Yours sincerely
Sidney Peacock
Ellen read the letter and stared open-mouthed at it and then flung it into the air. When it landed face up on the desk she read it again. She couldn't tell how much of the letter was intended to be slyly insulting or even what Peacock thought of her, and it infuriated her that she was wondering. She was tempted to drop it in the wastebasket, but she wanted Ben to read it first, if only for a laugh. She opened one of the Ember envelopes instead.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Sterling,
I am eleven years old. First I want to say how much I enjoyed your book
"The Boy Who Fell Up The Mountain". A!!
my friends did except one who said there could not be a mountain so high you would fall into the sky instead of down. 1 told her there probably is on the moon and anyway it says on your book it is a fantasy, which is the kind I like best.
When I grow up
I
want to be an artist like Mrs. Sterling. Do you think I may have a chance if I work hard at my pictures? Do you have to have an agent if you want them to be published? I am enclosing some of them for you to look at so you can say what you think of them. I hope you will not mind
uniting
and saying. Yours admiringly, Melanie Tilliger.
Behind the sheet of paper were three more, small enough not to have needed folding to fit into the envelope. They were scenes from the book. In one the boy was more than halfway up the mountain, because his staff which had started out taller than he was had been worn to the length of a walking-stick. In the second he was among the birds, so high that they were white with frost, and in the last one he must have reached his destination, the height where he was able to hover for just the duration of a heartbeat, the one point from which you could see the meaning of the world, before the winds cast him down and he awoke at the foot of the mountain with nothing to show that he hadn't been dreaming except his worn staff. "When he tried to tell the people of his village what he knew they called him mad and drove him into the forest ... All this was many years ago, but perhaps he is still wandering the world, looking for someone who will listen to him," Ellen quoted to herself, laying the pictures side by side on the sunlit desk. They were colourful and imaginative and meticulously detailed, and they seemed worth dozens of favourable reviews, not that the book had attracted so many, she was thinking how to reply as she opened the third envelope.
Hi Sterlings!
Hope some or all of you will be in town again soon so I can buy you lunch. Meanwhile maybe you should treat yourselves to an answering machine
—
I've been trying to call you for a few days. Ellen, if you've got any ideas for the
Boy Who Caught The Snow-flakes
promo, could you let me have whatever you want me to see? Ben, if you can tell me what your next book will be about I'll make an offer for the next two. We don't want you getting away from Ember just when you're about to be mega!
Kiss the kids for me and tell them lots of stories.
Love,
Kerys.
"Phew," Ellen said. She prepared dinner, feeling rather dazed, straying back now and then to the desk to reread the letters, and then she made herself sit down and write an encouraging response to Melanie Tilliger before she set about sketching ideas to send Kerys. An hour later the ideas were breeding, and she hadn't had time to sketch them all when she had to dash out to collect the children from school.
Johnny was even more impressed by her receiving fan mail than by the books themselves, and Margaret asked if she could write her own letter to the girl. "Do something sensible while I finish off some work," Ellen told them.
They tried, bless them. Johnny watched television with the sound turned low while Margaret wrote to Melanie Tilliger. When he tired of cartoons in which the characters lacked the energy to move their faces and their bodies simultaneously, Johnny read for a while and then wandered into the kitchen, wanting to draw. Soon Ellen had to sort out a squabble over pencils, after which the children began to accuse each other of increasingly heinous peccadilloes. She was ordering a few minutes' peace as Ben came home.
He seemed oddly amused by the uproar. "Shush, now," he said to the children, and "Well" to each of the letters. When he left it at that she demanded "Are you going to let me into the secret?"
"Tell you when you're older," he said, and gave her a kiss in case she thumped him. "When the rest of us are in bed," he added for only Ellen to hear.
She hustled him into the front room as soon as the children were tucked up. "So?"
"I was thinking that we'll have so many rooms we might want to use a few more of them."
"Go on."
"Well, if we lived here and used my aunt's house for an office we'd have all the peace we needed for working."
"That's silly and moreover it's wasteful."
"I suppose it is when we've another house that's the size of them both put together. We could sell this one or my aunt's and let the other in case we wanted to come back."
"You've been thinking this over."
"Do you blame me?"
"Of course not. I'm glad you feel that way. I wasn't sure how going home had affected you."
"It isn't only me. The children were asking me again this morning if we could."
"I wonder if they realise how much change would be involved, leaving their school and all their friends."
"They insist they don't mind. They seem to think it would be an adventure."
"What sort of job could you find up there? I didn't notice many opportunities on offer."
"I was wondering if it isn't time for us to take the chance we've been working for."
"Write and paint full-time, you mean."
"That's still what you want, isn't it? Otherwise you won't hear another word from me about anything I've said. It's been a few years since that anniversary when we raised our glasses to the day when we could devote our lives to being the people we really are."
She knew how much it meant to him — even more than it meant to her. His proposal semed to solve so many problems that she was instinctively suspicious of it. "Give me time to consider," she said, and was touched by the way he immediately went to the desk to work on their next book: he reminded her of a child finding himself a task to distract himself from some almost uncontainable eagerness. After an hour or so he reappeared. "I'm just going out to get some night air."
He closed the front door gently behind him, letting in a cold wind which rustled papers on the desk. She listened to his footsteps being carried away by the wind, and felt as if her indecision was making him restless. When he returned, his eyes glittering with chill, she told him "I want to go up to Stargrave first for another look."
SEVENTEEN
Two days later Ellen drove to Stargrave, out of a dawn like a great fire of Norwich. Whenever she reached a clear stretch of motorway she found herself composing responses to Sid Peacock.
