She had to keep searching the stations for programmes of carols. Between the stations, and sometimes between the carols, the radio would fall so silent that she could imagine it was stuffed with snow. The news reports were about little else but snow: several motorways rendered impassable, towns and villages cut off, worse to come. Whenever she heard how the snow was advancing she glanced out of the window, but the sky and the horizon were clear.
Ben didn't want coffee or lunch. Surely he wouldn't disappoint the children by not going to the play. 'Will you be ready in a few minutes?' she called as she reached for her coat.
'For anything,' he called in a windy voice which seemed to fill the house. Almost at once he ran downstairs and grabbed her by the hand, and would have pulled her out of the house immediately if she hadn't reminded him to put on a coat. As he urged her along the path beside the allotments and sneaked through a gap in the churchyard hedge near the school, he seemed close to dancing. 'Nearly there now. Not long now,' he told her, so unnecessarily that she laughed, as they ran through the shadow of the forest. Given his mood, she couldn't resist asking 'Has it been a productive day?'
He smiled so widely that her own face ached in sympathy. 'Wait and see.'
A makeshift stage stretched across the school assembly hall, two sets of tables and chairs representing an inn beside a cardboard stable scattered with hay in front of a tall length of plywood painted with palm trees and a night sky. The plywood masked the classrooms where the performers were audibly hiding. Heads kept poking around it, searching for their parents. Margaret leaned out and flashed Ellen a smile which was trying to appear unconcerned, Johnny grinned as if his face might stay like that throughout the performance, and Ellen crossed her fingers for them. At least now she had a reason to be nervous.
By the time the play commenced, it was dark outside. Stars gleamed through the high windows behind the audience as Johnny's teacher dimmed the lights. Mrs Hoggart struck up 'Silent Night' at the piano, and the voices of the unseen children began to sing.
In the first scene Margaret acted her role of a difficult customer at the inn with such vehemence that Ellen came close to tears. She wasn't the only mother whose voice wasn't quite steady as they joined in 'Once in Royal David's City'. Joseph was holding his tablecloth robe so high above his ankles that he must have tripped during rehearsal. Mary rocked the baby Jesus ferociously throughout the inn scene, and at one suspenseful moment appeared to be about to drop him, though he looked as if he would bounce. The innkeeper forgot most of his lines and was prompted so loudly that his parents in the audience kept echoing the prompter. By now Ellen was suppressing both laughter and tears, and several of her neighbours on the bench were having the same problem. It was a relief when the onstage cast and the choir invisible began to sing 'We Three Kings of Orien' tar' and the parents could join in. She wondered if the heating had broken down; though the children might be too busy to notice, their breaths were faintly visible.
The kings brought in their treasures, a box piled with chains painted gold followed by two jars which Ellen suspected had contained bath salts, and then Johnny and the rest of his year scurried squeaking around the hall before subsiding somewhat reluctantly in front of the hay. Everyone sang 'O Come All Ye Faithful', and the lights came up so that parents could photograph the players. As Ellen took half a dozen photographs Ben smiled oddly at her, as if he thought her actions were somehow redundant, though the pictures would bring back memories in years to come. 'Be quick changing,' she called after Johnny and Margaret, and rubbed her arms through her coat to keep warm.
Mrs Venable was apologising for the chill, which had obviously caught her and the heating unprepared, when the children began to reappear from behind the night sky. One of Johnny's friends pointed up at the windows, and a chatter of excitement multiplied as children crowded into the hall, buttoning their coats and clutching their costumes in plastic bags. 'Well, that seems to be the explanation,' Mrs Venable said, following their gaze. 'The snow's here at last. Don't catch cold on the way home. I'll have the heating seen to for tomorrow.'
Johnny ran to his parents, squeaking 'Come on' at his sister, who was chatting importantly with some of her friends. His voice was so high that it sounded as if he hadn't stopped playing the mouse. Ellen wiped away traces of the whiskers which had been drawn around his mouth, and let herself be tugged along the corridor. But the families already in the schoolyard had halted there, blocking the doorway, and the buzz of excitement had become a growing mumble of bewilderment. Frost sparkled on the concrete of the schoolyard and the bricks of the school walls, but that was all. Of the whiteness which had loomed at all the windows facing the forest, there was no sign.
THIRTY-SIX
On the way home Johnny kept protesting 'It was snowing. I could see it.'
'I thought it looked as if it was,' Margaret said.
Her attempt to placate him only aggravated his frustration. 'It was,' he declared as if repeating it and glaring at the sky would make it so. 'Jim and David who are in my class saw it. Melanie Burton who took me to Mrs Venable when I cut my leg in the playground did, and she's older than you.'
'Melanie's sister is in my class, little boy, and she says Melanie's a scaredy cat who has to have a light on in her room at night or she can't sleep.'
'So? Maybe you did when you were little.'
'That's a really sensible answer, Johnny, a really intelligent thing to say. And just in case you're wondering, I've never had a light on when I go to sleep. It isn't me who wanders about at night when he's supposed to be asleep because he can't wait for it to snow.'
'I seem to remember a toddler who nearly cried her eyes out when her china cottage with a light in it got broken,' Ellen murmured.
'That was because I liked seeing the little cottage when I was going to sleep, Mummy. I was never afraid of the dark.'
'I'm glad neither of you are, because it's nothing to be afraid of, so let that be the end of the argument,' Ellen said. 'As for the snow, Johnny, we must have been expecting it for so long that we saw it, that's all. Don't you think so, Ben?'
Ben had been gazing at the stars above the forest as he walked, watching the forest grow almost imperceptibly brighter and feeling as though he was about to understand what he was seeing, truly understand for the first time in his life. 'Maybe it was a dream,' he said.
Margaret raised her eyes heavenwards and sighed. 'We weren't asleep.'
His smile seemed to rise from deep inside him, and made his teeth ache with the cold. 'Not our dream.'
Johnny giggled and saw he wasn't meant to do so. 'Whose was it, then?'
'What do you think would dream of snow? Maybe something that needs it to be even colder so that it can wake up.'
'It's just a story, Johnny,' Margaret said. 'Don't be telling him stuff like that, you'll be giving him nightmares.'
A surge of love for her passed through Ben like an icy wave. He felt as if he was observing the family and himself from somewhere high and cold and still. The darkness all around them was a huge insubstantial embrace whose stillness he was sharing. 'Think for a moment, Johnny,' he said. 'What exactly did you see?'
The boy stared stubbornly at his own feet. '1 told you, snow.'
'What was it doing?'
'Falling, of course.' Johnny looked up. 'Not falling, exactly. More like it was a sort of curtain hanging there with a kind of pattern on it.'
'You saw a pattern? What kind?'
Johnny closed his eyes and held onto his mother's hand to guide him along the main road. Eventually Margaret said 'There wasn't a pattern, but Johnny's right, it was just standing still in the air.'
'So you see, Johnny, it couldn't have been snow,' Ellen said. 'I expect it was frost on the windows and light reflecting off the forest. Never mind.'
