The Winter House

by Unknown

  ‘His morphine.’

  ‘Yes. That has side-effects. Drowsiness, of course. Serious constipation and stomach cramps. On occasion there can be bad dreams, even waking hallucinations.’

  ‘Poor Ralph.’

  ‘But he doesn’t have to suffer much pain. And if he needs to go into hospital –’

  ‘He doesn’t,’ said Marnie, quickly. ‘He’s doing well. We’re doing well.’

  They sat in silence for a few seconds.

  ‘In that case…’ he said eventually.

  ‘Of course. And thank you.’

  ‘If you need anything…’

  ‘Yes.’ She opened the car door. ‘Dr Gray?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘I can’t answer that. But I would say not long at all.’

  That evening, Ralph tried to escape. He staggered from his bed, clutching the blanket round his waist, his spindly legs sliding under him. Marnie and Oliver tried to hold him back but panic made him strong and he thrashed out against them. Marnie felt his hot breath on her face and his bones slipping under her fingers. His open palm landed with a slap on Oliver’s cheek. One of his fingers viciously poked him in the eye. He was gabbling obscenities at them, telling them that, oh, God, oh, dear fucking Jesus, they had to let him go; it was his last chance. Momentarily free of their restraining hands, he pressed up against the window, fumbling at its catch and half sobbing.

  Then, suddenly, he stopped. His body sagged and his face, which had been drawn back in a snarl of fear, collapsed. He looked like a baby and like an old man, bewildered and alone. They wound their arms carefully round his breakable body and led him back to his bed, which they’d made up beside the sofa, laid him down, covering him with his duvet and leaning over him to tell him that it was all right, everything was all right, there, dear heart, they loved him and they weren’t going to leave, he was safe. They called him ‘darling’ and ‘sweetheart’ and nonsense names, holding his hands, stroking his clammy brow. His panting subsided, though his caved-in chest still rose and fell rapidly.

  After a few minutes, Marnie boiled milk and added nutmeg with honey; she held the striped mug to his lips and let him take tiny sips. His eyes were closed, the lids faintly blue, and he smelt fetid and damp. Oliver put on a CD of Chopin’s Études, then poured two tumblers of whisky and handed one, without a word, to Marnie. After a while, Ralph relaxed into sleep and Oliver went upstairs, treading slowly and heavily. Marnie sat on the floor beside Ralph, holding his hand and letting the music wash over her while she drank her whisky, which tonight seemed to have no effect. She thought of Ralph’s expression as he had rattled at the window: he had looked like a cornered animal.

  He whimpered in his sleep and his limbs tightened in a spasm. Marnie put her hand on his clammy forehead and murmured something meaningless. ‘You’re all right,’ she whispered, though of course he wasn’t. She felt a very long way from anywhere safe; an ill wind blew through her. She didn’t know how she was going to endure this, and for a moment she imagined walking out into the icy darkness and simply leaving Ralph and Oliver in this little house to face what was coming without her.

  ‘Marnie.’

  She must have fallen asleep. The fire had burnt low in the grate and she felt chilly and stiff. Her back was sore from sitting in the same position. ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  ‘I just wanted to know you were still there.’

  ‘I’m still here.’ She clambered to her feet, put a couple more logs on the fire, then knelt to blow strength back into the dwindling flames. She pulled the tartan rug off the sofa and wrapped herself in it, shivering. There was still some whisky left in her tumbler so she took a swig. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ She leant her head against the edge of Ralph’s bed, feeling sleep thin and recede. ‘Listen…’

  Chapter Eight

  At first Marnie had said she would not go to David’s funeral. The memory of their last meeting, the sound of her laughter sending him storming out of the door and into his car, stayed with her. It didn’t matter how often her mother told her that David had been on his way back from his friend’s house when he died and that he had been drinking: her own guilt was lodged in her. She had spent hours trying to compose a letter of sympathy to his parents, and in the end had simply put, in her careful, crooked handwriting: ‘I am so very sorry for your loss, with best wishes Marnie Still.’

