The Winter House Read online

  Hearing Seth’s voice in her skull, teasing her, she grimaced and picked up another stone, bent low, scudded it across the lake and watched it skip rapidly several times. ‘There,’ she said out loud. ‘But you’d be able to do it better, wouldn’t you? Of course you would. It’s not fair.’

  But it wasn’t Seth’s voice she wanted to hear: it was Emma’s. Her mother had always been good at knowing when to give advice and when to withhold it. She was never hasty. Marnie could see her face now, the considering frown corrugating her forehead. She would put her hands on her hips, legs slightly apart, and wait until she was sure of what she wanted to say.

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’ Marnie had sat down on a small wooden boat that had been dragged up the shore a few feet and turned turtle, its oars tucked underneath its pot-bellied bow and a piece of canvas tied over its middle. ‘I’m scared.’

  But her mother didn’t answer. Marnie had sat for what seemed an age but was probably no more than a few minutes, listening to the erratic slap of tiny waves on the shore and the ripple of her thoughts.

  Now she threw a couple more split logs into the barrow, then straightened up to watch Oliver. As soon as she wasn’t moving, the cold cut into her. ‘Don’t stop, but can I say a few things?’

  ‘Sure.’ Oliver let the cleaver thud onto a small log; it sliced into it like a knife through butter.

  ‘I’m going into town with your car so we should make a shopping list. You need to tell me the things he can still eat.’

  ‘Right. But I can do the shopping if you want. Or Dot will always go. She’d like to do something.’

  ‘I’ll go, if that’s OK. And I’ve been thinking we should move Ralph’s bed into the main room. That way, instead of shutting him into that little room – which feels a bit like death’s waiting room, don’t you think? – he can be at the centre of the life of the house. Everything will happen around him. We’ll cook and wash and talk and read and play music. Even if he can’t join in, he’s there with us.’

  Oliver paused to wipe a forearm over his brow. ‘If that’s what he wants,’ he said. ‘But he might feel a bit public. What about when he needs a bedpan or just wants to be hidden away?’

  ‘I could easily rig up a kind of screen from the curtain in my room. We could pull it across when he wants privacy.’

  ‘We can ask him anyway.’

  ‘And we could both sleep in that room as well.’

  ‘Really?’ Oliver sounded doubtful.

  ‘It just feels odd, leaving him.’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  ‘I keep thinking he could go anytime.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘We should talk to him, even when he looks as though he’s asleep. Maybe he can still hear.’

  ‘I do that now.’

  ‘It all seems a long time ago, doesn’t it?’

  He didn’t answer, just lifted the axe once more and swung it down, the blade glinting, his breath clouding from his mouth.

  ‘It does to me, anyway,’ continued Marnie, determinedly. ‘A long time ago and yet impossibly close.’

  Oliver rested the axe on the ground and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. Marnie watched him, but at first he didn’t look at her, just stared beyond her at the woods as if he could see something in them that needed his attention. Then he dropped his eyes to her. ‘I don’t know, Marnie,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I think about it.’

  It was such a nondescript little sentence but for a moment it felt as if the distance between them had dissolved.

  ‘Well,’ she said, and smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back. His face was tired and subdued.

  ‘This is such an odd way to meet again.’

  ‘Any way would have been odd.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Imagine bumping into each other at a party, or the theatre or something.’

  ‘Very awkward,’ he agreed, but he still wasn’t smiling and his expression remained troubled. Questions crowded into Marnie’s mind. Are you married? How many children do you have? Have you thought about me? Who have you loved? Have you found contentment? She found she couldn’t ask them.

  ‘Have you always kept in touch with Ralph?’ she said instead. ‘I mean, after…’ She let the sentence die.

  ‘As much as he’d let me. Sometimes he’d disappear for a while.’

  ‘Has he been happy?’

  ‘Happy? No. That’s not the word I would use. Joyful sometimes. Euphoric. Excited. Restless. Wretched. Despairing. In heaven and then in hell. You know.’

