The Winter House

by Unknown

  I can’t remember how I got there. Big student house, tiles sliding off the roof, overgrown front garden, ripped curtains, noise. Someone playing the piano, jazz, I think. Notes floating through the rooms. Faces looking at me. I sat on the sofa. And then Lucy came down the stairs, in control. She sat beside me to hold me in her arms. Thin, wiry arms. She was wearing a white towelling robe that came down almost to her ankles. I put my head on her chest, against the soft folds. She smelt clean and good. She had slender fingers, short nails, small white feet, and a firm chin that rested on my head. She didn’t say anything and I felt I could fold up in her embrace for ever. I was in safe hands.

  She took me in. She took me out of the dark night and held me. She looked after me. Button nose, ironic mouth, sharp tongue, truthful eyes. I should never have. I was lonely. I knew she was glad. She was too glad.

  From her bedroom at the top of the house I could see rooftops and lights spread out to the smudged horizon. I think I cried.

  Unhappiness withdrew, stood to one side, still there but no longer eating into me, taking up the space where my heart and lungs and kidneys should have been. Weak and peaceful with weariness. Defeated. Sometimes it’s right to admit defeat.

  Other people. Lisa-May, round blue eyes and a giggle like a bell pealing in some English village churchyard; I looked her up the other day and she’s one of the few female brain surgeons in the country. Fred – yes, Fred was in that house too. Burly, taciturn, clever. Pianist’s fingers – it was he who was playing the jazz that night. I liked him but he didn’t like me – or didn’t trust me. Quite right. He already loved Lucy.

  A mess. Fred loved Lucy, Lucy loved me. I loved you. Who did you love, Marnie Still, and who do you love now?

  I should never have. Tell her I’m sorry; I liked her more than I could ever say, ever show, ever know.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  In the middle of the night, Ralph started to cry. Marnie, jerking awake from fitful dreams, sat upright. Tiny sounds were escaping him; his whole body was trembling. But his eyes were still shut and she thought at first that he was asleep and racked by morphine nightmares. Leaning towards him, she put her hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw her and he was trying to smile, trying to speak, but no words would come.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’

  Looking round, she saw that Oliver was stretched out on the sofa, fast asleep. His fists were curled into tight balls and held up to his face, as if he was ready to defend himself. She wouldn’t wake him. She took tissues out of her pocket and dabbed at the tears on Ralph’s cheeks, but more came. His whole face was wet. He made hardly a sound, just looked helplessly at her out of his streaming eyes.

  ‘Oh, my darling,’ she said, her voice cracking with tenderness. ‘What can I do for you? Are you in pain?’

  He was trying to speak: his face was screwed up with the effort; spittle ran down his chin. His hands clawed towards her. Marnie almost drew back from him; she was frightened, though she couldn’t have said of what exactly. He barely seemed human any more and she found it hard to recognize this creature as Ralph. But she made herself look into his eyes, deep in their sockets, redrimmed, with yellowing irises, but still greeny-blue, still his. The same eyes that had looked at her so longingly all those years ago.

  Through shallow, tearing breaths, he managed a sound. Was he trying to tell her something? Trying to say her name? She grasped both flailing hands between hers and pressed them to her lips. She bent over him and tried to cradle him, but he was all sharp bones, flapping skin and matted hair. ‘I’m here,’ she whispered. ‘We’re both here. Tell me what to do.’

  ‘Hold me.’ Was that what he said? He repeated the words, more clearly this time. Hold me, yes.

  She climbed onto the bed and lay beside him, putting both arms around his shuddering form, pressing her lips to his sticky cheek, feeling his breath on her skin. Bit by bit, he became still. His breathing was calmer. Marnie sat up and wriggled out of her long skirt, she took off her pale grey jersey and thick tights. She untied her long hair and shook it loose. Then she climbed under the covers and pressed her body, no longer young and firm, against Ralph’s disintegrating one. She spooned him to her, her breasts pressed against his zip-sharp spine, her toes against his quivering calves. She could feel every string and knot of his terrifying body, every artery and bubbled vein.

