Midnight Sun

THIRTY-TWO

As Ellen and the children turned along the track they saw the parked car. "Daddy's home," Johnny shouted, and ran towards the house.

Ellen wondered if one night at the Milligans' had been enough for Ben or if he had just been homesick. "Don't ring the bell, Johnny. He's probably asleep."

The boy dodged around the house and hid among the snow-figures. "Mummy, he's going to chuck snow at us. It'll be hard. Mummy," Margaret protested, wailing with tiredness.

"Come out now, Johnny. I let you stay up late so you could finish your game on Stefan and Ramona's computer. I thought you were old enough to behave."

When she advanced towards him he leapt up among the figures, and Margaret screamed. "I said not to wake Daddy," Ellen said, thinking as she spoke that Ben might not be asleep yet: the windscreen of the car was clear of frost, and so it couldn't have been parked for long. She glanced past it, at the oddly symmetrical luminous cloud which had been hovering above the forest ever since they'd started home from Kate's. Somehow she couldn't judge how large or how distant the cloud was. She unlocked the front door and switched on the hall light. "Straight into the bathroom, now," she murmured.

"Can't we just peep at Daddy?" Margaret pleaded.

"Very quietly, then. Quiet as snow."

Sometimes the children took Ellen's instructions too literally out of contrariness, but now they seemed to be trying to do as they were told; by the time they reached the top of the house she couldn't hear them. From the foot of the stairs she watched Margaret ease open the bedroom door and then the door of the unlit workroom. "He isn't here," Margaret called to her.

She must be too tired to realise that meant there was no need for quiet; Margaret could barely hear her voice. "Faces and teeth, then," Ellen said. "I'll be up to tuck you both in in ten minutes."

While they were in the bathroom she looked into the downstairs rooms in case Ben had been so exhausted by his journey that he'd fallen asleep in one of them, but they were deserted. She filled the percolator and switched it on before shooing Johnny up to his room, having checked that he'd washed his face and brushed his teeth. "Where's Daddy?" he repeated.

"He must have gone to look for us. The quicker you go to sleep now, the less time you'll have to wait to see him."

She was making Ben sound like Father Christmas, but she didn't want Johnny worrying about him and giving himself anxious dreams. She kissed Johnny as the pillow swelled around his cheeks, she stuffed the edges of the duvet under the mattress and made sure his bedroom window was securely fastened, then went into Margaret's room. "I'll come and tell you if I hear Johnny in the night," Margaret whispered.

"I shouldn't think he'll walk again. He never has before. Anyway, I'm going to wait up for your father."

"Can't I?"

"You go to sleep. You'll see him in the morning," Ellen said, and stopped Margaret's flagging protests with a kiss. She left the bedroom doors ajar and returned to the bubbling percolator.

The coffee took away a little of the chill which was penetrating the kitchen window and the blind, but Ellen felt as if something huge and cold was massing just beyond the glass. She pulled the blind-cord and sent the strips of plastic rattling upwards. There was nothing to see except the frozen garden and the pack of rudimentary figures at the edge of the glow from the kitchen. She let the blind down and retreated to the living-room.

The suite she'd brought from Norwich and the easy chairs she'd bought in Stargrave were old friends by now, all part of the room. She curled up on the sofa and sipped her coffee while she gazed at her pictures and the children's hanging on the walls, the velvet curtains shutting out the night, the grey stone mantelpiece which she would fill with Christmas cards. She tried to imagine how the house had felt before it had become hers and the rest of the family's, but she could call up nothing but an impression of empty darkness.

She finished her coffee and sat listening for footsteps on the track. Surely Ben wouldn't be long now; he'd had time to walk around Stargrave and back. She listened until her intentness made the silence seem to be settling against the windows and she had to resist an urge to break it. It evoked the night and the crowd of still figures behind the house, and for no reason she could identify, a phrase began to repeat itself in her brain: faces and teeth, faces and teeth.

When she found herself remembering the grin of the climber who'd frozen to death on the crag, she reached for the remote control and summoned up the channels on the television. Nothing looked like sufficiently good company, not even a Cary Grant film that she watched for a few minutes. She was keeping the sound low in order to listen for Ben, and once she realised that the black and white film was set mostly at night she felt as though it was helping darkness and silence to gather. She switched it off and closed her eyes.

She wasn't intending to fall asleep; she meant only to quieten her thoughts. Sleep came almost at once, a soft weight which settled on her eyelids and her mind. She didn't know how long she dozed before the cold wakened her. A door or a window must be open, and she was about to force herself fully awake in case Johnny was sleepwalking when she heard the front door closing quietly. It was Ben. He was home.

She ought to go to him or at least call a greeting to him. But he seemed to have brought sleep into the house with him, a drift of heavy enveloping somnolence. She no longer knew how much she was dreaming. She felt Ben come into the room and tower over her as if the winter night had added to his stature, but her eyelids were too ponderous to open. Now he was slipping one arm beneath her shoulders and the other behind her knees. He was carrying her upstairs, lowering her onto the bed, raising her legs out of the flower of her skirt, undressing her. The touch of his hands sent shivers through her, and she wanted him. But when he eased himself into her, his penis felt like ice.

She must be dreaming, otherwise surely that would have shocked her awake – though if she was dreaming, how was she able to rationalise the situation that way? She clenched herself around his icicle of a penis, trying to impart some warmth to it as her body responded drowsily to him. When he came and then shrank, she felt as if the icicle was melting inside her. The sensation was so dreamlike that she fell asleep almost at once.

The next time she wakened, the room was dark. She was lying on her side, facing away from the middle of the bed, her empty arms reaching out beneath the duvet. How much had she dreamed? She turned over and found Ben lying beside her. That was all that mattered. She pressed her face against his neck and drew the quilt over his shoulder, and was asleep.

The children's cries roused her. She was alone in bed. Brightness pressed against her eyelids, making them flinch: daylight between the curtains. As she shielded her eyes with one hand and levered herself out of bed with the other, she heard the children again. They were cheering.

They and Ben were scattered about the furniture in the living-room, watching television. A long-range weather forecast was just ending, and Ben's eyes seemed even brighter than the children's. "Mummy," Johnny cried as his father continued to gaze ahead with an odd smile of which he seemed to be hardly aware, "there's going to be snow everywhere for Christmas."