He'd seemed uninvolved, though busy, and she wondered if he was remembering his Christmases here. He turned to the children as if they knew more about the season than he did. "Have we forgotten anything?"
"A tree."
"We've a forest of them, Johnny. Go and see them whenever you like."
"I mean one we can have in the house." When his father looked as if he was about to refuse, Johnny cried "We always have one. It won't be like Christmas."
"It won't," Ben said flatly, and seemed to relent. "I don't suppose one tree will make any difference."
Ellen switched off the lights as they left the house. Above the roof the sky was so clear that she could see a sprinkling of galaxies in the black depths beyond the stars. She followed Ben and the children past the crowd of shrunken figures staking out the house until the snow came. "We won't need to go far, will we?
"How far do you think we should?" Ben said.
Above the whitened treetops the mist glowed sullenly like clouds above a snowscape. Rank after rank of trees emerged from the dimness, forming a darkly luminous pattern which fastened on her vision. If she ventured into the secret twilight she was sure there would be more to see, but how could she even consider wandering into the forest at night with the children? One day Ben could show her the depths of the forest, but not now. "Just far enough to dig up a little tree," she said.
"No distance at all." He shrugged and stepped off the marked paths, though surely he could have chosen a shrub from the very edge of the forest. She had to keep blinking her eyes as she watched him, otherwise the trees appeared to step forwards almost imperceptibly as he passed between them. She was about to call out to ask him how much farther he meant to go when he halted. "This is for us," he announced.
He'd found a shrub not quite as tall as himself. He fell to his knees and began to dig at the roots with a trowel. "Come here," he said in a voice which seemed more breath than words, and sat back on his heels. "Everyone should have a dig."
For a moment the sight of him, a dark shape crouching among the trees with a glint of metal in its hand, seemed to Ellen to suggest a fairy tale or a childhood nightmare which the tale had provoked. It was just Ben waiting there, she told herself, and led the children off the path.
She took the trowel from him and poked among the scrawny roots while a cold smell of growth and decay filled the air. As she freed the roots their spidery tendrils brushed the backs of her hands, scattering earth and fallen needles and glistening insects which scuttled into the dark. She dug halfway around the tree and passed the tool to Margaret, who probed the ground and recoiled when a root sprang up through the needles as if impatient to be free. Johnny dug like a terrier until his father stopped him. "It'll come now," Ben said.
Ellen trowelled the soil away from the roots as he lifted the tree, and then she stood up. Perhaps she moved too quickly, for just as the tree emerged from the soil the air seemed to darken overhead. It felt to her as if the open sky had suddenly appeared – as if the trees had been pushed apart. She wavered dizzily and glanced up, and saw the white belly of the mist lowering itself onto the treetops. She grabbed the children's hands and started away from the pit where the tree had been, only to discover she had lost the path. Ben seemed to know where he was going, and so she followed him.
She'd darkened the house so as not to be dazzled on the way back, but now she realised that the lights would have allowed her to orient herself. Still, the forest was thinning ahead of Ben, until she could distinguish beyond the trees a dark bulk which dwarfed a host of pale shapes – the house and the snow crowd.
"Let's run and get everything ready," she said.
She conducted Margaret and Johnny down the track while Ben followed with measured steps, the thin silhouette of the tree craning over his shoulder and waving insect limbs behind his back. By the time he came into the house she had produced the tub and decorations from the cupboard under the stairs. He stood the tree in the tub and packed earth around the roots, and the children helped drape the branches with streamers and skeins of bulbs. Ellen switched on the bulbs and turned off the living-room light, and the family sat in front of the shining tree.
For her the tree had always had a special magic, but this year the magic was darker. The lights nestling in the depths of the tree made her think of stars; the sight of them hovering in the dark seemed almost to bring the black sky down through the house and into the room. As the winter nights grew longer and colder, she thought as she lay in bed, primitive folk must have thought the sky was coming to earth. She slept and dreamed that the stars were cold, covered with ice which kept them shining as they fell towards her, until she realised that there was no light for them to reflect and they went out, leaving her struggling to waken from the dark.
She must have dreamed that because she was waiting for the snow. In the morning it hadn't arrived, nor the next day, nor the day after. Despite the absence of clouds, the air felt weighed down by the massing of snow, an impression which made the bright sky seem unreal. Her classes in Leeds were finished now until the new year, but at least there were plenty of seasonal preparations to keep her busy, since Ben insisted on typing the new book. In three days he transcribed exactly what she'd written, though she had been hoping he would put something of himself into it, and posted the typescript to Ember.
Waiting for the publishers to respond made her unexpectedly nervous. Perhaps she had always believed that they were bound to like Ben's tales as much as she did and that her illustrations were only a bonus, unnecessary to their success. Thank heaven for the time of year, she thought, for an evening of carol-singing with Hattie Soulsby to subsidise the playgroup. Without that she would have been in danger of brooding on her nervousness, which had begun to feel so large and vague that it could hardly be explained by anxiety about the book.
Hattie brought her husband, a large shy man whose duffel coat gave him the appearance of a monk. Margaret and Johnny shared the music Stefan and Ramona were reading with the aid of a flashlight. The waits started from the town square, where frost glinted on the tarmac like reflections of the stars. Half a carol brought Mr Westminster to his front door, to clear his throat ferociously and drop several pound coins in Hattie's plastic bucket. Sally Quick had mince pies waiting for everyone. Tom, the bus driver who lived opposite, seemed abashed that he only had money to offer, and joined the procession as it climbed Church Road. Les Barns was so delighted to see him – "So that's what it takes to get you out at night, you daft bugger" – that he too joined the waits.
This was how Christmas should be, Ellen thought: the air so cold it made the dark between the streetlamps glitter, the cottages displaying trees and open fires, the community rediscovering itself. She squeezed Ben's hand, but he was gazing above the town at the cloud rooted to the earth. Terry West led "The Holly and the Ivy" in a high strong voice, and Ellen found herself thinking how many ancient customs had been taken over by Christmas: the pagan holly and mistletoe, the fairy on the tree, the tree itself, even the date, which had originally been the winter solstice, the shortest day… On the way home up the track she saw the shining tree and felt as if stars had got into the house. When she opened the front door she heard the tree creak, and long shadows reached out of the living-room and scuttled over the carpet. "The tree's saying hello to us," she said.
All the walking must have tired her, because she overslept on the morning of the nativity play, of all mornings. Surely Ben could have wakened her and the children before heading for the workroom. She hurried Margaret and Johnny to school and shopped on her way back. As she let herself into the house she heard Ben's voice upstairs. "She's here now," he was saying.