Midnight Sun

SEVENTEEN

Two days later Ellen drove to Stargrave, out of a dawn like a great fire of Norwich. Whenever she reached a clear stretch of motorway she found herself composing responses to Sid Peacock. Dear Mr Peacock, While I appreciate your invitation to be aggressive I think you might prefer me not to be… Dear Sidney, Given your skilful choice of words I don't think you really need my assistance… Dear Sid, Thank you for making it clear in your letter that you're as gallant as ever… Dear Peacock, Up your tail… She mustn't start thinking as though everything was resolved, she told herself. She was going to Stargrave to see what needed to be done to the house.

Once she was past the villages beyond Leeds she tried not to enjoy the landscape too much. As the road soared up through a multitude of clumps of moist bright grass under a piebald sky, the car started a moorhen out of the heather. The flight of the bird drew her gaze to the first crags, dark masses of gnarled stone which neither the weather nor the vegetation could overcome and which made her feel as if the landscape was baring its soul to her. She drove for half an hour without meeting another vehicle, and was quite glad when she saw the railway bridge ahead. Feeling solitary was fine, except that she had the family to think of.

"Having a rest from the family?" the receptionist at the Station Hotel said, and showed Ellen to a small room at the front of the building. The lift was still out of order. "Better than a three-mile hike, this place," the receptionist panted as she unlocked Ellen's room.

Ellen freshened up after the drive and headed for the estate agent's, where Henry Tovey exhibited his scrubbed smile for her. "Still no offers?" she said.

"Some folk from out of town said they'd be letting us know.

You'll have noticed that in general our local homeowners prefer more compact properties. But I'll guarantee that Elgin's can make it more attractive."

She and Ben had asked him to recommend a builder, and now he took her to the yard. It was diagonally opposite the school, between the two loops, Church Road and The Crescent. As Tovey opened the wicket in the wooden gate, a woman surrounded by children imploring "Mrs Venable" gave Ellen a smile as she crossed Church Road to the schoolyard, where she all but vanished in a crowd of children. Of course, she and her husband had been the only other diners at the hotel when the Sterlings had stayed there. "She's the headmistress," Tovey said as he let Ellen through the gate.

A bulky man in overalls and a black wool cap slammed the bonnet of the only van in the cobbled yard and came to greet them, wiping his hands on a rag which he stuffed in his pocket. His wide ruddy face and swaying gait made her think of a sailor who'd lost the sea. "Stan Elgin," he said and shook her hand fastidiously, using one large finger and thumb. "I'll look after her, Henry. I've put a sheet in the van."

He'd spread what appeared to be a lacy tablecloth over the passenger seat. "I was thinking I could show you some of the work we've done for folk," he told her. "See that or your house first, whichever you like."

"Let's go to the house."

"You're the boss."

He drove out of a lower gate into The Crescent, where a curve of houses pulled in their gardens and turned into shops. As Market Street brought the van in sight of the bungalow at the end of the track to the Sterling house, he pointed without letting go of the wheel. "I helped my dad build that."

"It looks very snug."

"Old Mrs Broadbent used to live where that is now. Your husband might remember her. She had the sewing shop when he went away." The builder swung the van onto the track and said "Her house burnt down that Christmas. She had a stroke or summat like. Fell against the stove while it was on and must have cracked the pipe."

"At Christmas," Ellen mourned, her voice shaking with the jouncing of the van. As he parked the van beside the house, on a weedy patch of earth frozen hard as concrete, she said, "You'd think my husband's family would have had this road improved."

"Reckon they weren't as well off as folk thought, and they never had much time for visitors."

Ellen climbed down from the van, thinking how lonely the house might have felt to a child. The forest and its miles of secret shadows seemed more present than the town. All at once she was determined to rescue the house from its own loneliness. She unlocked the front door and was met by her breath in the long shabby hall. "One thing this house could use is some heating," she declared.

"We can put that in for you." The builder followed her in and set about stamping on floors, rolling back carpets and poking floorboards with a screwdriver, opening and closing doors, peering at ceilings, tapping on walls or laying his palm on them as though feeling for a heartbeat. Every so often he scribbled on a pad in handwriting which looked as if it was struggling against a high wind. At the top of the house he hoisted himself through the attic window, elbows on the slates, to scrutinise the roof. "We'll need to get the ladders to the other side, but it's a rock of a place, this house," he said. "Damp course and your heating and a replacement for that broken window and a good strong coat of paint outside are most of what it needs. I can drop the estimates into the Station tomorrow morning if you're happy when you've seen some of our work."

"That would be ideal," Ellen said, gazing from the window he'd vacated. From up here the presence of the forest was even more overwhelming – because she could see more trees, she told herself. "Does anyone walk in the woods?"

"You won't see many. There's no paths, and if you aren't careful you'll think you've found one. It's not a place to walk on your own, but there's been a few who have."

"What happened to them?"

"Got lost and couldn't find their way out before dark. Had to stay there overnight and froze to death." He shook his head slowly and turned towards the stairs. "Unless you reckon they strayed in there after dark."

"What would have made them do that?"

"Just what I say," he responded as if she'd expressed more scepticism than in fact she had. "But to hear some of my dad's generation talk you'd think the forest was to blame, not these folk who go gallivanting when anyone with any sense wouldn't put their nose out of doors if they could help it. They're born that way if you ask me. If they aren't getting themselves stuck on the crags because they think they're Edmund Hillary, they're trying to prove they've more ice in their veins than the rest of us when it comes to the weather."

"Are the winters very cold here?"

"Mostly they're like it is now. It's when the rest of the country freezes you need to watch out. Maybe the cold drove those folk crazy," he said as if the explanation had just occurred to him, "and that's why they wandered up there after dark."

