the mirror. When she stroked his knee, he didn't seem to notice. Feeling snubbed, she moved her hand to her lap as the car passed under the bridge. She was telling herself not to be silly when Margaret said 'Daddy, could we come and live here?'
Ben stared at the oncoming road, and his face and voice grew blank. 'Who knows.'
Johnny began to jump up and down in his seat-belt. 'Could we? Could we?'
'Calm down now, johnny,' Ellen said. 'Don't you two like where we live any more?'
'I do,' Johnny said, sounding abashed.
'Well, so do I,' Margaret said angrily.
Ellen decided it was time to close the subject. 'Quiet now. Let Daddy concentrate on driving.'
At the hotel she'd offered to drive, but now it looked as if driving might beneficially occupy Ben's mind. Half an hour later, when the moorland road straightened out as it descended into the first of the villages outside Leeds, he broke the silence with one of the nonsense verses he used to invent for the children on family walks:
'Come quaff the mugs and fill the jugs
And baste the goose with lotion.
Haraldahyde has sunk inside
The coracle of potion…'
'Say another one,' Johnny requested as traffic built up dangerously ahead. When the way was clear Ben intoned:
'There are wombats in the kitchen
And tapirs on the stairs.
The large old chest of drawers supports
A family of bears…'
The sight of the sun sinking over Lincolnshire prompted:
'Red sky at night,
Fish won't bite.
Red sky in the morning,
Frogs are spawning.'
'No they aren't,' Margaret said sleepily.
'Frogs are yawning, rather. Don't you, or we won't be able to eat out on our way home.'
By the time the car crossed the Norfolk border, both she and Johnny were asleep. Ben glanced in the mirror as headlights rushing by on the winding road illuminated their faces, and confided to Ellen:
'The rich man often dines on quail,
The poor man picks at scrod.
But the hungry man consumes their turds
And says 'Thanks be to God!''
'That's terrible,' she said with a grin. 'I take it you're feeling better now we're nearly home.'
'Got to grow up sometime. Maybe I should think about writing a book for adults.'
He hadn't really answered her, but this wasn't the time or the place to insist. When he began to look out for restaurants she said 'Let the kids sleep and we'll eat in Norwich.'
It was only when she awoke to find Ben placing a hot bundle in her lap that she realised she had nodded off. The car was parked outside a fish and chip shop where several youths with their hair in tarry spikes were gesticulating at the Chinese family behind the counter. The smell of food in newspaper roused the children, who stretched as if their bodies were gaping to be fed. Once they were home and taken care of, Ellen hastened them up to the bathroom and into bed.
Ben seemed more exhausted than the length of that day's journey would normally have made him. 'Sweet dreams,' she said as she wriggled under the duvet and slipped her arm around him, but he was already in his own dark. The next she knew, a shape like thin grey breath was dancing above her: steam from a mug of coffee on the bedside table. The children were kissing her awake. Til walk them to school and go on to Milligans,' Ben said behind them.
When she heard them in the street, Johnny emitting sounds of a rocket launch while Margaret chattered to her father about books, she propped herself up in bed, feeling luxurious. She stayed in bed until she heard the postman pushing letters into the house. As she went downstairs she could see that they weren't bills; the envelopes didn't have that dingy thickset bullying look. She examined them as she took them to the desk in the back room. Two of the long white envelopes were from Ember Books, the other was from Ballyhoo Unlimited. 'Say what you like,' she told the latter, forcing a laugh at her tenseness as she thrust a finger under the flap and pulled the single sheet out of the envelope.
Dear Mrs Sterling
Thank you for submitting yourself for interview with regards to a position with our agency. Both Gordon Fuge and myself were impressed by your presentation and the main reservation expressed by our senior partner Max Rutter concerns whether after twelve years absence from the business you would have lost the aggressive qualities our clients look for in our campaigns. We have therefore decided to offer you a trial contract for twelve months to run from 15 February at the advertised rates. Max Rutter has asked me to mention that the contract makes no provision for maternity leave. May I say how much I personally look forward to working with someone as mature as yourself. Please let us know at your earliest convenience if these terms are satisfactory.
Yours sincerely
Sidney Peacock
Ellen read the letter and stared open-mouthed at it and then flung it into the air. When it landed face up on the desk she read it again. She couldn't tell how much of the letter was intended to be slyly insulting or even what Peacock thought of her, and it infuriated her that she was wondering. She was tempted to drop it in the wastebasket, but she wanted Ben to read it first, if only for a laugh. She opened one of the Ember envelopes instead.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Sterling,
I am eleven years old. First I want to say how much I enjoyed your book 'The Boy Who Fell Up The Mountain'. A!! my friends did except one who said there could not be a mountain so high you would fall into the sky instead of down. 1 told her there probably is on the moon and anyway it says on your book it is a fantasy, which is the kind I like best.
When I grow up I want to be an artist like Mrs. Sterling. Do you think I may have a chance if I work hard at my pictures? Do you have to have an agent if you want them to be published? I am enclosing some of them for you to look at so you can say what you think of them. I hope you will not mind uniting and saying. Yours admiringly, Melanie Tilliger.
Behind the sheet of paper were three more, small enough not to have needed folding to fit into the envelope. They were scenes from the book. In one the boy was more than halfway up the mountain, because his staff which had started out taller than he was had been worn to the length of a walking-stick. In the second he was among the birds, so high that they were white with frost, and in the last one he must have reached his destination, the height where he was able to hover for just the duration of a heartbeat, the one point from which you could see the meaning of the world, before the winds cast him down and he awoke at the foot of the mountain with nothing to show that he hadn't been dreaming except his worn staff. 'When he tried to tell the people of his village what he knew they called him mad and drove him into the forest… All this was many years ago, but perhaps he is still wandering the world, looking for someone who will listen to him,' Ellen quoted to herself, laying the pictures side by side on the sunlit desk. They were colourful and imaginative and meticulously detailed, and they seemed worth dozens of favourable reviews, not that the book had attracted so many, she was thinking how to reply as she opened the third envelope.
Hi Sterlings!
Hope some or all of you will be in town again soon so I can buy you lunch. Meanwhile maybe you should treat yourselves to an answering machine – I've been trying to call you for a few days. Ellen, if you've got any ideas for the Boy Who Caught The Snow-flakes promo, could you let me have whatever you want me to see? Ben, if you can tell me what your next book will be about I'll make an offer for the next two. We don't want you getting away from Ember just when you're about to be mega!
Kiss the kids for me and tell them lots of stories.
