fine woman, a great loss to us all. Would you iike time off? I can manage on my own if I have to.'
'Thanks, Dominic. I'll go and see the police, at any rate. Maybe I'll be back this afternoon.'
His grief began to reach him as he followed Ellen to the car. He'd felt relieved when his aunt had gone to stay with friends for Christmas and the New Year – relieved that the family was spared the usual two days of sustaining polite conversation and being determinedly convivial. She'd seen the Christmas cards the children had painted for her, he thought, but they wouldn't be making her any more birthday cards. He'd never thanked her for bringing him up, and now it was too late. He gulped and clenched his fists and managed not to weep until he was sitting in the car, where Ellen put her arm around him. Eventually he mumbled 'Let's find out what there is to know.'
He blew his stuffed nose as she eased the car into the traffic. 'Did the police say how it happened?'
'I don't think she could have suffered much, Ben. Apparently she had hypothermia.'
'How could she have? What did her friends think they were up to?'
'She wasn't with her friends. She was in the town where you were born.'
'Stargrave? What would she have been doing there?'
'I never thought to ask.'
His eyes were aching, his mouth tasted of grief, his incomprehension felt like a storm which wouldn't break. He hurried into the police station while Ellen parked the car. A policeman who looked incongruously like a doorman was at the enquiry desk. 'Can I help you?'
'I'm Ben Sterling. You had a report that my aunt died up north. I wonder if you know what she was doing there.'
If he found it strange that this was Ben's primary concern, he kept his opinion to himself. He tramped away into an office where typewriters were clacking. By the time he reappeared with a sheaf of papers in his hand, Ellen had joined Ben and was squeezing his arm.
'Your aunt is the lady who was found in a place called Star-grave?'
'She must be, but I don't understand why she was there.'
'I believe the police there have established that she was visiting her house.'
Ben felt dizzy, and grasped the edge of the counter. 'What house?'
The policeman scrutinised the topmost paper. 'The house she's apparently been letting for a good many years. If you'd like to follow me,' he said.
THIRTEEN
The day after the funeral, Margaret asked 'Dad, how many houses do we own now?'
They were walking along a path at the edge of a cliff, where their Sunday drive had ended up. The grey sky was broken only by the shining of a cloud like a sliver of mirror above the sea. Wide slow waves floated down from the horizon to part at the corroded breakwaters protruding from a beach overlooked by hotels which were closed for the winter. Margaret's question took Ben by surprise, interrupting a reverie which he was immediately unable to remember. 'Just the one we live in, Margery,' Ellen said.
'But Dad said his auntie Beryl wanted us to have everything of hers.'
'Soon,' Ben told her. 'Unless my long-lost brother Shack-leton Sterling, who was sent abroad before he was out of his cradle and who's been exploring the unexplored regions of the world ever since he was a teenager, turns up.'
'You haven't really got a brother,' Johnny pleaded.
'I've just got Mummy and you two and whoever's taking shape inside my head.'
'If there's all those people it's a good job we'll have lots of houses.'
'Only three, Margery,' Ellen said, 'and I shouldn't think we'll be keeping all of them.'
'Will we keep the one in the mountains where Daddy came from? Can we go and see that house?'
'Yes, Daddy, can we?' Margaret cried. 'I'd love to see that house.'
'I suppose we could.'
A wind sharp as salt brought sand hissing through the grass at the edge of the cliff. 'Get a move on or we'll be too cold to see anything,' Ellen said.
Ben lagged behind on the way back to the car. So, he thought again, his aunt had overcome her dislike of the Sterlings enough not only to accept the legacy of their house but also to have an estate agent in Stargrave collect rents from tenants for her ever since. She must have kept her ownership a secret from him because she'd been afraid the knowledge would revive some aspect of his childhood which she had tried to suppress, but couldn't she have told him once he had grown up? Then he would have been able to visit Stargrave on her behalf, and she wouldn't have died alone up there, having apparently fallen and injured herself on her way back from the house to the hotel. Why couldn't she have followed the main road instead of wandering across the common alongside the forest, too far above the town for anyone to notice her in time? 'Silly old woman,' he muttered, and had to fight back tears before following the family away from the sea.
Later, when the children were in bed, Ellen said 'As long as you're going to look at your old home, shall we all go?'
'It's quite a way to drive.'
'We could make a weekend of it. Unless you'd rather we weren't there, of course.'
At once he felt selfish. It might be their only chance to see Stargrave, and he could always go for a solitary walk while his memories surfaced. 'Let's see if there's room at the inn.'
The hotel receptionist sounded delighted to be asked and to reserve two rooms for Saturday. 'We can have a bit of a dirty weekend when the children are asleep,' Ellen said, and matched his grin. 'We can practise now if you like.'
Afterwards, as he pulled the duvet over them and rested his head on her breast, she whispered 'Tell me a secret.'
'I don't think I have any from you.'
'Then tell me what you remember best about growing up in Stargrave.'
'Waiting,' he said at once. 'Feeling as if I was always waiting for something»like Christmas, only it never quite came.'
'Poor little boy.'
'I don't mean I was disappointed. I mean those years of my childhood seemed like the start of an adventure. Everything around me felt like a preamble to some event I couldn't put a name to.'
'That sounds like childhood right enough.'
'I suppose that must have been all it was,' Ben said, but he felt as if she'd reduced the reality to a cliche which prevented him from remembering. 'Anyway, I lost it once I moved away from Stargrave. I still experience something like it now and then, sometimes when I'm writing.'
'Not when you're with me?'
'Of course,' Ben said, kissing away her wistfulness. 'I'm having it now.'
He was certainly experiencing a sense of imminence which put him in mind of the first hint of light above the horizon before dawn. When he awoke next morning it was still there, and it stayed with him during the week. By Friday evening he was as expectant as the children were. That night he dreamed of standing on a mountain where the ice grew beneath him and raised him towards the stars.
In the morning, however, the prospect of breakfast on the motorway was barely capable of rousing the children. Margaret had gone dutifully to bed but had then been unable to sleep, Johnny had had to be harangued up the stairs, and now they were having to rise before dawn. For the next half-hour the family stumbled in and out of the bathroom, bumping sleepily into one another as they vied for space. They straggled out to the car, into a heavy darkness which seemed to cling like grime to Ben, making him feel unable to waken fully. He trudged back to the kitchen and splashed his eyes with handfuls of cold water until he felt alert enough to drive.
Their route led them away from the dawn. An hour later, as he drove through darkness which felt as if it had accumulated the weight of the long night, the children began to stir. Margaret played with her mother at relishing place-names aloud
