Margaret had the sudden terrible notion that unless she sang with all her soul she would be acting as though she didn't expect to see them again. For the rest of the afternoon she sang as if only the carols were able to delay the snow. "That was much better. You sounded like you had something to sing about," Mrs Hoggart said.
The final bell shrilled, and Margaret ran to the classroom ahead of the rest of her class. She grabbed her lunchbox and her coat from the corridor and struggled through the crowd of children from the other classes. She hadn't yet been able to see the school gates, but at least the sky beyond the windows was clearing. "Scuse me. Scuse me," she said, and dodged out of the school, into the shadow of the forest. Then she felt her heart stumble. All along the railings parents were waiting for their children, but neither of her parents was there.
At least one of them would be here by now unless something had gone wrong. She found herself wishing that she was either as young and unaware as Johnny or much older; it seemed horribly unfair that she should have to prepare him for the worst at her age. She felt as if the clear sky overhead had
suddenly turned black. Children who seemed hardly present to her pushed past her towards the gates, and then she heard Johnny run into the yard.
"There's my sister," he was complaining to his friends. "I've got to go now." For a moment Margaret was certain that she would burst into tears, but she managed to stiffen her face as she turned to him. She was trying to think what to tell him when he walked straight past her.
Rage flared in her, so violently that it frightened her. She swung round, trying to restrain herself from grabbing him, because she would only hurt him and make the situation worse, if it could be worse — and then she saw why he was walking so confidently towards the gates. Daddy was coming up Church Road.
She felt dizzy with relief, and yet the sight of him wasn't quite as reassuring as she would have expected. Why wasn't Mummy with him? Margaret closed her eyes and swallowed and sidled between two prams out of the gates, and raced Johnny downhill to their father, who gave her a vague smile. "Where's Mummy?" she said as neutrally as she could.
"She'll be at the freezer. We're only just home."
That ought to have rid Margaret of her fear, but perhaps there was more to it than she'd realised, unless it was only the shadow of the forest which was making her so shivery. She held onto the jagged top of a garden wall until Johnny and her father looked back to see why she wasn't following. "Come on if you want to see your mother," Daddy said.
Margaret trudged after them, past the information centre where Sally Quick had hung Mummy's paintings on the walls, alongside the dead railway and up the rough track. Though the shadow of the forest had reached the house, none of the visible windows was lit. The snow figures were glowing; mustn't that mean the kitchen light was on? She ran past the house, though the chill of the forest seemed to leap at her; ringing the doorbell and waiting would take too long. Her mother was in the kitchen, and waved to her through the window.
Margaret felt as if she had to give everyone a hug. She sprinted up the garden path and emb
r
aced Johnny, who protested "Get off," and her father, who looked bewildered. As soon as he unlocked the front door she raced to the kitchen and clasped her mother tight. "I love you too," Mummy said, and returned the hug. Margaret was tempted to blurt out her fears, but there was no need; they no longer mattered — the family was together and safe. She wasn't going to take any more notice of her imagination, of any feelings she might have about the winter. She squeezed her mother again and held onto her. "We'll never forget this Christmas, will we?" she said like a promise.
THIRTY-FIVE
As Ellen stirred the soup she remembered meeting Ben on the heights. She remembered the smell of the sunlit grass, the rounded mountains like the flanks of animals too huge to waken, bright ripples spreading leisurely behind a boat on a lake until they were almost as wide as the shore, the hush which seemed to slow down the song of a bird and set it like a jewel-in the air, and it occurred to her that these were precisely the impressions she needed to convey in the last scene of the book she was rewriting. Was this how writing felt to Ben, the story either demanding to be written or struggling to take shape even when he wasn't at the desk? He'd often said it was the nearest he came to being pregnant, but it didn't feel much like pregnancy: there was nothing physical about the newness growing inside her, and perhaps that was why she felt compelled to set it down before it vanished. She called the family to dinner and ladled out the soup. "Don't say very much to me," she said. "I've an idea I want to write."
