The stairs were deserted. The children's doors were ajar as she had left them, but she could hear no sound from either room. By craning over the banister she saw that the front door was still bolted. Surely the house couldn't be so cold unless a window or an outer door was open. Her mind was frantically cataloguing the contents of the workroom, but she could think of nothing in there that would be of any use to her as a weapon. She darted back into her room and seized an empty wooden coat-hanger from the wardrobe, and ran on tiptoe down the stairs.
She was shivering so much she had to hold the coat-hanger away from the wall and the banisters. Even her heartbeats felt shivery. "Don't you touch my children," she hissed through her chattering teeth. She reached the middle landing and stared into the dark of Margaret's room.
Margaret was in bed. As Ellen made out her shape the girl shifted beneath the duvet, her hair spilling over the edge of the mattress. Ellen tiptoed to the adjoining room and peered around the door. That must be Johnny under his duvet, however oddly flat it looked. She took a nervous step forwards and saw that the shape was a faint shadow on the duvet. Johnny wasn't there.
She sucked in a breath which felt like a shudder, and made herself step into the room, praying that the sight meant what she thought it did, afraid to switch on the light until she knew. But yes, it was Johnny's shadow on the bed. He was leaning out of the open window, his head and arms reaching for the dark.
He must be sleepwalking; otherwise, why didn't he move when she spoke to him? "You'll catch your death, Johnny," she said, and put one arm around his waist to pull him back while she closed the window, beyond which she glimpsed a hint of snow, eddying around the corner of the house towards the forest. Under the pajama jacket his body was dismayingly cold. She carried him to his bed, trying to persuade herself that she'd felt him begin to shiver but knowing that the shiver had been her own. She deposited him gently on the bed and then, before she made for the light-switch, she dared to look directly at him. Whatever she had been trying not to admit she was afraid to see, it wasn't this. His hands and face appeared to be glittering dimly like ice.
She ran to the switch. The light dazzled her. As she blinked, the traces of crystal melted from his hands and face, leaving his stiff features looking as though they had just been washed. Then his mouth twitched unhappily and, thank God, his eyes flickered open momentarily. "Where's Daddy?" he mumbled. "When's he coming home?"
"Soon, Johnny, soon. Let's get you warm." She sat him on the edge of the bed and set about rubbing him from head to foot with a warm towel from the bathroom. "You gave me such a fright," she murmured. "We'll have to ask Mr Elgin to put a lock on your window if you're going to start sleepwalking."
He seemed not to have heard anything she'd said. His mouth twitched again as though it was stiff. "When's Daddy coming home?"
"We'll see him on Saturday." She pressed her mouth against his to warm his lips. "Why do you keep asking? What were you dreaming?"
"Wanted to know."
"Of course you did. 1 understand. He's never been away from us like this before. Don't fret, he'll be back."
The boy shook his head impatiently and let out a loud breath. "Wanted to know."
The breath sounded so like an unspoken word that Ellen blurted "Who did, Johnny? Someone in your dream?"
His face crumpled as if he wasn't sure how the memory affected him. "The big white," he said.
She thought of an enormous butterfly, and wondered why the vague image caused her to shiver. "It's gone now. You were dreaming."
She finished warming him at last, and dabbed away drops of moisture which lingered in his hair. When she laid him on his side on the mattress and covered him with the duvet, he was almost asleep. She fixed the catch of the window as immovably as she could. "No more roaming, Johnny," she murmured, kissing his forehead, and left his bedroom door open. As she tiptoed to her own room she glanced at the front door, and couldn't avoid wishing it had already let Ben into the house. "Come back soon," she whispered, hugging herself.
THIRTY
Ben awoke convinced that he ought to be on his way home. He was halfway out of bed before he remembered that he had yet to sign books at the shop. He listened to the world awakening around him – a bird shrilling at the dawn from a branch of the cherry tree outside the window, one of Dominic's parents plodding downstairs and back up – and leafed through books chosen at random from the several bookcases in the room. He wasn't reading, only occupying himself in order to avoid getting in anyone's way so early, and that gave him time to think.
Last night he'd fallen asleep thinking of the Milligans, having gone to bed before them to sleep off his long day. He'd heard Dominic's mother reading to her husband, whose eyes had grown too weak for him to read for more than a few minutes at a time. Whenever anything she read revived a memory for either of them she would stop so that they could share it aloud. Ben had been touched by this, but he'd thought it should mean more to him. Now, as he blew the dust off a faded book whose author he had never heard of, he wondered if it had reminded him of how he'd realised yesterday that his own books were lacking.
As he'd read through The Boy Who Caught The Snowflakes, not a line of it had inspired him in the way imagining the story had. Ellen's illustrations were truer to his inspiration than the writing was, and more genuine in themselves. He was sure that they were the source of the appeal of all the books.
Once he'd met the publicist the day had become too demanding for Ben to reflect on any of this, but now he didn't find it as dispiriting as he might have. He'd done his best with the books, and now they were separate from him. They were really Ellen's books – Howard Bellamy had virtually told him so on meeting him – but that was a reason for him to feel prouder than ever of her. The trouble was, it also made today's session at the bookshop seem even more irrelevant to his real task.
Perhaps once the bookshop was out of the way his task would become clear to him. Last night, drifting off to sleep surrounded by old books, he'd thought it had to do with Edward Sterling. He'd realised that while he had been searching for his own books in Charing Cross Road he hadn't even considered trying to track down Edward Sterling's last book. He no longer needed it, he understood that much – because being denied it as a child had caused him to retell its stories, having forgotten where he'd found them. Whatever remained to him to tell or to perform, he felt instinctively that it had been with him since before he could remember.
The knock on his door and Dominic's announcement that the bathroom was free came as something of a relief. Ben took his time over bathing and shaving, though his thoughts had given way to nervous anticipation, and then ventured down to Mrs Milligan's inescapable breakfast. "That's it, you tuck in," she said, dumping more bacon on his plate as soon as he'd made room. "You've a big day ahead."
"We've been telling all our customers for weeks how you were coming back to us," her husband said.
"The second coming of Ben Sterling," Mrs Milligan suggested with a wry grimace at her own wickedness.
"Mother," Dominic reproved her, and turned to Ben. "What will you do until this afternoon?"
"Eat, by the look of it," Ben refrained from saying. "I'll revisit some of my old haunts," he said.
Outside, where all the parked cars had gone blind overnight with frost, he decided to visit the houses where he used to live. His aunt's hadn't changed much, though there were dolls in the windows and more stray twigs poking out of the shrubs in the garden than she would have allowed to grow, but it seemed small and unfamiliar. When he strolled to his and Ellen's first house it looked shrunken too, and secretive with net curtains. He was glad Ellen wasn't there to see it, although the sight of it only confirmed the impression which had been developing in him, he didn't know for how long, that the whole of his life in Norwich had been no more than an interruption.