TWENTY-ONE
When Ellen arrived at the college that morning she learned that the model for her art class had called in sick. 'She's off with a bug,' the college secretary said. Nobody else was available, and so Ellen introduced her students to the drawing of still-lifes, improvising a theme from random objects in the classroom – an apple, a bunch of keys strung on a safety-pin, a handbag, a headscarf, a copy of The Boy Who Let The Fire Go Out which one young mother had brought for Ellen to autograph. Ellen encouraged them to look for the details which made each object unique at the moment of looking – the lopsidedness of the apple, the irregular mark which gave its crest the appearance of a miniature yellow beret with a frayed brown stalk, the hint of a bruise on its bright green cheek… You couldn't capture how the handbag smelled of unlit cigarettes and a dry perfume which tickled the nostrils, but that was reality for you: there was always more to any aspect of it than you could reproduce, and that was what made it real. She strolled up and down between the desks occupied by her eighteen students and talked about selecting the details which brought the subject alive for you. Here and there controversies were flaring, a pensioner who never let her bag out of her reach insisting that the objects Ellen had chosen were too ordinary to be called a still-life, a Pakistani chef maintaining that one had to master all the skills of draughtsmanship before one could produce anything original – a claim which provoked support and disagreement and which vanished into a larger argument. Despite all this, everyone had a picture to show by lunchtime. Ellen was struck by the care quite a few of the students had taken in drawing the book, the ways the pages of the propped volume leaned, the random pattern of the text, the light and shadow of her illustration on the left-hand page; she wished Ben could be there to see. 'Keep looking,' she told her class as they straggled out of the room.
She was driving away from Leeds when the sky ahead began to darken. By the time she reached the last village, the horizon beyond which Stargrave lay was ominously black. She hoped Ben was on his way home if the weather was about to turn nasty. A small cold sun illuminated the moors, so that the slopes shone unnaturally bright against the strip of darkness. The vegetation seemed deadened, as metallic as the sheen of the exposed rock.
Could the height of the moors above Stargrave affect the atmospheric conditions? The blackness appeared to be poised over the town. She felt as if she ought to have found out more about the climate before the family had decided to move from Norwich. She hadn't listened to the car radio since their move, and now she had to assume that the geography interfered with the reception: she could raise nothing but a silence so total she would have thought she had fallen deaf if she hadn't been hearing the sounds of the car.
When she came in sight of the railway bridge, the sky was impenetrably black. She could imagine the sky having given way like ice, leaving a great hole above the town for outer space to show through. It was only a mass of clouds, she told herself firmly, and drove under the arch.
The dark closed over her like icy water so deep that no light could reach it, and she gripped the wheel harder in order not to shiver. For a moment she was nervous of how much darker it might be on the far side of the bridge than it was on the moors. Of course that was nonsense: when she drove up the slope beyond the bridge she saw the houses glaring almost silver; only the forest looked as if it welcomed the blackness overhead. She swung the car onto the track to the house, hoping that Ben would be there.
When she opened the front door she was greeted by a hint of central heating. 'Ben,' she called, stooping to pick up an envelope from the doormat, but even when she shouted up the stairs there was no response. She switched on the heating and gazed from the kitchen window at the deserted track. She tore off a length of kitchen roll to mop the rings of blackcurrant juice which the children had left like an Olympic emblem on the working surface next to the washing machine. She filled the percolator and turned it on, and then she opened the letter.
It was a form letter from Kerys at Ember. Apart from Dear
Ben and Ellen, only the signature and the lines beneath it were handwritten, and so Ellen read the postscript first. Someone else who's gone to a better place is our publicity director, but the new bod Mark Matthews comes recommended. Give him a call to introduce yourselves or ask Alice to next time you're down. Remind him how good you are. Only wish I could've been around for your success. Heaps of good luck.
The letter itself announced that because of a personnel rationalisation exercise at Firebrand and Ember, Kerys would be leaving at the end of the month, to be replaced by Alice Carroll, the new children's fiction editor with several years experience in juveniles.
Ellen stared out of the window, willing Ben to appear on the track so that she could stop worrying about him, but staring only seemed to make the sky and the forest grow darker. The contents of the letter felt like a dull ache in her mind, an ache she couldn't begin to deal with until she saw Ben. There had been no sign of him when it was time to fetch the children from school. She propped the envelope against the telephone on the fourth stair up and hurried out.
The sun was beyond the forest now. In the streets people were shaking their heads at the sky, blowing on their hands or burying them in their armpits. 'Always dark before the silver lining,' Mrs Dainty called after the greengrocer as he dashed out of her post office and back into his shop next door, trailing a strip of stamps from one hand and pinching his shirt collar shut above his muddy apron with the other. Two young men from Elgin's were perched on the exposed timbers of the roof of a house near the school, fitting new slates, and Ellen found their shouts to each other oddly reassuring. As she hurried uphill, the sky and the forest and the darkening town felt like aspects of a single darkness.
The sight which met her as she neared the school made her forget the gloom. Ben was leading Margaret and Johnny out of the schoolyard, and his eyes were glittering. 'Wait until you hear my story,' he said.
TWENTY-TWO
He seemed to be in no hurry to tell her, even when the children eased themselves out of his grasp and ran ahead. He seemed as exhilarated by the blackness of the sky and the possibility of its heralding snow as the children were. When Ellen cried 'You're freezing' and rubbed his hands and then his cheeks, he gave her a vague smile. He was so cold that holding his hand made her shiver, but he was here, and what else mattered? She hurried him after the children, back to the warmth of the house.
The white envelope was still propped against the white telephone, both of them glimmering as Ellen closed the front door. Ben picked up the envelope and blinked at it, and eventually said 'Good news?'
'Not the best. You'll see better if you put the light on,' Ellen said, and headed for the front room to sort out an argument over first choice of television channel. 'Let Johnny have the control now, Peg. The programmes you like best are on later.'
In the hall Ben was fumbling to unzip his quilted anorak and waving away the heat with his free hand. While she waited patiently he blinked again at the envelope, threw off his anorak, took out the letter. Since he hadn't switched on the hall light, she did so as he peered at the letter. 'Well,' he said.
'Well?'
'Well, Mark Matthews sounds like two kinds of saint, and can you imagine a better name than Alice Carroll for a children's fiction editor?'
'You don't think it's serious, then.'
'Only one v/ay to find out,' he said slowly, and unplugged the phone to carry it up to their workroom. 'Let's see what Kerys has to say for herself.'
When Ellen followed, having told the children not to interrupt them, he was standing at the window of the unlit workroom. The darkness made the forest appear to have closed around the house; as she went into the room the window was full of a mass of black foliage which might almost have been printed on the glass. She switched on the light and crossed the floor to him, and the view of the forest regained some perspective, though it still looked as though the premature night was forming patterns on the hillside. 'Will you make the call or shall I?' she said.
He plugged in the phone and dialled, then handed her the receiver. 'I'll be your prompter if I think of
