The Winter House

by Unknown

  ‘Our Christmas tree.’ She held it up.

  ‘Gone by Christmas,’ said Ralph, hoarsely.

  ‘You’re here now and so are we. This is our Christmas. I thought I’d decorate it for us.’

  Marnie lifted the branch into a plastic flower-pot she had found in the woodshed, then packed it in tightly with stones collected on her way back from the woods. She put the pot on the packing case and stood it at the end of Ralph’s bed, so he wouldn’t have to turn his head to see it.

  ‘Now you’re here,’ said Oliver, standing up, ‘I’m going to dash over to Dot’s. I’ll collect the heaters and she’s bought ice cream, as you asked, and also I’m going to borrow a DVD player and some old films I asked her to find for me. The Lady Vanishes, His Girl Friday, that kind of thing.’

  Marnie nodded. She wanted to tell him not to be long, but held back the words. She had the sense that Ralph was slipping away from them, minute by minute. She could almost see him go, like a figure receding into the fog and then there would come a moment when he would be invisible. He rarely spoke now, and when he did the words seemed wrenched out of him by an enormous effort.

  Oliver piled more logs onto the fire, then left, and Marnie put the kettle on to boil – she seemed to be making pots of tea on the hour. She rifled through the drawers and the piles of books and notepads stacked on the floor, and found some stiff card, as well as scraps of coloured tissue. She ran up the stairs to Ralph’s old bedroom and took her sewing case and pastels out of her travel bag, then returned to the kettle’s whistle.

  ‘Shall we have music?’ she asked Ralph. He didn’t answer, though he looked at her all the time, following her movements with his enormous eyes. ‘How about Haydn?’ She pulled the CD out of its case and inserted it into the player. Violins filled the room in a minor key. She poured two mugs of tea for them, then sat beside Ralph and put a hand on his forehead briefly. She took out the sewing scissors and picked up the card. ‘Bells?’ she asked. ‘Reindeer? Maybe just shapes.’

  She cut a tiny spiral and laid it on the cover, over Ralph’s chest. Soon dozens of paper shapes littered the bed; they rose and fell almost imperceptibly with his shallow breathing. She lifted Ralph’s head gently and let him take a few sips of tepid tea, wiping his mouth with the hem of her shirt. Then she took her pastels and started to colour the card: blue, pink, green. She used a thick needle to pierce a hole in the top of each one, then threaded cotton through it and hung it from the pine branch. It was like being back at primary school. She twisted shreds of coloured tissue paper into fraying ribbons and tied them on as well, then added shreds of tin foil she took from the kitchen drawers.

  ‘How does that look?’

  ‘Nice,’ he managed, or that was how Marnie interpreted the wisp of sound that came out of the side of his mouth.

  Now the music was slower, more muted. It seemed to Marnie to possess a sombre, meditative quality and to be full of a sense of yearning. A kind of sorrow lodged in her throat; it was very like the homesickness she used to feel as a child. She rose from the chair and went to the low drawer beside the oven where she had noticed a bag of tea-lights. She took it out, tore open the thick plastic with her teeth and started to put them on every available surface.

  ‘We’ll light them later,’ she said, ‘when it starts to get dark. Now it’s quite light for the first time since I arrived and rather beautiful outside – cold but almost clear. Look, I’ll pull this curtain right back and you can see it better. I was in the wood, Ralph, just now, and there were shafts of light falling through the trees onto the floor of pine needles and moss. It was lovely. Mysterious, like a sacred place. I thought…’ She stopped, hearing how her voice was thickening. ‘I thought how precious you’ve been to me, even when we haven’t seen each other for so long.’ She stopped and looked at him. His eyelids were flickering. ‘Can you hear me?’

  He made no answer. She sat back in her chair, watching all the hanging shapes turn slowly on the pine branch, and listened to the music, which had speeded up without her noticing, sounding urgent now, as if it was reaching some kind of climax. From here, she could see how the sun broke in and out of clouds, so that the landscape was in continuous motion – now sombre and fantastical, now luminous. There was no clock in this room, and she didn’t know what time it was; the implacable movement of minutes and hours had been replaced by light and dark, by half-dreams, poems read aloud and the quiver of flames in the grate, casting shadows over the room.

