The Winter House

by Unknown

‘Let’s go next door,’ said Marnie, extricating herself.

  ‘No, no. I’ll leave. I know when I’m not wanted.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Marnie, as the door shut behind him. ‘He’s not always like that. He can be –’ She stopped, frowning. What could he be? Tearful, sentimental, impassioned, scared, frail, failed. That was the trouble: she could always see the unhappiness behind the bluster. It was the unhappiness that kept her here. ‘What did you want to ask?’

  ‘Do you want to come back with me?’

  ‘Come back with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You mean now?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because –’ She stopped and looked around her. ‘I don’t know,’ she said weakly.

  ‘I’ve come to rescue you,’ he said, quite seriously. His face was illuminated.

  ‘What if I don’t want to be rescued?’

  ‘Tell me to go and I’ll go.’

  ‘He’s not a bad man.’

  ‘Just bad for you.’

  ‘Bad for himself. Disappointed.’

  ‘Come on, Marnie. You can only save yourself – that’s what you’ve always said to me.’

  ‘I did, didn’t I?’ She stared at him, hope running through her, like cold water over a dusty plain. ‘God, Ralph – am I really going to do this?’

  ‘I don’t know. Are you?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I am. I should get changed.’

  ‘Why? You’re going to get dirty all over again, walking. Just put on some proper shoes, if you’ve got any.’

  ‘We’re going to walk?’

  ‘I thought so, and hitch. St Malo’s the nearest ferry. And it’s a lovely town. We can have a meal there.’

  ‘Oh! All right. I mean, good. Yes! I’d like that. God, this is weird, though.’

  ‘Get your passport and warm clothes and we’ll be off. George is waiting outside.’

  ‘George! Who’s George, Ralph?’

  ‘A friend. He came with me.’

  ‘You never mentioned him!’

  ‘You’ll like him. He’s quite eccentric. Very optimistic about life.’

  Marnie felt light-headed. She stared around the wreckage of the kitchen. ‘I have to go and tell Gilbert.’

  ‘Leave him a note. Paint it on the wall.’

  ‘No, that would be very wrong.’

  ‘Go and tell him, then. Shout if you need us. We’ll be in the garden.’

  ‘It’s pouring with rain.’

  ‘It’ll be pouring with rain on the road.’

  Marnie used to think – used to say, in conversation with friends – that happiness and unhappiness were not each other’s opposites. Unhappiness was a condition: you almost always knew when you’d got it. But happiness was more elusive, a sensation that was fleeting and mysterious, not to be confused with pleasure or contentment. You couldn’t pursue it, and you rarely knew that you were happy, only, once it was over, that you had been. You looked back and said, ‘Yes, there, then, with that person, in a world now gone.’

  But it wasn’t like that with Ralph. Just as his unhappiness was a tangible burden, dulling his eyes and slumping his shoulders, practically crushing him, so, too, his happiness had an animal quality. You could see it in his gaze, hear it in the way he spoke, almost smell it on his skin. Sometimes Marnie thought that if she closed her eyes she would still be able to tell his mood at a distance by feeling it vibrating in the air, in the atmosphere he cast. On those two days in France, Ralph’s happiness streamed off him. His feet were light, his voice strong; he sang, laughed, leapt over puddles in the road, vaulted over gates, teased George (who idolized him, stared at him when he thought no one was looking with a hopeless expression of worship), told jokes and nonsensical stories, got them thoroughly lost.

  After their first embrace, he didn’t touch Marnie, except to jump her down from stiles or to see her into cars that sometimes stopped for them – although only if the two men hid behind a tree and Marnie stood alone to lure them to a halt. With his companion like an absurd fellow knight beside him, he was saving her, redeeming them both from the ways of the past. The road, winding through lush fields and tiny villages, led them to a different future. When they finally arrived in Portsmouth, filthy and light-headed with the triumph of their journey, Emma, who had been alerted, was waiting. She waved to them from her rusty little car with the split plastic passenger seat. At which point Ralph and George simply left them.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that!’ Marnie snapped at her mother as they drove away.

