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

Alix brushed the snow off. ‘Why is she never ill?’

‘She has migraines.’

‘Hardly ever. Only when she’s severely vexed, and since she makes sure everyone does precisely what she wants, she rarely is.’

Edwin paused in the act of creating a large snowball in his gloved hands. ‘Do you know, that never occurred to me, about her migraines coming on when someone has crossed her? I must say that as soon as Lipp starts pursing her mouth and muttering about m’lady’s twinges, I run for cover.’

‘You can, of course, to Lowfell. And I suppose Grandpapa just shuts himself away in his study as he always has done. One thing you have to say for Grandmama, she doesn’t look for sympathy when she’s laid up with a headache.’

‘They say migraines are devastatingly painful.’

‘And admitting pain is a sign of weakness.’

Edwin gave her a direct look. ‘You should know about that. You’ve inherited exactly the same stoicism, only with you it’s anguish of the spirit you won’t own up to.’

Startled, Alix ducked his snowball and began to gather one of her own. Was that true? She didn’t care to think she might be like Grandmama in any way. Did she refuse to admit that she hurt? Yes, she supposed she did, preferring to lick her wounds in private and to draw down the shutters between herself and any well-wishers, however kindly their intentions.

She chucked the snowball at Edwin with unusual force, leaving him protesting and laughing and shaking the snow off his shoulders. ‘You wretch, it’s gone down my neck. Hold on there, and I’ll give you a taste of your own medicine.’

‘You have to catch me first,’ said Alix, sliding and slipping down the hillside to escape his long arms.

Eyes and cheeks glowing from their exertions, they went in through the back of the house, leaving their boots in the flagstoned passage. ‘I’ll come up and collect your wet things, Miss Alix,’ Phoebe called out as they padded past the kitchen in damp socks, leaving a trail of fat footprints.

Rokeby was hovering in the hall. ‘There’s a letter for you, Mr Edwin, sent up from Lowfell.’

‘Thank you,’ said Edwin, more concerned with his cold feet than a letter. He had no expectation of it being from Lidia, and nothing else could stir any great interest.

Perdita came thumping into the hall, her face pink with the cold air and indignation. ‘Golly,’ she said. ‘Grandpapa was going on about the Grindleys, for Rokeby says Roger and Angela are there, and I said I wondered if they’d taken that terrifying stuffed ferret out of the downstairs lav, because Angela made a row about it last time she was at the Hall, and Grandmama heard me and really laid into me. I mean, what’s so awful about mentioning a stuffed ferret?’

Alix wasn’t paying much attention to Perdita; she was too busy watching Edwin’s face as he read his letter.

‘She treats me like a baby; I don’t see why she should. Alix, you aren’t listening to a word I’m saying.’

‘You’re the last of the brood,’ said Alix. ‘Children, grandchildren, all living here, all under her thumb. It won’t last into another generation, we shan’t bring up our children here, so she’s making the most of her crumbling power.’

‘Edwin might live here. When Grandpapa dies, although I bet he’ll go on for ever, and I hope he does.’

‘Can you see Edwin living at Wyncrag without Grandpapa, if Grandmama were still alive? Not if he had a grain of sense. It isn’t bad news, is it Edwin, you look stunned?’

‘No, no, not bad news at all.’ Edwin stuffed the letter back in its envelope and turned to the waiting Rokeby.

His eyes were alight with joy; what was there in the letter to make him look like that? Alix asked herself.

‘I need to send a telegram. Urgently.’

‘What’s he so excited about?’ Perdita asked Alix, as Edwin rushed towards the library. ‘He’s gone quite pale. Do you know who that letter was from? You look a bit pale yourself.’

‘Do I? A trick of the light. Ask Edwin later, I don’t think he wants to be bothered now.’ It must show, she thought, the sharp face of jealousy, the knowledge that whoever wrote that letter – Lidia, sure to be – was close to Edwin in a way that she, his twin, never could be. And that, with this new relationship, there would be a distance between her and her brother. Quite hard to accept that, after nearly twenty-five years. She’d come to think it wouldn’t ever happen, as girlfriends came and went out of Edwin’s life, and none of them made any real difference.

Had she considered for a second how excluded Edwin might have felt over the last few years when she’d been so wrapped up in her own love affair? She didn’t think he’d minded, he’d had his work, his own interests, and perhaps with their strange gift of knowing how each other felt, he’d known, even before she had, that John would leave her, that he wasn’t going to become part of her life on any permanent basis.

