The Winter House Read online

  Sometimes, in the silence, she would hear Seth’s voice in her ear, but it was usually sardonic and not at all like the voice of a seven-year-old, more like the voice of Marnie’s hidden alter ego. She was used to it now, so would no longer swing round wildly in an attempt to glimpse him before he was swallowed by her mind. With her father, it was worse in many ways, because she found that she remembered nothing at all: he was just a paternal myth, vague as fog. ‘Did he read to me?’ she would ask her mother. ‘Did he lift me onto his shoulders? Did he tickle me, feed me, dry my tears?’ and when Emma replied that of course he had, Marnie would picture Paolo sitting on the side of her bed, or hoisting her high in the air, and try to convert that into a memory. But all of her authentic memories, even before the storm, were of Emma, with her strong shoulders and her steady gaze, her calloused man’s hands that would hold Marnie’s, the creases and grooves in her face, like water marks on a cliff. Emma, like a rock after the tragedy, the momentous grief crashing against her determination not to collapse.

  And she hadn’t collapsed, thought Marnie. Not once – or not in front of Marnie. She had been a potter when her husband and son were swept out of her life, but had been unable to continue except in her spare time. To make ends meet, she had turned the house into a bed-and-breakfast. With spring approaching, the season for guests would soon be under way again. White cotton sheets would billow on the washing-lines or, in wet weather, be draped across the chairs; the fridge would be full of bacon rashers, packets of pork sausages, eggs bought from the farm down the road, beef tomatoes that Emma grilled, white button mushrooms and bags of coffee beans.

  Marnie thought that of all the people she knew, her mother must be one of the least suited to running a B-and-B. Like Marnie, she wasn’t naturally sociable. What was more, if she took against someone it was almost impossible for her to hide her feelings and, more often than not, she took against the unfortunate guests who pitched up at their house and were upset not to find an en-suite bathroom, a TV at the end of their bed and a coffee-maker beside it. Marnie had developed a kind of sixth sense for the kind of person Emma wouldn’t welcome. She had only to see them getting out of their car and her heart would sink, for she could already picture her mother’s firmly closed mouth and hear the stern clack of plates on the table in the morning, the leathery egg lying like a sticky insult alongside a split, charred sausage.

  So it was when she brought David back to be inspected. Emma’s mouth became a grim, closed line when he took her hand between both of his and said, ‘I can see where Marnie’s looks come from.’

  Emma smiled, a curiously flat smile that showed her teeth sharkishly. He can’t tell, thought Marnie. He thinks he’s charming her. They climbed up the narrow stairs to her bedroom. Her mother’s eyes were on them and Marnie was conscious of David’s hand burning into the small of her back.

  ‘That seemed to go OK,’ he said, pulling her onto his lap. ‘I think I’m good with mothers. Do you want to meet mine as well?’

  Marnie didn’t really: she knew this would end almost before it got going. ‘All right,’ she said.

  That was how she had met Ralph. The first time she went to David’s home – which was on the outskirts of town in a cul-de-sac of thirties houses all built of the same yellowish brick – it was a Sunday afternoon and an air of boredom glazed everything. Men were out washing their cars, and mothers pushed buggies along the streets with a slow purposelessness.

  Marnie locked her bike to the fence and rang the doorbell; she heard a tune sound inside and, through the frosted glass, a shape appeared. ‘Yes?’

  The woman who stood there was thin and pale. Marnie thought she looked washed out – or rubbed out, perhaps, as if her edges were bleeding away and her colour diluted.

  ‘I’m Marnie.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m a friend of David’s,’ Marnie said politely. Surely David had told his mother she was coming for tea.

  ‘Come in, then.’

  David’s mother stood back just enough to let Marnie squeeze past, like an unwanted salesman. But then David came down the stairs two at a time, his yellow hair bouncing. He draped his hand around his mother’s sloping shoulders, and Marnie saw her face transform. It opened, sweetened, became girlish with pleasure. ‘This is my mother,’ he said unnecessarily.

  ‘How do you do?’ said Marnie. She held out her hand to take the woman’s slim, unresponsive fingers. In the silence, she added, ‘I’m pleased to meet you.’

