“Don’t let him make a fool of you,” Ambrose said quite kindly. “He doesn’t know he’s bigger than you are.”
“I know it, though.”
“You’re going to have to learn to ride, so—”
They passed through another gate; Daisy realized she would have to learn to mount and dismount without assistance if she were to take this ride by herself. The cart track continued, but now there was open moor to each side. The plants between the tracks were lower, coarse and prickly; Osbert didn’t seem interested by them. For a long way there was nothing but stones, heather, and the occasional sheep. The heather was purple and dull green on top, below it was brown and dry and the roots seemed to have raised a small mound around each plant; Daisy had the impression that each winter the dying plant contributed a little to the earth in which it grew and that the soil beneath was veined with roots and more like the turf they burned at Dunmaine than the rich dark earth in the vegetable garden. The afternoon was fine and clear, the mild wind part of the quiet sounds of the moor. Daisy saw a skylark high above and, a little later, a hawk. She was filled with the unreasoning happiness that Ireland sometimes gave her.
“Make him come alongside,” Ambrose said, and with new confidence Daisy pressed her heels into Osbert’s fat, furry ribs. To her surprise he reacted obediently to her instructions—or maybe he just wanted to walk beside Cissy.
“You have to grip with the upper part of your legs,” Ambrose said. “If you depend on balance you’re going to spend a lot of time on your bottom in the mud. If you grip, you’ll be ready if your horse shies or changes direction without warning.”
“I’ve been thinking about what you told me the day I asked about Dunmaine.”
Ambrose nodded, not apparently surprised by the change of topic; for a moment Daisy wondered if his last equestrian instruction had contained a hint of metaphor, then decided it was not likely.
“When I drew up some rough accounts, it seemed to me as though Dunmaine was a disabled ship drifting very slowly toward an iceberg—”
Ambrose laughed.
“Forgive me,” he said, “I’m not unsympathetic, it’s just I’ve often—usually in the small hours of the morning—drawn similar pictures for myself. A sluggish whirlpool, a waterfall around the bend of a slow-moving river. But I’ve never heard anyone voice these images. Perhaps everyone in the same situation, and that’s practically everyone we know, thinks like that.”
“With an image of water, do you think?” Again, Daisy had the impression that Ambrose was not much interested in metaphor. “But the point is that it is slow-moving and therefore not necessarily inevitable—in the case of Dunmaine, at least.”
“It doesn’t have to be, but it usually is,” Ambrose said gently. “Everyone has a scheme for cutting costs or earning money; it’s just that they don’t usually work or they don’t work enough to change anything. Which isn’t to say there isn’t fat that could be cut from most households; it’s just the luxuries are often the last to go—they often feel like the only thing that makes existence bearable.”
Daisy looked puzzled.
“My place is fairly uncomfortable, but I’m attached to it. I don’t know how long I’d go on trying to make a go of it, though, if I couldn’t have the occasional whiskey and soda and a couple of days a season with the West Waterfords.”
“Why doesn’t anyone get a job?” Daisy was surprised at the level of irritation in her voice. “Mickey, for instance, why couldn’t he get a job as a teacher?”
“A knowledge of the Irish language is necessary to graduate from a school or college or to obtain most professional qualifications. I suppose there are a few Protestant schools that might employ Mickey, but nothing around here.”
Corisande’s clothes, Mickey’s maze. Now was the time to ask Ambrose about the private finances of her new family, of her brother- and sister-in-law, of her own husband, but Daisy found herself putting off these questions for another occasion.
“Mild market gardening, keeping hens, they’ve all been tried,” Ambrose continued. “Even PGs—that could work if it was done properly, but most people think of it as a last resort and combine it with cutting costs around hot water and edible food.”
“PGs?”
