Midnight Sun

THIRTY-SIX

On the way home Johnny kept protesting "It was snowing. I could see it."

"I thought it looked as if it was," Margaret said.

Her attempt to placate him only aggravated his frustration. "It was," he declared as if repeating it and glaring at the sky would make it so. "Jim and David who are in my class saw it. Melanie Burton who took me to Mrs Venable when I cut my leg in the playground did, and she's older than you."

"Melanie's sister is in my class, little boy, and she says Melanie's a scaredy cat who has to have a light on in her room at night or she can't sleep."

"So? Maybe you did when you were little."

"That's a really sensible answer, Johnny, a really intelligent thing to say. And just in case you're wondering, I've never had a light on when I go to sleep. It isn't me who wanders about at night when he's supposed to be asleep because he can't wait for it to snow."

"I seem to remember a toddler who nearly cried her eyes out when her china cottage with a light in it got broken," Ellen murmured.

"That was because I liked seeing the little cottage when I was going to sleep, Mummy. I was never afraid of the dark."

"I'm glad neither of you are, because it's nothing to be afraid of, so let that be the end of the argument," Ellen said. "As for the snow, Johnny, we must have been expecting it for so long that we saw it, that's all. Don't you think so, Ben?"

Ben had been gazing at the stars above the forest as he walked, watching the forest grow almost imperceptibly brighter and feeling as though he was about to understand what he was seeing, truly understand for the first time in his life. "Maybe it was a dream," he said.

Margaret raised her eyes heavenwards and sighed. "We weren't asleep."

His smile seemed to rise from deep inside him, and made his teeth ache with the cold. "Not our dream."

Johnny giggled and saw he wasn't meant to do so. "Whose was it, then?"

"What do you think would dream of snow? Maybe something that needs it to be even colder so that it can wake up."

"It's just a story, Johnny," Margaret said. "Don't be telling him stuff like that, you'll be giving him nightmares."

A surge of love for her passed through Ben like an icy wave. He felt as if he was observing the family and himself from somewhere high and cold and still. The darkness all around them was a huge insubstantial embrace whose stillness he was sharing. "Think for a moment, Johnny," he said. "What exactly did you see?"

The boy stared stubbornly at his own feet. "1 told you, snow."

"What was it doing?"

"Falling, of course." Johnny looked up. "Not falling, exactly. More like it was a sort of curtain hanging there with a kind of pattern on it."

"You saw a pattern? What kind?"

Johnny closed his eyes and held onto his mother's hand to guide him along the main road. Eventually Margaret said "There wasn't a pattern, but Johnny's right, it was just standing still in the air."

"So you see, Johnny, it couldn't have been snow," Ellen said. "I expect it was frost on the windows and light reflecting off the forest. Never mind."

Ben smiled behind them in the dark. At least they had all had a glimpse of what he'd seen. The swarm of whiteness which had appeared at the windows, like moths drawn to the light or to the children and their parents in the school, had been shifting stealthily, restless to settle into a pattern, to show them its face. The waiting which his life had been was almost over. His stories had kept his instincts alive until it was time for those instincts to grow clear. His aunt had been unable to destroy them, and she had been too late to sell the Sterling house to prevent it from passing to him. He could see his life, and it was irrelevant except as a thread leading here through the dark.

Now he understood the panic which had brought him racing home from promoting the book. It hadn't meant that he would never see Ellen and the children again; deep down he'd been afraid that he might no longer know them. But the change he'd sensed gathering was taking its time, though his life seemed full of signs of it – the fragments of ritual scattered through his Stargrave childhood, the midsummer day when snow had kissed his hand like a promise in the churchyard, his books which were by-products of the rediscovery of ancient truths. It would be here soon, and he mustn't be afraid. "Just as long as we're together," he sang and taking Johnny's free hand, danced with the family up the track to the house. Tomorrow would be the shortest day of the year.