The Winter House Read online

  Knocking at Eva’s door again as she passed, she returned to the kitchen and put two panini into the oven. A panino with Marmite and melted cheese was Eva’s current favourite breakfast (previously, it had been a cinnamon bagel). She was a slender young woman, everything about her – wrists, ankles, thin face, shallow hips and narrow shoulders – delicate, almost breakable, but she ate with the gusto of a brickie at the end of a hard day. Marnie didn’t know where it went: Eva rarely did any exercise and was as indolent as a cat lying in a puddle of sunlight.

  Eva and her younger sister Luisa were probably the reasons why Marnie had stayed with their father, Fabio, for as long as she had. Perhaps they were the reason she’d fallen in love with him in the first place; that and the need that had filled her body, top to toe, to have a child herself. When she had first met the girls, they were nine and just seven: shock-headed, springy-limbed waifs with dark eyes who’d been motherless for a year and a half and who had about them, in their different ways, a neediness that had overwhelmed Marnie with a maternal desire to protect them that she had never quite shaken off, just learnt to hide. Luisa, mild and painfully shy, had trusted Marnie at once, climbing into bed between her and Fabio, slipping her small hand into hers on the way to school each morning, allowing Marnie to tie her unruly hair into plaits and choose her clothes with her; Eva had ignored her, then sneered at her in front of Fabio, trying to humiliate her out of her patience, then fought her, once even spat at her, like a wild cat, and finally accepted her in a gust of tears.

  Marnie had steered both girls through hormonal rushes, friendship worries, periods, exams, first boyfriends, hangovers. She had taught them how to cook English food as well as Italian; how to use oil paints and watercolours; how to sew, knit, mend pots and change plugs. They had shown her Florence, Siena and Pisa, and corrected her Italian grammar. She had taken them sailing, as her own mother had taken her, and as the salty spume licked over her face and she saw them laughing while the little boat bucked through the waves, she told herself to remember this moment and call it by its proper name: happiness. She had held them when they wept. She had giggled with them. She had never had that baby with Fabio and bit by bit, like a fog gradually lifting, she had come to see that Fabio was off not-having-babies with other women as well, returning to her after each one with an exuberant, penitent tenderness that should have warned her long before it did. Leaving him was easy; leaving them was perhaps the hardest thing she had ever done – except that by the time she did, they were leaving too. And then, a few weeks ago, Eva had turned up on her doorstep with a small bag and a large, dishevelled Polish boyfriend. She’d come, she had said off-handedly, to stay for a bit and look for work before travelling – that was all right, wasn’t it? And Marnie, hiding her grateful joy under an equally casual manner, said that of course it was fine; she should stay as long as she wanted.

  She grated cheese over the panini, popped them back under the grill, then opened the kitchen door. ‘Eva! Come on!’

  ‘One minute.’

  ‘It’s been more than fifteen already.’

  When Eva finally made it into the kitchen, her high shoes tick-tacking over the tiles, she was wearing a short, swinging green skirt over patterned tights, an orange long-sleeved shirt, half unbuttoned to show a pink top beneath it. She was festooned with necklaces, bright bangles jangled on her wrists and earrings rattled in her small lobes; a stud glittered in her nostril. Her fingernails were painted vermilion, her eyelids turquoise, her lashes dark blue, her lips a luscious red.

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Marnie, feeling suddenly cheerful in spite of the phone call. ‘You make my eyes throb.’

  ‘I thought I should make an effort.’ Although her English was fluent, her intonation still pattered, a tuneful machine-gun.

  ‘Who’s the man on your floor?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Eva, vaguely. ‘He did tell me. We met him last night. He missed his last train home. Is this for me?’ She took a large bite of panino, and threads of melted cheese attached to her pointed, determined chin.

  Marnie saw that she had a small spiral painted – or tattooed? – on her collarbone. ‘You look like an emergency flare. At least it’s quite dark in the museum. That’ll mute you a bit. Anyway, there might not be any customers to scare off. Some days are very quiet.’