  ‘Loved?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘And in love?’

  Oliver laid his axe down carefully, resting the blade on a stump. ‘There are some things I don’t know and some things I can’t say.’

  ‘Does he ever talk about me?’

  ‘He used to. But for a long time now he hasn’t mentioned your name.’

  Marnie walked to the top of the hill on the other side of the lake. From here, it was just possible to get a signal. She listened to her messages, then pulled off her gloves and phoned Eva, with fingers that were rapidly turning numb in the cold.

  ‘Hello!’ a bright voice sang out.

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Marnie! I can hardly hear you. You sound as though you’re under water. Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m good. Is everything OK there?’

  ‘This place gives me the creeps. I keep thinking they’re going to come to life.’

  ‘But you’re all right?’

  ‘Fine. It’s fun.’

  ‘And is everything –’

  ‘I can’t hear you very well.’

  ‘I said –’

  ‘Marnie, I can’t hear you.’

  ‘I’ll call later,’ she yelled.

  Marnie moved a few yards along the slope to get a clearer signal and phoned Lucy, who had left her an urgent message to call.

  ‘Lucy?’

  ‘Marnie? Hang on, don’t go away. I’m just going to take this outside where it’s private.’ Marnie blew on her fingers, then pulled her gloves back on. ‘There – can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I rang you last night and Eva said you’d gone to Scotland to see a friend who was dying.’

  ‘Yes. It’s Ralph.’ There was a small intake of breath, and Marnie thought that this was the first time they had mentioned him for many years. He was their taboo. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly. ‘I would have told you but I had to leave in a hurry.’

  ‘I thought it was him. I don’t know why. I just had this gut feeling.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Marnie said again.

  ‘And it’s true?’

  ‘That he’s dying? Yes.’

  ‘So I’ll never see him again.’ It wasn’t a question but a dull statement. ‘I always thought… But you. You’re with him.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marnie, helplessly, hearing the bitterness in Lucy’s voice.

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Oliver’s here.’

  ‘Ah.’ It was a sigh more than a word. ‘Will you give Ralph a message?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Tell him…’ For a few seconds she did not speak. Marnie looked down the hill to the loch while she waited, watching the way the wind sent dark, tight wrinkles across its surface. ‘Tell him I’m happily married, with two children, but not a day’s gone by when I haven’t thought of him.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Now I’ve got to get back to the meeting.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I can’t really believe it. He’s always been so alive.’

  What could she say? Marnie pressed the phone to her ear and was silent.

  The nurse had gone. Oliver lifted Ralph in his arms like a baby and carried him to the sofa where Marnie sat. He laid him down, his head on her lap and the tartan blanket pulled over him. The fire flickered in the grate and there were flowers on the makeshift table in front of them, left by Do
t. Marnie ran her fingers through his hair, which was soft and clean. The nurse had washed it that morning.

  ‘OK?’ she asked.

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Oliver will bring your bed through soon. Tell me if you need anything.’

  ‘Will.’ His eyes opened and he looked up at her. ‘Nice smell.’

  ‘I made us some chicken soup. Do you want some?’

  ‘No. You. You smell nice.’

  ‘It’s just soap and woodsmoke. I thought maybe I could read to you, if you’d like.’

  ‘Soon. Wait.’

  ‘All right. Lucy sent a message.’

  ‘Lucy,’ he murmured.

  ‘She said that she’s happily married with two kids but not a day goes by without her thinking of you.’

  ‘Good.’ He giggled, and then his giggle turned into a cough, making him twist on the couch. ‘About happy marriage and children, I mean.’

  ‘It is good, isn’t it?’

  ‘At least one of us got there in the end. One out of four.’

  Marnie leant down and kissed his forehead and then on the cracked lips. She was aware of Oliver watching them from the doorway. ‘We’re here now, anyway.’

  ‘Go on with the story.’

