The Winter House

by Unknown

  The words were untidily large and covered several sides of paper. Marnie took a sip of water from the glass on the floor in front of her and wrote on:

  The thing is, my dearest darling beautiful Ollie, I know I will never send this letter to you, so I can say anything I want. The truth, for instance. The truth is that I am still in love with you and I don’t know what to do about it. I thought that without you around, the feeling would gradually disappear and in a way it has. It doesn’t hurt so badly, not usually, not the way it used to when I would feel sick and ill with missing you. Only sometimes, like tonight when I’ve drunk red wine and danced and now it’s too late to do anything except sit in my room and feel self-indulgent and weepy, remembering how it used to be, just for a few days. Such a tiny scrap of time. Why am I feeling like this tonight, when I’ve been dancing and laughing?

  I don’t know why we never saw each other again. Pride? Can pride be stronger even than love and hope? I guess so. I kept thinking I would go round to yours. Or that I would get on a train and track you down at university (except I kept thinking you’d be there with some woman and I’d stumble in on you and you’d be embarrassed and I’d be horribly humiliated and ashamed, a bigger version of the way I felt when I came to your room that time – do you remember? – or a version of Ralph finding us). In the end I didn’t even write. Actually, there was one time when I went to your house, but there was no one there. All the windows were dark. Anyway, I kept telling myself that you should come to me, because it was you who left me. And you never did. Do you know that feeling when you wait for the phone to ring, or the letter to drop through the letterbox, or someone to knock at the door? A dry feeling in your mouth all the time, a racing pulse. You go round pretending to be you, smiling and laughing and saying the right things at the appropriate time, and always you’re waiting. I’m waiting.

  And if we did meet, maybe we wouldn’t even like each other any more. Maybe there’d be nothing and we would be polite strangers who’d known each other in a different life. But that would be all right. Actually, it would be a great relief because at least I would know. I could put it all behind me and get on with life, wholehearted again.

  I’m trying to say I’m sorry about everything. And can we meet? I think of you all the time.

  Marnie stared at the letter. It looked as though a giant spider had been dipped in ink, then scuttled across the pages. She read what she’d written and grimaced. She didn’t even know if the words were true or not – or, at least, if they were true beyond this moment, the small hours, when even London seemed asleep, all the roar of life stilled and only her awake, with the pool of light from the bedside lamp making the darkness seem darker. She tore the pages in half, then half again, and screwed each piece of paper into a tight ball before chucking them into her wastebin.

  She took one of the postcards from her collection in the desk drawers (Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, which she had seen when she and Emma had been to Florence just before she’d left; they had spent hours in the monks’ cells where he’d made his restfully beautiful frescos and this one was her favourite; even looking at it touched and calmed her) and wrote, as neatly as she could, ‘Dear Ollie, I thought I would get in touch again, just to say I hope you are well and happy. I’m at art school in London now. Maybe one day we can meet? Love Marnie (Still).’ She examined what she had written with distaste and tossed the card into the bin, where it lay, picture upwards.

  She wrote to Lucy on the back of a Picasso line drawing.

  Dearest Lucy, I’m having a wonderful time and there’s nowhere else I’d rather be, and yet I’m always wishing you were here too. I keep thinking of things I want to tell you or show you. It takes ages to make new friends, doesn’t it – especially when the old ones are so close and so dear and know what you mean before you know it yourself? I hope you’re happy. Come and see me if you have time, Marniexxxx

  That one she might send. It said little enough.

  She climbed into bed and lay with her eyes open, staring into the darkness. Doesn’t everyone want someone to whom they can tell all the intimate secrets of their heart? That’s when you’re finally home.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ she said to Magnus.

  ‘I thought we were good together.’

  ‘We were.’

  ‘What changed? What went wrong?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  ‘Then I don’t understand.’ His handsome, open face creased in bewilderment.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said hopelessly. ‘I just – I can’t do it.’

  She went home for the weekend, taking a bin-bag of laundry. It was as if she had never been away. Her bed was neatly made up, one corner turned down ready for her to climb into it. The book she had been reading when she went away was still there, waiting for her on the bedside table. Her old sketchbook still lay on her desk, with the soft pencil beside it; when she opened it, she saw that she had been halfway through a drawing of her mother. They ate cauliflower cheese and, after supper, sat in front of the fire while Emma read and Marnie mended the ripped knee of her jeans and sewed up the hem of her favourite skirt. Then they played patience together, while outside Marnie heard the waves breaking on the shingle.

  ‘I finished it with Magnus,’ she said, gathering up the deck of cards and shuffling them. Emma looked up, not speaking, attentive. So Marnie continued, ‘Because he liked me more than I liked him.’

  ‘Was he all right?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Nostalgia’s a dangerous thing, you know.’

  Marnie sighed. ‘You shouldn’t do that. It feels like I’ve got nowhere to hide.’

  ‘Why do you want to hide?’

  ‘Everyone needs to hide sometimes – especially from their mother.’

  ‘I finished things with Eric as well,’ Emma said softly.

  ‘No! But why? You were so happy.’

  ‘Because – because I liked him more than he liked me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He’s gone back to his wife.’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘So here we are.’

