The Frozen Lake: A gripping novel of family and wartime secrets

Booted, jacketed and with woolly hats on their heads, Alix and Edwin set out with the large sledge in tow. It was an old one that had belonged to their grandfather when he was a boy, and it had the extravagantly curved runners of its time.

‘What about the lower orchard?’ Alix said. ‘The bit where it slopes down almost to the edge of the lake, you always get a good run there.’

‘When we’ve put in a bit of practice,’ said Edwin. ‘We’ll be rusty to start with, when did you last go on a sledge? We’d be bound to have trouble with the trees. Besides, the fun there is shooting out on to the ice, and if we did that, we might get a soaking, it’s where the beck runs into the lake.’

‘Pagan’s Field, then.’ Alix put her arm through his, and they tramped across the snow in companionable silence, the sledge running smoothly behind them on the ice-crusted snow.

‘What’s up, Lexy?’ Edwin asked presently, giving her a perceptive look. ‘I heard you’d broken up with John. Is that true? You never wrote, and I didn’t like to pry. You’re such a prickly old thing.’

She gave his arm an affectionate squeeze. ‘Love’s the devil, isn’t it, Edwin? One longs for it so, and then when it goes wrong, it’s the bitterest taste on earth.’

‘Did it go so wrong?’

‘He upped and left me, you know. He was never happy about our having an affair, it affronted his conscience. He felt the purity of his soul was sullied.’

‘Oh, Lord. Why ever didn’t you marry?’

‘We nearly did, we were unofficially engaged, only he kept on saying that marriage was a sacrament and for life, binding body and soul now and in the next world. All pretty hairy stuff. He just couldn’t bring himself to take the plunge, not when he saw a wedding as a sacrament, not just an announcement in The Times and a morning coat and top hat and Mr and Mrs from then on and making the best of it, as people do. So, naturally, he was nervous about what would happen to his immortal soul if it all went wrong, as marriages often seem to. It’s all for the best, I know; we’d have been miserable together, the three of us.’

‘Three of you?’ Edwin stopped in his tracks and looked down at his twin in surprise. ‘Alix, what do you mean?’

‘It would have been a threesome, that’s all. Him, me, and his conscience. Not really room for us all in the marriage bed, you know.’

‘And his conscience pricked him so much that he left you.’

‘Yes, for a virginal creature of great perfection; no contest, you see.’

‘Anyone we know?’

Her laugh held no mirth. ‘The Blessed Virgin Mary, idiot. He’s gone into the church, become a monk.’

‘Good Lord,’ said Edwin, completely taken aback. ‘I don’t think I ever knew anyone who wanted to become a monk. A Catholic monk? Good thing you kept him away from Grandmama, you know how she is about RCs. Well, let’s hope poring over his conscience makes him really miserable. He wasn’t good enough for you. I’m glad to see the back of your dowdy old clothes, too. Was that a reaction to his going off for higher things?’

‘It was rather. I went a bit wild, generally. Don’t let’s talk about it, it still makes me feel dreadful. Talk about you. How’s your love life?’

‘Hellish, since you ask.’ Edwin stooped and gathered two fistfuls of snow, which he shaped and pressed into a ball.

Alix made another snowball and then began to roll it. ‘You do the body, and I’ll make a head.’

Edwin heaped up a pile of snow and patted it into a semblance of human form. Alix fixed on the head and gave the snowman a bulbous nose.

They stood back and regarded the stout white figure.

‘Not bad,’ said Edwin. ‘We’ll have to find him a hat.’

Alix cleared a patch of snow and prised up two black stones for eyes. ‘And a carrot from Cook.’

Edwin wound his muffler around the snowman’s neck.

‘You’ll be cold without it.’

‘No, I’ll be glowing with exercise, while this poor chap has to stand in chilly stillness. I’ll collect it on the way back, and we’ll see if there’s an old one lying about.’

‘He does look lonely. Should we give him a mate?’

Edwin laughed. ‘Why should he have all the luck? Besides, he mightn’t take to her. Tomorrow we’ll come and build him a twin, that’ll be better company for him.’

What a pair we are, thought Alix, as they took a shortcut, clambering over a dry-stone wall, passing the sledge over and sending it sliding on ahead of them. ‘Is your love life hellish because she’s walked out of your life, or because she’s a shrew, or because she’s already married to someone else, such as your best friend?’

‘You’re my best friend, Lexy. No, she isn’t married, nor a shrew, nor has she walked. She just doesn’t feel about me the way I feel about her.’

The one who kisses and the one who turns the cheek, just as it had been between her and John. ‘Have I met her? Do I know her?’

He shook his head.

‘No.’

‘Would I like her?’

He made an impatient gesture. ‘I dare say. How can I possibly tell? I’d like you to meet her. I’ve asked her up here, told her she can have the rooms above my studio for as long as she wants. Only she won’t come.’

‘Tell me about her. What’s her name?’

‘Lidia.’

‘Is she pretty?’

‘Beautiful, not pretty. She has the kind of timeless face you see in pictures, hers aren’t at all modern looks. She smiled, after we’d met. It went straight to my heart and that was that. Pierced, and bleeding, just like in the songs.’

‘Where did you meet her?’

‘At the Photographic Institute.’

Alix felt a spurt of jealousy; lucky Edwin to find a woman who shared his love of photography. ‘Is she a photographer?’

‘No, she was scrubbing steps.’

‘Edwin!’

‘She’s not a charlady, she’s a refugee,’ he said impatiently. ‘A musician, as it happens. Only think what having her hands in a pail of water all day does for a harpsichordist.’

‘A harpsichordist? That’s unusual,’ Alix said, not wanting to let Edwin see that there was anything amiss with her, although she already loathed this foreign intruder; who cared about her hands?

They had reached Pagan’s Field, a sloping expanse of virgin snow that squeaked and scrunched underfoot. The sledge was long enough for both of them to sit on it, and time and again they toiled and slipped up the hill, dragging the sledge behind them, and then flew down the slope. The run ended with a stretch of flat ground, through which one of the rivers from the fells meandered towards the lake. The rough grass there brought the sledge to a bumpy halt well before the frozen edges of the river, little more than a stream at present, that ran sparkling between undercut miniature cliffs of snow.

Sometimes one of them took the ride alone, lying flat, face only inches above the flying snow. Alix tumbled off after one such trip, and lay laughing in the snow, Lidia forgotten, feeling cold and wet and happier than she could remember being since … since goodness knew when; she couldn’t remember when she last felt like this.

Edwin hauled her to her feet. ‘If you lie there, you’ll catch cold, and you know how much Grandmama hates anyone sneezing.’