Midnight Sun

THIRTY-FIVE

As Ellen stirred the soup she remembered meeting Ben on the heights. She remembered the smell of the sunlit grass, the rounded mountains like the flanks of animals too huge to waken, bright ripples spreading leisurely behind a boat on a lake until they were almost as wide as the shore, the hush which seemed to slow down the song of a bird and set it like a jewel-in the air, and it occurred to her that these were precisely the impressions she needed to convey in the last scene of the book she was rewriting. Was this how writing felt to Ben, the story either demanding to be written or struggling to take shape even when he wasn't at the desk? He'd often said it was the nearest he came to being pregnant, but it didn't feel much like pregnancy: there was nothing physical about the newness growing inside her, and perhaps that was why she felt compelled to set it down before it vanished. She called the family to dinner and ladled out the soup. "Don't say very much to me," she said. "I've an idea I want to write."

The children were almost too good. Even when Johnny forgot he was supposed to avoid distracting her, he remembered at once and put his hand over his mouth. The idea of requiring the family to be so muted just to let her work dismayed her. "I wasn't asking you to stop breathing," she said, and he nodded as if the silence had filled his mouth. The silence wasn't helping her at all, it was simply isolating the dinner-table sounds until Ellen had to start a conversation herself, no easy task while Ben was sitting like silence made flesh.

As soon as dinner was over Margaret said "Me and Johnny will help Daddy wash up."

"You get my vote," Ellen told Ben, and was rewarded with a vague smile for kissing his cold forehead. If the midnight sun idea was trying to take shape inside him, no wonder he was preoccupied. "I'll try not to be too long," she said, and went up to the workroom, composing her first sentence on the way. It was nearly midsummer, she wrote on the sketch-pad, and suddenly she didn't need to think what to write; her impressions of the day above the lakes were bringing the characters alive as if they had been starved of sunlight. Before long she was writing almost in a trance, and almost unaware of her surroundings until she had finished.

She'd heard Ben putting the children to bed. She read through what she'd written, then gazed out of the window. She thought she'd managed to convey everything she had set out to express, but the dimly luminous forest made both her achievement and herself feel suddenly insignificant, less than a spark in the darkness. Perhaps writing had exhausted her, for she was shivering. She hurried down to Ben, who was watching the weather forecast as if it was a coded message he'd forgotten how to read. "Is this any good?" she said, handing him the sketchpad.

"Of course it is." He seemed to feel it wasn't necessary for him to read her work. When he'd done so he gave her a smile whose wistfulness took her aback. "It's better than good."

"Do you remember?"

"Remember what?" Almost as soon as he saw her disappointment he said "Where you got it from, you mean? Why wouldn't I?" He leafed through the pages as if he might have missed a point, then returned the pad to her. "It's your book now." Uurs.

"If you like. I'm glad we had the chance to write one."

"I was thinking about your Father Christmas idea. I thought his dreams could be where all the presents come from. Maybe one year someone wakens him too early and he can't get back to sleep. I don't know what happens then, but I thought we might find out together."

"If there's time."

Of course there wouldn't be before Christmas. In the morning the first cards were on the doormat – two identical puddings from Norwich, Father Christmas climbing scaffolding to reach a chimney in front of a printed message from Stan Elgin and his firm – and she began to experience the usual pre-Christmas panic. There was just a fortnight to Christmas Day, and she still had to buy cards and the food she hadn't thought worth carting home from Leeds, still had to choose last-minute presents. "I'll be organised next Christmas," she told Ben as usual, thinking that he needn't look so unconvinced. She wasn't that disorganised; at least she had thought to stock up on petrol on the way back from Leeds, filling several cans as well as the tank.

She and the children spent the morning at the market, where everyone kept saying "AH the best" while their breath smoked like the chestnut stall, and staggered back laden with decorations, presents, crackers, cards. It took the family most of the afternoon to put up the decorations, especially since Johnny climbed the ladder at the flimsiest excuse, but by nightfall every downstairs room except the kitchen was crisscrossed with streamers, holly dangled from picture-rails, mistletoe hung in doorways. "Is everything as it should be, do you think?" she asked Ben.

He'd seemed uninvolved, though busy, and she wondered if he was remembering his Christmases here. He turned to the children as if they knew more about the season than he did. "Have we forgotten anything?"

"A tree."