  Chapter Six

  Against her expectations and almost against her wishes, Marnie and David remained a couple. That spring, he passed his driving test and would proudly turn up to collect her in his father’s blue Saab with black plastic seats and an air-freshener hanging from the roof. He rarely came in and Emma would stand in the doorway, hands on hips, and scowl as they drove off in a splatter of gravel. Emma and Marnie didn’t speak much about David, but Emma was fiercer than usual about Marnie’s need to study for her O levels, and ruder than usual with her B-and-B guests, charring bacon and breaking egg yolks, bashing her iron down on the sheets. At school, however, Marnie had acquired a kind of mysterious cool. The trendy girls no longer ignored her; they even invited her (‘Oh, and bring David, of course’) to parties. Marnie usually refused, very politely; she was ashamed of the secret glee that ran through her at being accepted when she despised the reason for it, and knew very well that she might be dropped at any moment. As a matter of honour, she wore the same odd cast-offs, didn’t put on makeup, and made sure she spent more time than ever with Lucy, fierce, geeky, loyal Lucy, who would ring her up at night to talk about Jane Eyre and Edward Hopper’s paintings, and who thought, and said, that David was – she hesitated, choosing her words to carry maximum impact – not who she would have expected Marnie to choose.

  Not who Marnie had expected either. But she climbed into his father’s car nevertheless, and let him drive her to the seaside, where he’d put his hand under her bra and murmur into her neck and she would think of the sound sea-shells made when cupped against her ear. Or to pubs, although he soon stopped doing that because Marnie would insist on walking home if he drank any alcohol, even though he railed at her for being prim, pious and stuck-up – she had given her word to Emma, she said, as if that was the end of the discussion. Or, every so often, to his house, where his mother still glowered at her for being the unworthy girlfriend of her flawless son, his father flirted in a beery, half-hearted fashion, and Grace smiled and smiled, dribble running down her chin.

  She saw Ralph a few times only. She painted the swallow on his fake window-sill, silhouetted against his brilliantly turquoise sky. Once, in the car with her and David, he talked as if against the clock about his favourite authors, most of whom she had never heard of. And another time, waiting for David to arrive triumphant from some football match, she let him teach her the rudimentary rules of chess. That was when she told him about her dyslexia, how she still couldn’t readily tell the time, recite the months of the year or spell – well, spell dyslexia, for example – and how she sometimes felt that she was wandering through a fog, feeling her way blindly. She dreaded the forthcoming exams, she said, woke up in a sweat of terror just thinking about them.

  ‘Yet you’re the cleverest person I’ve ever met,’ he said. His eyes glowed. His dark hair stood up in spikes. His cheeks were flushed.

  ‘Me!’ She laughed.

  ‘You. Yes.’

  ‘I’m not clever.’

  ‘You are. You’re clever in the only way that matters. The only thing wrong with you is –’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing’s wrong with you.’

  ‘That’s incredibly sweet.’ She smiled at him, but he turned away from her furiously, knocking the chess pieces to the floor and storming from the room in one of his unaccountable tempers. Yet she noticed how solicitous and respectful he always was towards Grace, even though he was uncontrollably rude with his father, and sulky or – much worse – pleading with his mother, like a small, disgruntled child.

  The japonica flowers bloomed and died. The blossom opened and the leaves on the trees unfurled. The magnolia stood like a candelabrum at the end of their potholed drive. The sea looked blue from Marnie’s window and the gutters no longer dripped rainwater onto the paving. Her mother had bought a cockerel and four hens, and each morning Marnie would be woken by the cockerel’s braggadocio crowing. She would slide out of bed, pull on her dressing-gown and slippers and pad over the dewy grass to the chicken run at the end of the garden in search of eggs. Usually there were several, smooth and warm in her cupped hands, and she would bring them into the kitchen where her mother would be laying the table for breakfast.