  She had recurring nightmares about it, waking up with a terrible lurch. She found that she could hardly bear to eat, although she tried to make herself because she did not want to play the part of victim and walk around the school with hollow cheeks. She would take half an hour to swallow her toast and marmalade in the morning, every mouthful like wet leather and nausea rising in her stomach; her mother studiously avoided fretting over her, but nevertheless Marnie was sometimes aware of her eyes following her.

  At school she was regarded as a tragic heroine – her handsome boyfriend had died, leaving her bereft – and her refusal to accept such a role only seemed to enhance her reputation. She was surrounded by girls who wanted her to confide in them, but the only person she talked to was Lucy, who would listen to Marnie, her flat, clever face tipped slightly to one side. She never offered words of false comfort. Lucy had disliked David; she had found his particular brand of good looks faintly repellent and his sporty, cocksure friendliness had made her pinched and grimly pedantic in his presence. It was Lucy whom Marnie rang when she decided, at the last minute, that she should go to the service after all, although she wasn’t certain why. She didn’t want to go alone, though: she needed dry-eyed, unsentimental Lucy to be there with her.

  Marnie borrowed a black skirt from her mother, which was too wide at the waist and came down almost to her calves, and black boots that were a bit too small for her now and pinched her toes. She pulled on a long black jersey, tied her unruly hair back as neatly as possible, and put a thin silver chain round her neck. She barely recognized herself in the mirror, pallid and ungainly in overlapping layers, and on an impulse she took her mother’s green-handled sewing scissors with their long blades and cut through her fringe, which she’d nearly succeeded in growing out. Now her face looked naked, and somehow younger under the asymmetrical slant.

  Outside, the sky was a marbled white and turquoise, the leaves on the trees were still clean and pale, the sea in the distance glittered and spun. This didn’t feel like the day of a funeral – in films, they usually happened on grim winter days, in black-and-white. Seth and Paolo had been buried in March, just on the cusp of spring; Emma, when asked, said merely that it had been raining, but not heavily. Marnie remembered only small and seemingly random patches of the day, as if she was catching glimpses of her own life through a thick, enveloping fog. She remembered needing urgently to pee, shifting from foot to foot but not daring to ask her mother, who was holding her hand so tightly she thought the bones would snap. She remembered – she thought she remembered – how weirdly small her brother’s coffin was and how a large lady in a purple dress bent down, displaying a deep and mysterious cleavage, to give her an extra-strong mint that had made her eyes water. Did someone – the vicar? – say something about how, when an adult dies, we remember and mourn their past, but when a young child dies we mourn their lost future, all that might have been, or had she read it later somewhere and added it to her paltry collection of memories? She remembered a tall man, whom she had discovered later to be her grandfather, dressed in a thick black suit and weeping so noisily and violently that everyone else’s grief seemed muted by comparison.

  Seth and Paolo were buried together in the local churchyard, Seth’s portion of ground pitifully small, his inscription brief to match his brief life (‘Beloved son and brother, for ever missed’). Emma and Marnie used to go together to visit the twin graves every weekend and put flowers there, but gradually Marnie had ceased to accompany her mother and Emma continued her vigils privately, almost furtively, as if she did not want to force her grief on her daughter.
Marnie still went sometimes, always alone and at odd times, drawn by emotions she did not fully understand. She would stand looking down at the graves with their simple headstones, which were already becoming worn with time and settling into the landscape. There were always flowers there; she wondered how often Emma came and how long she spent with her lost husband and son. Sometimes, to her shame, she felt a pang of jealousy, imagining the three of them huddled together out there, week after week and year after year, while she got on with her ordinary life.

  David’s funeral took place at the same church. The lozenge-shaped hole had been cut into the ground, ready for his coffin, for his parents did not want him to be cremated. Marnie saw, as she and Lucy walked up the lane towards the church, that a large number of people had already gathered and was relieved; she preferred to be hidden in the crowd. Many of the people there were young; some she knew, at least by sight; a few were from her school and those especially she wanted to avoid. Several of the girls were holding on to each other, buckle-kneed and starting to cry, or at least pressing tissues to their eyes.

