Midnight Sun

TWENTY-EIGHT

At first Ben thought he knew what was wrong with him: he was setting off for London before he was fully awake. He'd risen before he had planned to, having wakened from a dream which had seemed too large for his sleep to contain, but which he'd forgotten on the instant of waking. He'd crept through the sleeping house for coffee and a shower, only to fail to realise until he was towelling himself that he'd forgotten to turn on the hot tap. At least the cold shower ought to help him wake up, but no wonder Ellen and the children had shivered when he'd planted kisses on their foreheads. He'd found himself wishing that he didn't have to leave them, a wish which was momentarily so intense it felt like fear. It would do them no good if he cancelled his appointments, and perhaps the appointments were the source of his nervousness, which if it was true was ridiculous. He grabbed his overnight bag from the foot of the stairs and let himself out, hoping that the open air would clear his head.

It was just after four o'clock. The darkness seemed to be congealing icily about him. Behind the house the crowd of white still figures stood like a vanguard of the forest, the pale mass like an earthbound cloud which had yet to release its storm. When he climbed into the Volkswagen and switched on the headlamps, their beams looked as though the weight of the darkness was about to extinguish them. He released the handbrake and let the vehicle coast down the track so as not to waken the family, and started the engine when he came to the road. He drove under the bridge and onto the moor.

Chunks of the night flowered as the headlamp beams slid over them, patches of snow seemed to expand as the light found them. After most of an hour the glare of Leeds put out the stars. He drove through the empty streets, whose lamps made his eyes ache, and down to the motorway, where lorries bigger than he'd ever seen in daylight roared through the dark. From the sky the lights racing up and down the spine of England must look like nervous energy rendered visible, he thought, and then the need to concentrate on the traffic brought him down to earth.

By the time the sun wounded the horizon to his left, he felt as if the car was driving him. Certainly some compulsion was – not his appointments in London and Norwich. Perhaps his next tale was demanding to be told, which would explain why these two days seemed to be in his way. As daylight brought traffic swarming onto the motorway he was able to lose himself in driving, and once he reached the outskirts of London he found plenty to distract him: learner drivers leading slow processions along streets narrowed by parked lorries which dwarfed the shops they were stocking; pedestrians forced into the roadway by scaffolding and demolition; holes in the road planted with workmen in various stages of growth, no more than talkative heads protruding from one trench, men from the waist up sprouting from another. He lost his way at a diversion in Crick-lewood because of a burst water main, and it took him the best part of two hours to reach Soho, where he parked beneath the Firebrand building and emitted a yell of relief.

Despite the delay, he was almost an hour early for his first meeting. He walked through Soho – where there seemed to be fewer sex shops than in January but more handwritten notices beside doorways – to look for The Boy Who Caught The Snow-flakes in the bookshops on Charing Cross Road. He braced himself as he marched into Foyle's, but he wasn't prepared for the sight which greeted him. Every shop which sold children's books had his and Ellen's on display, and two of them had both The Boy Who Caught The Snowflakes and their other titles in the window.

He gazed at the second window display as lunchtime crowds hurried by. In Foyle's he'd wanted someone to buy the book while he was watching: he'd felt like a child, eager for his work to be appreciated. Now he wished Ellen and the children were here to see. Their delight would surely have communicated itself to him, but each time he was confronted by another group of Sterling books the spectacle seemed to have less to do with him, as if the books were products of a phase of his life which he'd left behind. He mustn't lose his enthusiasm now, when he needed it for the press interview. The thought sent him striding back to Firebrand Books.

Among the books displayed in a rack opposite the easy chairs in the reception area he found a copy of The Boy Who Caught The Snowflalxs. While he was waiting for Mark Matthews he speed-read the book, and was on the last page when a voice remarked "If even the author's reading it, it must be good."

This was Mark Matthews, a tall man in his thirties, already balding. His long face appeared to be trying to smile with as many features as possible. "We can hustle now if you like," he said, "if you feel like getting a drink in before Howard Bellamy wants to talk."

"You think that will loosen my tongue, do you?"

"We have ways of making you talk," the publicist said, and relinquishing his fake German accent, "but the way I hear it, you don't need any."

Ben hoped there wouldn't be much of this. When Matthews said "Italian all right for you?" Ben though momentarily that he was proposing to don another accent. "Whatever pleases Bellamy," Ben said.

It proved to be the restaurant where Kerys Thorn had lunched the Sterlings, and the interviewer was already waiting, perched on a bar stool just inside the window and feeding himself olives with one pudgy hand between sips of the cocktail in the other. He continued to survey the faces of the passers-by until Mark Matthews cleared his throat, and then he swung round on the groaning stool and raised his handlebar eyebrows. "Howard Bellamy, Ben Sterling," the publicist said.

Bellamy gave Ben's hand a loose shake and retrieved his cocktail from the bar. "Wife following?"

"Someone had to stay home with the children."