  The room was very crowded; it hummed with voices, peals of laughter, a hubbub of civilized camaraderie. Everyone looked prosperous and at home – those young men with high cheekbones and eloquent hands; those older men with intelligent dark eyes and rumpled suits; all the beautiful young women, thin as storks, with silky blonde hair or chic crops, aristocratic noses, clever dresses, modulated voices. They held glasses of pale golden wine and reached out for canapés of spiced prawns and tiny goujons of sole as they passed. She wished Lucy had come with her. Then they could have stood in a corner together, stuffing themselves with crispy delicacies and uttering spiteful, comforting remarks about everyone else in the room.

  This was a new world, thought Marnie, one to which she did not belong. She was an outsider, awkward and unworldly. If she spoke her voice would betray her, for she lacked irony and sophistication and – especially after her wretched months in Normandy – confidence. If she were to put anything down on paper, for God’s sake, her skewed, misspelt writing would shame her. She looked down at what she was wearing: the long velvet skirt with a ragged hem; the scuffed boots; the cotton jacket with big buttons and a cinched waist that she’d picked up in a charity shop. She had come straight from the theatre, hardly stopping to brush her hair. She wore no makeup and probably had paint on her face. Her hands were worn and calloused, with nails cut short.

  She stood in the doorway, clutching her bag and thinking that maybe she would turn and make a run for it before anyone saw her. Ralph wouldn’t mind; he wouldn’t even notice. She scanned the room for a sight of him. Yes, there he was. He was wearing a beautiful black jacket and jeans and talking to a young woman with apricot hair. As Marnie watched, he threw back his head in amusement and, even from this distance, she thought she could hear his laughter. So he was at home here, too, she thought. And as she looked at the familiar figure and saw him for the first time as others must see him, it came to her that he was beautiful. He wasn’t the scraggy, undernourished boy she had always seen him as. For a moment, she gazed transfixed: his black hair in a nimbus round his head, his slim figure, his thin, pale face, which could look so haggard but which this evening was mobile and expressive. He made everyone else seem dull, weighed down. The feeling that had flickered, illicit, inside her since their Normandy adventure returned more strongly and she practically gasped as she recognized it – for this was Ralph, after all, Ralph who was like her younger brother, Ralph who was like a puppy with eager eyes, Ralph who loved her with one-way adoration. No. It wasn’t possible.

  She hitched her bag onto her shoulder and turned to go.

  ‘Marnie!’ From across the room he had seen her and came rushing over, nimbly side-stepping outstretched hands. ‘Marnie, I didn’t know if you’d come.’

  ‘I was about to go,’ she admitted. ‘All these scary people.’

  ‘Scary? Rubbish. Come and meet some of them.’

  ‘No – listen, this is your evening. These are your guests.’

  ‘I don’t know half of them. To tell you the truth…’ he lowered his voice and leant towards her ‘… part of me wants to run away.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘I’ve got to wait for my editor to make his little speech and then give a little speech in return – after that, why not?’

  ‘Because you’re why everyone’s here.’

  ‘Me and the drink and the gossip and the feeling of belonging to some circle or other… Ollie was going to come, you know.�
��

  ‘Ollie!’ She couldn’t keep the alarm and the hope from her voice.

  ‘But his father’s ill, so he pulled out. He asked after you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I said you were just the same, but better. Look, there’s George. Come and talk to him while I do my duty, but don’t you dare go.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘Have you read his book?’ George asked. He was wearing a suit that was a little too tight for him and his face shone with sweat and earnestness.

  ‘I’ve just started,’ said Marnie. Dreaming of Home had been sent to her by the publisher the previous day; she had read the first few pages immediately, but had found herself so overcome with distress that she had been unable to continue, although she carried it in her bag and was conscious of it in the way that one is conscious of a love letter or a bomb.

  ‘It’s extraordinary,’ said George. ‘Completely extraordinary. It’s going to be a sensation.’

  ‘Is it autobiographical?’ asked Marnie.

