"We thought driving would be cheaper than training it," Ben said.
"Let me show you our car park and then we'll eat. You kids must be starving." She jogged beside the car as it coasted down the ramp beneath the Firebrand building. "I'm Kerys Thorn, as if you didn't know," she said when the Sterlings piled out of the vehicle. "It's really ace to meet you two at last after so much talking on the phone. How does Italian food for lunch sound? Slurp, slurp, if it's spaghetti, would you say, kids?"
Johnny giggled. "Sounds like him eating most things," Margaret said.
"You should hear me eating Chinese soup, Margaret," Kerys said.
"My name's really Margery."
"Do your mum and dad know?"
"We're kept informed of changes," Ellen said, and gave Margaret a kiss when the girl frowned at her.
Kerys led the Sterlings into the dull January daylight and through a confusion of streets to the restaurant, racing Johnny to it when they reached the block where it stood. A fat waiter who looked ready to burst into song ushered the party to their table as soon as he saw Kerys and brought them a bottle of Krug. "Here's to a bestseller. Success and long lives to us all," she proposed, and nudged Johnny when he made a face at the taste of his token glassful while Margaret demurely sipped hers. "We have to drink this stuff because we're grownups," she told him and helped him read the menu, which was half as tall as he was. When he remarked loudly on the prices before Ellen could hush him, Kerys nudged him again. "Ember's paying. You have whatever your mum and dad say you can have," she murmured in his ear, and Ellen found herself growing increasingly fond of her.
Once the waiter had taken their orders, Kerys produced a notepad from her handbag. "Kids, I'm going to ask your brilliant parents about themselves so I can tell our publicity department what to say about them but if you've any extra ideas, just shout. Who do I start with? Do you write the books around Ellen's pictures, Ben? What was it you said, Ellen, about each taking half the year?"
"Ben writes the book in the autumn and winter and then I illustrate it in the spring and summer when the light's better and the children are at school."
"Was Ben already writing when you met?"
"Not until years after we were married. I managed to persuade him to write down some of the stories he used to tell the children, and you took some persuading, didn't you, Ben?"
"Some."
"Don't worry, Ben, we'll let you talk," Kerys assured him. "We'll want everyone to hear from both of you when we send you touring to promote your book. We'd have done that with your other books if I'd been with Ember then."
"We may have to go separately if it's when the children are at school," Ellen said.
"The one of you who stays at home could be the inspiration behind the other one. The media should go for that." Kerys sat back as their meal arrived and the waiter departed, blowing a kiss in appreciation of their choices. "I mean, if it's true. Do you think you'd be a writer if you hadn't met Ellen, Ben?"
"I don't think I'd be much of anything."
"Let me ask you the question I always like to ask writers. Where would you say your stories come from?"
Ben raised a portion of veal marsala to his lips, then laid it down on his plate. "I'm not sure I ought to know. It works best if I just let the story tell itself to me. I think writers can be too conscious of their technique or what they're trying to say or who they're influenced by. I suppose I must be influenced by everything I've read, particularly when I was a child."
"I'd say your stories read like nobody except yourself. Who did vou —"
"I've never understood this thing about writers trying to find their own voice. It seems to me that if you've got one you're more likely to develop it when you're not straining to hear it yourself. I just try to tell the story as if you were listening to me tell it. I interrupted you."
"I'm glad you did," Kerys told him, and Ellen sensed she was relieved that his enthusiasm had overcome the self-consciousness he always experienced with strangers. "Don't let your food get cold. I was only going to ask what you used to read."
"Anything that helped keep my imagination alive." Ben chewed the forkful as if he was tasting his memories. "Children's fantasies, ghost stories. Science fiction one summer. And when I was a bit older, all the books I could get hold of that were supposed to get you sent to hell for reading them, or so my aunt who brought me up believes. Don't think I'm getting at Auntie Beryl, though, you two. Too much imagination scares some people, that's all."
"Not you kids, I can tell. Which is your favourite Sterling book?"
"The new one," they both said.
