ELIZABETH EDMONDSON

The Frozen Lake

Copyright

This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

Copyright © A.E. Books Ltd 2004

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2015. Cover illustration by John Harris.

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The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007335169

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2011 ISBN: 9780007438273

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Homecomings

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

Westmoreland

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

FORTY-TWO

FORTY-THREE

FORTY-FOUR

FORTY-FIVE

FORTY-SIX

FORTY-SEVEN

FORTY-EIGHT

FORTY-NINE

FIFTY

FIFTY-ONE

FIFTY-TWO

FIFTY-THREE

FIFTY-FOUR

FIFTY-FIVE

FIFTY-SIX

FIFTY-SEVEN

FIFTY-EIGHT

FIFTY-NINE

SIXTY

SIXTY-ONE

SIXTY-TWO

SIXTY-THREE

Keep Reading

About the Publisher

For Tio, who was there

This book is dedicated with love to my uncle,

James Edmondson, whose memories of Westmoreland

winters of long ago and stories of life in the

nineteen-thirties have been a delight and an inspiration

APRIL 1921

STOP PRESS

Westmoreland man killed in mountaineering accident

Neville Richardson, eldest son of Sir Henry and Lady Richardson of Wyncrag, fell to his death earlier this month, while climbing in the Andes. Aged forty-one, he leaves a wife, Helena, a son and two daughters. Sir Henry’s youngest son, Jack Richardson MC, died in France in 1917.

DECEMBER 1936

Never does the scenery appear to more advantage as when the lake is covered with transparent ice from end to end, and the glint of sunshine, investing its surface with bright and changeful colours, makes it appear like an opal set in a wreath of virgin white. Towards sunset the snow-clad fells assume every tint the sun can create, from deepest crimson to palest gold. Frost fringes becks and rivers, and the ice patterns windows with its chilly fingers, weaving ethereal cobwebs across hedges and fells. Breath freezes on the air and the black coats of Fell ponies on the hillside are dusted white, manes and eyelashes touched with ice, and icicles tangle the shaggy fleeces of the hardy native sheep while they forage for food beneath the snow.

There has not been a frost such as this since the winter of 1920/1921, and the news that the great lakes of the north are freezing over has reached not merely our local papers, but the columns of the great London newspapers, sending accounts of the icy weather around the globe. As northerners sharpen their skates and watch the clear blue skies and starry nights for any sign of an unwelcome break in the weather, exiles in England and abroad are remembering frozen days of long ago, closing their eyes to grey town streets as they dream of dazzling winter skies, of air unsullied by smoke and soot and fumes. In their minds, they are once again skating from one end of the lake to the other beneath the towering fells, sharp blades hissing on dazzling ice, ears and fingers tingling, spirits filled with a wild joy.

Homecomings

ONE
London, Chelsea

Why didn’t she go north for Christmas?

Alix Richardson broke two eggs into a bowl and stirred them with a fork. Cecy Grindley’s words hadn’t been critical or nosy, she had just asked a simple and natural question. Even though her childhood friend was aware of Alix’s sentiments towards her grandmother, she didn’t see that as a good reason for staying away from Wyncrag.

Cecy was probably right. Alix stared down at the yellow mixture without enthusiasm. She didn’t care much for omelettes, but seemed to be eating a lot of them.

Food for a solitary life.

Other people spent Christmas with their families. It was customary, even if they regretted it every time, and every year swore, never again. Those who had no real family life always imagined such gatherings as the acme of happiness and warmth, although the truth was that they were just as likely to turn out disastrously: family rows, old grudges dug up to fuel resentment and animosity, lost tempers and frayed nerves exposed over roast meats and bumpers of brandy.

Alix lit the gas under the omelette pan and watched the knob of butter dissolve and sizzle. Christmas at Wyncrag wasn’t like that. Grandmama’s eyebrows might be raised, but never voices. Temper, anger and arguments had no place in that household. Nursery scenes were kept to the nursery; once outside those protective doors, good manners and fear of Grandmama kept the house serene and orderly. On the surface, at any rate.

She poured the beaten eggs into the butter and tilted the pan as the omelette began to cook. There had been a time, once, when noise and laughter and happy voices had been heard at Wyncrag. When she and Edwin and Isabel and their parents had been together as a family.

In her mind’s eye, Alix could see her sister coming home to Wyncrag from a day’s shooting, before the frost had set in and the snow had swept down from the fells. Even at fourteen, Isabel had been a first-rate shot, unlike the rest of her family, who might take out a gun from time to time, but shared none of their neighbours’ passion for the sport.

She could remember being on the ice with Edwin, her twin, that December, sliding and skating and tobogganing.

The holiday had begun with the house ringing to children’s excited shrieks and the sound of their running feet – and had ended with cold, half-overheard words. Their last Christmas together.

She slid the omelette on to a plate taken from the rack over the stove and carried it to the table in the other room. She poured herself a glass of wine and put a forkful of omelette into her mouth, quite unaware of its taste.

There had been those conversations that ended abruptly when she or Edwin entered a room. She remembered, with sudden unnerving clarity, her mother for once raising her voice to Grandmama and Grandmama’s vicious, indecipherable replies, delivered in a hissing undertone.

She drank some of the wine – it could have been vinegar or orangeade. Isabel was ill, the twins were told. They didn’t say what was wrong with her, something infectious, so that she had been shut away in a distant corner of the house. Alix recalled quite vividly, looking through the eyes of forgotten childhood, coming into the hall to find Rokeby distractedly taking down the Christmas decorations. Aunt Trudie was there, too, tearing the candles and ornaments from the tree and piling them higgledy-piggledy in a cracker box, instead of wrapping each one in tissue paper and laying it in the wooden chest kept for the purpose.

Alix pushed the rest of her omelette to one side of her plate. Hotpot, it was a long time since she’d eaten hotpot. People in London knew nothing about hotpots. Or porridge at breakfast, with brown sugar and thick cream from the farm. Grandpapa ate his in the Scots way, with salt, but for her it was sugar and cream every time. Chocolate pudding. If she went home, Cook would make her one of her ambrosial chocolate puddings with the hot chocolate sauce that was famous throughout the lakes, the recipe for which was kept under lock and key.

Alix got up and carried plate and glass into the kitchen. She put them by the sink; her char would do the washing-up in the morning. She made coffee, watching with unseeing eyes as the hot liquid bubbled to the top of the pot.

She had cut her ties with Wyncrag, gone off to make a life of her own. Did the traditions mean anything to her? Did she yearn for carols and plum pudding and parcels under the tree?

No.

But she did yearn for the lake and the hills and for the feel of icy air on glowing cheeks, and she longed once again to be flying over the ice under pure, cold blue skies. And for hotpot and chocolate pudding. Not to mention the delicious game there always was at this time of the year. Bread, too, you couldn’t seem to buy proper bread in London. At Wyncrag, the baker’s boy still delivered the bread every morning, a basket of loaves wrapped in a cloth, miraculously warm.

Was there a risk of Grandmama dragging her back under her thumb if she went back? Surely not, not now.

If she went to Wyncrag for Christmas – it was only a few days, after all – she could spend hours and hours with Edwin. Talking and walking and skating and laughing, just as they used to. She’d avoided him since she came south, although she knew he came several times a year to London. She missed him, but their very closeness made her wary of seeing much of him. He knew her too well, and she felt that his understanding touched raw nerves that were best left alone. She had chosen to leave the north and her family, while his decision had been to remain. It was easier for him. Grandmama didn’t rule him with the ferocity that she applied to her female descendants, and so he could have his own place in Lowfell and keep a small flat in London, privileges that would never be granted to her.

Yet now, suddenly, she longed to see him again. And there was Perdita – what a difference between twelve and fifteen; did she want her sister to grow up a stranger to her?

She saw Grandpapa, when he came to London, two or three times a year. Strong-minded she might have become, but she wasn’t heartless. He would write, giving her plenty of notice, and then take her to dinner at one of his favourite restaurants, dark, peaceful places, where the waiters moved at a gentle pace and the food was substantial, beautifully cooked and comforting.

In the spring, they had gone to Germany for a week together. He had spent a good deal of time in Germany as a young man and had studied there. He wanted his children and his grandchildren to speak the language, and had employed German governesses and tutors to teach them. He shook his head over the new Germany, the sour fruit of Versailles, he called it. Alix had enjoyed herself, tasting the bizarre delights of Berlin in the company of young relations of Grandpapa’s friends. She hoped he had no notion of how different her contemporaries were from the serious, responsible citizens he knew so well, although Grandpapa had always had the knack of ignoring what he couldn’t change. She loved him, but knew that her world and its ways were a closed book to him – thank God for it. He would be so pleased to see her if she went back to Wyncrag this year. She had quickly read and torn up the wistful letter that came from him, as it did towards the end of every year, enclosing a handsome cheque and saying how much he missed seeing her at Christmas.

It was stupid. It was the time of year, the tinsel tiresomeness of it all, the catchy sentimentality of the season.

Of course she wouldn’t go north. It was a stupid idea.

And an idea that would never have occurred to her if she hadn’t run into Cecy while Christmas shopping in Harrods. Cecy, a Grindley of Grindley Hall, their nearest neighbours in Westmoreland, and one of her oldest friends.

She had been more pleased to see Cecy than she would have believed possible, her familiar smile, eyes merry behind round spectacles, a weight of fair hair trying to escape from a bun. Cecy belonged to the time before she’d plunged into the restless, messy life of her recent past. Then, she’d scorned friendship; now, she was grateful that there was any aspect of human relationship left that she hadn’t mocked and trampled on.

These last weeks, she thought, looking back over the bleak days, had made her long for the warmth of simple, genuine friendship. Friendship, not the mindless desire not to be alone for a moment, day or night. Her address book, her one-time bible, crammed full of names and telephone numbers of people she never wanted to see or hear from again, was shut up in her desk.

She still had no idea why she had woken up one morning, earlier than usual, hung-over, hot, uncomfortable, and had conceived an instant, blinding hatred for the man sprawled beside her, one masculine leg hanging over the side of the bed. He was no worse than the others, less so perhaps; inoffensive, with some charm about him, able to take away the loneliness for a few moments of passion and rob the night of its desolation.

She suddenly wanted none of him. She had yanked at his leg, thrown his clothes at him, driven him from the flat. Home from work that evening, she had taken the telephone off the hook, unwired the door bell, and spent the whole evening soaking in the bath and reading the children’s books she had bought at lunchtime: The Phoenix and the Carpet and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and What Katy Did.

She had expected the mood to pass, that in a little while she would want to be back among her set – but it hadn’t happened. The liveliness seemed brittle, their vivacity aimless and empty, the round of parties and nightclubs pointless, the sophistication superficial and unsatisfactory. She was like a snake that had sloughed its skin, and was waiting to see what new patterns it might find its scales forming themselves into. She bathed a lot, drank very little, refused all invitations, fled round corners or hid in shop doorways to avoid the acquaintances who’d been her companions for months past.

And now there was Cecy, smiling at her in the old way. She felt guilty at how she had let her old friends drop. All very well to cut herself off from her family, but Cecy wasn’t family. Alix had known she was in London, a medical student at one of the big hospitals, but had made no effort to meet up with her.

She suggested a film.

‘There’s the new Cary Grant at the Odeon. With Bettina Brand. Queues round the block, I should think.’

‘Never mind,’ Cecy said. ‘Let’s brave the queue, and go.’

It was a good programme, with a cartoon before the Pathé News and the main feature. They found the cartoon very funny, although the light-hearted mood was rather dispelled by the grainy news pictures of a rally in Berlin.

‘Good marchers, you’ve got to say that for them,’ said a woman in the row behind.

‘Some of that discipline would do all the layabouts in this country a bit of good.’

‘That Hitler’s barking: shouting and yelling and shooting his arm into the air all the time. And his moustache, did you ever see anything so silly?’

‘He makes my flesh creep, him and those others going about in uniforms all the time.’

‘Sssh.’

The scenes of Herr Hitler addressing a rally gave way to ranks of German beauties, bursting with health at a Strength Through Joy camp, waving scarves in synchronised patterns, and then to a shot of members of Hitler Youth relaxing with outsize tankards of beer on benches at a heavily timbered country inn, with snow-capped mountains as a backdrop.

‘At last,’ Cecy said, settling herself more comfortably in her seat as the strains of organ music faded away, and the curtains swished open again to show MGM’s roaring lion.

Late to bed, and cursed with wakefulness, Alix finally fell into a restless sleep in the early hours of the morning. As a result, she overslept and only just got to her office on time, signing her name in the book at one minute to nine. The man on duty at the reception desk scowled at her, he’d hoped to catch her out for once. ‘Thank you, Mr Milsom,’ she said brightly. Avoiding the minute and ancient lift in the centre of the stairwell, she started up the three flights of stairs to her office in the copywriting department.

Although office was a generous word for a cubby-hole carved out of a box room, with barely enough room for a small desk, a chair and a wobbly bookshelf containing out of date directories (cunningly dumped there by other members of staff), a thesaurus (essential, always tracked down and recovered within a short time of it being purloined from the shelf), a dictionary (1912 edition, the more modern one having been borrowed by the copy department and never returned), an aged copy of Gray’s Anatomy (invaluable for pharmaceutical clients and for the dull but profitable remedies-for-all-ailments products), last year’s Wisden (a mystery, that one), dictionaries of quotations and proverbs (almost as closely guarded as the Roget) and several discarded trashy novels, borrowed by members of the typing pool on dull days and kept there as being the only available shelf space.

A brisk morning’s work with the EasiTums account – For the liverish feeling that takes the zest out of life – saw her desk clear of immediate tasks, and at ten to one, she was in the telephone box on the corner of the street.

She’d try Edwin at his studio number first, she might be lucky and she’d rather telephone him there than risk ringing Wyncrag. She picked up the receiver, dialled the operator, and asked for a long distance number. There was a long pause, clicking sounds, the operator told her to put in her coins, and she was through.

Her twin’s voice came down the line, blessedly familiar. ‘Alix?’

‘Oh, Edwin, yes, it’s me. Look, I wonder …’ Now she didn’t really know what to say. ‘Is it true, is the lake freezing?’

‘Coming along nicely. Give it a few more days of this frost and we’ll be skating on it. They all swear there’s no sign of the weather changing. Come up, do, or can’t you bear to drag yourself away from the bright lights of London?’

‘If only you knew. I was thinking of it, but Grandmama …’

‘She’ll be pleased.’

‘It’s been more than three years.’

‘No time at all, and besides, it is your home. Come up as soon as you can get away. Don’t bring the man in your life with you, however.’

‘There isn’t one.’

The silence at the other end spoke volumes. ‘Edwin? Are you still there?’

‘Let me know what train, so that you can be met, Lexy,’ he said.

His use of her nursery name from long ago made her blink. ‘I’d better telephone Grandmama.’

‘I’ll tell her. I’ll say I rang you and persuaded you to come north. And I’ll look out your skates for you, take them to the blacksmith if the blades need sharpening.’

The operator cut in, her voice indifferent. ‘Your three minutes are up, caller.’

TWO
London, Whitehall

Saul Richardson looked down from the tall window. Beneath him, the traffic in Whitehall buzzed to and fro, the cars and taxis so many black beetles, the red livery of the double-decker buses a flash of brightness in the rainy gloom. A troop of Horseguards trotted past, hooves ringing on the Tarmac, the riders’ uniforms and the gleam of their breastplates adding another dash of colour to the scene. Black horses shook heads and manes, snatched at bridles, eager to get back to their stalls, out of the sleeting rain.

He turned and looked in the other direction, out over Parliament Square. Westminster Abbey and squat St Margaret’s, both blackened by soot, looked ancient, cold and unwelcoming. The great Gothic edifice of the Houses of Parliament did nothing to enliven the scene. A solitary constable in a cape stood on duty at the gates to the House of Commons. No flag fluttered above St Stephen’s Tower; the House had risen for the Christmas break, and MPs were away in constituencies, gadding abroad on fact-finding or government missions, or packing for holidays in warmer climes. Only MPs like Saul, a junior member of His Majesty’s Government, were still in town, serving king and country.

The door opened and a young man, smooth as to clothes, hair and expression, came into the room.

‘The morning newspapers, sir. I’ve marked one or two items for you to look at.’

‘Thank you, Charles,’ Saul said, still gazing out of the window.

Charles coughed, Saul looked around at him. ‘What is it?’

‘The lakes are freezing, so it says in The Times.’

‘The lakes? Which lakes? What are you talking about? Canada? The United States?’

‘Your lake, sir. I thought you would be interested.’

‘My lake?’

‘In Westmoreland.’

‘I’ll have a look at the papers in a minute.’

‘These letters are for you to attend to.’

‘Leave them on the desk.’

‘Will there be anything else?’

‘No, no … Why?’

‘Because if you don’t need me for a while, I’ll go to Downing Street and collect those papers from the Cabinet Office.’

‘Can’t they send a messenger? Oh, very well.’ Saul waited for the door to shut completely, and then bounded to his desk and took up the newspaper. Ignoring trouble in Turkey – dammit, there was always trouble in Turkey – alarming news in from the Far East and the tense situation in Spain, Charles, impudent young ass, had folded the newspaper back to an aerial photograph of snow-covered fells towering over that oh-so-familiar sheet of water, gleaming in icy splendour.

Saul read the caption and the piece that accompanied the photograph. Then he threw the paper down on the desk and went back to the window, his arms folded. He had the odd sensation of being two men, one clad in the black jacket and grey striped trousers of the official world, pale faced, not a sleek hair out of place; the other existing three hundred miles away, wearing tweeds, brown boots and skates on his feet, hair ruffled by the wind, cheeks glowing from the cold.

He reached out for the telephone on his desk and picked up the receiver. ‘Get me Mrs Richardson, please.’

