an unusually problematical episode of family life, the sort of confrontation which would prove to have left them with a better understanding of one another. Then Johnny's face stiffened, and the way his gaze edged reluctantly towards the door jolted her heart. She could hear what he was hearing: slow footsteps ascending the stairs.
FORTY-TWO
'It's only your father,' she said. Perhaps Ben's footsteps were deliberate because he was taking time to frame an apology, or perhaps he was having to force himself to approach now that he realised how thoughtless he had been. He must be trying to muffle his footsteps so as not to unsettle the children further, but his tread only sounded ominous, soft and ponderous, somehow enlarged. Ellen saw the children shiver, and felt suddenly colder herself. Keep going, she willed him, go up to the workroom. But his footsteps halted outside the bedroom door, and there was silence except for a sound she couldn't bear to hear – the tiny chattering of Johnny's teeth. 'What do you want, Ben?' she said.
'To talk.'
The children glanced imploringly at her. 'What about?' she demanded.
There came a soft thump at the panels of the door, and the children flinched. Ben must be pressing himself against the door, because his response caused the panel which was level with his face to buzz like an insect struggling out of a nest. 'Can you hear me, Johnny?' his blurred voice said.
'Yes,' Johnny admitted, and obviously felt compelled by the silence to raise his voice. 'Yes,' he called.
'I didn't mean we'd disappear when it wakes up, if that's what you were afraid of. I only meant we'll change.'
For a moment Ellen couldn't believe what she was hearing. She stalked to the door, keeping her fury concealed so as not to alarm the children further. She snatched the door open, slipped through the gap and closed it in a single movement made deft by rage. 'Have you no sense, Ben?' she said, too low for the children to hear. 'Don't you care what you're doing to them? What kind of Christmas do you want them to have?'
He raised his hands as if he meant to seize her out of frustration.
His face was blank. 'The kind I'm looking forward to,' he said.
She felt as if the air was turning colder, as if he was somehow towering over her though his face was level with hers, but she wasn't to be intimidated. 'If that has anything to do with what you were saying downstairs, I suggest you go and write it and get rid of it that way. But keep it away from the children, I'm warning you.'
A flicker of bewilderment passed over his face, and he stretched out his hands to her. 'I'm here when you need me.'
He looked as if he was trying to appear reassuring but couldn't quite remember how. Ellen wanted to hold his hands and not relinquish them until she'd discovered what was wrong with him, but she couldn't let him win her over so easily when she was standing between him and the children. 'We need you as you've always been,' she said.
'And ever shall be, amen.'
He gave her an unsteady smile in which she thought she saw a plea, and she was just able to take the frail joke as an indication that he hadn't really changed deep down. 'That may do for me, Ben, but what are you going to tell the children?'
'What they still have to be told.'
A shiver so violent it felt like a spasm carried her out of his reach, shaking her head, slashing the air with her nails to prevent him from following. 'Don't you dare come near them when you're like this. If you do I'll take them out of the house, I swear it.'
'Where do you imagine you'll go?'
She wasn't going to argue with him. 'Enough, Ben. More than enough, if you want us to stay together. Just leave the children alone until you're sure you can keep those ideas to yourself.'
When she grasped the knob of Johnny's bedroom door and held onto it, he shrugged and headed for the dark at the top of the house. 'Should be prepared,' he was muttering. He sounded grotesquely like a boy scout, and she wanted to believe that a kind of reversion to boyishness was at the root of his behaviour, that inhabiting his imagination for the sake of his writing had rendered him temporarily unable to appreciate that some of his fancies should be kept from the children until they were older. When she heard the workroom door close softly, she looked into Johnny's room. 'Let's go downstairs. It's too cold up here for sitting around,' she said.
As the children hurried past her, both of them glanced nervously towards the workroom. He'd better stay up there until the family could trust him, Ellen thought in a fury of dismay at the change which had overtaken their life. She shepherded Johnny and Margaret down to the living-room, where the gas fire was cooling, its porcelain creaking as if it was settling into a new shape. She switched on the overhead light, and the tree withdrew its shadows into itself. 'Say if you're hungry, you two,' she said.
'I'm not,' Johnny said untypically.
'Sorry, Mummy, neither am I.'
'So long as you regain your appetites in time for Christmas dinner,' Ellen said with a jokey fierceness which was intended to conceal her grief. Since it didn't quite work, she grabbed the nearest source of distraction, the remote control for the television. 'Let's see if the world's still out there,' she said.
She rather wished she hadn't said so. Every channel was swarming with white particles which appeared to be settling into patterns that drew her vision into them. She tried the radio, only to find that it was emitting a noise which sounded like exactly the same hiss of static and which made her think of an oppressively amplified snowfall. When she'd switched off both sets, the silence seemed to blanket her thoughts. She took a deep breath. 'Well, what shall we play?'
'That game where we have to draw bits of a drawing and not see what it looks like till the end,' Johnny said.
'All right,' Margaret said as if she was indulging him.
Ellen went along the hall for paper. As soon as she opened her pad on the dining-table, the patterns she'd drawn earlier fastened on her vision. She blinked hard and slowly, and leafed onwards to the blank sheets, two of which she tore out and brought to the living-room. 'You can start, Johnny, since it's your game.'
Johnny found one of his annuals on which to rest the page. He sketched a head and folded that strip of the paper before passing the sheet to Margaret for her to add a neck and shoulders. Ellen was appending an upper torso to the hidden features when she remembered what the surrealists had called this game: 'the exquisite corpse'. It was surely much older than the surrealists, she thought, but that didn't strike her as particularly reassuring. At least the game was cheering Johnny up. She folded the page and gave it to him so that he could giggle over drawing a stomach. Eventually the page returned to him for the feet to be added, and then he unfolded the drawing.
He was expecting it to make him laugh, and so it did, but not much. 'It's good,' Margaret said, sounding more dutiful than pleased. While the figures revealed at the end of a game were in the main satisfyingly absurd, this one seemed wrong in a different way. It was unexpectedly regular, as if they had all been trying to describe the same form. In its roughness Ellen thought it resembled a cave drawing, a primitive attempt to depict – what? If it had really been primitive art she would have interpreted it as an image in the process of manifesting itself or of undergoing some transformation. Its stature conveyed an impression of hugeness; the hints of patterns within its outline suggested the beginnings of further growth. Most disconcertingly, the more she examined the face Johnny had given it, the more that face resembled a caricature of his father's, such a caricature that it seemed to be on the point of turning into something else entirely. She was gazing at it when she heard the workroom door open and footsteps descending the stairs.
She hadn't quite closed the door to the hall, and making a point of closing it now would only aggravate the children's nervousness. Instead she picked up the next blank sheet and began to sketch a face as Ben's slow footsteps reached the middle landing. She meant to seem unconcerned so that the children would be. The trouble was that the face she was drawing reminded her too much of Ben's, ai. a when she tried to alter it, it began to look nothing like a face. She felt as if she was calling Ben down by drawing him.
His footsteps reached the hall and paced to the kitchen, and she heard the rattle of the window blind. Her