  ‘I’ve hugged you like this once before,’ she said, to the back of his head. She felt, rather than saw, that Oliver was awake and listening to her. ‘In a tent in the rain. Do you remember, Ralph? I know you do. It could have been yesterday, couldn’t it? Time doesn’t matter any more. We’re here and we’re there as well. Adults and children all at the same time, past and present and future all meeting. Let these seconds last for ever.’ Nonsense words spooling out in the darkness, but she could tell that Ralph was listening. His body was quiet. She put a hand against his chest and felt his heart still beating there against his fragile ribcage. The impossible preciousness of life. Her voice spilled out like a river to wash over him. ‘If you asked me to marry you now, I’d say yes. Yes, Ralph. Don’t cry any more – I can’t bear it if you cry. Don’t be sad. Sorrow has gone. We’re here and we love you, and we’re not going to leave you, never again. Yes,’ she repeated. ‘Dry your eyes, dearest friend. Don’t be downhearted.’

  It seemed to her that she was speaking with Emma’s voice as well as her own; that she had become her mother and was cuddling her son and keeping him from harm.

  I wish you all the things that I won’t have. Have them for me, enjoy them for me. Early-spring sunshine on the back of your neck, a beloved face to wake to, seagulls screeching, long grass moving when the wind blows, scrambled eggs and crosswords on Sunday mornings, though you were never very good at crosswords, were you? Journeys to strange hotel rooms and to empty beaches where sea anemones stir in hidden rock pools, green seas bucking, a horse breathing warmth into your open hand, seasons coming round and round again. Dawn choruses, full moons and new moons and white clouds and high winds, cuckoos in May and owls that call across the woods, storms, people who recognize you, secrets, giggles, eyes across a crowded room. I wish you old age. I wish you love.

  Hold me now. If you hold me, surely I can’t go.

  *

  They must have fallen asleep together, because when she opened her eyes dawn was just breaking. Through the open curtains, she could see an eerie pink light on the snow and the pine trees looked as though they were tipped with flames. The smell of coffee filled the room and a fresh fire crackled in the hearth; logs were piled up to one side and the old ash had been removed. Marnie felt stiff, sore. One arm was trapped under Ralph and she had to wriggle it gently free before she slithered out of bed, making sure not to pull the covers off him. She stood on the floor in her T-shirt and knickers, feeling middle-aged, foolish and cold.

  ‘Here,’ said Oliver, crossing the room and putting a mug of hot coffee into her hands. ‘Why don’t you go and have a bath while I make us some porridge? We’re running out of milk so it will have to be mostly water. I’ll get Dot to bring some more over this morning. I made sure the immersion heater was on so there’s enough hot water.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marnie, bemused. She couldn’t work out what day it was, or how long she’d been there. She picked up her clothes and rubbed her gritty eyes with the back of her hand. ‘All right. Thanks. I could do with a proper wash. I’ve lost all track of time. How long did I sleep?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Three hours, maybe.’

  ‘And Ralph?’

  ‘The same. He’s been very peaceful – no distressing dreams as far as I could tell.’

  ‘That’s good.’ She hesitated. ‘I was afraid I’d wake up and find him dead.’

  ‘I don’t think it’ll be long now. I’m going to call the doctor and see if he’ll come round today.’

  ‘What for?’

  Oliver shrugged.

  Marnie made her way up the stai
rs with her coffee. The unheated bathroom was icy, the tiles almost too cold to stand on with bare feet, but the water, for once, was scalding. She lay in the tub, surrounded by clouds of steam, and looked at the icicles that hung from the guttering above the window, a row of glistening, dripping stalactites. She let herself sink beneath the water and now the sounds of the house were reverberating through her: footsteps, drawers opening, Oliver’s voice saying something reassuring to Ralph. She surfaced and shook the water out of her hair, planning how she would break the day up into moments: making more custard; changing Ralph’s clothes and washing his sweat-stained T-shirt; reading to him, Gerard Manley Hopkins today, she thought, his soaring nature poems, not his sonnets of desolation, which, now she came to think of it, expressed something of Ralph’s worst moments of lacerating depression; pots of coffee and tea; a quick walk when Colette came, down to the loch to watch the ice thicken and the light fade; a phone call home to Eva, to Lucy.

