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, raisin
g 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.
Charlotte had seemed to sum up the seedy grandeur of the Sterlings. That February day she had been wearing an ankle-length black coat of corduroy so thick that her arms had looked twice as plump as her frail wrists. She'd unwound several lengths of a black scarf from around her head and let it flap from her shoulders as she'd stalked up to the counter. Her grey hair had been restrained by heavy combs above a long pinched face of tissue-paper skin. "Some spools of green thread, the most expensive, if you please," she'd told Mabel with regal politeness. "Are these all? In a stout bag, thank you. Please don't trouble," she'd added when Mabel had reached for her change, a few pence. She'd flung the scarf around her ears and had swept out, leaving Mabel too amused to be furious.
Some weeks later Charlotte had come back. "Have you replenished your stock? I should have made myself clearer. I shall need a regular supply of your finest green thread. Meanwhile, please show me your white."
"You must enjoy sewing."
"So it appears," Charlotte had responded curtly. This time, however, she had accepted her change, which was a start. As she had continued to visit the shop she'd unbent very gradually, letting slip a compliment about Mabel's dress one day, another time remarking that a shopkeeper such as Mabel must see all manner of people to talk to. Thus encouraged, Mabel had eventually asked "What are you sewing with all this thread?"
Charlotte had stared so hard at her that meeting her gaze had made Mabel's eyes sting. At last the old woman had said "When it's finished I'd like you to see."
Mabel shivered and went to the oven to pull out the trays of mince pies. She slid in the last tray and stood close to the oven, hugging herself. Translucent flames of frost were spreading imperceptibly up the window. She hurried upstairs to put on a heavier cardigan before sitting with her back to the kitchen window and the dripping tap. She wouldn't be driven out of her kitchen, but while she was remembering the Sterlings she preferred not to face their dark house and darker woods.
A little more than a year ago Charlotte had brought in her sewing, producing it from a worn black handbag large enough to contain the cash register. It had proved to be an embroidered message, god is good, in a heavy wooden frame. "It's for Ben, my grandson," Charlotte had announced with a kind of grim pride.
The message had been surrounded by elaborate patterns which looked as if Charlotte had been trying to fix the meaning of the words for ever. To Mabel the patterning had seemed obsessive almost to the point of compulsion, the symmetry somehow discomforting. "Look at all the care you've taken," she said. "You must think a lot of your grandson. Are you pleased with how he's growing up?"
As Charlotte had stared at her Mabel had thought she'd presumed too much – and then Charlotte had gripped the edge of the counter and leaned so close that Mabel had smelled medicine on her breath. "His mother is," the old woman had whispered, "but not her sister."
It was clear which of them she agreed with. Before Mabel could think what to ask next, Charlotte had shoved herself away from the counter, sucking in her breath so hard that her lips had turned white. A moment later the shop door had opened to admit both of the Sterling men, pale nostrils flaring as they thrust their sharp faces forwards almost doglike, white eyebrows raised in identical expressions of mild reproof. "We were wondering where you'd wandered off to, Mother," the younger man had said.
"Come along now, Charlotte. You're always saying you don't like the cold. Let's get you back to bed. You'll be losing your sewing if you start taking it out of the house, and it's been doing you so much good."
As each man took hold of one of her arms, Charlotte had given Mabel a look which stopped just short of an appeal. The memory made her shiver and glance towards the window as if her thoughts might be overheard. There was nothing to see except the frost climbing the glass, the cold of the night rendered visible. She turned away and moved closer to the oven.
Perhaps Charlotte had been as confused and senile as the men had made her seem. Perhaps her own condition had been what she was afraid of, and he
r public image her defence against it. Mabel had dismissed the notion that the men had been putting on a show for her, but she'd wondered what sort of Christmas the little boy would have. Whenever the black car passed her cottage she'd watched for him, sitting bright-eyed and alert beside the driver, and she couldn't help thinking he looked starved of an ordinary childhood, though mustn't children always regard their own childhood as the norm? She'd considered inviting the Sterlings to her house over Christmas, and once she'd started up the track, but had felt so cold in the shadow of the forest that she'd turned back. Later that day she had been shocked to see the two men and the little boy disappearing into the pathless forest when it was almost dark. She'd watched for them to reappear, but she must have missed them. Surely they couldn't have been in there until after midnight, when she had gone to bed.
Early in January Charlotte had returned to the shop. She'd looked withered, exhausted, barely capable of supporting the weight of her overcoat. She'd stood at the counter, flicking her fingers irritably at locks of grey hair which wouldn't be contained by her scarf, until Mabel had said "Did your grandson like his present?"
The old lady had gripped the counter as if she might fall. "It isn't finished," she'd said.
Presumably she'd meant her embroidery, but why should that have caused her voice to shake? Mabel never knew, because at that moment she'd seen Ben's mother hurrying across the square. She'd thought of warning Charlotte, and then it had been too late. The old lady had started nervously as Ben's mother opened the door. "There you are, Charlotte. Carl and his father were worried about you."
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