LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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