forehead. 'If I can just bring it out into the open…'
'I know you will. It sounds a wonderful idea. Do you think it might be best to save it until we've done our second book for Alice Carroll? Then we could make sure it goes somewhere it'll be appreciated. Or you could write it and then do something else for her. Your walk in the woods was productive, anyway,' she added to cheer him up.
'It's started something. I only wish it would be a bit quicker taking shape.'
'Had you just come out of the woods when I met you? How far did you walk?'
'I can't remember.' He frowned as if she had distracted him unnecessarily. 'I really don't know. I must have been too deep in my story. What does it matter? I came back.'
'That's all that matters,' she assured him. She gave him a long hug and stood up. 'I'd better feed the starving before they realise they are.'
She wasn't sure if he heard her. When she reached the door he had shifted onto the chair and was crouched over the desk, his face close to the window. 'Turn the light off,' he muttered, and she did so, hoping that would help him bring his tale alive. She'd sensed how much it meant to him, and she thought his passion for the idea meant it could be their best book.
When dinner was ready she sent Margaret to fetch him. The girl ran downstairs almost at once, looking unhappy and refusing to say why. Soon Ben appeared, narrowing his eyes at the light, opening them determinedly wide and smiling. 'Sorry if 1 made you jump, Peg. I didn't realise you were there until you touched me. I must have been far away.'
During the meal he retold the story which had been her favourite when she was little, about the boy lost in the mountains who had to venture to the very edge of what appeared to be a sheer drop in order to be rescued by a girl who turned into a cloud once he was safe, and then he told an ideologically corrected version in which the girl proved to be a member of the local mountain rescue team and lectured the boy on do's and don'ts for climbers. The children laughed so much that Johnny choked and had to be thumped on the back, and Ellen stuck out her tongue at the new version. 'Looks as if there are still children whose minds haven't been sewn up by Alice Carroll and her kind,' Ben said.
He gave in to pleas for a repeat of the original version once Johnny was in bed. Margaret sat on the end of the mattress where Johnny's feet didn't reach. As soon as the story was over she got into her own bed. Ellen went to bed early too, taking refuge from the chill which seemed to seep into the house whenever the central heating pump clicked off. Ben was in the workroom, and hadn't emerged when she fell asleep.
In the night a shiver wakened her. She clasped Ben's waist with one arm and pressed herself against his back to warm him up. There was movement at the window, a soft irregular patting on the glass. A white shape which looked tall as the gap between the curtains was dancing in the darkness, fluttering against the window like a bird or a moth. The children would be pleased in the morning, she thought drowsily. For a few seconds the sounds on the panes seemed to grow absolutely regular, in a rhythm too complicated to follow. She was trying to define it when it lulled her to sleep.
TWENTY-THREE
Ellen's sleep was so profound and dreamless it felt like an absence of self. When the children's cries roused her, she struggled back to consciousness, feeling as if the stillness had accumulated on her, a weight whose impalpability made it all the more difficult to throw off. It filled the room, more than the room. She forced her eyelids wide and shoved herself clumsily into a sitting position, dislodging her pillow, which struck the carpet with a soft thud. How much had she overslept for the room to be as bright as this? She frowned at the clock, which was insisting that the alarm wasn't due for another ten minutes, as the children came racing upstairs. They both knocked on the bedroom door, inched it open, piled into the room. 'It's snowed,' Johnny shouted.
'It always will,' Ben said.
Ellen hadn't realised he was awake; she wasn't sure even now that he was. He lay on his back with his eyes shut, his face as expressionless as his murmur had been. She put her finger to her lips and slipped quietly from under the duvet. Tiptoeing to the curtains, she looked through the gap.
The world had turned white. Beneath a blue sky which seemed almost as bright as the sun, snow like a sketch that reduced the moors and fields to their merest outlines sloped to the horizon, to the newly risen mountains which were clouds. Sheets of snow were folded over all the roofs of Stargrave. A few cars encrusted with white were proceeding slowly along the main road towards the bridge. A bird of prey hovered above the moors, its wings shining as if they or the sky around them were being transformed into crystal. It swooped to a small animal which dashed across the snow, seized it in its claws and wheeled away across the dazzling moors as the children wriggled under Ellen's arms to see the view. 'Can we get dressed and go out?' Margaret whispered.
Ellen steered them out of the room. Though Ben's eyes were closed, she sensed he was awake; she thought he might be trying to shape his tale. 'All right, but don't get too cold and wet. I'll call you when there's something hot to put inside you.'
While she was making breakfast, having closed the kitchen blinds to shut out the glare of the swollen forest, she heard the slam of the workroom door. When she'd fed the children and brushed the melting snow out of their hair and ensured that they didn't spend too little time in the bathroom, she sent Johnny to tell his father that breakfast was in the oven. Johnny knocked on the workroom door and gabbled the message and raced downstairs, out of the house.
Once they were off the main road, the middle of which was already a mass of slush, Ellen let Margaret and Johnny run ahead, collecting snow from garden walls and shying it at each other. The streets were full of children doing so, as though a custard pie fight had taken over the town. She left the two of them, pink-faced in anoraks, at the school gates and tramped carefully downhill. Despite all the sounds – the creak of compressed snow underfoot, the scrape of spades on paths, the revving of car engines, shouts of greeting and speculations about the weather – the town seemed laden with silence which massed around her as she trudged beyond the newsagent's and along the edge of the rough track to the forest. Over the muffled squeak of her footsteps, she heard the phone ringing at the top of the house.
It continued to ring while she slithered towards the front door. Why hadn't Ben answered it? As she unlocked the door, the ringing ceased. She stamped her boots clean of snow and stepped into the house, and heard the workroom door open. 'Ellen? Call for you,' Ben shouted down. 'Sally Quick.'
He must have been elsewhere in the house when the phone began to ring, though he was blinking as if he'd just come back to himself. 'Don't forget your breakfast,' she said, and he wandered downstairs as she picked up the receiver. 'Hi, Sally.'
'Fancy a trip to the moors?'
'Do you mean what I think you mean?'
'I've just had a call from Richmond. Someone who's supposed to have come over here yesterday for a walk and a clamber has been reported missing by his family. He didn't bother to let us know what he was doing,' Sally added with a sigh. 'Four of us should be enough to be going on with if we start from High Ridge and work our way down either side in twos.'
'I'll meet you as soon as I've got my togs on, shall I?'
'Lucy's coming in on her day off. She'll be here in five minutes and then I'll pick you up.'
Ellen had pulled on her waterproofs and was lacing up her boots when she heard the Landrover approaching along the track. She zipped up the pocket in which she'd put her compass in case the weather grew opaque, and went to find Ben. He'd opened the blinds and was dawdling over his breakfast, staring out of the kitchen window at the woods, whose burden of snow made the treetrunks look as black as the depths of the forest. 'Someone's missing on the moors,' she told him. 'If I'm not back in time you'll be here to collect the children, won't you?'
'I'll be here.'
She kissed him on the forehead. 'You'd better be, for me.'
Sally was turning the Landrover. Ellen ran through the churned slush and hoisted herself into the passenger
