During the last few days of that school term he felt as if whatever he had almost glimpsed was lurking at the edge of his thoughts. The days were growing colder, not with the clinging chill of mist but with a relentlessness which made him feel like frozen bones imperfectly insulated by flesh as he walked between his aunt's house and the school. He tried to distract himself with schoolwork and with the token party which Mr O'Toole conceded to the school — apparently at the request of the teachers — on the last day of term, but the schoolwork seemed as much of a game as the party. Wearing a paper hat and consuming sandwiches and lemonade and playing battleships with Dominic in squared exercise books all felt like putting off the inevitable, and he was afraid to know what it was.
"Enjoy your Christmas," their teacher said when the final bell rang, "but don't eat so much you won't fit behind your desks." Some of the children gave him Christmas cards, and Ben wished he had thought to bring one, not least so that he could linger in the classroom. But his aunt was waiting at the gates. Taking deep breaths and pinching his coat collar shut, Ben sent himself out of the school.
There was no mist. The first star hung low in the sky as if it had crystallised out of the deep blue. The star was so bright, and the unblemished sky so glassy, that he felt as if the blue was about to shatter and let the starry night appear. The roofs of buildings and the bare branches of trees looked as though they had been outlined with a razor, and to Ben that seemed a sign that everything was about to grow still clearer. Buildings and trees were absolutely motionless against the sky, which appeared to solidify as it darkened, holding fast the luminous peaks of roofs, the sunlit tips of branches. As he walked home the glowing branches turned grey, and he remembered this was the shortest day of the year.
When his aunt opened the front door, a draught followed her in. Ben heard pine-needles scattering on the carpet, and fetched the brush and dustpan from beneath the kitchen sink. As he cleared up the needles he saw his reflection in a silvery globe on the tree, his head swelling as he shuffled closer on his knees, until he thought he looked like a tadpole held by ice. His grandfather had had to be pleaded with to decorate the trees they brought into the house from Sterling Forest; he'd seemed to believe that the trees, or whatever they signified, were enough.
His aunt gave him sausages and Christmas pudding for dinner, and found a carol concert on the radio to accompany the meal. Afterwards, while she put away the dishes, she sang along with the last carols as if she hoped Ben would. However, when he told her well before his bedtime that he was going up to his room she only said "I'm here if you need me."
He didn't switch on the light above the stairs as he climbed towards the stars which he could see beyond his bedroom. From his window he gazed at the stars, which barely pierced the blackness in whose depths galaxies floated like snowflakes. The blackness was no more than a hint of the limitless dark in which the world was less than a speck of dust. He imagined seeing a star move as the Christmas story said it had. The idea disturbed him, and he didn't think he wanted to know why. He switched on his bedroom light and knelt in front of the photograph.
But praying was no use: the words meant nothing to him. Had the headmaster robbed them of meaning, or had it been Father Flynn? Even the photograph unnerved Ben — not so much the frozen smiles of the women as something about the eyes of his father and grandfather and even his own eyes. He turned off the light so as not to see the eyes, and returned to the window.
A star blinked, and then another. For a moment he was sure he was about to see one move. Downstairs his aunt had tuned the radio to a comedy show to which he often listened with her. He thought she was turning the volume higher in case that would tempt him to join her, but the signature tune might as well have been trying to reach him from another world, because he'd understood at last how reassuring the sight of a moving star would be: it would mean that however dark and cold and empty it appeared to be, infinity
cared.
He felt as if he was falling off the world. The endless dark seemed to be reaching for him with its swarm of stars, with light which, felt as bleak as the space between them and which might be older than the world. He thought he could feel how the light was travelling towards him, unthinkably swift and yet slower than snowflakes when set against the expanse of time. All at once he was sure the headmaster was right to suggest that the truth which the crib made appealing was far more terrible and awesome. He realised he was shivering uncontrollably when he shoved himself away from the window, towards the light-switch. But the dark and the stars were in the mirror too, and so was he, beside the photograph. The dark was gazing back at him out of his own eyes.