A minute later, the telephone bell shrilled out. ‘Jane? I’m cancelling the Christmas visit to the constituency. We’ll go north. Ring Mama and tell her we’re coming. After the weekend, I think. We’ll drive. I leave all the arrangements to you.’

He replaced the receiver, strode across the room, unhooked his overcoat from the coatstand, put it on, wrapped his sombre scarf into the neck of the coat and, bowler hat in hand, left the room. He travelled swiftly through the outer office. ‘I’ll be back at about, oh, say four,’ he said in passing to the bun-faced woman lodged behind an enormous typewriter. ‘Tell Charles to deal with those papers, no, I can’t be contacted.’

Then he was out in the corridor and walking quickly towards the lifts. He didn’t want to leave London without seeing Mavis.

THREE
London, Knightsbridge

The phone rang and rang. Jane Richardson could see, as clearly as though she were there, the telephones sounding their shrill alerts: in the Great Hall, in Rokeby’s pantry, in Henry’s study, in Caroline’s dressing room.

Finally, the phone was picked up in mid-ring, and Jane heard a harsh, French-accented voice say, ‘Hello?’

‘Who is this?’ Jane said, her own voice tart now.

‘Lipp.’

‘Lipp. I might have known. Why are you answering the phone?’

‘There’s no one else to answer it. Is that Mrs Saul?’

How she hated to be called Mrs Saul. ‘Lipp, after all these years you surely know that when you answer the telephone, if you must do so, please respond with the number. Don’t just say, Hello. It’s most unhelpful. One could have been connected to anyone, and I don’t see why you have to answer the telephone. Where is Rokeby? You must know.’ Of course Lipp knew, she always knew where everyone was.

‘Rokeby’s helping Sir Henry with the generator.’

‘Oh, really, it’s too bad.’ Why a man of her father-in-law’s years and dignity, who moreover kept a full staff, felt he had to attend to the generator was beyond her understanding. ‘Go and tell Lady Richardson I would like to speak to her, please.’

There was a clunk as Lipp laid the receiver down; far away in London, Jane could hear the click-clack of Lipp’s heels receding into the distance as her mother-in-law’s maid went upstairs.

Lipp must have left the receiver too close to the edge of the table, for there was a rustling sound and a thump, then more bangs. The receiver dangling on its cord, no doubt, swinging to and fro, and banging against the table leg as it did so. There was a harsh crackle down the line, further bumps and bangs, and then she heard Caroline’s voice.

‘Jane?’

‘Shall I put this one down now, my lady?’ cut in Lipp’s voice.

‘Yes,’ said Jane and Caroline together. Crash.

‘That terrible woman,’ Jane said, under her breath.

‘What did you say? Nothing? I distinctly heard you speak. Never mind. How is Saul?’

‘Perfectly well. He wants us to come to Wyncrag for Christmas.’

Caroline’s crystalline tones came down the line, as clear as though she were standing beside her; Caroline’s voice was like that on the telephone. ‘I was expecting you. When are you coming?’

‘Saul hasn’t decided. He intends to drive down, so he’ll be anxious to get away from London in good time before the Christmas exodus starts. One day next week, I’ll let you know. Perdita breaks up this week, I suppose. Who else will be there?’

‘Edwin wants to persuade Alix to come.’

‘Alix! Good heavens, after all this time? Have you heard from her?’

‘I’ve heard of her, which is quite enough. It seems that she’s fallen into unsuitable company.’

‘Alix is old enough to decide what company is or isn’t suitable for her, Caroline. She’s no longer a child. If you set into her the moment she steps into Wyncrag, you may find she turns straight around and leaves. I would.’

‘I hardly think your opinion on this subject is of any importance.’

Nor was her opinion on anything else, not as far as Caroline was concerned.

‘Besides, I have no expectation of her coming.’

The sound of the receiver being put down, a pause, and then another voice quacked at her. ‘You have upset Madame.’

Lipp again.

‘Madame’s upset me.’

‘She is no longer young, you should have consideration.’

‘Thank you, Lipp. Is there anything else you want to say?’

‘Madame wishes you to go to Bond Street and collect some linen she has ordered. You may bring it up with you in the car.’

‘Goodbye,’ Jane said firmly. She replaced the receiver with deliberate care, and then sat absolutely still, hands folded in her lap. Not a hair was out of place; from her elegant grey shoes through her pale grey skirt and cashmere grey twinset, worn with a restrained diamond brooch, to her faultless face and sleek jaw-length hair, she was a picture of perfection.

Outside, all was calm. Within, she seethed. She longed to hurl the telephone across the room, to bang her hands on the table, to yell and stamp. Wyncrag. How she hated Wyncrag. Almost as much as she hated the Surrey house with its ridiculous half-timbering and pompous attempt to look like a real country house. Almost as much as she hated this flat, with its spindly French furniture, its valuable rugs and pictures and mirrors. Perfect. Sterile. Appropriate. Just as she was the perfect, most appropriate wife imaginable for an up-and-coming politician.

She flipped open the cigarette box and jammed a cigarette between her lips. She lit it with the heavy silver table lighter, shaped like a tureen, loathsome thing, and flipped open a copy of Country Life, jerking through the pages filled with photographs of desirable properties for sale.

Her eyes fell on a small, black and white picture. Impey Manor, she read. Fifteenth-century manor house with many original features, in need of modernisation and improvements. Gardens, garaging, stabling, maze, small lake, paddocks, nine acres in all.

In your dreams, she thought. In those dreams where she lived in shabby comfort in the country, in a mellow old house, full of twisting passages and unexpected stairs. Dogs. Ponies. Doves fluttering around a dovecote. Winter mud and ice; sudden spring; the deep smells of summer, newly cut grass, hay, roses; autumn trees in a blaze of colour. Children in gumboots swishing through the fallen leaves.

That was the knife twisting in the wound. To linger in such dreams was unendurable. She dragged herself back into the actual world of here and now. Forget manor houses and the country and roses, she told herself.

Children.

The children Saul wouldn’t let her have. Or, rather, the children Saul’s mother didn’t want her to have, since she and her husband were cousins, and the dangers of inbreeding, as Caroline so charmingly put it, not worth risking.

She slammed the magazine shut, got up, drawing ferociously on her cigarette, making mental lists. Saul first: his man would see to his clothes. His skates, were they here or at Wyncrag? Binoculars. Books, presents, she would have to finish her shopping in a hurry. Her mind skittered from thing to thing. The evening dress that needed altering. Her engagement diary, day after day over Christmas and New Year filled with cocktails and dinners and dances; every one to be cancelled, apologies to be made, ruffled feathers smoothed, every word watched. Any carelessness could mean a vote lost.

Time spent in Saul’s constituency was always time spent walking on eggshells. Dammit, she’d have to lie and deceive. ‘Sir Henry, Mr Richardson’s father, not too well.’ How ridiculous, his father was always as fit as a flea, with the energy of three ordinary men. Saul’s constituents weren’t to know that, thank God he sat for a southern seat.

His mother then? Lady Richardson? They’d picture a fragile beauty, walking with a stick, silvery hair, a faded rose. Let them picture, provided they never set eyes on the short, powerful woman with her hooded, hawk’s eyes and hair still showing the traces of the rich chestnut colour of her youth. What would bring Saul more sympathy, rushing to his mother’s or his father’s side?

How tired she was of the whole wretched business; to think how pleased she’d felt when he’d been elected, when his delight in it had been so open, more like the thrill of a little boy given just the present he wanted than a grown man embarking on a political career.

She stubbed out her cigarette with restrained violence, then rang for her maid.

FOUR
SS Gloriana, at sea, the Bay of Biscay

The waves were long and deep, and dark beneath the foamy carpet of spray. Hal Grindley’s mackintosh was bunched tightly around him, its collar up, its deep pockets a refuge for his icy hands. He wore no hat; the wind would have whipped it off in a second.

He was standing at the same place at the rail on the third deck where he had stood every night of the voyage since the first day out from Bombay. From there he had watched an enormous moon rise over a gleaming dark sea, and had seen the southern stars give way to the more familiar northern constellations shining with pinpoint brilliance in icy December skies. There, evening after evening, he had felt in its full intensity the strange suspension of reality belonging to a sea voyage. There he had thought about Margo, night after night, trying to order his feelings, to lessen the hurt, to regain a sense of proportion.

She had been with him in his mind all those months since his departure from San Francisco; she was beside him in his dreams as he crisscrossed Australia, as he tossed and turned in the sweltering heat of summer, as he sat outside on verandahs in India, listening to the eerie night sounds of the east. Finally, as the seas grew more grey and rough, he had reached the state of indifference he had longed for. A door slammed behind him, shutting away all the years he had spent with her, reducing her betrayal to no more than the hissing breaking of a wave, spray tossed into the air and vanishing in the mass of water.

Tonight, as the SS Gloriana forged her way through the heaving seas of the Bay of Biscay, there were no stars to be seen.

A door opened further along the deck, and he caught the vanishing sounds of chimes summoning passengers to dinner. With a last look out into the blackness of the night, he went back in to warmth and light and the steady hum of the ship’s engines. He made his way to his cabin to shed his coat; he was already dressed for dinner, although he had disarranged his black tie by fastening the collar of his mackintosh close about his neck. He twitched the tie back into place and set off once more to make his way along the swaying corridor, not at all bothered by the plunging motion of the vessel.

The vast dining room was sparsely filled. A steward at his elbow deferentially whispered in his ear that normal seating arrangements had been set aside for the present, as so few passengers were dining. He allowed himself to be escorted to a table where a handful of people were already seated; they gave him the confiding smiles of those immune to seasickness.

The little wooden guards, designed to stop the silver and china sliding to the floor, were up on all the tables, and as the waiter pushed his seat in and he reached for his napkin, the glasses at his place rattled into each other. The waiter deftly set them to rights. Hal spread the thick linen napkin across his knees and turned his attention to his table companions.

It was inevitable that one of those seated at the table was Lady Gutteridge. She was the wife of the Governor of the Central Provinces, bringing her girls back to prepare for the Season next year. Nothing short of an Act of God could subdue her immense vitality, and certainly she would stand no nonsense from mere waves. He wondered if her two daughters were glad of the chance to stay in their cabins, shut away for a few hours from the relentless supervision and chivvying of their demanding mother.

Both girls had paid Hal some attention in the sly snatches of time when no watchful maternal eye was upon them. One of the girls had judged him too old to be interesting, he was too sure of himself, had too hard a core to be played with. The other was fascinated, drawn to him by the very qualities that repelled her sister, delighted with his lean, dark looks. His sardonic expression made her shiver, and when he was amused, with his almost black eyes gleaming and that mobile mouth set in a slanting smile, she found him deeply disturbing.

Was he going to be in London for the Season? she wanted to know when she cornered him during a game of deck quoits.

Wasting her time, her sister told her. Hal Grindley, whoever he was, certainly wasn’t going to figure on Mummy’s List, why, they knew nothing at all about him or who his people were. He was reticent on the subjects of school and regiment and university, those pillars of status, and his clothes defied classification, though his well-cut evening clothes could only have come from the hands of a London tailor – but what about those yellow socks?

Rumour had it that he came from the north of England, that he had been living in America and travelling about all over Australia and God knew where; definite signs of not being any kind of an eligible partner, neither for a dance nor for life.

It was all too true, but the damage was done, and for all the next year she would be the despair of her mother, rejecting as soppy and stupid all the desirable young men paraded for her approval and finally making a most inappropriate match with a rising but none-too-young Labour politician – ‘of all dreadful people, my dear!’ – who had something of the same quicksilver mind and natural ease of authority that she had fallen for in the enigmatic Mr Grindley.

The colonial bishop seated opposite asked Hal where he would be going when they landed in England.

‘To Westmoreland,’ he replied without any hesitation. Where the lakes were freezing, and where he had family.

He didn’t add that visiting his family hadn’t been any part of his original plan, but the story in the newspapers brought on board when the ship called at Gibraltar had brought back a longing for his native hills that overwhelmed him. He had sent telegrams and retired to his cabin with a head suddenly alive with memories of childhood winters beside the lake and among the great fells, of skating in clear bright air, of toboggans and yachts and hot pies eaten with cold fingers on the ice, and Nanny scolding when he came in freezing and hungry and exhausted, ready to sleep for twelve hours and then to be back on the ice, sliding and tumbling among his friends.

He could see Grindley Hall in his mind’s eye; would Peter have made many changes? What about Peter’s new wife? She sounded uninteresting, certainly a comedown after funny, vital Delia whom he had adored, and who had run away from Peter one summer’s night with a Scottish poet. She had paid a high price for her new life in a Highland castle, since Peter had vented his hurt rage in a refusal to allow her any contact with her children. She kept in touch with them, he knew, only by clandestine means, writing to Nanny at a separate address from the Hall.

Hal didn’t blame her. He’d run away himself, to all intents and purposes. Less scandalously, but almost as effectively. Like Delia, Hal had sought refuge from his family among Bohemians and artists, only in his case, he knew that those he had abandoned felt nothing but relief at his absence. He was a changeling among the Grindleys, sharing neither of the family’s absorbing interests of killing things and making money.

After a dinner that had run to its usual five courses, despite the raging sea, he and the bishop took refuge from her ladyship in the Smoking Room, a place too masculine for even one of her assurance to enter. There, amid the satisfactory aroma of good cigars and leather chairs, they sat companionably enough, the bishop drinking whisky and Hal with a glass of bourbon at his elbow.

Talk of the frozen north led the bishop to turn the subject to the one great passion of his life: fishing. Fly fishing in particular, and he settled down to indulge in a long drone about casts and flies and pools in obscure places and long-lost fishy prey that had got away.

Hal found listening to this saga quite restful, having grown up surrounded by guns and rods, and by material evidence of the Grindley obsession in the shape of such delights as an enormous salmon mounted in a glass case, set among bright green reeds, with a placard beneath it announcing that it had been caught by Gertrude Grindley in 1898.

This particular trophy had for some reason ended up in his bedroom, where it at first gave him nightmares and then simply joined the list of things he disliked about his home. He marginally preferred the fish to the antlered heads with their sad eyes, and the stuffed stoats, weasels and foxes that some taxidermy-mad ancestor had collected so avidly and which stood around on side-tables and on shelves in every room of the house.

His attention was jerked back to what the bishop was saying by the alarming words, ‘and of course, I used to go fishing there with your uncle, Robert Grindley. Dead now, I heard.’

‘Uncle?’

‘You’re old Nicholas Grindley’s boy, aren’t you? He’s dead, too, of course, none of that generation left except a sister, that’ll be your Aunt Daphne. You must be Peter’s youngest brother. I was at school with Peter, he fagged for me one year. We called him Jakes. On account of the family business, you know.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Hal could remember all too well his own school soubriquets of Jeyes, and Clean-round-the-bend. Roger had been called Flush, he recalled, which never seemed to bother him.

‘How is Peter? Keeping well? I heard about his wife; shocking business, shocking. He’s married again, though.’

‘Yes. I rarely see him, living abroad as I do.’

‘Yes, yes, you always were the odd one out.’

Hal was feeling some alarm. ‘I’d rather you didn’t mention that you know my family. To Lady Gutteridge. I mean …’

The bishop shook with laughter. ‘No, no, I saw right from the start that it would never do, and I have no desire to make mischief. Mind you, Grindley Hall is all very well, but I should think she has ambitions beyond the younger son of a northern squire, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘Oh, just so. However, with that kind of woman, one can’t be too careful.’

‘No, indeed, indeed. You can rely on me. Yes, Peter Grindley, how that takes me back. I remember one year, we’d taken a couple of rods up Loweswater way …’

Hal was beginning to regret that the bishop had caught whatever tropical disease it was that left him so thin and yellow and apparently unable to continue with his ministry overseas. Not that the bishop seemed to mind. As he turned his episcopal thoughts from past fish to watery pleasures yet to come, the sense of boredom that Hal had so often experienced when with his family and their friends began to get the better of his good nature and manners. He rose to his feet. ‘I think I’ll turn in,’ he said, stretching out a hand to steady himself as the ship hurtled down into an extra deep wave.

‘Quite so,’ said the colonial bishop, his mind full of whisky fumes and fishy foes.

It was bitterly cold, the day the ship docked at Tilbury, and he bid the bishop goodbye at the Customs Shed. The bishop was heading for a cathedral town in the West Country; Hal was spending the night in his club in London. He would devote the next day to professional and business affairs, and then catch the night sleeper to the north, and the frozen lake.

FIVE
Yorkshire

Perdita Richardson hadn’t expected a letter from her best friend Ursula Grindley, not so near the end of term. Yet there it was, tucked into a tattered old copy of the Couperin Suites by an obliging and well-bribed school maid.

Letters at Yorkshire Ladies College, where Perdita was a boarder, were considered dangerous items and reading an illicit letter was almost as much of a problem as receiving it, for the young ladies were constantly watched. Twenty seconds in a practice room without playing a note and a teacher would be at the door wanting to know why you were slacking. Hawk eyes bored into you in the library, as you went along the corridor, in the dining room; spies were everywhere in dormitories and common room. The lavatory was a possibility, but there were set times for that, and usually a queue outside the door.

Perdita broke into a ripple of arpeggios with her left hand while she tucked the letter into her liberty bodice with her right hand. Later, she would contrive to slip it inside her sock, and then, in the afternoon, she would work the frayed lace trick.

‘I don’t know what it is with you and bootlaces, Perdita Richardson. Yours are always breaking.’ The brick-faced games mistress suspected a ruse, but couldn’t deny that there was the lace in two pieces, and, on inspection, it had suffered what appeared to be a natural breakage with appropriate fraying.

‘I think it’s because my hockey boots are too small for me,’ said Perdita helpfully. ‘It must put a strain on the laces.’