The children were almost too good. Even when Johnny forgot he was supposed to avoid distracting her, he remembered at once and put his hand over his mouth. The idea of requiring the family to be so muted just to let her work dismayed her. "I wasn't asking you to stop breathing," she said, and he nodded as if the silence had filled his mouth. The silence wasn't helping her at all, it was simply isolating the dinner-table sounds until Ellen had to start a conversation herself, no easy task while Ben was sitting like silence made flesh.
As soon as dinner was over Margaret said "Me and Johnny will help Daddy wash up."
"You get my vote," Ellen told Ben, and was rewarded with a vague smile for kissing his cold forehead. If the midnight sun idea was trying to take shape inside him, no wonder he was preoccupied. "I'll try not to be too long," she said, and went up to the workroom, composing her first sentence on the way. It
was nearly midsummer,
she wrote on the sketch-pad, and suddenly she didn't need to think what to write; her impressions of the day above the lakes were bringing the characters alive as if they had been starved of sunlight. Before long she was writing almost in a trance, and almost unaware of her surroundings until she had finished.
She'd heard Ben putting the children to bed. She read through what she'd written, then gazed out of the window. She thought she'd managed to convey everything she had set out to express, but the dimly luminous forest made both her achievement and herself feel suddenly insignificant, less than a spark in the darkness. Perhaps writing had exhausted her, for she was shivering. She hurried down to Ben, who was watching the weather forecast as if it was a coded message he'd forgotten how to read. "Is this any good?" she said, handing him the sketchpad.
"Of course it is." He seemed to feel it wasn't necessary for him to read her work. When he'd done so he gave her a smile whose wistfulness took her aback. "It's better than good."
"Do you remember?"
"Remember what?" Almost as soon as he saw her disappointment he said "Where you got it from, you mean? Why wouldn't I?" He leafed through the pages as if he might have missed a point, then returned the pad to her. "It's your book now." Uurs.
"If you like. I'm glad we had the chance to write one."
"I was thinking about your Father Christmas idea. I thought his dreams could be where all the presents come from. Maybe one year someone wakens him too early and he can't get back to sleep. I don't know what happens then, but I thought we might find out together."
"If there's time."
Of course there wouldn't be before Christmas. In the morning the first cards were on the doormat — two identical puddings from Norwich, Father Christmas climbing scaffolding to reach a chimney in front of a printed message from Stan Elgin and his firm — and she began to experience the usual pre-Christmas panic. There was just a fortnight to Christmas Day, and she still had to buy cards and the food she hadn't thought worth carting home from Leeds, still had to choose last-minute presents. "I'll be organised next Christmas," she told Ben as usual, thinking that he needn't look so unconvinced. She wasn't that disorganised; at least she had thought to stock up on petrol on the way back from Leeds, filling several cans as well as the tank.
She and the children spent the morning at the market, where everyone kept saying "AH the best" while their breath smoked like the chestnut stall, and staggered back laden with decorations, presents, crackers, cards. It took the family most of the afternoon to put up the decorations, especially since Johnny climbed the ladder at the flimsiest excuse, but by nightfall every downstairs room except the kitchen was crisscrossed with streamers, holly dangled from picture-rails, mistletoe hung in doorways. "Is everything as it should be, do you think?" she asked Ben.
He'd seemed uninvolved, though busy, and she wondered if he was remembering his Christmases here. He turned to the children as if they knew more about the season than he did. "Have we forgotten anything?"
"A tree."
"We've a forest of them, Johnny. Go and see them whenever you like."
"I mean one we can have in the house." When his father looked as if he was about to refuse, Johnny cried "We always have one. It won't be like Christmas."
"It won't," Ben said flatly, and seemed to relent. "I don't suppose one tree will make any difference."
Ellen switched off the lights as they left the house. Above the roof the sky was so clear that she could see a sprinkling of galaxies in the black depths beyond the stars. She followed Ben and the children past the crowd of shrunken figures staking out the house until the snow came. "We won't need to go far, will we?
"How far do you think we should?" Ben said.
