He knew what he was doing – knew that there was no taking it back. Both his hands caught fire as the matches burst into flames and he dropped the book between his feet. At once flames raced up his body and reached his face before he could draw breath to scream.
The forest seemed to emit the cry for him. The snow between the trees rose up and flocked towards him with a screech of ice on ice. In the moments before the fire which was himself blinded and deafened him, he saw the swarming patterns reverse their direction and rush towards him as though to extinguish him. He felt the flames boiling his eyes and entering his skull through every orifice, and he thought he would go mad with agony before he died, an agony which felt as if it might never end.
And then the agony fell away from him, although he was still conscious. He seemed to be borne away by the icy flock, lifted into the endless dark. He felt he was merging with the blizzard, but it was more than that: he was expanding like a galaxy. Perhaps his consciousness was doing so at last; perhaps his terror of the presence he'd glimpsed in the forest had been a symptom of his failure to grasp the awesomeness of it. Perhaps this insight was all he could expect, the nearest to a resolution of a lifetime of expectancy he could hope for, or perhaps it was only the beginning.
EPILOGUE
Though the restaurant near Covent Garden was new, it tried to seem older. Beneath the half-shell of the pediment, the front door was of stout oak and sported a heavy brass knocker, the face of a jovial chef with a ring between his teeth. Beyond the latticed windows whose panes resembled flat transparent breasts set in glass, a few blurred shapes of diners were silhouetted against a fire. On the pavement by the doorway, one of a pair of blackboards supporting each other and staggering a little whenever the wind found them announced that for the duration of the Christmas holidays a magician would be performing at lunchtimes and in the early evenings. "We can go somewhere else if you'd rather," Kerys said. "I only booked us in here because I thought you'd have the children with you."
"Why, do you think I'm too old for magic?"
"You better hadn't be. The food's meant to be good," Kerys added, and grinned wryly. "Don't you dare say what you're thinking."
"I was thinking it might be an adventure."
"I've known writers I'm afraid to open my mouth near because anything they hear you say, they'll worry it to death. Not that I want writers who don't care about words," Kerys said, and turning the heavy doorknob, let them in.
The low ceiling of the long dim stone-floored room was supported by new oak beams. Benches composed of back-to-back pews which faced bare tables protruded from the walls. Beyond the ranks of booths a log fire blazed in an open hearth on which the flames made a set of gleaming fire-irons appear to dance. On the plaster walls between the pews, most of which were noisily crowded, holly wreaths hung. Everything about the restaurant, including the vaguely Dickensian uniforms worn by the staff, was intended to appeal to a generalised nostalgia, but Kerys obviously hadn't expected the decor to be so concerned to invoke an old-fashioned Christmas. Once they were seated in their booth and the waitress had cleared the places the children would have used, Ellen was silent until the champagne arrived, and then she clinked glasses with Kerys. "To Christmas Dreams," she said.
"And all the other books I hope we're going to do together."
"I hope so too."
Just as the pause grew awkward, Kerys said "Will you want to help promote it, do you think?"
"Try and stop me. I'd be out promoting it now if I'd delivered it in time for you to have it in the shops this Christmas."
"You had to take all the time you needed," Kerys said as if she didn't suspect Ellen of bravado. "Did Alice Carroll have much to say about your coming to us?"
"There wasn't much she could say once I told her how much you were offering."
"No more than you're worth. And remember I said that if you ever feel Ember aren't doing right by your – by the earlier books, you know where they'll find a home."
"I'll remember. Now, Kerys, listen -"
But a mob-capped waitress had stopped at their table, asking "Ready to order?" Ellen and Kerys selected their meals from the schoolroom slates which served as menus. As soon as the waitress moved away Ellen said "Kerys, you needn't be so careful what you say to me. It's been a year."
"I won't if I'm making it harder for you. I didn't know if you wanted to talk about it, to me anyway."
"Why not to you? You're a friend," Ellen said, smiling wryly at the way the roles of counsellor and counselled were switching back and forth. "Besides, talking may help me remember."
"You don't think you're having problems with that because…”
"Because I can't bear to think I've lost Ben?" The aching hollow opened up within her before the words were past her lips. "I don't think so. I know I've lost him, I won't ever stop knowing, but I'm beginning to get over it, I'm even beginning not to feel guilty because I am. The children and I, we look after each other. They're growing up."
All the same, they would have liked to see the magician, a young man in a top hat and tails who was performing for three children in a booth by the fire. As Ellen watched, he lit a piece of paper on which the eldest had written his own name and then, having reduced it to ashes in the ashtray, produced the signed paper from them. The sight of the children's absorbed faces illuminated by the flames affected her with a yearning so intense that she winced. As the children applauded, Kerys turned away from watching. "How are they taking it, your two?"
"They got over the worst of it sooner. Their friends helped, the ones who were left. Children can bear a lot if they have to. Sometimes I think that's a tragedy and sometimes a miracle. But they don't remember any more than I do."
"Do you want to talk about what you remember?"
"I thought you'd never ask," Ellen said so that Kerys wouldn't blame herself for doing so. She drained her glass slowly, trying to reach into the gap which interrupted her memories, but all she could find there was an image of endless unmarked snow. "I remember it being so cold we thought we were all going to die," she said.
"Everyone thought they had it bad, but where you live is supposed to have been colder than anywhere else in the country, so cold the weather people don't know why."
"So cold that I think it affected our minds up there. Nobody remembers what happened on what's supposed to have been the worst day."
"When the town fell asleep, it said on the radio."
"Radio, television, newspapers… The world's forgotten about us by now, thank God, except for the counselling service that came in. Some people still use it, but it didn't seem to do much for me. I'm not complaining." She waited while Kerys refilled the glasses. "As you say, the cold put the town to sleep, but nobody remembers that. I remember waking on the floor at the top of the house with no idea of when the children and I had gone up there or why. We must have been trying to keep one another warm. I don't know how long it took us to disentangle ourselves so we could go to the window. It was frosted thick and frozen shut – it took the three of us to shift it. You might think opening a window on a night like that wasn't such a brilliant idea. The children did," she said, and paused, but the flicker of another memory was already extinguished. "We got it open, and there was the snow, nothing but snow. And yet somehow I knew the worst was over."
She had never understood what she had been afraid to see which had made the sight of the forest huddled under snow beyond the blank common so reassuring. She'd craned out of the window until she had been certain that the air, icy though it was, was growing warmer. "You must have felt…" Kerys said, and trailed off.