"There's no sense in it, Ben. These books I gave you, they're the kind boys ought to read. There's nothing in that one except stories made up by people who had to have Edward Sterling write them down because they couldn't do it for themselves. Nasty fairy tales, like some of those Hans Andersens, only worse. They're from the same part of the world." She held out a hand which he noticed was shivering slightly. "Why don't you give me it to look after if it means so much to you? It can be a special kind of present to you when I think you're old enough."
"Can't it be in the bookcase where I can see it? It makes me think of Granddaddy."
His aunt was struggling with her emotions. "You'll have me thinking I shouldn't have wasted my money on buying you those books," she said, and blundered out of the room.
By dinnertime she seemed more in control of herself. They had meat and vegetable stew as usual, the meal which she often told him was what a growing boy needed. As usual, it tasted blander than it had smelled, as though the tastes had drifted away on the air. He mimed enjoying it, and after a few mouthfuls he said, "I like you buying me books, Auntie. I do read them."
"Do you truly? They weren't just my idea, you know. Your mother thought they would put your mind on the right track." She scooped a mush of vegetables onto her fork and looked up, balancing her cutlery on the edge of her plate. "Try to understand, Ben — this is hard for me too. It was one thing having you stay for a week every so often, but I never thought I'd be sharing my life with someone after I'd got used to living on my own, even with such a good boy as you. You mustn't think I'm complaining, but you'll give me time to get used to it, won't you? 1 know I can never replace your mother, but if there's anything within reason I can do to make you happier, don't be afraid to speak up."
"Please may I have one of the photographs you brought from the house?"
"Of course you may, Ben. Will you have one of you with your mother?"
Ben chewed another mouthful, but that didn't keep his ques
tion down. "Auntie, why didn't you like my dad and his
family?" ,
She closed her eyes as if his gaze was hurting her. "I'm being silly, Ben, you're right. I'll find you a photograph of all of you."
"But why didn't you like them?"
"Perhaps I'll tell you when you're older."
He thought she was blaming them for his mother's death. If he persisted she mightn't give him the photograph. Later, while he was clearing the table, she went up to her room, and stayed there until he began to think she had decided to refuse. At iast she brought him a photograph of himself as- a baby in his mother's arms. "That's your christening. I got your mother to have you baptised."
His father was supporting Ben's mother, or perhaps he was leaning on her; he looked as if he wanted to mop his shiny forehead. The summer heat which had stretched wide the leaves of the trees in the churchyard of St Christopher's had visibly enfeebled his grandparents. All the smiles, even his aunt's, were past their best, as if everyone had tired of waiting for the click of the camera. Ben gazed at the photograph, feeling as if he was somehow missing the point of it, until his aunt hugged him awkwardly, making him smell of her lavender-water. "You can always talk to me about them if you need to," she said. "You ran away because I hadn't given you enough time to say goodbye, didn't you?"
The question sounded casual, but he sensed how on edge she was for his answer. "Yes, Auntie," he said, unable to decide how far he'd fallen short of telling the truth. "What do you think happened to them all? Nobody would tell me."
"Carelessness, Ben. That's all it could have been, up there in broad daylight in the middle of nowhere. You should never distract someone when they're driving." She enfolded his hands in her warm plump slightly wrinkled grasp. "Thank God you were staying with me that week. We can't bring any of them back, but we'll do our best for each other, won't we? Time for bed now. No arguments, you've school tomorrow. A fine guardian I'd be if I let you bend the rules."
When he was in bed he called down to her. She let him lie under the blanket while she knelt by the bed and intoned prayers for him to amen. Her praying for peace for his family stayed with him after she'd tucked the blanket tight as a bandage around him. Somehow the idea of eternal peace invoked a memory of being carried on his father's shoulders, feeling as though he could pull the stars down from the black ice which held them and from which they had seemed already to be falling, gleams turning slowly in the night air. It had been snowing, of course, but it was odd that his father had carried him into the forest on such a night, so deep into the forest that it had swallowed the lights of Stargrave. Where had his father meant to take him that Ben had been shivering with anticipation? Ben's mind seemed to shrink from the memory, and soon a jumble of thoughts like overlapping channels on a radio put him to sleep.