"We've a forest of them, Johnny. Go and see them whenever you like."

"I mean one we can have in the house." When his father looked as if he was about to refuse, Johnny cried "We always have one. It won't be like Christmas."

"It won't," Ben said flatly, and seemed to relent. "I don't suppose one tree will make any difference."

Ellen switched off the lights as they left the house. Above the roof the sky was so clear that she could see a sprinkling of galaxies in the black depths beyond the stars. She followed Ben and the children past the crowd of shrunken figures staking out the house until the snow came. "We won't need to go far, will we?

"How far do you think we should?" Ben said.

Above the whitened treetops the mist glowed sullenly like clouds above a snowscape. Rank after rank of trees emerged from the dimness, forming a darkly luminous pattern which fastened on her vision. If she ventured into the secret twilight she was sure there would be more to see, but how could she even consider wandering into the forest at night with the children? One day Ben could show her the depths of the forest, but not now. "Just far enough to dig up a little tree," she said.

"No distance at all." He shrugged and stepped off the marked paths, though surely he could have chosen a shrub from the very edge of the forest. She had to keep blinking her eyes as she watched him, otherwise the trees appeared to step forwards almost imperceptibly as he passed between them. She was about to call out to ask him how much farther he meant to go when he halted. "This is for us," he announced.

He'd found a shrub not quite as tall as himself. He fell to his knees and began to dig at the roots with a trowel. "Come here," he said in a voice which seemed more breath than words, and sat back on his heels. "Everyone should have a dig."

For a moment the sight of him, a dark shape crouching among the trees with a glint of metal in its hand, seemed to Ellen to suggest a fairy tale or a childhood nightmare which the tale had provoked. It was just Ben waiting there, she told herself, and led the children off the path.

She took the trowel from him and poked among the scrawny roots while a cold smell of growth and decay filled the air. As she freed the roots their spidery tendrils brushed the backs of her hands, scattering earth and fallen needles and glistening insects which scuttled into the dark. She dug halfway around the tree and passed the tool to Margaret, who probed the ground and recoiled when a root sprang up through the needles as if impatient to be free. Johnny dug like a terrier until his father stopped him. "It'll come now," Ben said.

Ellen trowelled the soil away from the roots as he lifted the tree, and then she stood up. Perhaps she moved too quickly, for just as the tree emerged from the soil the air seemed to darken overhead. It felt to her as if the open sky had suddenly appeared – as if the trees had been pushed apart. She wavered dizzily and glanced up, and saw the white belly of the mist lowering itself onto the treetops. She grabbed the children's hands and started away from the pit where the tree had been, only to discover she had lost the path. Ben seemed to know where he was going, and so she followed him.

She'd darkened the house so as not to be dazzled on the way back, but now she realised that the lights would have allowed her to orient herself. Still, the forest was thinning ahead of Ben, until she could distinguish beyond the trees a dark bulk which dwarfed a host of pale shapes – the house and the snow crowd.

"Let's run and get everything ready," she said.

She conducted Margaret and Johnny down the track while Ben followed with measured steps, the thin silhouette of the tree craning over his shoulder and waving insect limbs behind his back. By the time he came into the house she had produced the tub and decorations from the cupboard under the stairs. He stood the tree in the tub and packed earth around the roots, and the children helped drape the branches with streamers and skeins of bulbs. Ellen switched on the bulbs and turned off the living-room light, and the family sat in front of the shining tree.

For her the tree had always had a special magic, but this year the magic was darker. The lights nestling in the depths of the tree made her think of stars; the sight of them hovering in the dark seemed almost to bring the black sky down through the house and into the room. As the winter nights grew longer and colder, she thought as she lay in bed, primitive folk must have thought the sky was coming to earth. She slept and dreamed that the stars were cold, covered with ice which kept them shining as they fell towards her, until she realised that there was no light for them to reflect and they went out, leaving her struggling to waken from the dark.

She must have dreamed that because she was waiting for the snow. In the morning it hadn't arrived, nor the next day, nor the day after. Despite the absence of clouds, the air felt weighed down by the massing of snow, an impression which made the bright sky seem unreal. Her classes in Leeds were finished now until the new year, but at least there were plenty of seasonal preparations to keep her busy, since Ben insisted on typing the new book. In three days he transcribed exactly what she'd written, though she had been hoping he would put something of himself into it, and posted the typescript to Ember.

