Her face had looked fattened by Christmas and dull with suppressing emotion, with doing her duty as she saw it, and Mabel had instinctively disliked her. "You know where I am if you need to talk," Mabel had wanted to tell the old lady – but mightn't that have brought her to Mabel's house as, perhaps, she grew more senile? In retrospect, too late, that seemed unlikely. Holding her head high, Charlotte had stalked out of the shop so abruptly that Ben's mother had had to trot to keep up with her. Mabel had never seen her to speak to again, but surely that was no reason for Mabel to feel guilty about the car crash.
Nobody knew for certain what had caused it, even if the only witness had seen the Sterlings arguing as their car had passed hers – even if the witness had thought she'd seen the people in the back seat, Ben's mother and grandfather, trying to calm down an old woman. Perhaps Charlotte had finally lost her temper at the way they treated her, but could that have been enough to cause the crash on a moorland road where you could see for miles? It must have been. Surety there was no need to wonder if Charlotte had deliberately caused the accident to put a stop to something she'd imagined or to save Ben from his family.
Mabel told herself that she had been reading her own anxiety about the little boy into Charlotte's behaviour, and huddled closer to the oven. Perhaps she wouldn't think about the Sterlings any more until she could discuss her thoughts with someone; just now they were making her feel vulnerable. Had she caught a chill? Though she would be disappointed if she had to forego midnight mass, she thought she might be well advised to take a glass of brandy up to bed once the last tray of pies was out of the oven. At least the tap had finally stopped dripping, but it would require some effort for her to wait for the pies if she kept on shivering like this. Could she have left the front door open? No, the cold was coming from the direction of the window, for her back felt like ice. The casement must have opened somehow. She staggered to her feet, her legs trembling, and waved her hands to try and clear away the sudden mist of her breath.
The window was closed tight. It was closed, even though an icicle was hanging from the tap. At first she didn't understand what else she was seeing. Even when she held her breath until her head swam, the window still looked pale and blurred. She flapped her hands at the air as best she could – they were beginning to feel stiff and unfamiliar – and then she realised that the pallor wasn't in the air, it was on the window itself. Ice was spreading across the entire window, so swiftly she could see the translucent tendrils growing.
She couldn't move. Her legs felt withered and unstrung, barely capable of supporting her. An intricate circular pattern of ice was spreading from the centre of the window as if a focus of intense cold was approaching the glass. It was like a mask, Mabel thought with a terrible clarity: a mask for a head that must be wider than she dared imagine, the head of a presence so cold that its advance was causing the ice to form – a presence, she knew suddenly, whose attention her thoughts had drawn to her. She sensed its hugeness in the dark outside her cottage. Please make it go away, please let her be preserved from seeing what it looked like behind its mask of ice. She vowed before God to stop thinking if that would make it go away…
And then she had a thought which would have made her clench her fists if she had been able to move them. If her thinking of Ben Sterling had brought this out of the night to her, what might it want of him? She could feel the arctic cold settling over her like sleep made tangible, but she mustn't let go: someone had to keep the little boy away from whatever was waiting for him. Then the ice on the window spread onto the wall like marble coming elaborately to life, and she felt that happening inside her too. As she fell helplessly towards the stove, her thoughts were extinguished like a match.
THINGS OVERHEARD
"Understand me, when I talk of purity. I don't mean a little matter, but my purity – the purity I have in mind – is distinguished and aloof… metaphysical, of the stars… of the big spaces…"
David Lindsay, Devil's Tor
NINE
The children were expecting London to be an adventure, and it proved to be one. Ellen was congratulating herself on having navigated the Volkswagen into the West End despite the lunch-time traffic when they were confronted by a sign which said Oxford Street was closed to private cars. Now Ellen saw why it was surrounded by so many one-way arrows on the map. The car tailgating Ben's blared its horn at him for braking, and a businessman crossing in front of him brandished two fingers as if he had sounded the horn. "That's a bad example," ten-year-old Margaret advised her brother.
"I expect he was wishing us success," Ben said. "V for victory. I don't mean to change the subject, but where do I go now?"
The map appeared to have turned into a mass of arrows which collided and dodged away like a diagram of turbulence. "Across and next right," Ellen said, since that seemed to be the only way to go.
The route took them past the British Museum. "That's where they have lots of old weapons, isn't it, Dad?" seven-year-old Johnny said. "Could we go and see them if there's time?"
"I don't suppose they'd have an old tank we could use to make our way to where we're going," Ben wondered, showing his teeth at a No Entry sign.
"Only if there's time," Johnny said rather plaintively. "We aren't going to be late, are we? Won't they publish your book if we're late?"
"I'm sure they will, sweetie," Ellen said, turning 'to smile at his thin pale eager face, almost a miniature of his father's except for his hair, which was black like hers. "Be a little quiet now until we get there."
Shaftesbury Avenue led them across Cambridge Circus, beyond which Ben raced the oncoming traffic into a wide street, beating a double-decker bus to the intersection so narrowly that Johnny cheered while Margaret screamed and Ellen held her breath. Traffic wardens and women wearing fishnet stockings prowled a labyrinth of streets made even narrower by illegally parked cars, some immobilised by wheel-clamps. Whenever a gap opened in the traffic there seemed to be a taxi poised to dart into it. Ben drummed the wheel as if he was about to fling up his hands, and then he bumped the car over the kerb into a oneway street. "A miracle. A space."
