"You mightn't ever have met again," Margaret said accusingly to her father.
"Then you wouldn't be here to tell me off. Believe me, all the way down I was berating myself for being so eager to show off, and trying to think of a reason to go back. But you'll have to wait for the next instalment. You've school in the morning and it's time for baths and bed."
Later, as Ellen lay naked under the duvet with him he said "After you saved my life that day, did you see me nearly miss my footing oh the way down?"
"I couldn't have seen you any clearer if I'd had a telescope."
"I was sneaking a look at you, that was why I slipped. For years I used to dream of how you looked, all by yourself with your pad and pencil and the mountains. And sometimes I'd dream of you appearing like the good fairy of the mountain when I thought the shale had finished me off."
Ellen rolled onto her side and laid one leg over his. "I'm a bit more substantial than a fairy, you'll have noticed."
"Rather. I was remembering how you looked in jeans, you realise. Pretty tight, they were," he said, running a finger along the inside of her thigh. "That was another reason I hoped when Milligans got the poster for the exhibition that it would turn out to be yours. But I was only hoping to carry off the artist, not the art."
"I couldn't have let you pay for that picture when I saw how much it meant to you."
"Remember how your boyfriend tried to convince you that justified raising the price?"
"And went off in a huff when I told him it was the picture I'd been working on when you and I first met." She closed one hand gently around Ben's penis. "Hugh wasn't such a bad sort really. He was there when I needed him at art school, to tell me I mustn't be shy of promoting my work. And he put in a word with a friend of his father's which got me into Noble's, even though I was going out with you by then. He couldn't have foreseen the trouble I'd have there. I think he always wanted me to do more with my talent than he thought he could do with his."
Ben slipped one arm beneath her shoulders as his penis began to push her fist open. "No need for either of us to feel the way he did, as I hope Kerys and the rest of them at Ember managed to persuade you," he said, and kissed her breasts.
"I wouldn't paint those pictures if you didn't make me see them."
"I wouldn't write the books if I didn't have your pictures of them to look forward to."
"You know that's not true," she said, though she liked the idea. As she felt her nipples swelling, she took hold of his chin and raised his head so that she could look into his eyes. "Do you think this one could really be the book?"
"The book," he intoned like a footman announcing royalty, and then grew serious. "I think if Kerys has her way we're going to be in every bookshop in the country."
"Only the country?"
"And the towns, and the airports, and that hotel in Grasmere where the paperbacks in the revolving bookstand looked as if the dust was holding them together."
"We never did go back there after we were married to flash our certificate at the manager. I still think he rang the fire alarm that night to catch me coming out of your room. And I'm sure that old lady sent her poodles down to trip him up, because she tipped me a look that was as good as a wink." Ellen gave Ben a long deep kiss, feeling his tongue rough on hers, and opened her thighs around his. "It would be grand if the book does soar, wouldn't it? The children would be so pleased."
"So would the bank manager."
"He'll have no reason to complain once I get back into advertising. And listen, I truly don't mind working in it for a while, so stop worrying. Wherever I go I'll come back the same."
"That's all I'll ever want," Ben said, and eased himself into her. She hugged him and slowed down his rhythm with hers, waves of warmth growing in her before the flood. Afterwards she laid her head on his chest, breathing in the smell of the two of them, before drifting off to sleep. Sometimes she liked this kind of sex best of all, the kind which was so gentle and familiar it felt like stability made flesh. If their books raised their life to new heights, it mustn't leave this behind. "Not too far," she murmured drowsily to Ben's sleeping face.
ELEVEN
The night before her interview at Ballyhoo Unlimited, Ellen leafed through her portfolio and was impressed by hardly anything. She had already preferred her illustrations for Ben's books, but now she saw that it wasn't just a matter of her having developed her skills: nearly all the work in the portfolio was dated. Admittedly some of the assignments – a teenage fashion store, a chain of discos which had been meant to light up the winters of half a dozen Norfolk towns but which had winked out before Johnny was born – would inevitably have dated, but why should she expect the agency to take that into consideration? She quite liked the work she'd done on the campaign to advertise the houseboat holiday firm, but that wouldn't be enough. She pulled out all the material which seemed stale to her, gazed wistfully at her depleted portfolio, and came to a decision. "I'm going to show them Broads Best."
Ben glanced up from copying changes of address from last year's Christmas cards. "I should hope so. It's your work."
"It isn't quite that simple."
"Then it should be, and if anyone can make it so, you can. And if you ever bump into Sid Peacock you can tell him from me to insert himself up himself and twist."
"I can't imagine ever seeing him again," Ellen said on her way to the back room. Beside the desk in front of the large window which in daytime gave the room all the light it could hold, one shelf of the deep bookcase contained a few copies of each of the two Sterling books, Ben's battered electric typewriter, pots of Ellen's brushes bunched like withered blossoms waiting for the spring to return their colour to them. A pile of folders of her work occupied the bottom shelf. She extracted the Broads Best folder and took it to the desk, where she rested her elbows on either side of it without opening it. She was suddenly afraid that it would prove to be less inspired than she remembered it to be.
It hadn't seemed inspired only to her, judging by Sid Peacock's behaviour. He was the head of what he liked to call his department of Noble Publicity – an office in which he'd worked with Ellen and an older man called Nathan, who was gay and who openly loathed him. Sid, who was three years older than Ellen, had borne his wide tanned face and Oxford accent like presents he was offering the world, and smelled of aftershaves with savage names. Whenever the agency bosses had assigned him a campaign he would call a brainstorming session, draining Ellen and Nathan of their ideas and usually preferring his own. Three years of this and no promotion had begun to frustrate Ellen, but there had been no other opening for her in Norwich. Then the agency had acquired the Broads account and she had lost her innocence.
Broads was the oldest brewery in Norfolk, and its directors had wanted to give it a new image. Everyone at the agency had been delighted to have the account – at least, until Broads had turned down all the proposed campaigns. The directors didn't like spacemen drinking their ale in free fall, they didn't care for anything involving computers, they especially disliked the idea of associating their product with pop stars or film stars, either current or nostalgically revived. After several rejections Sid had stormed into the office. "It's like talking to mummies. Why the hell did they bother coming to us if they think they know more than we do about what's up to date?" And Ellen had begun to wonder if the agency was missing the point – if they couldn't make the future of the brewery by delving into its past. She'd thought she remembered something she'd once heard about the ale, and over the weekend she had tracked it down in a history of Norfolk.