The Winter House Read online

  ‘In the last few years, he lived in Amsterdam. He went there with a woman called Elsa who was a journalist on a glossy monthly. I met her a few times and they came and stayed with me a year or so ago. She was much younger than him but seemed rather calm and nurturing – like Carrie, really. She wanted children. There was one evening, when Ralph was out, that she confided in me. She thought that if she got pregnant, Ralph would understand how much he wanted to be with her and to have his own family. Maybe she was right, maybe it could have worked. I don’t know why he left her either. He worked as a carpenter in Holland – I had an idea that that was a kind of way of recapturing what Emma had done with her pots. He loved Emma, you know. He talked about her even after he stopped talking about you. She was the mother he never had.’

  ‘I know,’ said Marnie. ‘I always knew that.’

  ‘Her death was a great blow. Hers and Grace’s.’

  ‘I was going to ask about Grace.’

  ‘She was the one person he ever felt responsible for. Even when he lost contact with the rest of us he kept in touch with Grace. After she died, I think it was the last tie to – well, to normal life, obligations. He suddenly had a terrible freedom.’

  ‘Terrible? He always wanted freedom – remember how he used to lecture us on it? He even read The Outsider to me once. Every time I was about to fall asleep he’d prod me and say, “This is important, Marnie! Pay attention.” ’

  ‘Terrible because it was as if the last rope tying him down had broken, and he could simply be – be blown away. I suppose I used to think he would kill himself, just because there was nothing stopping him.’

  ‘Did he try?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t know, though. He never said. There were lots of things he didn’t say. I knew him intimately, he was – is, for God’s sake – my best and oldest friend, and yet I sometimes feel I don’t know him at all. I tell you this, though: when my marriage broke up, he was really very good to me. I think he liked being needed. Usually he was the one who needed.’

  ‘That’s true – he was always happy when he could help me with my work, or Mum with things in the house or the garden. He used to try so hard to be useful to us.’

  ‘People would say – do say, every so often, like in those “Where Are They Now?” pieces in a Sunday supplement – that Ralph did not live up to his potential. Perhaps that he even ran away from it, because for some reason he couldn’t bear to be a worldly success. For Ralph, the important things in his life were probably all the ones that he never told anyone. Things inside his head. Feelings, perceptions, torments, joys. Who can say? He would call himself a failure, but I wouldn’t. He was always adorable. Is. Is adorable.’

  ‘Yes. He is.’

  Oliver got up and went to the window, drawing open the curtain to peer outside. ‘I think it might snow tonight,’ he said. ‘It has that heavy feeling.’

  ‘What if we get snowed in?’

  ‘We’ll think about that if it happens. But Dot has a tractor that can get through anything. We’ll be fine.’

  ‘Are we doing the right thing here?’

  ‘It’s what he wanted.’

  ‘I feel so – so unqualified.’

  ‘What qualifications do you need?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Of course. It’s scary.’

  ‘Right.’ Marnie stood up. ‘I’m going to make some custard. Ralph used to love Mum’s custard – he’d eat bowlfuls. I know he won’t manage any, but I’m going to anyway. And then we can drink whisky and watch one of those films. What’s the choice?’

  ‘His Girl Friday, The Lady Vanishes, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Bringing Up Baby. Optimistic, smart, fast films.’

  ‘You choose. I’ll make us some sandwiches, shall I?’

  There was a brisk knock at the door, which opened, and Colette stepped into the room, her cheeks bright pink, steam curling from her rosebud mouth.

  ‘Good evening. My, it’s cold out there and –’ She stopped mid-sentence. ‘Why, gracious me,’ she said quaintly. ‘You’ve done everything up. It looks like Fairyland in here.’

  Marnie laughed self-consciously, feeling foolish. ‘I wanted Ralph to have a taste of Christmas. Maybe I went a bit too far.’

  ‘It’s lovely – don’t you think so, Ralph? But I think I’ll need the overhead lights on, don’t you? Now, how are you? Let’s be having a look at you.’ She pulled off her coat. Drops of water sprinkled the floor.

