Minette Walter’s debut novel, THE ICE HOUSE (published 1992) opens with an arresting discovery of a decomposed body found in…you guessed it, the ice house.
Lady of the Manor Phoebe Maybury lives with her female companions Diana Goode and Anne Cattrell. Of course, the villagers gossip about the three women, and not in a kind way. They believe them to be a coven of witches. But as this novel is set in the 20th century, that opinion doesn’t carry the dangerous implications that it did in the past. So someone comes up with the bright idea that they are lesbians who groom young girls in unspeakable acts. Things get so tense that a group of villagers trashes Phoebe’s manor house, terrifying herself and her two young children. Which is when her two friends Diana and Anne move in with her.
At around that time, Phoebe’s evil husband David Maybury disappears. The local police believe that Phoebe was responsible for his death, but that was never proven. The novel opens ten years later with the discovery of that body in the ice house. Of course, the DCI put on the case, George Walsh, believes it to be the body of the long-disappeared David Maybury. But if he died ten years ago, all that would be left would be a skeleton.
And so the novel begins. The ostracism by the villagers means that they live in seclusion in the manor house, and don’t have many visitors. So it is easy to picture them as three old crones. But in fact, they are much younger than you would think, especially as their children are in their late teens or early twenties. That fact gives this novel an old-fashioned twist. For 37-year-old Phoebe has a son who is now twenty years old and an eighteen-year-old daughter. Her friends, whom she met when they were all in their teens, are similarly placed with DIana having a daughter who is in her late teens. This means that two of the three women (Anne doesn’t have children) started motherhood before they were out of their teens themselves.
And so the tragedy of the novel is that we have three women, still in their prime, being treated to the kind of loneliness that much older people tend to face. All of that starts to change when the police reopen their investigation, and the manor house starts to hum with activity.
For those of you who have never heard of this novel, and are not familiar with Ms Walter’s style, a warning is in order. The beginning of the novel, involving as it does a decomposing body, is not for the faint of heart and definitely should not be experienced if you are eating. However, once that unpleasantness is got over, the rest of the novel is a great who-dunnit, with interesting and quirky characters.
