When a longer knock brought no response, he set the cup and saucer down and inched the door open.
The room felt muggier than his, as if its contents – the quilt which hung down to the floor on both sides of the bed, the dwarf cushions bristling with hatpins on the dressing-table, the fat-bottomed chair confronting itself in the mirror beyond the pins – had soaked up the heat. His aunt was huddled under the quilt, looking smaller than she ought to. Her face was greyish, pulled out of shape by her slack drooling mouth. He couldn't tell if she was breathing.
Then she snorted and closed her mouth, and her eyes wavered open. As soon as she saw Ben she sat up, wrapping the quilt around her and wiping her chin furiously with the back of one hand. 'I've brought you some tea, Auntie,' he stammered.
By the time he reached the bed with it she had put on her bed-jacket and spectacles. Her squashed curls were springing up, but she still looked greyer than she ought to. 'Leave it on the little table,' she said when he attempted to hand her the cup and saucer. 'Go and be a good boy while I get up.'
Perhaps she wasn't fully awake, but the blurring of her voice unnerved him. 'Are you all right, Auntie?'
She placed one hand over her heart as if she was examining herself. 'I hope I will be this time. But you must never upset me like you did yesterday, do you see?'
'I won't ever,' Ben said, and retreated to his room. If she died he would be wholly alone, and where would he have to go? He set about tidying his room to take his mind off the possibility, lining up his Dinky toys on the windowsill, one model car for each Christmas since he was three years old. They made him think of frost at the windows, sparks flying up the chimney as the wrapping-paper blazed.
He carried the bundle of his books down to the front room. When he untied the string from around them the books seemed to expand with relief, the Hans Andersens his father had given him and the boys' adventure annuals his aunt had. Best of all, because it was still mysterious, was Edward Sterling's last book, Of the Midnight Sun.
He had only begun to leaf through it when his aunt came downstairs. 'Don't put too many books in my bookcase or you'll be making it lean. We don't want people thinking we bought our furniture off a cart, do we?' she said, and frowned at the book in his hands. 'What's that musty old thing? You don't want that. It might have germs.'
Ben hugged it. 'I do want it, Auntie. It's the book Great-Granddad wrote. Granddad gave it to me and said I should keep trying to read it until it made sense.'
'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
