for all of them. For her, because she’d been longing to have Edwin to herself. For the whole household, if Lidia turned out to be as unsuitable as she sounded. No one more fierce in her intolerance than Grandmama, no one less happy to accept an outsider as a husband or wife for any of her family.
Edwin flew back across the hall, his shoes ringing out on the tiles. ‘Just off to the Post Office.’
‘We’ll come,’ said Perdita quickly. ‘Won’t we, Alix? I want to see what the ice is like over on that side of the lake.’
‘Be quick then,’ said Edwin. ‘There’s not a moment to lose.’
Alix sat beside him in the front, and Perdita squeezed herself into the tiny space behind the seats. ‘Jolly uncomfortable in the back here, you ought to get a bigger car.’
Edwin concentrated on getting his car safely over the ice lurking at the entrance to the drive, and out on to the narrow, twisting country road that led to the ferry. ‘I was going to ask if you both wanted to come to Manchester tomorrow. I’ve got some business there, and you’ve got shopping to do. But if you’re going to be rude about my car, Perdy, then the invitation’s withdrawn.’
‘I long to go to Manchester, and Ursula breaks up on Friday, so tomorrow would be perfect,’ said Perdita. ‘But can we take a proper car, please? I’d be bent double for good if I went all the way to Manchester like this, fit for nothing but the freak show.’
A carter coming the other way stopped his horse to tell Edwin that the ferry wasn’t running.
‘Frozen solid, no point in breaking the ice and heaving her out, not any more. You’ll have to go around the head of the lake, Mr Edwin.’
Edwin thanked him, cursed, and backed carefully into a gateway thickly rutted with frozen mud.
Half an hour later, they drove over the humpbacked bridge and drew up outside the Post Office. Her brother and sister dragged Perdita from her wedged position, and she stood beside the car shaking herself like a horse.
Edwin vanished into the Post Office. Alix and Perdita walked down to the lakeside. A few intrepid skaters were on the ice, not venturing beyond the rope barriers with their signs saying DANGER THIN ICE. A troop of children were sliding ecstatically over the frozen surface, under the watchful eye of PC Ogilvy. Perdita waved to him, and he slithered in a stately fashion towards them.
‘Hello, Jimmy. How’s the ice bearing?’
‘Coming along nicely, Miss Perdita.’
‘Can we skate all across the lake?’
‘Wherever you like, so long as you watch out for the soft patches where the Wyn flows out, it doesn’t ever freeze right over there. I’ll be taking those signs down come tomorrow morning. And I reckon now it’s holding, it’ll be solid for a good while, no one’s forecasting a thaw for the foreseeable future.’
Edwin came out of the Post Office. ‘That’s done,’ he said with great satisfaction. He caught sight of Alix’s face. ‘Feeling the cold, old thing? You’ve gone soft spending all that time in London.’
Hal didn’t recognise the chauffeur.
He hadn’t expected the motor car to be the same one, but who was the man standing beside the gleaming Delage? What had become of Wilbur? He was a young man still, Hal’s contemporary, a partner in first boyish and then youthful forays up fells and into the old lead mines and out on the lake. And the uniform, no Grindley chauffeur had ever worn a uniform like this one except on the most formal occasions. Was Hal’s arrival at the railway station a formal occasion? He thought not. Yet here was this dark-jowled man with guileless brown eyes touching his hat and asking him in an accent that owed nothing to the north of England if he were Mr Henry Grindley.
And that gave him a jolt. No one had called him Henry for more than fifteen years, and not often before that; only headmasters and strangers. He had been Hal to everyone since he was a baby.
The chauffeur helped the porter load Hal’s luggage into the boot of the car. Then he opened the rear door for Hal, saluted, and took his place behind the steering wheel.
It felt odd, to be in these familiar surroundings but sitting in the back of a car behind straight grey-uniformed shoulders, instead of sitting beside Jerry Wilbur, or even pushing him over to take the wheel himself.
He leant forward. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Parsons, sir.’
It seemed unlikely, but Hal let it pass. ‘Where’s Wilbur?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘You do know who Wilbur is.’
Or was, had something happened to him and no one had bothered to say? Nanny would have written to him about it, she wrote him regular if indecipherable missives in a spidery hand. Recent letters, now he came to think of it, had mentioned Changes at the Hall. These Changes, he gathered, were not for the better, at least not according to Nanny. Since she was pure conservative from the starch on her cap to the tips of her sensible shoes, he hadn’t taken much notice of her grumbles. Peter’s new wife would be bound to make changes, new wives always did. He had had plenty of experience of new wives in America, where his friends of both sexes dipped in and out of marriages with astonishing ease.
‘I heard of Wilbur, yes. He drove cars before me.’
So Wilbur had left. Hal felt a moment of dismay; how many others of his friends would still be there? It hadn’t occurred to him, but fifteen odd years was a long time to expect everything to be the same. He had changed out of all recognition, so he couldn’t seriously think that at Grindley Hall everything would be just as it was. How childish, and how childish was his disappointment at not being greeted by Wilbur.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked the chauffeur.
‘Spain. I am from Spain.’
Best not to enquire further. The fellow might be a republican or a follower of General Franco, and Hal had no wish to pry or offend. Strange that he hadn’t opted to stay and fight for whichever side he favoured.
‘I have no sides in Spain,’ the man said, as though he had read Hal’s thoughts. ‘I have family, uncles, brothers fighting on both sides, this one hates priests, that one is all for Franco. So I leave. Is better, then at least my mother has one son left alive to bury her when she grows old and dies, one son who is not crazy in his head and fighting for crazy men.’
‘So now you work at Grindley Hall.’
The man gave an expressive shrug. One is lucky to have any work.’ He was silent for a moment and then burst out in an unexpected and infectious guffaw. ‘I feel at home. In Spain, my family fight each other. Here, in cold England, I find also that families fight each other.’
Hal didn’t want to know. He sat back in his seat, looking out into the dusk, and the Spaniard, probably regretting his outburst, stayed silent as he drove expertly along the wintry roads. It was a half-hour journey from the station, but it only seemed minutes before they were driving through
