It was just after four o'clock. The darkness seemed to be congealing icily about him. Behind the house the crowd of white still figures stood like a vanguard of the forest, the pale mass like an earthbound cloud which had yet to release its storm. When he climbed into the Volkswagen and switched on the headlamps, their beams looked as though the weight of the darkness was about to extinguish them. He released the handbrake and let the vehicle coast down the track so as not to waken the family, and started the engine when he came to the road. He drove under the bridge and onto the moor.
Chunks of the night flowered as the headlamp beams slid over them, patches of snow seemed to expand as the light found them. After most of an hour the glare of Leeds put out the stars. He drove through the empty streets, whose lamps made his eyes ache, and down to the motorway, where lorries bigger than he'd ever seen in daylight roared through the dark. From the sky the lights racing up and down the spine of England must look like nervous energy rendered visible, he thought, and then the need to concentrate on the traffic brought him down to earth.
By the time the sun wounded the horizon to his left, he felt as if the car was driving him. Certainly some compulsion was – not his appointments in London and Norwich. Perhaps his next tale was demanding to be told, which would explain why these two days seemed to be in his way. As daylight brought traffic swarming onto the motorway he was able to lose himself in driving, and once he reached the outskirts of London he found plenty to distract him: learner drivers leading slow processions along streets narrowed by parked lorries which dwarfed the shops they were stocking; pedestrians forced into the roadway by scaffolding and demolition; holes in the road planted with workmen in various stages of growth, no more than talkative heads protruding from one trench, men from the waist up sprouting from another. He lost his way at a diversion in Crick-lewood because of a burst water main, and it took him the best part of two hours to reach Soho, where he parked beneath the Firebrand building and emitted a yell of relief.
Despite the delay, he was almost an hour early for his first meeting. He walked through Soho – where there seemed to be fewer sex shops than in January but more handwritten notices beside doorways – to look for The Boy Who Caught The Snow-flakes in the bookshops on Charing Cross Road. He braced himself as he marched into Foyle's, but he wasn't prepared for the sight which greeted him. Every shop which sold children's books had his and Ellen's on display, and two of them had both The Boy Who Caught The Snowflakes and their other titles in the window.
He gazed at the second window display as lunchtime crowds hurried by. In Foyle's he'd wanted someone to buy the book while he was watching: he'd felt like a child, eager for his work to be appreciated. Now he wished Ellen and the children were here to see. Their delight would surely have communicated itself to him, but each time he was confronted by another group of Sterling books the spectacle seemed to have less to do with him, as if the books were products of a phase of his life which he'd left behind. He mustn't lose his enthusiasm now, when he needed it for the press interview. The thought sent him striding back to Firebrand Books.
Among the books displayed in a rack opposite the easy chairs in the reception area he found a copy of The Boy Who Caught The Snowflalxs. While he was waiting for Mark Matthews he speed-read the book, and was on the last page when a voice remarked "If even the author's reading it, it must be good."
This was Mark Matthews, a tall man in his thirties, already balding. His long face appeared to be trying to smile with as many features as possible. "We can hustle now if you like," he said, "if you feel like getting a drink in before Howard Bellamy wants to talk."
"You think that will loosen my tongue, do you?"
"We have ways of making you talk," the publicist said, and relinquishing his fake German accent, "but the way I hear it, you don't need any."
Ben hoped there wouldn't be much of this. When Matthews said "Italian all right for you?" Ben though momentarily that he was proposing to don another accent. "Whatever pleases Bellamy," Ben said.
It proved to be the restaurant where Kerys Thorn had lunched the Sterlings, and the interviewer was already waiting, perched on a bar stool just inside the window and feeding himself olives with one pudgy hand between sips of the cocktail in the other. He continued to survey the faces of the passers-by until Mark Matthews cleared his throat, and then he swung round on the groaning stool and raised his handlebar eyebrows. "Howard Bellamy, Ben Sterling," the publicist said.
Bellamy gave Ben's hand a loose shake and retrieved his cocktail from the bar. "Wife following?"
"Someone had to stay home with the children."
"Thought I'd rather have the pretty half, did you?" Bellamy said to the publicist, and to Ben: "Shame, though. She could have made me a sketch to send out with my pieces. Let's put something in our tummies while you're being grilled."
"It sounds as if you're going to make a meal of me."
"Do you know, I think I'm going to like this man," Bellamy said, descending gracefully as a seal from the stool and tugging his velvet waistcoat over his paunch. "You'll be easy," he told Ben. "We'll have fun."
The interview was certainly fluent and slick. Once Bellamy had posed his tape-recorder beside the bowl of parmesan, Ben forgot it and discoursed on all the subjects which Bellamy raised or which his own responses led to: childhood as a visionary state, the stifling of imagination by pressures to conform, imagination as the soul of man, the undying essences of myths and fairy tales, the need to let them tell themselves, the possibility that only children could hear them clearly and rediscover the meaning they must have had when they were told round the fire under an unknown sky in the midst of an unknown dark which perhaps had been the real storyteller, borrowing a human voice to tell its tales… Bellamy nodded and smiled and managed to look eager for more while he swallowed an extravagant amount of spaghetti. He didn't switch off the recorder until coffee had followed several bottles of wine. "That'll more than do," he said. "Unless you've anything else in your head that you particularly want to let loose on the world."
The termination of the interview took Ben off guard; he'd reached a stage where he was scarcely aware of talking. "I was just thinking how many people I've known who sound like adjectives or adverbs. Dainty, Quick, and now you. Not overweight, just comfortably bellamy."
Bellamy took his time about smiling at that, but once he did his smile looked set for a while. "I predict we'll be seeing you up high before long. I'll be bending my efforts towards it," he said, and wrote his address inside one of the restaurant's match-books. "Drop me a line if you think of anything you forgot to say."
As Ben and Mark Matthews walked back to Ember the publicist said "I'll want to use you a lot more next year. We mustn't let all that charm and eloquence go to waste."
"Maybe I should save some for my new editor."
"Maybe."
Without warning Ben felt as if the part of him which talked about writing and which had carried him through the interview had deserted him, exposing him to his impatience with the delay of the next two days. He was afraid he might be rude to Alice Carroll, and then so angry with being afraid that he felt like being yet ruder. But when he saw that she looked even smaller behind Kerys' desk than Kerys had, his anger didn't seem worth sustaining. "He was perfect for Bellamy," the publicist told her. "I've been there when Howard took against someone he was interviewing. Not a pretty sight, I can tell you."
Ben had to admit to himself that Alice Carroll was: the dabs of pink on her marbly cheeks emphasised her delicate bones, her blonde hair cascaded to her waist out of a hairband shaped like a snake. She gave his hand two shakes and said "Anything you can do to maximise sales."