Midnight Sun

TWENTY-SEVEN

Ben seemed determined to be at his best in Leeds. The family hadn't been in the bookshop two minutes before he had charmed the staff, complimenting them on the window display for The Boy Who Caught The Snowflakes, one copy of which looked crystalline with silvery glitter. After that the generously chinned proprietress and her two assistants, both of whom were uniformed in overalls like hers which made them resemble fractions of her, couldn't do enough for the Sterlings, enquiring anxiously whether the chairs at the table where they were to sit were comfortable enough, bringing them and Johnny and Margaret drinks, making sure everyone who set foot in the shop knew there was a book signing, even a diminutive pink-eyed man who was trying to remain unobtrusive while straining on tiptoe to reach the erotica. As customers began to approach the table, Ben brightened further. "Is this for you? You look young enough to me," he told a grandmother who wanted the book inscribed to her grandson for Christmas. He talked to customers about the kinds of book their children liked or, if they were children, about the adventures which were snow and the lengthening nights. "They're our mum and dad, you know," Johnny informed anyone who came near him. Three of Ellen's students turned up to buy a copy each of the book, but it was undoubtedly Ben's show, and she felt happy for him.

The last people in the queue were a reporter and photographer from a local newspaper. The reporter wanted only to check that they lived locally enough to be of some parochial significance. "Let's have your brats in the picture to add a bit of interest," the photographer said, and Ben hugged the family so hard that Ellen gasped. When the photographer said "That'll do" Ben continued to hold on for several seconds, as if he was afraid to let go.

Afterwards they walked through the premature Advent of the city streets. Though Johnny was beginning to entertain doubts about Father Christmas, he wanted to visit his avatar. Ben and Ellen took the children into a department store and waited outside the grotto, whose evergreen plastic entrance was emitting scrawny carols, while Johnny queued and Margaret went off to look at clothes by herself, feeling grown-up. "What do you think?" Ellen asked Ben. "Have we started off well?"

He was looking bemused by the thin singing which seemed to hover in the air. "Are you pleased?" he said.

"I thought we did rather well for beginners."

"If you're pleased, then I am."

"More to the point, the bookshop and the public were, particularly with you."

"The world's ready for me, you think? Wherever I go there'll be children around me? Ben Sterling, magnet of imagination, Pied Piper of the collective unconscious. Myths restored while you wait, tales retold which you'd forgotten you knew, dreams dreamed on your behalf while you sit closer to your fire…"

He was gazing across the cosmetics counter, at his reflection framed in an oval of seasonal glitter, and Ellen felt as if he was scarcely aware of her – as if, perhaps, he was taking refuge in the kind of almost automatic response which he'd produced for the customers at the bookshop. "Just do the best you can on your walkabout next week," she said, "and then it'll practically be Christmas."

"I can't take any responsibility for that."

"Not even for making our first Christmas in Stargrave special? I mean to, for all of us."

"I'm sure this year will be special."

Johnny came out of the grotto just then, wearing his grin which meant he had a tale to tell his parents, and he reminded her so much of his father that her love for both of them seized her deep inside herself. Ben grinned like that sometimes, like a little boy with a secret to share, and she hoped he always would. He was still the person she'd fallen in love with, and she mustn't let herself feel lonely if sometimes that person had to go into hiding inside him. "What was so funny?" she said.

"Father Christmas kept sniffing," Johnny giggled, "and the boy in front of me asked him if he was sniffing the glue that kept his beard on."

"That's how you can tell he wasn't real," Ben said. "A real

Father Christmas wouldn't need chemicals to give him visions. He'd spend the year dreaming of flying over the snow and ice under the stars, dreams like snowstorms that take all year to gather until the days are shortest and it's time for him to rise."

"That could be a book," Ellen suggested.

"What could?" Margaret said, emerging from among the teenage fashions.

"I've already told it once," her father said.

Disappointment and rejection and a shaky resolve not to show her emotions in public flickered across Margaret's face until Ellen came to the rescue. "If your father keeps telling it he may lose the urge to write it," she explained. "It was just the idea that Father Christmas spends nearly all year dreaming of when he'll wake up."

The idea stayed in her mind as she drove out of Leeds. The snow on the moors had all but melted, renewing the colours of the vegetation, shades of moist green which put her in mind of spring. Having at least two books to complete made her feel secure. If by any chance Ben proved not to be inspired by the idea he'd thrown out, she might have a go at writing it herself.

By the time they reached Stargrave, the first stars were glinting above the bridge. The miles of Sterling Forest were composed of night and ice, and seemed somehow to dwarf the lights of the town. The heat of the house welcomed the family, fending off the chill and effacing their breath. After dinner they played Monopoly, using a battered old set of the game, its banknotes crumpled from years of figuring in shops the children pretended to run, one tiny plastic hotel permanently crippled by being chewed and almost swallowed by two-year-old Johnny. Before the game was over, Margaret and Johnny were trying not to shiver. They were overtired, Ellen thought as she hurried them to bed, though perhaps the house was also chilly with a cold which seemed to settle on it from above. Only Ben was unaffected by the chill, unless that was why he grew randy once the children were out of the way. She pulled the duvet over his shoulders as he slid bulging into her, then she rubbed his body hard, trying to keep the chill at bay. When he subsided she held onto him. That didn't seem to keep the chill outside their bed, but soon she was so drowsy that it didn't bother her. She drifted into sleep which felt soft as snow, only to be wakened by a small voice in the dark.

It was Johnny. He was standing by the bed, huddling against the edge of the mattress. When she reached for his hand she discovered that he was shivering. "What's the matter, Johnny?"

