THIRTY-SIX
On the way home Johnny kept protesting "It was snowing. I could see it."
"I thought it looked as if it was," Margaret said.
Her attempt to placate him only aggravated his frustration. "It was," he declared as if repeating it and glaring at the sky would make it so. "Jim and David who are in my class saw it. Melanie Burton who took me to Mrs Venable when I cut my leg in the playground did, and she's older than you."
"Melanie's sister is in my class, little boy, and she says Melanie's a scaredy cat who has to have a light on in her room at night or she can't sleep."
"So? Maybe you did when you were little."
"That's a really sensible answer, Johnny, a really intelligent thing to say. And just in case you're wondering, I've never had a light on when I go to sleep. It isn't me who wanders about at night when he's supposed to be asleep because he can't wait for it to snow."
"I seem to remember a toddler who nearly cried her eyes out when her china cottage with a light in it got broken," Ellen murmured.
"That was because I liked seeing the little cottage when I was going to sleep, Mummy. I was never afraid of the dark."
"I'm glad neither of you are, because it's nothing to be afraid of, so let that be the end of the argument," Ellen said. "As for the snow, Johnny, we must have been expecting it for so long that we saw it, that's all. Don't you think so, Ben?"
Ben had been gazing at the stars above the forest as he walked, watching the forest grow almost imperceptibly brighter and feeling as though he was about to understand what he was seeing, truly understand for the first time in his life. "Maybe it was a dream," he said.
Margaret raised her eyes heavenwards and sighed. "We weren't asleep."
His smile seemed to rise from deep inside him, and made his teeth ache with the cold. "Not our dream."
Johnny giggled and saw he wasn't meant to do so. "Whose was it, then?"
"What do you think would dream of snow? Maybe something that needs it to be even colder so that it can wake up."
"It's just a story, Johnny," Margaret said. "Don't be telling him stuff like that, you'll be giving him nightmares."
A surge of love for her passed through Ben like an icy wave. He felt as if he was observing the family and himself from somewhere high and cold and still. The darkness all around them was a huge insubstantial embrace whose stillness he was sharing. "Think for a moment, Johnny," he said. "What exactly did you see?"
The boy stared stubbornly at his own feet. "1 told you, snow."
"What was it doing?"
"Falling, of course." Johnny looked up. "Not falling, exactly. More like it was a sort of curtain hanging there with a kind of pattern on it."
"You saw a pattern? What kind?"
Johnny closed his eyes and held onto his mother's hand to guide him along the main road. Eventually Margaret said "There wasn't a pattern, but Johnny's right, it was just standing still in the air."
"So you see, Johnny, it couldn't have been snow," Ellen said. "I expect it was frost on the windows and light reflecting off the forest. Never mind."
Ben smiled behind them in the dark. At least they had all had a glimpse of what he'd seen. The swarm of whiteness which had appeared at the windows, like moths drawn to the light or to the children and their parents in the school, had been shifting stealthily, restless to settle into a pattern, to show them its face. The waiting which his life had been was almost over. His stories had kept his instincts alive until it was time for those instincts to grow clear. His aunt had been unable to destroy them, and she had been too late to sell the Sterling house to prevent it from passing to him. He could see his life, and it was irrelevant except as a thread leading here through the dark.
Now he understood the panic which had brought him racing home from promoting the book. It hadn't meant that he would never see Ellen and the children again; deep down he'd been afraid that he might no longer know them. But the change he'd sensed gathering was taking its time, though his life seemed full of signs of it – the fragments of ritual scattered through his Stargrave childhood, the midsummer day when snow had kissed his hand like a promise in the churchyard, his books which were by-products of the rediscovery of ancient truths. It would be here soon, and he mustn't be afraid. "Just as long as we're together," he sang and taking Johnny's free hand, danced with the family up the track to the house. Tomorrow would be the shortest day of the year.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Thank heaven for Christmas, Ellen thought – for the way the season had revived Ben. Now that he'd returned to the family, the old enthusiastic Ben who liked nothing better than to make her eyes and the children's light up, she could admit to herself that one reason for her nervousness had been a secret fear in case his introversion wasn't only a side effect of his work. Now she was able to laugh at herself and at him as he sketched an elaborate sign in the air with the key before unlocking the front door and flinging it wide as if he was ushering the family into somewhere much larger than a house. The tree in the living-room creaked, long fingers of shadow rearranged the traces of coloured light which lay on the hall carpet as though a rainbow was dying there, and all of Ellen's senses seemed to waken: she smelled the pine and listened to the whisper of falling needles, which sounded for a long moment as if it wasn't contained by the room, as if the tree had brought the edge of the forest into the house, a forest as large as the dark. For a moment, as she shivered, she thought she could see her breath. "Here we are," Ben said as though he was announcing their arrival, and switched on the light in the hall.
Ellen let out a sigh, which she couldn't see after all. "That was strange. Maybe it comes of helping tell your story. I was imagining the kind of thing you must imagine sometimes. Can it be a bit unnerving until you see how it can be turned into a book?"
"A bit unnerving?" He gave her a smile so encouraging it looked manic. "However it feels, I'll be here. It can only bring us together."
"Good for it, then," Ellen called after him as he followed the children into the living-room, saying "Leave the television off, Johnny. Open up your mind to something bigger."
"I want to see what the weather man says."
"We don't need him to tell us what's coming. Can't you feel it out there?" When Johnny darted to the curtains and peered between them, only to turn away in disappointment, his father said "We'll have to wake your imagination up."
"Go on then."
"Let's see what we can bring alive between us. Remember the idea I had about the midnight sun? Let's try to imagine what the sun kept dormant and tell one another over dinner."
When Ellen reached into her imagination while she grilled the burgers she'd made earlier, she found she was fixated on the cold which felt like a presence beyond the window blind, ready to invade the kitchen whenever the heat wavered. She could imagine the snow figures crowding towards the window, mounting one another until they stood outside the glass like a faceless totem-pole, waiting for her to raise the blind and see them. She caught herself thinking that the blind appeared whiter than usual, as if something paler than the strips of plastic were at the window. She turned away and felt the cold like a prolonged chill breath on the nape of her neck. "Take some plates, you two," she called.
"You interrupted me while I was having inspirations," Margaret complained as Johnny marched into the kitchen, looking too preoccupied to have heard the call. Ellen finished preparing a salad and sent it through with Johnny while she followed with the burgers in their buns. "Well," Ben said at once, "what do you think was under the midnight sun?"
"You go first, Johnny," Margaret said.