  Eva perched on a chair. ‘So, tell me. Where are you off to, all dressed in black and grey like a nun?’

  ‘To see a friend who’s ill.’

  ‘A friend? A man friend, by any chance?’

  ‘Someone I knew a long time ago.’

  ‘Before Babbo?’

  ‘Long before.’

  ‘A mystery. How ill is he?’

  Marnie didn’t reply: in the face of Eva’s concern she found that she couldn’t. There was a hook in her throat. She bit her lip hard and stared out of the window. Three young women rippled past in the increasing rain; a traffic warden, trudging head down; a father and his tiny child, who was swaddled in a colourful scarf and had a bobble hat pulled down over his brow.

  ‘It’s that bad?’ said Eva. ‘Oh dear. Dear-dear-dear.’ She had a motherly side: she tutted soothingly and her small hand, heavy with cheap rings, was stroking Marnie’s shoulder.

  ‘I’m not sure when I’ll be back. It won’t be long. A few days. Maybe I’ll be home tomorrow. I’ll ring. You’ll be all right?’

  ‘Certainly I’ll be all right.’

  ‘And you’ll –’

  ‘And I’ll look after the flat and not make too much noise at night and I’ll make sure everything’s all right at your work. Can I borrow your pink woolly jacket?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Marnie. ‘I expect you to plunder my wardrobe. It makes me feel I’m still your stepmother.’

  ‘You’ll always be my stepmother. My other mother.’

  ‘That’s all right, then. We should make a move.’

  But she tarried for a moment, then took a crooked striped mug from the sideboard and from the cupboard a small glass jar of whole nutmegs and a pot of local honey. Eva watched her with a glinting stare but didn’t ask any questions.

  The museum had a Dickensian pokiness about it that had probably been one of its contrary selling-points for Elaine. She had fallen for its quaint, uncomfortable Englishness, its warped shutters and narrow staircase, and was unfailingly delighted when other people – not her, because of her short stature – bumped their heads on its beams. It was squeezed between a sixties office building and a down-at-heel house that had been divided into several unsatisfactory flats. Its three narrow storeys looked out, at the back, onto a tiny yard. Marnie had been clearing it of its accumulated junk (a child’s broken tricycle, a stack of assorted roof tiles, tins of hardened paint, a rotting door), and was planning to stock it with potted shrubs and perhaps an apple tree. She was going to buy a bird table, and she had even started a compost heap in the corner, which she fed with customers’ coffee grounds, teabags and orange peel. Marnie had never managed to cure herself of her home-making compulsion. If she was staying in an anonymous hotel room for just one night, she would still unpack her bag into the drawers, line up her toothbrush, hairbrush, face cream and shampoo as if she was settling in for the long haul. Ralph used to tease her about it. He used to call her ‘Mother Hen’. He would lay his thin, untidy body at her feet and tell her not to clear him up as well.

  ‘The bulbs are always going,’ said Marnie, unlocking the door. ‘There are spare ones in the big cupboard.’ She switched on the lights and at once the shapes hanging from beams and sagging on shelves came to life. She had never quite got used to the eerie effect of so many puppets watching her with their painted eyes, their sectioned jaws gaping and leering, their spindly hands dangling by their sides and their legs folded under them. She was quite well acquainted with them all by now: she knew their names, their ages (some of them were hundreds of years old), their origins. She could tell visitors which came from Sicily, which from Indonesia, which were home grown. She had repaired
many of their costumes – this Japanese silk kimono, for example, she had stitched back together, and she had fashioned a new sword for one of the old wooden warriors in the back room and a fan for the courtesan, whose hickory cheeks were painted scarlet. The large, shabby dragon near the entrance, which children loved, had newly mended seams. She had polished Orlando’s armour. Sometimes, when she was alone, she would gently lift one down from its perch and walk it over the floor, the lozenge-shaped feet drumming the boards, the arms lifting jerkily as if to ward off a sudden blow. Some were ornate – like the twenty-eight-inch princess from Burma – and upstairs many of the others were simple hand puppets. There were several topsy-turvy dolls among them and a few that reminded her of the papiermâché puppets she’d made at school, dipping shreds of newspaper into water and glue, and laying them over the crudely fashioned Plasticine head. There were some inflexible figures, too, mounted on sticks, and others that barely earned the title ‘puppet’ at all. Her favourite was the small, blunt-faced dog from Papua New Guinea, whose crumbling, legless body was made of bark.

