This Cold Country (25 page)

Thoughtfully, Daisy put the photograph down and opened a drawer. Inside were three packets of nylon stockings. In the second drawer two pairs of unworn gloves, made in soft thin leather. Opening the third—Daisy was beginning to feel like the heroine in a fairy tale—she found the ration books. They were held together with a thick red rubber band. Replacing Corisande's book in the drawer, Daisy wondered whether Corisande had forgotten that she would need hers or if she had been unable to ask for it since that would entail allowing someone to go through her desk. Daisy had so far uncovered evidence of selfishness, an attachment to a man other than her fiancé, some miscellaneous black market goods; who knew what else might lie in the other drawers?

Daisy helped herself to another chocolate, closed and locked the desk, and returned the key to its place in the dressing-table drawer. As she did so, she heard the pony and trap arriving at the front door and crossed to the window. On the other side of the landing from her own, Corisande's room looked out not only over the field in front of the house, but a little way down the avenue. Mickey was making his way past the overgrown laurels and rhododendrons to an area where the shrubs were lower and seemed to have been clipped. Leaning her face against the window, Daisy could just see the edge of a small grass clearing. A moment later, Mickey had passed out of her vision.

 

THAT AFTERNOON WAS
the first time Daisy had driven the pony and trap by herself, although she had occasionally taken the reins in Wales when she and Rosemary were going to church or when they, on a warm summer evening, took Sarah for a drive and a dolls' picnic. The pony, Prudence, simulated terror at the sight of a couple of sheep looking bleakly through a gap in the hedge, but Daisy was in no mood for that kind of carry on. She had done some simple arithmetic with a pencil and paper before she left the house and she was running through the figures again with some alarm. Two pounds for the cook, thirty shillings for the parlormaid, twenty-five shillings for the housemaid, twenty-five shillings for Philomena. Six pounds. Twelve pounds if she were to pay them this week's wages also. Daisy had fifty pounds—the income for a year and one quarter from her small trust—in the bank at Cappoquin; there seemed something shocking about withdrawing almost a quarter of it to pay two weeks' wages. She felt worried and resentful. This was a problem that should not have been landed on her. She was uncomfortable about the prospect of telling whoever it was that she was owed twelve pounds and requesting that some more efficient method of weekly wage paying be put into practice. It was only since her father had sent her the trust fund check that she had had a bank account and a checkbook. What would have happened if she had not had her grandmother's money to borrow for the wages? She wasn't even quite sure how to find out who was responsible for household finances. It certainly wasn't Mickey, and she didn't look forward to extracting the necessary information from him. She supposed, hoped, that vague as he was, he would at least know who was in charge. And if he didn't, she asked herself, panic rising and then receding as common sense reasserted itself—and if he didn't, then she would telephone Corisande and have the necessary, if embarrassing, conversation.

Daisy tied the pony's reins to a telegraph pole; it didn't seem quite satisfactory but it was what other people were doing, and she could see no alternative. Corisande and Rosemary appeared to have the ability to summon up a small boy who, in return for sixpence, would hold the pony's bridle until they returned. The men in their families always seemed to have a groom or stable lad close at hand. Just at that moment, Daisy was far from sure she wanted to part with a sixpenny bit and the idea of adding another person, however temporarily, to the Dunmaine payroll made her shudder. She patted Prudence firmly and, she hoped, reassuringly, and went into the grocer's.

The shop was one of the most cheerful places Daisy had been in since she had come to Ireland. Two large windows onto the main street of Cappoquin let in daylight and the shop was better lit than most houses Daisy had visited. The floorboards were bare, unpolished and uneven; the softer parts of the wood had worn down in the areas most often trodden. A counter ran the length of the shop, on it a cash register and an accumulation of brown paper packages and bags belonging to the other customer, a woman in a brown coat with permed hair. Daisy did not recognize her but thought she might be a schoolmistress or housekeeper for the local parish priest. Mr. Fleming, the grocer, Daisy knew; she had seen him in church. Mr. Fleming took around the plate on Sundays; he had a strong baritone voice and often kept the trickier hymns and duller psalms on track.

