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

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      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.

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