Kitabı oku: «The Frozen Lake: A gripping novel of family and wartime secrets»
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.
Cover images © Shutterstock.com (border).
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
Version:2014-12-11
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.
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