“Mr. Fleming, I'm Daisy Nugent, from Dunmaine. My sister-in-law—” Daisy could tell, from Mr. Fleming's expression of respectful interest, there was little she could tell him about Corisande's affairs he didn't already know; all she could add to his complete familiarity with the progress of Corisande's life and courtship was the party line taken by those of the Nugent family remaining at Dunmaine.

“I'll be ordering the groceries now that Miss Nugent is getting ready for her wedding.”

Mr. Fleming took the order book and glanced at it.

“I'll have it ready for you in about fifteen minutes.” He set the book on the counter, pressed it down to encourage it to stay open at the right page, glanced at it again, and started moving up and down behind the counter, taking packages from the shelves and setting them down beside the order book.

At the bank Daisy withdrew twelve pounds in pound notes, ten-shilling notes, and half-crowns. It was more money than she had ever had in cash before.

The grocer was slicing rashers of bacon when she returned. The machine hummed and whooshed back and forth, each return dropping a fatty rasher onto a sheet of thin, white greaseproof paper. When Mr. Fleming had finished, he ripped a sheet of brown paper from a roll beneath the counter and neatly wrapped the bacon in a small flat package.

“That's it,” he said. “We'll carry it out for you.”

He picked up the order book from the counter but hesitated a moment before he returned it to her.

“Mrs. Nugent,” he said, and Daisy's heart sank. Something—the directness of his look, the lack of embarrassment, the respectful tone but concealed irritation in his voice—made it clear this was going to be a demand for overdue payment of an account.

“Yes, Mr. Fleming,” Daisy said brightly, appalled to find herself playing for time, simulating an innocence that had, just a moment before, been genuine. It crossed her mind that she had taken another step toward becoming a member of the Anglo-Irish. In the next two minutes she took two further steps: she made a six-pound payment on a thirty-pound overdue account and, robbing Peter to pay Paul, she did not write a check but took the money from the wages envelope in her handbag.

Minutes later, the boy from Fleming's loaded the groceries into the trap, and Daisy untied Prudence and set off for home. She had intended to stop at the ironmonger's—lightbulbs for the chandelier—but thought better of it, fearing a similar confrontation.

 

AS TIME PASSED
Maud experienced less and less difference between being asleep and awake. Between day and night. One hour led to another and light and darkness seemed to alternate more quickly than they used to. Most of her dreams were pleasant and she had, during the past two years, learned to exert a degree of control over them. Tonight she was reliving a summer afternoon in 1890, a hot day during her first pregnancy, and a picnic on the strand at Woodstown. The pony, head down and drowsy under a tree, sandwiches and smoky tea on the plaid rug, the flattened beach grass underneath making small bumps, the perfection of the moment tinged with the beginning of a backache. Charles—long since dead—insisting she should take off enough of her clothing to accompany him into the sea. The ridged sand under her feet, the shallow water warm from a tide that had, as they watched, crept in over a mile of sun-warmed sand. And Maud, her young husband's hands supporting her, had floated, at first a little embarrassed by her protruding belly, then, with pleasure and relief, feeling weightless and relaxed, happily aware that her hair was wet and the sun and salt water were soaking into her body, refreshing her and, it felt to her, nourishing her child.

The dream started to slip away and memories of uniforms, letters from the front, and—Maud steered her dream, her thoughts to safer and happier memories and they floated, the past and present not being clearly delineated, to that afternoon when a young woman with a pleasant voice had arrived in her room, greeted her warmly in a not overfamiliar manner, and had sat beside the fire and read to her.
Evelina
—the first chapter. When she had finished, the girl—Maud did not know her name but felt that she lived in the house and seemed to be in some way attached to the family—had sat quietly in the shabby armchair, looking into the glowing, slowly burning turf for a few minutes. Then she had left, announcing she would return the following afternoon. Maud remembered it, without curiosity, as being strange; the present generation was not of much interest to her.