“Paying guests. Five guineas a week is about what you can get. But you can’t act as though there is something amusingly eccentric about taking in lodgers. And you can’t think of it as a fiver clear profit and five shillings to be spent on the unfortunate guest. You charge someone five guineas and you have to spend some of it on food, heat, and making sure they have a comfortable bed, a warm room, and an adequate clean bathroom.” Ambrose spoke severely; Daisy could not be sure if he was lecturing the impoverished Anglo-Irish as a class or telling her that Dunmaine had a long way to go before she could think of entertaining a guest, let alone making one pay for the privilege. Charging five guineas—it could be a way out of the quicksand, out of the end-of-week embarrassment of late wages, the end-of-the-month bills let slide by, the middle-of-the-night fears. The thought of it made Daisy feel energetic and somewhat excited.
“But where would one—where do they find paying guests? Do they advertise? And doesn’t that cost a fortune?”
“I suppose the initial advertisement in, say, the Agony column of the Times probably sets you back a good part of a week’s rent, but you don’t necessarily have to invest an advertisement for each guest. You should get more than one response and if you do it properly you’ll get most of your business by word of mouth.”
“So, why don’t more people try it—if everyone’s in the same boat?”
“Lack of imagination, pride, a level of household disorder they would be reluctant to show to a friend, let alone a stranger with some rights and expectation of comfort. Not enough energy or capital to deal with the leak in the middle of the spare room.”
“And form? How about form?” Daisy asked, addressing what she suspected was the principal obstacle in such an endeavor. What would Patrick have to say if he came home and found his bride running a boardinghouse? But what would he say if he returned, exhausted, from Europe to find bailiffs in the kitchen? And if he never came home? Or if the war lasted another five years?
“Oh form—it’s a little late for that,” Ambrose said dismissively.
Daisy knew he could not really mean so lightly to renounce the creed by which he lived; that he had omitted form from the list of reasons the south of Ireland had not been converted into a series of uncomfortable lodging houses was an indication he approved of her as yet unarticulated plan.
“If you wanted to give it a try,” Ambrose said casually, “a friend wrote and asked only the other day if I knew of a house in the country where a fellow officer could put up for a week or two. He’s on medical leave and would like to be somewhere with fresh air, fresh vegetables, and plenty of meat.”
The casual manner of Ambrose’s suggestion did not ring quite true and Daisy wondered if Dunmaine were in greater trouble than her amateur calculations had suggested.
“What do you think Patrick would want me to do?” she asked after a moment’s hesitation.
“I think Patrick would want you to use your judgment and initiative. And housing a wounded officer would surely be something he would approve of.”
“Even if I was charging him for it?”
Ambrose shrugged; she was losing his attention.
“Now we’re going to go a little faster. No one can teach you to post; it’s just a matter of trial and error. In the meantime, it’s pretty uncomfortable so you’ll probably catch on quite quickly.”
Without any, to Daisy, perceptible action on Ambrose’s part, Cissy walked a little faster and then broke into a gentle trot. Daisy flapped her calves and heels against Osbert’s sides and he lumbered into a gait that kept him close to, though not abreast of, Cissy. Daisy was jarred, awkward, bounced about by Osbert’s changed stride. She tried to find his rhythm and after a while she found it for a moment and then lost i
t again. It was quite enough to keep her thoughts occupied until they turned and headed back to Dunmaine and tea.
Chapter 16
ANDREW HESKITH WAS tall, slight, and fair. His eyes were blue and cold; he walked with a limp. Daisy’s stomach contracted when she first saw him. Desire made her stop breathing for a moment before she greeted him and showed him up to his room.
Daisy waited in the drawing room, but he did not come downstairs for tea. He must, she thought, be resting. His hair was a little too long and she supposed he had been recovering from his wound, or whatever made him limp, for some time.
When she went upstairs to get ready for dinner, taking a little more trouble over her appearance than she usually did, she opened the book of Yeats poetry on the table beside her bed. She found quite easily the poem that Heskith made her think of. The final two lines—
...his hair is beautiful,
Cold as the March wind his eyes.
