He plugged in the phone and dialled, then handed her the receiver. "I'll be your prompter if I think of anything to say."
She wouldn't have minded deciding for herself when she was ready to talk. She was moving to sit on the chair at the desk when a receptionist's voice announced "Firebrand Books."
"Kerys Thorn, please."
"I'll put you through to her secretary."
The receptionist had barely paused, but Ellen had noticed. "I think something may be up," she whispered to Ben, who knelt by her and brought his face alongside hers. Momentarily she felt as if he was kneeling before the dark forest. "Hello, can I help?" Kerys' secretary said.
"It's Gail, isn't it? This is Ellen Sterling."
"Who did you want to speak to?"
"Would you believe Kerys?"
"She isn't here now. Alice Carroll is if you want a word with her."
"I think I should."
Ben was hearing both sides of the conversation as far as she could tell. He'd leaned his face closer to hers and was gazing at the forest. She had never seen trees so still. She felt as if the stillness had invaded the telephone receiver, which was emitting none of the usual restless electrical sounds. When a new voice spoke it seemed such a violation of the silence that she jumped. "Who is this?" the woman's voice said.
Her emphasis on the first word was light but unmistakable. "Ben and Ellen Sterling," Ellen said.
"Of course, the husband and wife team," Alice Carroll said briskly. "What can I do for you?"
"We were wondering what happened to Kerys."
"We decided I should take over now so that Ember can move forward."
Ellen wondered if "we" included Kerys. "When are you next in town?" Alice Carroll wanted to know. "We should meet and talk about directions you might take."
"From whom?"
"Not that kind of direction," Alice Carroll said with a token laugh. "Avenues for exploration. Ideas in keeping with Ember's new image."
"Our books aren't, you mean."
"I like your snowflake book. I think that could point you the way you might want to go."
"Which is?"
"Developing the ecological theme which you were hinting at there. I felt you could have foregrounded that more, made your concern about it plainer. No need to be afraid of alienating your readers, if that was your problem. Today's children want relevance."
"You think so?"
"I wouldn't be here if I didn't. Have you talked to your readers lately?"
"Some of them."
"Let's hope we can make contact with many more. You've the talent. All it should take is an awareness of their needs," Alice Carroll said more briskly than ever. "We'll be putting out the book you delivered to Kerys Thorn, of course, assuming that you don't have second thoughts, but I really think we should get together for a drink and a chat before you start work on your next. How's your diary looking?"
"Kerys said we'd be wanted in London to help promote
The Boy Who Caught
The
Snowflakes."
"That's up to Publicity. I'll have you put through to them and then you can let me know your plans."
The line went dead, which presumably meant she was having the call transferred. Ellen sat up, massaging her arms, which had stiffened with tension, but Ben stayed as he was. "Can you hear?" she said.
"What?" He seemed startled by her question until he glanced at her. "Yes, don't worry. You're doing fine."
She wondered fleetingly if he'd thought she was asking about something other than the conversation, but what else could he have heard? "Publicity," a voice said. "Cynth speaking."
"Could I have a word with Mark Matthews?"
"What's it concerning, please?"
"The Boy Who Caught The Snowflakes.
This is Ellen Sterling."
"Who do you review for?"
"Not for anyone. I'm the artist."
"You'll want the art department, then. Hold on."
As Ellen drew breath to protest, Ben jerked his head towards the mouthpiece, so roughly that his cheekbone bruised her cheek. "This is Ben and Ellen Sterling. We wrote and illustrated the book. We want you to connect us with Mark Matthews while you've still got a job. Regard this call as a valuable lesson. One day you may be grateful."
"Don't take it all out on the poor girl," Ellen murmured as he withdrew from the mouthpiece. He blinked at her as if he didn't understand why she was rubbing her cheek, then gave it an apologetic kiss. She was turning her mouth to his when another voice separated them. "Mrs Sterling?"
"I'm here."
"Mark Matthews. Sorry if Cynth got it wrong. She's new here, like me. How can I help you?"
"We were wondering about publicity for our new book."
