This Cold Country (21 page)

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 embarrassed 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.”

Edmund laughed. He, Ambrose, and Aunt Glad looked amused. Mickey seemed to be thinking about something else; Daisy was alert, watchful; the others—Corisande and Fernanda and Hugh Power—angry, Corisande to a degree that made Daisy uncomfortable. Watching Ambrose and Edmund working in concert, she thought they were like sophisticated schoolboys. Then she realized that it was more than a similarity; they were two men who had never grown out of a taste for teasing someone smaller and weaker than themselves. Edmund was simply teasing Corisande. No wonder he had been willing and amused to run upstairs for the cigarette case; it allowed him to make more of a fool of her later. In front of the same audience.

“Beggars can't be choosers. He who pays the piper calls the tune,” Aunt Glad said cheerfully.

Daisy couldn't tell whether Aunt Glad was joining in the men's teasing of Corisande or if she was operating as an independent agent. Or maybe Aunt Glad just meant what she said; she was rich enough to be allowed to mouth banalities with impunity.

“I don't see why you don't hunt them yourself,” Corisande said, her voice unsteady. “It's not like you have to join your regiment or anything.”

Edmund laughed; the rest of the table was silent and aghast. Even Mickey—for that matter, why had Mickey not enlisted in the English army as his brother had?

“The white feather,” Edmund said, and laughed again. “I don't hunt the Lismore hounds because I don't want to, and so far as enlisting in the English army, let me remind you I am a citizen of a neutral country. Even Ambrose here is a neutral volunteer.”

“One of the reasons I'm usually on leave,” Ambrose said lightly. “I really only serve until cubbing begins, and I have time off for major race meetings.”

“Cubbing is the beginning of the hunting season,” Mickey said to Daisy.
“The Four Feathers
is a novel by A. E. W. Mason. It's about—”

“Shut up!” Corisande screamed, pushing back her chair. And she ran out of the room.

Once again a silence descended. Despite her embarrassment, Daisy wondered whether Edmund and Ambrose felt satisfied with the outcome of their teasing, or whether they felt they had gone too far. Did Ambrose really have a part time arrangement with his regiment? He must have been less casual than he seemed to have earned his Military Cross. And again she wondered about Irish neutrality: she strongly disapproved of it and of the stance of the Irish government; the attitude of the average Irish citizen was mysterious to her, incorporating, it seemed, both those fighting—or the families of those fighting—in the British Army; and those who hated England, seeing her as the enemy as long as the six counties in Ulster were not part of the Republic; now she began to see that even the attitudes of the Anglo-Irish varied, were unclear and inconsistent. After a moment, Aunt Glad rose heavily to her feet, as did Fernanda. Daisy thought, for a second, that the women were following Corisande in sympathy, and then realized they were leaving the men to their port. She got up, a little too quickly, and followed them. Ambrose smiled, although not unkindly; he knew she had missed her cue.