The forest seemed to emit the cry for him. The snow between the trees rose up and flocked towards him with a screech of ice on ice. In the moments before the fire which was himself blinded and deafened him, he saw the swarming patterns reverse their direction and rush towards him as though to extinguish him. He felt the flames boiling his eyes and entering his skull through every orifice, and he thought he would go mad with agony before he died, an agony which felt as if it might never end.
And then the agony fell away from him, although he was still conscious. He seemed to be borne away by the icy flock, lifted into the endless dark. He felt he was merging with the blizzard, but it was more than that: he was expanding like a galaxy. Perhaps his consciousness was doing so at last; perhaps his terror of the presence he'd glimpsed in the forest had been a symptom of his failure to grasp the awesomeness of it. Perhaps this insight was all he could expect, the nearest to a resolution of a lifetime of expectancy he could hope for, or perhaps it was only the beginning.
EPILOGUE
Though the restaurant near Covent Garden was new, it tried to seem older. Beneath the half-shell of the pediment, the front door was of stout oak and sported a heavy brass knocker, the face of a jovial chef with a ring between his teeth. Beyond the latticed windows whose panes resembled flat transparent breasts set in glass, a few blurred shapes of diners were silhouetted against a fire. On the pavement by the doorway, one of a pair of blackboards supporting each other and staggering a little whenever the wind found them announced that for the duration of the Christmas holidays a magician would be performing at lunchtimes and in the early evenings. "We can go somewhere else if you'd rather," Kerys said. "I only booked us in here because I thought you'd have the children with you."
"Why, do you think I'm too old for magic?"
"You better hadn't be. The food's meant to be good," Kerys added, and grinned wryly. "Don't you dare say what you're thinking."
"I was thinking it might be an adventure."
"I've known writers I'm afraid to open my mouth near because anything they hear you say, they'll worry it to death. Not that I want writers who don't care about words," Kerys said, and turning the heavy doorknob, let them in.
The low ceiling of the long dim stone-floored room was supported by new oak beams. Benches composed of back-to-back pews which faced bare tables protruded from the walls. Beyond the ranks of booths a log fire blazed in an open hearth on which the flames made a set of gleaming fire-irons appear to dance. On the plaster walls between the pews, most of which were noisily crowded, holly wreaths hung. Everything about the restaurant, including the vaguely Dickensian uniforms worn by the staff, was intended to appeal to a generalised nostalgia, but Kerys obviously hadn't expected the decor to be so concerned to invoke an old-fashioned Christmas. Once they were seated in their booth and the waitress had cleared the places the children would have used, Ellen was silent until the champagne arrived, and then she clinked glasses with Kerys. "To Christmas
Dreams,"
she said.
"And all the other books I hope we're going to do together."
"I hope so too."
Just as the pause grew awkward, Kerys said "Will you want to help promote it, do you think?"
"Try and stop me. I'd be out promoting it now if I'd delivered it in time for you to have it in the shops this Christmas."
"You had to take all the time you needed," Kerys said as if she didn't suspect Ellen of bravado. "Did Alice Carroll have much to say about your coming to us?"
"There wasn't much she could say once I told her how much you were offering."
"No more than you're worth. And remember I said that if you ever feel Ember aren't doing right by your — by the earlier books, you know where they'll find a home."
"I'll remember. Now, Kerys, listen —"
But a mob-capped waitress had stopped at their table, asking "Ready to order?" Ellen and Kerys selected their meals from the schoolroom slates which served as menus. As soon as the waitress moved away Ellen said "Kerys, you needn't be so careful what you say to me. It's been a year."
"I won't if I'm making it harder for you. I didn't know if you wanted to talk about it, to me anyway."
"Why not to you? You're a friend," Ellen said, smiling wryly at the way the roles of counsellor and counselled were switching back and forth. "Besides, talking may help me remember."
"You don't think you're having problems with that because. . .”
