by Unknown
Christmas had come and gone. Crackers pulled and gifts exchanged. Her two girls hung themselves round her neck, kissed her forehead and smiled anxiously at her, to make her smile back. The new year was nearly there and she tried to wrench her mind to the future, which lay blank and bare in front of her: everyone would leave and she would still be here. And yet all the time she was wandering in the cathedrals of forests, in the still white world where owls called in the darkness and a friend lay dying. Or she was walking slowly along the shingle beach in the golden evening sun, while the waves curled at her feet, and saw that someone was waiting for her by the rotting boat. It was Emma; it was Ralph, Lucy, Oliver. Sometimes they were all there together, her dear ones, smiling at her as she moved towards them along the ragged hem of the sea. How was it possible that she would never be with them all again? How could it be true that those bright days would not come again? If she had known then what she knew now, would it have made any difference? Would she have held precious things closer? ‘Let go,’ said a voice, and it was her voice, those final words to Ralph as he lay between her and Oliver, the last thread waiting to be snapped: ‘You can let go now. You can go.’
Her eyes filled with tears as she stood in the yard, in the snow. She had never been good at letting go, at saying goodbye and leaving things behind. Then the doorbell rang, rang again, and she went to answer it, her cheeks still burning from the cold.
‘Marnie,’ he said, and she drew him inside and closed the door on the street. There, among the puppets, he held her close; she laid her head against his chest, looked at by hundreds of blind eyes. For a long time they didn’t speak, but he pressed his lips against her hair and she wrapped her arms tight round him, under his thick coat and his shirt, feeling his skin move over his ribs and his heart beating strongly. Sometimes they drew apart and looked at each other, smiling and foolish with gladness. Then they clutched each other again, pressing against each other. How she’d missed him, all these years.
‘Let me take you home,’ she said.
At last, oh, at last. Come home with me, my dear heart, my love. I can be your home.
Much later, lying in her narrow bed, he said, ‘I’ve got something for you.’ He leant down and tugged his bag along the floor towards him, pulled out a battered hard-backed notebook, kept shut with a thick elastic band.
‘What is it?’
‘Ralph wanted me to give it to you.’
Taking it, Marnie swung her legs out of bed and put on her dressing-gown. She could hear Eva, Luisa and their friends laughing downstairs. She went over to the window and opened the curtains. There were fireworks going off in all directions, hissing into the night sky in fountains of stars. She took off the band, but for a moment, she didn’t open the book, just held it. Its spine was frayed and some of the pages were coming loose.
On the inside cover he’d written his name in full – Ralph Raymond Tinsley – and his address, with unaccustomed neatness. After that his writing returned to its customary slapdash urgency, letters leaning forward and piled up against each other as if he couldn’t keep up with his thoughts.
Several photographs slid out. Marnie looked at them one by one. Herself, very young, hair in plaits and a crooked, self-cut fringe, a scowl on her face, wearing denim shorts and a shapeless red T-shirt. Herself and Emma outside the house, arm in arm and squinting into the sun. She could remember Ralph taking that with a bulky camera he had picked up in a second-hand shop. Grace, laughing and waving a man’s black shoe at the camera. A young woman with silky blonde hair and a shy smile, looking over her shoulder.
She turned the page.
You painted a bird on my window.
You cut a door in my soul.
The bird opened its wings and it flew
Into my heart.
Oh, my dear heart,
Do you know
And there it stopped.
She turned the next page to a single couplet, with a line slashed viciously through it.
I dreamt I saw you smile at me.
I woke but I was dreaming still…
And then, a few pages later, after doodles and gibberish and the repetition of her name in different styles, she found:
Among the long grass, I held you;
By the churned sea, I found you;
In your grey eyes, I drowned
But your smile rescues me
And your voice reminds me
That I am saved.
My shining girl,
The face in all my dreams.
She slid the photos back inside the book, closed it and replaced the rubber band. Then she climbed back into bed where she lay in the circle of Oliver’s arms. She closed her eyes. In the darkness, voices from downstairs floated up to her, and although she couldn’t catch what they were saying to each other, the rise and fall of their conversation cradled her. A memory slid into her mind of lying in bed as a tiny child, listening to her parents’ voices from another room and feeling absolutely safe. Was it real, this sudden image from the past she had thought irretrievably lost in darkness? Some recollection buried deep that had finally worked its way to the surface and broken out at last? She didn’t know, but the sense of the past and the present weaving together in her head, of the voices of the dead and those of the living overlapping like waves that rippled across each other on the shingle beach of home, stayed with her like a blessing as she sank towards sleep.
This is what it means to die, Marnie. Darkness lies across the face of the earth. But listen. There are still sounds; there are still voices in the air. Listen now.
THE WINTER HOUSE
A reading group guide
Section 1
Themes for further discussion
• Marnie feels excited as she heads to Scotland. Why do you think this is?
