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

       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