Ellen climbed down from the van, thinking how lonely the house might have felt to a child. The forest and its miles of secret shadows seemed more present than the town. All at once she was determined to rescue the house from its own loneliness. She unlocked the front door and was met by her breath in the long shabby hall. 'One thing this house could use is some heating,' she declared.
'We can put that in for you.' The builder followed her in and set about stamping on floors, rolling back carpets and poking floorboards with a screwdriver, opening and closing doors, peering at ceilings, tapping on walls or laying his palm on them as though feeling for a heartbeat. Every so often he scribbled on a pad in handwriting which looked as if it was struggling against a high wind. At the top of the house he hoisted himself through the attic window, elbows on the slates, to scrutinise the roof. 'We'll need to get the ladders to the other side, but it's a rock of a place, this house,' he said. 'Damp course and your heating and a replacement for that broken window and a good strong coat of paint outside are most of what it needs. I can drop the estimates into the Station tomorrow morning if you're happy when you've seen some of our work.'
'That would be ideal,' Ellen said, gazing from the window he'd vacated. From up here the presence of the forest was even more overwhelming – because she could see more trees, she told herself. 'Does anyone walk in the woods?'
'You won't see many. There's no paths, and if you aren't careful you'll think you've found one. It's not a place to walk on your own, but there's been a few who have.'
'What happened to them?'
'Got lost and couldn't find their way out before dark. Had to stay there overnight and froze to death.' He shook his head slowly and turned towards the stairs. 'Unless you reckon they strayed in there after dark.'
'What would have made them do that?'
'Just what I say,' he responded as if she'd expressed more scepticism than in fact she had. 'But to hear some of my dad's generation talk you'd think the forest was to blame, not these folk who go gallivanting when anyone with any sense wouldn't put their nose out of doors if they could help it. They're born that way if you ask me. If they aren't getting themselves stuck on the crags because they think they're Edmund Hillary, they're trying to prove they've more ice in their veins than the rest of us when it comes to the weather.'
'Are the winters very cold here?'
'Mostly they're like it is now. It's when the rest of the country freezes you need to watch out. Maybe the cold drove those folk crazy,' he said as if the explanation had just occurred to him, 'and that's why they wandered up there after dark.'
When she'd locked the front door he drove her to a cottage which backed onto the railway. Mrs Radcliffe, who alternately coughed and smoked a cigarette, was even prouder of her new conservatory which overlooked the lower moors than the builder was trying to conceal that he was. 'If you want your windows doing you know where to come. Heights no object, my oid man always says,' she told Ellen as she saw her to the garden gate.
The next stop was a terraced house halfway up Hill Lane, a narrow street which led from the station to Church Road as if it was in no particular hurry to get there. The house was owned by the Wests, who greeted Ellen as warmly as they greeted the builder. By the time they had shown her Stan Elgin's work – a gritstone fireplace, built-in bookshelves, sliding doors between two downstairs rooms – she'd learned that Terry drove the Stargrave mobile library and Kate helped run a playgroup. On the gritstone mantelpiece she noticed a photograph of a boy and a girl slightly older than Margaret and Johnny. 'Are they at secondary school?'
'Since last September,' Terry said.
'Here in town?'
'There isn't one,' Kate said. 'It's a bus ride over the top every morning for Stefan and Ramona, most of an hour each way to Richmond. Smooth enough for them to do their homework en route, and we think the school's pretty recommendable. Why, have you got some candidates?'
'One who's ten.'
'If you need any help with settling in, just let us know. Nothing worse than moving somewhere you don't know anyone.'
The final stop on Ellen's guided tour was a cottage on The
Crescent, where the curve was so steep that the doorstep was wedge-shaped. The owner, Hattie Soulsby, was a compact wrinkled woman of about sixty, dressed in half a dozen bright colours, who served Ellen and the builder tea from a clay teapot as large as a football before showing them through the house, nudging Stan Elgin and saying 'That's his' every time they encountered some of his work – new ceilings, a fitted kitchen, central heating which felt like a welcome. In the front room she perched on a chair and said to Ellen 'Hubby at work today?'
'Yes, in a bookshop.'
'He writes books too, doesn't he?'
'We collaborate on them.'
'You must be the girl of his dreams,' Hattie said, and sat forward. 'I only meant to say I hoped you weren't here on your own because your hubby felt he might be unwelcome.'
'Should he?'
'Not any more if 1 know Stargrave folk. When he ran away to come back here, half my friends would have adopted him if they could have, so he could stay where he felt at home.'
'How did people feel before that?'
Hattie looked uncomfortable. 'You know how folk can be about things they don't understand. I think his family would have had no trouble fitting in if folk had just forgotten about that old explorer.'
'Edward Sterling? What about him?'
'The state of him when they had to bring him back to England. My gran said it was in all the papers.'
'I'm sorry to seem ignorant, but what state was that?'
Hattie raised her eyebrows, and Stan Elgin came to the rescue. 'They found him naked as a baby in the ice and snow. The cold makes folk strip off sometimes, only that's usually when they're about to die of it. All his exploring must have toughened him up.'
'I never knew that was how they found him,' Ellen said.
'Well, there you are,' Hattie said. 'Shows it can't bother your hubby or he'd have told you about it. And you can tell him from me that nobody worth knowing cares.'
'What was his family like?'
'They brought your hubby up by their own lights. I don't know of any harm that did him.' Hattie seemed to find the question a little unfair, but she went on: 'I'd have liked to see him play more, mind you, but then you'd expect me to say that, seeing as Kate and me run the playgroup. The old feller quite likes me having children I can send home, as long as him and me can't have any of our own.'
Ellen complimented her and the builder on the house, and walked back to the hotel through streets suddenly full of children, chattering and playing and fighting. She lay on her bed for half an hour, catching up on the rest she hadn't had time for when she'd arrived in Stargrave, and then she called home. The phone only rang. She had a bath and went down for dinner, hoping there might be someone to talk to in the dining-room. A young woman who worked in the cottage-sized bank on one corner of the square was being treated to a birthday dinner by half a dozen of her colleagues, who shouted across the room to Ellen and popped streamers in her general direction. Ellen raised her glass to them and joined in the chorus of 'Happy Birthday, dear Mona'. Once she'd had a piece of birthday cake to go with her giant thimbleful of coffee, she returned to her room.
This time Ben answered the phone. 'I'm just emptying Margery out of the bath so they can have a story.'
'Don't make it too long, will you? Johnny really should be asleep by now. Don't forget to put out their clothes for the morning. What did they have for dinner?'
'A Big Mac each,' he said, which explained why she hadn't been able to reach them earlier. 'How are you finding my place?'
'It's stood up well, the builder says. He seems reliable to me.'
'I wish I were there right now.'
'With me, I hope.'
'With all of us.'
'Maybe we will be,' she almost said, but there were questions she wanted to ask him when they were face