"The
Boy Who Caught The Snowflakesl
Mine too. What do you think we should tell children about it to make them want to read it?"
"About when he wishes he can't feel the cold," Margaret said, "and then the snowflake lands on his hand and he sees it not melting."
"And his second wish is the world should never be cold again, and the cold all goes inside him."
"Tell them about how the icecaps start melting and the seas begin to flood the land and all sorts of birds and other creatures start to die out. That was sad."
"But it's all right at the end, because he uses his third wish to put the cold back in the world."
"And you have to show them some of Mummy's pictures," Margaret told Kerys. "I like the one where the boy's standing in the snow and the two snowflakes are sort of perching on his hands like birds."
"That's superb. I thought we might use it on the cover."
"You remember I told you I've worked in advertising," Ellen said. "I was wondering if you'd want me to make suggestions about that side of things."
"You bet. I'll introduce you to our publicity person and you can sort her out," Kerys promised. "But I just saw some little eyes looking at the sweet trolley when they thought nobody was noticing."
Almost an hour later she ushered the family back to the Firebrand offices, where they were introduced to so many people who wished the book success, and shook so many hands, that Ellen promptly forgot all the names. She was left with a sense of general goodwill which more or less compensated for their being unable to track down the publicity director. "You can meet her next time you're down," Kerys told her, and led them through the children's book department to her office, grabbing an armful of books each for Margaret and Johnny on the way. She cleared a space amid the precarious piles of typescripts and memos and books on her desk while her assistant brought milk for the children and coffee for the adults, extra strong for Ben. When the drinks arrived Kerys raised hers in a last toast. "Here's to making this the year of the Sterlings," she said.
TEN
Twilight and traffic were gathering on the motorway out of London. Long before the car reached Cambridge Johnny was asleep. He was still her baby, Ellen thought as she glanced at his dreaming face in the light from an oncoming vehicle, even if he'd reached the age at which her telling him so annoyed him. Once they were past Cambridge she and Margaret and Ben took turns to spot strange place-names: Stow cum Quy, Snail-well, Puddledock, Trowse Newton ... By now they were on the outskirts of Norwich and following the ring road to their suburb while Margaret widened her eyes as if she was inserting invisible props under the lids and protested that she wasn't tired. "Then you're the only one," Ben said, beginning to snore loudly as he steered the car off the ring road. "Ouch, Margery. Don't kick."
"If you're not tired," Ellen told her, "you can finish clearing away the books and games you and Johnny left in the front room."
"Johnny has to help."
"He clears up when you're at dancing class. Don't sulk, or we'll think you aren't old enough to go to the market again with your friends."
"Mummy ..." Margaret protested, and left it at that, though when her father parked the car outside the house she peered suspiciously at her brother in case the movement made him betray that he wasn't really asleep. Convinced that he was, she relented and attempted to carry him into the house as she had when they were younger, but had to settle for helping him stumble along, which woke him up. "You can go to bed if you're tired," she said.
"'m hungry," he mumbled.
Margaret's tone had been so saintly that Ellen gave her an amused loving hug. "You're always hungry, Johnny. Tidy away your things while Margery and I make you something to eat," she said as she unlocked the house.
The front door swept a gathering of envelopes and leaflets off the doormat. Johnny pounced on them, handing his mother the leaflets — which advertised a knife-grinder and a newspaper bingo game and a charity which recycled Christmas cards — and sorted the envelopes in case there was one for him. "Just bills," he complained.
"Better give them to Bill, then," his father said. "On second thoughts, give them to me. Bill may be worse off than we are."
"Aren't we well off?" Margaret said.
"We are so long as we have one another, don't you think? And I don't think we'll have to leave either of you at the bank as security just yet." He swung his fist playfully past Johnny's chin to snatch the solemn look from the boy's face. "I get the feeling we're on our way to bigger things, don't you think, Ellen?"
"I hope so," Ellen said and headed for the kitchen, where she added a few vegetables to the soup in the stockpot while Margaret made sandwiches on the table. From the front room they heard the whir of Johnny's model car which recoiled from obstacles. "Put that away now," Ellen called.