Dear Mr Peacock, While I appreciate your invitation to be aggressive I think you might prefer me not to be... Dear Sidney, Given your skilful choice of words I don't think you really need my assistance ... Dear Sid, Thank you for making it clear
in
your letter that you're as gallant as ever... Dear Peacock, Up your tail ...
She mustn't start thinking as though everything was resolved, she told herself. She was going to Stargrave to see what needed to be done to the house.
Once she was past the villages beyond Leeds she tried not to enjoy the landscape too much. As the road soared up through a multitude of clumps of moist bright grass under a piebald sky, the car started a moorhen out of the heather. The flight of the bird drew her gaze to the first crags, dark masses of gnarled stone which neither the weather nor the vegetation could overcome and which made her feel as if the landscape was baring its soul to her. She drove for half an hour without meeting another vehicle, and was quite glad when she saw the railway bridge ahead. Feeling solitary was fine, except that she had the family to think of.
"Having a rest from the family?" the receptionist at the Station Hotel said, and showed Ellen to a small room at the front of the building. The lift was still out of order. "Better than a three-mile hike, this place," the receptionist panted as she unlocked Ellen's room.
Ellen freshened up after the drive and headed for the estate agent's, where Henry Tovey exhibited his scrubbed smile for her. "Still no offers?" she said.
"Some folk from out of town said they'd be letting us know.
You'll have noticed that in general our local homeowners prefer more compact properties. But I'll guarantee that Elgin's can make it more attractive."
She and Ben had asked him to recommend a builder, and now he took her to the yard. It was diagonally opposite the school, between the two loops, Church Road and The Crescent. As Tovey opened the wicket in the wooden gate, a woman surrounded by children imploring "Mrs Venable" gave Ellen a smile as she crossed Church Road to the schoolyard, where she all but vanished in a crowd of children. Of course, she and her husband had been the only other diners at the hotel when the Sterlings had stayed there. "She's the headmistress," Tovey said as he let Ellen through the gate.
A bulky man in overalls and a black wool cap slammed the bonnet of the only van in the cobbled yard and came to greet them, wiping his hands on a rag which he stuffed in his pocket. His wide ruddy face and swaying gait made her think of a sailor who'd lost the sea. "Stan Elgin," he said and shook her hand fastidiously, using one large finger and thumb. "I'll look after her, Henry. I've put a sheet in the van."
He'd spread what appeared to be a lacy tablecloth over the passenger seat. "I was thinking I could show you some of the work we've done for folk," he told her. "See that or your house first, whichever you like."
"Let's go to the house."
"You're the boss."
He drove out of a lower gate into The Crescent, where a curve of houses pulled in their gardens and turned into shops. As Market Street brought the van in sight of the bungalow at the end of the track to the Sterling house, he pointed without letting go of the wheel. "I helped my dad build that."
"It looks very snug."
"Old Mrs Broadbent used to live where that is now. Your husband might remember her. She had the sewing shop when he went away." The builder swung the van onto the track and said "Her house burnt down that Christmas. She had a stroke or summat like. Fell against the stove while it was on and must have cracked the pipe."
"At Christmas," Ellen mourned, her voice shaking with the jouncing of the van. As he parked the van beside the house, on a weedy patch of earth frozen hard as concrete, she said, "You'd think my husband's family would have had this road improved."
"Reckon they weren't as well off as folk thought, and they never had much time for visitors."
Ellen climbed down from the van, thinking how lonely the house might have felt to a child. The forest and its miles of secret shadows seemed more present than the town. All at once she was determined to rescue the house from its own loneliness. She unlocked the front door and was met by her breath in the long shabby hall. "One thing this house could use is some heating," she declared.
"We can put that in for you." The builder followed her in and set about stamping on floors, rolling back carpets and poking floorboards with a screwdriver, opening and closing doors, peering at ceilings, tapping on walls or laying his palm on them as though feeling for a heartbeat. Every so often he scribbled on a pad in handwriting which looked as if it was struggling against a high wind. At the top of the house he hoisted himself through the attic window, elbows on the slates, to scrutinise the roof. "We'll need to get the ladders to the other side, but it's a rock of a place, this house," he said. "Damp course and your heating and a replacement for that broken window and a good strong coat of paint outside are most of what it needs. I can drop the estimates into the Station tomorrow morning if you're happy when you've seen some of our work."
"That would be ideal," Ellen said, gazing from the window he'd vacated. From up here the presence of the forest was even more overwhelming — because she could see more trees, she told herself. "Does anyone walk in the woods?"
"You won't see many. There's no paths, and if you aren't careful you'll think you've found one. It's not a place to walk on your own, but there's been a few who have."
"What happened to them?"
"Got lost and couldn't find their way out before dark. Had to stay there overnight and froze to death." He shook his head slowly and turned towards the stairs. "Unless you reckon they strayed in there after dark."
"What would have made them do that?"
"Just what I say," he responded as if she'd expressed more scepticism than in fact she had. "But to hear some of my dad's generation talk you'd think the forest was to blame, not these folk who go gallivanting when anyone with any sense wouldn't put their nose out of doors if they could help it. They're born that way if you ask me. If they aren't getting themselves stuck on the crags because they think they're Edmund Hillary, they're trying to prove they've more ice in their veins than the rest of us when it comes to the weather."
"Are the winters very cold here?"
"Mostly they're like it is now. It's when the rest of the country freezes you need to watch out. Maybe the cold drove those folk crazy," he said as if the explanation had just occurred to him, "and that's why they wandered up there after dark."
When she'd locked the front door he drove her to a cottage which backed onto the railway. Mrs Radcliffe, who alternately coughed and smoked a cigarette, was even prouder of her new conservatory which overlooked the lower moors than the builder was trying to conceal that he was. "If you want your windows doing you know where to come. Heights no object, my oid man always says," she told Ellen as she saw her to the garden gate.