"Thought I'd rather have the pretty half, did you?" Bellamy said to the publicist, and to Ben: "Shame, though. She could have made me a sketch to send out with my pieces. Let's put something in our tummies while you're being grilled."

"It sounds as if you're going to make a meal of me."

"Do you know, I think I'm going to like this man," Bellamy said, descending gracefully as a seal from the stool and tugging his velvet waistcoat over his paunch. "You'll be easy," he told Ben. "We'll have fun."

The interview was certainly fluent and slick. Once Bellamy had posed his tape-recorder beside the bowl of parmesan, Ben forgot it and discoursed on all the subjects which Bellamy raised or which his own responses led to: childhood as a visionary state, the stifling of imagination by pressures to conform, imagination as the soul of man, the undying essences of myths and fairy tales, the need to let them tell themselves, the possibility that only children could hear them clearly and rediscover the meaning they must have had when they were told round the fire under an unknown sky in the midst of an unknown dark which perhaps had been the real storyteller, borrowing a human voice to tell its tales… Bellamy nodded and smiled and managed to look eager for more while he swallowed an extravagant amount of spaghetti. He didn't switch off the recorder until coffee had followed several bottles of wine. "That'll more than do," he said. "Unless you've anything else in your head that you particularly want to let loose on the world."

The termination of the interview took Ben off guard; he'd reached a stage where he was scarcely aware of talking. "I was just thinking how many people I've known who sound like adjectives or adverbs. Dainty, Quick, and now you. Not overweight, just comfortably bellamy."

Bellamy took his time about smiling at that, but once he did his smile looked set for a while. "I predict we'll be seeing you up high before long. I'll be bending my efforts towards it," he said, and wrote his address inside one of the restaurant's match-books. "Drop me a line if you think of anything you forgot to say."

As Ben and Mark Matthews walked back to Ember the publicist said "I'll want to use you a lot more next year. We mustn't let all that charm and eloquence go to waste."

"Maybe I should save some for my new editor."

"Maybe."

Without warning Ben felt as if the part of him which talked about writing and which had carried him through the interview had deserted him, exposing him to his impatience with the delay of the next two days. He was afraid he might be rude to Alice Carroll, and then so angry with being afraid that he felt like being yet ruder. But when he saw that she looked even smaller behind Kerys' desk than Kerys had, his anger didn't seem worth sustaining. "He was perfect for Bellamy," the publicist told her. "I've been there when Howard took against someone he was interviewing. Not a pretty sight, I can tell you."

Ben had to admit to himself that Alice Carroll was: the dabs of pink on her marbly cheeks emphasised her delicate bones, her blonde hair cascaded to her waist out of a hairband shaped like a snake. She gave his hand two shakes and said "Anything you can do to maximise sales."

Ben assumed she was talking to Mark Matthews as well, which made him feel only half acknowledged. "I'd like to have our photographer take you before you leave, Ben," the publicist said.

"What about Ellen?"

"Send us one."

"We can take him now," Alice Carroll said, and glanced at Ben. "If you don't mind, of course."

"I'll live."

She acknowledged his response with a terse smile and raised her faint eyebrows at the publicist until he retreated. "Coffee," she said to Ben as if she was advising him to sober up.

While they awaited the coffee she talked to him about the book she referred to as Snowflakes. She was pleased with the sales of Snowflakes, and sounded surprised as well. There was talk of submitting Snowflakes for a children's book award. Perhaps it was because her phone kept interrupting that he didn't find her comments as heartening as she presumably meant him to. Soon the photographer let himself into her glass and plywood booth. "Hold my calls," Alice Carroll told her secretary who brought the coffee, and nodded to the photographer to start whenever he was ready. To Ben she said "You're waiting to hear what I thought of your latest submission."

"Of course," he said graciously.

"I thought you were trying too hard."

The electronic shutter of the camera emitted a sound like a stifled exclamation. The photographer was shooting. Let him, Ben thought furiously; he wouldn't catch Ben unawares, as Alice Carroll had. He was so anxious not to betray she had that his tongue stumbled. "To do, to do what?"

"To produce what you think the market wants."

"Wasn't that what you asked for?"

"True, but my authors don't normally take me so literally. I have to see the finished product before I can judge it, obviously, and in this case I'd say it shows you aren't as good at carrying out instructions as you think you are."

Repeated swiftly several times, the noise of the camera shutter sounded like imperfectly suppressed mirth. "So what are you saying?" Ben said in a tone intended to seem receptive but aloof.

"What I just said." She sat forwards on her high revolving chair, and Ben imagined spinning it until she vanished beneath the desk-top. "If you're asking me what you should do," she said, "I'd say you ought to wag a few less fingers at your readers. Address their concerns but let your story make your points for you. People don't like to be preached at, children least of all."

"Nor do I," Ben retorted – not out loud, but he wondered if the snicker of the shutter meant that the camera had caught him thinking it.

"And you might try injecting more imagination into the rewrite," Alice Carroll said, "since that's what you're good at and it seems to sell. Enough?"