  ‘I’ve made a cake,’ the woman said. Her eyes slid across Marnie’s face. ‘Why don’t you come through to the kitchen?’

  There, David said, in an offhand voice, ‘This is my sister Grace.’

  ‘Hello, Grace,’ said Marnie. She bent down to take Grace’s plump hand, reddened at the knuckles. ‘I’m Marnie.’ Then she glanced at David. Why hadn’t he told her? Grace sat at the table in a wheelchair. Her legs were thin and floppy, like the tubular legs of a rag-doll, and her upper torso large and shapeless. She had a round, smiling face with a lopsided mouth and, under a block fringe of blonde hair, David’s blue eyes blinked nervously round the room. Her hands twitched and fretted in front of her. She made a low-throated sound and lifted a hand into the air, like a conductor asking for silence. When her mother tied a baby’s bib around her neck, she whimpered and tried to take it off.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ asked David.

  ‘He’s resting.’

  ‘Nonsense. Here I am.’ The man who stood in the door was an older version of David, but everything that was handsome in the son was coarsened in the father: his face was fleshy, so that his features seemed to have bunched up in its centre; his skin was weathered and broken, puffy under the blue eyes and in soft, grimy folds round his neck; his eyes were bloodshot, and Marnie thought there was a mean gleam to them; his waist strained over the belt, fastened too tightly on jeans that were too small.

  ‘It’s Marnie, isn’t it?’ He captured her hand in both of his and Marnie saw his nicotine fingernails and caught the sweet smell of alcohol on his breath. ‘My son’s got good taste. Takes after his father.’ He gave a broad wink, his features twitching.

  Marnie wondered if he might possibly be drunk. She smiled cautiously and tried to pull her hand free but he kept hold of it.

  ‘Ah, to be young,’ he continued. ‘Young and free.’ And he winked once more.

  This time Marnie did pull her hand free and stepped back sharply, knocking into the table. David’s mother hissed and tutted as pale brown liquid spurted from the spout of the teapot. Grace picked up a spoon and started banging it against her plate. David’s face was impassive and Marnie felt a spasm of pity for him – he hated above all to be pitied, aiming always to appear impregnable, in control. He stood, she saw now, in front of a series of framed certificates that honoured his sporting prowess, as if trying to establish how he wanted to be looked at. The conquering hero, not the son of a drunk father and the brother of a damaged sister.

  ‘Where’s my mad brother?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘In his room, of course. He knows you’re here.’

  ‘Shall we go and get him?’ David said to Marnie. He pulled her out of the room and she followed him up the stairs.

  ‘What’s wrong with Grace?’ she asked his back.

  ‘She was born like that.’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘This is Ralph’s room. He’s the real weirdo…’

  He didn’t bother to knock but pushed the door open with one vigorous bat of his hand. Marnie, peering into the room, was struck by its manic disorder. Where the rest of the house was clean and impersonal, this was like a thieves’ lair. It was, she thought later, as if Ralph’s feverish brain had been put on display. The floor was littered with disparate objects – a broken guitar, a legless chair, an ancient typewriter, a trouser press on which he had hung a tattered velvet coat, a cardboard box the length of a man’s body on which was written in huge red letters ‘RIP’. In the corner there was a life-sized
model of a skeleton – or half of it: it had no skull, and most of the ribcage and one entire leg were missing so it had to lean back against the wall for support. Books stood in piles and the narrow bed was heaped with notebooks, bits of paper, folders. There were postcards everywhere – even on the ceiling. She saw all of this before she saw the room’s occupant, for he was a skinny figure on his knees at the edge of the room, his back turned to them. In front of him on the wall he had drawn a large, slightly misshapen rectangle.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked, without looking round. He dipped a brush into a tin of paint on the floor beside him and lifted it, scattering drips across the carpet. He laid a thick daub of turquoise inside the rectangle.

  ‘Dad’ll kill you,’ David said, with more than a touch of relish.

  ‘Maybe.’ The thin shoulders shrugged. Another lick of paint was laid down. He had black curly hair; one foot was bare, with a grubby sole; the other wore a white plimsoll.

  ‘It’s tea. And this is Marnie.’