It was that strange link between them that made her realize now that Lidia was not the same as his other girlfriends. He’d had flirtations and friendships, and even one more serious affair, but none of them had got under his skin the way this woman had. In which case, his falling in love with her would make a tremendous difference to Edwin and therefore to herself.

A refugee. What kind of a refugee? She thought of those blank faces staring out from blurred newspaper photographs of dishevelled ship- and train-loads. Faces blank because beyond despair. What had Lidia gone through, what might have happened to her family, friends? Was she grieving for a lost life in another country, was that why she wouldn’t have Edwin, had she worn out any capacity for new feelings?

And why had Edwin fallen so much in love with her, and why did she reject him? It was a tease’s trick to refuse to marry him and then to write letters that brought brilliance to his eyes and sent him rushing to despatch telegrams. Perhaps Lidia was coming north, after all. And wouldn’t that just spoil Christmas and the frozen lake, for all of them. For her, because she’d been longing to have Edwin to herself. For the whole household, if Lidia turned out to be as unsuitable as she sounded. No one more fierce in her intolerance than Grandmama, no one less happy to accept an outsider as a husband or wife for any of her family.

Edwin flew back across the hall, his shoes ringing out on the tiles. ‘Just off to the Post Office.’

‘We’ll come,’ said Perdita quickly. ‘Won’t we, Alix? I want to see what the ice is like over on that side of the lake.’

‘Be quick then,’ said Edwin. ‘There’s not a moment to lose.’

Alix sat beside him in the front, and Perdita squeezed herself into the tiny space behind the seats. ‘Jolly uncomfortable in the back here, you ought to get a bigger car.’

Edwin concentrated on getting his car safely over the ice lurking at the entrance to the drive, and out on to the narrow, twisting country road that led to the ferry. ‘I was going to ask if you both wanted to come to Manchester tomorrow. I’ve got some business there, and you’ve got shopping to do. But if you’re going to be rude about my car, Perdy, then the invitation’s withdrawn.’

‘I long to go to Manchester, and Ursula breaks up on Friday, so tomorrow would be perfect,’ said Perdita. ‘But can we take a proper car, please? I’d be bent double for good if I went all the way to Manchester like this, fit for nothing but the freak show.’

A carter coming the other way stopped his horse to tell Edwin that the ferry wasn’t running.

‘Frozen solid, no point in breaking the ice and heaving her out, not any more. You’ll have to go around the head of the lake, Mr Edwin.’

Edwin thanked him, cursed, and backed carefully into a gateway thickly rutted with frozen mud.

Half an hour later, they drove over the humpbacked bridge and drew up outside the Post Office. Her brother and sister dragged Perdita from her wedged position, and she stood beside the car shaking herself like a horse.

Edwin vanished into the Post Office. Alix and Perdita walked down to the lakeside. A few intrepid skaters were on the ice, not venturing beyond the rope barriers with their signs saying DANGER THIN ICE. A troop of children were sliding ecstatically over the frozen surface, under the watchful eye of PC Ogilvy. Perdita waved to him, and he slithered in a stately fashion towards them.

‘Hello, Jimmy. How’s the ice bearing?’

‘Coming along nicely, Miss Perdita.’

‘Can we skate all across the lake?’

‘Wherever you like, so long as you watch out for the soft patches where the Wyn flows out, it doesn’t ever freeze right over there. I’ll be taking those signs down come tomorrow morning. And I reckon now it’s holding, it’ll be solid for a good while, no one’s forecasting a thaw for the foreseeable future.’

Edwin came out of the Post Office. ‘That’s done,’ he said with great satisfaction. He caught sight of Alix’s face. ‘Feeling the cold, old thing? You’ve gone soft spending all that time in London.’

THIRTEEN (#ulink_ca3e9c18-9836-5744-99c0-610fcd7d165c)

Hal didn’t recognise the chauffeur.

He hadn’t expected the motor car to be the same one, but who was the man standing beside the gleaming Delage? What had become of Wilbur? He was a young man still, Hal’s contemporary, a partner in first boyish and then youthful forays up fells and into the old lead mines and out on the lake. And the uniform, no Grindley chauffeur had ever worn a uniform like this one except on the most formal occasions. Was Hal’s arrival at the railway station a formal occasion? He thought not. Yet here was this dark-jowled man with guileless brown eyes touching his hat and asking him in an accent that owed nothing to the north of England if he were Mr Henry Grindley.

And that gave him a jolt. No one had called him Henry for more than fifteen years, and not often before that; only headmasters and strangers. He had been Hal to everyone since he was a baby.

The chauffeur helped the porter load Hal’s luggage into the boot of the car. Then he opened the rear door for Hal, saluted, and took his place behind the steering wheel.