"I do," Johnny protested, and Margaret said "You would."
"Don't stop me now, Ellen, when we're so close. I was just about Johnny's age when I nearly saw the truth, and it's taken me all this time to get back to it. I suppressed what I knew because I was afraid it would kill my aunt, but you aren't like her. You love danger and the heights."
"Not danger that involves the children."
"Call it adventure, then. Try not to interrupt me unless you absolutely have to, all right? It's time to look beyond the myths."
He was watching Johnny as if to prompt him to respond, and Johnny did. "What did you think when you were my age?"
"I'll tell you what I might have thought if I'd been brave enough — I might have thought that the idea of God coming to earth in the form of a man was about as likely as some fat old character being able to climb down chimneys."
This time Johnny's giggle was nervous. Ellen was opening her mouth to put a stop to the subject when Margaret said "You don't have to believe it literally happened. A priest said so on the radio."
"Exactly," Ben said, clapping his hands. "It's a symbol. And symbols are ways of disguising what people can't bear to see clearly."
"I wouldn't say it was that simple," Ellen said, but Margaret interrupted her. "What's Christmas supposed to disguise?"
"I believe it's a symbol of how God came to earth in the form of everything on it."
"Why should anyone be frightened to think that?"
Ben didn't answer immediately, and Ellen found she was holding her breath. The hiss of the fire seemed to intensify, though it wasn't quite keeping the cold at bay. Ben's head turned slowly, scanning the three of them, before he spoke. "What do you think God is?"
"How should we know?" Margaret said. "Nobody really knows."
"Do you think he's an old man with a beard who can be in all sorts of places at once, like Father Christmas?"
The children laughed, and Ellen would have liked to do so. "That's how painters used to picture him, isn't it, Ellen?" he said.
"I suppose so."
"So what is he like if he isn't like that? Could he be a bit like a person whose mind is so superior to ours that we can't begin to imagine his thoughts?"
"Maybe," Margaret admitted.
"Something that was there before the universe was made?"
"Yes," Johnny cried, and Ellen felt him start to raise his hand as if he were in school. "The Bible says."
"That's what it says. But people never seem to wonder what it avoids saying."
"Ben, I think it's time —"
"Just listen," he said urgently, and paused. Of course he wasn't telling them to listen to the hiss of the fire in the midst of his silence, and it was Ellen's nervousness which made her seem to hear another sound, a whisper in the surrounding dark. "If something lived in the dark before there were any stars or worlds, let alone any living creatures," he said, "it couldn't have been even remotely like us."
"I didn't mean he would look like a person," Margaret said.
"But dozens of religions imagine God that way. Why do you think they need to?"
"Why do you?"
Ellen thought Margaret had intended that as a retort rather than as a question, but Ben answered at once. "To help us not to remember what we're afraid of, what the human race has invented whole religions to conceal. All religions are like stories people told by the fire when there was nothing but the fire and stories to keep off the cold and the dark, because people couldn't bear to know what was out there beyond the light."
Both children nestled uneasily against Ellen. "Ben, that's enough," she said.
"No, it isn't. It can't be now." He moved so close to the edge of his chair that he appeared to be squatting, and stretched out his hands as if he was offering his audience the dark. "Ever since then we've believed we've progressed beyond our ancestors because they thought the darkness hid something so alien that they peopled it with gods and monsters and demons, but they were right to think so, don't you see? What lived all by itself in the dark was so unlike us and everything we know that it
couldn't
have created us and the rest of the universe, not consciously, at any rate. I believe we're its dreams, us and everything around us, and you know how unlike reality dreams are. But sooner or later it had to waken, and then —"
Ellen felt Johnny writhe in her hug. He struggled free of her and fled past the tree, which swayed and creaked and seemed to be doing its best to trip him up with its shadows. "Wait, Johnny," his father called in a voice like a gale as the boy fumbled the door open and ran upstairs. "I haven't finished."
"Yes you have," Ellen said as Margaret hurried out of the room, calling to Johnny. Ellen's anger must be constricting her voice, for she could barely hear herself. "What's got into you, Ben? What do you mean by telling them a story like that at Christmas, or any other time for that matter? I think in future you'd better tell me your ideas first so I can be sure they're suitable."
