The Winter House Read online

  Marnie was trying to revise for some exams, which were coming up, but at the question, a little jolt ran through her. ‘What do you mean?’

  Emma looked at her, amused. ‘What do I mean?’

  ‘No. I mean, nothing is. Nothing at all. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘Why did you wonder?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Marnie.’

  ‘Please tell me.’

  ‘The way you look at each other, that’s all. But I know it’s none of my business. I don’t want to pry.’

  ‘How do we look at each other?’

  ‘As if you like each other, my darling.’

  ‘Of course we like each other. We’re friends,’ said Marnie, crossly. But hope flared inside her and her skin felt suddenly warm – Emma had noticed. She wasn’t just imagining it.

  ‘He’s very nice.’

  ‘He is, isn’t he?’

  ‘So if you did happen to like him –’

  ‘There’s nothing going on.’

  ‘So, if you did happen to like him, Marnie, I’m telling you it’s all right. You’re allowed to.’

  Marnie felt something inside her collapse. ‘But –’

  ‘I know how it must feel. And I know you’re scared as well, after David. But I’m telling you, it’s all right. If you need it, which you shouldn’t, I’m giving you permission.’

  But it didn’t work out like that, after all, because what Marnie didn’t know at the time was that Emma had already discovered a lump in her breast. She didn’t tell Marnie about it; she didn’t tell anyone at all. She went to her GP who referred her, and she had a biopsy and only when she knew that it was cancer did she sit her daughter down, at the end of the day, and tell her calmly that she had discovered it very early, there was no sign of spread and that after her radiation and her advised course of chemotherapy, she was sure she would be all right. Nothing would change, except perhaps she’d feel sick and put on weight because of the medication (an unfair combination, she had always thought); maybe she’d lose her hair. But none of that was going to be a problem – she’d just have to loosen her belt and buy herself a few hats. Maybe a trilby, what did she think? Marnie’s exams would not be disrupted; the B-and-B guests would come in spring; it would be an inconvenience, that was all. Marnie wasn’t to worry.

  ‘Do you understand?’ She leant forward across the kitchen table that separated them. They had just finished eating scrambled eggs on toast, a comforting winter meal; a few drops of rain pattered on the window.

  Marnie looked at her mother. Her thick dark hair was peppered with grey. She looked at the new wrinkles, the crêpy skin under the eyes, those faint brackets around the mouth. Her mother’s face was so familiar to her and so dear that she had stopped noticing it; now it came to her with a jolt of dismay that Emma was no longer a young woman. She wanted to go to her and bury her head in her warm lap and feel Emma’s hands on her head and sob and tell her not to be ill, not to get old, never to leave her, she couldn’t bear it. In her mind she was clinging to Emma and howling for help. But instead she looked into her mother’s eyes and gave her a small nod. ‘I know you’re going to be all right. You’ll come through this.’ She took care to keep any note of panic out of her voice, matching her tone to Emma’s. ‘Tell me exactly what to do and I’ll do it. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. And thank you, Marnie.’

  Their gazes remained locked. Marnie understood that they were each keeping steady for the other’s sake. She knew that fear must be coursing through Emma – fear of her own death and fear for Marnie, as well, who had already lost her father. And, of course, Emma must be imagining what Marnie was feeling now: the terror that was pressing down on her so that it was almost impossible to remain sitting upright in her chair with her hands folded tranquilly on the table and that small, fixed smile on her lips. It was as if her innards were coming apart – her stomach had turned to liquid, her heart was spiky and sharp and didn’t seem in the right place any more, her throat was thick and breath rasped through it unevenly. One leg trembled and she had to push her foot onto the floor to keep it still. She felt dizzy, as if suddenly conscious of the earth spinning under her. Leaning over, she took one of Emma’s hands in hers and raised it, pressing her lips to the knuckles; there were hot tears in her eyes but she blinked them away.

  ‘Why you?’ Marnie wanted to say, but she could already hear her mother’s matter-of-fact response: ‘Well, now, why not?’

  They were such a little family, the two of them.

