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

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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

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