"It wants to come in."

He sounded more asleep than awake, yet close to tears. Ellen let go of his hand in order to slip out of bed and fumble her way into her dressing-gown, then steered him out of the room. "You've been dreaming," she murmured. "Let's get you back to bed."

He halted abruptly, and her hipbone struck the banister. For a moment she thought she would fall into the gaping darkness of the stairwell. "I heard it," he insisted.

She switched on the landing light and squatted in front of him to scrutinise his bleary rumpled stubborn face. "What do you think you heard?"

"The dog," he wailed as if she was affecting not to have heard it. "It's cold. It can't get in."

"If there's a dog its owner will hear it. We don't want you catching cold as well." She went down three stairs and led him after her, but he had taken only a few reluctant steps when he stiffened. "It's there," he said with a kind of unhappy triumph.

Ellen had already heard it – a distant howling somewhere above the house. It was worse than mournful; it was so distorted that it sounded like the cry of some new creature which was lost in the dark. "Whoever owns it must have heard it by now, Johnny. Snuggle back into bed."

He wouldn't close his eyes until she promised to stay with him while he tried to go to sleep. She sat on the end of his bed, hugging herself, willing slumber to take him before the howling rose any higher; it was turning into a thin hoarse shriek. When at last he fell reluctantly asleep she tiptoed up to the workroom. Of course she couldn't see the animal. The prospect from the window lingered in her mind as she sought sleep: the sight of the forest gleaming like an immense skeleton while the black sky blinked and the unseen creature howled as if the lonely dark had found a voice.

In the morning there was no sound above the house. Johnny seemed to have slept off his concern for the dog until Ellen drove past a knot of sorrowful townsfolk outside the post office. "It wasn't Golly, was it?" he pleaded.

"If it was, someone must have taken care of him."

Ellen parked near Tovey's and walked back to the market, where she left the children at Stargrave's nearest equivalent to a bookshop – everything exchangeable and mostly second-hand with a dozen or so new shrinkwrapped best sellers – while she tracked down the news. Gossip blocked the aisles between displays of wide-eyed fish, of shoes like so many pricked-up ears, of Christmas cards and decorations and cheap toys which the season had caused to flourish. Beside the home brew stall Stan Elgin was saying to old Mr Westminster "She'd no business having such a big bugger, she could never keep him under control."

"He near dragged her under my wheels once, as if the streets weren't already full of sheep on two legs looking for a short cut to heaven."

"What's happened?" Ellen said.

"Edna Dainty took a fall in your woods and froze to death."

Ellen shook her head sadly. "Where did they find her?" she asked, disliking herself for hoping it wasn't too close to the house.

"Up near the moors," Stan Elgin said reassuringly. "It looks as if her dog dragged her off the path."

"But that's at least a mile. What could have made it run so far?"

Mr Westminster gave a bubbling cough and spat behind the stall. "Like as not trying to escape a woman's prattling."

"If you ask me," Stan Elgin said, "he was after something. Those dogs were bred to hunt. Deep down we're all still what we were before we were born."

"I wouldn't ask except my little boy will want to know, but what happened to the dog?"

"They stuck a needle in him and carried him off to Richmond," Mr Westminster said with relish.

"He'll be taken care of," Stan Elgin said.

Ellen wasn't sure if he was saying that for Johnny's sake or hers. When she passed on the message Johnny cheered up at once, and Margaret was tactful enough not to express her dubiousness except in a momentary frown. As she bought next week's provisions, Ellen couldn't help wondering if anyone held her responsible for Edna Dainty's death. She hadn't known the woman well enough to mourn her except as an eccentric who had been part of the town, but the notion that Ellen might have revived some dislike of the Sterlings by doing her best to make the townsfolk welcome in the forest seemed capable of reducing her to tears.

"Whatever they think," Ben said that night, "they'd better keep their hands off. They've no right to touch a single tree."

"I shouldn't think they would."

"Better be sure," he said, and must have realised that he seemed to be angry with her. "Mrs Dainty didn't need us to lead her into the woods, she'd have gone where she wanted to go. At least now the place will be a bit quieter."

Perhaps nobody except herself blamed Ellen. "Nobody worth knowing," Kate West and Ha trie Soulsby responded almost in chorus when she confided to them that she felt as if someone might do so. They wouldn't let her go until they were convinced she believed them – until she managed to conceal the anxiety which still hovered over her like the shadow of the forest, which every day brought closer to the house.

Ben must have sensed her unease. On Wednesday evening he said suddenly "Would you rather I didn't go?"

Was she secretly nervous because he was going away for two nights when he'd never left her and the children alone before? "Don't even think of it," she said. "You've got to tell the world that the Sterlings are coming for Christmas."

Since he would leave before dawn, he was in bed before her. She found him asleep on his back, his fingers interwoven on the duvet. He looked as if he was meditating, his face almost symmetrical with calm. She climbed in beside him, burrowing her face into the angle between his neck and shoulder, telling herself that she wouldn't be nervous if he weren't going away so soon after Mrs Dainty's death, which was no reason for nervousness.

She slept, and wakened to find herself alone in bed. She felt as if she might have been roused by a goodbye kiss, though surely Ben's lips couldn't have left her forehead so cold. She padded to the window and saw that the car had gone. Perhaps that was its light beyond the moor, where lingering snow made the horizon glimmer, or was that a low star? The more she squinted at it, the less certain she became that the light was there or ever had been. "Go carefully," she murmured, wishing she had been awake to tell Ben so, and retreated into bed, where the chill kept her awake until dawn.