‘See you are supplied with a new pair of boots for next term. Go and put in a spare lace. Be back in five minutes.’

She could stretch that to seven or eight, Perdita thought as she jogged back to the changing rooms. Once there, she tugged off the offending boot, one she’d taken from the lost property box, and pulled on her own boot with its perfectly good lace. Then she sat down on the wooden lockers, plucked the letter from its hiding place in her sock and began to read.

It started without any preamble – a precaution in case it should fall into hostile hands.

Very near the end of term, I know, but I had to write to tell you all the news as there’s a terrific to-do going on here. The chief reason is that the family Black Sheep will shortly be with us – in case you don’t know who that is, it’s my Uncle Hal. You never met him – nor did I, or if I did I was a mere puling infant & don’t remember it – because he went off years and years ago, to America! Yes, that one!

Well, the fuss, you’d think some arch-criminal was on his way. And the point is, I can’t find out that he ever actually did anything very terrible, except to take up acting when he was at Cambridge and then head for London to Go On The Stage! That was before he went to America. I mean, what’s so shocking about an actor, only you know what Daddy’s like, he shouts and rants about ‘Those Sort of People’? He says actors are a bunch of Pansies and then goes red if he thinks I’ve heard – he imagines I don’t know what he means. Musicians and painters are Pansies, too, of course – if they’re men. If they’re women, they’re badly brought up with no allure and probably thick ankles who should have been controlled by their fathers. He doesn’t get any less Victorian as he gets older. He should control his temper, never mind his daughter – all that going red can’t be doing him any good at all.

I asked Nanny to tell me about Hal. She has a soft spot for him, you can tell that at once. She let out that his brothers called him the Afterthought, because he’s so much younger than they are. He’s thirty-eight, she says, and Pa’s fifty-five, and Uncle Roger fifty-two, so it’s quite a gap, I do see. Grandma must have been awfully old to have a baby when he was born. One thing is, he didn’t come back from America when Grandma died, and that’s held against him, BUT, Nanny says that Daddy didn’t send the cablegram until he knew it was too late for him to get here for the funeral.

It isn’t only the acting that’s causing all the agitation. It’s money. Isn’t that always the way with my family? Hal got a third of the business when Grandpa died, and that still rankles with Daddy – considering he got the house as well as shares and so on, I don’t think he’s being very fair. Anyhow, they reckoned that being an actor and no good at it – well, no one’s ever heard of him, have they? – he’d have sold his shares, spent the money and be living in penury. Only he hasn’t, they’re all still in his name. There’s some deal brewing, and they need his shares to put it all through. Hence the flap – will he be difficult about it?

The Grindleys are gathering. Uncle Roger and Aunt Angela have arrived, with Cecy. Uncle Roger’s still being beastly about her training to be a doctor. Aunt Angela says Hal is a nice man, only not in the least interested in sport and shooting and all that. He was clever, too, and you know how suspicious Daddy is of anyone clever, books and plays and things all being a waste of time and not in the real world, meaning lav pans and baths. You don’t know how lucky you are that your family’s money comes from dull old engineering works and not from sanitary chinaware. Nicky knocked a boy down this term because he got so fed up with remarks about things going down the pan. He’s at home, therefore, in disgrace, but he doesn’t care a bit; he hates school.

Anyhow, that’s not all. Exquisite Eve (my new name for my awful stepmother, don’t you like it?) has set her mind against Hal, don’t ask me why, and says he shouldn’t have just announced he was coming but should have waited to be invited. He’d have had to wait a jolly long time in that case. Aunt Angela says, ‘Rot, it’s his home,’ or words to that effect, but Eve isn’t pleased. Then a cable came from Lisbon mentioning the name of his ship, the SS Gloriana. When Uncle Roger heard that, he cried out, ‘That’s not on the Atlantic run, it’s a P&O vessel and goes to and from India and Australia.’ So that’s got them even more worked up, did he get the letters about the shares that they sent to New York, and what on earth could he be doing in Australia and India? As if no one ever went there before, which of course they do, all the time.

My stepsister Rosalind will be turning up from her finishing school in Munich. You haven’t met her, but I’ve told you how ghastly she is – well, she would be, with exquisite Eve for a mother. Daddy thinks she’s wonderful, he goes on and on about her poise and beautiful manners and grooming – you’d think she was a horse. Only she isn’t, she’s frightfully pretty in a boring, brittle sort of way, and very affected. She behaves as though the Hall is a leftover from the Middle Ages (she’s got a point there), and treats me like I was some kind of a peasant. Simon can’t take his eyes off her, I never saw anything so soppy, and he won’t hear a word against her. He’s home from Cambridge, and gloomy as usual, he knows that Daddy won’t hear of him joining the army after university; the eldest son has to go into the business, and that’s that. Honestly, my brothers, what a pair, but at least Nicky isn’t at all struck by the fair Rosalind. Just wait till you see her.

Must finish, or there’ll be so many pages you won’t be able to flush them down the lav, hope it’s a Jowetts, we need to keep the money coming in to pay for Rosalind’s expensive clothes and Eve’s beauty treatments. Oh, and guess what, we’re going to have a dance over Christmas, hooray, but it’s in honour of Rosalind’s seventeenth birthday. It makes me sick. Catch Daddy ever giving a dance in my honour.

Can’t wait to see you and have a really good talk about it all, xxx

PS Cecy says she’s been trying to persuade E’s twin (better not mention her name) to come back for Christmas. I hope she does.

SIX
London, Bloomsbury

Edwin had met Lidia on the steps of the Photographic Institute in London. To be exact, he had tripped over her; she had been on her knees, scrubbing, and he hadn’t been looking where he was going.

‘Blöder Idiot,’ she exclaimed.

‘Oh, Entschuldigung, ich habe Sie nicht gesehen,’ he replied, startled. ‘I’ve knocked over your bucket,’ he continued in English.

‘It is nothing,’ she muttered, getting to her feet and wiping her hands on her worn crossover apron. Why was the man staring at her like that?

‘I am sorry,’ he said again. ‘May I take the bucket in for you?’

She clutched the bucket to her chest, and backed away. ‘No, no. It would be most unsuitable.’

Edwin didn’t give a fig about what was or wasn’t suitable. He took the bucket firmly from her and followed her down the basement steps to deposit it in the area. Then he went back up to the pavement, and, lighting a cigarette, took up a position by the railings.

He didn’t have long to wait before she came up the steps, dressed now in a shabby, dark coat and a nondescript hat. ‘Oh,’ she said, when she saw him. ‘Why are you still here?’

‘I’m waiting for you. Have you finished your work for now? Then I shall buy you a cup of coffee. No, don’t protest, it’s the least I can do after sending your bucket flying.’

He walked her quite a way, to a place he knew of near Harrods. A Hungarian pastry chef had opened a hugely successful tea room, where his exquisite cakes and pastries were bought and sampled by appreciative members of the upper classes.

She didn’t hang back at the door, despite her poor clothes, but lifted her chin and went in. The proprietor eyed her with momentary disapproval, then took in the well-cut, if casual, clothes of her companion and ushered them to a table.

Edwin ordered coffee and pastries. ‘I don’t have to ask a Viennese if she likes these,’ he said with a smile.

‘How do you know I come from Vienna?’

‘Your accent. I studied in Vienna for a while.’

‘You don’t have a Viennese accent.’

‘No, I learnt my German as a child, from a German governess.’

‘Do you always stare at people? Isn’t this rude, for an Englishman?’

He wasn’t at all abashed. ‘I’m a photographer. I always stare when I see something or someone I want to take photographs of.’

The light died out of her face, and her big dark eyes became wary. ‘Photographs?’

‘Not the kind you’re thinking of,’ he said quickly. ‘Nothing distasteful or dishonourable.’

That was what she was thinking, of course. You didn’t arrive as a penniless but attractive refugee to any country without certain suggestions being made to you. Had she chosen that route, she would never have had to scrub a step, and she wouldn’t be wearing these clothes. She said no more, but took a bite of her Marillenkuchen and with that delicious apricot mouthful, all her memories of Vienna, pushed so resolutely out of her mind, came flooding back. She smiled.

She couldn’t help it, and she couldn’t have dreamt of the effect it would have on Edwin, who sat transfixed, gazing at her with blank astonishment.

He had thought she had an interesting face. The arrangement of cheekbones and nose and mouth appealed to him, as an artist, not as a man. Now he was overwhelmed.

She didn’t want to meet him again, didn’t want to be photographed, wanted to be left alone. She didn’t notice him following her through dingy streets to a house in Bloomsbury. As she put her key in the lock of the front door, which badly needed a coat of paint, she looked around and up and down the street, as though she sensed his eyes upon her; he had ducked behind a parked van, and she didn’t see him.

He sauntered around the corner and went into a shop that announced itself as a newsagent and tobacconist. A small man with a moustache stood behind the counter, and he greeted Edwin in a voice that held a trace of a foreign accent. Edwin bought a paper and a packet of cigarettes.

There were no other customers in the shop, and it wasn’t hard to fall into conversation with the man. Edwin’s relaxed, unassertive ways encouraged people to talk to him, and in no time at all, he had the rundown on everyone in Cranmer Street, including the inhabitants of number sixteen. The owners of the house were an elderly couple, who let out rooms to add to a meagre pension. Their only lodgers at present were a young married couple. The man was English, his wife from Austria. Also staying there for some weeks now was the wife’s sister, recently arrived from Vienna.

‘A musician,’ the little man said, his eyes gleaming with pleasure. ‘She plays the piano. For hours. Bach, mostly, and Scarlatti. Beautiful, beautiful.’ Then the eyes became watchful. ‘You are from the authorities, perhaps?’

‘Good heavens, no,’ Edwin said, taken aback. ‘Do I look like a policeman?’

‘It is not only the police, but there are Home Office officials, who come and ask unpleasant questions in areas like this. There are a lot of foreigners here. But Mrs Jenkins, the musician’s sister, is married to an Englishman, she has a British passport, I have seen it, I know what it looks like. I was once a German, but now I, too, have a British passport.’

‘Does the sister have a passport?’

‘Only an Austrian one, if that. She has come as a refugee, her brother-in-law arranged it. It wasn’t easy, because he’s a writer, and has little money. However, Mrs Jenkins works, and earns some money, and so they managed it. Mrs Jenkins was very worried about her sister, for they are Jews, like me. It isn’t safe to be Jewish these days.’

‘No, I suppose not,’ Edwin said inadequately. ‘I’m aware that Mrs Jenkins’s sister – I don’t recall her name …?’ He looked expectantly at the newsagent.

‘Weiss. Lidia Weiss.’

‘Miss Weiss has a cleaning job. Surely, if she is a musician she shouldn’t be scrubbing floors?’

The man shook his head, making clucking noses. ‘No, no, of course not. It is terrible for her hands. Musicians have to be careful of their hands, and the water, and the cold, it isn’t good for bones and muscles. Only what work is there for a musician, newly arrived in this country? They are two a penny. I myself know a cellist of international reputation who stays alive by washing up at a restaurant. A violinist, a wonderful artist, is a lavatory attendant – and the stories he tells about what goes on in such a place, it makes your hair stand on end, the English are a strange people. A friend of mine who is a horn player is more fortunate, he is a big, strong fellow, and he is employed by a nightclub. On the door.’ The little man spread his hands in a despairing gesture. ‘Lidia Weiss is lucky, she is well-educated, she speaks good English. If she didn’t, it would be difficult for her even to get a cleaning job.’

‘I see,’ Edwin said.

It took him two days to scrape an acquaintance with Richard Jenkins, a thin, likeable young man engaged in writing a long novel set in mediaeval Wales. This work was to make his fortune; Edwin doubted it, and when he went back with Richard to take potluck at the evening meal, he saw that Lidia doubted it too, but was too kind to say so. He had handed the food he had thoughtfully brought with him to a relieved Anna Jenkins, who had been wondering how she could make an already watery tomato soup and a tin of sardines feed four people, and then turned around to be introduced to Lidia. She looked at him as though she had seen a ghost.

Although they hadn’t met before, Richard moved in much the same London circle as Edwin, and they had friends in common among the Bohemian group of writers, artists and musicians endeavouring to live by their various talents. By the end of the evening, Lidia seemed to have shed her mistrust of Edwin. She sat down at the battered old piano after supper and played for them. Edwin didn’t take his eyes off her, his gaze moving from her rapt face to her reddened, swollen hands.

She visited him in the rooms he kept in London, one of which was rigged up as a small studio. The first time she came, she brought her sister Anna with her. Then, finally, after further tea-time outings to sample Viennese pastries, a recital at the Queen’s Hall, ‘A friend asked me to use the tickets, such a shame to waste them,’ he lied, and an evening at the cinema, she came to his rooms alone.

She refused to marry him.

‘Why, why?’ he would ask her in despair as they lay side by side on his narrow bed. ‘What’s wrong with me? I’m so much in love with you, don’t you feel anything for me?’

‘Nothing is wrong with you, but everything is wrong with me. I am foreign, and Jewish, and Richard tells me that you come from an important, rich family. They would hate me. Then, I’m older than you, and men should be older than the women they marry.’

‘Four years! It’s hardly a generation. One of my aunts is married to a man fifteen years her junior, and they are very happy.’

‘Even so. And besides …’ It was hard to tell him that she slept with him for the release and comfort it gave her, not because she was in love with him. She craved human warmth and company, desperate to drown her grief at her parents’ death in a railway accident, to forget for a short while the loss of her first lover, a Berliner who had vanished into one of the KZ camps for some minor act of disobedience to the State, and had died there in mysterious circumstances. After making love she wept on Edwin’s shoulder, for the people who were gone, for the country she had loved, for the Jews who were left.

Edwin had never in his life been exposed to such raw emotion, he wanted to detach himself from it, yet ended by finding himself even more deeply in love with his brown-haired Viennese refugee.

She was a harpsichordist, not a pianist, he learnt. Which was not a good thing to be, because if good pianos were hard to come by, harpsichords of any kind were impossible. Edwin pleaded with her to give up her cleaning job, to come and live with him if she wouldn’t marry him, but she refused, and twice a week went to classes, paid for out of her slender earnings, to learn shorthand and typing.

Edwin had to return to the north. He begged her to come with him. His studio there wasn’t in his parents’ house, he told her, but on the ground floor of a house in the local town. ‘I own the whole house, there are bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen. It’s a small town, but friendly. The air is good, there are hills,’ he added helplessly.

She shook her head, and got out of bed to dress in her worn clothes and go off to attend to the steps of the Photographic Institute. Edwin went around to Cranmer Street, and railed at her sister, Anna, who looked at him with pity in her eyes.

‘It will be better for her when she has another job. It will be better for her when she can work indoors, and use her mind, and not have her hands in water all day. Then she can play properly, and remember what she is.’

Like you, thought Edwin, although he was too kind to say so. Like Anna, who had a degree in chemistry, and was grateful for the job of laboratory assistant at a girls’ school.

‘Please persuade her. None of this is because I feel sorry for her, you do understand that?’

‘I know. It is because you love her. Sadly, love comes at no one’s bidding, and so …’ She shrugged.

The scrubbing got no easier, when Edwin had gone, and the piano playing became more and more painful and difficult. Edwin wrote to her every day, passionate letters, and sent her photographs, of fells and lakes and ruined chapels.

‘What an artist!’ Richard said, when he saw them.

Lidia agreed, as she put them silently away in the bottom of the tatty suitcase where she kept all her worldly possessions. She cooked supper; Anna was feeling unwell. She often felt sick these days, she said the smell of the chemicals at school was upsetting her. She knew this wasn’t the reason, and so did Lidia, but neither of them spoke about it.

More letters, more photographs, this time of snow scenes, sunlit and moonlit, an enchanted world, it seemed to Lidia. Do you skate? he wrote. I know, that’s like asking a duck if it quacks. I remember you telling me about Christmas in the mountains. They will soon be skating on the lake here.

Then Anna told Richard her news, and he was ecstatic, brushing aside her worry about her job – they thought she was unmarried; where was the money to come from? Richard’s thin face took on a determined look, and three days later he announced that he had accepted a job. Teaching at a preparatory school for boys in Sussex, a live-in job with a small house provided. No, she wasn’t to exclaim about his writing. Schoolmasters had long holidays, he’d been a fool not to find such a job long ago. Yes, he would miss London, but country air and food were what his Anna needed at a time like this. He was to take up his post at the beginning of the Lent term, but might move into the house whenever he wished.

Of course, Lidia must come too, he said.

Lidia looked at her sister’s tired but radiant face. ‘Later perhaps,’ she said, and arranged to work all the extra hours she could, to pay for the train fare to the north and to buy a pair of skates.

SEVEN
Sussex

The telephone rang in Hut 3 of the Gibson Aeronautical Company’s premises, the shrill sound startling Michael Wrexham. He blinked, looking up from the measurements he was checking, and stretched out his hand to answer the call.

‘Michael?’ said the caller. ‘Freddie here. Can we talk?’

‘Go ahead.’ Michael Wrexham balanced the receiver on his shoulder, and put a tick on the sheet in front of him. He was sitting on a high stool at a drawing board. A strong light from an angular lamp clipped to the board cast a brilliant pool on his work. Outside the steamed-up windows of the wooden building, snow pattered down in the darkness, unnoticed. A stove at the other end of the hut kept it warm, if stuffy. There were three drawing boards, and a desk with a typewriter on it. He was the only occupant; the others had long since gone home, and the typewriter had had its cover tucked over it on the dot of five-thirty.

‘Have you noticed the weather, or are you so wrapped up in your blasted aeroplanes that snow passes you by?’

Michael shifted his gaze to the nearest window. ‘It is snowing here, now you come to mention it.’