  ‘We’ll be leaving you for a bit, then,’ said Marnie.

  ‘Grand.’ Colette was bending over Ralph.

  Oliver and Marnie climbed the stairs together to Ralph’s room, and sat side by side on his bed. Oliver put an arm round Marnie’s shoulders and she leant against him. He smelt of woodsmoke and was warm and solid. He pressed his lips to the crown of her head, and she put one hand flat against his chest to feel the steady beat of his heart. He pulled her closer and she felt his breath against her cheek.

  ‘It doesn’t seem fair, does it?’ she asked. ‘Being happy.’

  *

  Ralph woke, half woke, into the soft golden fuzz of the room. He blinked at all the tea-lights that were guttering and throwing strange shapes, and his dry lips twisted into a smile. ‘Oh, Lord, have I died and ended up in a kitsch heaven?’ he whispered. ‘God’s going to be very pissed off with me; I haven’t been very nice about him.’

  ‘Hi, Ralph.’

  ‘You’ve been decorating.’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘Might have known.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Can’t see you properly. A blur.’

  ‘Can I get you anything?’

  ‘’S OK. Where’s Ollie?’

  ‘He’s just taking a shower. We thought we’d watch a film all together. Would you like that?’

  He made an indeterminate sound. Marnie leant forward and picked up his hand. ‘It’s going to snow,’ she said. ‘But it’s warm inside. Warm and cosy.’ She was prattling foolishly. She pressed her lips to his hand and continued, ‘We’ll sit by you and watch an old film and play music and we won’t leave you.’

  ‘It’ll be me leaving you.’ Ralph made a dry, choking sound that Marnie realized was the remnants of his old laughter. ‘That’s never happened before, has it?’

  Chapter Thirteen

  When her treatment was over, Emma announced that they would go on holiday that summer. ‘Eric’s invited us to stay in his summer cottage in the Highlands.’

  ‘What about the B-and-B?’

  ‘We’ll have to tear ourselves away from it.’

  ‘Can we afford it?’

  ‘That’s not your concern – but, yes, we’ll be fine. I think we’ve earned it.’

  ‘Doesn’t Eric need the cottage?’

  ‘He’ll be there too.’

  ‘What about his wife?’

  ‘She won’t be. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t live with her any more. They’ve decided to separate.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Marnie. ‘I see.’ And she thought, with a wild lurch of apprehension, that perhaps she suddenly did see, though she wasn’t sure she liked it. She stared at her mother accusingly, but Emma returned her gaze, refusing to drop her eyes.

  ‘It’s by a loch, very remote and beautiful. There’s a boat.’

  ‘Just you and Eric and me?’

  ‘Yes. Is that a problem?’

  ‘No. No problem. And I’m – well, I’m glad you can have a proper rest after everything. It’s just – can I invite Lucy? I know she’s not doing anything in the summer.’

  ‘Of course. As a matter of fact, I was going to suggest that myself. What about Ralph?’

  ‘What about Ralph?’

  ‘Do you want to ask him as well?’

  ‘No!’ said Marnie, crossly. ‘I do not. It would just make everything too complicated. I don’t want to be worrying all the time. I want to be selfish.’

  ‘OK, no Ralph.’

  Eric’s house was wooden and snug. From it
s two large front windows you could see the small loch, which, on the evening they arrived, glowed in the sunset, still as a mirror in which was reflected the fringe of trees and the few streaks of cloud; the back looked out onto the forest, which stretched away, cool, dark and mysterious.

  Emma stayed in the wooden guesthouse that Eric had built on the side of the main house, with its own separate entrance, just big enough for the double bed and a basin in the corner. She never mentioned her relationship with Eric, and Marnie, watching her, couldn’t tell what was going on between them. Her mother went to bed every night in the guesthouse, alone; each morning she would emerge from there, washed and dressed and looking refreshed. They still behaved courteously to each other, and certainly never touched or held hands. But there was a new shine to Emma, a softness and restfulness that hadn’t been there before. And sometimes Marnie would intercept a glance between them, a smiling look of intimacy. It was like being the mother, not the daughter, she thought: first nursing Emma through her illness, and now spying on her love life, if that was what it was.

