Читать книгу The Frozen Lake: A gripping novel of family and wartime secrets - Elizabeth Edmondson - Страница 21

‘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.’