  She washed her hair and rinsed it, then climbed out of the bath onto the freezing tiles. Soon she was dressed in clean clothes, her hair towelled dry and tied back, her teeth brushed. Ready for what the day might bring.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Marnie came home from Italy at Christmas, but only for a few days. They baked ginger biscuits in the shape of hearts and stars, as they had every year that Marnie could remember. Emma, in accordance with carefully preserved tradition, hung an orange spiked with cloves from the beams in the kitchen to fill the air with its pungency; Marnie made snowflakes out of sheets of white paper and stuck them to the windows with dabs of honey. They put out the little cherubs they had made together from ping-pong balls and stiff red card when Marnie was seven. She remembered how she had drawn their faces and hair with a black felt tip; she could smell the glue they had used, feel its plasticky skin on the tips of her fingers.

  They bought the tree on Christmas Eve, as they always had, and from the same farm. Emma dragged the box of decorations down from the attic: the same old tin reindeers and glass stars and shiny balls in red and green; the saved fistfuls of silver tinsel to drape over the branches; the rope of coloured lights they had used year after year, replacing its dud bulbs and untwisting its knots, mysteriously acquired over the past year in storage. Emma put the shabby angel on top and they stood back to look at the effect, then carefully tilted the tree in its iron stand so that it stood straight. Everything was the same; everything had changed.

  Marnie’s room, with the accordion gathering dust in the corner, the empty easel by the window, waited for her; the bedcovers were turned back and Emma had put a miniature cyclamen on the sill. But the air smelt different and the spaces seemed unfamiliar. Her clothes, when she pulled open the chest’s drawers or opened her wardrobe, belonged to another age. Giddy with nostalgia, she ran a hand through the dresses and tops hanging in the cupboard; since she almost never threw anything away, it seemed as though her teenage years were captured among their worn folds, memories in the creases of her coat, in the faded cotton shirt.

  On an impulse, she went up the stairs to Seth’s – and more lately Ralph’s – old room and sat on the bed beside the folded covers. It was so clean and bare in here; everything breathed absence and was white with loss. Marnie had a sudden sharp sense of this house, this home, being no longer her centre, the hub from which her life spun out, but something that lay in her past, growing more distant and unreal with each week that passed. Even while she stood at the window looking out at the choppy grey sea, she felt she was observing the distant landscape of her childhood, one that she had left without realizing it.

  On Christmas morning they exchanged presents. Marnie had bought Emma a silk scarf in vibrant blues and greens and a pair of gloves in thin, soft leather; she had wrapped them in tissue paper and tied them with thick gold ribbon, and her mother took a long time to open them. Her hands looked as though they were trembling. She draped the scarf round her shoulders and held the gloves against her cheek. ‘This is too extravagant,’ she said. ‘You should be saving your money, not wasting it on me.’

  ‘I wanted to buy you something beautiful, not just practical.’

  ‘Well, you have.’

  ‘Because – well, you’re beautiful.’

  Emma closed her eyes briefly, then opened them and smiled. ‘You’re a very kind liar. I’m middle-aged and grey and suffering from the pull of gravity. But thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  They both felt awkward; they weren’t accustomed to speaking emotionally to each other.

  ‘Here – this is your present.’ Emma handed Marnie a large, square parcel.

  ‘I know what it is – a football!’ One or other of them had made the same feeble joke every year for the past fifteen or so.

  ‘That’s right. How did you guess? Go on, open it.’

  ‘I don’t want to tear the paper.’

  ‘It’s something I’ve been working on,’ said Emma, trying to sound casual.

  ‘Hang on. Oh. But…’

  It was a photo album, with a thick cloth cover. Marnie opened it to the first page, on which Emma had written in her bold calligraphy: ‘To my beloved daughter Marnie, who makes me so proud.’

  Tears stung her eyes.