‘It’s snowing almost everywhere. Especially in the north. What are you doing for Christmas? Any chance of your getting a few days’ leave?’

‘Difficult at the moment, Freddie. There’s a bit of a flap on.’

‘That’s what you always say. Now listen, I feel a terrific urge to get in a bit of skating. I know I won’t be able to entice you to Switzerland, but how about a trip to the Lake District? You must have read that the great lakes are all freezing. We could put up at an inn, I telephoned around and there are two rooms going spare at an inn called the Pheasant, in Westmoreland – a cancellation. A family had booked, but the father’s gone down with measles of all things, poor chap. I feel sorry for them, missing all the fun. A colleague at the hospital says they look after you well there, and the food’s good. The innkeeper, Mr Dixon, is holding the rooms for me, until tomorrow morning. Do say you’ll come. We can walk and skate, it’s a wonderful chance to get those muscles working and breathe a bit of fresh air. You’re no use to anyone cooped up in your office all the hours God gives.’

Michael laughed. ‘I must say, I don’t feel very fit. But I don’t think I can get away.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s tricky just now, you know how things are. Look, leave it with me. I’ll get back to you first thing, one way or the other.’

‘Right-oh. Speak to you then.’

‘Bye, Freddie.’

He put the receiver down and pushed the telephone away. He sat straight on his stool, musing. Westmoreland. He closed his eyes for a minute, seeing the fells, the frozen lake, the craggy landscape of so many childhood holidays. He hadn’t been back for years. Sixteen years, his exact mind told him, when he’d been twelve years old.

He bent over his drawing board once more, slide rule in hand, muttering to himself. The door opened, and a blast of cold air hit the back of his neck. ‘Shut that door,’ he yelled, then turned to see a tall, bearded man standing at the door, the shoulders of his jacket covered in snow. Giles Gibson stamped his feet, leaving a puddle of melting snow about his brogues. ‘Sorry, sir,’ Michael said. ‘Didn’t realize it was you.’

‘It’s late. You should have gone home.’

‘I wanted to get these figures finished.’

‘For the Pegasus?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Are you nearly through?’

He straightened, running a hand through his hair. ‘Another hour should see it done.’

‘Finish it, and then come across to my office, would you?’

‘Yes,’ Michael said, already mentally back with his work.

‘An hour, no more. I’m going out to dinner tonight. I can’t be late, or Marjorie will be annoyed.’

‘Yes. I mean, no. I’ll be there.’

Giles Gibson’s office was in another wooden hut, on the other side of the airstrip. Michael felt his breath taken away by the cold, and set off at a steady jog across the windy spaces. Snow blew into his face, making him blink as fat flakes settled on his eyelashes. He swung up the three steps to Gibson’s hut, knocking at the door as he went in.

‘Snowing hard,’ he said, giving himself a shake.

Gibson was already in his overcoat, sitting behind his desk and shovelling some papers into a drawer before locking it and pocketing the key. ‘Come on, I’ll give you a lift to your digs, you can’t cycle home in this weather.’

‘It’s not as bad as that,’ he protested. ‘Still, I’d be glad of the ride.’

‘We’ll talk on the way.’ Gibson switched off the light over his desk, and followed him out of the door, locking the door and giving it a push to make sure it was secure. Then the two of them hurried, heads down, towards the main buildings, skirting around the edge to the potholed area where Gibson parked his car.

‘Get in,’ Gibson said, going around to the driver’s side. ‘Let’s hope she starts.’

The engine made some dispirited noises, groaned and coughed, and then subsided into silence.

‘I’ll do it,’ Michael said, taking the crank handle from Gibson.

‘Careful, she’s got the devil of a kick,’ Gibson called to him as he went to the front of the car.

‘You’re right about the kick,’ Michael said as he climbed into the car, rubbing his shoulder. He gave the door a tug to close it.

They spluttered down the rutted lane, Gibson peering through the windscreen, where the wipers were fighting a losing battle with the snow.

‘A pal of mine telephoned today,’ Michael said. ‘He wants me to go to Westmoreland for a few days. They say the lakes will freeze over, so one could get some skating in. He’s very keen on winter sports.’

Gibson was hearty in his approval. ‘Excellent. Just the ticket. Fresh air and a bit of exercise. Do you the world of good.’

‘I told him I didn’t think I’d be able to get away.’

‘You did, did you?’

‘If you drop me here at the bottom, I can walk the rest of the way. Then you can take a right turn there and be back on the main road.’

Gibson pulled the car into the side of the road. ‘Ring up your friend, or send him a telegram saying you’ll join him.’ He raised a gloved hand as Michael opened his mouth to protest. ‘No, that’s an order. Finish what you’ve got to do on Pegasus, and then I don’t want to see you again until January.’

Michael got out of the car, thanked Gibson for the lift, and crunched across pristine snow to the small terraced house where he lodged. The hall had a light burning, but the rest of the house was in darkness. His landlady had left him a note. Supper keeping hot in oven, have gone over to be with Mrs Knight, she’s nervous of the snow.

Mrs Knight was nervous of everything. No doubt she thought a vagrant snowman was going to come tapping on her door, all set for a spot of icy rapine and ravaging. He screwed up the note and threw it into the embers of the fire in the kitchen. He put some more coal on the fire, and took out the plate of food from the oven. Congealed meatloaf and lumpy mashed potato. Hadn’t Freddie said the food at the Pheasant was good?

He ate his supper and sat looking into the flames as he drank a cup of tea. He was tired, he had to admit it. Bone tired, after months of long hours and no breaks. Was fatigue affecting his work? Even the simplest calculations seemed to take longer than they used to. Perhaps Gibson was right, and he needed to get away.

He shut his eyes, his mind drifting away to the frozen north. Sixteen years since he’d been there; sixteen years since he’d nearly died of pneumonia. He had been found wandering in a wood, had caught a severe chill, they told him when he was out of danger, and he came around from the lost days of fever to find all memory of the winter holiday wiped from his mind.

His chin fell to his chest, the landlady’s tabby cat jumped on to his lap, running all her claws into his legs; he stirred, and then slept.

His landlady found him there when she came back hours later. ‘Look at him, sleeping like a baby,’ she said to the cat. ‘I’ll make him a nice cup of cocoa and then wake him up so’s he can take himself off to bed.’ She looked at his face, interesting even in sleep; she liked a proper man, and his sort made you remember what it was like to be young. Pity he spent so much time at his precious work, what chance had he to meet a nice young lady when he worked all the time?

She poured the gooey brew into a cup, and shook him gently by the shoulder. ‘Wake up, Mr Wrexham, it’s bedtime, and I made you a nice cup of cocoa.’

He blinked and shook himself awake. ‘I must have dropped off. Good heavens, is that the time? Oh, thank you, how kind.’ He looked doubtfully into the cup, he loathed cocoa. ‘I’ll take it upstairs with me, if that’s all right.’

Where he took it with him into the bathroom, and tipped it down the basin.

EIGHT
York

Where was Perdita?

There were so many girls in the vast nave of York Minster, rows and rows of grey flannel overcoats, a sea of grey hats, each with its purple band. True, they weren’t identical, they came in many different heights and sizes, but then, at that age, girls shot up so, his sister could be inches taller by now.

Craning his neck in his efforts to scan the congregation, he lost his place in the hymn sheet, earning a scornful look from the tall woman in a sensible felt hat who was sitting in the seat next to him as he came in several ‘Noels’ too late. Lord, these were the same carols he’d sung at his school a thousand years ago, did nothing ever change? The carol ended, an invisible choir sang some incomprehensible verses in mediaeval English, a woman with rigid grey hair and a tight mouth, wearing a Cambridge MA gown, ascended the pulpit and began to read the story of the Annunciation.

The service wound to a close, the jolly-looking bishop in gold and pink raised his crook to give the blessing, the organist crashed into the opening chords of Adeste fideles, and the stately procession of senior and lesser clergy, headmistress, servers and choir made its way down the central aisle.

There was Perdita. One of the choir, wearing a white surplice that looked too short for her, her dark brown hair scraped back from her face in a pair of straggling plaits, her face pale and unrevealing as she sang the soaring final descant. He turned his head to watch the retreating backs of the choir. How quickly could he make a getaway? He stuffed the order of service into the rack at the back of the seat in front of him, beside the hymnal and the prayer book, and began to edge his way past his more devout neighbours who were kneeling or sitting with bowed heads in attitudes of prayer.

Dark-overcoated fathers looked at him with scorn, disapproval of his brown tweed overcoat and corduroy trousers written all over their faces. Their wives screwed up their mouths and made little mutterings of dismay at his unmannerly attempts to escape. Then he was at the end of the row and in the aisle, free to make a dash for the action end of the cathedral before he was completely swamped in the wave of schoolgirls pouring out of the front rows.

Polished brown shoes of every size trod on his feet, hockey-trained muscles shoved him out of the way, firm elbows dug into his sides; what a relief to reach a place of safety in front of the choir screen and tuck himself in beside a huge urn of festive greenery. He had kept an eye on the choir as it disappeared into the far reaches of the north aisle; surely all the girls from the choir would pass this way sooner or later.

They did, looking like chesspieces in their purple cassocks, with white surplices now draped over arms or shoulders.

‘Edwin, oh, good, I am so pleased to see you. I wasn’t sure if anyone was coming for me.’ Perdita gestured to her cassock and surplice. ‘I have to put these in the hamper and get my coat and hat. Will you wait here?’

‘I shan’t budge,’ he said. ‘I never saw so many girls in my life, they’re terrifying.’

She smiled her wide smile at him and bounded away.

A giant grey crocodile was forming in the south aisle, with gowned mistresses running up and down like sheepdogs, lining the girls up in pairs and rounding up stragglers. ‘Come along, girls, we have a train to catch. Fiona, put your hat straight. Mathilda, where are your gloves? Deirdre, how many times do I have to tell you not to stand on one leg?’

‘My stockings make me itch,’ said the unfortunate Deirdre, who had been rubbing her shin violently with the edge of her sensible brown leather shoe.

‘Deirdre! Mentioning underwear in public, whatever are you thinking of?’

His breath was visible in the cold air; it hadn’t seemed so very cold at first, but the chill had struck up through the ancient stones, and now his feet were growing numb. His nose was no doubt pink; the parents and girls milling around him nearly all had glowing noses and cheeks.

However warm the overcoats and furs, nothing could subdue the arctic chill of York Minster on a December day. The weather had been unusually bitter, even for the north of England, but he could never remember a time when he had been in the Minster and not felt cold.

Cold as charity. The words mocked him as he looked down the immense length of the nave to where the great west doors stood open and the congregation streamed out into the pale wintry sunlight. Then Perdita was beside him. ‘I’m glad you came to collect me, it’s a gruesome journey by train. Five hours in a stuffy compartment, or sitting on freezing platforms, and I hate having to change trains here, there and everywhere.’

Another of the iron-grey regiment of teachers – grey as to hair and expression rather than in what she wore – was bearing down on them. ‘Perdita Richardson!’

Perdita hastily unwound her arm from his. ‘This is my brother, Edwin, Miss Hartness.’

Eyes sharp with disbelief raked him from head to toe. ‘He looks very old to be your brother.’

He was amused. ‘I think my grandmother let you know I would be coming.’

‘The headmistress received a telegram from Lady Richardson to that effect, I believe. We don’t usually let our girls leave with their brothers. You girls without parents do make difficulties for the school.’

He turned to Perdita. ‘Do you have any luggage?’

The mistress answered for her. ‘The girls’ trunks and boxes were sent by railway two days ago. Perdita has an overnight case.’

Miss Hartness still looked suspicious; did she think he was a fraudster planning to abduct the girl? He was fond of his sister, but the woman should realize that if he had such intentions, he’d pick a dazzler, not a gawky girl like Perdita.

The woman was still talking. ‘Now, I really do think …’

He was spared her probably unflattering thoughts, since at that moment a bird-like figure, elegantly clad in a scarlet coat with a modish hat perched on her sleek head, darted out of the throng. ‘Edwin, darling, are you here to pick up Perdita? This is my Grace, only a baby, her first term at the Ladies College, isn’t it, darling?’

A diminutive girl with her fair hair tied in two tight plaits looked up at her mother with calm grey eyes. ‘Oh, Mummy, don’t call me a baby.’

Edwin kissed the woman, shook hands with the solemn child, who gave him a cool look and then skipped aside to talk to a friend.

‘Hello, Lucy,’ he said. ‘Is Rollo with you?’

‘He’s gone to see where Watkins has got to, it’s always such a mêlée here after the end of term service.’ She leant up to peck him on the cheek. ‘Lovely to see you, darling, they say the lake may freeze from shore to shore, if so, nothing will stop us coming over after New Year. Give my love to Caroline and Henry, won’t you? Goodbye, Perdita, have a wonderful Christmas, of course you will, Christmas is always heaven at Wyncrag.’

Miss Hartness’s expression lost some of its suspicious edge, although her mouth was still set in a tight line. ‘You know Mrs Lambert, I see.’

‘She’s a cousin.’ He could tell that although the mistress was pleased to have a positive identification for him as the genuine article and not a brotherly impostor, she didn’t altogether approve of the vivacious and elegant Lucy Lambert.

‘Very well, Perdita,’ said Miss Hartness. ‘You may go.’

‘Merry Christmas, Miss Hartness.’

He urged Perdita along, as she called out farewells and seasonal good wishes to friends and teachers. ‘Buck up, old girl. We’ve a long drive back to Westmoreland.’

‘Is it true?’ she asked. ‘Is the lake frozen?’

‘Not yet, but Riggs says the frost will hold, and if it does, the lake should freeze from north to south and east to west.’

‘Freeze over completely? I do hope it does, I long for it, every year, but it never happens. Will I be able to skate across to the island?’

‘Certainly you will, and from one end to the other if it freezes as hard as it did last time.’

‘When was that?’

‘The winter before you were born.’ He took her arm again. ‘It seems a long time ago, and here you are, a young lady.’

‘Just a schoolgirl. Not a young lady, sadly.’

‘Why not a young lady?’ They had reached the west door and were out in the cold air. There was the unmistakable smell of coal fires; the jumble of houses along Stonegate and Petergate each had a column of smoke rising into a cloudless sky.

‘It’s all right for schoolgirls to look like I do. For young ladies, it’s hopeless.’

He caught the note of despair behind her even tones.

‘You look very nice to me, old thing.’

‘You’re my brother, you’re used to me. But anyone else would just think, awkward, overgrown schoolgirl.’

‘Who else?’

‘Oh, everyone,’ said Perdita. She changed the subject. ‘Where have you parked the car?’

‘In St Helen’s Square. Not far. Where’s your overnight case?’

‘Our suitcases are all lined up on the pavement beside the motor coaches, over there. Where shall we lunch?’

‘I thought we’d stop at the Fox and Hounds. They do a decent meal there, and I expect you’re hungry.’

They drove north through Boroughbridge and on to the Great North Road. It was cold inside Edwin’s car, and white puffy clouds began to drift across the sky as the easterly wind strengthened.

‘Plenty of snow on the ground already.’ Perdita was glad of the rug that Edwin had tucked around her. She huffed on her fingers to warm them. ‘Is the road clear?’

‘It was yesterday, and it hasn’t snowed seriously for two or three days.’

‘Did you take any photographs on the way?’

‘A few. The light was very strange in the early afternoon, just before dusk. Very clear, good contrasts.’

They sat at a table in front of a roaring log fire at the inn and ate hearty platefuls of ham and leek pie. They were the only customers apart from a couple of local shepherds, and the landlord, a burly man with bushy eyebrows, had time to chat. ‘Blowing up for a bit of a storm, I reckon. Best not linger if you’ve far to go.’

‘Westmoreland,’ said Perdita, scraping the last spoonful of custard from her pudding plate.

Edwin got up from the table, pulling it out so that Perdita could get past. He settled the bill and they bid the landlord and his customers a cheerful goodbye before going out to face the blast of the wind, now blowing from the north-east. It sent flurries of snow dancing around the yard of the inn as Edwin opened the car door for Perdita. He wiped the settling flakes from the windscreen and the small rear window before getting in and coaxing the car back into life.

After a few miles, the skies lightened, and the snow petered out, leaving paths of smooth, unbroken whiteness among the boulders and rocky places. Where the snow lay sparsely, the tough moorland sheep, fleeces thick with ice and snow, searched for tufts to tear away and chew briskly as they eyed the car driving past on the narrow, winding road. There were few other vehicles. They passed a farm cart, the big shire horse placing his huge hooves with care on the uneven surface, his back protected from snow by an old blanket the carter had thrown over him. The driver sat under a battered felt hat, shoulders hunched against the cold, reins bunched in a mittened hand. He gave them a slow salute as he pulled to one side to let them through. A post van came the other way, acknowledging the presence of other people in this desolate place with a cheery hoot of his horn.

Perdita was stiff and very cold by the time they reached Sedburgh, and thankful when her brother suggested they might stop. ‘We can stretch our legs a bit.’

‘You mean you want to take some photographs,’ she said. She scrambled out of the car and stood stamping her feet as she blew on numb fingers.

‘Just the street here, with the dusk coming on, and lights showing in the windows.’

‘A long exposure job,’ said Perdita, who liked to help her brother with his work. ‘Have you got a tripod in the car?’

‘On the back seat.’

The locals went to and fro about their business with hardly a second glance at him as he set up his apparatus. One or two stopped to greet him, and the vicar halted his striding steps for a few minutes’ chat. ‘You’ll need chains further on,’ he said as he went on his way.

Perdita didn’t ask if Edwin had chains. Born and bred in the north, she took cold winters and blocked passes for granted; any driver who ventured out at this time of year without a set of chains tucked away inside the boot was asking for trouble. Edwin would have a shovel, too, and a powerful torch tucked into a pair of gumboots thrust down behind the driver’s seat.

