Midnight Sun

SIXTEEN

Ellen had fallen in love with the landscape around Stargrave. She thought she mightn't see it again, given the way Ben's homecoming appeared to have disheartened him. She was sorry they hadn't taken time to explore the moors, but he had grown so taciturn since they'd visited the house that she hadn't liked to suggest lingering. The sooner they were home and the children were in bed, the sooner she might be able to help him talk out his feelings. Retreating into himself so as to write was part of his job, but she didn't see how brooding over his memories could benefit him.

The car sped past the house and gathered speed towards the bridge, and she saw Ben look for the house in the mirror. When she stroked his knee, he didn't seem to notice. Feeling snubbed, she moved her hand to her lap as the car passed under the bridge. She was telling herself not to be silly when Margaret said "Daddy, could we come and live here?"

Ben stared at the oncoming road, and his face and voice grew blank. "Who knows."

Johnny began to jump up and down in his seat-belt. "Could we? Could we?"

"Calm down now, johnny," Ellen said. "Don't you two like where we live any more?"

"I do," Johnny said, sounding abashed.

"Well, so do I," Margaret said angrily.

Ellen decided it was time to close the subject. "Quiet now. Let Daddy concentrate on driving."

At the hotel she'd offered to drive, but now it looked as if driving might beneficially occupy Ben's mind. Half an hour later, when the moorland road straightened out as it descended into the first of the villages outside Leeds, he broke the silence with one of the nonsense verses he used to invent for the children on family walks:

"Come quaff the mugs and fill the jugs

And baste the goose with lotion.

Haraldahyde has sunk inside

The coracle of potion…"

"Say another one," Johnny requested as traffic built up dangerously ahead. When the way was clear Ben intoned:

"There are wombats in the kitchen

And tapirs on the stairs.

The large old chest of drawers supports

A family of bears…"

The sight of the sun sinking over Lincolnshire prompted:

"Red sky at night,

Fish won't bite.

Red sky in the morning,

Frogs are spawning."

"No they aren't," Margaret said sleepily.

"Frogs are yawning, rather. Don't you, or we won't be able to eat out on our way home."

By the time the car crossed the Norfolk border, both she and Johnny were asleep. Ben glanced in the mirror as headlights rushing by on the winding road illuminated their faces, and confided to Ellen:

"The rich man often dines on quail,

The poor man picks at scrod.

But the hungry man consumes their turds

And says 'Thanks be to God!'"

"That's terrible," she said with a grin. "I take it you're feeling better now we're nearly home."

"Got to grow up sometime. Maybe I should think about writing a book for adults."

He hadn't really answered her, but this wasn't the time or the place to insist. When he began to look out for restaurants she said "Let the kids sleep and we'll eat in Norwich."

It was only when she awoke to find Ben placing a hot bundle in her lap that she realised she had nodded off. The car was parked outside a fish and chip shop where several youths with their hair in tarry spikes were gesticulating at the Chinese family behind the counter. The smell of food in newspaper roused the children, who stretched as if their bodies were gaping to be fed. Once they were home and taken care of, Ellen hastened them up to the bathroom and into bed.

Ben seemed more exhausted than the length of that day's journey would normally have made him. "Sweet dreams," she said as she wriggled under the duvet and slipped her arm around him, but he was already in his own dark. The next she knew, a shape like thin grey breath was dancing above her: steam from a mug of coffee on the bedside table. The children were kissing her awake. Til walk them to school and go on to Milligans," Ben said behind them.

When she heard them in the street, Johnny emitting sounds of a rocket launch while Margaret chattered to her father about books, she propped herself up in bed, feeling luxurious. She stayed in bed until she heard the postman pushing letters into the house. As she went downstairs she could see that they weren't bills; the envelopes didn't have that dingy thickset bullying look. She examined them as she took them to the desk in the back room. Two of the long white envelopes were from Ember Books, the other was from Ballyhoo Unlimited. "Say what you like," she told the latter, forcing a laugh at her tenseness as she thrust a finger under the flap and pulled the single sheet out of the envelope.

Dear Mrs Sterling

Thank you for submitting yourself for interview with regards to a position with our agency. Both Gordon Fuge and myself were impressed by your presentation and the main reservation expressed by our senior partner Max Rutter concerns whether after twelve years absence from the business you would have lost the aggressive qualities our clients look for in our campaigns. We have therefore decided to offer you a trial contract for twelve months to run from 15 February at the advertised rates. Max Rutter has asked me to mention that the contract makes no provision for maternity leave. May I say how much I personally look forward to working with someone as mature as yourself. Please let us know at your earliest convenience if these terms are satisfactory.

Yours sincerely

Sidney Peacock

Ellen read the letter and stared open-mouthed at it and then flung it into the air. When it landed face up on the desk she read it again. She couldn't tell how much of the letter was intended to be slyly insulting or even what Peacock thought of her, and it infuriated her that she was wondering. She was tempted to drop it in the wastebasket, but she wanted Ben to read it first, if only for a laugh. She opened one of the Ember envelopes instead.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Sterling,

I am eleven years old. First I want to say how much I enjoyed your book "The Boy Who Fell Up The Mountain". A!! my friends did except one who said there could not be a mountain so high you would fall into the sky instead of down. 1 told her there probably is on the moon and anyway it says on your book it is a fantasy, which is the kind I like best.