  Marnie turned on the heating, stacked leaflets and postcards on the front desk, showed Eva where the coffee and tea were, and how to operate the till. You could buy cheap puppets here – animals with foolish faces, villains with moustaches, kings with crowns and jesters with surprised eyebrows – and also the flatpack of a bright miniature theatre, complete with tiny cardboard characters you could colour yourself and move around on sticks. Marnie would have adored it as a girl: she tingled with nostalgia whenever she sold one.

  ‘Do you think,’ asked Eva, running a finger over the shelf where cardboard masks were stacked to inspect it for dust, ‘that you and Babbo will ever –’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s very – What’s the word?’

  ‘Unequivocal?’

  ‘I don’t think that was it. You shouldn’t have left us.’

  ‘I didn’t leave you, I left him – and, anyway, I only left what was already long gone. You know that. In any case, this isn’t the right time to talk about it.’

  ‘I know. I always start talking just when the other person’s about to leave. It’s a bad habit. There must be some psychological explanation, but I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to leave now. You’re sure you’ll be all right?’

  ‘Don’t worry so. I’m grown-up now, remember?’

  ‘And is Gregor –’

  ‘Staying? Yes. You asked that before. But he’ll behave, OK? We’ll both behave. We won’t drink all your wine and trash the place.’

  ‘So I’ll be going, then.’

  ‘You will be, yes.’ Eva slitted her eyes. ‘Don’t you have a plane to catch?’

  ‘Yes.’ She reached out and removed an imaginary hair from Eva’s shoulders, just for the comfort of touching her and breathing in her familiar smell. Under the tobacco smoke, camomile, lemon and balsam, she was sharp and clean. They hugged. Eva’s soft black hair rustled on her neck and her warm, grassy breath blew against her cheeks.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Eva, as she left.

  As the plane took off, Marnie leant against the window; her forehead bumped gently against the smeary oval. The sky was a stewed brown. Through it, she briefly glimpsed a scattering of houses, patchwork hills and then the curve of the Thames. Somewhere down there her day was continuing but without her in it. Eva was sitting in the gloom of the museum, tapping her glossy nails or smiling at a customer with her full red mouth. Heavy-limbed, white-faced, silent Gregor was occupying her flat and filling it with his own smell of beer, tobacco, Polish food. Her mother was lying in her small plot of ground, beneath needles of winter rain. And the other two, of course – but they had died so long ago that their graves were shallow, grassy mounds, one so small that it was scarcely visible. Then there was David – he lay somewhere down there as well, although Marnie tried not to think about him too much, pushing his memory to the muddy floor of her consciousness, where occasionally it stirred, sending up dark clouds in which she could detect no shape, just a vague dread. Ahead of her were Ralph and Oliver: her past had flipped and lay waiting in her future. After months of peaceful inactivity, of repair and slow consideration, she was on a journey again. And although the journey was to say goodbye, she felt again a throb of excitement. Something was happening. Life was shifting under her feet.

  Chapter Two

  She had landed in a different world. She climbed from the plane into the grip of winter, which had not yet arrived in London and perhaps never would, not like this. She was hit by a bitter, stinging cold that made her nose ache and the tips of her fingers start to pulse, and she pulled her scarf over her chin and mouth. Though it was only mid-afternoon, the sun had sunk below the skyline and the moon had risen to float its tilted crescent above the frosted landscape. On either side of the runway, she could see fields; in one, horses were grazing, apparently undisturbed by the noise of planes, while another was ploughed and looked, in the twilight, like a lumpily frozen sea. Beyond, the massed shapes of pine and birch trees stood against the sky. Her worn boots slid on the tarmac, where ice glistened.