Perdita craned her neck to catch a view of the sky from the car window. It was clear now, and the first stars were out. The car’s powerful lamps cast long beams on to the freezing surface of the road. As the road climbed again, the snow lay more thickly, and they stopped the car to put on chains. From then on it was a snail’s pace journey, snow giving way to stretches of treacherous ice, other icy patches covered by a concealing cover of windblown snow.

‘Grandmama will be cross,’ said Perdita, peering at her wristwatch. ‘We’ll barely be home by eight o’clock.’

‘Late running service in the Minster, heavy snow on the way,’ Edwin said.

‘And no stopping here and there to take photographs. Don’t worry, I shan’t say anything. She’ll blame me, in any case, if we’re late; she always does. Could we have had a puncture?’

‘I did, on the way to York.’

‘There you are, then.’

‘And dinner on the dot or no dinner, I’m not doing anything until I’ve had a hot bath.’

‘You’ll have not to potter,’ warned Perdita, as they finally turned in through the gates of the drive that wound up to the front of the house. She was never sure whether this was the way she liked the house best, a shadowy, gaunt shape, with its improbable crenellations and towers outlined against a starry sky, lights shining out from a few of the large stone windows. Mostly, they were dark, with heavy curtains within keeping the light in and the cold out. A daytime arrival had its own, different charm, revealing the vast array of arches and the ornate details of carving on door and window surrounds. Sir Henry’s grandfather had built the house to his own design after a lengthy visit to the continent, where the Renaissance palaces and Bavarian castles had impressed him equally.

The front door was opening as they drew up, light spilled out on to the broad stone steps and Rokeby came down with stately tread to help Perdita out of the car.

Perdita greeted the butler with enthusiasm. ‘Hello, Rokeby.’

‘Welcome back, Miss Perdita.’

‘I’ll just take her around to the stables,’ Edwin said. ‘Get someone to come out for the suitcases and things, will you, Rokeby?’

The butler bowed, and escorted Perdita into the hall. A fire was lit at one end in an enormous fireplace, and the wall lamps, huge nineteenth-century mediaeval torches, threw light on to the upper part of the walls, where antlered heads twinkled with tinsel and tiny bells.

‘Aunt Trudie’s been at work,’ said Perdita, looking around her. ‘Cheers those gruesome old heads up a bit, don’t you think?’

‘Miss Trudie has achieved a very festive touch,’ said Rokeby, his lips sealed on the subject of the chaos that eccentric lady had caused while touched by the Christmas spirit. Great branches of firs and prickly bundles of holly had been deposited in the Herb Room, a vast, stone-flagged room off the kitchen where the dogs were fed and any untidy work was done on the worn wooden table that ran down its centre. The gardener and his two assistants had been pressed into service; one of the maids, who had deft fingers, had been summoned from dusting duties to make paper flowers; Eckersley had been sent in the large car to buy all kinds of gaudy delights from the nearest Woolworth’s, and even he, Rokeby, had been instructed to make good use of his unusual height and climb up and down ladders to affix garlands and streamers in various inaccessible places.

‘Everyone has gone up to dress,’ he told Perdita. ‘Your trunk has not yet arrived, I dare say the weather has caused some delays.’

‘Oh, I’ll find something. I’d better get a move on, though, I don’t want Grandmama in a temper on my first night home.’

‘No,’ agreed Rokeby, with feeling. ‘Miss Alix is upstairs, she arrived a little while ago and went straight up.’

Perdita’s face lit up. ‘She’s here?’ She made for the stairs and started up them, two at a time.

NINE
Wyncrag, Westmoreland

Alix stood at the top of the second landing, watching Perdita’s rapid ascent. As she reached the last few steps her sister hesitated, looking upwards, her face uncertain. ‘Alix? Is that you?’

‘Hello, Perdy.’

Perdita came slowly up to the top of the staircase, leaning against the wide polished banister rail as she eyed her sister up and down. ‘You’ve changed. You look quite different.’

Her voice was brusque, but Alix knew that it was shyness. ‘So do you, you’re so tall, Perdy.’ And then she gave a spurt of laughter, ‘Lord, that’s the school tweed suit you’re wearing, gracious, I’d forgotten how awful it was.’

Perdita lost some of her shyness and grinned. ‘Isn’t it? In fact, this was yours. It’s a bit tight on me.’

‘You’ve got a bust, which is more than I had at your age. Do you still have to wear those vile green divided skirts for games?’

Perdita nodded.

‘You’ll have to change for dinner,’ Alix said, suddenly practical. ‘In about five minutes if we aren’t to be late. I don’t suppose Grandmama is any less of a stickler for punctuality than she used to be.’

‘No, she isn’t. Oh, help!’ Perdita flung herself through the door of her room.

Alix followed her in. ‘I’ll give you a hand with hooks, if you like.’

Perdita’s room was large, as were most of the rooms at Wyncrag, and heavily panelled; their great-grandfather must have cut down half a forest to satisfy his love of panelling when he was building the house. Underfoot was a thick carpet. All the bedrooms were carpeted, for which the occupants were thankful during the long, cold winters. Winter curtains, velvet, lined and interlined until they could practically have stood up without support, hung across the big windows. The marble fireplace had a fire lit in its grate, but it hardly took the chill off the room.

Perdita bent down to take her shoes and stockings off, then stretched out her frozen feet towards the fire. ‘The trouble is, one has almost to toast them before they feel warm, especially after being in Edwin’s car.’ She rubbed them for a few moments before padding over to the immense mahogany wardrobe. She flung open the doors and stood gazing at the clothes hanging within, each garment covered with tissue paper shawls and smelling of lavender from the little bags tied to each hanger.

‘Lipp?’ Alix asked. It had to be; lavender and Lipp went together at Wyncrag.

‘Lipp,’ Perdita said, as she dragged a dark blue frock off its hanger, and laid it on the bed, a hefty four-poster with a high mound of a mattress. She struggled out of her suit jacket, blouse, vest and liberty bodice, and took off her half slip and tweedy skirt. Then she rummaged in the top drawer of a chest of drawers and found a brassière.

‘That’s pretty,’ Alix said. It seemed an unlikely item of underwear for Perdita to own; she could make a good guess at just how few pretty things her younger sister was likely to possess.

‘It was a present from Aunt Dorothea, Grandmama doesn’t know about it, although I suppose she will now if Lipp’s been snooping in my drawers. I shall have to hide it.’

‘You couldn’t have taken it to school, of course.’

‘Goodness, no; brassières are banned at school by Matron on grounds of immorality and frivolity.’

She hunted for a pair of stockings, not silk, Alix noticed, but at least not quite such a dreary colour as her depressing brown school ones. A long slip completed her underwear, and then she heaved the dress over her head.

Alix got up and went over to do up the back, as Perdita looked doubtfully at herself in the looking glass inside the wardrobe door.

‘Oh, well,’ was all she said before thrusting herself into a shapeless evening bolero, charcoal coloured, with metallic threads.

They were at the door just as the gong went and Rokeby’s voice boomed up to them with his announcement of dinner.

The dining room at Wyncrag was long, high, and lit only by candlelight. Lady Richardson considered dining under electric lights vulgar. There were two fireplaces, each with a roaring fire. Alix knew those fires of old; if you sat near them you roasted, and your face went red; if you sat further away you froze and your arms developed goose pimples. Her grandfather gestured to her to come and sit beside him. His wholehearted welcome to her earlier on had in itself made the journey worthwhile, she thought, as she gave Aunt Trudie an affectionate smile. He had been so very pleased to see her. Unlike his wife.

Alix had been thinking about her grandmother as she travelled northwards. When the other two passengers left the train at Crewe, wishing her a happy Christmas, she sat alone in the first-class compartment of the Lakeland Express, wondering whether Lady Richardson would show any pleasure in seeing her again.

No, she shouldn’t expect a warm welcome, not from Grandmama. She released the blind at the window beside her seat and looked out at the darkening wintry scene. Snow-clad hills were illuminated by brilliant starlight; she heard the shrill whistle of the locomotive as it took a curve, its wailing sound floating out into the remote whiteness of the landscape. The train sped past a village, a square church tower visible for a moment before the train plunged into the darkness of a deep, rock-sided cutting.

The window blurred with smoke. She pulled the blind down again, and sat back in her wide, well-upholstered seat, reaching up to switch on the light over the empty place next to her. Half past five; nearly two hours to go. She shut her eyes, listening to the steady tuppence-three-farthings rhythm of the train. Her eyes stayed closed, the book on her lap slipped to the floor, and she sank into a dreamy half-awake, half-asleep state, her mind filled with images of hills and snow.

The sound of the compartment door opening roused her, and the cheery, ‘Just coming in, Miss Richardson,’ spoken in the familiar accent of the fells and lakes, told her she was home. ‘It’ll be a few minutes yet,’ he added, as she jumped to her feet. ‘No need to hurry.’

There was every need to hurry. She didn’t want to miss a minute, no, not a second, of the ice-world lying outside. She gathered together her possessions, picked up the book from the floor, paused in front of the mirror to tidy her hair under her hat. As the train pulled into the curve of the platform she stood in the corridor and tugged at the thick leather strap to let down a window. The dark air rushed in at her, arctic cold, but so fresh and clean that she wanted to gulp great mouthfuls of it, to rid her lungs and head of the smoke and fret of London. The gloom and sour, smoky smell of Euston lay in another dimension, surely not inhabiting the same world as this.

Then through the murk of steam she saw a short, stocky, bow-legged figure in gaiters advancing along the dimly lit platform through the little throng of waiting people. Eckersley, in his gaiters, his chauffeur’s hat slightly askew, his weathered face breaking into a smile at the sight of her.

‘Eckersley, oh, it’s been so long!’

‘Too long, Miss Alix, and we’re right glad to have you home. Is that all your luggage with the porter there? I’ve got the motor car just outside. Hand that suitcase to me.’

If only Grandmama’s greeting had been half as friendly. She had dutifully gone up to Lady Richardson’s room soon after her arrival, to be received with perfect, frigid courtesy. And Alix knew, without a word being spoken, that her grandmother wholly disapproved of her elegant new persona and what it said about her life in London.

It was now Perdita’s turn to greet her grandparents, and Alix could see the stiffness in her young body as she clumped in her heavy shoes to Grandmama’s end of the table.

‘Good evening,’ she said, bending her head to receive her grandmother’s chilly kiss.

‘You were extremely late back from Yorkshire, Perdita. I was concerned.’

‘Here we go,’ Edwin said under his breath as he slid into his seat and gave Aunt Trudie a conspiratorial smile. Then he turned and grinned at Alix.

How lovely it was to see him again, his dark hair falling across his forehead as it always had done, his long fingers crumbling his roll, his grey eyes, the mirror of hers, alight with pleasure at the sight of her.

Grandmama’s attention had turned from Perdita to her grandson, and it was clear to anyone who knew her that, although her voice was calm, she was, in fact, very angry with him.

‘I can’t say how distressing, Edwin. In the dark, and the snow, you and Perdita, with no older person there. It’s most inappropriate.’

‘What’s inappropriate about it? We’re brother and sister, not a couple out on a romantic tryst. And I am twenty-four, not some boy scout who’d panic at a bit of snow.’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Good evening, Edwin,’ said Sir Henry, coming to his rescue. ‘Rokeby, stop hovering about and pour Mr Edwin a glass of wine. Edwin, you look cold. I’m afraid the central heating’s not working properly tonight,’ he went on, clearly keen to distract his wife’s attention from the iniquities of her errant grandchildren.

Wyncrag had central heating throughout the house, an extraordinary luxury that scandalized neighbours who used no form of heating except coal fires. Warm passages and bathrooms and bedrooms were considered soft and un-English. However, Sir Henry had travelled, and appreciated the warmth in some of the North American houses he had visited. It came as a welcome novelty to him to step into a hall or a bathroom and not find the temperature dropping by several degrees.

‘Poor quality coal, playing the devil with the furnace,’ he said. When the miles of piping he had had installed in every room and passage carried a stream of hot water as intended, the house was a haven of blissful warmth. But the advanced system battled against a temperamental furnace that produced water that was either too cold, or almost boiling hot. ‘Hardens are delivering more coal tomorrow, and they can take the rest of this load away, I never saw such stuff. Can’t think where it came from; it certainly isn’t fit for household use.’

Soup was served. Trudie, looking particularly vague, began an anecdote about the dogs, the tension eased. Then Lady Richardson noticed for the first time what Perdita was wearing. ‘What have you got on, child? You look like something out of the orphanage.’

‘Sorry, Grandmama,’ said Perdita, concentrating on her plate. ‘It doesn’t seem to fit very well, and I didn’t have time to look for anything else.’ She reached out to flick at a candle that had a guttering flame, and there was a loud ripping sound.

‘Oh, dear, I think the sleeve’s coming off,’ she said, lifting her arm to inspect the damage.

‘Perdita!’

‘I’ve grown rather a lot.’

‘She has,’ Edwin said. ‘I hardly recognised her in the Minster.’

‘My feet have grown, too,’ said Perdita. ‘My school shoes are awfully uncomfortable. I seem to be growing out of everything.’

Lady Richardson was disapproving. ‘I think it’s most unsuitable for you still to be growing at your age. I’d reached my full height by the time I was twelve. Tomorrow, we shall look through your things, Perdita, and decide what can be done about your frocks. Lipp may be able to lengthen them and let them out.’

‘It doesn’t matter much in the holidays, I shall be in jodhs most of the time.’

‘You won’t, however, wear jodhpurs in the evening, nor do I expect to see you in them for meals. I shall see if any of my old dresses could be made over for you, although I fear you’re too tall.’

‘No, Grandmama, really,’ said Alix. ‘That’s too bad. You can’t ask Perdita to wear hand-me-down frocks. She’d look a perfect fright, now she’s fifteen and nearly grown-up.’

‘Fifteen is very far from being grown-up.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Perdita unwisely. ‘Look at Juliet. We’ve been doing Romeo and Juliet this term, and …’

‘I can’t think what your English mistress imagines she’s doing; it’s not a suitable play for girls of your age. Emotion is so bad for girls.’

‘If Perdita’s grown, then of course she must have new frocks,’ said her grandfather. ‘If the freeze continues, a lot of families will be up here for Christmas and into the new year, and that means parties. At least, it always did in my day. Perdita will need a long dress or two.’

‘She’s much too young for that,’ Lady Richardson said.

‘She’s too tall for anything else,’ said Sir Henry, inspecting his granddaughter with a critical eye.

Perdita was used to people talking about her as though she weren’t there, so she tucked into her lamb and green peas and asked Edwin to pass the water. Then she gave Alix a wide smile. ‘Have you got lots of blissful clothes with you? Edwin said you’d got fearfully smart last time he saw you, only I didn’t believe him. It’s ages since you were here, and then it was all tweeds bagging at the back and dull jumpers. I do love the colour of frock you’re wearing, where do you buy heavenly things like that?’

‘I’d offer to let you try all my clothes on, but you’ve grown so, they won’t fit you.’

Perdita sighed. ‘I’m too big all over, you mean. Don’t spare my feelings, I know it.’

‘It’s fortunate that Alix is here,’ said Aunt Trudie, chasing a pea around her plate. ‘She must know all about the latest fashions, and can say just what we should be wearing.’

‘Alix’s clothes would be entirely unsuitable for Perdita.’ Grandmama’s voice was sharp and Alix felt the familiar twinge of alarm come over her. Only, this time, the severe words weren’t directed at her. ‘Don’t put ideas into her head, please, Trudie. London fashions are all very well in their place, but not here.’

Grandmama hasn’t changed, Alix thought, as she waited for the maid to hand the pudding. Not a jot. Then her attention was centred on the plate placed in front of her. Chocolate pudding, wonderful Cook, serving her favourite on the first night she was back.

It was clear that Perdita liked chocolate pudding, too, but there was no need for Grandmama to be so quick with a sharp comment. ‘Not so much, Perdita, please. Chocolate is too rich for you.’

Perdita swiftly took another spoonful. Kind Aunt Trudie distracted Grandmama with a query about flowers, and she was left to consume her pudding in peace.

When she was a girl, Grandmama must have enjoyed things like chocolate, Alix mused as she savoured her pudding. She couldn’t always have been such a puritan. Family portraits hung on the walls of the dining room, and Grandmama was seated beneath a painting of herself when she was a girl, a vital beauty in a pink silk with a bustle, her hair artlessly up, her dress cut low over her white bosom, a fan in her hand. It had been painted by a French artist, and had, Grandpapa had told her, caused a scandal when it was first hung in the Academy summer exhibition.

‘It wasn’t considered at all a suitable picture of the daughter of a Master of a Cambridge college. It was a true likeness, though, that’s just how she looked the night I met her. At a ball.’

It was strange that Grandmama had never taken down that portrait of herself. No one now would recognise the hawklike woman sitting beneath it as being the girl in the painting. Life had emptied her of joy. She’d had tremendous charm, an ancient family friend had once told Alix, memory gleaming in his eyes. ‘When she was a young married woman, she had so much charm she only had to smile at a man to bring him to her side.’

Alix had never been aware of any charm. Her eyes strayed to the picture hanging on the wall at the other end of the table, a three-quarters portrait of a young man in the uniform of an army officer: Jack Richardson, killed in action in 1917. ‘You have his chin, Perdy,’ she said, nodding her head at the painting.

The silence at the table was absolute. What on earth was there in that remark to make Grandmama look like that? Was she still grieving for her youngest son, after nearly twenty years? They all knew he’d been her favourite; perhaps she would never get over it.