• What effect does the isolated setting of the house have on Marnie, Oliver and Ralph?
• Do you think Oliver is the love of Marnie’s life?
• Did Marnie ever love Ralph in the way she loved Oliver?
• Marnie and Ralph both lose members of their family – what impact do David and Emma’s deaths have on them both?
• Had Ralph not been ill, do you think Oliver and Marnie would have found each other again?
Section 2
Nicci Gerrard in conversation
What inspired the story behind The Winter House?
That’s a hard question because The Winter House had a long, slow gestation; it lay curled up at the bottom of my consciousness for a while, occasionally stirring. I knew that I wanted to write something about the way that the past breaks through into the present. There’s often a way in which things that have happened can haunt us, people we’ve left behind can be like ghosts, and sometimes we need to move back into the past before we can properly move forward into the future. So I decided to have a structure that would allow me to switch between two time structures. I liked the idea of having Marnie tell Ralph their joint stories, without even knowing that he could hear her. I wanted to fill the novel with different voices – her voice, his, the lost voices of her mother and her brother. In part, The Winter House is about things that are lost and can’t be recovered but I also wanted it to be about things that are hurt and can in part be healed. It sounds strange to say that a novel which is so much about death and absence is happy, but I did set out to write a happy book.
Marnie came first as a character – someone who isn’t beautiful, glamorous, successful or articulate, but who is kind (the older I get, the more I think that real kindness is a very underrated virtue) and who is often invisible to others. I wanted to make her visible. Then it was always important to me that there are several pairs in the novel. Sometimes the story between Marnie and Ralph was central, but sometimes it was the one between her and Oliver, or her and her mother. Also – sorry that this is turning out to be such a long answer – I always wanted to write about the meaning of home and homesickness. Marnie is a home-maker all her life, and Ralph is homesick a
ll of his.
Much of the novel is set in Scotland – why did you decide to place it there?
Because in winter it’s cold and remote and beautiful, and you can feel like you’ve stepped off the edge of the world. I wanted the days that the three of them spend in the little house to have the quality of a dream in which a story is told by the fireside. Actually, when I wrote it, I was thinking as much of winter in Sweden, where we spend each New Year, as much as Scotland – the extraordinary cold and quiet there, the way the world of the summer is transformed.
Who is your favourite character in the novel?
Oh dear – I was about to say Marnie, because she’s the kind of person we overlook but who is, in her own practical and unshowy way, making the world a better place. But then I feel incredibly protective towards Ralph: the book is a kind of attempt to save him, to make him all right and ease his anguish.
You capture the voice of each character so well – was it difficult to switch from Marnie’s story to Ralph’s first-person reminiscences?
I did it with great care. I wanted to make Ralph’s unspoken memories, the ones we know are inside his head but Marnie doesn’t hear, much more suggestive and lyrical than Marnie’s. It became less hard the further into the book I went, because I came to know the sound of their voices.
Do you think incidents that happen in our teenage years shape who we become?
Oh, I do – sometimes I think that things that happened years and years ago feel sharper and more intense than things that happen now. I have four children and they are all teenagers now, or older, and it makes me remember with extraordinary vividness, more like being there again than like a memory, how it felt to be that age – not just the big things like friendships and falling in love for the first time, but little details. I can recall the smell of our kitchen; I can tell you what clothes hung in my wardrobe; I can take you along our drive full of potholes, under the beech trees, down to the road where I took the bus; I can give you a word-for-word account of certain conversations; I can remember a look on a face…
Are you still in contact with your friends from school?
Recently, I have re-made contact with several friends to whom I used to be extremely close. When I left school, I think I fled from everything, I couldn’t wait for a new life to begin, a new me; I wasn’t terribly fond of the old me. And we all went in such different directions. Now I think I regret this. There are ways in which your childhood friends know you that is quite distinct from how people know you as an adult. Perhaps that is what I was fleeing and that is what I have returned to.
You write thrillers with your husband – how different is it writing solo, and also writing in a different genre from crime?
Well, in some ways it is very different. It’s lonelier, especially at the planning stage when Sean and I spend weeks and months together, working out the new book. It’s scarier – when I write as Nicci French, there’s a strange way in which I can hide behind her. And thrillers have a more obvious structure that can carry you along when you write. There were times writing The Winter House when I felt suddenly stranded. Indeed, halfway through I stopped for several months; I needed to know exactly what Marnie would have done and felt before I continued writing and for a while she resisted me. With a thriller there’s a kind of irresistible momentum that can be immensely comforting. On the other hand, the actual act of writing remains the same. Sean and I never write together. We need to be private and to sink down into that mysterious internal space, the same space I go to when writing alone.
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
The Winter House
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
The Winter House: A reading group guide