than a glance, but she had the impression that there had been something odd about their rudimentary faces – as if, she thought now, they had all been sketches of the same image, trying to make it look more like a face. 'What do you want to sing, Margaret?' she said to quiet her nonsensical thoughts.
'I don't feel like it. I'm too cold.'
'What's your favourite carol?'
' 'Silent Night', I suppose.'
'Mine too,' Ellen said, and began to sing it, raising her voice to encourage the children to participate. Johnny did so halfway through the first chorus, and Margaret picked up the next line. By then, however, Ellen was finding phrases in the carol uncomfortably appropriate. It was increasing her awareness of her surroundings, of the calm which didn't seem as holy as she would have liked, the brightness where the snow reflected the glare of the lamps leading into the outer darkness, the sense of being surrounded by sleep as if she and the children were part of a dream. If their singing had brought someone out of a house or even to a window she would have felt less isolated, but every door stayed closed, and not a curtain moved. Once she thought she heard a fourth voice joining in, but surely it was an echo; it sounded too close to be inside a house – too close for her to be unable to see where it was coming from. Perhaps it was Stan Elgin, though if he was nearby she wondered why she hadn't heard him going from door to door.
The carol took the family as far as the last streetlamp. They were singing 'Slee-eep in heavenly peace' as they left the light behind. To their left the snowbound landscape stretched to the edge of the silenced world, to their right it swept upwards to the vast snowy efflorescence which was the forest, up further to the icebergs of the crags. The sky was black except for the random patterns of stars – so black that she could imagine that the stars were flickering because the dark was overtaking them. She felt the heat draining out of her body into the sky and the landscape.
As they trudged past the outlying cottages, Margaret broke into song. Ordinarily 'The Holly and the Ivy' would have been a good choice for a walking song, Ellen thought, but just now she would have preferred not to be reminded how the song took ancient traditions and tried to disguise them as Christian, traditions whose age was no more than a moment of the ancient darkness overhead. Besides, not only did the carol emphasise the stillness rather than relieving it, but Ellen's impression that there were more than three voices had returned. She blamed her imagination until Margaret's singing faltered and the girl began to peer at the swollen hedges which glowed like a moon in a cloud on both sides of the road. Didn't her behaviour suggest what the icy whisper must be? 'It's just wind in the hedges,' Ellen said.
'I thought there were birds moving about in there,' Johnny said.
When had she last seen birds around Stargrave? But she couldn't feel a wind either. Presumably she was too cold. She stumbled past another cottage and began to sing:
'God rest ye merry gentlemen, Let nothing you dismay. Remember Christ our Saviour Was born on Christmas Day…'
Of course, she thought, the echo was under the railway bridge, even if it seemed to be behind them and around them, more like a stealthy chorus, a whispering which seemed enormous and yet on the edge of inaudibility. It must be the bridge which turned the echo of her last words into a sound like muffled icy laughter. She peered along the road at the lightless mouth and the hint of whiteness at the far end of the tunnel, and looked away quickly. Her eyes were misbehaving again; the whiteness had appeared to lurch forwards into the tunnel. 'Nearly there now,' she said firmly, and stepped off the road onto the track past the lit and curtained cottage. Then she sucked in a breath to suppress whatever comment she might have blurted out. As far as she could see, their house was dark.
'It looks as if your father's gone out looking for us,' she said.
She fumbled in her pocket and managed to extract her keys without dropping them as she picked her way along the track. She would feel better once she was home, she promised herself. She could only assume it was the way her vision was struggling to grasp the obscured shape of the forest which had caused the patterns to reappear in the snow, stretching across the common and up to the ridge. She hurried the children towards the house, gripping the key to the front door so hard between her finger and thumb that she could feel the chill of the metal through her glove. But she hadn't reached the front step when the door of the dark house swung open. 'I was just coming to get you,' Ben said.
FORTY-ONE
For the moment all that mattered was to get the children and herself inside and shut the cold out. Ellen pushed Margaret and Johnny into the hall with her clumsy magnified hands and stamped her feet on the doorstep. She could hear snow scattering around her boots more clearly than she could feel her soles thumping the step. She swayed into the house and fell against the door to close it, and found that she could see nothing but the glimmer of Ben's face. 'Someone switch on the light, for heaven's sake,' she said.
Ben didn't move. She couldn't distinguish his expression or even his features, just the pale blur which the icy glow through the panes of the front door made of his face. She closed her eyes, because the dim glow was causing his face to appear to shift restlessly. The switch clicked, and the light turned her eyelids orange. She forced them open at once.
He was at the foot of the stairs, between her and the children, one of whom had switched on the light. His face was blank except for an ambiguous gleam in his eyes. 'There you are,' he said.
She didn't know if he was greeting them or alluding to the light, but she assumed his tonelessness was intended as a rebuke. 'I meant to come home earlier,' she said, 'but I couldn't face the walk without some fuel inside me. Take your wet things off, you two, and jump into a hot bath. You could be making us a hot drink, Ben, while I persuade my fingers to work.'
'Whatever keeps you happy,' he said, turning away so quickly that he sent a cold draught through the hall. Surely whatever surprise he had in store for the family could wait a little longer – he needn't act like a disappointed child because they'd kept him waiting. She would go to him in a few minutes to make friends with him.
The children piled their outer clothing by the front door and raced upstairs as the kettle on the cooker began to creak with heat. Ellen sat on the stairs and levered one of her boots off with the other, tugged off the latter with her cumbersome hands and then trapped the gloves in her armpits so as to pull her hands free. She flexed her fingers and unzipped her anorak as they began to tingle painfully, and staggered on her shivery legs to lean against the hall radiator. The next moment she recoiled from it, for it was even colder than she was.
The thought of going out again to find Stan Elgin, or waiting while Ben did so, almost made her weep. She hobbled to the kitchen, trying to wriggle her fingers and toes. When she stepped off the carpet onto the linoleum it felt like stepping barefoot onto ice. She tiptoed rapidly to the boiler, only just keeping her balance. Then she wavered, and her heels struck the linoleum. The heating hadn't failed; it was switched off.
She spun the timer wheel and heard the warmth surge through the house, then she stumbled backwards and lowered herself onto the nearest bench. 'When did you turn off the heating, Ben? What were you thinking of?'
He was at the window, his palms flat on the metal of the sink. The shape towering outside the window seemed to be in the process of merging with the smaller figures, whose positions looked more symmetrical than they previously had. 'Us and the children,' he said.
Had he been so preoccupied by their absence that he'd switched off the boiler without thinking? 'We're here now,' she said to placate him. Hearing water in the bath overhead, she braved the linoleum so as to reach the hall. 'Is the water hot?' she called.
'Yes,' Johnny and then Margaret said.
'What do you want to drink? Hot fruit juice or hot chocolate?'
'Hot blackcurrant,' they responded virtually in chorus.
'That's what 1 was going to make for them,' Ben murmured. 'We don't want them going to sleep.'
'Coffee for me,' Ellen said, and padded into the living-room to find her slippers. She eased her feet into them with a sigh of anticipation and held onto the radiator to feel the warmth spreading through it and through
