The Winter House Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  The Winter House

  Praise for Nicci Gerrard’s novels:

  ‘Beguiling, poignant, wonderful’ Sunday Express

  ‘Acutely observed, this is modern relationship territory with a twist’ Elle

  ‘Unpretentious and page-turning’ Independent

  ‘Truthful and wise… this is a fine anti-romance’ Daily Mail

  ‘A quietly impressive novel that isn’t afraid to take on the big themes of life, love and the inescapable influences of families’ Guardian

  ‘A skilfully observed book about grief, sibling relations and first love’ Company

  ‘A thoughtful tale of love, sibling rivalry and family secrets’ Vogue

  ‘A moving and perceptive insight into deception and renewal’ Sunday Mirror

  ‘A heartening story of a woman betrayed by her husband who slowly realizes she has her own passions and dreams to follow’ Good Housekeeping

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nicci Gerrard writes for the Observer and is the co-author, with Sean French, of the bestselling Nicci French thrillers. She lives in Suffolk with her husband and four children. Her novels Things We Knew Were True, Solace and The Moment You Were Gone are all published by Penguin and received rave reviews.

  The Winter House

  NICCI GERRARD

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2009

  Copyright © Joined-up Writing, 2009

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-195794-4

  To Jackie, Tim and Kate

  Chapter One

  The phone call came at a quarter to eight, when it still wasn’t fully light outside; a chilly drizzle spattered the window-panes and spread a fine gauze over the skyline, so that nothing was entirely clear and rooftops and trees acquired a blurred, mysterious air. Marnie hesitated. Her slice of bread was under the grill and already done on one side; her coffee was brewing in the cafetière; a newspaper lay open on the table beside the plate and the jar of marmalade. This was her peaceful time of the day. She had already been out for a run and taken a shower. Now she was wearing her dressing-gown, scrubbed and virtuous, the pleasurable ache of exercise in her limbs, in a kitchen that smelt of toast, detergent and the basil that grew in a pot on the window-sill, which she watered every morning. Eva and her boyfriend would be asleep for hours, the door shut on the unimaginable squalor of their room. The unblemished day lay ahead of her. Reluctantly, she picked up the phone.

  ‘Hello? Marnie here.’

  ‘Marnie?’ The voice, overlaid by a static crackle, was not one she immediately placed, though it was oddly familiar and, as certain smells can, awoke a powerful but elusive memory.

  ‘Yes, speaking.’

  ‘This is Oliver. Oliver Fenton.’

  ‘Oliver?’ She frowned, and her grip tightened on the phone. The morning tipped into strangeness. ‘But – I mean, what –?’

  ‘I know this is unexpected. I’m calling about Ralph.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Marnie. ‘Please hold on for just one moment.’ She put the phone down carefully, noticing that her hands were shaking slightly, and went to turn off the grill. The toast was just beginning to burn, its crust singeing. She poured herself half a cup of coffee and picked up the phone again, turning her back on the ordered morning she had prepared for herself and looking instead out of the window. In the flats opposite, a man in boxer shorts was eating cereal straight out of the packet. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I had to – Ralph, you said?’

  ‘You need to come and see him.’ The voice bounced, losing syllables. It sounded as though Oliver was shouting through a high wind.

  ‘I need to come and see him,’ she repeated stupidly. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘He’s dying.’ A young woman in combat trousers carrying a polystyrene cup of coffee was passing beneath the window now; Marnie gazed down at the straight white parting in her sleek black ponytail. She walked very gracefully, like a dancer. ‘Marnie?’

  ‘I’m still here.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I can’t hear you very well.’

  ‘I said, he’s dying. And he wants to see you.’

  ‘But I –’

  ‘He’s in his cottage in Scotland. I’ve booked you on a flight to the nearest airport. It’s about sixty miles from here.’

  ‘Hang on. I can’t simply – as if –’

  ‘The plane leaves at three twenty this afternoon. From Stansted. You just need to show your passport.’

  ‘I have to go to work today.’

  ‘Someone will meet you there,’ continued Oliver, as if she hadn’t spoken.

  ‘You’re breaking up.’

  ‘I said, someone will meet you there. OK?’

  ‘Oliver, wait! You have to tell me – I mean, why?’

  ‘I can’t do it alone,’ he said. Or she thought he said, through the crackle.

  ‘Wait!’ The wind blew down the line at her and she shuddered, imagining she could feel its cold breath against her skin. ‘How long for?’ she shouted against it. ‘Hello? Oliver? Are you still there? Can you hear me? Damn.’