When she had first read the lines, not unaware of the implication of their context, she had felt the same erotic shock as she had when, an hour ago, she had shaken her new guest’s hand. Cold as the March wind. Patrick, she thought, trying to summon up an image of her husband; but he had been gone too long and she had worn out the memories of their three nights together. Every word, every touch, every sensation had been taken out and held in her mind until, like an old photograph, they were faded and cracked and there were times when Daisy was not sure she could accurately summon his image. Although she could still remember the hard warmth of his body against hers.
MAUD COULD FEEL there was someone new in the house. Not someone she could see or hear, not someone she knew. A soldier, she thought. Not Patrick, her favorite grandson, missing. Not James. How strange it was, she thought, as she sank deeper and even less communicatively into herself, that they kept information from her as though she would not be able to understand the horrors and implications of war. Why did they imagine Thomas’s room was kept untouched since his last leave in the spring of 1918? Why, for that matter, did they suppose she had taken to her bed and more or less stopped talking when war had been declared? Not because she was old and senile and didn’t understand what was happening, but because she was the only one who really knew. And because she knew she would not experience it twice.
The rhythm of the house, the subtle changes in the times and quality of the meals told her something had changed a little. She was not sure whether she smelled or imagined the distant scent of a cigar.
DAISY DECANTED A bottle of port before dinner and opened a bottle of wine; she was for the first time grateful that Mickey was oblivious to the greater part of what went on around him. He drank a glass of what Daisy now slightly nervously assumed to be the best wine in the cellar, and ate his Irish stew—did it always have to be so gray?—with his usual somnambulistic mealtime methodical lack of concentration. Heskith ate the stew as unflinchingly and largely silently, although he raised one eyebrow slightly in appreciation as he tasted the wine and shot a quick surprised glance at the label on the bottle.
The dining-room fire smoked. Daisy noticed, to her surprise and horror, that there was a small stream of dirty white smoke coming from just under the mantelpiece. It suggested a small outlet on the side of a volcano that occasionally emits threatening but not necessarily dangerous gusts of sulfur.
Heskith said little and his expression did not encourage small talk. He and Mickey seemed equally preoccupied and Daisy broke the silence only to offer food and drink. The former invitation was largely rhetorical; she had never seen anyone take a second helping of any food offered at Dunmaine. Heskith took some more wine and a glass of port afterward. Daisy felt a nervous compulsion to offer him something further and by the end of the meal it had been arranged that Osbert should be made available each afternoon for the week; Daisy blushed when she offered the cob, self-consciously aware that she might appear to be alluding to Heskith’s wounded leg.
After dinner, the entire meal—even with the glass of port that Daisy had left the men to drink, presumably in total silence—taking less than an hour, Heskith went upstairs to his room. Daisy was restless, filled with nervous energy. What she really wanted to do was to have a stern conversation with Mrs. Mulcahy; dinner the following evening would be better, she promised herself, even if it meant holding a gun to the cook’s stubborn, untalented head.
Instead she went to her room, lit the small fire, and sat at her desk in the nest she had made for herself in a corner of her new home.
First she wrote to Patrick; the letters now were not so hard to write. Form, ritual, superstition were invoked and drawn upon. They were written in a vacuum and sent into a void. She no longer believed he received them, but equally she believed if she stopped writing that she would allow him to float away from her, to die, that she would kill him. Dutifully she wrote a description of the day, of the weather, of the buds on the trees in the lane behind the walled garden. She described Heskith’s arrival, and by alluding to his reserve, avoided much description. She told her husband that she loved him, that she was reading Bleak House, that his family was well, that there was a small patch of damp under the window in the library but she was keeping an eye on it.
