July 7, 2023
Marianne pushes open the door of her study with a ‘Ta-daaa!’.
She’s put on a special dress for the occasion, a long black kaftan I’ve never seen before with a silver brocade pattern around its square neck and lines of sequins down its sides: glistening slug-trails on dark ground.
On her feet are shiny black sandals with matt black soles as thick as bricks and elaborately bumpy arrangements near the toes: white lace bows and pale pink pearls.
She has painted her toenails the same pink; same shade of lipstick too.
Marianne hardly ever bothers with dresses or make-up.
I’ve known her for nearly thirty years and I’ve seen her done up like this no more than five times.
Normally she wears a floppy white or pale blue shirt, dark blue jeans and the plainest, flattest flip-flops on her always-bare feet.
She boasts about her good circulation – how she never feels the cold – and about how she doesn’t need to look smart because she knows she is smart intellectually.
Only last week she boasted, ‘I’m the scruffiest nearly-seventy-year-old I know, and I’ll still be dressing the way I did in my early twenties when I’m a hundred and ten. ’
Arm still outstretched, she stands back to give me an unbroken view. I look, but there’s nothing.
Her study – or rather, the room that used to be her study – has been stripped of all its contents. She has dressed up like this – her ‘glad rags’, she calls them – to show me emptiness. A destroyed room.
The three windows have marks around them, suggesting the presence of curtains and blinds at some point, but they’re all gone.
The walls are patchy pink-beige plaster, like skin that has suffered one trauma after another.
Shelves have been torn down, light fittings pulled out.
None of it has been done with care. Covering the floor is a fuzzy grey substance, unevenly distributed; there are thicker clumps and sparse patches.
I haven’t seen the inside of this room for seventeen years, but the three windows are just as they have been all this time in my memory.
One, large and rectangular, overlooks the black wooden barn and the thin gravel path that separates it from the house.
The second is tiny and square and offers a glimpse of what Marianne calls her ‘show-piece’, the formal, walled section of the front garden.
The third is the size and shape of a large car wheel and faces the wildflower meadow at the back and the lodes and fens beyond.
Dad took an instant dislike to this room when we came to look round the house in 1998. He said it jutted out from the side of the house in a way that was jarring, and thought the odd assortment of clashing window styles made it look untidy.
‘Oh, Gareth, don’t be so unimaginative.’ Marianne laughed at him, delighting in his wrongness as she always did.
In her eyes, Dad has never been someone whose thoughts needed to be taken seriously.
‘Things don’t have to be identical to belong together,’ she said, providing him with his new opinion, to be learned by heart.
‘These windows are the perfect trio. Think of an orchestral trio. You’d want violin, cello and double bass, wouldn’t you?
Not three boring old identical violins.’ This winning argument was perfectly calibrated to silence all opposition. She’s a master at those.
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 also that 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 say with 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’s so like 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 – and I love it.
I adore the contrast, the … unexpectedness of 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 longue by 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 my outburst, 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 you just happened to fail?’ Her emphasis advertises her contempt for all things that occur by chance, that are not orchestrated by her.
Yes, that’s exactly what I thought. I made a request and a man – N.P. Pelphrey – told me to forget it, in a tone that was blunt-verging-on-rude. I decided his response was typical of the rudeness of a lot of people these days – not noteworthy at all.
And then, all the others …
I wonder how much danger I’m in, and what kind of danger, now that Marianne knows what I did. Tried to do.
She smiles. This is the bit she’s been looking forward to most: forcing me to watch her savouring the full extent of my failure.
‘That’s why everything had to go.’ She nods in the direction of the empty room, then moves towards me and pulls me into a hug that stinks of the only perfume she ever wears, a peppery, leathery vanilla smell that I’ve come to loathe.
My body is rigid, fossilised in her arms. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says.
‘I’m not angry. In your shoes, I’d have done the same. ’
Except you’d have found a way to succeed.
‘Like mother, like daughter, eh?’ she whispers next to my ear, and it occurs to me that what I need is for her to die. I want to make that happen.
I want it more than I’ve ever wanted anything.