Daisy felt discouraged and depressed. The future was hard to imagine, so much depended on events outside her control, on history, but it seemed reasonable to suppose she and Patrick would, one day, live at Dunmaine and that she would be mistress of this house and its spirit-sapping contents. She tried for a moment to imagine what she would do. In her mind’s eye she emptied the room she was looking at, ruthlessly dispatching everything in it to the rubbish heap. Then what would she have? A large room with a cracked windowpane; peeling paint; a patch of damp; drooping and dirty curtains, all lit by one overhead lightbulb partially shaded by a cheap and dusty shade. It could be pretty—the windows were large and graceful, despite the cracked pane and the knob missing from one of the shutters—if someone spent quite a lot of money on it. Which brought her back to the question of how well off was the family. Were these rooms of broken and worn objects a symptom of comparative poverty or was it merely lack of energy? Or both?
Although now understanding Corisande’s reluctance to show her over the house properly, and with a suspicion that she’d be well advised to return to her bedroom, Daisy opened the door to another room.
She stood for a moment, surprised, in the doorway. Then she stepped into the room and, sensing she had now come upon something private and secret, she pulled the door almost closed behind her. But not shut; it seemed, by some rule or instinct drawn from the fairy tales that had frightened her as a small child, important to draw a distinction, should anyone come upon her, between someone who had chanced upon something private, perhaps not understanding what it was, and one who was concealing herself in order to pry.
The room was small, Spartan; it contained a bed, a chest of drawers, a chair, and some shelves. The bed had a plain iron frame, the kind Daisy had slept on at boarding school, and on the shelves were some worn books. G. A. Henty, Rider Haggard, The Just So Stories and Kim, the Bible, and, Daisy noticed with pleasure, Loma Doone. But it was not only a boy’s bedroom. By one of the two windows there was a stand that suggested that at some time the room had become also a man’s dressing room. The top was shaped to hang a jacket on with a press below for a pair of trousers; on a narrow shelf in front were a shoehorn and a buttonhook, and at the base a pair of hunting boots, a man’s size, carefully polished.
Daisy looked around the room. It was spotlessly clean. The sheets on the bed were fresh and crisply starched, the pillow plump, and the blanket at the foot of the bed neatly folded. No personal objects were visible and Daisy didn’t open the wardrobe or look inside the drawers. On top of the chest, in an open, silk-lined box, lay two medals, their striped colored ribbons flat and parallel behind them.
It didn’t take Daisy long to understand that this room was kept as a shrine to Patrick’s father who must have died in the Great War. It took her a little longer to realize that the room she now occupied—the room that should be hers and Patrick’s—had in all likelihood been that of his parents.
Chapter 12
DEAREST PATRICK,” DAISY wrote, and paused. It was the twenty-first letter she had written to him from Ireland, the twentieth since she had received his last and only letter. Each letter was a little more difficult to write than the one before; very little happened each day, what happened tended to be the same as what had happened the day before, each time she described her impression of something new she was aware of describing something familiar to him, and each day it was a little harder to have a sense of her absent husband. And she was worried and trying not to show it in her daily letter; each one carefully dated since it seemed possible to her that he might receive a week’s worth all at once. Then she would think of how repetitious her letters must be and it would be harder still to embark on a new one.
She looked out her bedroom window, seeking inspiration in the unfamiliar view. At least this letter would be a little different; the writing paper had a different address. Corisande, Mickey, and she were staying at Shannig, Edmund Crighton’s house. They had just finished a late tea and Daisy had come upstairs to write to Patrick before she changed for dinner. The house was smaller than Dunmaine and quite a lot warmer; a fire burned in the small grate in her bedroom. She wrote quickly, describing the slow train journey and the drive in the pony and trap at either end. Daisy knew the journey must be familiar to Patrick, but it had taken most of the day to travel between the two houses and there was little else, apart from telling him which of her two dresses she planned to wear for dinner, to write about.
She had begun, during the past ten days, to fill a paragraph with a description of what she was reading. There seemed to be no book in the library at Dunmaine that had been bought during the past fifteen years; prior to that time, a sprinkling of novels of the period—The Green Hat, Of Human Bondage, The Constant Nymph—had been added by, Daisy imagined, a female Nugent. Among the older books were Dickens, Hardy, military memoirs, and the complete works of Charles Lever. Daisy rationed herself, reading the lighter, more romantic novels for an hour before she went to bed, and during the empty hours of the day reading the heavier, darkly bound, seemingly more masculine classics. For an hour every afternoon she read history and this most often filled her daily paragraph to Patrick.