  ‘It’s more like a deeply personal meditation – and a weird philosophical ragbag, too, of course, with all the things he’s ever been interested in thrown in – on the meaning of home. It reads like an intimate confessional memoir, you know, with that voice that feels as if it’s talking directly to you – except Ralph doesn’t talk about himself in the book. Doesn’t talk about himself, but you feel he’s in every line. I’m in awe of it. And deeply jealous, of course.’

  ‘Do you want to write?’

  ‘Me? No. But I want to have written and be at a party like this, with a book like that on the table and critics talking about me as the new bright hope of British literature.’ He laughed. ‘It’s hard to be jealous of Ralph, though. He’s so…’ He paused, looking searchingly at Marnie. ‘What’s the word?’

  ‘Sweet?’

  ‘Good God, no! He’s too scarily strange to be sweet. But he’s adorable, isn’t he? Everyone adores him.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘I do,’ George said frankly. ‘But I think the word I was looking for was vulnerable. He’s very vulnerable.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marnie, glancing across the room at Ralph, who was now talking to a man with a tape-recorder. ‘He is. He always has been.’

  ‘Don’t hurt him,’ said George.

  Marnie was taken aback and didn’t immediately reply. She took a glass of wine from a passing waiter and drank a deep, cool mouthful. ‘I don’t intend to hurt him,’ she said finally. ‘He’s my dear friend.’

  ‘Since getting back from Normandy,’ said George, ‘he’s been extricating himself from a relationship.’

  ‘I didn’t know. He didn’t say,’ said Marnie. ‘I haven’t seen very much of him in the last year or so, and not at all since France. You two just disappeared.’

  ‘Sophie. There she is.’ George nodded in the direction of a tiny woman, whose dark eyes and blue-black hair gave her an Oriental appearance. She was wearing ballet pumps and a very short orange shift. She made Marnie feel large and clumsy. ‘A linguist. She speaks about a hundred languages. Postgraduate at Cambridge, like Ralph.’

  ‘Oh.’ She didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘She was very upset,’ said George, and Marnie felt he was accusing her of something.

  At that moment someone knocked a knife against a glass, and someone else called for attention. The room fell silent and the crowd tightened in a circle around Ralph and a man with thick white hair, who introduced himself as Ralph’s publisher and friend. He talked, without notes, for about ten minutes. Marnie, standing at the back, could only catch half of what he said, although she did hear the word ‘brilliant’. He told an anecdote about his first meeting with Ralph, in which Ralph had apparently arrived at his office wearing odd shoes. A ripple of affection ran round the room. Marnie looked at the faces around her: it was true, they did all adore him, she thought, and a stab went through her – of what? Desire, tenderness, pride, fear.

  Ralph’s talk lasted a much shorter time, just a minute or so. He thanked his publisher and his agent – who was clearly the woman on his right, beaming at him as if he was her beloved son. Then he said that friends from all parts of his life were in the room and that, perhaps, was what home meant to him: where people he loved were gathered together. He raised a glass to everyone, and everyone raised a glass to him. Cheers and applause burst out and conversation built up again, until the room was once more buzzing. George introduced Marnie to a man with a thin, quiet face, who turned out to be one of Ralph’s old tutors, then to a woman with flaming red hair and a chipped front tooth, who told a long, breathless story about how she had arrived late because a man with only one leg had fallen down the Underground escalator, which she was travelling up, and she’d taken him to have a drink but it turned out that he… At this point, Marnie lost track of the story.

  An older woman with hair the colour of cigarette ash and an attractively low voice arrived and introduced herself as a friend of Ralph’s who had always wanted to meet Marnie. She had seen one of her pictures in Ralph’s room, and made Ralph tell her the story behind it. Marnie knew the canvas she meant: the charcoal drawing of the shingle beach in winter, the old hulk in the centre and just the suggestion of Lucy and Ralph’s figures to one side. She remembered working on the sketch of it; she could feel the sting of wind on her cheek and her hair lashing her face. She could see Ralph and Lucy as they were then, shabby, young and overexcited, tipsy on new relationships and hope.

