On the Edge of Darkness. Barbara Erskine
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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