Most of the parking meters in the street had bags over their heads, but the one at the end was working. He steered the car into the space and jumped out, and was reaching in his pocket when he read the sign on the meter. "How much for ten minutes? At this rate we'll just about have time to walk to the end of the street and back. My curse on whoever's responsible. May their noses turn into sausages and be eaten by dogs, may their toes grow so long they have to tie them in knots to walk
Anxiety and mirth and dismay because she'd brought no money were chasing one another over Margaret's long delicate oval face. "What comes after noses and toes?"
"Don't ask, or something might be after yours," Ellen said, searching her own purse. "Oh dear, the milkman took all my change."
"Shall I ask that lady in the doorway if she can change your notes, Mummy?" Johnny suggested.
"I think she might misinterpret your intentions, Johnny," Ben said, squeezing Ellen's knee and winking at her as he climbed into the car. "Let's blunder onwards. I see now, this is like a kind of life-size board game where the object is to avoid Oxford Street. I only hope this isn't an illegal move."
He backed to the intersection and was veering left when Margaret said "What's the name of your and Mummy's publishers?"
"Any other time I'd enjoy repeating it. Ember, a subsidiary of Firebrand Books."
"We just saw it."..
"Across the road you just came out of," Johnny gabbled, and Margaret added, "Where a lady's jumping up and down and waving."
Ellen looked back. On the far side of the crossroads a young woman was pointing at their car and gesturing with her other hand as she tried to cross the intersection. "She's telling us to go left twice and come back," Ellen guessed.
"You don't think her idea of fun could be misdirecting strangers."
When they managed to return to the crossroads the young woman was
still there. She ran to the car as it turned right. She was wearing a moss-green suit, green tights and dark green shoes, and struck Ellen as altogether pixie-like, even her smile which was disproportionately wide for her small triangular face. "I didn't think there could be many families with children cruising through Soho. If I'd known you were coming by car I'd have given you better directions."
"We thought driving would be cheaper than training it," Ben said.
"Let me show you our car park and then we'll eat. You kids must be starving." She jogged beside the car as it coasted down the ramp beneath the Firebrand building. "I'm Kerys Thorn, as if you didn't know," she said when the Sterlings piled out of the vehicle. "It's really ace to meet you two at last after so much talking on the phone. How does Italian food for lunch sound? Slurp, slurp, if it's spaghetti, would you say, kids?"
Johnny giggled. "Sounds like him eating most things," Margaret said.
"You should hear me eating Chinese soup, Margaret," Kerys said.
"My name's really Margery."
"Do your mum and dad know?"
"We're kept informed of changes," Ellen said, and gave Margaret a kiss when the girl frowned at her.
Kerys led the Sterlings into the dull January daylight and through a confusion of streets to the restaurant, racing Johnny to it when they reached the block where it stood. A fat waiter who looked ready to burst into song ushered the party to their table as soon as he saw Kerys and brought them a bottle of Krug. "Here's to a bestseller. Success and long lives to us all," she proposed, and nudged Johnny when he made a face at the taste of his token glassful while Margaret demurely sipped hers. "We have to drink this stuff because we're grownups," she told him and helped him read the menu, which was half as tall as he was. When he remarked loudly on the prices before Ellen could hush him, Kerys nudged him again. "Ember's paying. You have whatever your mum and dad say you can have," she murmured in his ear, and Ellen found herself growing increasingly fond of her.
Once the waiter had taken their orders, Kerys produced a notepad from her handbag. "Kids, I'm going to ask your brilliant parents about themselves so I can tell our publicity department what to say about them but if you've any extra ideas, just shout. Who do I start with? Do you write the books around Ellen's pictures, Ben? What was it you said, Ellen, about each taking half the year?"
"Ben writes the book in the autumn and winter and then I illustrate it in the spring and summer when the light's better and the children are at school."
"Was Ben already writing when you met?"
"Not until years after we were married. I managed to persuade him to write down some of the stories he used to tell the children, and you took some persuading, didn't you, Ben?"
"Some."
"Don't worry, Ben, we'll let you talk," Kerys assured him. "We'll want everyone to hear from both of you when we send you touring to promote your book. We'd have done that with your other books if I'd been with Ember then."
"We may have to go separately if it's when the children are at school," Ellen said.
"The one of you who stays at home could be the inspiration behind the other one. The media should go for that." Kerys sat back as their meal arrived and the waiter departed, blowing a kiss in appreciation of their choices. "I mean, if it's true. Do you think you'd be a writer if you hadn't met Ellen, Ben?"
"I don't think I'd be much of anything."
"Let me ask you the question I always like to ask writers. Where would you say your stories come from?"
Ben raised a portion of veal marsala to his lips, then laid it down on his plate. "I'm not sure I ought to know. It works best if I just let the story tell itself to me. I think writers can be too conscious of their technique or what they're trying to say or who they're influenced by. I suppose I must be influenced by everything I've read, particularly when I was a child."
