appeared to step forwards almost imperceptibly as he passed between them. She was about to call out to ask him how much farther he meant to go when he halted. 'This is for us,' he announced.
He'd found a shrub not quite as tall as himself. He fell to his knees and began to dig at the roots with a trowel. 'Come here,' he said in a voice which seemed more breath than words, and sat back on his heels. 'Everyone should have a dig.'
For a moment the sight of him, a dark shape crouching among the trees with a glint of metal in its hand, seemed to Ellen to suggest a fairy tale or a childhood nightmare which the tale had provoked. It was just Ben waiting there, she told herself, and led the children off the path.
She took the trowel from him and poked among the scrawny roots while a cold smell of growth and decay filled the air. As she freed the roots their spidery tendrils brushed the backs of her hands, scattering earth and fallen needles and glistening insects which scuttled into the dark. She dug halfway around the tree and passed the tool to Margaret, who probed the ground and recoiled when a root sprang up through the needles as if impatient to be free. Johnny dug like a terrier until his father stopped him. 'It'll come now,' Ben said.
Ellen trowelled the soil away from the roots as he lifted the tree, and then she stood up. Perhaps she moved too quickly, for just as the tree emerged from the soil the air seemed to darken overhead. It felt to her as if the open sky had suddenly appeared – as if the trees had been pushed apart. She wavered dizzily and glanced up, and saw the white belly of the mist lowering itself onto the treetops. She grabbed the children's hands and started away from the pit where the tree had been, only to discover she had lost the path. Ben seemed to know where he was going, and so she followed him.
She'd darkened the house so as not to be dazzled on the way back, but now she realised that the lights would have allowed her to orient herself. Still, the forest was thinning ahead of Ben, until she could distinguish beyond the trees a dark bulk which dwarfed a host of pale shapes – the house and the snow crowd.
'Let's run and get everything ready,' she said.
She conducted Margaret and Johnny down the track while Ben followed with measured steps, the thin silhouette of the tree craning over his shoulder and waving insect limbs behind his back. By the time he came into the house she had produced the tub and decorations from the cupboard under the stairs. He stood the tree in the tub and packed earth around the roots, and the children helped drape the branches with streamers and skeins of bulbs. Ellen switched on the bulbs and turned off the living-room light, and the family sat in front of the shining tree.
For her the tree had always had a special magic, but this year the magic was darker. The lights nestling in the depths of the tree made her think of stars; the sight of them hovering in the dark seemed almost to bring the black sky down through the house and into the room. As the winter nights grew longer and colder, she thought as she lay in bed, primitive folk must have thought the sky was coming to earth. She slept and dreamed that the stars were cold, covered with ice which kept them shining as they fell towards her, until she realised that there was no light for them to reflect and they went out, leaving her struggling to waken from the dark.
She must have dreamed that because she was waiting for the snow. In the morning it hadn't arrived, nor the next day, nor the day after. Despite the absence of clouds, the air felt weighed down by the massing of snow, an impression which made the bright sky seem unreal. Her classes in Leeds were finished now until the new year, but at least there were plenty of seasonal preparations to keep her busy, since Ben insisted on typing the new book. In three days he transcribed exactly what she'd written, though she had been hoping he would put something of himself into it, and posted the typescript to Ember.
Waiting for the publishers to respond made her unexpectedly nervous. Perhaps she had always believed that they were bound to like Ben's tales as much as she did and that her illustrations were only a bonus, unnecessary to their success. Thank heaven for the time of year, she thought, for an evening of carol-singing with Hattie Soulsby to subsidise the playgroup. Without that she would have been in danger of brooding on her nervousness, which had begun to feel so large and vague that it could hardly be explained by anxiety about the book.
