At first he'd assumed that the excitement of coming home was distracting him. As soon as the air had begun to smell of autumn he'd taken himself to the desk every morning and kept himself there until he'd written at least a paragraph, but he felt as if the story wouldn't come alive. He was nervous of telling it to the children in case the act drained it of whatever energy it had. He was beginning to wonder if having signed a contract in advance was making him afraid that he couldn't deliver, but he thought more than that was involved. As he sat at the desk each morning and gazed into the forest, he felt as though an inspiration or a vision larger than he could imagine was hovering just out of reach.
"Climb with us, Daddy," Johnny was calling, and Ben relinquished his thoughts with a sigh. By the time he arrived at the children's favourite crag, which Margaret had immediately compared to a giant loaf nibbled by giant mice, the family was halfway to the top. The wind tugged at Margaret's clothes as she followed her mother up the zigzag path worn into the rock, and Ben clambered after her in case she needed help.
Johnny danced on the flat summit and chanted "I'm the king of the castle" while the others hauled themselves over the edge to join him. Having wavered upright, Ben planted his feet well apart before he surveyed the view. All he could see were another few distant slopes and isolated farmhouses. Even if the view had anything extra to offer, his anxiety in case the children strayed too close to the edge was distracting him.
From the foot of the crag they walked across the moor to the common between the forest and the town. A faint path which Mrs Venable forbade her pupils to use on the way to and from school led through the grass above the schoolyard and churchyard and back gardens of Church Road. As the road curved downhill, half a mile of allotments took the place of gardens beside the path, and ended near the track which led past the Sterling house.
As the Sterlings reached the track, Mrs Dainty stumbled out of the woods onto the further stretch of path, mopping her forehead with her free hand. "Thank the heavens it was you I kept hearing and you stayed there long enough for me to find you."
"We've only just got here, Mrs Dainty," Ellen said.
"If I was hearing some other lost soul whispering in there, may the dear Lord see them out before it's dark. The dog only had me off the path as far as you are from the church, and I thought we were gone for ever."
"There you are," Margaret said to her parents. "We need to make some more paths."
"I wouldn't ache my head with that if I were you, lass," Mrs Dainty said. "There won't be many besides me walking in there till spring. There's not many can take the chill."
"Thank you, Mrs Dainty."
Ben didn't think she heard him as the dog yanked her away, but Ellen heard. "What were you thanking her for?"
"Showing me where I can be alone to work out my story."
"I expect all you need is not to feel under pressure. I won't need to start painting for six months. You do whatever your feelings say you have to, but don't get lost in there."
"How could I?" Ben said, and waited until she turned away before following her and the children to the house. He heard the forest creak and whisper behind him, and shook his head at himself. Finding his way into the book had to be his only reason to spend time in there. It wouldn't help him in his task to feel that he was using the book as an excuse to be alone in the woods.
TWENTY
The cold wakened him before dawn. He couldn't tell whether it was the night which was cold or only himself. When he put one arm around Ellen, she shivered in her sleep. Though he didn't feel the need to shiver, the cold was making him restless. He padded into the workroom and watched the stars flickering above the forest, and wondered how many of the crystal sparks were ghosts of dead stars, their light kept alive by the gulf they had to cross, just now, when the night was darkest, the mass of trees looked like a distillation of the space between the stars. He would have switched on the desklamp if he'd thought of so much as a phrase, but his nervous exhilaration seemed for the moment to have nothing to do with writing. He watched until the forest began to glimmer and then to glow faintly as the stars went out. It was the dawn, but it looked to him as though the starlight was settling into the forest, impregnating the silvery branches.
The click of the central heating reverberated through the pipes and brought him back to himself. Soon the family would be about, and he didn't want the bother of explaining why he had been sitting naked at the desk; he hadn't even realised until now that he was. By the time he'd bathed and dressed himself the family was still asleep. He brought Ellen a cup of tea, and sang softly in the children's ears to rouse them.