Waiting for the publishers to respond made her unexpectedly nervous. Perhaps she had always believed that they were bound to like Ben's tales as much as she did and that her illustrations were only a bonus, unnecessary to their success. Thank heaven for the time of year, she thought, for an evening of carol-singing with Hattie Soulsby to subsidise the playgroup. Without that she would have been in danger of brooding on her nervousness, which had begun to feel so large and vague that it could hardly be explained by anxiety about the book.

Hattie brought her husband, a large shy man whose duffel coat gave him the appearance of a monk. Margaret and Johnny shared the music Stefan and Ramona were reading with the aid of a flashlight. The waits started from the town square, where frost glinted on the tarmac like reflections of the stars. Half a carol brought Mr Westminster to his front door, to clear his throat ferociously and drop several pound coins in Hattie's plastic bucket. Sally Quick had mince pies waiting for everyone. Tom, the bus driver who lived opposite, seemed abashed that he only had money to offer, and joined the procession as it climbed Church Road. Les Barns was so delighted to see him – "So that's what it takes to get you out at night, you daft bugger" – that he too joined the waits.

This was how Christmas should be, Ellen thought: the air so cold it made the dark between the streetlamps glitter, the cottages displaying trees and open fires, the community rediscovering itself. She squeezed Ben's hand, but he was gazing above the town at the cloud rooted to the earth. Terry West led "The Holly and the Ivy" in a high strong voice, and Ellen found herself thinking how many ancient customs had been taken over by Christmas: the pagan holly and mistletoe, the fairy on the tree, the tree itself, even the date, which had originally been the winter solstice, the shortest day… On the way home up the track she saw the shining tree and felt as if stars had got into the house. When she opened the front door she heard the tree creak, and long shadows reached out of the living-room and scuttled over the carpet. "The tree's saying hello to us," she said.

All the walking must have tired her, because she overslept on the morning of the nativity play, of all mornings. Surely Ben could have wakened her and the children before heading for the workroom. She hurried Margaret and Johnny to school and shopped on her way back. As she let herself into the house she heard Ben's voice upstairs. "She's here now," he was saying.

"Who's that?"

Silence met her, and she wondered if he had been talking to himself. She had almost reached the workroom when he responded "It's for you. The publishers."

He was holding the receiver away from his face as if he resented its presence. "Alice Carroll?" she mouthed.

"Nobody else."

Ellen lifted the receiver from his hand and perched on one corner of the desk. "Hello, Alice."

"Ellen. Glad I could get you. Half the calls I've tried to make this morning, the lines have been down with the snow." She paused. "Do you happen to know if I've offended your husband in some way?"

"Not that he's told me," Ellen said, hoping that would make Ben look at her. He continued to gaze at the forest, so intently that his eyes appeared unfocused; he hadn't moved except to lay the hand from which she'd taken the receiver palm down on the desk, fingers splayed, so like his other hand that she could imagine the two were symmetrical. "Why do you ask?" she said.

"Just that he didn't seem interested in discussing the new book."

He didn't regard it as his, Ellen thought, but couldn't he see that even if she had written every word of it, it would be his too? "I think you may have called while he was trying to bring something else to life," she said, and suppressed the panic which made her nervous of saying "Tell me about the book."

"I was supposed to go to a party last night, but the snow put paid to that, so I read what you sent me. I thought I'd call rather than write you a letter so near Christmas. I wanted you both to know that the rewrites are exactly what the book needed. As a matter of fact, as far as the text goes, I think it may be your best book."

Ellen was dumbfounded. "I mean," the editor said, "once you've illustrated it."

"Thanks for saying so. Thank you," Ellen said, still unsure how she felt. "Have a good Christmas."

"Many of them."

Ellen said goodbye awkwardly and leaned her back against the window so as to look into Ben's eyes. "She likes the book now."

"I'm pleased for you."

"For us, Ben, us."

He grasped his chin and turning his head, met her eyes. "It'll always be us, I promise," he said.

She had the disconcerting impression that even now his thoughts and his vision were somewhere else. She mustn't pester him if he was trying to work. "I'm here if you want me," she told him, and went downstairs, wondering why Alice Carroll's praise hadn't assuaged her nervousness. Perhaps her nerves needed time to recover.