  She was wrong: it wasn’t just the two of them, after all. Looking back at those months now, Marnie remembered how full the house became, how crowded with activity and hope. She discovered she wasn’t alone. Even now she could feel a swell of gratitude towards her friends who, effectively, became her second and chosen family, gathering round to take her and Emma through the hard spring and out free into the summer.

  She was flooded with memories. Lucy – no cook at the best of times – making ginger snaps as hard as rock because ginger was supposed to be good for nausea; arriving at the crack of dawn each Saturday to help Marnie clean the house, scrubbing baths and lavatories. Ralph weeding the garden with a gusto that left the vegetable plot bare and all the climbing plants pruned to death, or lighting oversized bonfires that sent billows of acrid smoke over the fields and down to the beach. Ralph and Lucy taking it in turns to sit beside Emma as she lay in grim nausea and read poetry to her. Oliver, who had passed his driving test, taking Emma to hospital for her treatment and waiting there with her; and later, when the B-and-B season had begun, turning up with his mother who – seeing sheets draped steaming over all the chairs – insisted she would be responsible for the laundry for the next few months. Ralph and Lucy arriving in the morning before school to help Marnie cook fried breakfasts for guests while Emma lay upstairs with her window wide open, gagging on the smell of bacon. Oliver and Ralph climbing onto the roof to replace slates that had blown off one windy night: Marnie remembered standing in the garden and watching them balance precariously, their shapes outlined against the sky. All four of them repainting Emma’s room the day she had to spend the night in hospital – they were at it for more than ten hours, and when they’d finished they lay side by side on the floor with cans of beer, looking at the pristine ceiling and not saying anything, exhausted and satisfied.

  She had come to know Oliver better over those months. He was the youngest in a large family and his three older sisters, who had cosseted him through his childhood, had all left home. He was reserved and self-deprecating – Marnie had never heard him brag of his achievements and it was only through Ralph that she learnt he was good at languages and popular at his school. He was very protective of Ralph, who in some ways had become the younger brother he’d always wanted (he told her he hated being the youngest in the family, the one who was always looked after, and she told him she didn’t really like being the only child – she didn’t mention Seth). He liked sour apples and dark chocolate, beer with a head of froth and glasses of cold milk; she would see the tiny white moustache on his upper lip and her heart would swell. He liked Dr Who; his favourite novel was The Woman in White; he could play the guitar and if he sang along his voice was husky. He could beat them all at arm wrestling. He had a scar on his knee from a hockey game. He knew lots of jokes but told them badly, so they missed the punch line and then he would blush as they laughed at him. Marnie would see him blush and understand that he was vulnerable like her, anxious like her. Hope would grip and leave her as shaky as a convalescent.

  Once, while they were sitting in a bus station late at night after a concert, he said he had visited Ralph’s house and been appalled by it. He and his parents, who were already dreading their son leaving home, had invited Ralph to move in with them. But Ralph wouldn’t leave Grace alone. Everyone, it seemed, needed to care for someone. Even Ralph, whom they all feared for, had Grace who needed him.

  ‘And you, Ralph.’
More than two decades later, Marnie turned to him on his deathbed. ‘Do you remember how you even went and shaved your head, you bloody fool, to keep Emma company? God, you looked a sight.’ Actually, he had looked both grotesque and beautiful, like a sexless alien with his gleaming skull and enormous eyes. How Marnie had loved him then; tenderness overwhelmed her. She remembered throwing her arms around him, pulling him close to her and kissing his bald head where she could see blue veins running just under the surface. She remembered how still he had gone in her arms, tense with hope, so she had very carefully let him go and stepped away. She shook her head to clear the picture and grinned down at him. ‘And then she didn’t lose any hair after all. It just got a bit thin.’

  His eyes had closed again but she saw a smile quiver on his bloodless lips.

  In a way, they had been the happiest of times, in spite of the cancer. Every day felt precious. Every emotion was heightened, yet also simplified. All that Marnie had felt about Oliver was put on hold. He was simply on her team, and they were working together in the stout old house.

  Spring had come and was going. Oliver, who was taking his A levels very soon, didn’t come so often, although twice a week his mother still collected the sheets. He would be going to university the following term, and as the months passed Marnie allowed herself the sense of lost possibilities. Summer came, spreading golden light over the sea and the fields. The roses bloomed in the garden and the evenings were long and soft. Emma’s treatment was nearly over. She sat in a deck-chair near the beech tree and read novels, or simply stared out at the sea shimmering in the distance. It was the first time that Marnie could remember her mother not being occupied.