Her last word was meant for the photographer, but Ben was tempted to respond. As the photographer went out she said to Ben, "I hope you didn't mind him taking you while we were talking. I think it makes for a livelier image. We've enough shots of you trying to look like an author."

"So to return to what you were saying…"

"I meant everything I said, of course."

Had Ben thought or hoped otherwise? "Simple as that," he said, and stood up.

"I'll walk you to the lifts." She held the door of her booth open while he struggled into his coat, which felt like his anger made heavy and hotter and even more frustrating, then she led him along the aisle between the unpartitioned desks. Someone held open a lift for Ben, but she waved it away. "Have your children read this book?" she said.

"Not yet."

"Don't you usually let them?"

"There hasn't been time."

"Maybe you should turn them loose on it and see if they're of my mind." When he didn't speak, she pressed the button between the lifts. "There wasn't any call to rush the book, you know," she said. "I appreciate your doing your best to please me, but I didn't need to see it so soon. If I were vou I'd relax over Christmas and see how the story stands up in the new year."

"Thanks for making yourself clear," Ben said, and watched the doors of the lift close over her face. His rage seemed to have crystallised into a single thought: she was going to wish she hadn't been so smug about the new year. He wasn't quite sure what he meant by it, and its lack of definition aggravated his nervousness. When the lift touched bottom he hurried across the car park, where the chill was some relief, and drove the Volkswagen up the ramp.

Before he was out of the one-way maze he found that his instincts were leading him north. "Not yet," he muttered, and blundered more or less eastwards until he saw a sign for Cambridge. By the time he reached the motorway it was a stream of light and fumes. He carne off it at Stump Cross and headed for Six Mile Bottom, a name which had given Johnny a fit of the giggles. The memory made Ben feel unexpectedly lonely in the midst of the flat landscape where headlamps passed like comets drawn by their tails into the dark. He'd call home once he arrived at Dominic's, he promised himself.

Most of the shops were closed when he drove into Norwich. As he parked beneath the only tree in the narrow side street, a gaunt metallic shape which he remembered bearing cherry blossoms, Dominic's father hopped off the Milligans' front doorstep and trotted over, leaning on a gnarled stick. "Here he is. Put the kettle on," he shouted, and to Ben in the same tone: "Let's have your bag."

Dominic hurried out of the house. "Hello, Ben. I'll take it, Father. We don't want you overexerting yourself."

"It isn't worth arguing over," Ben said, and carried his overnight bag into the hall, where Dominic's mother met him. "That's right, Ben, don't let them boss you about. What can 1 offer you after your travels? There's tea or coffee, and a snack to keep you going until dinnertime."

"I'm not hungry just now," he said, anxious to bypass her disordered cuisine as far as he decently could. "I hope Dominic told you I'm taking you all out to dinner."

The rooms with which the house was crammed were even smaller than he remembered, but brighter. The interior had been repainted – yellow in the hall and up the stairs, blue walls and one green in each of the rooms – until the house seemed almost to be turning into a cartoon of itself. It was no longer scattered with books, though there was a tottering pile of them beside the front-room chair into which Dominic's father subsided; Ben saw that he was doing his best to be tidy in his old age. "I read your new book," the old man told him. "It took me back to that time you told us a story. I said then you ought to see about finding a publisher."

"So you did," Ben said, and retreated to the spare bedroom. He'd forgotten the incident until now; what else might he have forgotten? He dropped his bag on the bed, which was surrounded by bookcases occupying all the space between the furniture against the walls, and went downstairs. "Would it be all right if I were to phone Ellen?"

"I should jolly well think it would," Mrs Milligan declared, drawing the heavy curtain over the front door to keep out draughts, and shut all the doors to the hall as she returned to the kitchen. "You'll want some privacy while you're talking to your lady love."

Margaret answered the phone. "Is that Ramona?"

"Not unless her voice has broken."

"Oh, it's you. Did you sign lots of books?"

"Maybe tomorrow."

"Mummy says did you drink lots of drinks. I'll get her."

He listened for her footsteps hurrying away or her calling to Ellen, but the silence was so total he began to wonder if he'd been cut off. He was suddenly aware of the expanse of night which separated them under the infinite dark. Ellen's voice made him start nervously. "What timing," she said. "I was taking dinner out of the oven."

"I just wanted to say hello."

"Hello. Were we a success? How did Alice Carroll turn out to be?"

"Unenthusiastic. She's decided she likes me better the way I was."

"She can keep her hands off. Or are you talking about the new book?"

"She thought it was all message and no magic."

"Shall I look at it again and see what I think?"

"It's your book."

"It'll keep me company when the children are in bed. Must go now before dinner gets cold. Drive carefully on Saturday but don't be too late, will you? I love you." The silence closed in so immediately that he thought she'd gone, but as he murmured "I love you" he heard her last words to him. "It's colder when you're not here," she said.