"A bit of the cold that'll come when the sun goes out."
"No," Margaret said, "a bit of the cold there used to be before there were any stars."
"Maybe just a single crystal." Ben's eyes were brightening. "Where's the rest of it, do you think?"
"It went away when everything got made."
"Or it's out where there's nothing but dark," Margaret said.
Johnny bit into his burger and chewed fast. "What's it doing, then?"
Ellen felt as if the three of them were waiting for her to speak. More disconcertingly, she felt that they were waiting for her to say what they had already thought themselves, because all that she'd heard so far were ideas which had occurred fleetingly to her when she was in the kitchen. She'd taken part in plenty of brainstorming sessions while she was working in advertising, but never one in which all the participants seemed to speak with the same voice. "It's dreaming," she said.
"Not quite. Not only that," Ben said. "It must dream of perfection, of recreating everything in ways we can't begin to imagine."
"It's only a story, remember," Ellen told the children, "for our next book."
Ben was obviously delighted by their having shared their fancies. Throughout the meal he kept smiling as if to encourage the family to continue imagining or even to ask him some question. After dinner he followed her and the children into the kitchen and loitered, gazing at the blind as if he could see through it, while they helped her with the washing-up. "How shall we pass the time now?" he said.
"Play a game," Margaret told him.
"Ludo," Johnny cried.
"That's an old word," Ben said, and brought the battered game from in the cupboard under the stairs. He seemed fascinated by the patterns the counters made on the board as the play progressed, and Ellen couldn't recall ever having seen a game bring them so frequently close to symmetry. When Johnny's eyelids began to droop she announced that the game in progress would be the last, and was taken aback when it was his father who protested. "No rush to break up the party, is there? It's going to be a long night."
"With Christmas on the other side of it, and we don't want people being too tired to enjoy that."
For a moment Ellen thought he was about to disagree, but what was there to contradict? When at last the game was over, Margaret said "I'm going up now, Johnny."
As soon as Ellen headed for the bedrooms to say goodnight to the children, Ben came after her. Of course he wanted to bid them goodnight too, yet his behaviour seemed indefinably childlike; surely he wasn't trying to avoid being left by himself. She kissed Margaret and Johnny, snuggled their duvets under their chins, turned out the lights in their rooms. Ben murmured "Get some sleep now" with an urgency he ought to realise would be counter-productive, and lingered in the dark with them until Ellen was downstairs. "Another game?" he said as he came down.
"I'd just like to sit and look at the tree for a while."
"We both will." He switched off the overhead light and sat on the edge of a chair. Shadows of branches patterned his face, reflections glinted in his eyes like shards of ice. He was gazing so intently into the depths of the tree that he made her feel as if she was overlooking something in there. "Do you want to talk?" she said.
"No need."
It must be a trick of the light which caused the needles on the branches to appear identical wherever the bulbs illuminated them. The pattern drew her gaze into the unlit depths, and she felt as if the branches were reaching for her until she closed her eyes. That was more peaceful, almost enough to send her to sleep, except that whenever she began to drowse the silence lurched towards her, stopping her breath. She felt suspended between sleeping and consciousness by the silence which was displaying her heartbeat, making it seem both to be growing louder and quicker and to have detached itself from her. Then she realised that not all the soft dull sounds were her heartbeats. Some of them were at the window.
Her eyes sprang open. For a few seconds she was dazzled by the tree; then she saw Ben watching her awaken. His smile widened, glistening as if his mouth was full of ice. "It's here," he said.
Angered by the shiver which his words sent through her, she pushed herself out of her chair and stumbled to the window. She wasn't fully awake yet; she had to grope among the folds of the heavy curtains in order to locate the gap. The patting at the window sounded as impatient as she was. Chilly velvet snagged her fingernails, and then she found the opening. She parted the curtains and stuck her head between them.
The night flocked to meet her. It was snowing so heavily that the lights of the town appeared doused. Flakes almost as large as the palm of her hand sailed out of the whiteness and shattered on the window. She had never seen snowflakes so crystalline; in the instant before each of them broke and slithered down the glass, they looked like florid translucent stars. She peered past them, wiping her breaths from the window, and managed to distinguish a glimmer of the lights of Stargrave drowning in white. Beyond the town and the railway line, a mass like veils as tall as the sky was dancing on the moors. She was gazing entranced at the snow, feeling her breaths becoming slower and more regular as the colourless onrush appeared to do so, when a dim figure rose out of the snow and came towards her.
It was Ben's reflection. His face was a featureless pale mask which seemed to be trying to swarm into a new shape. She turned to him so as to dispel the illusion, and found he was closer to her than she'd realised. His eyes and his smile looked illuminated by the snow. "Shall we get them?" he said.
"What?"
"You mean who."
"It can wait until the morning, Ben, surely. If we wake them now they'll never go back to sleep."
"Maybe they're still awake. At least we can go and see."
As soon as she let the curtains drop, he padded through the shadows which rooted the tree to the floor. She caught up with him on the stairs, but the snow was ahead of them, thumping softly and insistently at the windows of the children's unlit rooms. The breathing beyond the ajar doors told her that Margaret and Johnny were asleep. "They can have a surprise tomorrow," she whispered.
"That's true," he said with an odd shaky smile. "Let's go and watch."
When he ran upstairs she made to quiet him, but he must be tiptoeing. Apart from the sounds at all the windows the house seemed hushed as a snowscape; even her own footfalls sounded muffled to her, and she felt as if she was in a dream. She joined Ben as he opened the workroom door.
The night was beyond it, swooping luminously towards the house. When he took her hand and led her to the window, Ellen felt as if she was walking into darkness much larger than the room. The snow must be rushing down from the moors above Stargrave, but it looked as if it was rising from the forest in a ceaseless wave and homing in on the house. She was hardly aware that her hands were grasping the far edge of the desk so as to have something to hold onto. There were so many patterns in the air that she felt dizzy, almost disembodied – so many patterns moving in so many different directions that they seemed to be taking the world apart before her eyes. The whiteness streamed out of the forest like the seeds of an unimaginable growth; the sky seemed to sink towards her, an endlessly prolonged fall. She felt as though everything, herself included, was slowing down. Stars of ice exploded on the windows, and she thought that soon she might be able to distinguish the shapes of the flakes in the air.
She was distantly aware of her breathing and of Ben, resting his chin on her shoulder as if she had acquired a second head. When he commenced stroking her, his hands moving down her body with exquisite slowness, those sensations felt distant too. She thought he was describing patterns on her skin, patterns which seemed part of the dance of the snow; he might almost have been using her body to sketch what he was seeing. As his fingertips moved down her thighs she opened like a flower. Her flesh had never felt so elaborate, so capable of growing unfamiliar.