she said.
'Not yet.'
'Don't you usually let them?'
'There hasn't been time.'
'Maybe you should turn them loose on it and see if they're of my mind.' When he didn't speak, she pressed the button between the lifts. 'There wasn't any call to rush the book, you know,' she said. 'I appreciate your doing your best to please me, but I didn't need to see it so soon. If I were vou I'd relax over Christmas and see how the story stands up in the new year.'
'Thanks for making yourself clear,' Ben said, and watched the doors of the lift close over her face. His rage seemed to have crystallised into a single thought: she was going to wish she hadn't been so smug about the new year. He wasn't quite sure what he meant by it, and its lack of definition aggravated his nervousness. When the lift touched bottom he hurried across the car park, where the chill was some relief, and drove the Volkswagen up the ramp.
Before he was out of the one-way maze he found that his instincts were leading him north. 'Not yet,' he muttered, and blundered more or less eastwards until he saw a sign for Cambridge. By the time he reached the motorway it was a stream of light and fumes. He carne off it at Stump Cross and headed for Six Mile Bottom, a name which had given Johnny a fit of the giggles. The memory made Ben feel unexpectedly lonely in the midst of the flat landscape where headlamps passed like comets drawn by their tails into the dark. He'd call home once he arrived at Dominic's, he promised himself.
Most of the shops were closed when he drove into Norwich. As he parked beneath the only tree in the narrow side street, a gaunt metallic shape which he remembered bearing cherry blossoms, Dominic's father hopped off the Milligans' front doorstep and trotted over, leaning on a gnarled stick. 'Here he is. Put the kettle on,' he shouted, and to Ben in the same tone: 'Let's have your bag.'
Dominic hurried out of the house. 'Hello, Ben. I'll take it, Father. We don't want you overexerting yourself.'
'It isn't worth arguing over,' Ben said, and carried his overnight bag into the hall, where Dominic's mother met him. 'That's right, Ben, don't let them boss you about. What can 1 offer you after your travels? There's tea or coffee, and a snack to keep you going until dinnertime.'
'I'm not hungry just now,' he said, anxious to bypass her disordered cuisine as far as he decently could. 'I hope Dominic told you I'm taking you all out to dinner.'
The rooms with which the house was crammed were even smaller than he remembered, but brighter. The interior had been repainted – yellow in the hall and up the stairs, blue walls and one green in each of the rooms – until the house seemed almost to be turning into a cartoon of itself. It was no longer scattered with books, though there was a tottering pile of them beside the front-room chair into which Dominic's father subsided; Ben saw that he was doing his best to be tidy in his old age. 'I read your new book,' the old man told him. 'It took me back to that time you told us a story. I said then you ought to see about finding a publisher.'
'So you did,' Ben said, and retreated to the spare bedroom. He'd forgotten the incident until now; what else might he have forgotten? He dropped his bag on the bed, which was surrounded by bookcases occupying all the space between the furniture against the walls, and went downstairs. 'Would it be all right if I were to phone Ellen?'
'I should jolly well think it would,' Mrs Milligan declared, drawing the heavy curtain over the front door to keep out draughts, and shut all the doors to the hall as she returned to the kitchen. 'You'll want some privacy while you're talking to your lady love.'
Margaret answered the phone. 'Is that Ramona?'
'Not unless her voice has broken.'
'Oh, it's you. Did you sign lots of books?'
'Maybe tomorrow.'
'Mummy says did you drink lots of drinks. I'll get her.'
He listened for her footsteps hurrying away or her calling to Ellen, but the silence was so total he began to wonder if he'd been cut off. He was suddenly aware of the expanse of night which separated them under the infinite dark. Ellen's voice made him start nervously. 'What timing,' she said. 'I was taking dinner out of the oven.'
'I just wanted to say hello.'
'Hello. Were we a success? How did Alice Carroll turn out to be?'
'Unenthusiastic. She's decided she likes me better the way I was.'
'She can keep her hands off. Or are you talking about the new book?'
'She thought it was all message and no magic.'
'Shall I look at it again and see what I think?'
'It's your book.'
'It'll keep me company when the children are in bed. Must go now before dinner gets cold. Drive carefully on Saturday but don't be too late, will you? I love you.' The silence closed in so immediately that he thought she'd gone, but as he murmured 'I love you' he heard her last words to him. 'It's colder when you're not here,' she said.
TWENTY-NINE
'It's colder when you're not here,' Ellen said, and kissed the chilly mouthpiece. 'Here you are, Johnny, if you want to say hello.'
The boy ran out of the dining-room, brandishing a handful of the cutlery he was placing on the table, and she took the dessert spoons from him to distribute them herself. She was touched and amused by how carefully he'd set the table; he'd already placed the knives and forks, and the settings on the round table were exactly equidistant, or as near to it as her eyes could judge. Children and their rituals, she thought, smiling. She closed the heavy floor-length curtains, shutting out the lights of Stargrave. 'Hurry up with those plates, Peg,' she called.
By the time Margaret had brought the plates and Ellen had ladled beef in red wine out of the casserole, Johnny was saying goodbye to his father. 'Daddy says it hasn't snowed much there,' he told them as he wriggled onto his chair. 'When are we going to have more snow?'
'Johnny would like it to snow in his room,' Margaret said.
'I would not,' Johnny said indignantly, then admitted 'Actually, I wouldn't mind.'
'You'd feel it kiss you to sleep.'
'That'd be good.'
'It would feel like the heaviest blanket in the world,' Ellen put in.
'It'd be so cold you wouldn't know you were.'
'You'd be able to have snowmen around your bed,' Johnny said. 'If you woke up in the night you'd see them all there.'
Ellen was unable to find that idea appealing; indeed, it made her shiver. After dinner, as she carried casserole and plates into the kitchen, she noticed snow in the air beyond the window, motes dancing in a wind which hissed down from the forest.
'You've made it snow, Johnny,' she was about to call, but the thinness of the snow would only disappoint him. Besides, she found the sight of the faint icy auras sparkling around the snow figures oddly disturbing. She let the blind down and lifted the apple pie out of the oven, and felt grateful for its warmth.
Johnny saw off more than half the pie. Feeding him was like feeding a black hole, she often told him. The children were helping her at the sink when she said 'Would you like me to read you the new book?'
'Yes please,' Johnny cried, but Margaret hesitated. 'Won't Daddy mind?' she said.
'I'm sure he'd want to hear what you think of it,' Ellen said, and fetched the typescript from the workroom. Snow, or the imminence of it, whispered at the windows of the darkened rooms. As she crossed to the desk, a wind so large and cold it felt like a breath of the forest came to meet her at the window. Despite the wind, the
