike, if I remember, without pranging it!’

‘That was a while ago, Adam. I can drive a car now! Grandfather taught me. He’s got a Morris Cowley. And I’ve a licence to ride a motorbike. I can take you on the back!’ His enthusiasm was beginning to cheer Adam up.

‘What does your father say about all this?’ Adam had always rather liked the factor, who used to take him and Robbie on bird-watching trips up in the hills when they were too young to go on their own.

‘Och, he’s fine about it. He doesn’t care what we do.’ He sounded just a little too casual. ‘What about you, Adam? What about the minister?’

Adam grimaced. ‘I can’t wait to get my Highers and go.’ It was true, he realised suddenly. Without Brid and her family, what had he to stay for?

It was nearly dark when Adam sat on the window seat of his attic room and took his mother’s letter out of his pocket. He turned the envelope over several times and looked down at it. It had the one word Adam written on it. The sight of his mother’s handwriting made him feel strange. First he thought he might cry; then he felt angry. He crumpled it up and threw it in his waste paper basket, overwhelmed by a feeling of lost betrayal, then as suddenly he dived on it and tore it open.

My darling Adam,

I have written to you several times before, but I don’t know if you ever got my letters. It may be your father didn’t pass them on.

Please try and understand. I could not live with your father any more. Why need not concern you now, only believe me, I had no choice. I had to come away. I know how hurt and angry you must be with me. Please, let me explain. Your father won’t let you come and see me now, but when you leave school, if you would like to, please come then. I love you so much and I miss you dreadfully. Your loving Mother.

Adam put down the letter. His eyes were full of tears. No, of course his father had not given him her letters. He looked at the piece of paper in his hand again. She did not say if she was alone or what she was doing. There was just an address, in Edinburgh, and those few impassioned words.

The light was on in his father’s study. Pushing open the door without knocking Adam thrust the letter across the desk. ‘Is it true? Did she write to me?’

Thomas stared at the letter. There was no anger in his face when he looked up at Adam, only a terrible haggard sorrow.

‘And what was the sin you told me she had committed?’ Adam wasn’t sure where the courage had come from to allow him to speak to his father in this way.

Thomas’s face darkened. ‘That is not your business, boy.’

‘Was it another man? Wee Mikey said she ran away with a Frenchman.’ The question he had wanted to ask for so long burst out of him. ‘Did she? Weren’t we good enough for her?’ Tears were pouring suddenly down his face.

His father stared at him without expression for several seconds, then at last he shook his head. ‘I do not know, Adam, and I don’t want to.’ And that was all he would say.

The stone was silver in the moonlight, the old symbols showing clearly, their deep incisions darkened by lichen, their design as clear as the day they were cut. Adam stood looking at them miserably. The serpent, the crescent and the broken rod, and there, at the base, the mirror and the comb. He frowned. Gartnait had never copied the mirror on his stone. The designs had been finished last time he had seen him but that small corner of the stone was empty. He bent and touched the outline with his fingers. The mirror on his mother’s dressing table, with her brush and comb, had been burned with all her other things on his father’s bonfire. He had found the blackened ivory and splintered glass next to some charred pieces of brown fabric which had once been his mother’s best dress.

He would see her again. Whatever she had done, she was still his mother. She wouldn’t have gone if his father hadn’t driven her away. Even if she had found someone else – his mind slid sideways around the thought, not able to confront it – she still loved him, her letter had said as much. And she missed him. His mind made up, he found himself smiling in the moonlight. He would go to Edinburgh next year, to study medicine as planned, and he would go and see his mother. And in the meantime he would write to her and tell her his news.

Chastened and obedient, Brid learned the names of the thirty-three kings. She learned the rituals of fire and water. She learned divination from the flight of birds, from the clouds and the stars, from the trees and the falling of the fortune sticks. She learned spells and incantations and healing. She began to learn the nature of the gods and goddesses and how to intercede with them and about the sprinkling of the blood; she learned about the soul which dwells within the body but which can fly free as a bird, to travel, to learn, and to hide and she learned how she too by dint of study and dreams and the use of sacred smoke could enter the dream and travel through the layers of time to the worlds beyond the world.