"Because I can't bear to think I've lost Ben?" The aching hollow opened up within her before the words were past her lips. "I don't think so. I know I've lost him, I won't ever stop knowing, but I'm beginning to get over it, I'm even beginning not to feel guilty because I am. The children and I, we look after each other. They're growing up."
All the same, they would have liked to see the magician, a young man in a top hat and tails who was performing for three children in a booth by the fire. As Ellen watched, he lit a piece of paper on which the eldest had written his own name and then, having reduced it to ashes in the ashtray, produced the signed paper from them. The sight of the children's absorbed faces illuminated by the flames affected her with a yearning so intense that she winced. As the children applauded, Kerys turned away from watching. "How are they taking it, your two?"
"They got over the worst of it sooner. Their friends helped, the ones who were left. Children can bear a lot if they have to. Sometimes I think that's a tragedy and sometimes a miracle. But they don't remember any more than I do."
"Do you want to talk about what you remember?"
"I thought you'd never ask," Ellen said so that Kerys wouldn't blame herself for doing so. She drained her glass slowly, trying to reach into the gap which interrupted her memories, but all she could find there was an image of endless unmarked snow. "I remember it being so cold we thought we were all going to die," she said.
"Everyone thought they had it bad, but where you live is supposed to have been colder than anywhere else in the country, so cold the weather people don't know why."
"So cold that I think it affected our minds up there. Nobody remembers what happened on what's supposed to have been the worst day."
"When the town fell asleep, it said on the radio."
"Radio, television, newspapers ... The world's forgotten about us by now, thank God, except for the counselling service that came in. Some people still use it, but it didn't seem to do much for me. I'm not complaining." She waited while Kerys refilled the glasses. "As you say, the cold put the town to sleep, but nobody remembers that. I remember waking on the floor at the top of the house with no idea of when the children and I had gone up there or why. We must have been trying to keep one another warm. I don't know how long it took us to disentangle ourselves so we could go to the window. It was frosted thick and frozen shut — it took the three of us to shift it. You might think opening a window on a night like that wasn't such a brilliant idea. The children did," she said, and paused, but the flicker of another memory was already extinguished. "We got it open, and there was the snow, nothing but snow. And yet somehow I knew the worst was over."
She had never understood what she had been afraid to see which had made the sight of the forest huddled under snow beyond the blank common so reassuring. She'd craned out of the window until she had been certain that the air, icy though it was, was growing warmer. "You must have felt ..." Kerys said, and trailed off.
"I felt as if I was still waking up, because it was only then I realised Ben was missing. So we went down through the house calling for him, and we found the front door was locked. I think he locked us in so that we couldn't follow him if we regained consciousness. It shows how desperate he must have been, to have forgotten I had a key too."
"You think he went for help."
"Nothing else makes sense. He'd left our car when he found the radiator burst, but he'd taken the petrol out of the boot. He must have gone into Stargrave hoping to find a car that would run, only there weren't any. We went out of the house and shouted for him, but I didn't dare go far with the children while it was still so cold and dark. I'll always wonder whether if I'd left them in the house and gone on by myself I might have been able to bring him back."
"You couldn't have left them alone on a night like that."
"That's what I keep reminding myself. Sometimes it helps." Ellen sighed and managed to smile, and squeezed Kerys' hand to cheer them both up. "So the children and I got into my bed and piled all the quilts on top of us, and it wasn't long before we had to push most of them off. We didn't sleep much. As soon as it was daylight we put on all the clothes we could and went into the town."
"What was it like?"
"Not as quiet as I was afraid it would be. There were already people in the streets, trying to find out if their neighbours were all right, having to break in where they couldn't get an answer. Well, you heard about it in the news. Almost two hundred dead, and most of the rest needed medical help. At least that was already on its way because the meteorologists had realised how cold it must have been. The woman who ran the playgroup was looking after all the toddlers, and I left Johnny and Margaret helping while I looked for Ben. That's really all there is to tell."
Kerys' eyes were brimming. "Has it helped?" she said hopefully.