The sight paralysed him. He thought of the eyes of the old man with the drum in Edward Sterling's book, but he sensed that something far older — so old that the fleeting thought of it stopped his breath — was watching him. He didn't know how long he crouched in front of the mirror, unaware of resting his weight on his knuckles on the dressing-table. As he leaned inadvertently closer his breath whitened the mirror, which sparkled as if the stars around the silhouette of his head were settling on the glass. He felt as if he himself was only an illusion that would flicker for an instant in the vast darkness, as if he was gazing through himself deep into the dark. He was afraid to move, but if he didn't he would see what was watching him out of the lightless depths.
Someone was calling his name. The voice was too distant to reach him, but it was distracting him. It was his aunt who was calling him, standing at the foot of the stairs and raising her voice to be heard over the music at the end of the comedy show. She must be wondering why he had stayed so long in his room, though as far as he was concerned no time at all had passed. When he didn't answer, she would come to find him.
She would find him in the dark, gazing entranced at himself, and it would kill her. His running away to Stargrave almost had, and he was sure that she would find the sight of him as he was now at least as dismaying. The thought made him squirm with concern for her, scraping his knuckles on the rough wood. The inane music finished its scurrying, and he heard her start up the stairs, calling anxiously to him.
A surge of panic stiffened his arms and flung him away from the mirror. He gulped a breath and flailed at the light-switch. "I'm here, Auntie," he stammered. "I was only resting." Then, terrified of what she might be able to see, he forced himself to turn to the mirror.
There was nothing to see but his own face and the photograph, nothing in his eyes except bewilderment and fading panic, nothing secretive about the faces in the photograph. Whatever had made him see what he'd seen, surely it had gone back into the dark. "I'm coming now, Auntie," he called, managing to keep his voice steady. When he heard her stop and eventually descend the stairs, he let out a shaky breath. He went downstairs as soon as he was able to conceal his nervousness, vowing that Christmas would mean everything to him that it meant to her. He mustn't ever see anything like that again, please God, for her sake.
EIGHT
Mabel Broadbent was locking her shop on Christmas Eve when the newsagent's daughter ran up, looking so crestfallen that Mabel asked what she'd wanted to buy. "Only some blue thread," Anita said as if the smallness of her purchase was an open-sesame. "I nearly finished sewing something that said Happy Christmas to my mam."
Mabel had to take pity on her. She reopened the shop long enough to sort out a reel of the blue which matched the sample Anita had wound around her forefinger, and told her to bring the money after Christmas; the day's takings were already banked. The little girl stuffed the reel into her pocket and stood on tiptoe to give Mabel a clumsy kiss that smelled of chocolate. "Have a lovely Christmas, Miss Broadbent," she gabbled.
"I've just started, love. You have one too," Mabel said as the child dashed across the square and up the hill. By the time she had locked the shop she was alone. Without the market stalls which sprouted weekly around the eroded stone cross, the town square sounded hollow. Wrapping her scarf more snugly about her neck and burrowing her hands into her gloves, Mabel gave the unlit shop a last appraisal — she would change the display of balls of wool and knitting patterns on New Year's Eve as usual — before strolling home.
The sun had sunk beyond the moors. Above Stargrave and the gloomy mass of Sterling Forest, a jade sky exhibited the carving of the jagged gritstone ridge. On Market Street, the main road through the square, most of the shops scattered among terraces of cottages on the northward stretch and clustering on both sides of the half-mile which paralleled the railway line were shut until next week. Outside the station the estate agent and his wife were loading armfuls of last-minute purchases into the larger of the taxis as the next-to-last train before the holidays chugged north. Mabel stopped at the newsagent's for a carton of du Maurier cigarettes and sipped a glass of the sherry he offered all his customers on Christmas Eve, and then she braved the night again while the alcohol was keeping off the chill.