She sealed the envelope; any afterthoughts she might have before she posted it would be gratefully included in the following day’s letter. Then, quickly and without much consideration, she wrote to her grandmother. She wrote a letter similar to the ones she sent home each week: full of description, short on event, devoid of any reference to the doings of her new family. She was silent on the subject of her lack of news from Patrick, of her financial worries, of her grandmother-in-law’s apparent senility, of Mickey’s eccentricity, of her scheme to take in paying guests.
Then she got into bed and stretched her legs under the cold sheets until her feet found the now tepid earthenware hot-water bottle.
A SPRING DAY shone outside the landing window. Daisy gazed dreamily out, putting off the moment when she should go down the main staircase to the hall. She felt a reluctance to speak or to be spoken to. Words or, in fact, sound that was not part of the rhythm and pattern of the now largely silent natural world outside seemed an intrusion on her confused feelings and aroused senses. Gradually, she became aware of activity below. Distant but animated voices, oddly lacking the usual gloomy, almost sullen, sounds of morning. No sound of silver on china, no double clink of cup clumsily returned to saucer. Instead voices, urgency, the energy of emergency. Daisy was by now too well aware of the pleasure the bored servants took in any kind of drama to find comfort in the cheerful tone of the voices below.
Mickey and Heskith were already sitting at the dining table when she came in. Daisy was not hungry; she was pouring herself a cup of weak tea when Nelly came into the room. The housemaid stood for a moment, struggling for the words to explain her presence in the dining room and for maximum dramatic effect.
“Begging your pardon, Mrs. Nugent.” She paused, apparently considering including Mickey and Heskith in her greeting, then deciding not to spoil the timing of her announcement. “They’ve gone and bombed Belfast.” She had their full, shocked attention now. Mistaking their silence for incomprehension or a request for elucidation, she added: “Hitler’s bombed Belfast. Last night.”
Mickey and Daisy just stared at her, but Heskith rose quickly and left the room. After a moment, they could hear the wireless begin to hum as it warmed up, then a high-pitched atmospheric whine that quickly changed to crackling and then the reassuring, convincing voice of a BBC newsreader. An account, general and lacking in detail, of the bombing followed: the docks had been the target; the extent of the damage not revealed. Soon the news moved to the war in Europe, an encounter at sea. None of them moved. Daisy thought of the afternoon in Wales when they had listened to an account of the sinking of the Royal Oak at Scapa Flow.
“How do you get the Southern Irish news?” Heskith asked, his tone a little impatient.
“Radio Eireann”—Radio Eireann was t
he station the wireless was tuned to in the kitchen, the station on which the maids had heard news of the night’s raid. The Nugents listened to it only for race meetings—“It’s on the other band; let me.” And Mickey, slowly but accurately, moved the dial until the station was clear. “Why do you want the Irish news?”
Heskith shot a quick look at Mickey; Daisy, who had been wondering the same thing, was grateful it had not been she who had asked.
“I wondered what the official Irish reaction was.”
The wireless crackled, then a man’s voice, speaking Irish. After a moment or two, Daisy picked up the word “Finisterre”—a weather report. While they waited, Daisy considered the implications of Heskith’s thought. While Eire was neutral, the six counties of Northern Ireland—in a sense another country—had remained loyal to England and were at war with Germany. Ireland might be neutral, but Irish families—Irish although not citizens of Eire—had been victims of the bombing. De Valera’s adamant neutrality would be tested; the hatred and distrust of a large part of the Irish for England, at whose hands they had suffered in the recent past, would be weighed against Germany, who had bombed the northern part of their own island.
She glanced at Heskith; he was alert, attentive, not so tense. Now she could see that there was and probably had been for a long time, beneath the surface tautness, a look of deep sadness, of a loss she could not imagine.
The newscaster continued to speak in Irish—farm prices, Daisy thought. She, Mickey, and Heskith continued to listen as carefully, struggling to understand. It was de Valera’s goal, already implemented in the schools, for the country to revert to its native tongue. Would it be possible, in the unimaginable future after the war, Daisy wondered, that she would live in a country whose language she didn’t speak?
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