That wasn't why Ellen had experienced a twinge of panic. She must be thinking of her parents: if communications weren't restored she and the family wouldn't be able to call them on Christmas Day as usual. "Can anything be done?"
"We'll have to wait for Leeds to fix it, though heaven knows what they can do in this. When Eric from the dairy went to fetch his load this morning he couldn't get more than a few hundred yards past the bridge. The snow was over his wheels out there. We're going to be living off whatever's in our shops and houses until conditions improve."
"I may have something surplus in the freezer if anyone gets desperate."
"Let's hope things don't come to that, but bless you for offering." She picked up Ellen's old boots and followed her to the counter with them. "It'll take more than a bit of snow to spoil Christmas in Stargrave, and I can see it's making Christmas for the kids."
As Ellen came out of the station she heard the children on the common, their cries so tiny they sounded in danger of being wiped out by the silence, but all she could see beyond the roofs was the forest poised above the town. Around her, as her ankles began to ache with the chill of the snow in which she was standing, everyone looked unconcerned: people were depleting the food shops and even the video library, but otherwise the snow seemed hardly to have affected the town. Not yet, she thought, and told herself to stop being so gloomy: was she going to be the only member of the family not to enjoy the season to the full?
She was picking her way across the icy ruts on the road when Kate West emerged from the computer shop. "Cheer up, Ellen," she called. "It may never happen."
Ellen gave her an embarrassed smile. "I don't even know what it is."
"If you're wondering how to keep these two occupied you know they're always welcome. I've just bought a new computer game for when boredom sets in. You and I are lucky to have children who are readers and can make their own entertainment, but I suppose even they'll feel robbed."
"Of what?"
"I take it nobody watches daytime television in your house."
"Not as a rule."
"You'll see nothing but snow if you do – interference, I mean. And the radio seems to have lost its voice as well."
Johnny was watching his toes burrowing in a pile of cleared snow. "Kate, when can we come and play with the new game?"
"Now, if you like," Kate said, winking at Ellen to forestall any rebuke. "We ought to make sure it's popular before the shop shuts for Christmas. I'll have them until whenever you want to collect them after lunch, Ellen."
"You're a life-saver, Kate. Stefan and Ramona must come for lunch soon. Both of you be good until your father or I come for you," Ellen said.
No sooner had she tramped past the shops than she was met by a silence which seemed to extend to the edge of the world. The children on the common were building snow images now. The shadow of the forest crept towards them as the shrouded treetops reached for the low sun. She marched up the track, retracing the trail of her footprints, and let herself into the house.
After the glare of the snow, the hall was as dark as the forest must be. She heard the tree creak, and then light streamed down from the top of the house. Ben had opened the workroom door. "Only me," she announced.
Wood creaked above her, disorienting her until she realised he was leaning on the banister. "Where are they?" he demanded.
"At Kate's. I thought we might like to be on our own for a while."
"How long for?"
"They're having lunch there," Ellen said, trying to blink her eyes clear. Of course it was the stairwell that made his voice sound as large as a wind. "Come down. Whatever it is, you can tell me."
"Whatever what is?"
"Whatever's been making you so secretive lately."
She waited, but he didn't stir. She couldn't tell if he was arrested by her words or if his thoughts were somewhere else, but he seemed unlikely to come to her, and so she started up the stairs. "I don't know why, Ben, but it's making me nervous."
"I was too. It won't be for long now, I promise."
She felt as though she was dreaming the conversation, it was so difficult to grasp and so isolated by the silence. She didn't speak again until she was on the stairs leading to the top floor. "What won't?"
"Ellen…" It sounded like a plea. He clenched his fists, and she saw him shudder from head to foot. She was running to hold him when he swung towards her, his face blank. "If you need me to talk, I will when the children are here. Better collect them before it's dark," he said, and went into the workroom, closing the door behind him.
THIRTY-NINE
"Better collect them before it's dark…" He couldn't have meant anything by that, Ellen told herself, yet it had left her feeling more on edge than ever. She felt as if he'd trapped her in the dimness with her doubts, and she might have pursued him into the workroom if she hadn't been overcome by a fit of shivering as she noticed how cold the house was. Ben must have let the central heating lapse. Breathing hard into her clasped hands, she ran down to the kitchen.
The timer on the boiler had switched off the heating shortly after breakfast. Had he been too preoccupied to turn it on again, or could he have gone out of the house? She thought he might have been moulding a face on the snow giant beyond the window, except that the marks on the spherical head didn't add up to anything she would have called a face; she wasn't sure what the pattern, which appeared to have emerged from the way the ball of snow was formed, reminded her of. She spun the wheel to override the timer and listened to the twangs of metal as heat coursed through the house. She stood by the boiler until she felt unfrozen enough to move away, then she went into the living-room.
The tree was dark. She switched on the bulbs and tried the television. The transmitter must be snowbound; the screen showed an endless fall of white. She was hoping Kate had been mistaken about the radio, but all it emitted was a stream of static which sounded constantly about to shape itself into a voice. She gave up and sat listening to the silence and her thoughts.
