to face. Before she could respond he said 'Here's Johnny to speak to you, and a wet Margery.'
She told Johnny to brush his teeth properly and Margaret to put her hair in a pony-tail for school, and sent Ben a goodbye kiss. 'Don't get too lonely in bed,' she told him.
She felt exhausted by the long day. When she was ready for bed she went to the window for a last sight of the town. Above Market Street the lamps rose towards the church, but it seemed to her as if the forest was drawing them towards itself. There was a faint glow in the air above the forest. It was a mist, she thought, made to glow by the scrap of moon in the bare sky. Was it shifting? As she gazed at it, she couldn't even distinguish where the treetops ended and the vague luminosity began. If she gazed much longer she would be convinced that the dim glow and the forest were merging into some new vast shape. She closed the curtains and rubbed her eyes hard, and climbed shivering into bed. Mustn't Ben be responsible for Sterling Forest now? Surely it wouldn't cost much to mark paths through it. If the family came here to live – if they did, she repeated to herself as though the idea was an impatient child – then the least they could do for the town would be to make sure there were walks in the woods.
EIGHTEEN
An envelope from Elgin's was waiting on the breakfast table. The estimate was so low that at first Ellen thought she was misreading it; it wasn't much more than a tenth of the amount which the sale of one of their Norwich houses should realise. It only meant they could afford to improve the Sterling house, she told herself, but she wanted to see what the secondary school was like. She called the number Kate West had given her, and the school secretary told her she was welcome to look around. She packed her case and checked out of the hotel.
As the car passed between the first crags Stargrave vanished. For a couple of miles she was surrounded by crags like arcs of several concentric stone circles too large to be seen as a whole, or like fragments of something whose original shape could only be guessed at after centuries of weathering. They made her feel as if the landscape had tried to form itself into a pattern above the forest. Fifteen minutes out of Stargrave the crags dwindled into a mile-wide border composed of hundreds of crumbled rocks, beyond which the moors spread like a tartan of heather and limestone and grass pinned with stony sheep. Apart from the sheep and the cry of a curlew, the only sign of life was a glinting dot ahead. It proved to be a green double-decker bus coming back from Richmond and now bound for Leeds. The driver waved to her, the bus shook the Volkswagen with its tail-wind, and then she lost sight of it until the gleam of its windows in the mirror caught her attention. As the bus disappeared over the horizon towards Stargrave, she heard the shriek of a bird overhead, so lofty that it sounded thinned by the air. For no reason she could grasp, she imagined the bus toppling over the edge into a gulf dark and deep as a night sky. 'Save your imagination,' she told herself, and shrugged off a sudden chill.
Richmond was a huddle of brown brick and slate which reminded her of a great nest of moorland birds. She drove down into the busy streets, heading for an obelisk balancing a stone globe on its snout, and parked near the school. As she crossed the deserted yard she heard an orchestra more or less agreeing on a key. A lanky schoolgirl in a skimpy uniform, who was relaying a message from classroom to classroom, directed her to the headmistress, an ample quiet-voiced woman who gave Ellen coffee and quizzed her about Margaret and Johnny before showing her around the school. The pupils seemed bright and happy, and Ellen was impressed by what she saw of the teaching and its results. 'If you're thinking of enrolling your daughter,' the headmistress said, 'I'd ask you to let us know soon.'
Ellen could no longer see a reason to procrastinate. 'I'd like to put her name down,' she said, and immediately felt liberated from her doubts.
She could always cancel the enrolment if she changed her mind, she thought as she drove south through the Vale of York, but why should she? Hours later she drove out of an ashen sunset into Norwich and was greeted by the lighting of the lamps as she turned along her street. The sound of her car door brought the children running along the path. 'Are we going to live there?' Margaret cried, and Johnny echoed 'Are we?'
'Let me into the house at least. Hasn't anyone a kiss for me?'
Johnny trotted into the house with her case, and she followed with Margaret clutching her hand and chattering about her day at school as if she couldn't bear the silence that was letting her question linger. 'I wouldn't mind a cup of tea,' Ellen called, dropping herself onto the front-room couch.
'We heard your tongue hanging out ten minutes ago, didn't we, kids?' Ben responded from the kitchen. Soon he paced in with a brimming cup in each hand, and gave her a kiss so prolonged she was afraid the cup he'd given her would spill. 'Did you drive straight home today?'
Ellen would have liked to relax before the excitement began, but you shouldn't have children, she thought, if you wanted to relax. 'I had a look at the secondary school.'
Margaret jumped and widened her eyes as if her whole body was performing a double-take. 'Was it good? Will I like it?'
'Now, Margery, I haven't said we're going there.'
Margaret clenched her fists and her face, and slumped into a chair. 'Oh, Mummy…'
Ellen took pity on her. 'How do you feel now, Ben?'
'About Stargrave? The way I said I did before you went.'
She handed him the builder's estimate and saw that he was pleasantly surprised. 'Listen, you two,' she said, 'I want to be sure you realise what it would be like to live there, not just to visit. Think how much smaller than Norwich it is. Think of all the places you wouldn't be able to go…'
That was as far as she got before the children leapt up and danced around the room and then flung themselves on her and hugged her. 'When are we moving?' Margaret cried.
'Not for months at least.' When the children let go of her and grabbed each other's hands to dance in a ring, she turned to Ben. 'Well, that seems to be decided.'
'It was time we moved up in the world.'
He seemed contented, but she wished he would express himself more directly. Later, too exhausted by her driving to do more than lie next to him in bed, she said drowsily 'Do you know how they found Edward Sterling?'
'Deep in a forest that hadn't even grown yet.'
'I don't mean when he died, I mean when he had to come back to England.'
'Somewhere under the midnight sun where only the mad and the English would go.'
'What do you think he was looking for?'
'Someone who could tell him the oldest story in the world, maybe,' Ben said, and smiled dismissively. 'I don't really know. I always thought of him more as a legend than a relative. He was a folklorist, and from what I remember of the book he was writing when he died he'd been researching the lore and legends of the midnight sun. As far as I can remember, the book doesn't say what he found at the end.'
'Did you know they found him with no clothes on?'
'I didn't, but maybe I should have guessed. The way I heard it from my granddad he could hardly wait to be thawed out before he fathered him. Edward must have been a randy old cove for the cold to have affected him that way. Who told you the story?'
'The builder. I think most of Stargrave knew.'
'Probably everyone but me.'
'Didn't any of your friends at school ever mention it?'
'I didn't let outsiders get that close to me. A family trait, I suppose it was.'
'Do you think it bothered your family that so many people knew?'
'About old Edward? I should think it must have. They weren't that strange.'
'Would that be why they kept people at a distance?'
'That and not wanting to mix with the herd.' He dug his elbow into the pillow and propped himself above her. 'What are you getting at? What's the mystery?'
'I was just wondering – if they felt like that about Stargrave, what kept them there?'
She was suddenly afraid she'd probed too deeply or too clumsily into his memories, because a cold glint
