All the walking must have tired her, because she overslept on the morning of the nativity play, of all mornings. Surely Ben could have wakened her and the children before heading for the workroom. She hurried Margaret and Johnny to school and shopped on her way back. As she let herself into the house she heard Ben's voice upstairs. "She's here now," he was saying.
"Who's that?"
Silence met her, and she wondered if he had been talking to himself. She had almost reached the workroom when he responded "It's for you. The publishers."
He was holding the receiver away from his face as if he resented its presence. "Alice Carroll?" she mouthed.
"Nobody else."
Ellen lifted the receiver from his hand and perched on one corner of the desk. "Hello, Alice."
"Ellen. Glad I could get you. Half the calls I've tried to make this morning, the lines have been down with the snow." She paused. "Do you happen to know if I've offended your husband in some way?"
"Not that he's told me," Ellen said, hoping that would make Ben look at her. He continued to gaze at the forest, so intently that his eyes appeared unfocused; he hadn't moved except to lay the hand from which she'd taken the receiver palm down on the desk, fingers splayed, so like his other hand that she could imagine the two were symmetrical. "Why do you ask?" she said.
"Just that he didn't seem interested in discussing the new book."
He didn't regard it as his, Ellen thought, but couldn't he see that even if she had written every word of it, it would be his too? "I think you may have called while he was trying to bring something else to life," she said, and suppressed the panic which made her nervous of saying "Tell me about the book."
"I was supposed to go to a party last night, but the snow put paid to that, so I read what you sent me. I thought I'd call rather than write you a letter so near Christmas. I wanted you both to know that the rewrites are exactly what the book needed. As a matter of fact, as far as the text goes, I think it may be your best book."
Ellen was dumbfounded. "I mean," the editor said, "once you've illustrated it."
"Thanks for saying so. Thank you," Ellen said, still unsure how she felt. "Have a good Christmas."
"Many of them."
Ellen said goodbye awkwardly and leaned her back against the window so as to look into Ben's eyes. "She likes the book now."
"I'm pleased for you."
"For us, Ben, us."
He grasped his chin and turning his head, met her eyes. "It'll always be us, I promise," he said.
She had the disconcerting impression that even now his thoughts and his vision were somewhere else. She mustn't pester him if he was trying to work. "I'm here if you want me," she told him, and went downstairs, wondering why Alice Carroll's praise hadn't assuaged her nervousness. Perhaps her nerves needed time to recover.
She listened to the radio while she wrapped presents, wrote cards in response to some of the morning's mail, copied changes of address into her address book, iced the Christmas cake, made beefburgers for dinner. She had to keep searching the stations for programmes of carols. Between the stations, and sometimes between the carols, the radio would fall so silent that she could imagine it was stuffed with snow. The news reports were about little else but snow: several motorways rendered impassable, towns and villages cut off, worse to come. Whenever she heard how the snow was advancing she glanced out of the window, but the sky and the horizon were clear.
Ben didn't want coffee or lunch. Surely he wouldn't disappoint the children by not going to the play. "Will you be ready in a few minutes?" she called as she reached for her coat.
"For anything," he called in a windy voice which seemed to fill the house. Almost at once he ran downstairs and grabbed her by the hand, and would have pulled her out of the house immediately if she hadn't reminded him to put on a coat. As he urged her along the path beside the allotments and sneaked through a gap in the churchyard hedge near the school, he seemed close to dancing. "Nearly there now. Not long now," he told her, so unnecessarily that she laughed, as they ran through the shadow of the forest. Given his mood, she couldn't resist asking "Has it been a productive day?"
He smiled so widely that her own face ached in sympathy. "Wait and see."
A makeshift stage stretched across the school assembly hall, two sets of tables and chairs representing an inn beside a cardboard stable scattered with hay in front of a tall length of plywood painted with palm trees and a night sky. The plywood masked the classrooms where the performers were audibly hiding. Heads kept poking around it, searching for their parents. Margaret leaned out and flashed Ellen a smile which was trying to appear unconcerned, Johnny grinned as if his face might stay like that throughout the performance, and Ellen crossed her fingers for them. At least now she had a reason to be nervous.
By the time the play commenced, it was dark outside. Stars gleamed through the high windows behind the audience as Johnny's teacher dimmed the lights. Mrs Hoggart struck up "Silent Night" at the piano, and the voices of the unseen children began to sing.
In the first scene Margaret acted her role of a difficult customer at the inn with such vehemence that Ellen came close to tears. She wasn't the only mother whose voice wasn't quite steady as they joined in "Once in Royal David's City". Joseph was holding his tablecloth robe so high above his ankles that he must have tripped during rehearsal. Mary rocked the baby Jesus ferociously throughout the inn scene, and at one suspenseful moment appeared to be about to drop him, though he looked as if he would bounce. The innkeeper forgot most of his lines and was prompted so loudly that his parents in the audience kept echoing the prompter. By now Ellen was suppressing both laughter and tears, and several of her neighbours on the bench were having the same problem. It was a relief when the onstage cast and the choir invisible began to sing "We Three Kings of Orien' tar" and the parents could join in. She wondered if the heating had broken down; though the children might be too busy to notice, their breaths were faintly visible.
The kings brought in their treasures, a box piled with chains painted gold followed by two jars which Ellen suspected had contained bath salts, and then Johnny and the rest of his year scurried squeaking around the hall before subsiding somewhat reluctantly in front of the hay. Everyone sang "O Come All Ye Faithful", and the lights came up so that parents could photograph the players. As Ellen took half a dozen photographs Ben smiled oddly at her, as if he thought her actions were somehow redundant, though the pictures would bring back memories in years to come. "Be quick changing," she called after Johnny and Margaret, and rubbed her arms through her coat to keep warm.
