The Winter House

by Unknown

  ‘He always wanted a daughter. He used to call you “Carissima”. Dearest. He would get up at night and sit by your cot, making sure you were all right.’

  ‘You’ve never said any of this before. You never speak about him.’

  ‘There are some things I find hard to talk about. I should have done. Instead, I’ve shut them away and the longer I didn’t speak, the more impossible words became. He was very proud of you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘And he would have been very proud of who you’ve become.’

  Marnie stood for a while, listening to the slap of the curling waves on the shingle. Her chest ached. ‘Sometimes,’ she said at last, ‘I feel you love them more than me.’

  ‘I know you do.’

  ‘And that nothing I can do will ever match up to them.’

  ‘I’ve tried to behave towards you as I would have done if they hadn’t died. I didn’t want our relationship to be always intense and tragic. I was wary of oppressing you, or being too soft on you. I wanted you to have a normal childhood.’

  ‘I have.’ Marnie gave a little shiver. ‘Is it over, then?’

  ‘What? Your childhood?’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’

  ‘Wait until you leave home, then say that.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘When you leave, you mean? Oh – there’s lots of things. Make more pots, for a start.’

  ‘What’s happening with Eric?’

  Emma didn’t reply at once. She pulled her coat more tightly round herself and stared out at the dark sea. Then she said, avoiding the subject, ‘Speaking of Eric, I should call him about Ralph. Come on, let’s go home before I freeze to death.’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘Yes?’

  But Marnie didn’t know what she wanted to say. Her eyes filled with tears and she blinked them away in the darkness. Emma linked arms with her and they walked slowly home.

  Marnie thought she would never go to sleep, not with Ralph still missing and perhaps out in the cold, wet darkness. Emma made her a boiled egg with toast and butter, then a mug of hot chocolate, which she drank in front of the fire. She could hear her mother talking on the phone, a low murmur whose words she could not make out. In bed, she lay with her eyes open, listening to the rain against the window, the wind in the trees, the sea’s incessant murmur in the distance. She thought of their small house, illuminated in a world of black sky and dark water, and wrapped her arms round herself for comfort. Ordinarily she loved the sense of their snug isolation, but tonight it scared her.

  She woke when Emma put a hand on her shoulder and shook her gently.

  ‘What? Is it morning?’ But her windows were still dark.

  ‘No. It’s just before four. But I thought you’d want to know.’

  ‘Ralph?’

  ‘Eric’s found him.’

  ‘Eric! Where?’

  ‘At his summer house.’

  ‘What on earth was he doing there?’

  ‘I don’t know. Eric’s bringing him back tomorrow.’

  ‘So he’s all right?’

  ‘Cold, wet, shame-faced. But fine.’

  ‘I’ll kill him,’ said Marnie, as relief swept over her. ‘I’ll wring his stupid neck for making us so worried.’

  ‘Go back to sleep now.’

  ‘Plus,’ Marnie said, and she snuggled back down in her bed.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Plus he’s gone and ruined things.’

  ‘Think about it in the morning, not now.’

  ‘We ought to ring Ralph’s mother.’

  ‘I already have.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Not much. She cried.’

  Ralph came back the day that Oliver went away. Marnie didn’t see either of them. Instead she went for a long walk with Lucy along the coastal path, while Oliver’s parents drove him with his belongings – including a battered life-sized skeleton – to start his new life at university, and Emma spent the day with Ralph and Eric. Marnie never discovered what had gone on between them, but she imagined her mother had been stern, calm, practical.

  When she eventually did meet Ralph, several days later, he was subdued and at first could barely meet her eye. He apologized, rather formally, for causing her concern and for reacting so melodramatically; he said he had been selfish and childish, and of course he understood that she wanted to keep certain parts of her life private. He had no wish to harm her relationship with Oliver. He spoke as if he’d learnt the words by heart. With equal formality, she had accepted his apology and said that she, too, was very sorry: she had never meant to deceive or hurt him. They had hugged, but lightly and carefully, and kissed each other’s cheek.