"I'm sure it must have, Kerys, and seeing you certainly has. Now here comes lunch to give my mouth something else to do and let you have a chance to talk."
Over lunch Kerys enthused abut
Christmas Dreams
and proposed that Ellen should illustrate a book by a children's writer Kerys had discovered. So that was the purpose behind their meeting. Once Ellen had read the opening pages and learned how much Salamander Books would pay her to illustrate the story, the offer seemed irresistible, particularly since it would give her more time to compose her next book, the story about the man who lit a torch from a star and fended off the next ice age. She and Kerys celebrated with another bottle of champagne. "Next time bring the kids," Kerys said. "You know they're always welcome."
"They'd be here now, but they're going to a pantomime with one of Margaret's friends from her new school."
It was almost dark by the time the women left the restaurant. Taxis packed with shoppers and with festively wrapped packages dodged through the side streets. As the women said goodbye on New Oxford Street, outside a store where mistletoe dangled above the window dummies and a taped choir sounded as if it would never tire of wishing its audience a merry Christmas, Kerys took hold of Ellen's shoulders and kissed her on the mouth. "Give that to the kids for me and tell them I've sent them books for Christmas."
Ellen walked to Kings Cross. Bare trees gleamed metallically in the squares; between the streetlamps the pavement glittered like coal. She felt lonely yet befriended, robbed of the part of herself which was Ben and yet discovering aspects of herself which, while they would never replace him, would at least prevent her from failing. "Happy Christmas, wherever you are," she whispered. The streets were dark enough to let her weep.
She dabbed at her eyes as the tearful lights of the station appeared ahead. She found a window seat on the Leeds train and waited while the carriage filled up. The brakes kept emitting a loud sigh as if the train was impatient with being held back. A minute or so after it was due to leave, it crawled out of the station. Soon it was racing past streets which made Ellen think of glaciers composed of headlights. These streets gave way to suburbs where deserted streets looked scoured by the street-lamps, and then there was only the night and the glow of an occasional distant house like the ember of a fallen star.
She ought to have known she would miss the children when this was the first time she'd left them in Stargrave. The experts said there was no evidence to suggest that the area would ever be so cold again, but she wished she weren't recalling memories she had refrained from telling Kerys: her \yalking the frozen streets of Stargrave and promising herself that Ben would be around the next corner, that she had only to catch up with him; her asking the ambulancemen from Leeds if they had seen him on the road and then having to wait an endless hour for the team from Richmond to arrive; the numbness which had spread through her mind as she'd seen draped corpse after draped corpse borne out of the houses on the upper slopes of the town, a numbness which had felt like muffled fear and then like knowing Ben was gone for ever ... She tried to concentrate on the book Kerys had given her to illustrate, and nodded halfway through it and fell asleep.
A voice as large as a cavern wakened her. It was announcing the arrival of the train in Leeds. She jumped down to the platform, the impact jarring her fully awake, and hurried to the car park. The car engine was cold; it kept stalling whenever she had to stop for traffic lights. Night separated the villages beyond Leeds, and then scattered the houses, and stones like houses blurred by ice loomed out of the dark. She didn't know when she had last seen the stars as clear — so clear they seemed to tremble on the edge of a new meaning while they emphasised the night. Of course this was the shortest day of the year.
The railway bridge clenched her headlight beams, dazzling her as she drove beneath the arch. The car swung into the open and up around the curve, and Stargrave appeared by stages: the crags on the high moor, the forest hovering like a spiky earth-bound cloud miles long, her tall lightless house, the town itself. Skeins of streetlamps and bright windows led like candles to the multicoloured glow of the church. She drove up Church Road to Margaret's friend's house.
As she parked just beyond the cottage opposite the playground, she saw the front door swing inwards. What had happened in her absence that someone was waiting for the sound of her car? She'd thought she might see the children in the playground, but only a wind through the forest moved the swings. She switched off the engine, a muddle of suppressed fears making her clumsy, and struggled out of the vehicle so that she could see past Janet's parents' van.