"We've put away everything else," Ben responded.
Margaret sighed loudly. "Boys," she said like someone several times her age.
"Maybe if your father hadn't stayed that way inside himself he wouldn't write our books."
Margaret carried the trayful of sandwiches and plates into the front room while her mother followed with the soup. Because this was the largest room in the house it functioned as dining-room and sitting-room and the children's playroom, while the smaller room beside the kitchen was where Ellen and Ben worked. Johnny dropped his car in the box of toys in the corner cupboard and ran to the table to slurp his soup, gazing past her at her charcoal study of Lakeland fells. "When are we going to the mountains?" he said between quick mouthfuls. "You said we could one year."
"Maybe this year. Your father and I often used to have walking holidays, but then Margaret was born, and by the time she was old enough to keep up with us you'd come along."
"I like walking," Johnny protested. "I walked all those miles round and round the school field for the starving children."
"It's a good job you didn't see the food you bought them," Margaret said, "or you'd have gobbled it all up."
"We'll have to make sure you don't get too far ahead of us, Johnny," Ben intervened. "We don't want you running off the edge of everything. I thought I'd done that once, and your mother had to save me. That was how we met."
"Tell us the story," Margaret pleaded.
"How old were you?" Johnny said.
"More than three times your age, so don't even dream of doing what I did. And your mother was even younger than she is now," Ben said, ducking as Ellen aimed a punch at him. "I'd gone up to Ambleside with my aunt for a week, and I did most of the ambling while she went on coach trips with a retired couple she'd got talking to at the hotel. So the day before we were due to leave for home I decided I was going to walk along the ridges all the way to the next lake, and I almost didn't come back.
"Maybe it was being up so high there was nothing to get in the way of my seeing, or maybe it was the air up there, which is so clear you can taste how clear it is, but suddenly it was as though a light had been switched on inside everything around me. All the rocks and the grass and the heather looked as if they were made out of the same brightness as the sky and the clouds. That's what I was trying to capture in our first book, where the whole world seems to take a step forwards and greet our hero with its shapes and colours and the rest of it, which shows you how far short I fell of putting what I experienced into words."
"I liked that bit," Margaret said, and Johnny nodded hard.
"I remember you did. I wouldn't have left it in otherwise. You two and Mummy are the only readers I try to please, you know. Anyway, that day I got so drunk on what I was seeing that at first I didn't realise I wouldn't be at the hotel in time for dinner if I went back along the top — not that I cared about keeping body and soul together, but I didn't want my aunt to get herself into a state. So I did one of the worst things you can do in the mountains: I followed what looked like a short cut down. And an hour later I couldn't go back up and couldn't see how to go down."
"Why couldn't you climb back up?" Margaret wanted to know.
"Because I'd slid down a shale slope. Climbing that stuff is like trying to climb a pile of slates. It looked fine from above, just a narrow path between two walls with lots of tiles sticking out to hold onto, but when I lost my footing halfway down all the tiles I grabbed came away in my hand. So I slid maybe two hundred yards on my bottom towards what looked like a sheer drop, and when I managed to stop myself by digging in my heels and elbows I couldn't have been more than fifty yards from the edge."
"You shouldn't have gone down that way," Johnny said like a rescuer.
"My thoughts exactly. Only the other routes had looked a lot more dangerous, and when I'd started down it seemed as if there ought to be an easy way over that edge. You had to be as close as I was then to see that the last fifty yards were even steeper and more treacherous than the path I'd just fallen down. And the only way I'd have been able to see if there was a path beyond the edge would have been to scramble down so far that it would have taken a host of angels to carry me back to safety if there turned out to be no path. So I panicked. I started snivelling and praying to whoever might be listening, and when that didn't get me anywhere I told myself I'd have to climb up the shale. I told myself I'd be all right as long as I planned every move before I made it and only moved one limb at a time. So I started inching myself upwards on my back to get to somewhere I'd feel safe to turn onto my front. And as soon as I moved, half the shale I was lying on slid out from under me.