Midnight Sun

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.

"I can still remember how it sounded as it slid over the edge – like bones rattling. I remember what frightened me most was how long I might be falling. I was clenching my fists so hard I felt as if I was holding two handfuls of rock, only they were my nails, and digging my elbows and the back of my head into the shale so hard they ached for days. And just about the moment I realised I hadn't slipped after all, I heard a voice."

"It was Mummy," Johnny cried.

"I told you I needed an angel to save me. Though I have to admit that what she was saying wasn't exactly angelic."

"Words to the effect of 'Is some silly sod trying to start a landslide up there?'" Ellen recalled.

"To which my response was to ask if she could see a way down for me, though I had to shout so loud because of the wind I was afraid that was enough to start me sliding. She told me there was an easy climb down on my left, in the angle of the overhang, she said. And I thought she must mean my right, because all I could see to my left was shale that looked practically vertical. We almost got into an argument about which left she meant, and I'd have asked her to climb just high enough to show me which way she was coming, but I suppose that was more than my masculine pride was worth. So all I could do was trust her and crab myself down on my back to where she said I'd be safe. And I was nearly at the edge when I slipped and felt myself going head first towards the drop."

"But you were saved," Johnny insisted.

"Yes, because your mother had realised I might need help and she was coming up as I went sliding. She caught my shoulder and held me up while I managed to get one leg round and stand on the first step, and after that it was just like walking down a staircase onto a ledge as wide as this room. Mind you, I didn't take in much of that until my arms and legs stopped shaking. We sat on the ledge and chatted for a few minutes and discovered we were both on holiday from Norfolk. Then she asked me if I'd like her to walk down with me in case I got into any more difficulties. And of course I said no, being a man."

Ellen remembered him striding unsteadily but determinedly away down the uneven path. Sometimes Johnny reminded her of what had seemed at the time to be her last sight of his father. Once Ben had stumbled, flailing his arms, at a point where she'd needed to take care on her way up. She'd started after him, both anxious for him and glad when it had seemed he'd given her an excuse to follow him, until she had seen him regain his balance. She'd watched him out of sight before sighing and returning to her study of the fells, only to discover that frustration had interposed itself between her and the view she was trying to sketch. She'd pushed her pad into her rucksack and made her way down to the hostel, wishing that she had suggested to whatever his name was that they should meet in Norfolk, blaming herself for not having suggested it, surprised at herself for expecting that of him so soon after his mishap on the shale, snorting at herself for having missed her chance.

"You mightn't ever have met again," Margaret said accusingly to her father.

"Then you wouldn't be here to tell me off. Believe me, all the way down I was berating myself for being so eager to show off, and trying to think of a reason to go back. But you'll have to wait for the next instalment. You've school in the morning and it's time for baths and bed."

Later, as Ellen lay naked under the duvet with him he said "After you saved my life that day, did you see me nearly miss my footing oh the way down?"

"I couldn't have seen you any clearer if I'd had a telescope."

"I was sneaking a look at you, that was why I slipped. For years I used to dream of how you looked, all by yourself with your pad and pencil and the mountains. And sometimes I'd dream of you appearing like the good fairy of the mountain when I thought the shale had finished me off."

Ellen rolled onto her side and laid one leg over his. "I'm a bit more substantial than a fairy, you'll have noticed."

"Rather. I was remembering how you looked in jeans, you realise. Pretty tight, they were," he said, running a finger along the inside of her thigh. "That was another reason I hoped when Milligans got the poster for the exhibition that it would turn out to be yours. But I was only hoping to carry off the artist, not the art."

"I couldn't have let you pay for that picture when I saw how much it meant to you."

"Remember how your boyfriend tried to convince you that justified raising the price?"

"And went off in a huff when I told him it was the picture I'd been working on when you and I first met." She closed one hand gently around Ben's penis. "Hugh wasn't such a bad sort really. He was there when I needed him at art school, to tell me I mustn't be shy of promoting my work. And he put in a word with a friend of his father's which got me into Noble's, even though I was going out with you by then. He couldn't have foreseen the trouble I'd have there. I think he always wanted me to do more with my talent than he thought he could do with his."

Ben slipped one arm beneath her shoulders as his penis began to push her fist open. "No need for either of us to feel the way he did, as I hope Kerys and the rest of them at Ember managed to persuade you," he said, and kissed her breasts.

"I wouldn't paint those pictures if you didn't make me see them."

"I wouldn't write the books if I didn't have your pictures of them to look forward to."

"You know that's not true," she said, though she liked the idea. As she felt her nipples swelling, she took hold of his chin and raised his head so that she could look into his eyes. "Do you think this one could really be the book?"

"The book," he intoned like a footman announcing royalty, and then grew serious. "I think if Kerys has her way we're going to be in every bookshop in the country."

"Only the country?"

"And the towns, and the airports, and that hotel in Grasmere where the paperbacks in the revolving bookstand looked as if the dust was holding them together."

"We never did go back there after we were married to flash our certificate at the manager. I still think he rang the fire alarm that night to catch me coming out of your room. And I'm sure that old lady sent her poodles down to trip him up, because she tipped me a look that was as good as a wink." Ellen gave Ben a long deep kiss, feeling his tongue rough on hers, and opened her thighs around his. "It would be grand if the book does soar, wouldn't it? The children would be so pleased."

"So would the bank manager."

"He'll have no reason to complain once I get back into advertising. And listen, I truly don't mind working in it for a while, so stop worrying. Wherever I go I'll come back the same."

"That's all I'll ever want," Ben said, and eased himself into her. She hugged him and slowed down his rhythm with hers, waves of warmth growing in her before the flood. Afterwards she laid her head on his chest, breathing in the smell of the two of them, before drifting off to sleep. Sometimes she liked this kind of sex best of all, the kind which was so gentle and familiar it felt like stability made flesh. If their books raised their life to new heights, it mustn't leave this behind. "Not too far," she murmured drowsily to Ben's sleeping face.