  Marnie lurked behind a large bush and put a restraining hand on Lucy – who was dressed in an ugly tweed jacket with oversized leather buttons that looked ancient and equestrian, though as far as Marnie knew she had never so much as offered a sugar cube on an open palm to a horse. ‘Let’s wait until the last minute,’ she whispered. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, feeling hot and oppressed in her thick black garments. The skirt itched against her waist and her feet felt cramped and sweaty. ‘I want to be right at the back.’

  Lucy nodded. ‘Sure.’

  ‘What are you wearing, anyway?’

  ‘This? I found it in Mum’s cupboard, though I’ve never seen it on her. I didn’t know what I was supposed to wear to a funeral. Horrible, isn’t it?’

  Marnie felt a dreadful mirth working its way up her throat. She frowned sternly and concentrated on those filing past them into the church: a steady stream of people, old and young, dressed in sober clothes and on their faces a look of solemn anticipation. ‘Why are we here?’

  ‘I’m here because you asked me,’ said Lucy. ‘And you’re here because you knew David. Quite well.’

  ‘Not very well, really. In some ways, we were strangers.’ She remembered his mouth clamping down on hers and his hands warm and solid on her back, then his splattered face as she had last seen it, harsh with dislike; in the days since he had died, it had taken on a hard-edged, over-lit quality. It loomed out of nightmares like a curse.

  Lucy took Marnie’s hand in hers, which was small and dry, with bitten nails and a callous on the middle finger from the press of her fountain pen. ‘You’re right to be here,’ she said. ‘Don’t torment yourself. He crashed the car because he was in a giant strop. You didn’t loosen the brake pads or whatever, did you? Everyone today will describe him as some kind of saint. He wasn’t. He was a bit of a jerk, to be honest.’

  ‘Ssh.’

  Lucy’s voice had risen on the last words, and a few heads had turned towards them.

  ‘Sorry. But it’s just moral luck. Bad luck.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He was being a bully and you giggled at him. What’s so terrible about that? If he hadn’t died, you wouldn’t feel your behaviour had been wrong, would you?’

  ‘Maybe not, but –’

  ‘Ergo, it’s not.’

  It was what Marnie wanted to hear – and why she’d brought Lucy with her, if she was honest. But it jarred: it was the wrong day for a beginner’s lesson in moral philosophy.

  ‘It’s very kind of you to try to make me feel better, but it’s not that simple, Lucy. Anyway, I don’t want to be thinking about myself right now. It’s not right somehow. It gets in the way of the main thing, which is nothing to do with me and my stupid guilt, or if not guilt then – shame, I suppose. I want to think about David and his poor family and feel sorry that he’s dead – not bad, sad. That’s what I’m here for. I want to feel sad.’

  ‘Right. Sad. But they’re about to close the doors.’

  Standing right at the back of the thronged church, Marnie could not immediately see the chief mourners, only the bobbing heads of those in front of her. She stood on tiptoe and caught a glimpse of the coffin, with a large bouquet of flowers placed on top, and of the vicar’s white surplice. It was hard to make out what he was saying. His words distorted in the high spaces of the church, and the woman in front of them rustled in her bag for lollipops that, at regular intervals, she popped like a dummy into the mouth of her small, fidgety daughter. There were hymns but Marnie, whose mother, as far as she could recall, had never taken her to a single religious service after the one when they had buried Seth and Paolo, didn’t know the tunes. The densely printed words in the hymn books ran together when she squinted at them, turning into meaningless and shifting squiggles under her dyslexic stare. She tried to follow the lines with a finger, but was always several phrases behind, so she gave up. People seemed to her to be singing two different tunes, and there was a self-satisfied baritone somewhere near the front at least four notes ahead of everyone else. She frowned and bowed her head, trying to concentrate on the organ music.

  She was waiting for sadness to well in her at last. No one else seemed to be having trouble. Muffled sobs and gasps filled the church. People sniffed and blew their noses. Someone near the front, whom Marnie couldn’t see, was weeping quietly and steadily. David’s headmaster gave an address and the sounds of grief swelled, like a river about to burst its banks. Chas Fulbright, David’s best friend, made a clumsy little speech that was addressed not to the congregation but to the dead boy – he recalled football triumphs and kept calling him ‘mate’. Choked with tears, he couldn’t get to the end.