Later, when Perdita had gone yawning to bed, Alix and Edwin found themselves alone at last. Grandpapa was in his study, Grandmama had gone to her room, Aunt Trudie was taking the dogs out for a last run. By unspoken agreement, they headed for the billiard room. It was an old haunt of theirs, not least because it was a difficult room for eavesdroppers, being next to the study and only having one door. It was felt to be off-limits to Lipp’s snooping, although, as Edwin observed, one could be sure of nothing where she was concerned.

Alix had spent enough time in the world to know that Lipp wouldn’t be tolerated in any normal household. ‘Other people don’t let themselves be bullied by their servants,’ she told Edwin as he chalked a cue for her.

‘Other people wouldn’t employ Lipp as a maid. What a monster she’s become.’

‘Grandmama’s eyes and ears and feet.’

It was peaceful in the billiard room with its deep, leather-covered armchairs and sofas, the prints and maps on the panelled walls, the soft carpet underfoot, the subdued lighting, and the green baize surface with the red and white balls gleaming beneath the lamp suspended above the table.

Their voices were low to match their quiet surroundings. Outside the curtained windows, in a white world lit only by the sliver of a crescent moon and the chilly sparkle of winter stars, the silence was absolute; within there was only the crackling of the fire and the click of cue against ball.

‘Grandmama hates Perdy,’ Alix said at last. ‘You never told me.’

‘When you’re here most of the time, as I am, you don’t notice it. Though I was a bit taken aback by the way she treated Perdy this evening, I will admit.’

‘She’s much worse than she was with me, and that was bad enough. We have to do something. It can’t be good for Perdy to be the focus of so much dislike, she’ll grow up warped if it goes on.’

‘Perdy’s tougher than you think, or at least she seems to be. I suppose she’s developed a kind of carapace; well, you’d have to, wouldn’t you? Thank God for boarding schools, that’s all.’

‘And to think that one would live to say that!’ Edwin took up a cue and leant over the green surface of the table.

‘What is it about Jack and Grandmama?’ Alix said. Returning after an absence of three years, three years that had taken her to independence and a sense of the strength of her own judgement, she was struck by how complex a woman her grandmother was. She was also struck by the ability Grandmama had to quell and diminish each member of her family. Each living member, that was. ‘There’s some mystery there; it’s more than just years of grief.’

‘I think it’s much, much better not to open that particular can of worms, Lexy.’

‘But don’t you long to know?’

‘Why she was attached to Jack above all her other children? Not really. He was her Benjamin, and for some reason he touched her heart in a way none of the others did. Then, also, he died young, too young to be a disappointment to her, one supposes. No unsatisfactory bride brought home, no making his own way, no setting up a family of his own to take his affection away from his mother. From all I’ve ever heard, he was a wilful man, unpleasant even, judging by how disinclined the locals are to speak of him – those that remember him, that is. You must have noticed that Aunt Trudie never mentions him, and you just try talking about him to Rokeby and watch him clam up.’

‘So he remains our mysterious Uncle Jack,’ said Alix, giving a violent yawn and laying down her cue. ‘Lord, how tired I am. Off to bed, I think; I’ll leave you to turn the lights out.’ She gave her brother an affectionate kiss on his lean cheek.

‘Sleep tight, Lexy. And welcome home.’

TEN
The Great North Road

By arriving early at his office, and working without a break for lunch, Michael wrapped up the last details of the Pegasus designs by mid-afternoon. He wished a Merry Christmas to his colleagues and to Giles Gibson, cycled back to his digs in time to collect his gear and suitcase and caught the four thirty-five train to Waterloo. He took a taxi from the station to Freddie’s flat off Marylebone High Street.

‘Just in time for dinner,’ announced his friend, stacking his cases beside his own suitcases which were already packed and waiting, together with a pile of books, in his small hallway. ‘I thought of getting tickets for a show, but I didn’t, just in case some demanding calculations made you miss your train.’

‘Waste of money buying a seat for me, the way I feel,’ Michael said, smothering a yawn. ‘I’d sleep through any performance. Where shall we dine?’

They walked to Soho, and enjoyed a leisurely Italian meal at Bertorelli’s. ‘Up early tomorrow, old thing,’ Freddie said when they got back to his flat. ‘Long drive ahead of us, and I don’t suppose the roads will be any too good when we get further north.’

So Michael was ruthlessly woken from a deep sleep at seven the next morning and sat down to a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs cooked by Freddie’s man, who came in on a daily basis.

‘Do stop looking at your watch,’ Michael complained, as Freddie checked the time yet again and refused to let him start on another piece of toast.

‘We’ve got to get on, no point in spoiling the run by getting held up this end in the rush hour.’

Freddie was a car fiend, and his big touring Bentley was his pride and joy. Since he loathed driving in a closed car, they had the roof down, and, togged up in leather jackets and helmets, with scarves around their necks, gauntlets on their hands and stout goggles over their eyes, they drove through the heavy London traffic, heading for Potter’s Bar and the Great North Road.

Despite the layers of protective clothing, they were chilled enough to be glad of a stop for coffee at Baldock. Michael had the big Thermos refilled and they were soon back in the car and on their way to Grantham.

‘I dislike Lincolnshire,’ said Freddie. ‘I never drive through this landscape without wanting to be among the northern crags.’

‘I don’t much like the Fens myself,’ he agreed. ‘Never mind, we’ll soon be in sight of hills, and tomorrow we’ll be on the ice, or at least out tobogganing.’

‘It’s sixteen years since the lake froze completely, they say. I can’t wait to see what it’s like, and to be out there on my skates. I go to the rink in London, but there’s nothing to touch skating out of doors.’

‘I was there sixteen years ago.’

‘What, in Westmoreland? That winter, when it last froze?’

‘That winter.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Twelve. It wasn’t much of a holiday for any of us, for I caught a chill and got pneumonia. We never went back to the lakes after that. My mother didn’t fancy going north again.’

‘So it’s sixteen years since you’ve been there. No wonder you didn’t sound too keen when I rang and put the plan to you. Understandable, if you had a bad time there when you were a boy.’

‘If I didn’t jump at your offer straight away, it was because of worries about leaving my work, that’s all. I’m glad my chief almost threw me out; I intend to spend all the hours of daylight on the ice or on the snow. I’ve been caged up in the office for too long, and I need to get fit.’

The last miles of the journey were slow and tedious, with an icy surface on the dark country roads and the great headlamps lighting up the icy filigree of the roadside hedges, making eerie patterns out of branches and tree trunks. They were more than glad to reach the inn, where a solicitous Mrs Dixon showed them to low-beamed bedrooms with creaking wooden floors and panelled walls hung with faded prints and framed maps and assorted copper items. Fires flickered in the grates, and downstairs, while they waited for dinner to be served, a huge log fire burned in the wide, centuries-old stone fireplace.

The inn was full, and all the conversation was about the lake. ‘Holding splendidly,’ said a middle-aged man with a bushy moustache. ‘Brought your skates, have you?’

‘We certainly have,’ replied Freddie. ‘Out on the ice first thing, just the ticket, isn’t it, Michael?’

Michael was more than half asleep in the warmth of the fire, but he nodded in agreement.

‘Didn’t I read that they had bonfires on the ice last time it froze?’ Freddie said.

‘No good asking me,’ he said with a yawn. ‘I don’t remember much about that winter.’

‘They did indeed,’ the innkeeper said, coming in to summon his guests to dinner. ‘Braziers to roast chestnuts on and warm your hands, and a huge bonfire as well. There were some who skated holding great flaming torches, oh, that was a sight to see.’

‘Sounds rather like the Inquisition on Ice,’ murmured Freddie, as they went in to their soup.

They found themselves sitting at the same table as the man with the moustache, and two young women. He was a solicitor from Manchester, he told them. The young women smiled, and said they were teachers, PT teachers. One of them ventured that she loved winter sports, didn’t he agree the frozen lake was topping?

Nice, ordinary people, thought Michael, as he drank his soup and let his gaze drift around the small dining room. A family sat at the next table, father, mother and two dark-haired sons of about fourteen and sixteen. A fair younger sister was busily making bread pellets and dropping them into her soup, despite her mother’s protestations. An older man, tall and thin, sat at a small table by himself, a monocle in one eye, a book laid beside his plate. Peaceful people, enjoying a respite from work and duties, like himself.

Ordinary people who might soon be plunged into the furnace of war, if what Giles Gibson said were true. Michael wondered if the prospect of war was the cause of the slight feeling of unease that he couldn’t otherwise explain. More likely it was simple weariness after a long, cold drive.

‘They say there’s a glamorous American woman who’s taken a house here over Christmas and the new year,’ announced the young woman next to him. ‘Practically no one’s seen her, but the woman at the Post Office is sure she’s a film star.’

The solicitor laughed. ‘To people in an out of the way place like this, any visiting American is immediately assumed to be a film star. What would a film star be doing here, I’d like to know?’

‘Skating?’

‘Plenty of winter sports in America, my dear. No need to cross the Atlantic for ice and snow. We get excited about it, because we don’t often see weather as cold and frosty as this, but Americans would make nothing of it, take my word for it.’

She looked disappointed. ‘I hope she is someone famous, I’d like to get her autograph if she is.’

‘If she’s famous and over here, I expect she’s travelling incognito, and wouldn’t thank you for asking her for an autograph,’ Freddie said. ‘We’ll see her on the ice in dark glasses and with a scarf covering her hair and face, and shapeless clothes so that we shan’t recognise her legs. All glamorous film stars have lovely legs, you know.’

The young women both giggled at that. ‘She’s got a companion with her, so the woman at the Post Office told me. Her husband, I suppose, but you never know with film people, do you?’

The woman at the next table cast a frowning glance towards them, her mouth pursed up in disapproval. Her sons were listening avidly to the discussion about the American visitor, and she gave them a quelling look before starting up a very dull conversation of her own about whether the scarf she had bought for Uncle Bobbie would prove to be warm enough for such bitter weather as they were having.

After dinner, the solicitor bore Freddie away to the tap for a game of shove ha’penny. ‘I haven’t played for years,’ Freddie said.

‘Good, then I’ll beat you. Better than taking on the locals, they have a way with the ha’pennies.’

Michael wandered into the room that served as bar and sitting room, pipe in hand, and ordered a brandy. ‘And something for yourself,’ he added to the landlord.

He sat down in a settle by the fire, and the landlord joined him in a minute or two, a pewter mug of bitter ale in his hand. They sat in companionable silence while Michael lit his pipe, and then the landlord spoke. ‘We’re fair glad you and Dr Kerr were able to come, Mr Wrexham. We were in a way to being perplexed about those empty rooms. No trouble filling them, you’ll say, in weather such as we’re having, but we’d turned away two visitors, and it’ud look bad if you hadn’t come, and we’d got the rooms spare after all, for they were insistent they’d have the rooms if they weren’t taken, and I’d not be wanting them under my roof.’

‘Why, what was wrong with them?’ Michael asked idly, watching the smoke from the fire curling up the chimney.

‘If you’d seen them …’ The landlord pursed his lips, shook his head. ‘The moment they came in here, looking for me, I thought, aye, now, here’s summat to think about, and if these two men don’t mean trouble, my name’s not Robert Dixon. Very short hair one of them had. Nothing wrong with short hair, but there’s no need to look like you might have taken your own razor to your scalp. Bristly, I’d call it. That was the bigger of the two men. Although it was the other that did the talking. He had short hair, too, but more gentlemanlike, if you take my meaning. And a smooth way of talking. I fancied, just for a moment, that I’d seen him somewhere before, but the wife says no, that was just my imagining.’

He paused to take a good draught of his beer, and Michael sipped his brandy, more than half-asleep now.

‘The long and the short of it was, I said right out, polite, mind you, but definite, as how we were full up and likely to be so right to t’other side of the new year.’

Michael stirred himself, feeling that he was expected to express a proper interest. ‘So what didn’t you like about them, Mr Dixon?’

‘I’ll tell you what I didn’t like, and then you tell me if you think I did wrong. They weren’t wearing those uniforms that have been banned, but I reckon they might as well have been.’

‘Uniforms?’

‘Black shirts is what I’m talking about; they looked as though for two pennies they’d be dressed up in that uniform those Mosleyites like to wear.’

‘Good Lord,’ Michael said, waking up properly. ‘You mean you think they were British Fascists?’

‘I do that,’ the landlord said, pleased with Michael’s reaction. ‘I’ve seen some of those folk, in Manchester, and they’ve got a look to them I don’t care for. Now, you tell me this, Mr Wrexham, in my place, what would you have done?’

‘Oh, I don’t think I’d care to have a pair of fascists in black shirts under my roof, if that’s what they were, and I dare say you’re right. What on earth are they doing up here? It’s a bit off their usual haunts, I should think.’

‘They said they were up here for sport. Skating and that, the same as my other guests. “Toughening ourselves up,” one said. “And a spot of business,” said the other. Well, they didn’t look like men who needed any further toughening, and that’s a fact, and I shouldn’t care to think about what their business might be.’

‘So you turned them away?’

‘I did that. Which is why, as I said, I was that pleased when Dr Kerr telephoned us again, saying he’d take the rooms for himself and for you.’

‘I wonder where they went.’

‘Now that I can tell you. They’ve got rooms at Mrs McKechnie’s up at the top of the town. She’s not so fussy, she’d let to Old Nick himself if he could pay. Being a Scot, you understand.’

‘Well, well,’ Michael said. ‘Let’s just hope they don’t get up to any of their tricks up here.’

‘You can trust young Jimmy Ogilvy for that. He’s our policeman, and a right big fellow he is, too. I was thinking I’d step over to his house tomorrow and tell him about those two, he might like to let his superiors know what’s what. Just in case.’

ELEVEN
London, Pimlico

Mrs Sacker knew at once that the man was a policeman. She also knew, before he showed her his card, that he wasn’t from the local police station nor from the CID. Even the most respectable London landlady came into contact with the police; if not questions about her tenants, then there were routine enquiries about residents, temporary and permanent, in neighbouring houses and streets. Landladies are often at home. They watch. They sum people up quickly – and shrewdly, if they want the rent to be paid regularly.

‘Two guineas a week my gentlemen pay,’ she told the dark-overcoated man as she let him in through the front door. No point in keeping him on the doorstep for watchful eyes to take gleeful note. One of your lodgers in trouble, is he, Mrs Sacker?

The man removed his hat and followed her down the stairs to the big, high-ceilinged kitchen. There was welcome warmth and a seat close by the range, and the offer of a cup of tea.

‘Only gentlemen?’ he enquired.

Her mouth pursed. ‘Only gentlemen. Women, however respectable, are a trouble. I mean, you expect gentlemen to be in rooms, but a lady? No, if she’s a lady, she’s at home. With her parents if she isn’t married, or living with a sister or an aunt. I don’t hold with women going out to work, I never have.’

‘Many women have to earn a living, Mrs Sacker, the same as the rest of us.’

‘Taking the bread out of men’s mouths. It’s one thing for a widow like myself to let out rooms, and look after a few gentlemen, that’s women’s work and entirely right. Hoity-toitying into an office and being paid proper wages like a man is quite another matter.’

‘I expect you’re careful about who you take on. Have to be in your line of business, and with a high reputation to keep up. I dare say your rooms aren’t ever empty for long.’

Mrs Sacker wasn’t deceived. He was trying to flatter her into helpfulness. Well, she was as ready to help the police in their proper business as anyone else, but catching criminals was their proper business, not creeping around asking questions about her tenants who were most certainly not criminals.

‘My gentlemen tend to stay. They’re well looked after and why should they move on?’

‘So how long has Mr Roberts been with you?’

Aha, Mr Jago was his target, was he? There was one person they wouldn’t get any information on, and for why? Because he was a gentleman who kept himself to himself.

‘Very respectable, Mr Roberts is,’ she said. ‘More than a year he’s been here now. He’s one that’s been brought up properly, you can always tell a gentleman who’s had a nanny and been to the right kind of schools. Everything in its place, that’s Mr Roberts.’

‘Doesn’t the army teach a man neatness in his ways?’ the policeman asked mildly.

‘It does and it doesn’t. Once they’ve been in the army, they’ll be careful, most of them, about keeping their clothes in good order, they like their shoes polished, put on clean collars, that kind of thing. But someone like Mr Roberts, you can tell he was at a public school. Take his hairbrushes. He’s got a pair of them, laid out on the dressing table just so. With his initials, JR, on the back, and a number below. Not an army number, only two figures, 44. That’s a school number. They all have a number at those kind of schools. In nails on the soles of their shoes and printed on the name tapes. Although you’d know it as soon as you spoke to him, he speaks like the gentleman he is, and he has lovely manners, doesn’t have to think about them, he’s been taught those manners since he could sit up. Course he has.’

‘So he’s English?’

‘Yes, he’s English.’ Her voice was indignant. ‘As English as you and me sitting here now.’

David Pritchard was Welsh on both sides, but he knew better than to intrude any jot of his personality on the conversation. ‘I had heard, from one or two people I’ve spoken to, who know him, that his English doesn’t always sound up-to-date. That he uses some old-fashioned expressions.’

Mrs Sacker smiled. If that was all they had to go on … ‘It’s his way. It’s what they call an affectation. “Hand in hand with a statelier past,” he says to me. There’s some of the old ways he prefers, and why not?’

‘Not a foreigner then. Not French, nothing like that?’

‘French! I wouldn’t have a Frenchman in my house.’

‘You have had visitors from abroad. A Dutchman used to stay here, our records show. And a Mr Schiller, from Vienna. And one or two Irishmen.’

That was Special Branch for you, suspecting every foreigner of being a danger, and letting these communists get away with murder under their very noses. Only, if it was Irishmen they were after, then Mr Roberts had nothing to worry about.

Inspector Pritchard saw the look of relief in her face. He said nothing, but took another drink of his tea.