Her special study was the wildcat. She left the school as did the other women from time to time, completely alone, and followed the animals’ secret trails into the hills. She studied their hunting and their killing. She studied their sleeping and their lazy washing on a hidden sunlit ledge amongst the rocks and cliffs. She studied their meeting and mating and the secret places where the she-cats raised their mewling kittens. She learned how to read the mind of the cat and then at last she began to walk in the paw prints of the creature, feeling its skin as her skin, tearing her prey, eating the sweet raw meat of hare or vole or game and licking the rich blood from her paws.

And back at the school in the evenings sometimes she spied on Adam in her dreams. Secretly she remembered the strength of his arms, the passion of his kiss, the soft boy’s cheek above the newly rough man’s whiskers, the deep thrust of his manhood, and she slipped from her meditation out into the plane where there is no time or place and all things are one, and she crept close to him to touch his lips with her own as he slept.

It was a few days after Adam took his final exam the following summer that he saw Brid again. She was waiting for him, as she had once before, near his house, and she dived on him as he climbed off his bicycle after a visit to Robbie to celebrate the start of the holidays.

‘A-dam! A-dam! Where have you been? I have come for three days!’ She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the mouth, then she pushed him away and punched him gently in the stomach. ‘You forget Brid?’

‘No.’ Recovering from the shock of seeing her, his face broadened into a smile. ‘No, I never forget Brid. How did you get back? What about your uncle?’

She smiled, and put her finger to her lips. ‘I have persuaded him to be nice. I will tell you later.’ She glanced round. ‘Is it safe for me here?’ She looked nervously up the street. She would never tell him the fear she had felt when she saw her first car, a black Alvis belonging to James Ferguson from Birnam, roaring along the narrow road leaving a trail of blue smoke.

Adam followed her gaze and then glanced back at the house. Behind him the manse would be empty. Jeannie Barron would have gone on the bus into Perth as she usually did on a Wednesday and his father would be visiting the cottage hospital. He nodded. ‘No one will see us.’ He smiled at her, still holding her hand. ‘I tell you what, shall I fetch some cake?’

‘Chocolate cake?’ She looked at him archly.

‘Maybe.’

She followed him nervously around the back of the house and even more hesitantly in at the back door.

‘It’s all right. There’s no one here.’

He beckoned up the passage towards the kitchen.

‘It’s big. Like a castle.’ She tiptoed over the flags in awe.

‘No it’s not.’ He flung open the kitchen door and stopped in surprise. Jeannie Barron was standing at the table, up to her elbows in flour, rolling pastry.

It was too late to turn back. She had looked up and seen him. ‘Well, young man. Did you have a good visit with Robbie? Did you remember to tell him to say hello from me to his grandmother –’ She broke off abruptly as she saw Brid hovering behind him. ‘So, who is this?’

Adam watched her eyes move quickly up and down, taking in Brid’s long hair, her embroidered tunic, her soft leather skirt and her laced sandals. Her frown was so quickly hidden he wondered if he had imagined it.

‘So, lassie, come in and let’s be seeing you.’

Brid hesitated and Adam, turning, took her hand with a reassuring smile. ‘This is Brid. Brid, this is Jeannie who makes chocolate cakes.’

Brid’s face lit into a smile. ‘I like chocolate cake.’

Jeannie nodded. ‘I thought he couldn’t have been eating them all by himself. Well, if you look in the pantry you’ll find a new one I made specially for him.’ She turned back to her dough. ‘And what kind of a name is Brid, if I may ask?’ Like Adam she had pronounced it Breed.

‘It’s short for Bridget,’ Adam put in hastily. ‘Sort of a nickname.’

‘I see. And where do you come from then, lass? I don’t think I’ve seen you before.’

‘She lives in a village the other side of Ben Dearg,’ Adam answered for her again. ‘Her brother is the stone mason there.’