  Ralph laid the paintbrush on the upturned lid and turned round. Marnie saw a small, pale face, a shock of unkempt hair, flecked greenish eyes under heavy brows. She knew he was about the same age as her but he looked younger – and, even at this first glance, she had the impression of someone who was hungry, needy, restless and, like a flickering candle, never still.

  ‘Hi, Ralph,’ she said, stepping into the room.

  He stood up in one movement and came towards her, half limping in his single shoe. ‘Hello.’ A smile flared briefly on his face and died.

  ‘What are you painting?

  ‘A window. It’s really dark in here, and if I can’t have an actual window, I thought I could paint a large one on the wall, with the blue sky showing, and clouds. Maybe a tiny plane in the distance. What do you think?’

  ‘I like the colour,’ she said shyly. He went on watching her, waiting for more. ‘Like a spring sky,’ she added. ‘Or early morning, before it’s got really warm.’

  ‘That’s what I wanted. Everything new.’

  ‘Dad’ll just make you paint over it. You know that.’

  ‘You could have a bird on the sill too.’

  ‘I’m terrible at art. I can’t draw.’

  ‘I could do it.’

  ‘You could?’

  ‘It’s tea, Marnie,’ David interrupted. ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘If you wanted me to –’

  ‘Are you coming or not?’

  ‘You could paint me a swallow! A bird that returns each spring.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Have you seen their nests of mud?’

  ‘Marnie. He’s just showing off, you know, trying to get attention. You shouldn’t fall for it.’

  Marnie watched Ralph’s face flush. He stared at David, biting his lip, then turned away. She saw the muscles tighten at the nape of his neck.

  ‘Tell Mum I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Up to you.’

  ‘So there you were,’ said Marnie, bending closer to Ralph. ‘A burning star in a dark house.’

  And there you were. You stood in the doorway, with that funny little smile on your face, the one you wear when you’re waiting to see whether to smile properly or not. I remember you on that day – or I think I remember, anyway. Perhaps I’ve made it more vivid in recollection: ‘The First Time I Saw You’. I do that a lot. The past feels brighter than the present. But whether it’s true or not, I can see now your soft, pale, slightly smudged face half hidden by your hair. Grey eyes, fringe that looked as if you’d chopped it yourself in an absent-minded moment, large mouth, determined chin, a few freckles on your nose – they would spread out when summer came. No makeup, except, I saw later, your thumbnails were painted dark purple. You were wearing – in my memory at least, that discredited thing – old jeans that were too large for you and were held up with a canvas belt, a smocked jersey, well-worn walking boots. You didn’t look as if you’d dressed up at all, even though this was your first visit to meet the family. You weren’t what I’d expected, not at all. I thought you’d be like David’s last girlfriend: a stick-thin blonde, cool, vain and contemptuous. She would look at me and see someone wonky, nerdish, foolish, faintly amusing and pathetically small. But you – I had the sense that when you looked at me, you saw me, saw into me, and didn’t turn away.

  My mother never looked at me like that. She was always waiting to be dissatisfied, examining me with a discontented expression to see what was wrong with me – clothes all messy, hair too long and not brushed, face simply the wrong face because it wasn’t David’s, not his golden hair, his vicious baby-blue eyes, not his easy, charming smile; I was speaking the wrong words, feeling the wrong emotions, gripped by an anger she didn’t begin to understand. My poor mother. I used to try so hard to win her. As a child, I would follow her around like a shadow, telling her I loved her, hanging on to her fingers, waiting outside the locked bathroom door, sulking when she paid attention to David, unable to sleep unless she had said good night, begging her for just one hug, driving her mad with my neediness.

  ‘Where did you come from?’ she would say sometimes, helplessly. ‘How did I ever have a son like you?’ I would dwindle when she looked at me, shrinking back into myself like a sea anemone poked with a stick: the puny middle child squashed between the heroic, worldly son and the pitiable innocent daughter.

  I tried to say this to you once but I don’t know if you understood what I meant: I felt that until you came along, nobody had looked at me properly and seen the person I wanted to be. I felt recognized. No wonder I fell in love with you, that very first meeting, when you gave me your smile and offered to paint me a bird. Head over heels in love, till death us do part. Death us do part now.