  ‘Shall we go, then?’ As if on cue, Ralph appeared at her side.

  ‘Go where? And are you sure you should leave?’

  ‘Always leave a party before it leaves you,’ he said. ‘Anyway, it’s beginning to break up. Shall we have dinner?’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘There’s a place near here I’ve been to that does fish. It’s very simple. Is that OK?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  ‘Right, let’s make a break for it before anyone stops us. If someone calls my name, pretend we can’t hear.’

  They dashed from the room, down the broad stairs, through the double doors and out onto the street. It was early summer and the day was only just starting to fade, taking on the fugitive air that Marnie so loved; a time of vague shadows and promise. She slid an arm through Ralph’s, feeling shy, solemn, nostalgic, washed over by a lovely melancholy. She stole a glance at Ralph, and found he was looking at her, so she looked away again. Was this really happening? Once, long ago, they had kissed in the churchyard; she had let him kiss her. She remembered falling back on the grass and the way he had gazed at her then. She heard his words: Always, Marnie, don’t forget, don’t ever forget. But she had gone from there to Oliver. No, she didn’t want to think of Oliver. Not on this night, when a door she hadn’t even known was there was opening onto a new landscape.

  She ordered salmon, though she didn’t think she would be able to eat it; he asked for cod and a bottle of house white. They smiled at each other across the table, picking at hunks of bread. She couldn’t remember a time when just the two of them had been to a restaurant together, in all the years they had known each other. Pizzas with Lucy and Oliver; chips and sandwiches in service stations on the way to Scotland; bowls of tomato soup in the café near home; that dinner when he’d got his scholarship to Cambridge, and Emma had taken them out to celebrate and had, for the first time that Marnie could remember, let herself weep. But this kind of meal – alone, at a table in a corner, with the evening pressing up against the window: it had never happened before.

  The wine, when it arrived, was dry and light: it flowed through her veins, dissolved her self-consciousness. ‘I saw you differently tonight,’ she said.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I saw you in your own element.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘No – you know. For them, you’re the scholar, the writer, the young man of promise.’

  ‘Whereas you see
me as – what?’

  ‘Ralph,’ she said simply. But, of course, it wasn’t that simple, not at all. ‘What I mean is that when you know someone’s past, it’s hard to disentangle them from it. That’s why we have to leave home, isn’t it? We have to get away from our family and friends’ versions of us. You especially.’

  ‘Why me especially?’ She couldn’t read his expression.

  ‘Because your past was quite…’ she hesitated ‘… extreme. With David dying. With Grace. With your father as he was.’ She waited for his expression to close, as it always had done when she mentioned his father, but his face remained open, attentive. ‘So there was an extreme version of yourself that you must have had to escape.’

  ‘You mean neurotic, needy, dependent, volatile, fragile, unstable, unsafe?’

  ‘That kind of thing,’ she acknowledged. She took another sip of wine.

  ‘Is that how you see me?’

  ‘No. Or, rather, yes, in a way – I see it behind the you I see now.’

  ‘Like ectoplasm or something.’

  ‘I guess. Like a ghost. Ralph the boy who turned up on our doorstep and Ralph the man.’

  ‘And you see them both.’

  ‘Inevitably.’

  ‘But you do see Ralph the man?’ he persisted.

  She knew what he meant and held his gaze. ‘Yes. And perhaps that’s new to me.’

  The fish arrived. Marnie took a few mouthfuls, between sips of wine. She saw that Ralph was hardly eating either. He gave her news of Grace and she told him about Lucy. She looked at his hands, close to hers on the table; his bony wrists. She described the theatre where she was working, the motley collection of actors, some ageing, cynical and on their way down; some young, full of dreams and high-flown ambitions. His generous, mobile mouth and flecked greenish eyes. He described the strange life of a Cambridge scholar, the way that some of the dons had never left the town since they arrived and now cycled around it in their flapping gowns, like benign creatures from an earlier age. His dark hair in an unkempt cloud around his eager face; the way he still smiled at her. She knew him so well and yet here she was, learning him for the first time.