The newsagent's was the last shop on the main road. Further on were a few whitewashed cottages with rough brick porches, the walls of their large gardens decorated with extravagant rocks brought down from the moors. Across the railway line acres of heather divided the town from the farms, one of which was showing a lit window like a fallen star. Mabel's was the last cottage before the railway bridge, but not the last building. Above it, at the end of several hundred yards of bare track which met the main road beside her garden, was the Sterling house.
A car was approaching from the town as Mabel reached her gate. Mabel waited with her hand on the latch for the headlamps to illuminate the unlit house. She didn't like to think that any children might have ventured into it, though surely they would have better things to do on this night of all nights. The car swung round the curve out of the town, raising its headlight beams as the streetlamps gave out. The light streamed across a cottage garden and found the Sterling house.
Both the house and the forest above it seemed to step forwards. For a few seconds the house and a glinting mass of trees were the brightest things in Stargrave. She had always thought that the tall grey three-storey house, with its steep roof and overbearing crown of disproportionately large chimneys, looked as if it had been separated from a Victorian terrace — as if it needed something to complete it — but now she had the disconcerting impression that the light had caught the building in the act of sharing a secret with the forest. It must be because all the curtains were drawn that it looked secretive, she thought, but she couldn't help remembering Ben Sterling and how she had failed to intervene on his behalf. The shadows of the grotesque stones which squatted on the wall surrounding the unkempt garden danced across the outside of the building as the car sped towards the bridge, and darkness rushed into the space occupied by the house. Suppressing a shiver, Mabel hurried along her path.
As she unlocked the door her cottage greeted her with scents of the wild flowers she'd twined around the oval mirror in the hall and through the uprights of the dresser in the front room.
She turned on the caged electric fire in the sitting-room, where the rugs looked like perfectly circular islands of snow on the green carpet. She picked up the handbag-sized radio from beside her armchair, where an Agatha Christie novel was keeping her place, and tuned the set to the Home Service as she marched into the kitchen to deal with the dripping tap.
Though she screwed the tap shut as hard as she could, the plop of water on stone went on and, just as she kept thinking it had stopped, on. She would have to ask someone at Elgin's yard to deal with it when the holidays were over. While she waited for her casserole to heat up she listened to a voice plummy as a pudding reading Dickens and worked on the mince pies, shaping the pastry cases and spooning in the fruit before fitting the pastry lids and ventilating them with a fork. There should be enough for everyone who came to visit during the next few days — Edna Dainty from the post office and Charlie who worked on the railway, Hattie Soulsby and her husband whose efforts to have children Mabel prayed for every night, the retired teachers who lived next door to Mabel, not to mention all the customers who always brought her presents. She was ladling herself a second helping from the casserole and basking in her sense of a job well done when a wind rushed down past the Sterling house, so cold it penetrated the warmth of the kitchen and so fierce it made the window creak.
It sounded as if a tree was outside the cottage. Mabel held onto the edge of the thick stone sink and peered out of the window. All she could see was her lawn dotted with worm-casts and bordered by earth in which her flowers were hibernating, and the night leaning on her restless privet hedge. She finished her meal as A
Christmas Carol
came to an end, and then she switched the radio off, despite the dripping of the tap, and lit a cigarette. She waited for the mince pies and gazed towards the lightless Sterling house, and at once her memories began to race.
She had never resented the Sterlings, as many of the townsfolk had. In her childhood she'd found them somewhat unnerving; whenever their large dusty black car, which made her think of a hearse, crept past the garden the sight of them had given her a shiver even on the hottest days, the men with their thin sharp faces and startlingly pale hair, the women who seemed to be growing to resemble them. Once Mabel grew up, however, she'd decided they were just decayed gentlefolk. If they had spent Edward Sterling's legacy on planting the forest in accordance with his last wish, as a memorial to him around the grove where he had died, what was wrong with that? Most of the townsfolk seemed to disapprove of them for having acquired so much money without working, but now both men taught philosophy in Leeds. Considering Stargrave's attitude to them, it was hardly surprising if the family were aloof. Their lives were no business of Mabel's — or so she had thought until Ben Sterling's grandmother had begun to patronise her shop.