Midnight Sun

THIRTY-SEVEN

Thank heaven for Christmas, Ellen thought – for the way the season had revived Ben. Now that he'd returned to the family, the old enthusiastic Ben who liked nothing better than to make her eyes and the children's light up, she could admit to herself that one reason for her nervousness had been a secret fear in case his introversion wasn't only a side effect of his work. Now she was able to laugh at herself and at him as he sketched an elaborate sign in the air with the key before unlocking the front door and flinging it wide as if he was ushering the family into somewhere much larger than a house. The tree in the living-room creaked, long fingers of shadow rearranged the traces of coloured light which lay on the hall carpet as though a rainbow was dying there, and all of Ellen's senses seemed to waken: she smelled the pine and listened to the whisper of falling needles, which sounded for a long moment as if it wasn't contained by the room, as if the tree had brought the edge of the forest into the house, a forest as large as the dark. For a moment, as she shivered, she thought she could see her breath. "Here we are," Ben said as though he was announcing their arrival, and switched on the light in the hall.

Ellen let out a sigh, which she couldn't see after all. "That was strange. Maybe it comes of helping tell your story. I was imagining the kind of thing you must imagine sometimes. Can it be a bit unnerving until you see how it can be turned into a book?"

"A bit unnerving?" He gave her a smile so encouraging it looked manic. "However it feels, I'll be here. It can only bring us together."

"Good for it, then," Ellen called after him as he followed the children into the living-room, saying "Leave the television off, Johnny. Open up your mind to something bigger."

"I want to see what the weather man says."

"We don't need him to tell us what's coming. Can't you feel it out there?" When Johnny darted to the curtains and peered between them, only to turn away in disappointment, his father said "We'll have to wake your imagination up."

"Go on then."

"Let's see what we can bring alive between us. Remember the idea I had about the midnight sun? Let's try to imagine what the sun kept dormant and tell one another over dinner."

When Ellen reached into her imagination while she grilled the burgers she'd made earlier, she found she was fixated on the cold which felt like a presence beyond the window blind, ready to invade the kitchen whenever the heat wavered. She could imagine the snow figures crowding towards the window, mounting one another until they stood outside the glass like a faceless totem-pole, waiting for her to raise the blind and see them. She caught herself thinking that the blind appeared whiter than usual, as if something paler than the strips of plastic were at the window. She turned away and felt the cold like a prolonged chill breath on the nape of her neck. "Take some plates, you two," she called.

"You interrupted me while I was having inspirations," Margaret complained as Johnny marched into the kitchen, looking too preoccupied to have heard the call. Ellen finished preparing a salad and sent it through with Johnny while she followed with the burgers in their buns. "Well," Ben said at once, "what do you think was under the midnight sun?"

"You go first, Johnny," Margaret said.

"A bit of the cold that'll come when the sun goes out."

"No," Margaret said, "a bit of the cold there used to be before there were any stars."

"Maybe just a single crystal." Ben's eyes were brightening. "Where's the rest of it, do you think?"

"It went away when everything got made."

"Or it's out where there's nothing but dark," Margaret said.

Johnny bit into his burger and chewed fast. "What's it doing, then?"

Ellen felt as if the three of them were waiting for her to speak. More disconcertingly, she felt that they were waiting for her to say what they had already thought themselves, because all that she'd heard so far were ideas which had occurred fleetingly to her when she was in the kitchen. She'd taken part in plenty of brainstorming sessions while she was working in advertising, but never one in which all the participants seemed to speak with the same voice. "It's dreaming," she said.

"Not quite. Not only that," Ben said. "It must dream of perfection, of recreating everything in ways we can't begin to imagine."

"It's only a story, remember," Ellen told the children, "for our next book."

Ben was obviously delighted by their having shared their fancies. Throughout the meal he kept smiling as if to encourage the family to continue imagining or even to ask him some question. After dinner he followed her and the children into the kitchen and loitered, gazing at the blind as if he could see through it, while they helped her with the washing-up. "How shall we pass the time now?" he said.

"Play a game," Margaret told him.

"Ludo," Johnny cried.

"That's an old word," Ben said, and brought the battered game from in the cupboard under the stairs. He seemed fascinated by the patterns the counters made on the board as the play progressed, and Ellen couldn't recall ever having seen a game bring them so frequently close to symmetry. When Johnny's eyelids began to droop she announced that the game in progress would be the last, and was taken aback when it was his father who protested. "No rush to break up the party, is there? It's going to be a long night."

"With Christmas on the other side of it, and we don't want people being too tired to enjoy that."

For a moment Ellen thought he was about to disagree, but what was there to contradict? When at last the game was over, Margaret said "I'm going up now, Johnny."

As soon as Ellen headed for the bedrooms to say goodnight to the children, Ben came after her. Of course he wanted to bid them goodnight too, yet his behaviour seemed indefinably childlike; surely he wasn't trying to avoid being left by himself. She kissed Margaret and Johnny, snuggled their duvets under their chins, turned out the lights in their rooms. Ben murmured "Get some sleep now" with an urgency he ought to realise would be counter-productive, and lingered in the dark with them until Ellen was downstairs. "Another game?" he said as he came down.

"I'd just like to sit and look at the tree for a while."