At least now she felt certain that she knew why she was on edge, and perhaps she could persuade herself that she had no reason to be: whatever Ben's secret was, it surely couldn't be anything bad if he insisted on telling the children at the same time he told her – but why must he be secretive at all? She had only to ask him, except that might spoil the surprise; she was almost sure that underlying his mysteriousness was a boyish eagerness to astonish. In that case, why was she still nervous? Her thoughts and feelings chased one another until she had to close her eyes and rest her head on the upholstery of the chair. She didn't know what made her open her eyes and glance past the tree to the doorway.
Ben was watching her from the foot of the stairs. She couldn't see his face for the dazzle of the tree, only a pale blur. "I didn't mean to wake you," he said at once. "I was just seeing where you were. You sleep while you have the chance. I can get the children."
"I wasn't sleeping, just resting my eyes," Ellen said, but he was already retreating upstairs. "You needn't leave me alone unless you want to. We can always talk."
He faltered and then came to her, so slowly that he reminded her of a child trying to frame an excuse. "We don't have to," she said, almost laughing at his reluctance but not quite able to do so. "We can do whatever you want to do."
"Nothing much we can do now except wait."
He walked past her and stood at the window, gazing towards the blanched town. His face was so expressionless that she thought he was hiding impatience. "Let them have a few hours with their friends," she said.
He stretched out his arms and pressed his hands against the panes. "They may as well."
What on earth was there in his response to make her shiver? Just one reassurance, she promised herself. "It's going to be a pleasant surprise, isn't it?" she said.
"What is?"
"Whatever you're keeping from us."
"Keeping from you…" he said oddly, and pushed himself away from the windows. The patterns which his ha
nds had left there shrank and faded from the glass. They didn't much resemble the marks of hands, but she was concentrating on his face, which looked pleading. "Trust me," he said.
"I do, Ben, you know that." Surely he meant it as an affirmative response to her question; what else could he mean? All the same, she was shivering. "I'm cold," she said.
"It's the shadow of the forest. It's reached the house."
The explanation wasn't especially comforting. His sitting with her and holding her would have been, but she oughtn't to have to ask. "I'm going up," he said.
"To do what, Ben? What's keeping you up there?"
He halted in the doorway with his back to her. He was so still, and paused for so long before he spoke, that she held her breath. At last he said "How did telling that story feel to you?"
"Our book?" Presumably his question was an answer of sorts, or a stage on the way to one. "Like remembering things I'd forgotten I knew. Like letting the story use me to tell itself."
"That's it. The children will be fine with us to guide them." He paused again as he set foot on the stairs. "Be sure to let me know if you're going out."
"Why do you ask that?"
"So I won't need to start wondering who's in the house."
His demand had angered her, but she couldn't sustain anger in the face of his response; it was just another feeling to add to her confusion. She listened to his footsteps climbing the silence, the occasional muffled creak of a stair, the distant thud of the workroom door, the isolated sound of her own sigh. If he was going to play the solitary artist, so could she. She shoved herself out of her chair and, sprinting to the top floor, pushed the work? room door open. "I'm just getting my sketch-pad.”
Ben was at the desk. Beyond him a sun like a mirror of ice was lowering itself through the white sky towards the forest. His hands were upturned on the desk as if they were reaching for something he saw, unless he was gazing at them. In the pale light they looked drained of colour. "Work in here if you like," he said.
Even though the skylight under which her drawing-board stood had acquired a thick lid of snow, she would have stayed if there had been so much as a hint of invitation in his voice, but she felt he was barely aware of her. He seemed more interested in the white blur which was hovering above the forest and which, she told herself, couldn't possibly be the reflection of his face. "There's more room downstairs. I'll make lunch soon," she said.
"Not for me."
"Dieting to get ready for Christmas?"
He didn't answer. The room felt as though it was filling with a stillness which she lacked the energy to break. She grabbed her sketch-pad and some pencils and retreated to the dining-room, where she switched on the chandelier above the table and sat facing the window. The shadow of the forest was oozing down through Stargrave; some of the windows on Church Road were already lit, and the covering of snow had begun to shine dully in the gloom. She flipped the pad open at the first unmarked sheet and picked up a pencil without knowing what she meant to draw. It seemed not to matter so long as she marked the snowy blankness of the page.
Perhaps she could draw an image which would help bring Ben's story alive. She drew a disc a third of the way down the page to represent the midnight sun, taking her time to describe as nearly perfect a circle as she could, then she sketched a forest of pines and spruce low on the page. The picture didn't amount to much as far as she could see, and so she began to raise trees above and behind the first trees, drawing the branches in increasingly intricate detail, until they looked more like shapes of frost than trees and then, as she elaborated the next rank, like neither. She found the image disconcerting, and its appearance when she hadn't realised it was in her mind was more so. She turned over the page, having thought of a new subject: the crystal from before the beginning of time.