‘You’ve no business calling the Irish foreigners,’ Mrs Sacker said. ‘They speak the same language as we do, it’s not right to say they’re the same as Italians or Frenchies. And Mr van Hoek, he might have been English the way he spoke the language. He was in the cheese trade, over here to study our methods, he told me. I’m quite partial to a piece of Dutch cheese, myself, I like a cheese that always tastes the same.’

Inspector Pritchard nodded in agreement, although he would as soon eat a piece of India rubber as Edam. ‘I take it you’re sure Mr Roberts didn’t come from Ireland.’

‘Quite sure, and just to show you he’s English, I’ve seen his passport, which he keeps in the top drawer in his room.’

‘He’s away at the moment, isn’t he?’

‘He is, visiting friends for Christmas, as are millions of other perfectly respectable English people.’

‘Might I have a look at this drawer? See if this passport’s there?’

‘You might not. Not without you’ve got a warrant. But I can set your mind at rest, it’s there all right, for I took up a pile of his laundry only this morning and put his handkerchiefs away in that very drawer, and his passport is there. So he hasn’t done a flit.’

‘Now, why should you think for a moment that we’d suspect him of leaving the country?’

She got up from the table and went to the range to move the large kettle an inch or so to one side. Her bearing was rigid, an effect enhanced by the straight grey dress she wore unfashionably long. Inspector Pritchard guessed that her corsets were inflexible and firmly fastened, although he didn’t know why she bothered, bony types like her hardly needed to cage themselves in whalebone since they came ready stiffened.

‘If you don’t, why do you want to know if he’s got his passport with him?’

‘Do you have Mr Roberts’s current address?’

‘I do not.’

‘You won’t be forwarding any mail to him?’

‘I shan’t.’ Her mouth snapped shut on the words.

Was that because she was keeping his post for him, or because he received no letters? ‘We have information leading us to believe that Mr Roberts is involved with the fascist movement.’

‘It’s no crime to be a fascist, not that I ever heard.’

‘A man’s politics are his own business, I agree with that, but when politics spill over into violence, then it becomes a police affair.’

‘Violence? Mr Roberts? Get along with you. I’d know if he’d been up to any violence, and he never has, and that’s the truth.’

‘I’m not accusing Mr Roberts of any violent act, but the movement he belongs to is happy to use any means, including violence, to achieve its ends.’

‘So you say. I don’t see your lot stepping in to stop the Reds getting up to mischief. And it’s people like you going on about Spain and Hitler that stir up trouble. A citizen of any country that’s keen to keep those Bolsheviks at bay deserves our support.’

Inspector Pritchard got up. ‘You can’t even help us by telling me whereabouts he’s gone visiting? Would it be to the country or to another town?’

‘He’s gone to the south coast, I believe,’ she said, her refined accents now firmly back in place. ‘I’ll show you out.’

His superior listened to the account of Inspector Pritchard’s visit. ‘It bears out what we’ve heard about Mrs Sacker’s sympathies. Do we have anything on her?’

‘Only that her late husband’s name was Säckler, not Sacker, and that he was a naturalised Austrian.’

‘Ah. Do you think Roberts bears further investigation?’

‘I think we should still keep an eye on him.’

‘Difficult, if we don’t know where he’s gone. Do you believe he’s at the south coast?’

‘Not for a moment. Not unless they’ve had a heavy snowfall in Hastings that I haven’t heard about. I saw a tin of wax in her kitchen, and it’s the same kind my youngest son uses on his skating boots when he goes off on these winter sports trips of his. Now, sir, where can you skate without leaving the country? Barring ice rinks, which I don’t feel is where he’s spending his holiday.’

‘This winter, almost anywhere in the north where there are lakes.’

‘Exactly. It could be Scotland, it could be this side of the border. Only I did happen to see a postcard with a picture of Helvellyn sitting above Mrs Sacker’s fireplace. It might be from him, it might not. But he’s up north somewhere, I feel sure of it.’

‘He couldn’t have gone abroad, could he? He may have two passports.’

Inspector Pritchard shook his head. ‘No, I reckon he’s keeping his nose clean. I’d expect all his papers to be in perfect order, without any funny business. We’re dealing with a real professional here, no question about it.’

‘I’ll leave it in your hands, then. Keep me informed.’

Westmoreland

TWELVE

‘Well!’ said Lady Richardson, as Perdita hurtled into the dining room. ‘Is there a fire?’

‘Sorry, Grandmama,’ Perdita said as she eyed the sideboard. ‘I’m hungry, and I didn’t want to be late.’

Lady Richardson looked at her over a silver teapot. ‘You are late. I don’t know why, since you can’t have taken long to dress. You’re in breeches, I see.’

‘I’m going to the stables as soon as I’ve had breakfast.’

‘They seem very generously cut.’

Perdita pulled at the waistband. It was held in by a canvas belt, a necessary addition as the breeches were clearly several inches too large for her. ‘They’re Aunt Trudie’s. I can’t get into any of my jodhs. They’re all too small. These are long enough, only a bit big around the middle.’

Alix came into the room, kissed both her grandparents and joined Perdita at the sideboard. ‘Good heavens, Perdy, what are you wearing? You look a perfect scarecrow.’

‘Oh, thanks,’ Perdita said, going bright red.

Alix could have bitten her tongue off, as she remembered suddenly what it was like to be fifteen, when any adverse remark seemed like a monstrous criticism.

‘I didn’t put that very well. The breeches look as if they belonged on a scarecrow. You don’t look like a scarecrow.’

The damage was done. Perdita kept her head down as she dug a big silver ladle into the dish of porridge.

‘They are Trudie’s,’ Grandmama said. ‘Apparently the girl no longer fits into her jodhpurs.’

Grandpapa looked up from The Times. ‘It seems to me that Perdita needs more than the new frock or two we were talking about. Where does Trudie get her riding clothes?’

‘She has them made. Harold Simpkins, I think,’ Alix said, when Grandmama made no reply.

‘Very well. Get him to come and measure Perdita for whatever she needs. Can’t have her careering about the country in breeches that are far too big for her. People will talk.’

That was an old saying of Grandpapa’s, amusing because he had never given a damn what anyone thought about him or his family. Grandmama, now, she did mind about people talking. Not that she cared a fig for their opinion, but because to draw attention to yourself in any way was ill-bred, a failure of manners.

‘Lots of people get breeches from Partridges,’ Perdita said, glancing up from her porridge. ‘I could, too. It’d be quicker.’

‘Ready-made?’ said Grandmama. ‘I hardly think so.’

‘They mightn’t fit so well,’ said Alix. ‘They need to be comfortable for riding.’

‘I know that. I just don’t want anybody to make a fuss about it, that’s all.’

‘We’ve already established that your wardrobe needs an overhaul,’ Grandpapa said. ‘Go somewhere smart and get whatever you want. Tell them to send the bills to me.’

‘Perdita, go shopping for herself? It’s out of the question.’

‘I’m not suggesting she goes on her own. Alix can go with her.’

Grandmama’s face was a mask, her mouth inflexible. ‘Alix has no idea what is suitable.’

Alix bit back a rejoinder and kept her voice indifferent. ‘If we’re talking about buying off the peg, I don’t suppose it will be a matter of what’s suitable, more a matter of what one can find that’s the right length, Perdita’s so tall now. Lucky girl,’ she added, wanting to make amends for the unfortunate scarecrow remark. ‘There are so many clothes that look better if you’re tall.’

‘Just so,’ said her grandfather. ‘I expect it’ll mean a fair bit of traipsing around from one shop to another. Manchester’s the place to go, you won’t find anything suitable nearer than that. You won’t want to go to Manchester, Caroline, not at this time of year.’

He had her there. Grandmama hated crowds, and a busy city thronged with Christmas shoppers was her idea of hell. Alix turned her back on the table, and stalked along the sideboard, lifting the covers on the usual delicious Wyncrag breakfast. What a fuss about a schoolgirl growing out of her clothes. She piled her plate with bacon, eggs, sausages, tomatoes and mushrooms. She hadn’t, she realized, felt hungry like this for a very long time.

‘Surely a rather large helping,’ commented her grandmother as Alix sat down at the table and shook out a napkin.

‘Tea or coffee, Miss Alix?’ asked the maid, standing beside her with a heavy silver pot in each hand.

‘Coffee please, Phoebe, and lots of cream, if Perdita’s left any.’

Perdita finished pouring cream on to her porridge and licked the drop from the lip with her finger before passing it to Alix. ‘I’ll have it back when you’ve finished with it.’

‘You’ve had quite enough cream, Perdita,’ her grandmother said at once. ‘It’s bad for your complexion.’

‘Not that I’ve got any complexion to speak of,’ said Perdita. ‘Didn’t our mother used to be terribly sleek and smart? Nanny told me once that she looked like a picture in Vogue.’

‘Helena was a most elegant woman,’ Grandpapa said from behind his paper. ‘She paid for good dressing, and Neville loved to see her looking her best. “Buy yourself something pretty,” he would say, and so she did. Clothes, and jewels, too. He bought her some very good pieces, and it was a pleasure to see her wearing them.’

‘Helena was a married woman,’ Grandmama said coldly. ‘And an American.’

Married, good; American, bad, Alix said to herself.

‘Please pass the marmalade, Alix, and Perdita, do you really want toast as well?’

‘Yes,’ said Perdita, spreading a slice with a thick layer of butter. ‘I’ve got to keep up my strength for being out in the snow. Otherwise I might expire from frostbite and exposure, and be found a pale and interesting corpse in the ice.’

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.’

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

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.

It felt odd, to be in these familiar surroundings but sitting in the back of a car behind straight grey-uniformed shoulders, instead of sitting beside Jerry Wilbur, or even pushing him over to take the wheel himself.

He leant forward. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Parsons, sir.’

It seemed unlikely, but Hal let it pass. ‘Where’s Wilbur?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘You do know who Wilbur is.’

Or was, had something happened to him and no one had bothered to say? Nanny would have written to him about it, she wrote him regular if indecipherable missives in a spidery hand. Recent letters, now he came to think of it, had mentioned Changes at the Hall. These Changes, he gathered, were not for the better, at least not according to Nanny. Since she was pure conservative from the starch on her cap to the tips of her sensible shoes, he hadn’t taken much notice of her grumbles. Peter’s new wife would be bound to make changes, new wives always did. He had had plenty of experience of new wives in America, where his friends of both sexes dipped in and out of marriages with astonishing ease.

‘I heard of Wilbur, yes. He drove cars before me.’

So Wilbur had left. Hal felt a moment of dismay; how many others of his friends would still be there? It hadn’t occurred to him, but fifteen odd years was a long time to expect everything to be the same. He had changed out of all recognition, so he couldn’t seriously think that at Grindley Hall everything would be just as it was. How childish, and how childish was his disappointment at not being greeted by Wilbur.

‘Where are you from?’ he asked the chauffeur.

‘Spain. I am from Spain.’

Best not to enquire further. The fellow might be a republican or a follower of General Franco, and Hal had no wish to pry or offend. Strange that he hadn’t opted to stay and fight for whichever side he favoured.

‘I have no sides in Spain,’ the man said, as though he had read Hal’s thoughts. ‘I have family, uncles, brothers fighting on both sides, this one hates priests, that one is all for Franco. So I leave. Is better, then at least my mother has one son left alive to bury her when she grows old and dies, one son who is not crazy in his head and fighting for crazy men.’

‘So now you work at Grindley Hall.’

The man gave an expressive shrug. One is lucky to have any work.’ He was silent for a moment and then burst out in an unexpected and infectious guffaw. ‘I feel at home. In Spain, my family fight each other. Here, in cold England, I find also that families fight each other.’

Hal didn’t want to know. He sat back in his seat, looking out into the dusk, and the Spaniard, probably regretting his outburst, stayed silent as he drove expertly along the wintry roads. It was a half-hour journey from the station, but it only seemed minutes before they were driving through the sweep gate to the Hall, the stone Grindley griffins perched on either side atop the gateposts. Hal had once suggested that a pair of lavatory seats would be a better emblem for the family; they hadn’t found this amusing. Grindleys as a whole resented any humour directed at the source of their wealth.

The drive was neater than he remembered, the gravel swept clear of snow and crunching loudly under the wide tyres. Hal looked up at the familiar façade of the house where he had been born, not sure if he felt pleasure or misery at seeing it again. The huge front door swung open as the car drew up, and a maid in formal black dress and starched pinny and cap came out to stand at the top of the steps.

Hal didn’t recognise her either, nor the smart uniform. Hall maids in his day were a comfortable lot, duly clad in morning or afternoon uniform, but never looking as pressed and trim as this young lady. She looked straight through Hal and told the driver to take the car around to the back and unload the gentleman’s luggage straight away.

‘Mrs Grindley is upstairs resting before dinner,’ she told Hal as she followed him into the black-and-white chequered hall. ‘Mr Grindley will be home at half past six. Tea has been served in the drawing room, Mr and Mrs Roger Grindley are there, they have just arrived. It is this way.’

‘Thank you, I know where it is,’ Hal said. He crossed the hall and opened the fine white panelled door into the drawing room. He stopped inside the doorway, looking around in surprise. There had been something different about the hall, although he hadn’t been able to put his finger on it. Now it came to him, where were all the stuffed animals?

The drawing room ran from the front to the back of one side of the house, a long, wide room with windows leading on to a terrace. Gone were the heavy damasks, the patterned carpet, the heavy armchairs and sofas; gone most noticeably were the stuffed bear with a tray in its paws, several noble stags’ heads, the pair of stoats glaring at each other from two branches, a bewildered owl, and the fox with his head turned as though politely surprised to find the hounds upon him.

The parquet floor gleamed at his feet. Fine Persian rugs were placed here and there. Two deep sofas with plain dark pink covers faced each other across the fireplace, other chairs were in lighter shades of raspberry and looked thoroughly uncomfortable.

‘Good God,’ he said before he could stop himself. ‘Interior design comes to Grindley Hall? I don’t believe it.’

His remark was greeted by a peal of laughter and he looked over to the sofa, where a tall, fair woman, still laughing, was standing up and holding out her hands. ‘Hal, my dear! How distinguished you look, I don’t think I would have recognised you.’

‘Angela,’ he said, kissing her warmly on both cheeks. He was shocked to see the lines around her eyes. How old was she? Late forties, must be, but it wasn’t merely years that had added a strained look to eyes and mouth. If he were any judge, that was tension, not age. Well, being married to Roger would hardly be a bed of roses.

‘Good to see you, Hal,’ said his brother.

Roger hadn’t changed, Hal thought as they shook hands. He was heavier, but had the height to carry it off, so didn’t yet look portly. The main difference was in his air of success and prosperity; that was what advancement in the law had done for him. He dimly remembered a line in one of Nanny’s letters.

‘Aren’t you a KC now, Roger?’

Roger nodded, a satisfied look on his wide, handsome face. ‘I took silk more than five years ago. I thought Peter would have told you.’

‘I travel about so much,’ said Hal apologetically. He should have written, of course he should, only he never did write to his brothers. And of course becoming a KC was a great step for a lawyer, but it had seemed of no great importance in his theatrical world far across the Atlantic.

A much younger woman than Angela, but with the same fair complexion, had been standing by the window.

‘You can’t be Cecy!’

‘I am. Hello, Uncle Hal.’

‘Good heavens, Cecy. You were all legs and pigtails last time I saw you.’

There was a silence. Angela broke it with a polite enquiry about his voyage – what a time of year to brave the Bay of Biscay – had it been very rough – had he been staying in London, Peter had said his ship was due two days ago – had anyone shown him to his room?

‘I didn’t give the maid a chance to,’ Hal said. ‘What happened to Wilbur, Roger?’

‘Wilbur? Oh, the chauffeur. He went into the army, I believe. Eve found this present man, he’s some sort of foreigner, I shouldn’t care to have him in my employ, he looks rather a ruffian. However, Eve says he’s cheap and drives very well. Peter leaves all the staff side to her. You’ll find quite a few changes. Bound to, after so long.’

Silence again. It occurred to Hal that the stiffness of the atmosphere was not caused by his arrival. The tea tray stood untouched on a low table beside the fireplace. Whatever Roger’s family had been doing, it wasn’t taking a welcome cup of tea after a long drive. He could see that Cecy was eager to leave the room, she was sliding unobtrusively round behind the sofas towards the door.

‘Where are you going, Cecy?’ her father asked in a cold voice.

‘Upstairs. To dress. My frock needs pressing, I’ll have to ask the maid to do it for me. She won’t know which one I’m wearing tonight.’ With that she made a positive dash for the door and was gone.

‘Children,’ Roger said grumpily. ‘You never married, I suppose, Hal.’

‘No,’ Hal said.

‘They’re the very devil. One minute all dimples and not much of a nuisance to anyone, and the next causing no end of trouble. I’ll see you at dinner, then,’ he added, making for the door.

‘What’s Cecy up to?’ Hal asked Angela, who had sat down again. She picked up a glossy magazine and began to flick through the pages. ‘Has my niece taken up with some undesirable man?’

‘That would be simple,’ Angela said. ‘Unsuitable boyfriends are child’s play compared to a career as far as Roger is concerned.’

‘Career?’

‘Don’t ask. Medicine, I’m afraid.’

‘Cecy’s doing medical training? Training to be a doctor, not a nurse? Sorry, no need to ask, not with her being your daughter. Good for her.’

‘I agree with you, but Roger never liked the idea, and he knows that Peter will have a go at him about it, he thinks it’s rather lax.’

‘This is Peter as head of the family, I take it?’

‘It’s a role he plays more and more.’ She put the magazine back on the table and stood up. ‘I really do have to go and dress.’

‘Tell me one thing,’ said Hal. ‘What happened to the menagerie?’

‘The menagerie?’

‘The stuffed creatures.’