  The airport resembled a shack, and already the baggage was being unloaded onto a carousel that looped jerkily round the arrivals room. Marnie went to the Ladies, through a rackety door into a room lit by a bare bulb. She examined her face in the mirror, not out of vanity or anxiety so much as to remind herself of what she actually looked like: she half expected to see a stranger staring back at her, or perhaps her younger self, the one Ralph had first known. But no, it was her all right, with crow’s feet around her eyes, the first tiny threads stitched above her lip, the brackets faintly grooved between nose and mouth, the hair that had darkened over the years, the eyes that were – and had always been – calm. Indeed, she felt quite calm. Her heart beat slowly; her hands were steady; she felt clear-headed, though strangely distant from what was happening. She leant forward until she could see the flecks in her irises and the fine hatchings in her pale skin. Fabio had told her, long after she had moved in with him but before he had turned his eyes to other women, that when they first met he had barely noticed her, but that she had ‘grown’ on him so that one day he had realized he found her beautiful. And Ralph had once said that, more than anyone he had ever known, she could make herself invisible. When she had protested that she didn’t do it deliberately, he shook his head, not believing her. ‘You like to watch,’ he had said. ‘You stand in the shadows, seeing but not being seen. You’re a spy, Marnie.’

  Marnie left the toilet, picked up her bag from the carousel and, squaring her shoulders, walked through the swing doors and out into the hall, where strip lighting stuttered onto stained white tiles and a single car-hire desk. Everyone else seemed to know where they were going, swinging purposefully out into the chilly darkness to the vehicle that waited in the small car park over the road, or hugging a waiting partner. A small boy ran helter-skelter towards his returning mother; the paper bag he was clutching split, and small green apples rolled across the floor in all directions. He stopped and his mouth started to tremble. Marnie stooped and gathered them up, feeling a stab of envy for the woman who had a son waiting for her with apples in his hands.

  Then she looked around her uncertainly. Would Oliver be here, and would she even recognize him? Would he recognize her? She swung her gaze from face to face, anticipating the flicker of acknowledgement. Nothing. She put her bag down, pulled her mobile from her pocket and turned it on: no messages. She walked to the door and peered out into the gathering night.

  ‘Marnie Still!’ It wasn’t a question so much as a command.

  Marnie turned and found herself looking at a bulky woman with coarse grey hair chopped into a crude pudding bowl around a face that was creased with numerous lines, like crumpled linen. Her eyes were a startling pale blue, and she looked like the pen-and-ink drawings of a squaw from one of Marnie’s childhood books, but a squaw dressed in ill-assorted clothes – wellingtons over khaki canv
as trousers, and a man’s black suit-jacket (left pocket ripped open) on top of a thick grey fleece.

  ‘Oliver couldn’t come,’ said the woman, in a thick accent. She seized Marnie’s hand in her own broad, calloused one and squeezed it hard, so that Marnie’s ring bit into her flesh. ‘I’m Dorothy.’

  ‘Hello. It’s good of you to meet me.’

  ‘Or Dot.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Now you’re going to tell me I don’t look like a dot. That’s what Ralph always says.’ At the name, Dot’s stern face softened, so that she looked briefly girlish. It was an expression Marnie had often seen on the faces of ageing women when they mentioned Ralph – a kind of rueful helplessness in the face of his rawness and charm.

  ‘Is Ralph –’

  ‘Car’s this way.’

  It turned out to be a tinny little Rover with a caved-in passenger door that had been taped shut. Marnie, after putting her bag in the boot next to a rusty hacksaw and a tin of primer, had to climb over the driver’s seat to get in. It stank of dogs and cigarettes.

  ‘Heater doesn’t work.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Marnie, bravely, wrapping herself more securely in her overcoat. ‘It won’t take long, will it?’

  ‘Good hour and a half, two hours.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Bumpy road. And floods.’

  Dot, it seemed, rarely spoke in complete sentences: verbs were lopped off and question marks removed, so that her words hurtled like a fast ball thrown over-arm when all you could do was shield yourself against its impact.