Every day she read a chapter of the history of Ireland that Mickey had lent her. She began the unfamiliar story full of admiration for the country and people with whom she was now allied, and read it unquestioningly until she came to the sixteenth century, when some of the events described seemed familiar but different from how she remembered them being taught at school. During her exploration of the house, she had seen a copy of Our Island Story in the bookshelf of the empty and uninviting schoolroom. She now brought down the old illustrated English history book and read it in conjunction with the Irish version. Side by side, they made interesting reading. Elizabeth: the Virgin Queen, Sir Walter Raleigh laying down his cloak so that she shouldn’t dirty her shoe; the Spanish Armada; the tragic although possibly necessary execution of Elizabeth’s cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots—as a child, Daisy had been unable to read this passage without tears, mainly for the unfortunate and treacherous queen’s little dog. A parallel reading of the period in the Irish primer described the Ulster and Munster plantations and the Elizabethan scheme for wholesale extermination of the native Irish.
Our Island Story Daisy now saw as brilliant, but not necessarily cynical. Although she was only twenty-one and it was no more than ten years since she had last opened it, she knew that the stories and the dramatic and colorful illustrations were part of her memory and would be for life. And it was only because she had become part of another nation—living in another country would not necessarily have done the trick—that she questioned the truth of the images portrayed. The Irish history book—less interestingly illustrated in black and white and mostly maps—recounted an Irish version of the history of that period. Daisy had no way of gauging the truth, but knew the books accurately to reflect each nation’s attitude toward its own history. The Irish history book presented the Irish people as heroic and high-minded, crushed by the superior forces of a brutal invader, intermittently rebelling, often with no real hope of success but as gestures of brave, principled self-sacrifice. The English version, and this was what most interested Daisy, felt no need to justify any action. The emphasis was on the dramatic moment, often further impressed by effective, colorful illustrations: King Alfred, lost in thought, allowing the peasant woman’s cakes to burn; Henry I, told that the Black Prince had drowned, “never smiled again”; Drake finishing his game of bowls as the Armada appeared in the distance; Charles I on his way to the scaffold; Mary’s claim that the word Calais was engraved on her heart. The reader was not expected to, and probably wouldn’t, question the morality or motivation of the English people or their rulers.
Then Daisy filled a short paragraph telling Patrick how much she loved him and how much she missed him. She had written these sentiments before, every day for three weeks. They were less true than when she had first written them, when she could remember
with more emotion how his body had felt touching hers. Now these memories had worn out and her words seemed to her, unconvincing. She wondered if his letters to her—the ones she had not yet received—were equally threadbare. Whether he regretted their hasty marriage, if he couldn’t always remember what she looked like. These fears preceded the one she struggled to keep at bay; what if there were no more letters, what if he were dead? She finished her letter quickly, addressed it, but left it unsealed; maybe there would be something further to write after dinner.
She stood for a moment, looking out the window, before she changed into her evening dress. Her room was at the back of the house and looked over a field running down to a river. Fat red cattle grazed slowly on the still-lush grass; two horses—one bay, one chestnut—stood, heads sleepily lowered on the dusty, hoof worn patch under an oak tree. Already the days were becoming shorter. Daisy thought of the long, silent winter ahead of her, and felt desperate.
“WHAT IS MRS. GLYNNE doing here? Why is she staying with Ambrose?” Daisy whispered to Corisande after lunch the next day, during a moment when Edmund was diverted by a letter brought in by a maid.
“It’s what she does. She travels around, staying with people.” Corisande didn’t whisper. “I’m not sure she has a home of her own.”
“But why does Ambrose have her to stay?”
“God knows. It’s a sort of tradition. When she’s making a tour of her heirs she always stops with him for a day or two. And now she’s coming to tea and it’s your turn to entertain her.”
“Shouldn’t you be protecting your interests?”
“Aunt Glad would never leave her money to a woman. And, anyway, James has always been the pet. He can do no wrong.”
Daisy remembered Mrs. Glynne seated beside James at dinner at Bannock House and the way she had laughed when he teased her.
Two hours later she was sitting in front of the fire, being once again questioned by Mrs. Glynne. Daisy, putting a good face on her allotted task, had seen this as an opportunity to have a few questions answered. Unfortunately, she had been sidetracked into the “milk in first” question and was already regretting her own stubbornness in refusing to concede that a woman’s social future, if not her entire worth and character, should rest on the order in which she poured liquids into a teacup.
“Suppose I put the sugar in first?”
Aunt Glad looked interested but did not seem to make a connection to the subject under discussion.
“Suppose I put the sugar in first, then the tea, and then the milk, would that be all right?”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“I don’t, but suppose I did. Would it be”—and Daisy hesitated, trying to find the exact word that would make her question clear to Aunt Glad—“common? Awful?”
“No, it would be unusual, eccentric, perhaps a little clumsy, but not social suicide.”
It seemed to Daisy that she had succeeding in making Aunt Glad consider her point. Although it was far from the most important question Daisy had to ask, she had been determined to get to the bottom of one of the vague conventions that surrounded her, although it might mean postponing the solving of some of the larger mysteries. Her instinct told her there was a stronger, although invisible, connection between the two than the evidence would suggest.
“Let me put it another way. Given that we don’t pour the milk in first, what is it that causes those who do to do so?”
“I suppose,” Aunt Glad said after, for the first time in Daisy’s experience, pausing for thought, “they pour it in first because they’re frightened of staining the cups.”
“Yes?”
