Midnight Sun

TWENTY-FOUR

For over a week the death was the talk of Stargrave. Children dared one another to sneak up the moorland path to the crag, until Mrs Venable had to warn the school not to do so. Most of the townsfolk seemed to agree with Stan Elgin that the man's death confirmed how unprepared too many city people were when they visited the moors, though anyone who said so to Ellen made it clear that didn't include her. Indeed, as she passed the church hall one morning on her way back from walking Johnny and Margaret to school, Hattie Soulsby called her in to tell her what the town thought of her. "We heard you were a shining example to Sally and her merry men."

"It's news to me."

"Why, Sally says you stood your ground while she was near wetting herself and the rest of the team nearly brought the deader sliding straight down on your heads."

Ellen hadn't considered herself to have behaved particularly admirably. She'd walked arm in arm with Sally to the Land-rover, and they'd fetched two of Elgin's men to help Frank and Les bring the corpse down the rock. Ellen had been grateful to be spared a closer view of it, but now she wished she'd had the courage to examine the face, the better to deny the rumour which the children had brought home from school that not only the man's hair but also his eyes had been white with terror. It had just been snow, she'd told them firmly, but she couldn't help being disturbed by the strangeness of the rumour.

At least now she had the inquest to back her up. Sally had called her last night with the news that the verdict was death by exposure – "as if it could have been anything else." As Ellen watched the playgroup's toddlers stamping their tiny colourful boots and being released from their fat overalls, she found the sight more reassuring than the verdict had been. "Thanks for helping," she told Hattie and Kate, feeling relieved and somewhat guilty because of it. It seemed almost unreasonable of life to return to normal so soon after the death on the crag.

Of course life hadn't done so as far as the children were concerned. The streets leading down to the main road were ski slopes, the schoolyard had become a skating rink. Occasionally the snow began to thaw, but overnight it always froze anew, preserving that day's chaos of footprints and spiking gutters and garden walls with icicles for Johnny and his friends to use for sword-fights. Margaret and Johnny had staked their claim on the stretch of snow between the house and the common, and together with their friends they'd crowded the area with families of snow figures. Every morning Ellen would glance out of the kitchen window to see how the shifts of temperature had reshaped the dozens of figures beyond the garden wall.

As October turned into November, more snow fell. It drifted through the lamplight on Halloween and feathered the children's masks as the family picked their way through the streets to spend the evening with the Wests. Stefan addressed a hanging apple with baboon sounds to make Johnny giggle and then accidentally hit himself on the nose with it to ironic cries of sympathy from his sister and Margaret. Ramona spent minutes trying not to splash her party dress while she ducked for apples in a bowl, then plunged her face into the water with a drowned impatient squeak. Meanwhile the adults talked and drank, though Ben was quieter than usual. On the way home he gazed silently at the light snowfall, a pale dance which grew more massive in the distance where it merged with the restless dark. He was often taciturn while he was working on a book, but rarely as withdrawn as this. Perhaps, Ellen thought, his soul wasn't really in the book he was writing for Alice Carroll, though he was spending a great deal of time at the desk.

On Guy Fawkes Night he refused to be moved from it. "Won't you come down for the fireworks?" Ellen tried to coax him. "The children would like you to."

He crouched over the page of his writing, more than half of which was crossed out. "Tell them I can see from here. Better, though you needn't say that."

Ellen went downstairs cursing Alice Carroll. As Terry West let off the fireworks she saw Ben at the window. Every time a firework blazed, his eyes lit up; he reminded her of a little boy who'd been banished to his room. The explosions of the rockets brought the glazed forest and the snow figures crowding towards the house, and turned the workroom window into bursts of radiance which seemed to emanate from Ben's face. As the last rocket fell back to earth she felt the kiss of snow on her cheeks. Because Ben's was the only lit window in the house, the snow appeared to be homing in on him, whitening the pane and his face.

He hadn't left his desk when Kate and Terry took their children home. Ellen got Margaret and Johnny to bed, and called into the workroom that she was for bed herself. "Not long now," Ben responded distantly, but he hadn't joined her by the time she fell asleep.

When she awoke, feeling isolated by stillness, the sun was up. Ben must surely have come to bed at some point, but now he was in the workroom. It was time she persuaded him not to work so hard, she thought as she saw the children to school. She picked her way home over frozen slush furred with last night's snow, tiptoed upstairs, eased the workroom door open and looked in.

Ben was at the desk, his head raised towards the dazzling forest, resting the palms of his hands on either side of the handwritten book. For a moment she thought she glimpsed movement in the forest. Perhaps snow had fallen from one or more of the trees, though the stirring had seemed much larger; perhaps his breath had made the view waver and immediately settle back into stillness. She was halfway across the room when a floorboard creaked beneath her feet. He turned to her, a dazed expression on his face. "Now I'm ready," he said.

As she went to stand beside him she saw that he'd written the end at the foot of a paragraph and had followed the words with an exclamation mark in which an elaborate star took the place of a full stop. "I'm glad," she said and hugged him, rubbing his shoulders and arms to warm him up. She hadn't rid him of the chill, which was enough to make her shiver, when the phone rang.