Midnight Sun

FORTY-TWO

"It's only your father," she said. Perhaps Ben's footsteps were deliberate because he was taking time to frame an apology, or perhaps he was having to force himself to approach now that he realised how thoughtless he had been. He must be trying to muffle his footsteps so as not to unsettle the children further, but his tread only sounded ominous, soft and ponderous, somehow enlarged. Ellen saw the children shiver, and felt suddenly colder herself. Keep going, she willed him, go up to the workroom. But his footsteps halted outside the bedroom door, and there was silence except for a sound she couldn't bear to hear – the tiny chattering of Johnny's teeth. "What do you want, Ben?" she said.

"To talk."

The children glanced imploringly at her. "What about?" she demanded.

There came a soft thump at the panels of the door, and the children flinched. Ben must be pressing himself against the door, because his response caused the panel which was level with his face to buzz like an insect struggling out of a nest. "Can you hear me, Johnny?" his blurred voice said.

"Yes," Johnny admitted, and obviously felt compelled by the silence to raise his voice. "Yes," he called.

"I didn't mean we'd disappear when it wakes up, if that's what you were afraid of. I only meant we'll change."

For a moment Ellen couldn't believe what she was hearing. She stalked to the door, keeping her fury concealed so as not to alarm the children further. She snatched the door open, slipped through the gap and closed it in a single movement made deft by rage. "Have you no sense, Ben?" she said, too low for the children to hear. "Don't you care what you're doing to them? What kind of Christmas do you want them to have?"

He raised his hands as if he meant to seize her out of frustration.

His face was blank. "The kind I'm looking forward to," he said.

She felt as if the air was turning colder, as if he was somehow towering over her though his face was level with hers, but she wasn't to be intimidated. "If that has anything to do with what you were saying downstairs, I suggest you go and write it and get rid of it that way. But keep it away from the children, I'm warning you."

A flicker of bewilderment passed over his face, and he stretched out his hands to her. "I'm here when you need me."

He looked as if he was trying to appear reassuring but couldn't quite remember how. Ellen wanted to hold his hands and not relinquish them until she'd discovered what was wrong with him, but she couldn't let him win her over so easily when she was standing between him and the children. "We need you as you've always been," she said.

"And ever shall be, amen."

He gave her an unsteady smile in which she thought she saw a plea, and she was just able to take the frail joke as an indication that he hadn't really changed deep down. "That may do for me, Ben, but what are you going to tell the children?"

"What they still have to be told."

A shiver so violent it felt like a spasm carried her out of his reach, shaking her head, slashing the air with her nails to prevent him from following. "Don't you dare come near them when you're like this. If you do I'll take them out of the house, I swear it."

"Where do you imagine you'll go?"

She wasn't going to argue with him. "Enough, Ben. More than enough, if you want us to stay together. Just leave the children alone until you're sure you can keep those ideas to yourself."

When she grasped the knob of Johnny's bedroom door and held onto it, he shrugged and headed for the dark at the top of the house. "Should be prepared," he was muttering. He sounded grotesquely like a boy scout, and she wanted to believe that a kind of reversion to boyishness was at the root of his behaviour, that inhabiting his imagination for the sake of his writing had rendered him temporarily unable to appreciate that some of his fancies should be kept from the children until they were older. When she heard the workroom door close softly, she looked into Johnny's room. "Let's go downstairs. It's too cold up here for sitting around," she said.

As the children hurried past her, both of them glanced nervously towards the workroom. He'd better stay up there until the family could trust him, Ellen thought in a fury of dismay at the change which had overtaken their life. She shepherded Johnny and Margaret down to the living-room, where the gas fire was cooling, its porcelain creaking as if it was settling into a new shape. She switched on the overhead light, and the tree withdrew its shadows into itself. "Say if you're hungry, you two," she said.

"I'm not," Johnny said untypically.

"Sorry, Mummy, neither am I."

"So long as you regain your appetites in time for Christmas dinner," Ellen said with a jokey fierceness which was intended to conceal her grief. Since it didn't quite work, she grabbed the nearest source of distraction, the remote control for the television. "Let's see if the world's still out there," she said.

She rather wished she hadn't said so. Every channel was swarming with white particles which appeared to be settling into patterns that drew her vision into them. She tried the radio, only to find that it was emitting a noise which sounded like exactly the same hiss of static and which made her think of an oppressively amplified snowfall. When she'd switched off both sets, the silence seemed to blanket her thoughts. She took a deep breath. "Well, what shall we play?"

"That game where we have to draw bits of a drawing and not see what it looks like till the end," Johnny said.

"All right," Margaret said as if she was indulging him.

Ellen went along the hall for paper. As soon as she opened her pad on the dining-table, the patterns she'd drawn earlier fastened on her vision. She blinked hard and slowly, and leafed onwards to the blank sheets, two of which she tore out and brought to the living-room. "You can start, Johnny, since it's your game."

Johnny found one of his annuals on which to rest the page. He sketched a head and folded that strip of the paper before passing the sheet to Margaret for her to add a neck and shoulders. Ellen was appending an upper torso to the hidden features when she remembered what the surrealists had called this game: "the exquisite corpse". It was surely much older than the surrealists, she thought, but that didn't strike her as particularly reassuring. At least the game was cheering Johnny up. She folded the page and gave it to him so that he could giggle over drawing a stomach. Eventually the page returned to him for the feet to be added, and then he unfolded the drawing.