  It was on one glorious evening in May that she went to David’s house for an early supper. Afterwards they were expected at the home of one of his football friends for a game of poker, though Marnie had no idea of how to play poker and if it was for money she only had about a pound in coins tucked into the back pocket of her jeans. If it turned out to be the loud hilarity of strip poker, as she was beginning to suspect, she would go straight home without even removing a hairband.

  Everyone was there, and Marnie was seated next to David, with Mr Tinsley on her other side at the head of the table. Ralph sat next to Grace and talked to her about how many different kinds of French cheeses there were, while Grace chuckled and clucked softly at him, basking in his incomprehensible attentions. Mrs Tinsley put a plate in front of Marnie: three fat, undercooked sausages, a large heap of mashed potatoes, baked beans. She couldn’t eat all that. Mrs Tinsley tied a bib round Grace’s neck and put an over-heaped plate in front of her, too. Ralph stabbed a fork into one of the pink sausages, stood it upright and quivering, then announced loudly, ‘I think I’m a vegetarian.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said his father. He snapped the tab off the beer can in front of him.

  ‘Since when, may I ask?’ his mother said.

  ‘Now.’ He gave a nervous giggle. ‘Too much pig on my plate.’

  ‘If you don’t like your mother’s food, leave the table.’

  ‘Dad.’ Ralph turned towards him and pointed a trembling finger. ‘You don’t need to be personally offended by what is an ethical decision.’

  ‘Ethical fucking claptrap. I’ll show you ethical.’

  ‘Just eat up and don’t show off by making a fuss,’ said Mrs Tinsley, in a long-suffering voice.

  Grace picked up a sausage in her thick fingers and tried to push it whole into her mouth. Her left cheek bulged.

  ‘After all,’ said David, in the ironically patronizing tone he reserved for Ralph, ‘you won’t get big and strong without protein.’

  ‘Like you, you mean?’

  David smiled at Marnie, rolling his eyes, and sat back in his chair. He was wearing a new blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up and flexed one arm so that the muscles worked. ‘Could do worse,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think I could.’ Ralph’s voice was very low, but they all heard him. The room filled with a thick, ominous silence. Grace gave a small moan and plunged her fingers into the mess of baked beans on her plate.

  ‘Really?’ David leant towards his brother and smiled his beautiful bright smile, a hundred watts
of hostility. ‘Well, at least I don’t sit in my bedroom all day writing poems. Eh?’

  ‘You’ve been going through my things!’

  ‘All your sweet little secrets.’

  ‘Shut up – just shut up.’

  ‘Now, let me see if I can remember anything you wrote.’

  ‘I said, shut up. Fucking shutupshutupshutupshutup.’

  ‘Ralph, leave the room,’ shouted his father. ‘This moment.’

  ‘How does it go? Ah, yes. “I woke but I was dreaming still…” ’

  At this point, Ralph erupted to his feet, plate in one hand, glass in the other and, before anyone had time to move, his meal was flying through the air over the narrow table and splashing into David’s face, over his thick blond hair, across his ferocious smile, dribbling down his new blue shirt. A few beans found their way onto his freshly washed jeans. In the stunned silence that followed, Ralph almost listlessly tossed his glass of milk after the rest. For a few seconds, the scene was like a freeze-frame: his father halfway out of his chair, red-necked and purple-faced, his mouth open but not yet emitting the bellow that would follow; his mother’s thin lips drawn back in a snarl of outrage; Grace, one hand flat in the squished remains of her food, her face slack; Ralph quite calm and waiting for the storm, a little smile playing on his lips. Marnie saw on David’s spattered face the rage of a small child who had been made to look stupid.

  Then somebody laughed. Clear as a bell, the sound pealed out in the room. Marnie jammed her hand to her mouth but the laughter spilt between her fingers. In the commotion that followed – people shouting and yelling, Mr Tinsley dragging Ralph from the room by his hair, Mrs Tinsley standing beside David and staring at her where she sat, Grace throwing her own dinner onto the floor with a companionable gurgle – Marnie’s laughter grew weaker and at last stopped.