  Frowning, she returned the phone to its cradle. Her hands were no longer trembling, but she felt cold and oddly heavy. She took a gulp of coffee, but it was tepid and bitter, so she poured it down the sink. She threw the toast into the bin. Put the marmalade back on the shelf. Folded the paper so the headline (‘Family die in fire’) was no longer showing, and sat at the table, shutting her eyes and resting her head in her hands. She wanted to think but for a while no thoughts came, no images, even, just a voice in the darkness repeating words that made little sense. ‘It’s Ralph… He’s dying…’

  When she lifted her head again, the room seemed suddenly unfamiliar to her, as if she had already left it, and it had receded into her past, like a story that was over: a small, well-lit space; four chairs pushed against the wooden table she had rescued from a skip and restored; well-stocked cupboards; shelves lined with herbs; the calendar on the wall turned to December – a bare tree spreading its boughs across an empty winter landscape. There was a small whiteboard on the door, items to remember written on it in red felt-tip. ‘Milk’, ‘Bin bags’, ‘Phone council’, �
�B’day cards to Claire, Martin and Anna’. It was snug and functional, like a cabin on a great liner. Returning from work in the evening, she would look up at her illuminated window, and it would seem to her that her flat was bobbing in the buoyant darkness above.

  Perhaps she would simply ignore the phone call, pretend that it had never happened. Then her life could continue on the same tack, a steady course that over the last months had consoled her. But even as she thought this, imagining herself going smoothly through her unchanged day, she was making plans. She heated up a second cup of coffee in the microwave and made a list in her head of all the things she needed to do, her mind skittering across the icy surface of the news and trying not to break through into scary waters. Pack a few clothes – it would be cold in the north of Scotland in December. Walking boots and thick sweaters, gloves, thermal socks. Layers: that was what her mother had always counselled whenever Marnie was packing, and she seemed to have been packing for most of her life. Ralph was dying – at least, Oliver had said so, but it didn’t feel true or even possible. Passport, although it was only a domestic flight. A couple of books. Her notebook. Travel light – how long would she be gone, anyway? A day? Two? More? For a moment, Ralph’s face flashed into view, vivid with life, youthful with time unaccounted for, smiling at her as she sat befuddled in her kitchen. She felt a vicious pinch of panic. He couldn’t die. He couldn’t leave yet. Tampons, toothbrush, makeup, migraine tablets. She hadn’t asked how he was dying. Had he been hit by a car? Or perhaps a stroke, so now his mobile face was slack and lopsided. Would she even recognize him?

  Eight o’clock: only fifteen minutes had passed since Oliver’s phone call. She needed to tell Elaine that she wouldn’t be at work for the next day or so, and she knew Elaine would not be best pleased. Marnie worked in a puppet museum in Soho, just a few minutes from her flat, and Elaine was the owner. She was a short, fat, squashy American woman of indeterminate age who lived in Chichester with her cats, wore mustard-coloured leggings and prickly woollen jerseys, carried her purse (often containing great wads of cash) in a plastic bag, talked in bursts of furious speed, and was as sharp as a tack. She was also, it seemed, very rich, although Marnie had never discovered how, and the museum – which was really too small, dark, dusty and strange to deserve such a name – was one of her hobbies on which she occasionally, fiercely, lavished her attention and money until she forgot about it once more. She never expected it to make a profit and it never did.

  Indeed, unpublicized and hidden down an obscure side-street, few people seemed to know of its existence. There were entire days when Marnie would receive not a single visitor; she would spend her time rearranging the items that were for sale, dusting exhibits, cleaning windows, making cups of coffee. Sometimes, turning the handmade ‘Open’ sign to ‘Closed’, she would play truant for half an hour or so and wander round Soho, speeding past shops where leather corsets and alarming sex aids stood in the windows, but lingering in places that sold Indian wedding shawls or battered second-hand books of engravings.

  Nevertheless, Elaine liked her to be at the museum from nine thirty until six, except on Wednesday and Sunday when it was closed to the public. You could hire it then for parties, apparently, although nobody had done so in Marnie’s time: the rooms were too small, the stairway too narrow, there was no kitchen and only one tiny lavatory, which was squeezed into the space between the Sicilian marionettes and the shelves of tiny finger puppets.

  Marnie dialled the number.

  Elaine answered on the first ring. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Elaine, it’s me, Marnie – I hope I didn’t wake you.’

  ‘Nonsense – it’s past eight. What time do you think I get up?’

  ‘It’s just… I have a problem. I’ve got to take a few days off work.’

  ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘No, not me. A friend.’ She hesitated. ‘A good friend. I’ve got to go to Scotland.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Today.’

  ‘Oh!’ Elaine gave a small grumbling sigh. Marnie could hear her tapping her stubby fingers on a surface. ‘Well, if you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. I’ll just have to try and find someone to cover. We can’t have the museum closed while you’re away, can we?’

  ‘I was thinking, I know someone who might be able to stand in. She’s young, not quite twenty, but she’s –’ Marnie broke off. ‘Responsible. And she knows the museum already – she’s spent time there with me. She loves it.’

  ‘Who’s this paragon?’

  ‘Eva. She’s my, um, niece, kind of.’

  It was simpler than saying that Eva was her exstepdaughter.

  ‘I didn’t know you had siblings.’

  ‘No – well, it’s complicated.’

  ‘This Eva, when could she start?’

  ‘Today, I’m sure. She’s staying in my flat, so I could show her the ropes before I go.’

  ‘Hmm. Responsible, you say?’