  Lucy and Marnie shared the bedroom next to Eric’s, with a ceiling that sloped almost to the floor so that they had to crawl into their beds to avoid banging their heads. For the first two days Ralph – for of course Ralph had come too: Marnie was unable to leave him behind – slept in the small room next to the kitchen on a fold-out divan, but then he moved out into the one-man tent Eric hauled out of the attic. It was missing one of its poles so that the back sagged, and it leaked copiously if the rain was heavy. Mosquitoes whined in its darkness and there was a faint smell of mildew, but Ralph was absurdly cheerful about all discomfort. He had never been on holiday before, apart from a miserable week spent in Frinton a few years before, and he had never slept in a tent. He crawled into it each night with an air of ownership; in the mornings he emerged like a badger coming out of its sett, his face sprouting the unsatisfactory beginnings of a wispy beard.

  He had packed a motley collection of entirely inappropriate clothing: a thick, moth-eaten greatcoat, a balding velvet jacket, a pair of white drainpipe trousers he’d picked up in a thrift shop for a couple of quid, which quickly became so filthy he folded them into a wad and used them as his pillow, and cowboy boots from the same shop, which pinched his feet. Eric lent him an ancient pair of canvas shorts to keep him going, and these he wore day in, day out, though they were voluminous on his spare frame and he had to keep them up with a piece of rope he found in the bottom of Eric’s sailing boat. He looked more like an abandoned waif than ever, with his skinny legs and bony knees poking out of the flapping shorts and his matted hair.

  When Marnie looked back on those weeks, they had the quality of a dream, without context, disconnected from the past or the future. There in the north, in the middle of summer, it never seemed to get dark. Dawn broke softly almost as the dusk faded away; the horizon always seemed rimmed with a faint luminescence. In the evenings, shadows stretched long fingers across the grass, light thickened, coolness gathered in corners. Marnie, Lucy and Ralph would often swim at midnight, lying on their backs in the water and gazing up at the sky. Or they would take the rowing boat out into the middle of the loch and sit there for hours, talking and falling silent, maybe throwing a line out in a hopeless attempt to lure the bony perch that had long since retreated to the reeds. During the day, they would laze around on the shore or take the sailing boat out, though the wind was rarely strong enough to fill its sails. They sometimes walked in the forest, feet sinking into the soft moss. The light splashed through the pine trees and birches and birds sang invisibly above; often a woodpecker tapped somewhere in the distance, and the hollow sound reverberated through the woods.

  Emma and Eric were there, of course, but often they got up early and spent their days searching for wild mushrooms in the woods or going for long walks with binoculars and returning with tales of red kites and reed warblers. For much of the time, Marnie, Lucy and Ralph were alone, in days that seemed to have no boundaries. As if by unspoken consent, they left behind the prickly discomforts of their adolescence and behaved like children. It didn’t seem strange to Marnie to lie on her stomach and let Ralph unhook her bikini and rub sun lotion into her warm skin; when they wrestled in the water – her bare limbs tangling with his and his laughing, bristly face close to hers – she did not draw back from him, or worry that he might want to kiss her again. Lucy, her small face tanned and her hair growing out of its spikes into a soft muss, forgot to be sardonic; she almost forgot to be in love with Ralph, as if they had all regressed into a state of innocence. There was safety in the threesome.

  Several times, Eric took Ralph fishing. Marnie would always carry in her memory the picture of the pair silhouetted side by side on the boat with their rods. Sometimes she could hear Ralph’s laugh ripple over the water, a sound of pure happiness. She did a sketch of them in charcoal and years later, looking at it, she could still hear the accompanying laughter and it would bring back Ralph as he was then, suspended between boyhood and manhood, uncertain and oddly beautiful, energy coursing through his gangly frame and his face lit with joy.

