He gave in to pleas for a repeat of the original version once Johnny was in bed. Margaret sat on the end of the mattress where Johnny's feet didn't reach. As soon as the story was over she got into her own bed. Ellen went to bed early too, taking refuge from the chill which seemed to seep into the house whenever the central heating pump clicked off. Ben was in the workroom, and hadn't emerged when she fell asleep.
In the night a shiver wakened her. She clasped Ben's waist with one arm and pressed herself against his back to warm him up. There was movement at the window, a soft irregular patting on the glass. A white shape which looked tall as the gap between the curtains was dancing in the darkness, fluttering against the window like a bird or a moth. The children would be pleased in the morning, she thought drowsily. For a few seconds the sounds on the panes seemed to grow absolutely regular, in a rhythm too complicated to follow. She was trying to define it when it lulled her to sleep.
TWENTY-THREE
Ellen's sleep was so profound and dreamless it felt like an absence of self. When the children's cries roused her, she struggled back to consciousness, feeling as if the stillness had accumulated on her, a weight whose impalpability made it all the more difficult to throw off. It filled the room, more than the room. She forced her eyelids wide and shoved herself clumsily into a sitting position, dislodging her pillow, which struck the carpet with a soft thud. How much had she overslept for the room to be as bright as this? She frowned at the clock, which was insisting that the alarm wasn't due for another ten minutes, as the children came racing upstairs. They both knocked on the bedroom door, inched it open, piled into the room. "It's snowed," Johnny shouted.
"It always will," Ben said.
Ellen hadn't realised he was awake; she wasn't sure even now that he was. He lay on his back with his eyes shut, his face as expressionless as his murmur had been. She put her finger to her lips and slipped quietly from under the duvet. Tiptoeing to the curtains, she looked through the gap.
The world had turned white. Beneath a blue sky which seemed almost as bright as the sun, snow like a sketch that reduced the moors and fields to their merest outlines sloped to the horizon, to the newly risen mountains which were clouds. Sheets of snow were folded over all the roofs of Stargrave. A few cars encrusted with white were proceeding slowly along the main road towards the bridge. A bird of prey hovered above the moors, its wings shining as if they or the sky around them were being transformed into crystal. It swooped to a small animal which dashed across the snow, seized it in its claws and wheeled away across the dazzling moors as the children wriggled under Ellen's arms to see the view. "Can we get dressed and go out?" Margaret whispered.
Ellen steered them out of the room. Though Ben's eyes were closed, she sensed he was awake; she thought he might be trying to shape his tale. "All right, but don't get too cold and wet. I'll call you when there's something hot to put inside you."
While she was making breakfast, having closed the kitchen blinds to shut out the glare of the swollen forest, she heard the slam of the workroom door. When she'd fed the children and brushed the melting snow out of their hair and ensured that they didn't spend too little time in the bathroom, she sent Johnny to tell his father that breakfast was in the oven. Johnny knocked on the workroom door and gabbled the message and raced downstairs, out of the house.
Once they were off the main road, the middle of which was already a mass of slush, Ellen let Margaret and Johnny run ahead, collecting snow from garden walls and shying it at each other. The streets were full of children doing so, as though a custard pie fight had taken over the town. She left the two of them, pink-faced in anoraks, at the school gates and tramped carefully downhill. Despite all the sounds – the creak of compressed snow underfoot, the scrape of spades on paths, the revving of car engines, shouts of greeting and speculations about the weather – the town seemed laden with silence which massed around her as she trudged beyond the newsagent's and along the edge of the rough track to the forest. Over the muffled squeak of her footsteps, she heard the phone ringing at the top of the house.
It continued to ring while she slithered towards the front door. Why hadn't Ben answered it? As she unlocked the door, the ringing ceased. She stamped her boots clean of snow and stepped into the house, and heard the workroom door open. "Ellen? Call for you," Ben shouted down. "Sally Quick."
He must have been elsewhere in the house when the phone began to ring, though he was blinking as if he'd just come back to himself. "Don't forget your breakfast," she said, and he wandered downstairs as she picked up the receiver. "Hi, Sally."
"Fancy a trip to the moors?"
"Do you mean what I think you mean?"
"I've just had a call from Richmond. Someone who's supposed to have come over here yesterday for a walk and a clamber has been reported missing by his family. He didn't bother to let us know what he was doing," Sally added with a sigh. "Four of us should be enough to be going on with if we start from High Ridge and work our way down either side in twos."
"I'll meet you as soon as I've got my togs on, shall I?"
"Lucy's coming in on her day off. She'll be here in five minutes and then I'll pick you up."
Ellen had pulled on her waterproofs and was lacing up her boots when she heard the Landrover approaching along the track. She zipped up the pocket in which she'd put her compass in case the weather grew opaque, and went to find Ben. He'd opened the blinds and was dawdling over his breakfast, staring out of the kitchen window at the woods, whose burden of snow made the treetrunks look as black as the depths of the forest. "Someone's missing on the moors," she told him. "If I'm not back in time you'll be here to collect the children, won't you?"
"I'll be here."
She kissed him on the forehead. "You'd better be, for me."
Sally was turning the Landrover. Ellen ran through the churned slush and hoisted herself into the passenger seat as Sally set the wipers squealing back and forth on the windscreen before she drove down the track. She was a muscular redhead with a wide face which always looked humorous because of her lopsided mouth. "Did I interrupt anything?" she said. Don t worry.
"You wouldn't tell me if I had, would you? My niece says you're one of the stars of the college. Just you make sure you appreciate yourself."
She swung the vehicle onto the road in a flurry of slush and drove alongside the railway line, all traces of which had been erased by snow. An older Landrover was waiting outside the tourist information centre. Les Barns, who sold climbing equipment in the centre, was behind the wheel, and Frank from the butcher's was next to him. The walkie-talkie on Sally's lap cleared its throat as she drove up. "Men and their toys," she murmured to Ellen as Les said "Testing, testing."
"Head for the heights," Sally told him.
As she drove onto the moor the houses seemed to sink into the snow. She had reached the lowest crags when the green Stargrave bus appeared in the distance. The walkie-talkie spluttered. "Bus coming," Les announced.
"Thank you, Les. We had noticed."
When the meandering road eventually brought the bus and her Landrover face to face, Sally flashed her headlights. The driver slid his window open and leaned out of the cab, a frown supplementing the wrinkles of his weathered forehead. "There's a car abandoned just over the ridge."
"Did you happen to notice the number, Tom?"
"I did." He dug in his breast pocket and produced a tattered notepad no bigger than the palm of his hand. Licking his thumb, he leafed through the pad as though he was dealing cards. "There you are, you little bugger," he muttered at last, and read Sally the registration number. "Any help to you?"