  ‘Indeed. Here we are, the two of us.’

  Now Marnie looked across at Oliver, still sleeping in the moonlit room, his head tilted back, his mouth slightly open, his eyes flickering under their lids. He had no idea, she thought, of the havoc he had visited on her life all those years ago.

  Suddenly his eyes half opened. Marnie couldn’t tell if he was looking at her or not.

  ‘Marnie?’

  ‘Yes. It’s me. Are you awake?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He blinked at her in bewilderment. ‘I had this dream.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember.’

  ‘Was it a good dream?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe it was good. I feel…’ he rubbed the side of his face ‘… strange.’

  ‘Do you want anything? Tea or hot chocolate or whisky?’

  ‘Let me get it. You’re always looking after other people.’

  ‘Hardly!’

  ‘You are, though. It’s what you’ve always done.’

  ‘I don’t know that I like the sound of that – someone who rushes around being helpful.’

  ‘Being attentive. Caring. You would have made a wonderful mother, you know.’

  Marnie went to sit on the floor beside Ralph and put her hand on his clammy forehead. She picked up one hand and held it very carefully between both of hers, rubbing her thumbs over his knuckles. ‘It was all I ever really wanted,’ was what she didn’t say, because it hurt too much. ‘To have children. Sons and daughters, grandchildren for Emma, running around on the lawn outside our old house. I used to imagine it in such detail it almost seemed true to me. Leaning over their cots at night, holding their little bodies on my lap, that sweet, sawdusty baby smell, milk blisters on their lip. Picking them up when they fell over. Knitting them odd little outfits. Cooking meals for all of us to eat together.
Teaching them the things Emma taught me. Passing things on. Loving them and being loved by them, the way you’ll never love anybody else and no one else will ever love you. Even now I can’t believe it won’t happen, although of course I know it won’t.’

  What she said instead was: ‘Life doesn’t turn out the way you expect. But I was lucky. I had Eva and Luisa. And I’ve been like an honorary aunt to Lucy’s kids.’

  Oliver got up and went to the cooker. He poured milk into a pan and put it on the hob to heat.

  She said to his turned back, ‘Why did you never try to get in touch with me?’

  ‘Oh.’ His breath came out in a sigh, but he didn’t turn. ‘I don’t know, Marnie.’

  ‘You don’t know? Is that all?’

  ‘I could say it was because I was too proud, and that would be true. Or hurt: true. Or furious. Or let down. Or ashamed. Or because of Ralph. Or because I thought you didn’t care enough. Or because I made myself forget about you. Fell in love with other girls and left you behind, just like I assumed you’d left me behind. All true. I don’t know which is truest. I used to think about seeing you again.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I used to imagine it, and sometimes you’d run towards me and we’d fall into each other’s arms. Other times you’d barely recognize me and it would simply be humiliating. Ridiculous. This boy you never thought about any more, harbouring fantasies about you.’

  ‘I wrote you letters.’

  He turned to face her. ‘I never got any from you.’

  ‘No – I wrote them to you and then I threw them away.’

  ‘You should have sent them.’

  ‘I don’t think so. They were more like letters to myself. Maudlin meanderings.’

  ‘I wish you’d sent them all the same.’

  ‘Well, it was a long time ago.’

  ‘You mean, when we were young and foolish?’

  ‘No. We were young, but we weren’t foolish enough. If we’d been foolish we wouldn’t have stood on our dignity and pride. I would have sent the letters, telling you I wanted you back. You would have tracked me down and thrown stones at my window to call me out.’

  ‘I guess it takes courage to be foolish.’

  And they both looked towards Ralph, whose face glimmered bone-white in the moonlight.

  How long had it been since he’d spoken? They were running out of time, and as sand seems to pour through the hour-glass more and more quickly as it reaches the end, so it felt to Marnie that Ralph’s life was slipping past at gathering speed and only the last glistening traces of it remained.

  Chapter Twenty

  Running out of time, and time running out. Just a few grains left in the neck of the glass and the past lying in a domed heap beneath, all accounted for and done. So skip the next three years, and go to when Marnie was working in a theatre in the suburbs, painting sets and finding props for under-rehearsed productions of Oh! What a Lovely War and Anything Goes.

  She had recently returned from Normandy, where she had gone to be with a man, briefly her teacher and many years older than her, who was renovating a collapsing farmhouse there and trying to escape his sense of self-disappointment – ‘Your father substitute,’ Lucy had commented waspishly when she had first met Gilbert. Marnie had stayed long after she knew the relationship was over, because she had gone out in the first place in the teeth of her mother’s silent anxiety and Lucy’s articulate disapproval, and it hurt her pride to come crawling back.

  In fact, it was Ralph who had finally rescued her. Perhaps he had read between the lines of her jaunty postcard, or perhaps he had talked to Emma. Whatever the case, he turned up one wet and windy morning in April, with no luggage, just a passport in his back pocket and a tatty copy of Paradise Lost in a plastic bag. Marnie was on her hands and knees in the kitchen, laying tiles. She was tired and filthy: her clothes were caked with dirt, her ripped fingernails were black, her head itched with grit. The only operating shower was a nozzle on the wall of the downstairs bathroom that gave out a thin dribble of tepid water, and there was a faint smell of sewage that made her feel doubly unclean.

