Midnight Sun

FOURTEEN

To keep Johnny happy they lunched at the pizza parlour. A large-boned woman, whose plastic apron swarmed with pigs in bibs, stood over the display of slabs of dough, slapping the top of the counter in time with a pop song so tinny that the relentless percussion sounded like an uncontrollable sneeze. Once she'd brought a trayful of generous helpings of pizza to the table, an unsteady disc draped in gingham, she pretended not to notice the Sterlings. So did the other diners – a birthday party of several children and a man with a paper hat balanced on his head, an old couple taking turns to order their Alsatian to lie down, a woman who kept underlining phrases in a newspaper and who stirred her tea vigorously every time she was about to sip it – but Ben was sure they were wondering what had brought the newcomers to town, which made him realise that he didn't quite know himself. He dawdled over his pizza until Margaret said "Shall we go and see the house now?"

"No hurry. I'd like to walk off all that driving first." When she made a face he said "And you'd better walk off that pizza before you start looking like the wrong kind of doe."

In the space of a couple of seconds her face crumpled, grew furious at having done so in public, warned Johnny not to laugh. "Daddy said you might, not that you do," Ellen comforted her. "I'd like to see some of the moors, wouldn't you? It may not be a walking day tomorrow."

Ben's instinct had been for a stroll in the forest, but he didn't want to cause any more conflict. In the street he apologised to Margaret, but she snatched her hind away. Once they were past the increasingly scattered houses where the northward stretch of Market Street became Richmond Road, however, she let him help her over the stile in the gritstone wall onto the nearest moorland path.

As soon as he set foot on the path he felt as if he could walk for days. The frozen grass was springy as wire; here and there the path crackled underfoot. A sprinkling of frost highlighted the traceries of heather, and tiny crystal globes on the gorse beside the path sparkled where the failing sunlight touched them. A mile above him on the slope, against vegetation luminous as an afterglow, every grotesque outline of the limestone crags stood out lucidly. Overhead the deep blue sky looked frozen solid by the night which was massing beneath the horizon; it made him think of blue ice spreading across the sky and forcing the sun down. A solitary bird hovered above the western ridge, emitting a high thin cry, and the whole of the landscape seemed to share the piercing clarity of the sound.

Johnny ran ahead in search of puddles to trample and splinter, and Ellen strode after him. Margaret ventured a few paces and turned, looking rather daunted by so much loneliness. "Quick, Daddy, or we'll be left behind."

He felt as if she'd come between him and his perception of the landscape, of a meaning which he might have grasped. When he and Margaret caught up with the others by the crag, Johnny's teeth had begun to chatter. "It's lovely up here, but I think we'd better start back now," Ellen said.

"You three go back. I'll be down soon."

"I shouldn't stay up here by yourself. It'll be dark before you know it, and you need to see the path."

He stayed where he was and watched her lead the children down the path, into a twilight which appeared to grow darker in some exact but obscure relationship with the shrinking of the three of them. When Ellen sent him a look of mingled appeal and reproach, he trudged after them, and found that he felt as if he was walking further into the open. The fields and moors beyond the railway line stretched to the horizon, but it wasn't just the view; the openness he felt himself approaching was larger than that. He must be anticipating the night beyond the horizon, the night which was the edge of boundless darkness, yet for a moment it felt as though the edge of that darkness was much closer, massing above Stargrave. The mass was Sterling Forest, of course, and the night which came earlier beneath the trees than to the rest of the landscape, as if the tips of the pines were drawing it down to earth.

Before he reached the stile, the forest was above him. Though the nearest trees were several hundred yards away, he felt as if the shadow of the forest had fallen across him, an icy exhilarating shadow which helped him see the first star in the eastern sky, a bright steady star like a sign of the clarity he was aching to grasp. But Ellen was poking her head over the stile and making faces at him. "You look as if you're about to take root," she said.

As he followed her into Stargrave the streetlamps lit up. Beyond the chains of yellow light like an inverted double necklace the silhouette of the Sterling house was reaching for the star. Ben was gazing towards it when Johnny said "Are we going there now?"

"I've already said no hurry. We'll have plenty of time tomorrow."

"Remember Daddy hasn't been here since he was about your age," Ellen said. "It may feel strange to him."

"Let's go to that playground I saw," Margaret suggested.

As she and Johnny raced towards the square, Ben muttered to Ellen "Strange in what way? Tell me later."

The playground was on the highest curve of Church Road, between the church and the school. Two streetlamps stood guard outside it, but it was deserted. The streets staggered lamps and lamplit patches of terraced houses down to the railway; the church and the school were ponderous blocks of dimness relieved by the glint of streetlamps on the edges of bricks and in windows. None of this made Ben feel more than impersonally nostalgic; any childhood memories it conjured up were too faraway and minor to be worth recapturing. He moved closer to Ellen, who was jogging on the spot while the children pushed themselves on the swings, the shadows of the chains reaching for the forest as the children competed, each swing taking them higher into the dark. "Strange in what way?" Ben asked again.

"I thought you might be remembering so much all at once that you needed time to adjust. You didn't seem to want to go to the house yet."

So she hadn't seen the face at his old bedroom window. Now that he was sure, he felt unexpectedly sad. "I haven't remembered anything worth telling you," he said, and squeezed her hand.

As the family walked back to the hotel Ben felt as if he wasn't quite with them – as if he was already on the way to where he meant to go. During dinner he told Margaret and Ellen how pretty they looked, helped Johnny cut up his steak and unobtrusively picked up scraps of food the boy dropped on the carpet, kept the conversation light and flowing. A couple in evening dress, the only other diners in the panelled dining-room which occupied one side of the ground floor, glanced with increasing approval at them. When the Sterlings rose to leave, the woman beckoned Ellen over. "Your family's a credit to you," she said.

Once the children were out of the bathroom Ben told them the story of his next book, about the little boy who had to keep the fire alight to imprison the ice spirits. Tonight it seemed so clear to him that if he'd been at home he would have started writing it at once. He scribbled a few notes while Ellen tucked the children into their beds, and when she rejoined him he was ready. "You look tired," he said. "You don't mind if I go for a stroll, do you?"

"Don't wake me if I'm asleep when you come back. You aren't thinking of going on the moors so late."

"Of course not." He kissed her and held onto her, his reluctance to let go surprising him. He must feel guilty that he was concealing his intentions from her so easily. He gave her a last kiss and went quickly out of the room, out of the hotel, towards the Sterling house.