  One day, when Emma was at the hospital and Marnie, who had come back early from school, was alone in the house, she had gone into Emma’s room and sat cross-legged on the floor in the fuzzy rectangle of light that lay across the wooden boards. She rarely came in here; she and Emma were careful of each other’s privacy and this was Emma’s world. She looked at herself in the long mirror and saw how like her she was becoming. Standing up, she opened the wardrobe, pushing her hand into the fall of clothes that hung there, pulling out dresses she had never seen on her mother. This pale green one – had Emma worn it with Paolo, before she had children? Marnie tried to picture her, younger and carefree, no grey in her hair or lines on her face, twirling round and letting the skirt balloon out. Or this one: a little black dress that belonged to the kind of glamorous cocktail party Emma never attended now, from an era before Marnie’s time. Had she put on pearls and drunk champagne in it? Marnie buried her face in the soft material, inhaling a smell that was unfamiliar to her, then held it against her body, scrutinizing herself in the mirror. She stood on tiptoe and stared into her face, trying to see beyond it to her mother’s younger face, the face she would have worn before she had children, before she’d lost her son and her husband. She hung the dress back carefully and picked up a pair of pink shoes with high heels and a delicate ankle strap. Had Emma once been the kind of woman who wore these? She kicked off her sandals and inserted her feet into the shoes. They were slightly too big for her. She wobbled, unaccustomedly tall and splay-footed, before the mirror, in her mucky jeans and grass-stained T-shirt, her slightly grubby feet sliding about in the shoes.

  Like a toddler, she pulled open the top drawer of the chest near the window and peered at the cosmetics. Emma rarely wore makeup, maybe a bit of mascara now and then, a dab of lipgloss; most of the items in the drawer looked old and abandoned. Marnie pulled out an ancient red lipstick – again, when had her mother worn such a thing? – and unscrewed the top, winding up the sticky stub and colouring her own lips scarlet. She dabbed silver on her eyelids and put blusher on her pale cheeks. In the mirror an unfamiliar woman gleamed at her, over-defined and defiant. She looked horrible, someone Marnie would go out of her way to avoid.

  There was a black-and-white photograph in the drawer, which Marnie examined. It was slightly faded, with a brown ring to the side, as if someone had put a coffee cup on it. A couple stood in front of a low brick wall. They were smiling self-consciously at the camera. The man was in a suit, dark-haired and dashing; he had a beaky nose and his arm was round the young woman. She wore a skirt that stopped just above her knees and a crisp blouse and looked absurdly young. Her hair was brushed behind her ears. Marnie held the picture up to the window so that she could see more clearly the way her father’s fingers pressed into her mother’s waist; how her mother’s smile crinkled her eyes; how she wore the chain round her throat that she still wore today. Marnie sighed and put the photo back, then went into the bathroom and scrubbed her face until it smarted. She took the nail scissors and cut a triangle out of her fringe.

  One evening in June she went with Ralph to the churchyard. The sun was low in the sky and all the colours – the grey of the church, the green of the grass, the flowers and the deep blue sky – were rich. There were butterflies among the gravestones and birds sang from the trees. A soft, blurred chortle of wood-pigeons filled the air. Marnie led Ralph to where Paolo and Seth were buried, and they sat on the grass together and looked at their mossy names carved into the stone. Somewhere behind them, with a shadow slanting over it, was David’s plot. They both took off their shoes. Marnie wriggled her toes in the cool grass and tipped her head back.

  ‘I keep thinking,’ she said, ‘that soon there might be three of them lying here.’

  ‘Emma’s going to be all right, Marnie. You’ve heard what the doctor says. There was no spread.’

  ‘I know. But all the same –’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And then what would happen to me?’

  ‘You mean –’

  ‘Where would I go? What would I do? They’d all be here together and I’d be on my own. And I can’t even read properly. What will happen to me?’

  ‘No! You’ll never be alone. I’d look after you.’