"Let me just find the publication date." She heard pages turning, and then he said cheerfully "End of November. One of our Christmas books. I'm sure it will sell itself."
Though he wasn't infuriating her as Alice Carroll had, Ellen still felt vulnerable, unsure how important she and Ben and their books were. "Can't we give it a push?" she said.
"What do you feel singles it out from the rest of the season's books?"
"The advertising, I hope."
"Spoken like a true writer. We're holding over most of our advertising budget to relaunch Ember next year. I'm sure we'll have point-of-sale advertising for your next book."
"Aren't we supposed to be helping to promote this one?"
"Will you be free around the publication date?"
"One or both of us."
"I'll make sure our reps and the press know." He cleared his throat. "Sorry if I seem at all vague. I'll be in touch nearer publication, scout's honour."
His pleasantness seemed to have left her no honest response. She handed Ben the receiver in case he had anything to add, but he let it drop onto the cradle. "It sounds to me as if they're going to leave us on our own out there," she said.
"They must know how good we are."
"Are we really, though?"
"Believe it," Ben said, his eyes glittering fiercely. "If they don't know yet, they will when they hear my story. I'd like to see Alice Carroll turn this one into her kind of ideological sermon. The unimaginative always want to reduce imagination to a level they can cope with."
"Are you going to tell me the story?"
He turned back to the window. True night had fallen; it had seemed to spread out from the forest and across the landscape. "I need to spend more time on it," he said. "I don't want to write it until I've got it clear."
"Don't tell me if you aren't ready to."
"No, I want you to hear. Telling it to you and the children may help me see what I'm conjuring up." He gazed ahead as if the dark might show it to him, and said "Suppose that in the coldest places on earth the spirits of the ice age are still there in the snow and ice, waiting to rise again."
"Not much chance of that, the way the climate's going."
"It isn't the climate that keeps them dormant, it's the sun."
"I expect it would."
"The midnight sun, I mean. It shines so many nights each year that they can never build up enough power to leave the ice.
"So how do they, if they do?"
"They do, I promise you. I'm not quite sure how, but I know I've something in here," he said, tapping his forehead. "If I can just bring it out into the open ..."
"I know you will. It sounds a wonderful idea. Do you think it might be best to save it until we've done our second book for Alice Carroll? Then we could make sure it goes somewhere it'll be appreciated. Or you could write it and then do something else for her. Your walk in the woods was productive, anyway," she added to cheer him up.
"It's started something. I only wish it would be a bit quicker taking shape."
"Had you just come out of the woods when I met you? How far did you walk?"
"I can't remember." He frowned as if she had distracted him unnecessarily. "I really don't know. I must have been too deep in my story. What does it matter? I came back."
"That's all that matters," she assured him. She gave him a long hug and stood up. "I'd better feed the starving before they realise they are."
She wasn't sure if he heard her. When she reached the door he had shifted onto the chair and was crouched over the desk, his face close to the window. "Turn the light off," he muttered, and she did so, hoping that would help him bring his tale alive. She'd sensed how much it meant to him, and she thought his passion for the idea meant it could be their best book.
When dinner was ready she sent Margaret to fetch him. The girl ran downstairs almost at once, looking unhappy and refusing to say why. Soon Ben appeared, narrowing his eyes at the light, opening them determinedly wide and smiling. "Sorry if 1 made you jump, Peg. I didn't realise you were there until you touched me. I must have been far away."
During the meal he retold the story which had been her favourite when she was little, about the boy lost in the mountains who had to venture to the very edge of what appeared to be a sheer drop in order to be rescued by a girl who turned into a cloud once he was safe, and then he told an ideologically corrected version in which the girl proved to be a member of the local mountain rescue team and lectured the boy on do's and don'ts for climbers. The children laughed so much that Johnny choked and had to be thumped on the back, and Ellen stuck out her tongue at the new version. "Looks as if there are still children whose minds haven't been sewn up by Alice Carroll and her kind," Ben said.