  Finally, after a shuffling hiatus and an outburst of dry coughs, a violin started up. Marnie, pressed against the wall with a cold radiator digging into the small of her back, could not see who was playing, but the music, full of scraping errors and mis-hit notes, affected her in a way that none of the words had been able to do. She was thinking of the raw hole cut in the ground outside, narrower at its base. Soon David would be lying near her brother and her father, alone through all the cold dark nights ahead. No one would ever see his broad white smile again or hear him give that boisterous laugh. She let herself picture him standing in his characteristic posture: his strong runner’s legs slightly apart, his head back and his blue eyes gleaming with assurance, looking as if he owned the earth; it had irritated her then, but now it seemed tragic. Her eyes pricked; she ran a finger cautiously round the rims, anxious that no one should see her weeping and offer her sympathy she did not deserve.

  Then it was over, and the crowds bunched together to let the Tinsley family through. At last Marnie could see them at the top of the church near the pulpit, standing in a black-clad group: Mr Tinsley in a thick suit that was too tight, straining at his shoulders and held together by a single button at the front. His face looked redder than ever, eyes bloodshot, lips pulpy. It was only now, seeing his inflamed face, that Marnie understood what David’s death meant and a trickle of horror worked its way down her spine. At his side stood Mrs Tinsley, desiccated and almost yellow in her unbecoming mourning clothes. Her face was bonier than it had been, and her body under the coat was all angles and sharp joints; she looked suddenly old. Grace was slumped in her wheelchair, head sunk between her shoulders and one arm trailing over the side, the hand clenching and unclenching. And there was Ralph. His ill-made suit was enormous on him; inside it he seemed shrunken. Someone had taken the scissors to his hair, giving him an ugly convict’s cut that made him look like a mutinous, wretched ten-year-old.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Marnie whispered. She felt Lucy’s hand take hers for comfort. ‘Poor things.’

  The coffin was carried out of the church by six of David’s school friends, lumpy and awkward in their borrowed clothes. The Tinsley family followed it, walking slowly through the hushed congregation, Grace’s wheelc
hair bumping on the uneven floor. Mrs Tinsley’s burning eyes briefly met Marnie’s before they both glanced away, but Ralph stared at her as they passed, then turned his head to keep her in sight for longer. At last they were gone, out of the cool, still church and into the soft breathing warmth of the day.

  It must have been about a week afterwards, and already late. The long shadows that lay across the garden were being gradually engulfed by night. After a cloudless day, the air had a sharpness to it. Marnie and Emma had eaten boiled eggs with buttered toast, then poached pears and yoghurt for their supper, and had laid the table for breakfast the next morning. It was a quiet week: they only had an elderly couple with them who had come in at seven thirty that evening and gone to bed well before nine.

  Emma retired to the little room at the back of the house, more like a cupboard, where she struggled to keep up with her paperwork and bills, and Marnie went upstairs to finish her homework. Her O level play was The Tempest, and she was trying to write an essay on how Prospero changed from the first Act to the last. She knew what she wanted to say, it was putting it into correctly spelt words and separating them out with punctuation that remained hard for her. She put on her pyjamas and dressing-gown, then sat at the little table Emma had rescued from a skip and Marnie had painted green; she gazed helplessly at what she had already done. She saw how her writing tipped, slid off the lines, and felt certain it was riddled with errors that remained invisible to her. Emma always told her to read things out loud and listen to where she drew a breath, so she tried that now: ‘ “When we first see Prospero in Act One…” ’ Should there be a comma after ‘Prospero’? She put it in anyway and continued, ‘ “…he is an angry man full of thoughts of –” ’

  She broke off, hearing a soft, insistent rapping at the front door. She looked at her watch, frowning. It was nearly ten o’clock. The rap came again, slightly louder, and Marnie sighed, tightened the belt on her dressing-gown and went down the stairs. She pulled open the door.