"We both will." He switched off the overhead light and sat on the edge of a chair. Shadows of branches patterned his face, reflections glinted in his eyes like shards of ice. He was gazing so intently into the depths of the tree that he made her feel as if she was overlooking something in there. "Do you want to talk?" she said.

"No need."

It must be a trick of the light which caused the needles on the branches to appear identical wherever the bulbs illuminated them. The pattern drew her gaze into the unlit depths, and she felt as if the branches were reaching for her until she closed her eyes. That was more peaceful, almost enough to send her to sleep, except that whenever she began to drowse the silence lurched towards her, stopping her breath. She felt suspended between sleeping and consciousness by the silence which was displaying her heartbeat, making it seem both to be growing louder and quicker and to have detached itself from her. Then she realised that not all the soft dull sounds were her heartbeats. Some of them were at the window.

Her eyes sprang open. For a few seconds she was dazzled by the tree; then she saw Ben watching her awaken. His smile widened, glistening as if his mouth was full of ice. "It's here," he said.

Angered by the shiver which his words sent through her, she pushed herself out of her chair and stumbled to the window. She wasn't fully awake yet; she had to grope among the folds of the heavy curtains in order to locate the gap. The patting at the window sounded as impatient as she was. Chilly velvet snagged her fingernails, and then she found the opening. She parted the curtains and stuck her head between them.

The night flocked to meet her. It was snowing so heavily that the lights of the town appeared doused. Flakes almost as large as the palm of her hand sailed out of the whiteness and shattered on the window. She had never seen snowflakes so crystalline; in the instant before each of them broke and slithered down the glass, they looked like florid translucent stars. She peered past them, wiping her breaths from the window, and managed to distinguish a glimmer of the lights of Stargrave drowning in white. Beyond the town and the railway line, a mass like veils as tall as the sky was dancing on the moors. She was gazing entranced at the snow, feeling her breaths becoming slower and more regular as the colourless onrush appeared to do so, when a dim figure rose out of the snow and came towards her.

It was Ben's reflection. His face was a featureless pale mask which seemed to be trying to swarm into a new shape. She turned to him so as to dispel the illusion, and found he was closer to her than she'd realised. His eyes and his smile looked illuminated by the snow. "Shall we get them?" he said.

"What?"

"You mean who."

"It can wait until the morning, Ben, surely. If we wake them now they'll never go back to sleep."

"Maybe they're still awake. At least we can go and see."

As soon as she let the curtains drop, he padded through the shadows which rooted the tree to the floor. She caught up with him on the stairs, but the snow was ahead of them, thumping softly and insistently at the windows of the children's unlit rooms. The breathing beyond the ajar doors told her that Margaret and Johnny were asleep. "They can have a surprise tomorrow," she whispered.

"That's true," he said with an odd shaky smile. "Let's go and watch."

When he ran upstairs she made to quiet him, but he must be tiptoeing. Apart from the sounds at all the windows the house seemed hushed as a snowscape; even her own footfalls sounded muffled to her, and she felt as if she was in a dream. She joined Ben as he opened the workroom door.

The night was beyond it, swooping luminously towards the house. When he took her hand and led her to the window, Ellen felt as if she was walking into darkness much larger than the room. The snow must be rushing down from the moors above Stargrave, but it looked as if it was rising from the forest in a ceaseless wave and homing in on the house. She was hardly aware that her hands were grasping the far edge of the desk so as to have something to hold onto. There were so many patterns in the air that she felt dizzy, almost disembodied – so many patterns moving in so many different directions that they seemed to be taking the world apart before her eyes. The whiteness streamed out of the forest like the seeds of an unimaginable growth; the sky seemed to sink towards her, an endlessly prolonged fall. She felt as though everything, herself included, was slowing down. Stars of ice exploded on the windows, and she thought that soon she might be able to distinguish the shapes of the flakes in the air.

She was distantly aware of her breathing and of Ben, resting his chin on her shoulder as if she had acquired a second head. When he commenced stroking her, his hands moving down her body with exquisite slowness, those sensations felt distant too. She thought he was describing patterns on her skin, patterns which seemed part of the dance of the snow; he might almost have been using her body to sketch what he was seeing. As his fingertips moved down her thighs she opened like a flower. Her flesh had never felt so elaborate, so capable of growing unfamiliar.

She wanted to reach for his hand and lead him to their bedroom, but the flood of snow was blotting out her thoughts, and she couldn't let go of the desk. She pressed her spine against him as he lifted her skirt and slipped her panties down. When they fell to her ankles, her distant feet moved automatically to kick away the garment, and then his penis reared up into her.

It was so cold that she gasped and began to shiver uncontrollably with shock or pleasure or the all-embracing chill. Patterns surged out of the night, his fingers roamed intricately over her as he rose higher and higher within her, waves of shivering spread to the limits of her body and seemed to pass beyond them. When he came, it felt like ice blossoming. She pressed her lips together for fear that the cry she was battling to suppress would bring Margaret and Johnny to see what the matter was.

Her shivering abated somewhat as he dwindled gradually within her. Her skin was tingling so much it felt unstable as a bubble, and her legs continued to shake. When she closed her eyes and leaned back against him the onrush of patterns lingered on her eyes. "Let's go to bed. I'm cold," she said.

"Yes, that's enough for now." He took hold of her so firmly that she felt safe in keeping her eyes closed as he guided her away from the window. "It's going to be colder," he said.