She listened to the radio while she wrapped presents, wrote cards in response to some of the morning's mail, copied changes of address into her address book, iced the Christmas cake, made beefburgers for dinner. She had to keep searching the stations for programmes of carols. Between the stations, and sometimes between the carols, the radio would fall so silent that she could imagine it was stuffed with snow. The news reports were about little else but snow: several motorways rendered impassable, towns and villages cut off, worse to come. Whenever she heard how the snow was advancing she glanced out of the window, but the sky and the horizon were clear.

Ben didn't want coffee or lunch. Surely he wouldn't disappoint the children by not going to the play. "Will you be ready in a few minutes?" she called as she reached for her coat.

"For anything," he called in a windy voice which seemed to fill the house. Almost at once he ran downstairs and grabbed her by the hand, and would have pulled her out of the house immediately if she hadn't reminded him to put on a coat. As he urged her along the path beside the allotments and sneaked through a gap in the churchyard hedge near the school, he seemed close to dancing. "Nearly there now. Not long now," he told her, so unnecessarily that she laughed, as they ran through the shadow of the forest. Given his mood, she couldn't resist asking "Has it been a productive day?"

He smiled so widely that her own face ached in sympathy. "Wait and see."

A makeshift stage stretched across the school assembly hall, two sets of tables and chairs representing an inn beside a cardboard stable scattered with hay in front of a tall length of plywood painted with palm trees and a night sky. The plywood masked the classrooms where the performers were audibly hiding. Heads kept poking around it, searching for their parents. Margaret leaned out and flashed Ellen a smile which was trying to appear unconcerned, Johnny grinned as if his face might stay like that throughout the performance, and Ellen crossed her fingers for them. At least now she had a reason to be nervous.

By the time the play commenced, it was dark outside. Stars gleamed through the high windows behind the audience as Johnny's teacher dimmed the lights. Mrs Hoggart struck up "Silent Night" at the piano, and the voices of the unseen children began to sing.

In the first scene Margaret acted her role of a difficult customer at the inn with such vehemence that Ellen came close to tears. She wasn't the only mother whose voice wasn't quite steady as they joined in "Once in Royal David's City". Joseph was holding his tablecloth robe so high above his ankles that he must have tripped during rehearsal. Mary rocked the baby Jesus ferociously throughout the inn scene, and at one suspenseful moment appeared to be about to drop him, though he looked as if he would bounce. The innkeeper forgot most of his lines and was prompted so loudly that his parents in the audience kept echoing the prompter. By now Ellen was suppressing both laughter and tears, and several of her neighbours on the bench were having the same problem. It was a relief when the onstage cast and the choir invisible began to sing "We Three Kings of Orien' tar" and the parents could join in. She wondered if the heating had broken down; though the children might be too busy to notice, their breaths were faintly visible.

The kings brought in their treasures, a box piled with chains painted gold followed by two jars which Ellen suspected had contained bath salts, and then Johnny and the rest of his year scurried squeaking around the hall before subsiding somewhat reluctantly in front of the hay. Everyone sang "O Come All Ye Faithful", and the lights came up so that parents could photograph the players. As Ellen took half a dozen photographs Ben smiled oddly at her, as if he thought her actions were somehow redundant, though the pictures would bring back memories in years to come. "Be quick changing," she called after Johnny and Margaret, and rubbed her arms through her coat to keep warm.

Mrs Venable was apologising for the chill, which had obviously caught her and the heating unprepared, when the children began to reappear from behind the night sky. One of Johnny's friends pointed up at the windows, and a chatter of excitement multiplied as children crowded into the hall, buttoning their coats and clutching their costumes in plastic bags. "Well, that seems to be the explanation," Mrs Venable said, following their gaze. "The snow's here at last. Don't catch cold on the way home. I'll have the heating seen to for tomorrow."

Johnny ran to his parents, squeaking "Come on" at his sister, who was chatting importantly with some of her friends. His voice was so high that it sounded as if he hadn't stopped playing the mouse. Ellen wiped away traces of the whiskers which had been drawn around his mouth, and let herself be tugged along the corridor. But the families already in the schoolyard had halted there, blocking the doorway, and the buzz of excitement had become a growing mumble of bewilderment. Frost sparkled on the concrete of the schoolyard and the bricks of the school walls, but that was all. Of the whiteness which had loomed at all the windows facing the forest, there was no sign.