He was brushing his teeth after breakfast, gazing into his eyes as if they could tell him a secret, when he heard Ellen losing patience with the children. "Try and get a move on instead of arguing. You know I need to be quick on Mondays."
She taught an art class at a college outside Leeds twice a week. A niece of Sally Quick's was a student there and had persuaded Ellen to take the class. "I'll walk them to school," Ben told Ellen as he went downstairs. "I need to get away from the desk."
"Any joy this morning?"
"Nothing on paper to show for it. It's in here," he said, tapping his forehead. "I just need to give it room to breathe."
"If you go in the woods will you stay where we've marked?"
"If it keeps you happy," he said, feeling guilty as he saw how prepared she was to believe him. There was no point in troubling her when he knew what he was doing. He wanted to make sure nobody distracted him from his imagination, that was all.
When he opened the front door the October cold settled on him. The flowers in the garden were dusted with frost, the cobwebs on the spiky wall had turned into webs of spun glass. He felt entranced by the clarity of his surroundings, the cold made visible. When he reached the newsagent's and a newsboy with an empty shoulder-bag dodged into the shop, the furnace blast from the heater above the door almost shocked Ben into the roadway. Johnny was being a steam engine while Margaret strolled with two of her friends and pretended that her father wasn't there. As the horde of schoolchildren converged on the school, they seemed to him to be drawn towards the forest. The sight made him think of some fairy tale, perhaps one he had yet to tell.
At the school gates Margaret said goodbye with a kiss and a regal wave, and Johnny managed a hasty peck once he was sure that none of his friends would see. Ben watched as the two of them became part of the crowd in the schoolyard. He felt unexpectedly vulnerable, childlike. He wandered down Hill Lane to the main road, and was past the newsagent's again before he wondered why he hadn't made straight for the forest instead of heading for the end of the marked paths nearest the house. What reason could he have for putting off an exploration of the woods? He'd already explored the lower reaches of the forest with the help of Ellen and the children, after all.
Though the borough council was technically responsible for its maintenance, the terms of the original bequest meant that the Sterlings owned the forest. During the summer, at Ellen's suggestion, they'd begun to identify walks and paint arrows on the trees. Green arrows marked a path which curved from above the Sterling house to the edge of the woods nearest the stile on the moorland road, blue arrows led deeper into the forest and then returned across the green path to emerge onto the common above the church. Stan Elgin had erected marker posts along the paths, and the council was apparently proposing to gravel the paths if it ever had sufficient funds. "They'd rather argue about money than spend it," Ben told himself as he strode past the house.
When the track reached the common beside the allotments, it vanished. Only his shadow was there to lead him across the frosty grass to the start of the blue-arrowed path, where the earth showed black through a threadbare embroidery of moss. He halted there and stood listening. All he could hear was the silence of the trees, ranks of Norway spruce radiating away from him like centuries of Christmases until they met the pines which composed most of the forest. As he set out along the path he found he was instinctively trying to make no noise.
The silence closed around him like water, icy and gloomily green. He had taken only a few steps when he felt he was deep in the forest; the trees cut off all the sounds of the town. Soon they were towering over him, their spires of green branches perched high on mottled scaly trunks as tall as the spire of St Christopher's. While he'd been leading the family along the paths they'd marked, the forest had often seemed a refuge from the summer heat, a reservoir of wintry shadow, as though the trees had immobilised the seasons. Now he found they had trapped a chill which felt as if it might never recede. It made him breathless, and he walked faster, almost in a trance, until the sight of a marker post ahead told him that he was about to leave the path.
The arrow carved and painted on the waist-high post indicated that the path wound sharply to the right, and Ben wondered why he'd sent the path in that direction. He mustn't have wanted it to lead any deeper into the forest. Several hundred yards ahead the Norway spruce gave way to pines, and he felt as if he was about to cross a threshold, not necessarily one that was visible to him. He went to the post and held onto it, trying to decide if he'd wanted to save the depths of the woods for himself or to protect Ellen and the children from them. Perhaps it had been the latter, because suddenly he felt reluctant to leave the path.