When I grow up I want to be an artist like Mrs. Sterling. Do you think I may have a chance if I work hard at my pictures? Do you have to have an agent if you want them to be published? I am enclosing some of them for you to look at so you can say what you think of them. I hope you will not mind uniting and saying. Yours admiringly, Melanie Tilliger.

Behind the sheet of paper were three more, small enough not to have needed folding to fit into the envelope. They were scenes from the book. In one the boy was more than halfway up the mountain, because his staff which had started out taller than he was had been worn to the length of a walking-stick. In the second he was among the birds, so high that they were white with frost, and in the last one he must have reached his destination, the height where he was able to hover for just the duration of a heartbeat, the one point from which you could see the meaning of the world, before the winds cast him down and he awoke at the foot of the mountain with nothing to show that he hadn't been dreaming except his worn staff. "When he tried to tell the people of his village what he knew they called him mad and drove him into the forest… All this was many years ago, but perhaps he is still wandering the world, looking for someone who will listen to him," Ellen quoted to herself, laying the pictures side by side on the sunlit desk. They were colourful and imaginative and meticulously detailed, and they seemed worth dozens of favourable reviews, not that the book had attracted so many, she was thinking how to reply as she opened the third envelope.

Hi Sterlings!

Hope some or all of you will be in town again soon so I can buy you lunch. Meanwhile maybe you should treat yourselves to an answering machine – I've been trying to call you for a few days. Ellen, if you've got any ideas for the Boy Who Caught The Snow-flakes promo, could you let me have whatever you want me to see? Ben, if you can tell me what your next book will be about I'll make an offer for the next two. We don't want you getting away from Ember just when you're about to be mega!

Kiss the kids for me and tell them lots of stories.

Love,

Kerys.

"Phew," Ellen said. She prepared dinner, feeling rather dazed, straying back now and then to the desk to reread the letters, and then she made herself sit down and write an encouraging response to Melanie Tilliger before she set about sketching ideas to send Kerys. An hour later the ideas were breeding, and she hadn't had time to sketch them all when she had to dash out to collect the children from school.

Johnny was even more impressed by her receiving fan mail than by the books themselves, and Margaret asked if she could write her own letter to the girl. "Do something sensible while I finish off some work," Ellen told them.

They tried, bless them. Johnny watched television with the sound turned low while Margaret wrote to Melanie Tilliger. When he tired of cartoons in which the characters lacked the energy to move their faces and their bodies simultaneously, Johnny read for a while and then wandered into the kitchen, wanting to draw. Soon Ellen had to sort out a squabble over pencils, after which the children began to accuse each other of increasingly heinous peccadilloes. She was ordering a few minutes' peace as Ben came home.

He seemed oddly amused by the uproar. "Shush, now," he said to the children, and "Well" to each of the letters. When he left it at that she demanded "Are you going to let me into the secret?"

"Tell you when you're older," he said, and gave her a kiss in case she thumped him. "When the rest of us are in bed," he added for only Ellen to hear.

She hustled him into the front room as soon as the children were tucked up. "So?"

"I was thinking that we'll have so many rooms we might want to use a few more of them."

"Go on."

"Well, if we lived here and used my aunt's house for an office we'd have all the peace we needed for working."

"That's silly and moreover it's wasteful."

"I suppose it is when we've another house that's the size of them both put together. We could sell this one or my aunt's and let the other in case we wanted to come back."

"You've been thinking this over."

"Do you blame me?"

"Of course not. I'm glad you feel that way. I wasn't sure how going home had affected you."

"It isn't only me. The children were asking me again this morning if we could."

"I wonder if they realise how much change would be involved, leaving their school and all their friends."

"They insist they don't mind. They seem to think it would be an adventure."

"What sort of job could you find up there? I didn't notice many opportunities on offer."

"I was wondering if it isn't time for us to take the chance we've been working for."

"Write and paint full-time, you mean."

"That's still what you want, isn't it? Otherwise you won't hear another word from me about anything I've said. It's been a few years since that anniversary when we raised our glasses to the day when we could devote our lives to being the people we really are."

She knew how much it meant to him – even more than it meant to her. His proposal semed to solve so many problems that she was instinctively suspicious of it. "Give me time to consider," she said, and was touched by the way he immediately went to the desk to work on their next book: he reminded her of a child finding himself a task to distract himself from some almost uncontainable eagerness. After an hour or so he reappeared. "I'm just going out to get some night air."

He closed the front door gently behind him, letting in a cold wind which rustled papers on the desk. She listened to his footsteps being carried away by the wind, and felt as if her indecision was making him restless. When he returned, his eyes glittering with chill, she told him "I want to go up to Stargrave first for another look."