Of course it was Ben's idea, not hers, and she found that she didn't know how to give it life. She let the point of the pencil rest on the centre of the page, until the very blankness of her mind seemed to start it moving. It drew a minute line and crossed it with another, then divided the angles between them and separated the end of each line into halves which flowered like frost, then it returned to the centre and divided the angles again… Long before it finished she lost count of the number of tiny precise movements it described, but when at last it faltered she saw that she'd drawn a crystal or a symbol of one, a shape so small and pale it was well-nigh invisible, yet so complex it hinted at patterns beyond imagining. She gazed at it until she thought she understood how it might grow, and then she recommenced drawing.
She didn't know how long it took. At first she kept glancing at the window as the shadow of the forest seemed to loom at it, until she grew engrossed in her task. The more she drew, the more she felt that the pattern was already there before her, waiting to be deciphered. The shape of the page frustrated her, but what else could she use? She felt as if she would be unable to let go of the pencil until every inch of the paper was taken up. At last she finished, and put one hand over her aching eyes for a good few minutes before she examined her work.
It was exquisitely detailed and yet by no means clear. All the lines were as faint as her first drawing of the crystal. The pattern made her think of ripples frozen in the instant they reached out of sight, but what kind of ripples, in what medium? It made her think of the centre of a spider's web so wide it might be infinite. She gazed into it, trying to grasp what it should mean to her, until she had to squeeze her eyes shut to rid herself of a sense that it had fastened on her vision. It was behind her eyelids too. She turned her eyes towards the window in the hope that doing so would clear them, and realised with a start how long she had been at the table. Outside it was nearly dark.
Was Ben collecting the children from Kate's? Could Ellen have been so engrossed that he'd left the house without her noticing? She stood up quickly, almost tripping over the legs of the chair, and ran into the hall. "Ben, are you up there?"
There was silence, but it didn't feel as though she was alone in the house. "Are you still there, Ben?"
She was lifting her coat from the post at the foot of the banisters when the floor at the top of the house creaked, and she heard his voice. It sounded distant, and either she misheard his words or he meant them as a joke, but at least she knew where he was. "Are you coming with me to fetch the children?" she called.
"You'll come straight back, won't you?"
"I expect so."
"Then I'll wait here."
Perhaps he'd fallen asleep at the desk; he seemed to be struggling to control his voice. "Will you be all right by yourself until we get back?" she shouted.
"I'll make sure I am."
He sounded more determined; his voice was larger and stronger. "We won't be long," she promised. She wriggled her hands through the sleeves of her coat and zipped it up as she opened the front door. She took one step into the twilight, and her teeth began to chatter.
FORTY
Except for the misty blur above the trees, the sky was clear. The night was closing around Stargrave, darkness spreading over the horizon beyond the railway to meet the shadow of the forest. Both of the lonely farmhouses she could see on the moors were lit. Their yellow windows were brighter and steadier than the star which flickered in the depths of the rising night, but it was the darkness which Ellen felt coming into its own – the darkness, and the lurid glow of the snowscape, and above all the cold. The temperature must have fallen several degrees since she had last been out of the house. She felt as if a claw of ice had seized her face. She thrust her hands into her gloves and hurried down to the main road, stumbling over footprints.
By the time she reached the shops, the cold was close to overcoming her ability to think. Each breath stung her nostrils, each step struck chill through her boots. The snow on the pavements was trodden down, and walking was treacherous with frozen slush. Most of the shops were open, their windows grey with condensation, but they had few customers. A family with a terrier on a leash crossed t
he square, their footfalls sounding compressed, their heads hanging low as if they'd been defeated by the cold. "Watch you don't fall," the woman with the terrier said, and Ellen saw that they were only attending to their steps.
As she turned along Hill Lane, she faltered. The mass of white above the streets – the common and the forest which was almost indistinguishable from it except for the hint of shapes of trees – was glowing. It put her in mind of an enormous crumpled page which was illuminated from within, and it appeared not to be entirely blank: she thought she saw patterns extending from the dimness beneath the trees onto the edge of the common. She made herself concentrate on the street she was climbing. Poring over her drawing must have affected her eyes, but she had to ignore that for the children's sake.
Soon she couldn't see beyond the town for the streetlamps, which seemed to huddle together as they approached the common. Nearly all the houses had at least one downstairs window lit. Their illumination shone through curtains and Christmas wreaths and lay on the pavement or in gardens, exhibiting snow. A door opened ahead of Ellen, and a woman hurried across the street to deliver a saucepan covered with a steaming cloth to an ageing neighbour. "Don't leave it open, we'll catch our deaths," a man protested as the woman dashed back into her house. The door slammed, and then the street was deserted apart from Ellen and several figures poking their white heads over garden walls.
By the time she reached Kate's and Terry's house her face felt like a frozen mask. As she stepped onto the short path, the roses on the trellis over the gate shed snow on her. She heard Johnny and Margaret laughing as she picked her way along the icy path beside a snowman surrounded by footprints. She dragged one hand out of her pocket and prodded the doorbell, and Kate ran to let her in. "You look as if you could do with something to warm you up."
"Don't open any Christmas spirit just for me."
Midnight Sun Page 26