She could see a silhouette against the pale light from the fire.
Thomas,
she thought, but she could no longer see the image. Sometimes she imagined his presence and sometimes she knew that he was close by.

Her dream shifted to 1917, to the Troubles, the Civil War, to English uniforms until it came too close to Thomas's death. Instead of waking herself, she sank a little deeper into sleep and back to pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg.

 

MICKEY PADDED QUIETLY
along the corridor off which lay Maud's room; he was wearing his dressing gown and bedroom slippers. He carried an old blanket over his arm. Carefully avoiding the creaking board outside his father's room, he quietly opened the door and, without turning on the light, closed it after him. He opened a window, lay down carefully on the bed that had last been slept in in 1918, pulled the blanket over him, and waited. The curtains were undrawn and there was enough light from the moon for the old ash tree on the lawn to be visible in silhouette. One or two stars could be seen intermittently as a light west wind from the Atlantic pushed rain-filled clouds across the sky. Soon a bat flew in through the window and circled the room.

My dear Daisy,

You are often in my thoughts these days. So is Patrick, and I know that as soon as you have news of him you will let us know. We pray, at every service, for the armed forces and their families. It gives me, at least, some comfort.

On Sunday morning we celebrated Harvest Thanksgiving, rather belatedly because of the weather, and not quite as festive in recent years as it was when you were a child. Stooks of corn on either side of the front pews, a mound of fruits and vegetables at the baptismal font, and flowers at every window. After the evening service everything was taken away and nothing wasted. Your mother managed to distribute the fruit and veg discreetly and fairly—and so generously that the rectory ended up with a vegetable marrow and no grapes. The marrow is to be made into jam, rather to my relief since it was a large one and stuffed with rationed meat and minced leftovers it might have lasted for a week.

Your mother and your grandmother have had a difference of opinion and I am sorry to say....

Daisy sighed and put down the letter. She was sorry for her father and thought her mother and grandmother, fond of them though she was, selfish and self-indulgent if they could not control their bickering enough to keep it from her father.

There was a second envelope, the stamp also an English one, and the address in her grandmother's handwriting. Daisy opened it, glanced at the first few lines, then scanned the page.

...I can only assume she is having a difficult change of life...

Although Daisy was not in the mood for any letter of complaint about problems of the writer's own making, she was for a moment amused that her own new status as a married woman allowed her grandmother to make a reference to menopause. She skipped a few lines.

...so I feel I can no longer live under the same roof. I wonder if you would be good enough to look out for a pleasant, not too expensive, residential hotel, preferably close to the sea, and a church with an educated vicar, not
^too
how...

Daisy shook her head. A residential hotel. Even her hotel fantasies could not encompass an Irish seaside hotel out of season. Or her grandmother in such a setting. She supposed she was meant to invite her grandmother to visit her at Dunmaine, but she wasn't going to take the hint. What if her grandmother asked her straight out? She shook her head again to dismiss the thought; she had other problems closer to home.

 

VALERIE HAD ONCE
told Daisy a story she would never forget. It was a tragedy Daisy had not read about in any newspaper; she didn't ask anyone else about it, not wishing to know more than she already did. It had happened in Hyde Park, when a group of young and inexperienced WRACs were anchoring a barrage balloon. Daisy was not even sure whether the story was news when Valerie told it to her, or whether it was a rehash of a past disaster, or even apocryphal. The girls were attempting to anchor the balloon to mooring pegs on the ground when a gust of wind, or perhaps the buoyancy of the gas that filled it, had lifted it a little off the ground. The girls, about twenty of them, according to Valerie, had tugged at the ropes, trying to pull it down with all their strength and weight. But they were not heavy enough and the barrage balloon continued to rise; the WRACs clung on to prevent it from escaping and soon it was high enough for the girls to hesitate to let go. A moment later it was too late, and the girls clung on for their lives. The balloon rose over the park, caught the wind and was blown away. There was nothing any of the appalled witnesses to the disaster could do to help them and they watched as the girls, clinging to the ropes, drifted away and out of sight. According to Valerie, not one of them was ever seen again.