Mrs Venable was apologising for the chill, which had obviously caught her and the heating unprepared, when the children began to reappear from behind the night sky. One of Johnny's friends pointed up at the windows, and a chatter of excitement multiplied as children crowded into the hall, buttoning their coats and clutching their costumes in plastic bags. "Well, that seems to be the explanation," Mrs Venable said, following their gaze. "The snow's here at last. Don't catch cold on the way home. I'll have the heating seen to for tomorrow."
Johnny ran to his parents, squeaking "Come on" at his sister, who was chatting importantly with some of her friends. His voice was so high that it sounded as if he hadn't stopped playing the mouse. Ellen wiped away traces of the whiskers which had been drawn around his mouth, and let herself be tugged along the corridor. But the families already in the schoolyard had halted there, blocking the doorway, and the buzz of excitement had become a growing mumble of bewilderment. Frost sparkled on the concrete of the schoolyard and the bricks of the school walls, but that was all. Of the whiteness which had loomed at all the windows facing the forest, there was no sign.
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.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Thank heaven for Christmas, Ellen thought – for the way the season had revived Ben. Now that he'd returned to the family, the old enthusiastic Ben who liked nothing better than to make her eyes and the children's light up, she could admit to herself that one reason for her nervousness had been a secret fear in case his introversion wasn't only a side effect of his work. Now she was able to laugh at herself and at him as he sketched an elaborate sign in the air with the key before unlocking the front door and flinging it wide as if he was ushering the family into somewhere much larger than a house. The tree in the living-room creaked, long fingers of shadow rearranged the traces of coloured light which lay on the hall carpet as though a rainbow was dying there, and all of Ellen's senses seemed to waken: she smelled the pine and listened to the whisper of falling needles, which sounded for a long moment as if it wasn't contained by the room, as if the tree had brought the edge of the forest into the house, a forest as large as the dark. For a moment, as she shivered, she thought she could see her breath. "Here we are," Ben said as though he was announcing their arrival, and switched on the light in the hall.
Ellen let out a sigh, which she couldn't see after all. "That was strange. Maybe it comes of helping tell your story. I was imagining the kind of thing you must imagine sometimes. Can it be a bit unnerving until you see how it can be turned into a book?"
"A bit unnerving?" He gave her a smile so encouraging it looked manic. "However it feels, I'll be here. It can only bring us together."
"Good for it, then," Ellen called after him as he followed the children into the living-room, saying "Leave the television off, Johnny. Open up your mind to something bigger."
"I want to see what the weather man says."
"We don't need him to tell us what's coming. Can't you feel it out there?" When Johnny darted to the curtains and peered between them, only to turn away in disappointment, his father said "We'll have to wake your imagination up."
"Go on then."
"Let's see what we can bring alive between us. Remember the idea I had about the midnight sun? Let's try to imagine what the sun kept dormant and tell one another over dinner."
When Ellen reached into her imagination while she grilled the burgers she'd made earlier, she found she was fixated on the cold which felt like a presence beyond the window blind, ready to invade the kitchen whenever the heat wavered. She could imagine the snow figures crowding towards the window, mounting one another until they stood outside the glass like a faceless totem-pole, waiting for her to raise the blind and see them. She caught herself thinking that the blind appeared whiter than usual, as if something paler than the strips of plastic were at the window. She turned away and felt the cold like a prolonged chill breath on the nape of her neck. "Take some plates, you two," she called.
"You interrupted me while I was having inspirations," Margaret complained as Johnny marched into the kitchen, looking too preoccupied to have heard the call. Ellen finished preparing a salad and sent it through with Johnny while she followed with the burgers in their buns. "Well," Ben said at once, "what do you think was under the midnight sun?"
"You go first, Johnny," Margaret said.
"A bit of the cold that'll come when the sun goes out."
"No," Margaret said, "a bit of the cold there used to be before there were any stars."
"Maybe just a single crystal." Ben's eyes were brightening. "Where's the rest of it, do you think?"
"It went away when everything got made."
"Or it's out where there's nothing but dark," Margaret said.
Johnny bit into his burger and chewed fast. "What's it doing, then?"
Ellen felt as if the three of them were waiting for her to speak. More disconcertingly, she felt that they were waiting for her to say what they had already thought themselves, because all that she'd hear
d so far were ideas which had occurred fleetingly to her when she was in the kitchen. She'd taken part in plenty of brainstorming sessions while she was working in advertising, but never one in which all the participants seemed to speak with the same voice. "It's dreaming," she said.
"Not quite. Not only that," Ben said. "It must dream of perfection, of recreating everything in ways we can't begin to imagine."
"It's only a story, remember," Ellen told the children, "for our next book."
Ben was obviously delighted by their having shared their fancies. Throughout the meal he kept smiling as if to encourage the family to continue imagining or even to ask him some question. After dinner he followed her and the children into the kitchen and loitered, gazing at the blind as if he could see through it, while they helped her with the washing-up. "How shall we pass the time now?" he said.
"Play a game," Margaret told him.
"Ludo," Johnny cried.
"That's an old word," Ben said, and brought the battered game from in the cupboard under the stairs. He seemed fascinated by the patterns the counters made on the board as the play progressed, and Ellen couldn't recall ever having seen a game bring them so frequently close to symmetry. When Johnny's eyelids began to droop she announced that the game in progress would be the last, and was taken aback when it was his father who protested. "No rush to break up the party, is there? It's going to be a long night."
"With Christmas on the other side of it, and we don't want people being too tired to enjoy that."
For a moment Ellen thought he was about to disagree, but what was there to contradict? When at last the game was over, Margaret said "I'm going up now, Johnny."
Midnight Sun Page 24