‘Oh, the stoats and those poor, sad-eyed deer. Eve doesn’t care to have dead animals around her. So down they came and out they went. I couldn’t approve more. There was a wicked-looking ferret that had come to roost in the downstairs cloakroom. When I told Peter it was playing havoc with his bowels, he wouldn’t speak to me for a week. I was quite right, however. He used to disappear in there for hours with a pipe and the paper. No longer, and he’s lost that costive look he had.’

Hal held the door open for her. As they crossed the hall, the front door flew open and a red-faced schoolgirl in a thick navy overcoat stumped in, a satchel hanging off her shoulder, a hockey stick in one hand and a bicycle pump in the other. She was yelling as she came in, shouting out to Simon to jolly well come down right now and apologize for swiping her pump, the one that worked, and replacing it with his duff one, a foul trick to play on her, she finished with a triumphant roar.

She stopped, drew breath, saw them standing there and bounded towards them. ‘Aunt Angela, you’re here. Has Cecy come with you? I’m so late, all because I had a flat tyre and rotten Simon switched the pumps.’ She stared at Hal with undisguised interest.

‘This is your Uncle Hal, Ursula.’

Hal looked at the girl with more attention. So this was Peter’s youngest. Of course she was, he thought with a sudden pang. Of course she was: now that the redness of her face was fading, he could see the likeness. ‘You’re very like Delia,’ he said.

A blast of icy air at his back as the front door opened and shut again, and he turned to see his oldest brother regarding him with cold eyes as he pulled off his leather gloves.

‘That’s a name we don’t ever mention in this house,’ Peter said curtly. ‘Ursula, what are you doing hanging around in your school clothes? Go upstairs and change at once.’ He turned to Angela. ‘Ha. Roger’s here, I take it?’

‘Aren’t you going to say hello to Hal? You haven’t seen him for nearly sixteen years.’

From Peter’s expression, he could quite happily have gone another sixteen years without seeing his youngest brother.

‘You’re looking very well,’ he said, smoothing back his fast-retreating hair with his hand as he eyed Hal’s hair, short but undeniably thick.

‘So are you, Peter. I’m glad to see you again.’ Which Hal was, despite his brother’s aura of barely controlled ferocity.

‘I’ve made it an absolute rule,’ Peter was saying in a loud voice, ‘that we do not under any circumstances talk about Delia, especially not in front of the children. As far as they are concerned, she might as well be dead. She is forbidden to have any contact with them, with the full consent of the court, I may add. They know how wicked she has been and have no wish at all to have anything to do with her. It shouldn’t be necessary for me to explain this to you, anyone with a modicum of tact … Well, I dare say it’s all very different in America.’

‘There’s a lot more divorce over there, certainly.’

Peter winced at the word. ‘That will lead to their downfall. It’s monstrous what women get away with these days, it goes against nature and against every finer feeling. These so-called modern women are no more nor less than whores. Excuse me, Angela, it’s not a word I should use in front of you.’

‘It’s not a word you should use of your ex-wife,’ Angela said under her breath as she stepped past Peter and made for the stairs.

Hal wasn’t too sure about Peter’s finer feelings, and he was deeply shocked to hear his former sister-in-law spoken of in such harsh terms. He held his tongue. He was here because of the frozen lake, nothing more, and he would avoid quarrelling with either of his brothers if he could help it.

He thought about his two brothers as he followed the maid up the elegant staircase. Why had Angela, with her intelligence and caustic wit, ever married Roger? He had been good-looking, that had had something to do with it, and perhaps the growing career at the bar had seemed to promise brains and a certain worldliness. More astonishing was that ultra-conventional Roger should have fallen in love with a woman doctor, of all people. Roger as a young man, and no doubt to this day, resented women having the vote. He had never made any secret of his views.

Perhaps Angela had thought it would be possible to continue practising as a doctor once she was married, and perhaps it had gone against the grain to give up her medical work, even though she had all the help she needed in the house and nursery. She must have known that after those years away, it would be next to impossible to pick up the threads of a medical career. Let alone deal with Roger’s hostility.

Hal knew all about how Roger got his way, not through forcefulness like Peter, but through persistent nastiness. Faced with her husband’s bad temper and rudeness about her place in society, home, and likely incompetence if she went back into her profession, Angela had no doubt chosen the quieter course.

Only Cecy had then broken out; that was certainly one in the eye for Roger and he would naturally look upon it as a betrayal.

One of the maids will look after you, sir, since you haven’t brought a man with you,’ said the maid as she showed him into the Red Room. ‘Dinner is at eight-thirty, drinks are served in the drawing room from eight o’clock.’

He had half hoped they would put him in his old room, up on the attic floor with windows looking out behind the parapet, but the maid led the way to the Red Room, on the first floor. It had always been a guest room, but, when he was last here, a guest room with the patina of age and wear upon it. Now the paintwork gleamed, and the room had a spick and span, chintzy appearance. Rose-patterned wallpaper matched coverlet and chairs and cushions and the rug beside the bed. He pulled a face, remembering the higgledy-piggledy arrangement of old furniture and faded red damask curtains, and the assortment of china animals above the fireplace.

He picked up one of the thick towels on the washstand, one cream, one green, and went out to find an empty bathroom.

‘I was wondering when you’d find time to pop up and see me,’ said Nanny.

Hal, who liked to soak in a tub, had rushed his bath and dressed in a great hurry before springing up the stairs two at a time to reach Nanny’s domain. ‘You wouldn’t want me to come up here covered in smuts from the train,’ he said, bending down to give her a hug. She wasn’t a small woman, but he felt now as though he towered over her, surely she hadn’t been as bent as that when he went away?

‘Fifteen years and more, it’s been, and that’s a long time at my age, and my bones aren’t as strong as they should be,’ she told him. ‘I tell the doctor my bones can do what they want as long as I keep my wits, and so far I have. And you’ll have been leaning out of the train window to have smuts on you, how often have I told you not to do that? There was a man lost his head going into a tunnel, who’s to say it won’t happen again? Now sit down, there’s ten minutes before you have to be downstairs, and it won’t do to be late, for Mrs Grindley, as we must call her, although it sticks in my throat, gets in a temper if people are late. She gets into a temper about almost everything, you’ll notice that for yourself soon enough. Don’t be taken in, she’s got a will of iron, all the prettiness is like the army lads who go about with twigs in their helmets.’

‘Camouflage.’

‘I know what it’s called, Master Smart,’ she said swiftly.

He had to smile at the old nursery nickname. Peter had been Master Temper and Roger, Master Nastytongue whenever Nanny was displeased with them.

‘Which of them have you seen?’ Her knuckles might look too big for her hands and her hair might be grey and wispy, but her voice was low and sure – and those pale blue eyes were as keen as ever.

‘Angela, and two rather delightful nieces.’

‘Cecy and Ursula. She’s a little minx, that one.’

‘Ursula? She does resemble her mother, doesn’t she?’

‘More’s the pity. It doesn’t make her life any easier, let me tell you. What about your brothers?’

‘Oh, I’ve seen both of them, and left Peter in a rage because I mentioned Delia’s name, and Roger fretting over having a clever daughter.’

‘Fancy Cecy going to be a doctor.’

‘She, too, takes after her mother.’

‘I don’t hold with lady doctors. Never have and never will. Still, there are those who prefer it, and who’s to say they’re not entitled to their choice the same as I am?’

‘Well, Nanny, if there’s a war they’ll need all the doctors they can get.’

‘There isn’t going to be another war. And don’t go suggesting there will be one, or Mr Peter will be in even more of a rage. He won’t have any warmongering talk at the Hall, those are his very words.’

It was typical of Peter to issue an edict like that. Would he be taking the same line at work? Hal doubted it. War brought fat contracts, and Peter wouldn’t be last in line for those.

‘Mr Peter says he trusts the Germans to keep the Bolshies under control,’ said Nanny, clear approval in her voice; she detested Those Reds, as she called them.

‘Daddy’s got it all wrong,’ said a clear young voice from the door. ‘Hello, Nanny. Can you do my frock up for me?’

Ursula came into the room, one hand behind her holding a rather shapeless green dress together. ‘Hello again, Uncle Hal. I thought you’d be here, reporting to Nanny. She’ll want to know every single thing you’ve done since you last saw her.’

‘That could take some time, I suppose,’ Hal said.

‘You mind your tongue, Ursula.’ Nanny fastened the last of the buttons and Ursula straightened herself.

‘Five minutes to tell me the news,’ Nanny said. And then, to Hal, ‘I don’t get about so much these days. Ursula acts as my eyes and ears.’

‘Well, Nanny, the ice is bearing,’ said Ursula, sitting down on a pouffe that gave out a whistling sound as she sank into it. ‘That’s the most important thing. There’ll be skating all across the lake before the weekend’s out, that’s what they say.’

Hal propped himself against a tallboy, too big for the room, an item of furniture that he guessed Nanny had appropriated from some other part of the house. Ursula had Delia’s colouring as well as her mother’s features and voice: hair the colour of a copper scuttle, intense blue eyes in a pale face. She even had Delia’s hands, he noticed, as she tucked a lock of her straight hair behind an ear.

He couldn’t keep up with her flow of news. The people she was talking about were strangers for the most part. Until she told Nanny the news from Wyncrag. ‘Perdy’s back, she got back from school last night. Late for dinner, and Lady Richardson ripping her up, saying she shouldn’t be out in a car with Edwin. Her brother, I ask you, why not?’

‘Lady Richardson has her reasons,’ Nanny said. ‘Has Alix arrived yet?’

‘Oh, yes, she came by train, the same train you must have come on today, Uncle Hal. If she’d waited a day, you could have travelled up together. Although you might not have recognised her after all this time. She’s looking fearfully smart, apparently, Nanny. Lady R’s as stiff as a poker with her, and Perdy’s already in trouble.’

‘What has Perdy done?’ Nanny asked.

‘Grown.’

‘Do enlighten me,’ he said. ‘Who is Perdy?’

‘Perdita Richardson,’ Nanny said. ‘Since your time. You should remember, I told you all about her in my letters. Helena’s youngest, born just before Helena and Isabel were killed in America. In a car smash, such a terrible tragedy. You do remember that, surely? It wasn’t long after you’d gone away.’

‘Yes.’ He had written to Lady Richardson, and had received a brief, terse letter thanking him for his condolences. ‘She must have been shattered, losing her son so soon before, and then her daughter-in-law.’

Nanny’s face took on a tight, thin-lipped look, one he remembered so well from his childhood, the face that said, ‘So far and no further; not another word do I have to say upon this subject.’

FOURTEEN

‘Another foul evening,’ Ursula wrote in her journal that night. ‘No one except Aunt Angela is pleased to see Uncle Hal, it must be horrid for him to come home and find he’s about as welcome as a stray dog. I knew Eve was going to be at her sniffiest with him, she was moaning on to Daddy about what a nuisance it was Hal deciding to pay a visit just now, with Rosalind on the verge of her coming out and not needing to be associated with any doubtful characters. Any more doubtful characters, she means, since she feels that Mummy casts a cloud of unrespectability over the household and that it’s hard on Rosalind to be in any way connected with such a person. I don’t think Uncle Hal has any idea why Daddy wanted him to come to the Hall. I think he’s only come because of the frozen lake, otherwise he’d have stayed away. He’ll wish he had once Daddy and Roger start on him about those shares. They don’t think I know anything about it, in which case they shouldn’t talk so jolly loud. And Eve’s awfully cross that they need Hal’s agreement to make the sale, she’s so snobby about him being an actor. How old-fashioned can you be? Some actors are awfully grand. I don’t suppose Uncle Hal is or we’d have heard about him, but he doesn’t look like a down-and-out to me, which is how Eve seems to regard him. He looks jolly successful in my opinion, like someone who doesn’t give a button what people like Eve say about him. And he’s got a mocking look in his eye, I think he finds the whole situation amusing. I wish I did.’

FIFTEEN

Hal walked to Wyncrag after lunch, accompanied part of the way by Angela and Cecy who were going into the village, where Cecy wanted to buy a new pair of skates. It was slow walking on the icy snow, but Hal’s spirits rose as he breathed the cold pure air and looked up at the brilliant peaks set against a winter blue sky. Every stone wall, each field and tree was familiar to him; the years rolled away and he was back in the days of his youth, eager and brimful of expectation and ambition.

He had been set on becoming a great actor, one of the thespians of his generation, he would stun audiences with his interpretations of classic roles, his Hamlet and Macbeth and Benedict would be the talk of London and he would introduce intelligent and appreciative audiences to the complexities of modern works.

It hadn’t turned out like that. How many of the dreams we have at twenty do come true? he asked himself, as he followed the well-known path that led to the Wyncrag drive. He wasn’t walking on virgin snow so the two houses obviously kept up their steady relationship, many other feet had trodden this path since the last snowfall. He was looking down at the gritty frozen whiteness out of a reluctance to look up and see in reality what he could see in his mind’s eye: the extraordinary façade of Wyncrag. When he did look up, he surprised himself. It was as he remembered it, but it looked less real than the images he carried in his head. More like a film set than a massive northern pile. A film set for what? A fairy tale, maybe, with all those snowy turrets. Or possibly Hamlet, with a blond prince prowling the battlements of Elsinore, an enclosed world of darkness and secrets.

‘Come inside, come inside,’ Sir Henry said, greeting him as though he’d been away for a fortnight rather than fifteen years. ‘We’ll get them to rustle up some coffee for us. I was just wondering whether to put some more grit down on the drive,’ he went on, as they walked together towards the house. ‘You’ve missed my young folk, the twins and Perdita have gone to Manchester. The wheels of the car were slipping when they drove off, that’s why I came out to have a look. Of course, I think of them as your contemporaries and they aren’t, they were no more than children last time you saw them, and you’ll never have seen young Perdy at all.’

‘I was extremely sorry to hear about your tragedy,’ Hal said.

‘You wrote a very kind letter, that was good of you.’

‘I liked Neville and Helena, and to lose both of them in one year … Isabel, too. It was hard.’

Hard? Was that little thump of a word all he could find to say about such a loss? Sir Henry’s great loss had been Neville, his son, not Helena of course. Helena had never made her father-in-law’s heart sing at the sight of her, had never turned a grey day into a glorious one, had never sent him on his way on winged feet merely by a look, a smile, a turn of the head.

‘It was, it was hard,’ Sir Henry was saying. ‘But it’s in the past now, it all happened a good while ago and I don’t think about them much. I wish Neville could have been spared, but it wasn’t to be, and no good comes of repining, he was careless, and you can’t be careless on a precipice.’

Hal had to search for words to talk about Sir Henry’s eldest son. Why was it so difficult? He’d liked Neville, dammit. Admired him. ‘He was a skilful mountaineer. It’s a dangerous activity, but I should have thought he was the last person to take a risk.’

‘Mountains are unforgiving, and I dare say if he had to go, he was happy to die among his beloved mountains. He was lucky to survive the war, but his luck ran out when he went off to the Andes. He’d always wanted to climb there. Well, we all have to live our own lives.’ He was silent as he led Hal around to a side door. ‘We’ll go to my study, you’ll want to see Caroline and Trudie, but they can wait until you’ve warmed yourself and told me what you’ve been up to. Friendly welcome at the Hall, huh?’ he said with a shrewd look. ‘Lot of changes there, you’ll find. Your brother’s a fool to have married that woman, but I dare say you’ve already worked that out for yourself.’

Hal laughed, glad that they weren’t going into the drawing room. He wanted time to adjust to being in a Wyncrag without Helena. He cursed himself for a fool, he must concentrate on the here and now, not let memories from all those years ago sneak back into his life. Lord, he’d been so young. That was what accounted for the intensity of feeling that had struck him as he once again came to Wyncrag. A pale reflection of the feelings he had revelled in at the age of twenty, lost in the throes of first love, the not untypical love of a very young man for an older and very attractive woman.

He walked around the panelled walls looking at the familiar architectural prints hanging there. ‘I’ve hardly exchanged more than a few civil nothings with Eve, but no doubt she means well.’

Sir Henry gave him a sceptical look, but said no more as Rokeby came in with the coffee, and greeted Hal with stately courtesy. Hal was delighted to see him again, and impressed by how the years had turned him into the very model of a perfect butler.

‘Sit down, take one of the chairs by the fire,’ Sir Henry said, gesturing to one of a pair of shabby leather armchairs set in front of the burning fire. ‘Stir that fire up a bit, Rokeby,’ he went on. ‘Put another log on, must keep Hal warm, he’ll not be used to our northern chill any more.’

‘I’m not such a poor creature as you think,’ Hal protested. ‘New York can be bitter in the winter, and I go to Vermont for the snow sports most years. It’s cold enough there to remind anyone of Westmoreland in December.’

‘There’s nowhere quite like the lake, though, is there? You feel that, or you wouldn’t be here. Don’t tell me Peter’s invitation was so warm as to make you come back otherwise. He wants you here over a matter of business, I know, but that wouldn’t have brought you on its own, would it now?’

‘No,’ Hal agreed, very glad of the hot coffee into which, without being asked, Rokeby had added a tot of whisky. ‘To keep out the cold, Mr Hal.’

‘This freeze is bringing them all back,’ Sir Henry went on. ‘Alix hasn’t been home for three years, well, she and her grandmother don’t always see eye to eye, but she couldn’t resist the frozen lake. She lives and works in London, you know.’

Hal pulled out his memories of the twins, here at Wyncrag. Alix had been a solemn girl with a sudden smile and eyes too old for her years; Caroline had been very harsh with her, he recalled, strict as though she had been a wilful or wayward child. She hadn’t looked anything like Helena in those days; had she grown up to resemble her mother? He found the thought somehow alarming. ‘Does she take after Helena?’ he found himself asking.

‘No, she favours my side of the family, she’s very like my sister was at that age. Edwin is the one who takes after his mother.’

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