He awoke feeling full of the night at its darkest. A thought had wakened him — the thought that the dark, or something in it, had a message for him. He lay staring up, trying to recall what he'd failed to grasp. Surely this wasn't yet another of the mysteries which had to wait until he was old enough. That reminded him of Edward Sterling's last book, of Ben's grandfather telling him that in order to finish it Edward Sterling had ventured so far into the icy wastes under the midnight sun that he'd had to be brought back more dead than alive from a place without a name, and had died in Stargrave almost as soon as he'd finished the book. "What did he find?" Ben had wanted to know.
His grandfather had gazed hard at him, looking like himself reflected in a distorting mirror — withered, pale, his limbs stiffening into unfamiliar shapes — and Ben had wondered if Edward Sterling had looked like that too. "One day you'll know," his grandfather had said.
Ben gathered himself like a swimmer and slipped quickly out of bed. His aunt was snoring so loudly she must be fast asleep. Nevertheless he left the light above the stairs switched off as he tiptoed down to the front room. The house stood in the dimness between two streetlamps, and the houses opposite were unlit, but he was just able to distinguish Edward Sterling's book, its spine darker than those of its companions on the shelf. He closed his fingers around the spine, whose binding made him think of old skin, and squatted by the gap between the curtains.
The book fell open at the frontispiece, which showed a wizened old man sitting crosslegged and beating a drum with the palms of his hands. In the dimness his eyes resembled globes of black ice. Ben had often thought that he must have been one of the magicians who were supposed to beat drums for months to keep the midnight sun alight, but now the eyes unnerved him. He began to turn the pages, peering at the chunks of unrhymed verse which the book said was magic poetry but which he had never been able to follow. He supposed he would have to turn on the light when he found what he was looking for, though the stars tonight seemed almost bright enough to read by. Indeed, he was beginning to distinguish the separate lines of print on the pages. He felt as if illumination was reaching for him. He didn't know how long he crouched there, but he was sure he was about to be able to read the words and what they had to tell him when he heard his aunt wailing his name.
She ran downstairs clumsily, switching on lights. She must have found his bed empty while he'd been so engrossed in gazing at the book that he hadn't heard her get up. When she barged into the room, grabbing wildly at the light-switch, he wobbled to his feet. "I couldn't sleep, Auntie. I only wanted —"
He wasn't sure how to continue, but she appeared not to be listening; she was staring grey-faced at the book in his hands as if it mattered more than anything he could say. He leaned it against the boys' adventure annuals on the shelf and headed for the door as she stepped aside like a wardress.
The guilt of having upset her again kept him awake almost until dawn; but when she wakened him for school she was smiling as if the day had disposed of the night. He felt better at once because she did. If his reading the book bothered her, he'd wait until she was out of the house.
But that evening, when he sneaked into the front room for a surreptitious glance at the picture of the shaman with the drum, he found the annuals were alone on the shelf. He ran into the kitchen, where his aunt was chopping vegetables. "Auntie, where's my book?"
She glanced at him with a casualness which didn't begin to fool him. "I couldn't have been thinking, Ben. A woman came collecting books for some charity, and I didn't like to let her go away empty-handed. Never mind, you've still got the photograph I gave you. It was only an old book."
FOUR
In the weeks that followed she tried to make it up to him. On Saturdays, shopping in Norwich, she kept showing him the oldest parts of the town, cobbled streets where muddles of houses seemed about to tumble downhill. On Sundays after church she often took him to the coast, where she played timid football with him on the stony beaches or walked with him along cliff paths whose seaward edges smoked with windblown sand. Once she took him to the highest point on the coast, a token hill a few hundred feet above the sea at Sheringham. He gazed at the grassy landscape which was almost as flat as the sea, and wished the day were already tomorrow, because he'd realised how he might track down a copy of the book. The father of one of the boys in his class at school was a bookseller.