  ‘Turn the pages,’ said Emma. ‘You have to look inside.’

  ‘Oh, goodness,’ said Marnie. ‘But this is…’

  ‘Your father, when we first met. Isn’t he handsome?’

  ‘I’ve never seen these before.’

  ‘No. I’m sorry.’

  ‘And this is you. But you’re – you’re lovely.’

  ‘I’m young, that’s all.’

  ‘Where were they all this time? I used to look in your room for pictures, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ said Emma, with a hint of her old dryness. ‘I put them all away after the accident. I thought I’d never be able to look at them again. But after you left for Italy, I got them down. I should have shown them to you before. It wasn’t fair.’

  ‘Where was this?’ She was looking at a photo of Paolo and Emma in yellow oilskins, the hoods up so that only their grinning faces could be seen.

  ‘That? We went walking in Wales the year we met. It rained constantly.’

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ said Marnie. ‘You never said.’

  ‘I was wrong.’

  Marnie turned the next page. ‘Seth,’ she said.

  ‘He’s a day old in that one. I thought I’d never seen anything so tiny and breakable. I got home from the hospital and took about three hours to put a vest on him. I thought I’d snap off one of his arms if I wasn’t careful. Look, he has a stork mark on his forehead. It never quite disappeared. It was still there when…’ She stopped for a moment. ‘And his hair is slightly red. I don’t know where he got that from – not from either of us. I remember his smell. Even his shit smelt clean. I’d never had anything to do with babies so it was all completely new. I used to sit for hours feeling the way his fist closed round my finger. Or watching those involuntary twitches, and the way his eyelids pulsed with dreams. Like a miracle.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Marnie said again.

  ‘There, that’s him with your father.’

  Marnie looked at the photo of her brother in her parents’ bed, bunched up and naked against Paolo’s bare chest. On Paolo’s face there was an expression of peace.

  ‘And us three together,’ said Emma. ‘I might have got the order a bit wrong for some of them. You think you’ll never forget, but you do. Bit by bit you do.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Not everything, of course.’

  Seth learning to crawl, to walk, to ride a tricycle, then a bike with stabilizers; Seth with Paolo, with Emma, with the two of them.

  ‘I’m pregnant in that one,’ said Emma, laying a finger on the picture.

  ‘With me?’

  ‘Well, of course, you chump. Who else? And here you are in person.’

  ‘I look like a prune.’

  ‘And t
here’s Seth holding you for the first time.’ Indeed, there he was, on his face an expression of outrageous pride.

  ‘Did he like me?’

  ‘What do you mean, did he like you? He adored you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She turned the pages, watching herself grow. ‘God, I used to scowl a lot.’

  ‘You still do.’

  ‘Do I scowl?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Then the pictures stopped. There was a gap of several years before there were any more, and even then they were much sparser, and were almost always of Marnie on days of special importance: first days at school, final assemblies; formal images to mark her official progress through life. ‘Why are you giving me this?’ she asked at last, closing the book, and tying it shut with the blue ribbon.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Don’t you want these photos yourself?’

  ‘I want you to have them.’

  ‘But what about you?’

  ‘I’ve kept a few.’

  ‘Of the four of us together?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Best not to say anything, then.’

  ‘I don’t know if I’m happy or sad.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re both.’

  ‘Do you mind me not being here?’

  ‘Mind? No.’ Emma’s voice was very firm. ‘Of course I love seeing you, but you needed to leave.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘All children need to leave, one way or another. You were always such a homebody, I used to worry that you wouldn’t make the separation.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘You mean – do without you?’ Emma laughed. ‘I’m not completely at a loose end, if that’s what you’re worried about. Come on, let’s go for our walk.’

  *

  They went for their Christmas Day walk along the shore, in the teeth of a cold easterly wind. Stinging cheeks and watering eyes and the salty spray stiffening their hair. Crunching across shingle, past the old boat that was now a skeleton, its bones sinking into the pebbles and grit, along the ragged hem of the surf. Remember, remember. But the memories weren’t so sharp now: they didn’t sink their hooks into Marnie’s heart.