Hattie brought her husband, a large shy man whose duffel coat gave him the appearance of a monk. Margaret and Johnny shared the music Stefan and Ramona were reading with the aid of a flashlight. The waits started from the town square, where frost glinted on the tarmac like reflections of the stars. Half a carol brought Mr Westminster to his front door, to clear his throat ferociously and drop several pound coins in Hattie's plastic bucket. Sally Quick had mince pies waiting for everyone. Tom, the bus driver who lived opposite, seemed abashed that he only had money to offer, and joined the procession as it climbed Church Road. Les Barns was so delighted to see him – 'So that's what it takes to get you out at night, you daft bugger' – that he too joined the waits.
This was how Christmas should be, Ellen thought: the air so cold it made the dark between the streetlamps glitter, the cottages displaying trees and open fires, the community rediscovering itself. She squeezed Ben's hand, but he was gazing above the town at the cloud rooted to the earth. Terry West led 'The Holly and the Ivy' in a high strong voice, and Ellen found herself thinking how many ancient customs had been taken over by Christmas: the pagan holly and mistletoe, the fairy on the tree, the tree itself, even the date, which had originally been the winter solstice, the shortest day… On the way home up the track she saw the shining tree and felt as if stars had got into the house. When she opened the front door she heard the tree creak, and long shadows reached out of the living-room and scuttled over the carpet. 'The tree's saying hello to us,' she said.
All the walking must have tired her, because she overslept on the morning of the nativity play, of all mornings. Surely Ben could have wakened her and the children before heading for the workroom. She hurried Margaret and Johnny to school and shopped on her way back. As she let herself into the house she heard Ben's voice upstairs. 'She's here now,' he was saying.
'Who's that?'
Silence met her, and she wondered if he had been talking to himself. She had almost reached the workroom when he responded 'It's for you. The publishers.'
He was holding the receiver away from his face as if he resented its presence. 'Alice Carroll?' she mouthed.
'Nobody else.'
Ellen lifted the receiver from his hand and perched on one corner of the desk. 'Hello, Alice.'
'Ellen. Glad I could get you. Half the calls I've tried to make this morning, the lines have been down with the snow.' She paused. 'Do you happen to know if I've offended your husband in some way?'
'Not that he's told me,' Ellen said, hoping that would make Ben look at her. He continued to gaze at the forest, so intently that his eyes appeared unfocused; he hadn't moved except to lay the hand from which she'd taken the receiver palm down on the desk, fingers splayed, so like his other hand that she could imagine the two were symmetrical. 'Why do you ask?' she said.
'Just that he didn't seem interested in discussing the new book.'
He didn't regard it as his, Ellen thought, but couldn't he see that even if she had written every word of it, it would be his too? 'I think you may have called while he was trying to bring something else to life,' she said, and suppressed the panic which made her nervous of saying 'Tell me about the book.'
'I was supposed to go to a party last night, but the snow put paid to that, so I read what you sent me. I thought I'd call rather than write you a letter so near Christmas. I wanted you both to know that the rewrites are exactly what the book needed. As a matter of fact, as far as the text goes, I think it may be your best book.'
Ellen was dumbfounded. 'I mean,' the editor said, 'once you've illustrated it.'
'Thanks for saying so. Thank you,' Ellen said, still unsure how she felt. 'Have a good Christmas.'
'Many of them.'
Ellen said goodbye awkwardly and leaned her back against the window so as to look into Ben's eyes. 'She likes the book now.'
'I'm pleased for you.'
'For us, Ben, us.'
He grasped his chin and turning his head, met her eyes. 'It'll always be us, I promise,' he said.
She had the disconcerting impression that even now his thoughts and his vision were somewhere else. She mustn't pester him if he was trying to work. 'I'm here if you want me,' she told him, and went downstairs, wondering why Alice Carroll's praise hadn't assuaged her nervousness. Perhaps her nerves needed time to recover.
She listened to the radio while she wrapped presents, wrote cards in response to some of the morning's mail, copied changes of address into her address book, iced the Christmas cake, made beefburgers for dinner.