“And”—Aunt Glad’s face brightened, and her words came a little quicker and with the pleasure of making a clear point—“it shows they aren’t used to good things; they don’t know they should seem to take them for granted.”
Daisy nodded, not because she concurred with Aunt Glad’s explanation, but because she had been given one; the word “seem” might warrant some later consideration. They were quiet for a moment; Aunt Glad broke the silence.
“Do you play bridge?” she asked.
Daisy had been running through her list of unanswered questions—the mysteries she tried to solve in her head each night before she fell asleep—trying to find one she could ask Mrs. Glynne. When did Patrick’s mother die? Was it she or Maud who had made a shrine of his boyhood bedroom? What makes Corisande tick? What’s wrong with Mickey? Does Patrick love me?
“No. Tell me about old Mrs. Nugent. Does she know who I am?
Daisy had worried, ever since she had come to Dunmaine, at the reluctance her brother- and sister-in-law had shown to introducing her properly to the bedridden old lady.
Aunt Glad glanced at Daisy with more interest than she had shown during any moment of her previous cross-examinations. It didn’t prevent her answering Daisy’s question with another question.
“Have you met Maud yet?”
“Yes,” Daisy said. Aunt Glad had answered one of her unasked questions, the significance of days elapsing before Corisande had taken her to old Mrs. Nugent’s room to introduce her. “Corisande took me to see her, but she—Mrs. Nugent—didn’t say anything. She seemed to be asleep, but I wasn’t sure if she really was.”
“Sometimes she can surprise you.”
“SOME OF THE Wild Geese—some of the ones who settled in France—the ones with Patrick’s vineyards—the vineyards Patrick was writing about—were, in fact, going back to where they had come from originally. Although I don’t expect they, or anyone else, thought about it like that.” Mickey paused, looking at Daisy.
“They were originally Norman, you mean?” Daisy was having a harder time understanding why Mickey imagined they—he and she—should now continue a conversation that had begun in the library at Dunmaine almost three weeks before. Especially since everyone else at the table was weighing the merits and disadvantages of the current master of the local pack of foxhounds.
“Three daughters,” said Fernanda, a dark, well-dressed woman with a slight accent, whose surname Daisy had not heard clearly when Edmund introduced her and her husband.
Her husband, Hugh, as clearly homegrown as his wife was imported, looked at her as though she had said something in poor taste. But Aunt Glad nodded sympathetically.
“So unfair. Three girls, all of them pretty, all of them with money of their own. And no son.”
Fernanda opened her mouth as though she were going to protest that her own daughter—daughters?—was devoid neither of charms nor fortune nor likely to pursue the son—had there been one—of the MFH, and then changed her mind. Aunt Glad. Daisy thought that if she had married James, rather than Patrick, she would now be sitting in Westmoreland, in similar circumstances, with his family, rather than the comparatively friendly Irish Nugents, and was, once again, grateful for her lot.
“All of which has no bearing on his inability to exert any kind of control over horses, dogs, hunt servants, or the field. Or to get on with local farmers,” Corisande said crossly. She was looking lovely and was, as always, beautifully dressed, but she had been edgy all evening and Daisy thought it would not take much to reduce her to tears. Daisy found herself crying far too often; not only because she was separated from Patrick and feared for his safety, but over novels and, sometimes, minor frustrations.
Edmund laughed; Daisy was, as usual, curious about him and what he and Corisande were to each other. During the weekend, as on the only other occasion Daisy had spent time in his presence, Edmund seemed to allow himself to be bossed around by Corisande and to be sent on little errands for her. Before dinner he had gone upstairs to fetch her cigarette case. During his absence the room had been silent, no one pretending that Corisande’s request was anything other than a test of her power over Edmund. Aunt Glad’s silence had been disapproving. Ambrose had whistled quietly, lying back in his chair, looking at the ceiling, his face devoid of expression. Corisande had been defiant and a little pinkfaced. Daisy e
mbarrassed and, as usual, feeling some responsibility for the tension. Mickey, only, remained oblivious. He had offered his sister one of his own Senior Services from a crumpled pack; her only response had been a look of silent dislike which Mickey, again, showed no sign of noticing. When Edmund returned he had given Corisande the slender silver box and kissed the top of her head.
“There you are, my little Partlet. Happy now?”
Watching Corisande and Edmund, as a maid cleared away the plates on which had been served bread-and-butter pudding—flavored with kirsch and dotted with raisins worth their weight in rubies in England—Daisy wondered about them. Corisande was unhappy; Edmund was aware of it but seemed only amused. And yet he had not struck Daisy as being cruel. If he were, would she not herself have been an easy and novel target? But to her he had been kind, polite, thoughtful, and hospitable.
“So in one column,” Ambrose said, “we have a master who is at best a mediocre horseman, lacking in charm, authority, and sons of a dancing-partner age. In the other column, we have a substantial bank balance, albeit derived from what our grandparents—or, in the case of an old geezer such as myself, parents—would have called ‘trade.’ I’m not sure I see your problem.”
This Cold Country Page 16