As his left hand clamped his right on top of the post, he was reminded of a game he and his mother used to play, piling their hands alternately on top of one another, faster and faster,
towards some goal which he had always thought they'd failed to reach because of laughing. Infuriated by the childishness of the gesture, he shoved himself away from the post and off the path, onto a carpet of fallen needles which silenced his footsteps. He was heading for the centre of the forest, as far as he could tell. He wouldn't look back until he was certain that the path was out of sight. It was his forest more than anyone else's, and he felt as if it was poised to watch over him.
The pines multiplied around him with every step he took. He followed his shadow over mounds of decaying needles towards what appeared to be the edge of an infinity of pines, an edge which constantly renewed itself. Fallen needles surrounded him, green needles scattered on old gold and bronze and shards of ivory where frost had settled, and they made him feel as if the forest contained a pattern he was soon to distinguish. He looked over his shoulder at last and saw only pines leading away, he didn't know how long ago he'd left the spruce plantation behind. He was still walking as if he was under a compulsion to walk, and the next moment he lost his footing on a slippery root beneath the needles. He fell to his knees, his hands sinking into prickly decay, and was about to heave himself to his feet when it was borne in on him that his would be the only movement in the entire forest.,
He crouched there, hands on thighs, too awed to stir. The countless slender pines and the lattice of their shadows surrounded him with a calm which suggested to him that the very air had turned to ice. The avenues of bare trunks rose to a ceiling of gloomy green high as a cathedral roof, and he felt as if he were kneeling in a vast natural shrine to a stillness of which his surroundings were merely an omen. What might he find at the centre of such a stillness? Just as he wondered that, he heard a sound behind him.
It began above him, rattling through foliage, and came scuttling down a trunk. Ben gave a cry and twisted around, kicking up a heavy shower of needles. He was in time to see an object small and brown as a sparrow drop from the leaning trunk and land among the roots. For a moment, bewildered by the sound which had responded to his cry, he thought the object was a spider. It was a pine-cone, and he told himself that the sound had been the echo of his own voice; if it had been anyone else's, he would surely have been aware of its owner by now. All the same, he wished that he hadn't been making so much noise himself that he'd obscured the sound which, as he strained to recall it, seemed like a whisper which had come from several directions. "He could imagine that it had been the sound of the forest calling to him," he muttered as if making his impression more like a story would distance it from him.
A shiver sent him wavering to his feet. He stared about, trying to determine which way he'd been facing when he had looked over his shoulder, and then he saw that the forest itself was showing him: most of the shadows were pointing that way. His own shadow had joined them as he rose, and he went quickly after it, as though he could outrun it if he went fast enough.
There was another idea for a story. He must remember to write it down once he was home, and carry a notebook in future. That should help him focus his imagination, which seemed just now to be escaping his control. He was beginning to think that all the shadows around him and ahead of him were indicating the route he should follow, and that too many of the fallen needles were. Surely none of this need trouble him, because he could see open sky beyond the farthest trees. It had to be the edge of the forest, and he was bound to admit he felt a little relieved. He would welcome a few natural sounds once he was in the open. Until he was out of the forest, however, he would rather not hear anything beyond his breathing and his muffled footfalls which sounded like heartbeats in the earth.
He would have expected the patch of open sky to grow more quickly as he strode forwards. Even when he jogged towards it, it stayed frustratingly localised. The soft ground muffled his footfalls so completely that he felt as if the silence was intensifying, swallowing any sounds he made. Then he faltered. That wasn't the edge of the forest ahead; it was a glade deep within it. He knew that because he had already been there.
He remembered being taken to the glade on a day so cold his mother and grandmother huddled close to the fire in the house. Had the place looked then as it looked now? The pines around it glittered as though ice was crystallising faintly on their bark, and the grass at its centre resembled an explosion of frost yards wide. His memories were slipping away, because he'd realised what he must have been too young to realise then. This was the place where Edward Sterling had died.