When she'd locked the front door he drove her to a cottage which backed onto the railway. Mrs Radcliffe, who alternately coughed and smoked a cigarette, was even prouder of her new conservatory which overlooked the lower moors than the builder was trying to conceal that he was. "If you want your windows doing you know where to come. Heights no object, my oid man always says," she told Ellen as she saw her to the garden gate.

The next stop was a terraced house halfway up Hill Lane, a narrow street which led from the station to Church Road as if it was in no particular hurry to get there. The house was owned by the Wests, who greeted Ellen as warmly as they greeted the builder. By the time they had shown her Stan Elgin's work – a gritstone fireplace, built-in bookshelves, sliding doors between two downstairs rooms – she'd learned that Terry drove the Stargrave mobile library and Kate helped run a playgroup. On the gritstone mantelpiece she noticed a photograph of a boy and a girl slightly older than Margaret and Johnny. "Are they at secondary school?"

"Since last September," Terry said.

"Here in town?"

"There isn't one," Kate said. "It's a bus ride over the top every morning for Stefan and Ramona, most of an hour each way to Richmond. Smooth enough for them to do their homework en route, and we think the school's pretty recommendable. Why, have you got some candidates?"

"One who's ten."

"If you need any help with settling in, just let us know. Nothing worse than moving somewhere you don't know anyone."

The final stop on Ellen's guided tour was a cottage on The

Crescent, where the curve was so steep that the doorstep was wedge-shaped. The owner, Hattie Soulsby, was a compact wrinkled woman of about sixty, dressed in half a dozen bright colours, who served Ellen and the builder tea from a clay teapot as large as a football before showing them through the house, nudging Stan Elgin and saying "That's his" every time they encountered some of his work – new ceilings, a fitted kitchen, central heating which felt like a welcome. In the front room she perched on a chair and said to Ellen "Hubby at work today?"

"Yes, in a bookshop."

"He writes books too, doesn't he?"

"We collaborate on them."

"You must be the girl of his dreams," Hattie said, and sat forward. "I only meant to say I hoped you weren't here on your own because your hubby felt he might be unwelcome."

"Should he?"

"Not any more if 1 know Stargrave folk. When he ran away to come back here, half my friends would have adopted him if they could have, so he could stay where he felt at home."

"How did people feel before that?"

Hattie looked uncomfortable. "You know how folk can be about things they don't understand. I think his family would have had no trouble fitting in if folk had just forgotten about that old explorer."

"Edward Sterling? What about him?"

"The state of him when they had to bring him back to England. My gran said it was in all the papers."

"I'm sorry to seem ignorant, but what state was that?"

Hattie raised her eyebrows, and Stan Elgin came to the rescue. "They found him naked as a baby in the ice and snow. The cold makes folk strip off sometimes, only that's usually when they're about to die of it. All his exploring must have toughened him up."

"I never knew that was how they found him," Ellen said.

"Well, there you are," Hattie said. "Shows it can't bother your hubby or he'd have told you about it. And you can tell him from me that nobody worth knowing cares."

"What was his family like?"

"They brought your hubby up by their own lights. I don't know of any harm that did him." Hattie seemed to find the question a little unfair, but she went on: "I'd have liked to see him play more, mind you, but then you'd expect me to say that, seeing as Kate and me run the playgroup. The old feller quite likes me having children I can send home, as long as him and me can't have any of our own."

Ellen complimented her and the builder on the house, and walked back to the hotel through streets suddenly full of children, chattering and playing and fighting. She lay on her bed for half an hour, catching up on the rest she hadn't had time for when she'd arrived in Stargrave, and then she called home. The phone only rang. She had a bath and went down for dinner, hoping there might be someone to talk to in the dining-room. A young woman who worked in the cottage-sized bank on one corner of the square was being treated to a birthday dinner by half a dozen of her colleagues, who shouted across the room to Ellen and popped streamers in her general direction. Ellen raised her glass to them and joined in the chorus of "Happy Birthday, dear Mona". Once she'd had a piece of birthday cake to go with her giant thimbleful of coffee, she returned to her room.

This time Ben answered the phone. "I'm just emptying Margery out of the bath so they can have a story."

"Don't make it too long, will you? Johnny really should be asleep by now. Don't forget to put out their clothes for the morning. What did they have for dinner?"

"A Big Mac each," he said, which explained why she hadn't been able to reach them earlier. "How are you finding my place?"

"It's stood up well, the builder says. He seems reliable to me."

"I wish I were there right now."

"With me, I hope."

"With all of us."

"Maybe we will be," she almost said, but there were questions she wanted to ask him when they were face to face. Before she could respond he said "Here's Johnny to speak to you, and a wet Margery."

She told Johnny to brush his teeth properly and Margaret to put her hair in a pony-tail for school, and sent Ben a goodbye kiss. "Don't get too lonely in bed," she told him.

She felt exhausted by the long day. When she was ready for bed she went to the window for a last sight of the town. Above Market Street the lamps rose towards the church, but it seemed to her as if the forest was drawing them towards itself. There was a faint glow in the air above the forest. It was a mist, she thought, made to glow by the scrap of moon in the bare sky. Was it shifting? As she gazed at it, she couldn't even distinguish where the treetops ended and the vague luminosity began. If she gazed much longer she would be convinced that the dim glow and the forest were merging into some new vast shape. She closed the curtains and rubbed her eyes hard, and climbed shivering into bed. Mustn't Ben be responsible for Sterling Forest now? Surely it wouldn't cost much to mark paths through it. If the family came here to live – if they did, she repeated to herself as though the idea was an impatient child – then the least they could do for the town would be to make sure there were walks in the woods.