At the time I remonstrated with my mother, but she was a stubborn woman, at an age when she could take an unreasonable dislike to a two-year-old child not on her best behavior and disinherit her in favor ofa baby with a sunny disposition. She was, nevertheless, of sound mind in the legal sense. It seemed foolish to cause trouble between you and your sister and I am of two minds—although we should not, of course, resort to deceit—as to when or even whether we should mention it to Joan. It seems more than a little unfair that one unfortunate moment should have so influenced my mother.
Her father should not worry about his letters from the rectory being uninteresting to Daisy. She would now demand a full and complete account of how exactly Joan, at the age of two, had managed to get herself disinherited. Although the wording of her father’s letter betrayed nothing, Daisy suspected him of not being devoid of humor about this as yet undescribed event.
The income from the bonds has, of course, been reinvested over the years. At present it comes to about forty pounds a year. Not a fortune, but what used to be called pin money. Unless you wish it to the contrary, I propose to draw last year’s income and send you a check for forty pounds and will instruct the bank to credit the quarterly payments to your bank account as soon as you let me know where you have opened one. If you have no use or need for this money, it could be left to grow and would in time make something useful for a daughter or younger son. Please let me know what you decide.
The heroines whose adventures Daisy most enjoyed reading all had private incomes. It wasn’t necessary for them to be rich: too much money, for example, made Emma Woodhouse a little unsympathetic. Daisy read accounts of Dickensian poverty or of the lives of Mrs. Gaskell’s Industrial Revolution mill workers with sympathy and pity, but not with the pleasure she experienced knowing that Catherine Morland had set off for Bath with ten guineas in her reticule. Now she, too, was a woman of means, however modest. She felt grateful to her unremembered grandmother, and to her father for his well-timed letter and for his thoughtful decision to start her off with a whole year’s income. She would write to him and walk down to the post office after lunch. Taking, of course, a letter to Patrick.
“GRANDMA, IT’S CORISANDE.”
Maud was half asleep. Every bone in her body felt loose and warm; her bed held her as comfortably as though she were floating in warm water, the pillows on which her head rested soft and comforting. Last night the rheumatism in her leg had been acting up and her sleep had been intermittent and restless; now she was dozing, in the ideal state between sleep and wakefulness, her body free of pain in a way it never was while she was fully awake, her mind able to steer her thoughts, avoiding unhappy memories in favor of the half-dreams in which she now chose to live.
“Grandma, it’s Corisande,” she heard again, a long moment after the now almost forgotten interruption. “I’ve brought Daisy to meet you.”
Daisy. There had been a Daisy—a daughter of the consul in Copenhagen—or Berlin—a girl with curly hair and freckles, but the young men had liked her. The third secretary, a young man from Norfolk, had danced attendance—What was his name? Never mind—and at the embassy picnic by the lake...
“Daisy,” the voice, probably her granddaughter’s, repeated, “Patrick’s new wife?”
A short silence and then she heard a door close quietly and she sank further into sleep.
***
MAUD NUGENT, DAISY thought, must once have been beautiful. Her hair, now thinning, was a pure white. A whiteness devoid of the yellowish tinge usual in gray hair, or of the tint of blue employed to counteract that yellowness. Her nose was thin, straight, distinguished, and her skin pale and unmarked. Since Maud’s eyes were closed, Daisy could not see what color they were, but she imagined they were clear and blue. One hand, longfingered, slender, heavily veined, lay across her neck; the fingernails were short and buffed.
Daisy could not tell whether the old lady was asleep or whether her lack of consciousness had some other significance. No one had told her anything about Mrs. Nugent, but they had all managed to suggest there was something unusual that Daisy would see for herself. But all she could see was Patrick’s grandmother asleep and failing to react to Corisande’s thoughtless interruption. And she could think of no reason other than rudeness or apathy that had caused Corisande to wait almost a week before attempting this surely no more than ritual introduction.