"I'd say your stories read like nobody except yourself. Who did vou -"
"I've never understood this thing about writers trying to find their own voice. It seems to me that if you've got one you're more likely to develop it when you're not straining to hear it yourself. I just try to tell the story as if you were listening to me tell it. I interrupted you."
"I'm glad you did," Kerys told him, and Ellen sensed she was relieved that his enthusiasm had overcome the self-consciousness he always experienced with strangers. "Don't let your food get cold. I was only going to ask what you used to read."
"Anything that helped keep my imagination alive." Ben chewed the forkful as if he was tasting his memories. "Children's fantasies, ghost stories. Science fiction one summer. And when I was a bit older, all the books I could get hold of that were supposed to get you sent to hell for reading them, or so my aunt who brought me up believes. Don't think I'm getting at Auntie Beryl, though, you two. Too much imagination scares some people, that's all."
"Not you kids, I can tell. Which is your favourite Sterling book?"
"The new one," they both said.
"The Boy Who Caught The Snowflakesl Mine too. What do you think we should tell children about it to make them want to read it?"
"About when he wishes he can't feel the cold," Margaret said, "and then the snowflake lands on his hand and he sees it not melting."
"And his second wish is the world should never be cold again, and the cold all goes inside him."
"Tell them about how the icecaps start melting and the seas begin to flood the land and all sorts of birds and other creatures start to die out. That was sad."
"But it's all right at the end, because he uses his third wish to put the cold back in the world."
"And you have to show them some of Mummy's pictures," Margaret told Kerys. "I like the one where the boy's standing in the snow and the two snowflakes are sort of perching on his hands like birds."
"That's superb. I thought we might use it on the cover."
"You remember I told you I've worked in advertising," Ellen said. "I was wondering if you'd want me to make suggestions about that side of things."
"You bet. I'll introduce you to our publicity person and you can sort her out," Kerys promised. "But I just saw some little eyes looking at the sweet trolley when they thought nobody was noticing."
Almost an hour later she ushered the family back to the Firebrand offices, where they were introduced to so many people who wished the book success, and shook so many hands, that Ellen promptly forgot all the names. She was left with a sense of general goodwill which more or less compensated for their being unable to track down the publicity director. "You can meet her next time you're down," Kerys told her, and led them through the children's book department to her office, grabbing an armful of books each for Margaret and Johnny on the way. She cleared a space amid the precarious piles of typescripts and memos and books on her desk while her assistant brought milk for the children and coffee for the adults, extra strong for Ben. When the drinks arrived Kerys raised hers in a last toast. "Here's to making this the year of the Sterlings," she said.
TEN
Twilight and traffic were gathering on the motorway out of London. Long before the car reached Cambridge Johnny was asleep. He was still her baby, Ellen thought as she glanced at his dreaming face in the light from an oncoming vehicle, even if he'd reached the age at which her telling him so annoyed him. Once they were past Cambridge she and Margaret and Ben took turns to spot strange place-names: Stow cum Quy, Snail-well, Puddledock, Trowse Newton… By now they were on the outskirts of Norwich and following the ring road to their suburb while Margaret widened her eyes as if she was inserting invisible props under the lids and protested that she wasn't tired. "Then you're the only one," Ben said, beginning to snore loudly as he steered the car off the ring road. "Ouch, Margery. Don't kick."
"If you're not tired," Ellen told her, "you can finish clearing away the books and games you and Johnny left in the front room."
"Johnny has to help."
"He clears up when you're at dancing class. Don't sulk, or we'll think you aren't old
enough to go to the market again with your friends."
"Mummy…" Margaret protested, and left it at that, though when her father parked the car outside the house she peered suspiciously at her brother in case the movement made him betray that he wasn't really asleep. Convinced that he was, she relented and attempted to carry him into the house as she had when they were younger, but had to settle for helping him stumble along, which woke him up. "You can go to bed if you're tired," she said.
"'m hungry," he mumbled.
Margaret's tone had been so saintly that Ellen gave her an amused loving hug. "You're always hungry, Johnny. Tidy away your things while Margery and I make you something to eat," she said as she unlocked the house.
The front door swept a gathering of envelopes and leaflets off the doormat. Johnny pounced on them, handing his mother the leaflets – which advertised a knife-grinder and a newspaper bingo game and a charity which recycled Christmas cards – and sorted the envelopes in case there was one for him. "Just bills," he complained.
"Better give them to Bill, then," his father said. "On second thoughts, give them to me. Bill may be worse off than we are."
"Aren't we well off?" Margaret said.
"We are so long as we have one another, don't you think? And I don't think we'll have to leave either of you at the bank as security just yet." He swung his fist playfully past Johnny's chin to snatch the solemn look from the boy's face. "I get the feeling we're on our way to bigger things, don't you think, Ellen?"
"I hope so," Ellen said and headed for the kitchen, where she added a few vegetables to the soup in the stockpot while Margaret made sandwiches on the table. From the front room they heard the whir of Johnny's model car which recoiled from obstacles. "Put that away now," Ellen called.
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