  ‘Yes.’ Marnie said it more assertively this time, swallowing her misgivings.

  ‘Does she know about this?’

  ‘I thought I’d ask you first. But I’m sure she’ll want to do it – she’s looking for work.’

  That wasn’t quite right, of course: for the past ten days, Eva had been thinking about looking for work or, even, planning to think about it.

  ‘All right, then. If you vouch for her.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And, Marnie…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your friend, I hope she – he? – will be all right.’

  ‘Thank you.’ For a moment, the knowledge of what she was going to flooded through Marnie and she stood breathless, although she was half conscious that it wasn’t only fear she was feeling but a kind of mysterious, tingling excitement. There were moments when certainty dropped away and you were left in a high and lonely place, dizzy with precariousness. She put out a hand to touch the table, pressed her bare toes into the tiles. She wanted to add something, but all she could think was ‘His name is Ralph.’ Saying his name out loud brought meaning closer. And when had she last spoken it?

  Elaine’s tone became brisk again. ‘Right. Give this Eva my phone number in case of emergencies.’

  ‘Of course. Thanks, Elaine.’

  ‘Take care now.’

  ‘I will. You too.’

  Marnie made another pot of coffee, extra strong. She heated some milk and sloshed it into two mugs, adding a teaspoon of sugar to one. Then, holding both in one hand, she rapped sharply at Eva’s door. Waited. Rapped again.

  ‘Hnnuff?’

  ‘Eva?’ She pushed the door with a toe and it swung open a few inches before it was blocked by some unseen obstacle. ‘Good morning.’

  ‘’Stime?’

  ‘I’ve brought you both some coffee.’

  Marnie squeezed through the door, wading over soft drifts of discarded clothes and occasional crunchy objects – a CD case, a mobile phone, a wallet – to the futon where Eva and her boyfriend Gregor lay. She could make out Gregor’s soft brown locks, a single squinting eye, and one hand, outflung so that his fingers trailed on the littered carpet, but Eva was invisible. A sequined cushion, made by Marnie many years ago, lay squarely over her face, and the duvet was wrapped around her body. Only three toes, with dark purple nails, peeked out at the end of the bed. What was more, there was a third body in the room, sprawled on the floor dressed only in boxers and one sock, with a T-shirt of Eva’s covering his face. An irregular snore whistled through it and his hairless chest rose and fell peacefully.

  The curtained room was full of a sour morning smell, mixed with tobacco and perfume. Marnie wrinkled her nose. Until Eva had turned up, this had been her small workroom. Now all her tools and materials were stacked in shoeboxes and large bags under her bed and on top of her wardrobe. In their place, Eva and Gregor had scattered their things like farmers sowing seed. It felt like a mathematical impossibility: they had so few possessions yet they made so much mess with them.

&n
bsp; ‘I wouldn’t have woken you, only there’s an emergency.’

  A snuffling query came from under the cushion. Gregor’s long fingers curled into a fist that was retracted under the covers. He gave a wounded sigh. The man on the floor shifted slightly.

  ‘You’ve got a job. Eva, do you hear me?’

  ‘Job?’

  ‘Yes. You said you were looking for a job. Now you’ve got one.’

  ‘I’m hibernating.’

  ‘I’m putting two mugs of coffee down. I didn’t know you had a visitor. Don’t spill them. So this is where all my mugs have got to. Some are growing mould. Listen, I’ve got to go away for a few days.’

  Eva pulled the cushion off her face, though her eyes remained screwed tightly shut. She aimed her blind glance in Marnie’s direction. ‘When?’

  ‘Today. In a few hours. You’re taking my place.’

  The eyes opened a crack. ‘I am?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In your museum?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Oh.’ The eyes shut again.

  ‘Don’t go back to sleep again. Eva! I’m turning on the light – are you ready? I’m going to take you there in, let’s see, half an hour or so. I’ll show you how everything works and leave you.’

  ‘Half an hour!’

  ‘Yes. Please, Eva. This is important.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I need to leave before –’

  ‘No.’ Eva struggled to a half-sitting position and pushed back a tangle of black hair. ‘Why are you going?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when you’re out of bed and dressed.’

  ‘Marnie!’

  ‘Ten minutes. I’ll get you something to eat.’

  ‘’K.’

  ‘Remember your coffee before it gets cold.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  Marnie retreated, pulling shut the door. In her own room, she put on a black corduroy skirt, thin T-shirt, pale grey V-necked jersey and a pair of old black boots, then pulled her holdall out of the cupboard. It still had its last air ticket attached to the handle and in a side pocket a small spray deodorant and a hairbrush. She added knickers, bras, several pairs of socks and toiletries. Hardly pausing to think, she selected a pair of jeans, three shirts, another jersey, the dressing-gown she’d just got out of. What else? Shampoo, toothbrush. Passport, with six years left before it expired. Four years ago she’d looked much younger – a kind of softness about her face that had since been chiselled away. She pulled her belted grey coat out of the wardrobe and threw it on top of her bag.