What did the hints, the half sentences, signify? Was Maud—and even here Daisy hesitated. What was she supposed to call the old lady? Mrs. Nugent, she supposed. But normally there would be a response asking her to call her—what? Grandma, like Corisande had? Surely not. Was Maud—Mrs. Nugent—in a coma? Terminally ill? Senile? And who, in heaven’s name, would tell her? Another question for Patrick? Or Ambrose? Or should she first ask Patrick if she could question Ambrose about his—their—family? Daisy followed Corisande out of the room, by far the warmest in the house, holding back a silent, interior fit of hysteria. As they crossed the landing, an old woman carrying a tray came out of the corridor that led to the back stairs.
“Ah, Philomena,” Corisande said vaguely. She did not introduce Daisy. Corisande started downstairs; Daisy had the impression that her sister-in-law had forgotten about her. She went to her own bedroom for a Nugent-free half hour before lunch.
What, if anything, did they think of her? Of the sudden marriage? Of this stranger parked with them for the duration of the war? And Patrick, what had he thought? Why had he married her? She felt that he loved her, but with a love that would in peacetime have been the preliminary to a courtship. A courtship, during which, as they grew to know each other better, their love would have grown into something more mature or, if it didn’t, they would have gone their separate ways and avoided a terrible mistake. She didn’t ask herself why she had married him. She had made a choice—not quite consciously—between marrying Patrick and a future in which she had not married Patrick. A future that would not necessarily offer many choices. She would be part of the second generation left short of men by two world wars. Daisy knew that the idea of girls having much say about the direction their lives were to take was a relatively recent one. And that choice—for men or women—tended to be inextricably entwined with privilege.
What choices, if any, had Maud Nugent made to end up thus?
“WHY DO THE vineyards in Patrick’s letter have Irish names?”
Corisande stared at Daisy for a moment; her expression, as usual, lacked warmth. Daisy, although she would have welcomed a greater feeling of affection from her sister-in-law, did not take her coldness personally.
“Because of the Wild Geese.”
The wild geese? Daisy waited, but Corisande’s mouth had closed in its usual discontented line and her eyes looked at something far away; it was as though she were listening for the telephone, a knock at the door, the sound of hooves on cobblestones. Daisy glanced toward Mickey and found him leaning forward in his chair, in the manner of a shy child who knows the answer to a question posed, perhaps rhetorically, by the teacher. After a moment, and a flick of his eye toward his tensely daydreaming sister, he began.
“The Wild Geese were Irish exiles—after the Treaty of Limerick—well, actually the first Wild Geese were the Earls—the Flight of the Earls after the Battle of Kinsale in 1601?” He paused to see how much of what he was telling her was familiar to Daisy. None of it was and she felt ashamed.
“I went to school in England; we didn’t really learn any Irish history.”
“Why don’t you find her something in the library after lunch?” Corisande asked impatiently. She glanced with distaste at the uneaten remains of the rhubarb crumble on her plate, and stood up. “God, I’d kill for a cup of real coffee,” she said under her breath and, apparently oblivious to the other two, left the dining room.
The library was darker than the dining room. Mickey switched on the overhead light, a heavy chandelier; Daisy noticed, as she had not the night she’d arrived, that two of the bulbs were burned
out.
“I don’t know how much history—English history—you know,” Mickey said.
“Just what I learned at school. I remember most of it pretty well. We tended to do some parts more than others. The Tudors and Stuarts seemed to get a lot of attention.”
“Good, good.” Mickey’s animation made her feel slightly uncomfortable. Surely history, unless of course one was living in it, as she supposed they all were, was a dryer subject than Mickey apparently considered it?
“If you take the Reformation as a starting point—I know it’s impossible to draw a line in history and say it all starts here; but if you could, the Reformation is the place to do it.”
“All right.” Daisy was thinking back to fifth-form history. Henry VIII, six wives, taking on the Pope, England becoming Protestant.
“As soon as there were two religions, it was all over for Ireland,” Mickey said. “Until then the conquerors and colonists became enthusiastically Irish in about five minutes. There was a banal phrase in our history books about how they ‘became more Irish than the Irish themselves’ and most of the old families in Ireland, the pre-English families, are Norman. But as soon as there were two religions instead of intermarriage, you got slaughter.”