The boy's name was Dominic, and Ben knew little more about him. He seemed not to have any close friends — certainly not Peter and Francis and Christopher, who let Ben join in their schoolyard games, such as they were. Peter and Francis punched each other several times daily and made faces at each other in the classroom to try and get their classmates hit for giggling. Christopher had saved Ben from that on his very first day by faking a coughing fit to cover up Ben's fit of mirth, and the next day Francis had bitten a chocolate bar in two and given Ben the smaller piece, glistening with saliva. Ben had swallowed the offering, along with some nausea, and since then he supposed the four of them had been friends. All the same, he didn't mean to allow that to keep him away from Dominic.
On Monday his aunt walked him to school as usual, though in Stargrave he'd walked as far to school by himself. She said "Do your best" and patted his bottom — a gesture which she seemed to assume would embarrass him less than a kiss in front of his schoolmates — as he tried to dodge out of reach through the gates. The July sunlight capped his head with heat and glared from the tilted-open windows of the school as he waved to his aunt until she was out of sight and then strode across the crowded stone-flagged yard.
Dominic was standing near the boys' entrance to the school, humming to himself with his hands in the pockets of his baggy shorts and gazing down past his clean scabless knees at his feet, which were tapping the rhythm of his tune, a jazzed-up hymn, as his socks sagged to the beat. His face looked as if it had just been rubbed with a rough towel; his broad short nose and wide mouth seemed squashed by his high forehead, above which sprouted coppery hair that made Ben think of exposed wire. Ben was suddenly aware that Peter and Francis and Christopher were watching, and he blurted out the only question he could summon up. "Is your name Dominic?"
Dominic watched his feet stop tapping. "Want to make something of it?"
"No, why should I?"
"Just thought you might have." Dominic bent to pull his socks up. "Nicidom, you could have made, or Nodicim. Modinic's my favourite, though. Sounds like something you have to drink when you're ill." He straightened up and stared past Ben as if he didn't like what he saw. "What do you want, then?"
"Your dad sells books, doesn't he?"
"And yours feeds worms."
Ben gasped and didn't know how to respond. "When we had to say in class what our parents did and Mr Bolger let you off answering," Dominic continued, "I kept wondering what you'd have said."
Ben bit his lip and realised that though he was struggling to keep his feelings down, they weren't necessarily of grief. Without warning they spluttered out of him so violently he had to wipe his mouth. "I expect I'd have said they were under the sod."
Dominic made such a shocked face that Ben shrieked with laughter. It felt less painful this time, more of a relief. "What would Mr Bolger have said," Dominic prompted gleefully.
"He'd have said," Ben responded, and deepened his voice: "'How dare you contaminate my classroom with such language, boooy?'"
Dominic laughed at that, or at least wagged his head open-mouthed to indicate mirth. "So what were you going to say about books? I've never seen any of your gang in our shop."
"I'm not in a gang," Ben said, and turned to look where Dominic was staring. Peter and the others had come up behind him, their faces puffy and threatening. "Were you skitting at us?" Peter demanded of Dominic.
"Just at a teacher," Ben said. "We're talking. It's private."
"Maybe you'd better go in the girls' bogs," Francis suggested, fluttering his hands.
"What do you want to talk to him for?" Christopher complained to Ben. "He thinks he's too good for everyone just because his father's a stupid shopkeeper."
"He's not stupid, he's a bookseller. You're stupid if you think he is. My great-granddad used to write books."
"We're sorry, your lordship," Peter hooted, bowing low.
"Your two lordships," Francis said, and repeated it more loudly as if to bully someone into appreciating his wit.
Christopher ducked his head as if he meant to butt Ben. "You watch who you're calling stupid."
"I am watching."
Christopher shoved him against the wall and then, as a teacher appeared in the boys' entrance, swaggered away with his cronies. "So what did your great-granddad write?" Dominic said.
"Books of old legends and stuff that hadn't been written down. I wanted you to ask your dad if one of them's still published.
Of the Midnight Sun
by Edward Sterling."
"Shall my dad get it for you if he can?"