The Winter House by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 2009-11-13T23:00:00+00:00

‘Dear to you?’ she said now to Oliver, shaking away the memory that was two decades old but still made her feel ashamed.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it was a long time ago,’ she said. ‘We were very young.’

‘It doesn’t feel so long ago.’

‘Time’s strange like that, isn’t it? I used to think we changed and left the past behind us, but I don’t really believe that any longer. It’s more as if we carry all the parts of our lives inside us. I’m the ten-year-old me and the seventeen-year-old me, the twenty- and thirty-year-old me all at once. You know, when I was in the wood earlier, I could remember so vividly what it was like to be a small child in wellies crunching over the frosty ground at home that for a moment it was as if I was that girl. There was no distance between the memory and the event, if you see what I mean. I just was ten.’

‘Yes.’ The word was almost a sigh.

And now, for a moment, she was seventeen and wanting so badly to take his face between her hands and kiss his eighteen-year-old mouth and pull his youthful, slim body against hers that she was breathless with the old desire.

‘There’s been so large a gap,’ she managed, her voice slightly uneven. She had the dangerous sense of being suddenly unstoppered: she could say anything now and forbidden words would pour out of her. ‘But I’m glad you’ve thought about me, because I’ve thought of you, too. Of course I have. You and Ralph, and Lucy too, and those days we spent together. Sometimes the memory has been so vivid it’s been almost impossible to believe that that time is safely in the past, that I can’t reach back and be there again – be that person again. Young, with everything ahead and everything possible. But also there have been times – weeks, months – when I haven’t thought of you at all. You disappeared from me or, at least, became a speck on the horizon. It’s an odd feeling – to know you and not to know you, to feel close to you and yet far away as well. In fact, it feels a bit like a dream, unreal at any rate, to be here with you, watching Ralph die.’ She gave a small, choking laugh. ‘Sorry, I feel a bit drunk. Drunk on air, drunk on emotion. Shall we have the whisky a bit earlier tonight?’

‘Why not? We’re not in any real time zone here – it’s like at an airport.’

Waiting, thought Marnie, and gave an involuntary shudder. Waiting for a flight and he’ll be on it and we won’t. We’ll head back to normal life without him.

‘Do you know what I most remember about you, back then?’ Oliver was asking.

‘What?’

‘You were always kind.’

‘Was I?’

‘Through and through. Kind and reliable.’

‘Does that make me sound a bit boring?’

‘No! We all felt looked after by you – like I feel looked after by you now, here. You were the one we turned to, the one we wanted to do well for.

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