  Marnie wanted to rail at Ralph and weep, hurl objects and insults at him, tell him that of course he had bloody harmed her relationship with Oliver – what did he think? Instead, they were kind and well behaved. She felt that something was coming to an end. Suddenly her world, bounded by the sea on one side and the town on the other, was crumbling, its borders dissolving.

  Or, as Lucy said rather drily on their walk along the coast, ‘The fellowship is being broken up, isn’t it?’

  ‘No!’ said Marnie.

  ‘If it ever was a fellowship.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They’re both in love with you. It’s always been like that. Do you think I’m blind? And then there’s me, on the edge, being the plain best friend.’

  ‘That’s not right.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Lucy stopped for a moment and gave her an odd, glinting look.

  ‘You’re not plain, for a start.’

  ‘Now you’re just patronizing me.’

  ‘I’m not!’

  ‘Marnie,’ said Lucy, patiently, as if she was talking to a small child. ‘In this context I’m plain – or, at least, invisible.’

  ‘That isn’t how I see things at all.’

  ‘No? I wouldn’t mind, except –’ She stopped. The wind ruffled her short hair and blew the sea into corrugated shapes.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, you know anyway. It’s really odd, isn’t it, how some things are never said out loud, even though everyone knows, and everyone knows the others know too? Ralph is besotted with you, Oliver’s always had a thing about you –’

  ‘I don’t think that’s quite right,’ Marnie broke in. ‘And, anyway, he’s gone away now. That’s all over.’

  Lucy ignored her and continued, ‘And you like Oliver and I’ve always had a thing about Ralph. Which isn’t a good idea. It’s like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, isn’t it? Except there’s no dark wood and no magic potion, and Ralph’s not going to wake up suddenly and realize he’s mad with love for me instead of you. Well, is he?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Marnie muttered.

  ‘The thing is, if you weren’t there, then maybe he’d like me – sometimes I think so, anyway. We get on really well – we’ve probably got more in common than you two. I keep thinking that if he’d just look… But with you around, he can’t see anyone else. We’re all in the shadows. So, of course, I should be glad about you and Ollie, because theoretically it gives me more of a chance. Except it doesn’t seem to work like that. I sometimes think it’s like a weird formula – the more one of them loves you, the more the other does. You don’t even have to do anything, whereas I – I work so hard and it’s all for nothing.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Marnie said hopelessly.

  ‘I’ve been really jealous of you, you know. I mean, really jealous. It’s not a nice feeling – it’s like being poisoned.’

  ‘You should have said.’

  ‘I’m saying now, aren’t I?’

  ‘We’re going to be all right, though, aren’t we?’ Marnie asked, in a small voice.

  Lucy stopped again, glared at her distressed face, then tucked an arm through Marnie’s. ‘Yeah, we’ll be all right,’ she said gruffly. ‘Now, let’s go home.’

  The word brought tears stinging to Marni
e’s eyes, and she wiped them away with the back of her hands and sniffed loudly. ‘OK. Home.’

  Home. What do you think of now when you say the word? Do you think of the place you live now, alone? Or do you think of your old house by the sea, and Emma still there? Perhaps you go even further back and think of the time when it was the four of you together, the time you can’t even remember but you know is there, under everything, an image of happiness and loss? Do you still get homesick, the way you used to?

  Homesick. Sick for home. It’s one of the most desolating feelings that I know, the hungry ache in the pit of your stomach, that acute missing. It’s not like missing a lover whom you know you will see again soon so that absence becomes painfully sweet, anticipating the reunion. It’s just grim, heavy, cold. It hurts. Thoughts hurt. Knives in the chest, in the head. You can move around in the world, and talk and smile and make all the right gestures, and it’s a bright charade. Sometimes I couldn’t do it any more. I remember once walking away from your house and just stopping. It was too much effort to keep going, putting one foot in front of the other, forcing my eyes open, swallowing, breathing. I couldn’t. I simply couldn’t endure it. I lay down in a field and curled up like a foetus, arms round my knees, head tucked in, eyes squeezed shut. I don’t know how long I stayed like that. There were blades of grass against my face, and soil and bits of leaf and twig. I could hear myself breathing, and I could hear birdsong, wind and, in the distance, the hum of traffic. I thought that I could feel the earth moving.