He gave in to pleas for a repeat of the original version once Johnny was in bed. Margaret sat on the end of the mattress where Johnny's feet didn't reach. As soon as the story was over she got into her own bed. Ellen went to bed early too, taking refuge from the chill which seemed to seep into the house whenever the central heating pump clicked off. Ben was in the workroom, and hadn't emerged when she fell asleep.
In the night a shiver wakened her. She clasped Ben's waist with one arm and pressed herself against his back to warm him up. There was movement at the window, a soft irregular patting on the glass. A white shape which looked tall as the gap between the curtains was dancing in the darkness, fluttering against the window like a bird or a moth. The children would be pleased in the morning, she thought drowsily. For a few seconds
the sounds on the panes seemed to grow absolutely regular, in a rhythm too complicated to follow. She was trying to define it when it lulled her to sleep.
TWENTY-THREE
Ellen's sleep was so profound and dreamless it felt like an absence of self. When the children's cries roused her, she struggled back to consciousness, feeling as if the stillness had accumulated on her, a weight whose impalpability made it all the more difficult to throw off. It filled the room, more than the room. She forced her eyelids wide and shoved herself clumsily into a sitting position, dislodging her pillow, which struck the carpet with a soft thud. How much had she overslept for the room to be as bright as this? She frowned at the clock, which was insisting that the alarm wasn't due for another ten minutes, as the children came racing upstairs. They both knocked on the bedroom door, inched it open, piled into the room. "It's snowed," Johnny shouted.
"It always will," Ben said.
Ellen hadn't realised he was awake; she wasn't sure even now that he was. He lay on his back with his eyes shut, his face as expressionless as his murmur had been. She put her finger to her lips and slipped quietly from under the duvet. Tiptoeing to the curtains, she looked through the gap.
The world had turned white. Beneath a blue sky which seemed almost as bright as the sun, snow like a sketch that reduced the moors and fields to their merest outlines sloped to the horizon, to the newly risen mountains which were clouds. Sheets of snow were folded over all the roofs of Stargrave. A few cars encrusted with white were proceeding slowly along the main road towards the bridge. A bird of prey hovered above the moors, its wings shining as if they or the sky around them were being transformed into crystal. It swooped to a small animal which dashed across the snow, seized it in its claws and wheeled away across the dazzling moors as the children wriggled under Ellen's arms to see the view. "Can we get dressed and go out?" Margaret whispered.
Ellen steered them out of the room. Though Ben's eyes were closed, she sensed he was awake; she thought he might be trying to shape his tale. "All right, but don't get too cold and wet. I'll call you when there's something hot to put inside you."
While she was making breakfast, having closed the kitchen blinds to shut out the glare of the swollen forest, she heard the slam of the workroom door. When she'd fed the children and brushed the melting snow out of their hair and ensured that they didn't spend too little time in the bathroom, she sent Johnny to tell his father that breakfast was in the oven. Johnny knocked on the workroom door and gabbled the message and raced downstairs, out of the house.
Once they were off the main road, the middle of which was already a mass of slush, Ellen let Margaret and Johnny run ahead, collecting snow from garden walls and shying it at each other. The streets were full of children doing so, as though a custard pie fight had taken over the town. She left the two of them, pink-faced in anoraks, at the school gates and tramped carefully downhill. Despite all the sounds — the creak of compressed snow underfoot, the scrape of spades on paths, the revving of car engines, shouts of greeting and speculations about the weather — the town seemed laden with silence which massed around her as she trudged beyond the newsagent's and along the edge of the rough track to the forest. Over the muffled squeak of her footsteps, she heard the phone ringing at the top of the house.
It continued to ring while she slithered towards the front door. Why hadn't Ben answered it? As she unlocked the door, the ringing ceased. She stamped her boots clean of snow and stepped into the house, and heard the workroom door open. "Ellen? Call for you," Ben shouted down. "Sally Quick."
He must have been elsewhere in the house when the phone began to ring, though he was blinking as if he'd just come back to himself. "Don't forget your breakfast," she said, and he wandered downstairs as she picked up the receiver. "Hi, Sally."