All three windows look mistakenly designed and clumsily placed, but for some reason Marianne enjoys pretending things work that don’t.
Like me and Paddy.
When Dad and Marianne bought the house in late 1998,Marianne immediately claimed the room Dad had ‘pooh-poohed’ as her own. Throughout all the years that she kept its door locked and the key hidden, she never stopped trying to provoke him by singing the praises of its ill-matched windows. ‘It’s so clever,’ she told every visitor loudly, with one eye on Dad, who never seemed to notice or react. ‘It’s not only that they’re different shapes and sizes, it’s alsothat the views are all wrong, but deliberately so – at least, I’m sure it must be deliberate, since the house was built when architects still cared about beauty and attention to detail. I refuse to believe it’s by chance that the biggest of the three windows reveals far too much of what no one really wants to see: the side of an old, weather-worn barn. And the smallest one reveals just enough beauty to tempt you over to it in order to see the most stunning garden, but if you step even a foot back then you can hardly see it any more. Somehow, that makes the best view feel even more special than if you could see it easily from anywhere in the room.’
Over and over, she would recite the same lines to different guests, who would then be told they weren’t allowed to see any of it for themselves because the study was sacrosanct. ‘Just for me, and no one else,’ Marianne would saywith a shrug, as if nothing could be done about it. She only started to give her ‘room I can’t show you because it’s my private sanctuary’ speech in 2006, the year I chose Paddy and ended my relationship with Olly. Before that, her study was a perfectly ordinary and accessible part of our house.
For many years, I believed it was a coincidence that both these things happened at roughly the same time.
I never heard any guest question why Marianne’s study couldn’t be glimpsed by anybody, or the door opened even for a brief glance. She made sure always to offer a generously thorough tour of the rest of the house: ‘It’s quite something: the most romantic old rectory – well, it was a rectory at one time – that’ssolike something out of a Jane Austen novel, but not in a civilised village in Hampshire or anywhere like that. No, just plonked down in this flat Fenland village full of squat, beige brick bungalows where nothing ever happens – a place that, frankly, is fit for nothing but sugar beet and barley farming – andI love it.I adore the contrast, the …unexpectednessof it.’
I wonder if dolling herself up as if for a fancy cocktail party in order to show me this ravaged room had the same appeal for her: the clash factor. The unexpected.
She has won again and she knows it. I’m shocked, though not surprised to be, so that isn’t her victory. I was expecting to be blindsided by whatever I saw inside this room – as shocked as I felt when she offered to show it to me as if it were no big deal, after keeping it hidden from the whole family for seventeen years. The unexpected part is how gutted I feel, as gutted as Marianne’s study has been; I’d hoped to be surprised by a presence, not an absence – by the answer, whatever it might be. Instead, new questions seethe and swarm in my mind.
Marianne turns to face me, grinning. There’s pink lipstick on the side of one of her front teeth.
She can smell my desperation to know, as strongly as I can taste it: a thick sourness in my mouth.
‘What was in here, before you got rid of it?’ I ask.
‘How do you know it hasn’t always been like this?’
‘It wasn’t like this when we moved in.’
‘True,’ she says. Marianne can sound like the fairest person in the world when she wants to. ‘Do you remember the wallpaper, when we first came here? This was the only papered room – all the others were painted plain colours, but this one had grass-green wallpaper with a pattern of small pink tulips. Should have been gorgeous but wasn’t. Brought to mind a sickly person with a painful rash.’
‘What was in here before today that’s now gone?’ I ask, choosing my words carefully. ‘No one locks their family out of a room for so many years if there’s nothing in there.’
‘Well, someone might,’ says Marianne. ‘People will do all sorts of irrational things if you leave them to their own devices.’ She laughs, then points. ‘There was a lovely leather chair there, under the round window. And I had my battered old velvet chaise longueby the tiny window, so that I could read with my feet up and see the best part of the garden at the same time. I had a matching desk and captain’s chair set, too – medium oak, green leather.’ She sighed. ‘And framed photographs everywhere – so many of those. All of family. Always and only family. You were in nearly all of them. Whereas your house contains no photographs of me. It’s all right, I don’t mind any more. But I had at least twenty of you, on shelves, up on the wall—’
‘So, where’s it all gone?’ I snap. She’s won again: made me lose my cool. She feigns a look of surprise at myoutburst, which she knew would come. It’s what she’s been waiting and hoping for. ‘You haven’t just moved a few pictures. You’ve reduced the room to a shell.’
‘A more useful question than “Where?” would be “Why?”’
‘If I ask why, will you tell me?’ I stop myself from adding,I know that, somehow, the reason is linked to Olly.
‘I can’t believe you haven’t worked it out already,’ Marianne says.
I pull in a long, deep breath. ‘Why have you got rid of the contents of this room? I’ll never work it out. If you want me to know, tell me.’
‘You don’t know I’ve got rid of anything. I might have moved it all.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of you.’ Her feigned meekness makes me want to scream.Just a brief, simple answer,her tone proclaims.Just the truth, unadorned.‘Because you made a phone call, didn’t you? To Norman. N.P. Pelphrey, as you would think of him.’
The name is instantly familiar.N.P. Pelphrey, N.P. Pelphrey… Where have I heard it? It was recently, I know that much. An image of me sitting on Dad and Marianne’s bed appears in my mind. That’s right, they were out and I was in their room because …
Oh, no.
N.P. Pelphrey.In the search results on my phone.
There is nothing this can mean apart from the worst thing.
I try to breathe, but the air in my mouth and throat feels like a solid chunk of something too hard to inhale.
‘Norman Pelphrey told me what you asked him to do,’Marianne says. ‘Did you think youjust happenedto fail?’ Her emphasis advertises her contempt for all things that occur by chance, that are not orchestrated by her.