  Everything changed when Oliver turned up. He had told Ralph that he might ‘drop in’, because he would be visiting his sister who lived in Edinburgh, but no one had taken him seriously. It felt as though he had dropped out of their world. None of them had seen him for more than a month: straight after his exams he and two friends had gone backpacking round Europe. Marnie had received one postcard from Barcelona saying simply, ‘Eating tapas and thinking of you, O xxx’. She had it in her bag now and every so often, when she was alone, she would take it out and look at the line drawing of a naked woman on the front, and at the neat italic handwriting on the other side, relive the moment when she had put her arms around him and felt his mouth press down on hers, before his girlfriend had pranced in. That was the last time she had seen him, although he had phoned her twice, asking if he could come round. Both times, aching for a sight of him, she had said, no, she was busy, then cursed her own obstinacy and pride. And – proud himself, perhaps – he had not persisted.

  He arrived in the evening, when the sun was low and the light thick and golden. Apart from Eric, who was in the house cleaning the parasol mushrooms that he and Emma had gathered, they were outside, sitting on the grass. Ralph was making a big fuss about gutting the two perch he had caught, shouting in mock horror as he drew soft purple strings out of their bellies, Lucy and Emma were reading, and Marnie was trying to draw the birches that half hid the view of the loch. It was warm and windless. Marnie still remembered what she was wearing then – her old denim shorts and a halter-neck bikini top, bare feet, a chain around her ankle. Her hair was in a single French plait that Lucy had braided that afternoon after they’d swum and was coming undone. She even remembered that Emma had put on a wide-brimmed hat and, in her long skirt, looked like an out-of-place Edwardian lady.

  It was Marnie who saw him first, though she didn’t recognize him at once; he was just a figure in the distance, carrying a large rucksack. But then he drew closer. He raised a hand and she gave a small gasp, leaning forward and shading her eyes to make sure.

  ‘What?’ asked Lucy, looking up from her book.

  ‘I think –’

  ‘But that’s Ollie! Look, Ralph, it’s Oliver.’

  Ralph dropped his fish into the bucket with a wet plop and stood up; he was bare-chested and his shorts were stained with grass. Marnie saw how he flinched in shock, then wrenched his mouth into a broad smile and ran forward, shouting a loud hello, overdoing the delight. Marnie rose, too, but remained where she was, watching Ralph, who looked suddenly small and scrawny, approach his friend and hug him. She was oddly breathless. Her heart thumped and her hands were sweaty; she wiped them down her shorts and pushed her hair off her face. What did she look like?

  ‘Hello, Marnie.’

  So there he was in front of her, a shy, tentative smile on his face. He was taller than she remembered. His hair was lighter, bleached
by sun and salt, and longer. He was wearing a stained T-shirt and she saw how his arms were tanned and strong. He looked older, as well – as if he’d left them all behind.

  ‘Ollie,’ she managed. Her voice was husky.

  ‘I hope it’s OK that I’ve turned up out of the blue like this. I was quite close and I thought I couldn’t not. Lucy, hi. I like your hair, by the way. Emma, did you know I might come? Ralph said I should. Is it all right?’

  ‘Of course.’ Emma got out of her deck-chair and went over to kiss him on both cheeks. Marnie saw she looked concerned beneath the smile. ‘I didn’t know, but that doesn’t matter. You’re always welcome, as long as you don’t mind not having a bed.’

  ‘Ollie doesn’t need a bed. He’s been roughing it all the way round Europe without one,’ Ralph gabbled. ‘He can have my bed, or my tent, and I’ll take the bed, or he can share my tent with me. Whatever. How did you get here anyway?’

  ‘I hitched and then walked the last few miles.’ Oliver slid the rucksack off his back onto the ground and rubbed his shoulders. ‘It’s very hot.’

  ‘You must be knackered. Have you had an amazing time? You’re going to have to tell us all about it.’ Ralph turned to Emma. ‘He’s been everywhere, you know, all the places I dream of going to one day. Paris, Rome, Budapest – did you know that Buda and Pest used to be two cities? – Prague.’