  The music slowed once more and Marnie realized that she was listening to Haydn’s ‘Farewell Symphony’ in which, at the end, the musicians take their leave one by one. She had seen it performed once, long ago, in a church. There had been candles on the stands, which were snuffed out as the music died away and the musicians left. She sat motionless in her chair by the bed, scarcely daring to breathe. Now the oboes had departed, now the horns; then the double bass stopped and the cello. Finally only two violins were left playing, muted notes of farewell. Then silence. Marnie, her hand on Ralph’s, fixed her eyes on the brightness outside. She didn’t know if he was awake or sleeping, but she continued their story nevertheless.

  Chapter Ten

  Marnie was seventeen years old when she met Oliver; apart from David, she had never had a boyfriend. And even with David, she had never been in love – not head-over-heels, heart-dislodged-and-burning-in-her-throat, sleep-deprived, enchanted, sick-and-stomach-churning, yearning-and-dreaming-and-foolish in love. Sometimes she thought there was something wrong with her, something missing, which meant that she would always hold back, retreating to her haunted house, her haunted mother, clinging fast to her childhood.

  It was a drab Sunday in January – the kind of meagre day that never gets entirely light and passes slowly and restlessly in unsatisfactory tasks. Marnie had spent the morning helping Emma pack mugs and bowls in bubble-wrap, in preparation for a pottery stall the following week. Her fingers had whitened in the cold of the shed. After lunch she had tried to do schoolwork. Ralph and Lucy were doing their best to help her master grammar but, still, words turned to shapes as she stared at them. She hated punctuation, that was the fact of it. She was incapable of spelling. So instead, sitting in her room, she doodled on her English textbook, then picked up her art folder. She was taking Art and Textiles, and with those she felt at home. Sometimes, sitting in front of the fire while Emma sat nearby reading a book and Marnie pulled her needle through material watching a pattern grow, she felt a sense of contentment that was tangible and in the present: everything concentrated on the tiny, even stitches.

  Now she picked up her charcoal. She was working on a series of sea views in black and white. The one she had in front of her now showed the hulk of an old boat – only its ribs left – half hidden among the long grass at the sea’s edge. She and Ralph and Lucy had come across it on one of their walks a few days ago, and she had pulled out her sketchbook at once, drawn by its skeletal body in stark lines against the grey waves. Ralph and Lucy kept telling her to hurry up: they were freezing in the wind that lashed across from the east, flattening the reeds and blowing spray off the small waves. Marnie had told them they should go on without her, but they had dithered, throwing stones into the water and peering over her shoulder to see her drawing. Long-legged waders picked their way over the sand and shells, occasionally giving out muted, melancholy whistles. Lucy’s face was blotchy in the cold; her eyes in their new contact lenses watered and she pulled her coat closer about her. Ralph was ridiculously underdressed, as he almost always was – in the ill-fitting, striped velvet trousers he’d insisted on buying in the charity shop, a collarless white shirt that showed his sharp collarbone and a long, beaded scarf that flapped behind him; he didn’t even have a jacket. He hopped from foot to foot like a sea-bird, gabbling nonsense, his skin startlingly pale and his dark hair blowing about his face.

  Perhaps, Marnie thought, she might draw in their figures, just a suggestion at the very edge of the drawing to soften the bleakness of t
he scene. She was seized by a sudden tenderness for the two of them, their loyalty and unworldly enthusiasms. They made a strange, lopsided trio, she thought, not cool at all, thank goodness. Even though Lucy had recently started to make an effort with her appearance and was gradually acquiring a sleek, androgynous style, with her men’s jackets and the baggy trousers held up with braces, she remained geeky, sarcastic and peremptory. At school they called her a ‘nerd’ and made jokes about her behind her back, but they largely left her alone because they were cowed by her quick tongue and fierceness. Ralph – Marnie’s mouth twisted into a painful smile – was mercurial and gauche, tripping over himself in his eagerness, endlessly knocked back and endlessly resilient. In many ways, he seemed much younger than his years; still like a child full of impatience and greed. It was only in the past few weeks that she’d glimpsed another Ralph, a brooding young man with a thin face and beautiful eyes, but that was because she had seen him through Lucy’s smitten gaze. She let her charcoal trail a line down the margin of the page, where her two friends had hovered by the boat – bending down to pick up a dried cuttlefish, seizing a minute cowrie shell for Emma’s collection that she kept in a large glass jar in the bathroom, throwing a lank piece of seaweed at each other – then made a faint mark to suggest their presence, though only she would know what it meant.