  How odd it is, this business of being alive. Things matter so much. Emma used to tell me to stop caring so deeply about the smallest upset – but how can you persuade yourself not to care? Sometimes I think what a relief it will be to die, to be done with it.

  When I think of home, I think of your house, with you and Emma in the kitchen and the smell of bread baking; Lucy is sometimes there too. Or Eric’s house in Scotland, that summer before it all went wrong. Or here, which became my refuge.

  Is it still snowing outside? There was a poem I used to read to you – what was it? Something about flowers blooming behind the window-pane. I can’t remember any longer. I imagine the snow falling, covering the world with its white, blank beauty, erasing everything. My thoughts are spreading, fading, disappearing. Images move through my mind and one by one I watch them pass. Faces that will not come again.

  You touch my hand, my head. Maybe this is home. This moment, now.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Marnie stood up and went over to the window. She opened the curtains and moonlight streamed in, flowing like a silver river across the floorboards. For a moment the two sleeping men were illuminated by it, while the rest of the room lay in shadow. They looked like figures in an old painting and Marnie stood quite still, watching them both. They didn’t stir. Embers glowed and faded in the hearth.

  Outside, the snow had stopped, and stars pricked the clear sky. Tiny icicles hung from the guttering and the branches of the trees. So still, so flawless, serene and inhuman. The owl shrieked, close to the house, and then again. Marnie imagined the sound it made echoing through the forests and over the icy loch. Perhaps Dot, in her house on the other side of the hill, could hear it too. She pressed her face to the cold pane and tried to make out its shape in the trees. Perhaps it was calling desperately for a mate; she hoped it would find one soon to put it out of its demented loneliness.

  After Oliver, there had been Leo. She was never in love with him, never felt that rush of agonizing yearning, but she wanted to erase the memory of Oliver’s tender face, of Ralph’s wretched, needy expression when he looked at her. Cold turkey, she told herself. Pretend you’re OK, pretend you don’t miss Ollie and want him, pretend it didn’t really matter. After a bit, it won’t be pretending any more. Leo, she realized later – and maybe even knew at the time – was everything the two of them weren’t. Tall, bendy, almost like a rubber band, with long dirty-blond hair tied back in a ponytail and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He wore a moth-eaten army coat that swamped him, and a long scarf trailed round his thin neck. He was lethargic, indolent, pessimistic, sardonic, moved slowly and dragged his feet along the ground. He smoked without using his hands, puffing billows away from his face, and drew patterns on the backs of his hands and up his arms with indelible marker. The world and everyone in it, including himself, seemed a source of gloomy amusement to him. If Marnie was using him to get over her confusion and grief, she was sure he wouldn’t get too worked up about it. Anyway, he didn’t last long. They drifted apart just after Christmas, without regret or rancour, and Marnie never saw him again, although even now when she saw youths who drifted along pavements with their heads bowed and tatty clothes, she was reminded of him and of her strange last year at home.

  Next came Bill, who wore round glasses and cropped his hair short above his pale, creased brow. He was insistently intellectual, hungry with the need to impress. Marnie fell first for the way he talked, in eloquent paragraphs that sounded profound – until she discovered he was quoting Beckett or Baudelaire to her. Then she fell for his insecurity, the anxiety that lurked under his surface. But it wasn’t enough.

  For the first year at art school, when she wore black jeans, jerseys, and was thin for the first time in her life, there was Magnus. He was an Icelander who worked in a bar near her halls and was studying film. He was dark-haired, solid, bearded, unfailingly courteous, slightly mysterious, unreachable. He bought her flowers every Friday, and took her to jazz concerts in dark cellars, where his friends kissed her hand in greeting. In the spring, she went with him to Reykjavik to meet his family and to see the sulphurous plains, the bubbling springs, the black sand and thick light breaking over the vast, whale-inhabited sea. It was as though she had stepped off the edge of the world and she felt such a rush of homesickness for Emma and her little house, where there would be a candle in the window if she was expected, that she could barely move for the pain of it. Later, she tried to put down what she had seen and felt on canvas, the dark surge of yearning amid the spooky lunar landscape, but could never quite capture it. She was working in oils now. Her hands smelt of turpentine; her clothes were daubed with paint. There were flecks in her hair.