He was expecting it to make him laugh, and so it did, but not much. "It's good," Margaret said, sounding more dutiful than pleased. While the figures revealed at the end of a game were in the main satisfyingly absurd, this one seemed wrong in a different way. It was unexpectedly regular, as if they had all been trying to describe the same form. In its roughness Ellen thought it resembled a cave drawing, a primitive attempt to depict – what? If it had really been primitive art she would have interpreted it as an image in the process of manifesting itself or of undergoing some transformation. Its stature conveyed an impression of hugeness; the hints of patterns within its outline suggested the beginnings of further growth. Most disconcertingly, the more she examined the face Johnny had given it, the more that face resembled a caricature of his father's, such a caricature that it seemed to be on the point of turning into something else entirely. She was gazing at it when she heard the workroom door open and footsteps descending the stairs.

She hadn't quite closed the door to the hall, and making a point of closing it now would only aggravate the children's nervousness. Instead she picked up the next blank sheet and began to sketch a face as Ben's slow footsteps reached the middle landing. She meant to seem unconcerned so that the children would be. The trouble was that the face she was drawing reminded her too much of Ben's, ai. a when she tried to alter it, it began to look nothing like a face. She felt as if she was calling Ben down by drawing him.

His footsteps reached the hall and paced to the kitchen, and she heard the rattle of the window blind. Her pencil was covering the face with patterns like a tattooist's nightmare as the measured footsteps passed the door again and reascended the stairs. Too much time seemed to elapse before she heard the workroom door shut, and the children relaxed so obviously that she had to ask the question which had been forming in her mind. "Has Daddy been doing anything else to frighten you?"

"No," Johnny said at once with a mixture of loyalty and bravado.

"I was scared he was going to get us lost in the woods when we were playing hide and seek."

"He wouldn't have."

"I didn't say he would. Mummy asked if he ever made us scared, if you were listening."

"That isn't what she said."

Even an argument might be welcome now, Ellen thought, if it let them talk out their tension, even if their squabbling chafed her nerves. But the argument trailed off, leaving the silence to mass in the room as the cold had seemed to gather while Ben was approaching. "Shall we have another game?" Ellen said, and tore off the strip of paper on which she'd drawn. "It's Peg's turn to start."

Margaret accepted the page and the pencil balanced on the annual, and stared at the blank sheet as if she could already see an image there. She picked up the pencil reluctantly and drew a head, shading it from view with her free hand. She had been drawing for some time – long enough, Ellen thought, to have drawn more than a face – when her eyes widened as if she was emerging from a trance, and she crumpled the page.

"Don't waste paper, darling," Ellen said, holding out a hand for it. Margaret shrank back in her chair, and Ellen wasn't sure if she was doing so in order to avoid revealing what she'd drawn or because she'd heard the sound which had caused Ellen's voice to waver: the opening of the workroom door.

Ben was coming down again. How could his footfalls sound so large and vague? If he meant to unnerve her, he was succeeding; it must be her nerves which were making the room feel progressively colder. She couldn't take much more of this, and the children had suffered more than enough. His footsteps came into the hall, to the door, and she felt her breaths shake. He paced to the far end of the hall and back again like a jailer, and then the stairs began to creak beneath his soft deliberate tread. As soon as Ellen heard him pass the middle landing she murmured "Would you like to go and stay at Kate's tonight?"

The children gasped with delight, and managed not to clap their hands. "Yes please," they whispered.

Ellen put her finger to her lips and listened until she heard the thump of the workroom door. "Come on then," she said, and tiptoed to the cupboard under the stairs to hand the children their outdoor clothes. She wasn't afraid to have Ben realise they were leaving, she told herself, but she wanted to avoid any argument, which the children were bound to find distressing. By the time they were dressed she had pulled on her boots and was zipping up her quilted anorak with her gloved left hand. "Quietly," she murmured, dismayed to have to do so, and hurried the children to the front door, trying not to let them see that she was alert for any sounds from above. She pushed the strap of her handbag over her shoulder as Margaret turned the latch and tugged at the door, then tugged again. The door was mortise-locked.

"Quick," Johnny pleaded, and clutched his mouth to keep his loud shrill voice under control.

"It's all right," Ellen said, pulling her purse out of her bag and opening it with the other hand – but it wasn't all right, not at all. Her keys were no longer in the bag, where she had dropped them when she'd brought the children home. Ben must have taken them while she was in Johnny's room.

She was struggling not to betray her feelings to the children while her thoughts chased one another – the kitchen door was locked, the windows were, the phone wasn't working and even if communications had been restored it was in the workroom – when she heard a creak behind her, on the stairs. Ben was on the lowest flight, having somehow reached them without her hearing a sound. He was holding up his left hand, displaying her keys beside his pale expressionless face.

All the rage she was suppressing cramped her voice, which came out thin and clear. "Thank you, Ben," she said, and stuck out her hand.

She thought she would have to go up to him. Surely then he would be forced to hand over the keys, unless he wanted to forfeit the children's trust for ever. When an expression too swift to read crossed his face, and he came towards her with increasing speed, she braced herself. Whatever she was expecting, it wasn't that he would place the keys in her hand. She almost dropped them, for they were so cold that her hand jerked.

As she turned towards the door, hating herself for dreading that he would change his mind and grab the keys, he spoke. "We'll all go out," he said. "I won't talk unless you ask me to. You'll see."