  Rubble lay everywhere, and dust rose in clouds: Gilbert had started work on the principle that if you demolished everything to begin with, you would be forced to reconstruct it. He had wielded a pickaxe like a madman when they first arrived, knocking down walls and levering up stone floors, and then he and Marnie had had to live in the building site he had created. Wires poked through skirting-boards, wallpaper hung in shreds, and there were holes in the ceiling through which you could see the roof beams. To make matters worse, it had been raining for what seemed like weeks. Marnie had dreamt of blue skies and apple blossom, picnics of bread and Camembert on the lawn, the sun shining down on their labours, the lovely old house emerging from its years of neglect. Instead, the garden was a bog and water dripped or streamed into almost every room. French plumbers and electricians swarmed everywhere, but progress was slow.

  Gilbert started drinking earlier every day, until he was opening the first bottle at midday. He worked erratically, and the more Marnie laboured, the more resentful and critical of her he became. Marnie began to see his sadness as self-pity, his dreams as self-deluding bluster. She realized she couldn’t save him and that, after the first flush of love had died down, she didn’t really like him very much. Yet she didn’t leave: she felt she had made a promise to herself and to him and she didn’t feel able to break it.

  And then Ralph turned up, sodden, filthy, starving and full of a bright, glad energy that immediately changed the atmosphere of the house.

  ‘You!’ she said, scrambling to her feet, shading her eyes with her hand, as if he might turn out to be a trick of the light.

  ‘Me! You look a wreck.’

  ‘Thanks. You don’t look so great yourself.’ He did, though – he looked fabulous.

  They’d laughed into each other’s faces. Happiness bubbled through her and she opened her arms to him.

  ‘Even your scalp’s got dirt in it,’ he said, as he pressed his lips to the crown of her head.

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘To see you.’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘I was sitting in the library, waiting for a book I’d ordered to arrive from the stacks, and I suddenly thought, I have to go and see Marnie now.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘More or less. So I got on a ferry to Calais.’

  ‘Why do you look as though you’ve been sleeping in hedges?’

  ‘I have. I walked from Calais.’

  ‘You walked?’

  ‘It was part of the deal.’

  ‘What do you mean, “part of the deal”? What deal?’

  ‘I said that if I walked all the way, everything would be all right.’

  ‘Said to who?’

  ‘To myself,’ he replied patiently.

  Marnie gave a little giggle. Tears were brimming in her eyes. ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘D’you think?’

  ‘Either you’re mad or everyone else is.’

  ‘That’d be it. Don’t cry, Marnie, or I’ll cry too.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She wiped her hand across her grubby face. ‘God, I’ve missed you, Ralph. We haven’t been like this for ages, have we?’

  ‘No. But that’s OK.’

  ‘And you really did that for me?’

  ‘Of course. So, is everything all right?’

  ‘It is now you’re here. It hasn’t been.’

  ‘I can see,’ he said. ‘You look a bit down to me.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Does she?’ said a voice behind them, and Gilbert came into the kitchen, carrying several baguettes and a plastic bag bulging with bottles. He was wearing baggy trousers and a crumpled shirt; his face was unshaven. He looks like a bulldog, thought Marnie. ‘And why would that be?’

  ‘Ralph, this is Gilbert. Gilbert, Ralph.’

  ‘Ah – Ralph.’ Her heart sank: he was already slightly pissed. ‘The famous Ralph
. Were we expecting you?’

  In the first weeks of their affair, Marnie had talked to Gilbert about Ralph, confided in him. Now she wished she hadn’t. She recognized the cruel gleam in his eye.

  ‘Hello,’ said Ralph. ‘No, you weren’t – I just came on a whim. And, yes, she does look a bit down. I don’t know why, although I could make a guess.’

  ‘I am in the room, you know.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Ralph. He didn’t look sorry. A smile was pushing at his lips; he looked as though he was about to start giggling.

  ‘Do you both want coffee? Then I’ll show you round, Ralph.’ Marnie pushed stray strands of hair back from her face. She wished she could jump into a cold, fast-running stream and wash herself fresh again.

  ‘Or wine. When in France and all that,’ said Gilbert, and without waiting for a reply, he pulled a bottle out of the carrier-bag and a corkscrew out of his back pocket.

  ‘Not for me, thank you.’

  ‘Only after six, is that it? Like Marnie here. You don’t mind if I do? You’re much younger than I thought you’d be, Ralph. Are you still a student?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How long are you gracing us with your company?’

  Marnie winced: Gilbert always used florid language when he was spoiling for a fight – a kind of heavy-handed, blundering sarcasm that soured his face. But Ralph didn’t seem to mind. Today he was impregnable.

  ‘That depends on Marnie,’ he said, and turned towards her. ‘I want to ask you something.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Ask away,’ said Gilbert. He poured himself a large glass of red wine and held it up to the light. ‘We’re all ears, aren’t we, Marnie?’ And he put an arm round her, pulling her roughly to him.

  ‘Privately.’

  ‘Charming.’