He was still at the edge of his chair, squatting just within the glow of the fire. He looked bewildered by the reaction he'd provoked, and his bewilderment disturbed her more than anything he'd said. She turned away, shivering with rage and grief and undefined fear. She was at the door when he stood up with an odd movement of his whole body which made her think of a mime of sudden growth. "Leave us alone, Ben," she said wearily. "Give me a chance to patch up the damage you've done."
"I need to —"
"Whatever it is, it can wait," Ellen said, and strode out of the room. The sight of the unlit hall dismayed and enraged her. What sort of game was he playing, darkening the house and then upsetting everyone? When she switched on the light above the stairs, it seemed to emphasise the dark beyond its reach. She was tempted to switch on all the lights, particularly at the top of the house, where she sensed the cold and the silence weighing on the roof as if the night had closed wings over the house. She'd no time for such thoughts now; imagination had done the family quite enough harm for one day. She pulled the door shut behind her and ran up to Johnny's bedroom.
Johnny was sitting next to Margaret on his bed, fists clenched, knuckles digging into the mattress. As soon as his mother appeared he jumped up and went to stare at the ranks of plastic soldiers on the dressing-table, and dabbed furiously at his eyes once his back was to her. "Daddy was just being silly," Margaret told him again.
"Exactly, Johnny. It was just another of his stories, one he shouldn't even have told you," Ellen said. "You believe whatever you want to believe that means you'll have a lovely Christmas."
He emitted a loud sniff and swung round, grinning lopsi-dedly. "I knew it was really you and Dad who buy our presents," he said.
For a moment Ellen was able to think that nothing else was wrong — that the past half-hour had been simply an unusually problematical episode of family life, the sort of confrontation which would prove to have left them with a better understanding of one another. Then Johnny's face stiffened, and the way his gaze edged reluctantly towards the door jolted her heart. She could hear what he was hearing: slow footsteps ascending the stairs.
FORTY-TWO
"It's only your father," she said. Perhaps Ben's footsteps were deliberate because he was taking time to frame an apology, or perhaps he was having to force himself to approach now that he realised how thoughtless he had been. He must be trying to muffle his footsteps so as not to unsettle the children further, but his tread only sounded ominous, soft and ponderous, somehow enlarged. Ellen saw the children shiver, and felt suddenly colder herself. Keep going, she willed him, go up to the workroom. But his footsteps halted outside the bedroom door, and there was silence except for a sound she couldn't bear to hear — the tiny chattering of Johnny's teeth. "What do you want, Ben?" she said.
"To talk."
The children glanced imploringly at her. "What about?" she demanded.
There came a soft thump at the panels of the door, and the children flinched. Ben must be pressing himself against the door, because his response caused the panel which was level with his face to buzz like an insect struggling out of a nest. "Can you hear me, Johnny?" his blurred voice said.
"Yes," Johnny admitted, and obviously felt compelled by the silence to raise his voice. "Yes," he called.
"I didn't mean we'd disappear when it wakes up, if that's what you were afraid of. I only meant we'll change."
For a moment Ellen couldn't believe what she was hearing. She stalked to the door, keeping her fury concealed so as not to alarm the children further. She snatched the door open, slipped through the gap and closed it in a single movement made deft by rage. "Have you no sense, Ben?" she said, too low for the children to hear. "Don't you care what you're doing to them? What kind of Christmas do you want them to have?"
He raised his hands as if he meant to seize her out of frustration.
His face was blank. "The kind I'm looking forward to," he said.
She felt as if the air was turning colder, as if he was somehow towering over her though his face was level with hers, but she wasn't to be intimidated. "If that has anything to do with what you were saying downstairs, I suggest you go and write it and get rid of it that way. But keep it away from the children, I'm warning you."
A flicker of bewilderment passed over his face, and he stretched out his hands to her. "I'm here when you need me."
He looked as if he was trying to appear reassuring but couldn't quite remember how. Ellen wanted to hold his hands and not relinquish them until she'd discovered what was wrong with him, but she couldn't let him win her over so easily when she was standing between him and the children. "We need you as you've always been," she said.