  She sat in her grotty little room, with Magnus’s yellow roses on the broken-legged chest of drawers, and wrote to Ralph, knowing that the pages were probably thick with misspellings, grammatical failings and random punctuation.

  Don’t you think that very often our words aren’t heard? They bounce off the surface, don’t take root. I remember sometimes, with you or Ollie or Lucy, I would summon up the courage to utter something, and when at last I said it, it seemed tame, unremarkable, as if its meaning had been lost somehow. I’m sure everyone feels like that, not just me. It’s as if you have to write something down or turn it into a picture or something, in order to describe it properly. We’ve never really talked about what happened and that was partly because I simply didn’t know the right words for what I was feeling and I probably still don’t. And partly because I was scared – I don’t know why really. I don’t want to lose things. I don’t know if I’m angry or guilty or sad, or all three. I don’t know what I felt about Ollie. Or you. There are all these rolling emotions inside me and there aren’t words for them – or at least, I don’t know the words. Perhaps you do. You’re better at these things than I am. You’re better at almost everything except drawing pictures, tidying rooms, having confidence in yourself. I guess what I want to say is that I love you and I miss you. I miss you and I miss how everything was and in spite of everything, if you ever need me or are ever in trouble or distress, you have to tell me. Because I’ll always, always be your friend and even if years go by and we don’t meet, I’ll still be here.

  She didn’t send the letter, of course. She sent a postcard instead, with a Rembrandt self-portrait on one side, and on the other her scrawl saying simply: ‘Am really having a good time and learning a lot. Hope that you are too and that we meet in the summer. Thinking of
you and sending my love, M xxxxx’.

  She wrote to Oliver as well. She had been to a party: her feet were sore and her head throbbed with tiredness, but she knew she wouldn’t sleep. There was a buzz of sadness and unsatisfied excitement inside her. She sat in her flannel pyjama trousers and a thick hoodie, her back against her bed, her pad of paper on her knees, her feet on a hot-water bottle.

  Dearest Ollie, It’s that strange time of night, when it’s nearly dawn but it’s still quite dark. The curtains of my room (it’s horrible, a box with just enough space to cram in a bed and a chest and a desk and me) are open and I can see a few pale stars above the rooftops. I’ve been thinking about you – I’ve always been thinking about you ever since we met and you stood in the doorway with Ralph and I thought you were the loveliest person I’d ever set eyes on – and wondering if you’ve been thinking about me and if we can meet again, try again. Can we try again, or is it too late? I don’t know why it all went so wrong.

  I shouldn’t be writing this, I know that, but I can’t stop myself, maybe because it’s so late and so quiet and my head and my heart and my body and my bones and my blood are full of longing to be with you again and have you hold me the way you did and I was so happy, for a few days I was so happy. It’s been such a long time since we met. You’ve probably got a girlfriend. I’ve got a boyfriend. His name is Magnus and he’s much nicer than I deserve and he treats me well and I like him a lot (and so does my mother!). But it’s not the same. Everything was unfinished between us and I feel I can’t bear it. Though of course I can bear it. I just want to know if you feel the same, ever. It’s horrible, not knowing anything and having to make everything up in my head, in the silence. Maybe you never even think about me. Maybe I was just a little blip, a few days between two stages of your life. Maybe you barely remember what I look like any more and I’m fading away with every week that passes – I had a boyfriend after you left, and when I try and remember his face, I can’t properly. Perhaps that’s what it is like for you. I used to think that love – real love – had to be reciprocated, but I don’t believe that any more. The world is much more complicated than that. And I used to think that you reap what you sow, but now I don’t believe that either. Sometimes it’s just stony ground; sometimes it’s not fair.