Above the whitened treetops the mist glowed sullenly like clouds above a snowscape. Rank after rank of trees emerged from the dimness, forming a darkly luminous pattern which fastened on her vision. If she ventured into the secret twilight she was sure there would be more to see, but how could she even consider wandering into the forest at night with the children? One day Ben could show her the depths of the forest, but not now. "Just far enough to dig up a little tree," she said.
"No distance at all." He shrugged and stepped off the marked paths, though surely he could have chosen a shrub from the very edge of the forest. She had to keep blinking her eyes as she watched him, otherwise the trees appeared to step forwards almost imperceptibly as he passed between them. She was about to call out to ask him how much farther he meant to go when he halted. "This is for us," he announced.
He'd found a shrub not quite as tall as himself. He fell to his knees and began to dig at the roots with a trowel. "Come here," he said in a voice which seemed more breath than words, and sat back on his heels. "Everyone should have a dig."
For a moment the sight of him, a dark shape crouching among the trees with a glint of metal in its hand, seemed to Ellen to suggest a fairy tale or a childhood nightmare which the tale had provoked. It was just Ben waiting there, she told herself, and led the children off the path.
She took the trowel from him and poked among the scrawny roots while a cold smell of growth and decay filled the air. As she freed the roots their spidery tendrils brushed the backs of her hands, scattering earth and fallen needles and glistening insects which scuttled into the dark. She dug halfway around the tree and passed the tool to Margaret, who probed the ground and recoiled when a root sprang up through the needles as if impatient to be free. Johnny dug like a terrier until his father stopped him. "It'll come now," Ben said.
Ellen trowelled the soil away from the roots as he lifted the tree, and then she stood up. Perhaps she moved too quickly, for just as the tree emerged from the soil the air seemed to darken overhead. It felt to her as if the open sky had suddenly appeared — as if the trees had been pushed apart. She wavered dizzily and glanced up, and saw the white belly of the mist lowering itself onto the treetops. She grabbed the children's hands and started away from the pit where the tree had been, only to discover she had lost the path. Ben seemed to know where he was going, and so she followed him.
She'd darkened the house so as not to be dazzled on the way back, but now she realised that the lights would have allowed her to orient herself. Still, the forest was thinning ahead of Ben, until she could distinguish beyond the trees a dark bulk which dwarfed a host of pale shapes — the house and the snow crowd.
"Let's run and get everything ready," she said.
She conducted Margaret and Johnny down the track while Ben followed with measured steps, the thin silhouette of the tree craning over his shoulder and waving insect limbs behind his back. By the time he came into the house she had produced the tub and decorations from the cupboard under the stairs. He stood the tree in the tub and packed earth around the roots, and the children helped drape the branches with streamers and skeins of bulbs. Ellen switched on the bulbs and turned off the living-room light, and the family sat in front of the shining tree.
For her the tree had always had a special magic, but this year the magic was darker. The lights nestling in the depths of the tree made her think of stars; the sight of them hovering in the dark seemed almost to bring the black sky down through the house and into the room. As the winter nights grew longer and colder, she thought as she lay in bed, primitive folk must have thought the sky was coming to earth. She slept and dreamed that the stars were cold, covered with ice which kept them shining as they fell towards her, until she realised that there was no light for them to reflect and they went out, leaving her struggling to waken from the dark.
She must have dreamed that because she was waiting for the snow. In the morning it hadn't arrived, nor the next day, nor the day after. Despite the absence of clouds, the air felt weighed down by the massing of snow, an impression which made the bright sky seem unreal. Her classes in Leeds were finished now until the new year, but at least there were plenty of seasonal preparations to keep her busy, since Ben insisted on typing the new book. In three days he transcribed exactly what she'd written, though she had been hoping he would put something of himself into it, and posted the typescript to Ember.
Waiting for the publishers to respond made her unexpectedly nervous. Perhaps she had always believed that they were bound to like Ben's tales as much as she did and that her illustrations were only a bonus, unnecessary to their success. Thank heaven for the time of year, she thought, for an evening of carol-singing with Hattie Soulsby to subsidise the playgroup. Without that she would have been in danger of brooding on her nervousness, which had begun to feel so large and vague that it could hardly be explained by anxiety about the book.