"And ever shall be, amen."
He gave her an unsteady smile in which she thought she saw a plea, and she was just able to take the frail joke as an indication that he hadn't really changed deep down. "That may do for me, Ben, but what are you going to tell the children?"
"What they still have to be told."
A shiver so violent it felt like a spasm carried her out of his reach, shaking her head, slashing the air with her nails to prevent him from following. "Don't you dare come near them when you're like this. If you do I'll take them out of the house, I swear it."
"Where do you imagine you'll go?"
She wasn't going to argue with him. "Enough, Ben. More than enough, if you want us to stay together. Just leave the children alone until you're sure you can keep those ideas to yourself."
When she grasped the knob of Johnny's bedroom door and held onto it, he shrugged and headed for the dark at the top of the house. "Should be prepared," he was muttering. He sounded grotesquely like a boy scout, and she wanted to believe that a kind of reversion to boyishness was at the root of his behaviour, that inhabiting his imagination for the sake of his writing had rendered him temporarily unable to appreciate that some of his fancies should be kept from the children until they were older. When she heard the workroom door close softly, she looked into Johnny's room. "Let's go downstairs. It's too cold up here for sitting around," she said.
As the children hurried past her, both of them glanced nervously towards the workroom. He'd better stay up there until the family could trust him, Ellen thought in a fury of dismay at the change which had overtaken their life. She shepherded Johnny and Margaret down to the living-room, where the gas fire was cooling, its porcelain creaking as if it was settling into a new shape. She switched on the overhead light, and the tree withdrew its shadows into itself. "Say if you're hungry, you two," she said.
"I'm not," Johnny said untypically.
"Sorry, Mummy, neither am I."
"So long as you regain your appetites in time for Christmas dinner," Ellen said with a jokey fierceness which was intended to conceal her grief. Since it didn't quite work, she grabbed the nearest source of distraction, the remote control for the television. "Let's see if the world's still out there," she said.
She rather wished she hadn't said so. Every channel was swarming with white particles which appeared to be settling into patterns that drew her vision into them. She tried the radio, only to find that it was emitting a noise which sounded like exactly the same hiss of static and which made her think of an oppressively amplified snowfall. When she'd switched off both sets, the silence seemed to blanket her thoughts. She took a deep breath. "Well, what shall we play?"
"That game where we have to draw bits of a drawing and not see what it looks like till the end," Johnny said.
"All right," Margaret said as if she was indulging him.
Ellen went along the hall for paper. As soon as she opened her pad on the dining-table, the patterns she'd drawn earlier fastened on her vision. She blinked hard and slowly, and leafed onwards to the blank sheets, two of which she tore out and brought to the living-room. "You can start, Johnny, since it's your game."
Johnny found one of his annuals on which to rest the page. He sketched a head and folded that strip of the paper before passing the sheet to Margaret for her to add a neck and shoulders. Ellen was appending an upper torso to the hidden features when she remembered what the surrealists had called this game: "the exquisite corpse". It was surely much older than the surrealists, she thought, but that didn't strike her as particularly reassuring. At least the game was cheering Johnny up. She folded the page and gave it to him so that he could giggle over drawing a stomach. Eventually the page returned to him for the feet to be added, and then he unfolded the drawing.
He was expecting it to make him laugh, and so it did, but not much. "It's good," Margaret said, sounding more dutiful than pleased. While the figures revealed at the end of a game were in the main satisfyingly absurd, this one seemed wrong in a different way. It was unexpectedly regular, as if they had all been trying to describe the same form. In its roughness Ellen thought it resembled a cave drawing, a primitive attempt to depict — what? If it had really been primitive art she would have interpreted it as an image in the process of manifesting itself or of undergoing some transformation. Its stature conveyed an impression of hugeness; the hints of patterns within its outline suggested the beginnings of further growth. Most disconcertingly, the more she examined the face Johnny had given it, the more that face resembled a caricature of his father's, such a caricature that it seemed to be on the point of turning into something else entirely. She was gazing at it when she heard the workroom door open and footsteps descending the stairs.