  You can’t hear me. You kiss my forehead and say, ‘It’s all right, my darling Ralph, it’s OK.’ Was that here, just now, or was it fished out from memory’s pool, something that happened many years ago? Or perhaps it hasn’t even happened yet, but is waiting for me in the diminishing road ahead. In this little room where I can smell the stink of my own decay, the past and future don’t have the same meaning as they used to. Everything is contracting, like a pupil contracts in the light, until all that’s left is an aperture the size of a pinprick. Just enough to see. But darkness is drawing in.

  Chapter Five

  Oliver raised the axe. For a second, it hung in the air above his head. He had one foot planted in front of the other and the muscles in his neck stood out. Marnie watched him. There was an expression of fierce concentration on his face, and she thought that, briefly, he had forgotten where he was and what was happening. Then he brought the axe down in a smooth arc and it cleaved the log, sending tiny splinters of wood flying. Marnie picked up the two halves, breathing in their clean sappy smell, and dropped them with a clatter into the wheelbarrow.

  The nurse was still with Ralph, and for half an hour or so, she and Oliver had worked together in virtual silence, Oliver chopping the logs he had sawn up before she arrived and she carrying them to the wooden lean-to by the side of the house, where she stacked them in neat lines. The effort was strenuous and although it was very cold and blustery, threatening rain, both of them had taken off their jackets. Marnie did not ask why they were doing this, or for whom the wood was intended. It certainly wasn’t Ralph: by the time it had lost its sap and was seasoned, he would be dead. But the physical exertion took away some of the awkwardness between them, and the consoling rhythms of daily life were continuing: wood was chopped and stacked; sheets were washed and floors swept; the soup was on the hob.

  That morning, after sitting with Ralph, she had gone for a brief walk, her eyes watering in the cold. If she breathed in too deeply, the air hurt her lungs, sending little stabs of pain through her chest and up her throat. The lake lay at the bottom of the hill, beyond a small wood of pines and birches that creaked and groaned in the wind. Raindrops stung her cheeks; her feet crunched through the frosted brown leaves into the sodden mulch beneath. She remembered this l
andscape of lochs and pine forests from long ago, but then it had been summer, a watercolour idyll of blues and greens and the sun spinning a glittering kaleidoscope on the water’s surface, sending up glowing fragments of silver.

  Now everywhere was a dull impasto of brown, beige, grey and charcoal. Even the evergreen pines were drab and thin, and in the murky light the scene took on a ghostly aspect. Marnie had shivered and walked more briskly, wrapping her arms around her to hold in the warmth. The loch, when she reached it, looked brackish and sullen. She squatted at the edge where yellowish rushes sagged and put in her hand to feel the water, noticing how it was viscous near the shore, sludging to ice. In a few weeks, the whole lake would have frozen over; maybe snow would fall, to transform this colourless world into a place of brilliance and beauty.

  She had picked up a flat, flinty stone and sent it spinning over the water. It bounced once, then disappeared.

  ‘Why can’t girls throw properly?’ It was her brother’s voice, bright and smug.

  When she was younger, she had always tried to imagine what Seth would look like now, what he would be doing. Her mother used to measure her and Seth, and then just her, each New Year’s Day – she had stood Marnie against the door jamb and drawn a pencilled line where her head came to, jotting in her name and the year. Marnie would always step back and stare at the lines: hers continued to inch up the wood; Seth’s had stopped at four foot seven and a half inches. At eight, she was about the same height as he had been at seven; at nine she was taller – but not really, for she would draw an invisible line where she thought he ought to have reached, and he was always ahead of her. Ahead of her in height, in reading and writing (as a dyslexic, she was years behind everyone), in maths, in French, in passing exams, in easy friendships, in knowing best. She could never catch up. She knew when his voice would have broken. When he would have had his first girlfriend. When he would have sneaked off to the beach to smoke a furtive cigarette. She imagined his face, smooth, then spotty and then stubbly with new manhood; his body, once so slight, had bulked out in her mind, the shoulders broadening. But at a certain age she had lost track of him. Now he would have been in his forties. What would he be doing? Once, a long time ago, she had asked Emma what she thought, but her mother had turned on her a look that had made her feel scared because it was as blank and eerie as the moon.