Ben parroted the answer. Perhaps his aunt sensed his mounting dismay, because she said 'It's a hard thing for a little boy to grasp.'
'Hard means durable, Miss Tate. Shall I tell you something that may surprise you, Ben? I expect you're feeling very much as I felt when I was just about your age. See my grandmother up there? I lost her when I was nine years old.'
He was referring to a yellowed oval photograph on the mantelpiece, Ben saw as his thoughts began to chatter. 'I couldn't understand why an old lady who'd never done anyone any harm had to wait to be let into Heaven,' the priest said.
Whatever Ben had avoided thinking since the car crash, it wasn't this. 'Do you think she's there yet?' he said.
His aunt made a shocked sound, but the priest smiled indulgently at him. 'That isn't for us to know, is it? If we thought we did we might stop praying for them, and that's one of the jobs God gives us on earth, to pay Him our prayers so our loved ones can get to Heaven sooner.'
Ben was beginning to panic because this meant so little to him. 'But some dead people don't have anyone on earth to pray for them.'
The priest flashed his teeth at Ben's aunt. 'He's a bright boy. It's a good job you're bringing him up in the faith,' he said, and to Ben: 'That's why we pray for all the souls in purgatory, not just those who belong to us.'
'That's better now, isn't it, Ben?' his aunt said as if he'd scraped his knee. 'You know where your mother and everyone is now, and you know you're helping them.'
Ben knew nothing of the kind. Mustn't there be more souls in purgatory than there were stars in the sky, since Mr O'Toole had once told the assembled school that a single unconfessed sin could keep you in purgatory until the end of the world? If praying for all the dead people you'd never even met could help them, what was the point of singling out your own? If praying for them by name reduced their time in purgatory, how could that be anything but unfair to people who had nobody to pray for them by name? The whole set-up struck him as so unreasonable as to be meaningless, and that terrified him.
The priest leaned towards him almost confidentially. 'I think you're wondering what all this suffering is for, aren't you? Such a bright boy would. Now, Ben, whatever happens to us in this life and after it, however hard it may seem, don't you think it must be worth it if it leads us to see God?'
'I don't know.'
'I mean, if we have to suffer so as to be worthy of it, mustn't being able to see God for all eternity be a reward beyond anything we can imagine?'
'I suppose so.'
The priest sat back. 'I think that may do for now, Miss Tate. There's a little chap with a few big new ideas to turn over in his mind. If they're too much for you, Ben, don't be afraid to ask questions. Now what's this I see coming for a good boy? I do believe it's a glass of milk.'
Ben thanked the housekeeper politely and concentrated on drinking the milk. He had plenty of questions, but he was sure that the answers weren't here. The priest must be mistaken in his thinking; he'd said himself that he didn't know what God meant. But then was the church mistaken about death and what was waiting beyond it? Ben thought so, and he felt as if Father Hynn had separated him further from his family, had sent them further into the unknown dark.
That night Ben prayed for them more intensely than ever, under his breath so that his aunt wouldn't hear. He prayed in front of the photograph and then in bed until he fell asleep. He kept imagining them in purgatory, naked and writhing like insects thrown on red-hot coals, unable even to die. He gripped his praying hands together as if their aching would drive out the pain which clenched his whole body, and prayed so hard that he no longer knew what he was saying. When the vision faded, there was only the cold dark that felt like a promise of peace.
SIX
On Halloween night the streets smelled of mist and charred leaves. All day Ben had felt surrounded by signs too secret to interpret: the dance of decaying leaves in the air, the long shadows where the autumn chill lurked like winter biding its time, a sun which looked swollen with blood as the mist dragged it down beyond the unconvincing cut-out shapes the houses had become. He was almost able to believe that the anticipation with which the growing nights affected him was only the excitement he could see on the faces of the children around him, but then why was it making him nervous?
The Milligans invited him and his aunt to spend the evening with them. After dinner Ben's aunt led him through the streets, gripping his arm harder whenever they met figures wearing masks or pointed hats. 'They're just children dressed up,' she kept muttering, unaware that he was nervous of them only in case they might jeer at his costume, a sheet which she had reluctantly lent him and which he had to bunch in his fist to prevent the skirt of it from tripping him up. At long last they reached their destination, where a grinning pumpkin flickered in the front-room window, and Mr Milligan opened the door. 'Why, here's a Roman senator,' he shouted. 'Hitch up your toga, Bennius, and come in.'
Mrs Milligan bustled out of the kitchen, carrying two aprons and an apple from which she took a loud bite. 'He looks more like a little old pagan priest,' she said and then, so forcefully that she spat bits of apple, 'You don't really, Ben. You're the best ghost I've seen tonight. It makes me shiver just to look at you.'
She gave him and Dominic an apron each so that they could duck for apples in a washing-up bowl placed on a bath towel in the front room. The water and the apple which Ben eventually snagged with his teeth tasted of soap and of the smell of the candles which illuminated the room. Afterwards Mrs Milligan brought in sausages protruding from snowdrifts of mashed potatoes on large oval plates, followed by conical cakes meant to resemble snouts of rats, from which one had to pull the inedible whiskers. Ben's aunt kept glancing unhappily at the shadows of the sausages, flexing on the tablecloth like fingers threatening to shape a silhouette, and she wouldn't touch the snouty cakes. Mrs Milligan cleared the table and came back into the room, her shadow billowing after her as though the dark of the hallway had sent part of itself to join them. 'Time to tell some tales,' Mr Milligan said.
'Nothing unsuitable,' Ben's aunt warned.
'Nothing to turn anyone's hair any whiter.'
'Tell us about the man who found the whistle on the beach at Felixstowe,' Dominic said.
The boys sat on either side of the fire, their backs against the fireplace, which felt to Ben as if the snatches the heat made at him kept being thwarted by the chill of the tiles. Mr Milligan told them about a whistle that called a ghost which was dressed in a sheet, except that when it got between the man and the only door out of his bedroom he saw that nothing was wearing the sheet. Ben listened enthralled, feeling that he was sitting at the feet of giants with firelit faces, and watched their shadows merge and part and merge on the ceiling, a shifting centre of deeper blackness drawing them together. When Mr Milligan finished, having let the man escape from the room, Ben heard his aunt breathing hard with distaste. 'It's just a story someone made up, boys. It didn't really happen,' Mrs Milligan said to placate her.
'That's mean. You didn't have to say that,' Dominic complained.
'It sounds to me as if your mother did,' Ben's aunt said.
'Do you know any stories, Beryl?' Mrs Milligan suggested.
'If you mean about the supernatural, there are plenty in the Bible.'
'It's Ben's turn now,' Dominic said.
Ben wasn't sure if Dominic meant to aggravate the tension in the room, and he didn't care. He felt oddly excited, as if Mr Milligan's storytelling had awakened a story in him. 'I'll try,' he said.
'We'll have to be going shortly,' his aunt announced.
'You'd better have the storyteller's seat, Ben,' Mr Milligan said, and relinquished the lopsided armchair to him. Ben gazed into the flames and felt as if he was sitting by a camp fire, as if the dark behind him were bigger than the world. A story which he had to speak in order to know it seemed to be gathering inside him, but he didn't know how to begin. Mr Milligan brought a dining-chair from the next room and sat on it beside the fire. 'Try 'once