  ‘You!’ She’d almost laughed, then met his burning stare and realized he was in earnest. ‘How could you look after me, Ralph?’

  ‘I’d look after you,’ he repeated. ‘You’ll never be on your own.’

  ‘Oh, darling Ralph,’ she said, and started to weep, still cross-legged and rocking backwards and forwards on the grass, hugging herself and tears pouring unchecked down her cheeks.

  ‘Don’t, Marnie, I can’t bear it. You never cry. Please don’t.’

  ‘Sorry. Sorry. I don’t know why, it’s stupid, I haven’t really let myself think, and now it’s nearly over and it looks like it might be all right after all, well – sorry. I can’t seem to stop.’ She felt her face pucker and tears slide down her neck and onto the collar of her shirt. She felt salt on her lips. She was dissolving. She screwed her eyes shut but could still see the orange sun behind her closed lids.

  He knelt behind her and put his arms round her, holding her tightly. She half turned and pressed her face into his shoulder, feeling how bristly his head still was. Now he was stroking her tangled hair and wiping tears from her stained cheeks and murmuring words. Nonsense words she didn’t want to hear, about how he loved her, adored her, always had – no, she mustn’t listen, mustn’t cross that line, but still his arm was round her and holding her tight, his hand stroked her hair and her tears wet his T-shirt; his breath was against her cheek.

  He was going to kiss her and she was going to let him – because she was tired and upset and for once in her life all her defences were down and sadness had flooded in, because in his eyes she was unique and lovely, because Oliver hadn’t kissed her, because it was summer and a blackbird was singing its heart out above her, because she was surrounded by dead people and she was scared to death herself, because life seemed to be slipping by too quickly and she wanted to halt it, because the words he was whispering into her ear were comforting her: she had saved him and he would save her. Falling back into the grass, she heard him: he would always be there for her, always, no matter what happened, and no matter where she was or who she became. Seeing his
face above hers, one hand pushing her hair back: always, Marnie, don’t forget, don’t ever forget.

  She stopped and let silence fill the room. She gave a small sigh and took Ralph’s hand. She felt his pulse tick feebly under her thumb. A clock running down.

  Don’t worry, my dear heart, my sweetest love. I knew you didn’t mean it to happen. I knew it was just a kiss. A single kiss in the graveyard because you were sad and scared and I was there. I can close my eyes and be back there. Bats in the sky as the sun went down. A smell of cut grass and cool evening, fresh and earthy. Your face screwed up with misery, and fat tears streaming down your cheeks: I had never seen you like that before. You who were so calm and self-possessed, so kind and collected, always the one who was giving and never receiving, out of my reach. When I saw you cry, snotty and hiccupy and trying to catch your breath, your face creased and plain like a woebegone child’s, I wanted to tear my own heart out of my chest and lay it at your feet. Anything. I would have done anything for you.

  I put my arms around you and I held you, and when you turned your darling wet face towards me, I kissed you. Kissed you in the churchyard as the sun went down. But I knew you didn’t mean anything by it. It wasn’t really me you were kissing. It didn’t give me hope. It was your gift to me. Don’t feel bad. Never feel bad.

  Chapter Twelve

  Marnie went upstairs slowly, hauling herself up each step; her bones ached and her eyes stung. Her face was puffy. She allowed herself to imagine her bed at home – the pillow plumped up, the duvet cover turned back, the room orderly. Although, of course, it wouldn’t be orderly any more: Eva and her friends would have taken it over; makeup would be ground into the carpet, apple cores would be shrivelling on the bedside table and overflowing ashtrays lying on the desk. In the bathroom, she stripped off her clothes and stepped under the shower, shivering in the chilly air. The water came out in an unsatisfactory dribble, too hot at first but quickly cool. She hastily washed with the nub of soap that wouldn’t lather properly in the hard water, and rubbed shampoo vigorously into her hair, rinsing it off as best she could in the little splutters of now cold water. It was a relief to wrap herself in a towel and, scooping up her dirty clothes, go into Ralph’s old bedroom. She could hear that Oliver was setting up the TV and DVD. He was channel-hopping and bursts of studio laughter, gunfire, music drifted up the stairs.