“And the Wild Geese? The Earls?” Daisy asked. “They were fleeing religious persecution?”
Mickey paused, for a moment distracted, he gave his head a little shake before he started to speak again. How old, Daisy wondered, was Mickey. Corisande, she thought, might be twenty-eight, twenty-nine, a year or two older than Patrick. Mickey, despite an eccentricity of manner she associated with middle or old age, could not be more than three years older than she herself was.
Daisy missed the first part of Mickey’s explanation. She was realizing that Mickey wasn’t considering what path in life he would take, preparing—perhaps a tad lethargically—to spread his wings, deciding what his future would be. This was it. Mickey’s plan, or lack of it, for the rest of his life, was a continuation of what was in front of her eyes. This was Mickey’s home. They would grow old together. And Corisande—Daisy put off thinking that one through. She was not, under any circumstances, going to live out her life in the same house as Corisande Nugent.
“As soon as there were two religions instead of intermarriage you got slaughter. Henry VIII was stuck with being a Protestant; Edward died before he could do much harm; Bloody Mary was a Catholic; Elizabeth I a fierce Protestant. Religion was brutal but unambiguous. Then came the Stuarts—mixed marriages, favorites, conflicts of private and official beliefs, and no one knowing quite where he stood. Cromwell and the Protectorate were clear enough, of course, but the Restoration, Charles II, and the Roman Catholic James II really did for Ireland. When the Protestant William of Orange beat the Catholic James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, Sarsfield—do you know who he was?”
Daisy shook her head.
“Patrick Sarsfield—one of our more satisfying patriots. The first Earl of Lucan?”
“Same family as in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’?”
“Hm. Well, more or less.”
Mickey’s usually expressionless face lit up and Daisy was encouraged to add a thought she had had before but never clearly enough to put into words.
“I imagine that’s what a good—a really good—education feels like. That you can see how everything connects. For me it’s only these odd threads that join and hint at a pattern I can’t see.”
But she had gone too far. Mickey was looking at her nervously although she could see he was reluctant completely to let go of someone who might share his interests. Daisy wondered if this might be a good moment to ask about the bats.
“Yes, well—Lucan is close to Dublin. Soon after the Battle of the Boyne and the sieges of Limerick—you’ll find all that in this history book—” and Mickey took a battered and worn book from the bookcase, “Irish soldiers went to France and later all over Europe. Some of them made good, although most of them ended sadly. So you get the occasional Irish name on a French vineyard.”
Daisy crossed the room and took the book. There were traces of a partially erased name on the flyleaf; an ill-formed hand had written the words “third form” deeply into the paper; the book seemed to have belonged to more than one person before it had become Mickey’s. Unless he was in the habit of treating his books very shabbily.
“The local priest, Father Delaney, and I have talks about history and politics. He gave me this. It’s a textbook taught in the national schools all over Ireland. If you start with the accession of Elizabeth I—”
“I’ll start at the beginning, and then I’ll try and connect it to the English history I learned at school.”
“You may be surprised how differently they read,” Mickey said. He was moving toward the door. “Some of the Irish in France were successful enough to get themselves executed during the French Revolution and there were some Nugents who did well in Austria—probably distant relations. Very distant.”
And he was gone. Daisy, still holding the shabby book, stood at the window looking out. At the end of the graveled area in front of the house, there was a chain looped between four stone pillars. Behind there was a steep drop, too deep for Daisy to see from where she stood; apart from the chain, presumably to prevent someone driving a car over the small cliff, there were no fences, hedges or visible barriers of any kind for as far as her eye could see. Mickey, now wearing muddy gumboots, crossed her line of vision. She watched him go around the end of the house and out of sight; he did not look up at the library window.
The library was cold; a fire had been set in the fireplace but Daisy hesitated to light it. Not only because there probably was some traditional time for fire lighting at Dunmaine, but because she suspected there might be a knack to opening the flue or warming the chimney and she feared filling the house with smoke. At home her father had firm opinions about how fires were set, lit, and maintained, and he did not encourage females—the rest of his household—to fiddle with his handiwork.