  When there was a knock at the door, she immediately knew it was Ralph, though she hadn’t been expecting him today. No one else announced themselves like he did: a rapid, impatient hammering, as if he had something urgent to impart and couldn’t wait a second longer. She put her sketchbook on the table, careful not to smudge the charcoal before she had time to fix it, and went down the stairs. But when she opened the door, it wasn’t just Ralph who was standing there. At once, she felt uncharacteristically self-conscious: her jeans were torn at one knee and balding on the backside; the old flecked jersey had once belonged to Paolo and came down almost to her knees, her ancient slippers were squashed flat at the heel. She was dusty, and covered with charcoal, and had twisted a scarf around her hair so that it didn’t get in the way of her work.

  ‘Hi, Ralph,’ she said, noticing that he was holding an open can of spaghetti hoops in one hand and a spoon in the other.

  ‘Marnie,’ he said, and scooped a large spoonful of spaghetti into his mouth. She could tell that he was in one of his hyperactive moods: his whole body was practically steaming with restless energy. She felt that if she stepped any closer, she would be able to feel the heat he was giving out. ‘This is Oliver.’

  Marnie allowed herself to look at Oliver then, though she had been aware of him from the first, standing beside Ralph and waiting to be introduced. He was a calm presence – that was what she was first struck by. She didn’t notice that he was tall and, though quite slim, seemed substantial next to his wispy friend, or that he had grey eyes like hers and soft brown hair that fell to his shoulders, or that when he smiled bashfully at her and held out his hand he had a single dimple in his cheek. Later, she would think he was beautiful – and later still, she would realize that he was quite ordinary-looking, really, except never ordinary to her. But what she was struck by that first time, as he stood shyly beside Ralph, was that he seemed so blessedly real, so reticent and un-neurotic. Though her heart rose in her chest like a bird, she was at the same time oddly at rest in his presence. She felt recognized. That was it. She looked at him and she was in love and she would never be able to work out if there had been a gap between the moment of seeing him and the moment of loving him. To her, it felt as though she had been carrying the love inside her, like a precious, unopened package, waiting for the knock on the door and on her heart.

  Marnie heard the door open and shut, then Oliver came quietly into the room. She didn’t look up but her voice faltered and she came to a halt. She couldn’t tell if he had heard anything. He didn’t look at her, but plugged in the portable radiator, put the ice cream into the freezer compartment and the groceries into the fridge and the cupboard, then went out to fetch the TV and DVD player from the car. When he came back, he put them on the floor and went up the stairs, moving slowly and heavily. Ralph’s eyes were open. He half raised his head and looked at her with a self-mocking smile.

  ‘I don’t think you can stop at this point,’ he said. His voice was strong, his smile mischievous.

  ‘Later,’ said Marnie.

  ‘But you know I can’t afford laters.’

  Marnie took a deep breath, acutely conscious of Oliver in the room above. But what does it matter, after all these years? she thought. It’s all so long ago and we were barely more than children. Life has flowed on, like a broad, deep river, carrying us, dragging us down, separating us, and that time stands far behind us, shining with the clarity of something lost. And yet, here with her two old friends at last, she felt she was back in her past – no longer a forty-year-old woman with a botched history of love, a tendency to dote on damaged men she thought she could save, but on the threshold of life and trembling with unblemished hope.

  Chapter Eleven

  Say you believe in love at first sight. It has to be mutual, surely: he falls in love with her and she falls in love with him – isn’t that the rule? If it happens to one, it’s because it’s happening to the other as well: a two-way exchange, a duet and a symmetry, eyes meeting, a connection struck and held, an invisible thread that ties each to the other. His mouth dries and so does hers. Her heart leaps and his does too. When he feels her come into the room, the air stills around him; when she knows his eyes are on her there’s a blissful tingle up her spine, a shudder that runs through her and turns her stomach to liquid. They are both wretched, sleepless, moonstruck, unsteady, euphoric, foolish, weepy, turned inside-out and upside-down. It can’t be just her, feeling this. It wouldn’t make any sense.

  Why not? says Seth to her, as she lies in bed that night, after Oliver and Ralph have left. Her dead brother’s voice is loud and clear in her head and she turns her face to the wall, squeezing her eyes shut and wrapping her arms around her knees because it is cold in her room; there are already small flowers of frost gathering on the windows. But Seth continues: What makes you think you’re so different from all the other millions of people in the world who love without return? Look at Ralph, for goodness’ sake. Look at Lucy.

  ‘Be quiet,’ she mutters out loud.

  She doesn’t want to look at Ralph or at Lucy: she dreads disrupting the fragile equilibrium of their triangle. The soaring of her heart makes her feel like a traitor. She doesn’t want to think about how Ralph was this evening, his face shining with excitement, words pouring out of him, showing her off to his new friend, showing his new friend off to her, watching each with the same kind of proprietorial pride and anxiety. He had met Oliver, he said, because they both played chess in the school club – Marnie hadn’t even known Ralph belonged to a chess club or played competitively. ‘Ralph beats everybody, even the people who are supposed to be teaching us,’ Oliver told her, and Ralph glowed, his eyes bright and his cheeks flushed.

  Although Ralph has never confided in Marnie about school, just as he rarely speaks about home, she thinks she has a fair idea of what he endures there, day after day: hulking boys, good on the football field and not in class, who jeer at him for loving poetry, for wearing dandyish clothes, for being a sissy and a wimp and a dreamer. It’s as if David’s place has been taken by dozens of replica Davids who pursue him everywhere he goes. Once she asked him about friends and he flushed to his forehead and muttered something under his breath because he didn’t want Marnie to pity him; when he is with her, he needs to be someone other than the distraught, urgent and vulnerable young man wearing weird clothes and his father’s punishing marks. He always strives to rise above the panic and the darkness that threaten to engulf him: he’s the entertainer, the helper, the boyish and loyal friend, and he seems to have no idea that Emma and Marnie can read his moods. As soon as they see him at the door, they know from the expression on his face, the stoop of hi
s shoulders, how he is. Now, in a demonstration of his normality, he had brought Oliver to them: handsome, quiet Oliver, who came from a close-knit family, played tennis, spoke French, visited New York once a year. He was here to prove that Ralph wasn’t a freak and a loner, after all. Did he never imagine what might happen?

  Of course he imagined it, you idiot, hisses Seth. Don’t you see? Don’t you begin to understand your friend after all this time? A part of him, perhaps a hidden part, knows what he’s doing, even as he’s appalled by it. Why else do you think he was so frantic this evening, so simultaneously overjoyed and wretched?

  Say you know that if something happens between you and Oliver, your friend will suffer. He will think it’s natural and right that you should prefer Oliver to him, for under his vivid surface he’s bony, gawky, lonely and sad. His mind is full of dark corners where nightmares lurk.

  Say that, day after day, your head is filled with two faces – one of the modest, moderate young man whose mouth you want to kiss so badly it’s like a fever inside you, the other of the frail friend whose exuberance has brought light into your life but whose needs and sorrows press down on you. He’s suffered too much in his short life and he has become your responsibility. You know exactly what the look on that face will be if you hurt him. He trusts you.

  Which is worth more, asks Seth in the dark hours, a fling or a friendship? And she pulls the covers over her head in joyful despair because she is seventeen and in love and she knows it is only a matter of time now. The way he flushes when he sees her, the way that the silence between them is heavy and full of meaning, the way their gazes linger. When his hand touches hers by chance a shiver passes through her. He must feel the same. He must he must he must.

  ‘Is something going on between you and Oliver?’ Emma asked, one evening, studiously avoiding Marnie’s eyes. She was hemming a summer dress she was making for Marnie; her glasses were perched on the end of her nose and she had her silver thimble on her forefinger.