Daisy felt forlorn. Reminding herself her husband was away at war and the feeling perfectly natural but not to be indulged, she crossed the room and sat at the desk at the far end. A letter to Patrick and one to her father, then a walk to the village and the nearest post box.
Seated at the desk, aware of a draft about her ankles, Daisy drew a sheet of writing paper toward her and put it on the blotter. The blotting paper bore traces of previous letters, Daisy wondered if any of them had been written by Patrick. For a moment she considered taking the blotter to the looking glass over the fireplace and reading in the reflection the words and phrases from past letters, but instead she reached for the ornate stamp that impressed the address on the paper. Then the pen and the inkpot, but the nib was encrusted with dark blue rust and the ink dried out. She looked at the writing paper, the disused implements, and knew a moment of fear. As though she were Sleeping Beauty and the last in the palace to fall asleep.
Daisy pushed the chair away from the desk and got to her feet. She reminded herself of her exultation on the train traveling through Ireland, of the excitement of her first evening, spent in that very room. She told herself she was English, had been a member of His Majesty’s Forces, that she was the daughter of a Church of England rector. That was a new one, and it made her smile. She would write her letters upstairs. She would commandeer a chair for her desk. She would explore the house, have some questions answered, and if no one was willing to introduce her to Patrick’s grandmother at a time when the old lady was not asleep, she would take the law into her own hands, find her new relative, and introduce herself. She did not consider Mickey, or even Corisande, hostile, but that did not prevent them being dangerous to her. She could feel apathy, like the damp draft at her ankles or the Virginia creeper on the front of the house, ready to subsume her, freeze her, bind her, deaden her, and render her passive.
“No,” she said aloud. “I’m too young, too healthy, too English, too much in love.” The first two, at lea
st, sounded convincing. She took most of the writing paper and all of the envelopes and went upstairs to her room.
AFTER LUNCH EACH day the household retired. Daisy didn’t know what the servants did, but they disappeared until shortly before tea was brought in. Mickey went outdoors, Corisande and Daisy to their rooms. The house was never completely silent. It creaked as the wood expanded and contracted with the seasons; the wind shook windows and whistled in the chimneys on stormy days. But no sound was made by a human between two and four o’clock.
Corisande, Daisy assumed, was resting. But what did that mean? Neither she nor Daisy was young enough or old enough to need a nap. Maybe Corisande slept to shorten the day, to reduce the time she had to wait until her real life began. Daisy wrote to Patrick and then lay on her bed reading until it was time to go downstairs for tea. Sometimes in the mornings she went for a walk: sometimes it seemed too great an effort. She was aware of a lassitude creeping over her. She, too, was marking time, waiting for the war to be over and for her husband to come home.
The afternoon of the day she had been to some extent introduced to Maud Nugent, Daisy thought it was time to make a more extensive tour of the house than the one Corisande had taken her on when she arrived at Dunmaine. Leaving her room quietly—tell herself as she might that this was her house, the exploration felt clandestine—she tiptoed across the landing.
She knew which were Corisande’s and Mickey’s bedrooms. Corisande had indicated them with a casual hand toward the closed doors as they had passed. It was the other closed doors that now interested Daisy. She opened the door to a schoolroom, a box room, a bathroom—all containing nothing that would suggest any of them had been used, or even entered, by anyone in the recent past. The rectory in which Daisy was brought up was Victorian and large. Even so, she was startled by the amount of unused and wasted space. It would have been different if the rooms had been completely empty, or clean, or if the contents were neat though sparse. But each room seemed to have been used as a depository for pieces of damaged furniture, battered suitcases with missing locks and handles, or basins with chipped jugs standing in them. Objects that a person more energetic than any of the Nugents would have thrown away. Daisy suspected that, although damaged, most of the furniture was to some extent functional, and she could imagine Corisande saying vaguely that perhaps one could be mended, another would do in a pinch, and that any amount of them might come in handy someday. And relegating them to somewhere outside her view.
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