This Cold Country (28 page)

T
HE DAY OF THE
lawn meet began bright and sunny, the air cold and sharp. The traces of a light frost had disappeared by the time Daisy and Mickey set out for Ambrose's house.

As the crow flies, Dysart Hall was about five miles away, over some tall hills, or low mountains—Daisy could not decide which—and a river. By road, with the pony trotting briskly most of the way, it took them an hour and a half. Daisy had wrapped up as warmly as was compatible with the first social event since the weekend they had all stayed at Shannig, but by the time they had reached the end of the avenue her toes and fingers were aching. Mickey didn't seem to feel the cold; the top button of his overcoat was open and although he wore a scarf, it hung loosely over his lapels. An acquired Darwinian hardiness, Daisy wondered, or was her brother-in-law merely as oblivious to the natural elements as he was to the niceties of day-to-day social behavior? It wasn't that he was rude—he said please and thank you and good morning and stood up when a woman came into the room—it was just that preoccupation—melancholia? having been dropped on his head as a baby?—had made him seemingly oblivious or deaf to the tensions and subtext of most human conversation. Oblivious, too, to a greasy stain on his trousers that irritated Daisy.

Dysart Hall was larger than Daisy had expected, and in worse repair. The avenue was longer than at Dunmaine, but with bigger and deeper holes and puddles. On either side, behind railings, horses and bullocks desultorily grazed. The house itself was gray-stoned, early Georgian, the pleasingly plain lines of the front of the house emphasized by a wing, set back a little, on either side. At even a first glance, Daisy could see cracked tiles and sagging gutters and that all the windows of one wing were shuttered. There were similar shutters at Dunmaine: painted white, heavy wood, with a metal bar that slotted into place, the bar when swung up and attached made a distinctive sound, not loud, but one that could be heard several rooms away. Inside such a room it was heavily dark, the gloom only emphasized by the cracks of light between the folds of the shutters. Daisy knew that at least a wing of Ambrose's house was closed up; closed up, she suspected, in the sense of being shuttered and the doors closed on it, not sealed and secured against the day it would once again be opened. Damp, cold, and neglected, it would be deteriorating at an even faster rate than the rest of the house. The rest of their houses.

In front of the porched-in hall door, on the gravel and on the lawn surrounding it, horses shifted about nervously. Big Irish hunters; a pony or two with small, determined boys and girls on their backs; owners and grooms. It was an impressive sight: the sturdy horses, glossy bay or chestnut; the horsemen in black coats, hats, and boots, and cream riding britches; the brown of the grooms' jackets and flat caps; interspersed with the odd red coat that she knew she should call “pink.” Farther away, and on the lawn, the hounds waited, kept in place by hunt servants.

The sweep in front of the house was large and generously covered with gravel. Daisy, who now knew how much a load of gravel cost, wondered that Ambrose had not, instead, invested the money in repairing the roof. The sweep might become bare and muddy, might even sprout the odd dandelion, but it was not likely to deteriorate to the extent that it infected the rest of the house.

Daisy and Mickey turned off toward the stables, around the back of the house, and down a short stony hill into the stable yard. Mickey unharnessed the pony and put it in a stall, and he and Daisy walked back up the incline, past some overgrown rhododendrons, to the front of the house.

The first person Daisy recognized, and he was in front of her smiling before she knew how to—or even if she should—return his greeting, was Sir Guy Wilcox. He was dressed for hunting and a red poppy was stuck in his buttonhole. Armistice Day. His black coat, the stock tied at his neck, and his gleaming top hat made him seem even more distinguished than he had at the Powers' lunch party.

“Mrs. Nugent. Daisy—I hope I may call you Daisy?”

Daisy felt herself start to blush. She would have avoided Sir Guy if she had seen him first. Now, cutting him would be embarrassing and ridiculous. Nevertheless, she had no intention of allowing their acquaintanceship to become less formal or more intimate.

“Oh,” she said coolly. “Good morning, Sir Guy.”

There was a moment's silence.

“Armistice Day,” she said, her eyes indicating the poppy, made from a stiff red cloth around a black center. “I hadn't realized.”

“Yes,” he said, “the eleventh day of the eleventh month.”

Daisy glanced at Mickey—they were surely close enough to matters with which he concerned himself for a small, not necessarily uninteresting, fact to be produced—but he was looking thoughtfully at the hounds at the end of the lawn. The hounds, quarreling among themselves, were exhibiting more excitement and tension than were the humans who stood about, holding cups and glasses in one hand and the reins of their mounts in the other, talking and waiting for the hunt to move away.

“I thought I might try and find a cup of tea,” Daisy said at length, stamping her feet lightly to emphasize the cold. “Can I bring you anything?”

Somewhere on the way to the open front door, Mickey wandered away and Daisy entered Ambrose's house for the first time, alone.

Although the light in the hall had been turned on—a large opaque glass bowl coming to a metal-covered point in the center and suspended by chains from the ceiling—it was, at first, hard to see anything; the light outdoors had been hard and bright. When Daisy's eyes became more accustomed to the gloom, she saw that the atmosphere of the hall was completely masculine. Two old dogs, kept indoors because of the hounds on the lawn, were sleeping deafly by the embers of the fire. The large one looked like an old and lumpy black hearthrug.

The dining room, too, suggested that it had been many years since a woman had been mistress of Dysart Hall. Even the food and drink spread on the handsome and very long table seemed masculine: sandwiches, a visibly dry seedcake, decanters of whiskey and of a dark red liquid that Daisy thought might have been cherry brandy or port.

The older women were clustered around the fireplace, their tweed suits and thick stockings not warm enough for them to want to stand about outside. Some of them, Daisy supposed, were her neighbors; most of them knew who she was; none of them spoke to her. Daisy poured herself a cup of tea, drank it, and went back outside.

Ambrose, both hands free—his horse presumably still in the stables—stood close to the hall door. He was talking to a woman; their momentarily frozen silhouettes suggested a tableau vivant or, perhaps, a game. The woman held a tray supported by a strap around her neck. Daisy fumbled in her handbag for money.

“All right,” Ambrose was saying as Daisy joined them. He was holding up a pound note in a way that suggested that a bargain had not yet been struck. “If you'll buy a lily from me next Easter Monday.”

The woman tittered nervously, not quite sure how serious he was. After a pause Ambrose put the pound into the box and chose his poppy. Daisy, too, bought a poppy and the woman moved on. Ambrose waited until she was almost out of earshot before he spoke.

“Bloody sauce,” Ambrose said, securing the poppy in his buttonhole. “English, of course.”

Daisy raised her eyebrows, but Ambrose was undeterred.

“And an almost complete ignorance of history. Does she think Ireland doesn't have her own fallen to remember?”

Daisy hesitated, not because she felt the need to remind Ambrose she was English but because it seemed, if she could find the right words, a moment when Ambrose might answer some of her questions. How English was Ambrose? How did he manage to spend so much time on leave? And Patrick? Did he, like Ambrose, fighting in the English army, feel as strongly about Ireland as Ambrose seemed to? Or was Ambrose's objection to the Englishwoman about manners? Form? And what, if anything, lay beneath the apparent acceptance of Sir Guy Wilcox by the Anglo-Irish?

“Is the lily the Irish equivalent of the English poppy?” she asked instead.

“Yes, except in England you buy a poppy on Remembrance Day, the day the Great War ended. Here you buy a lily on Easter Monday, on the anniversary of a revolutionary beginning, the Post Office Rising. Both in aid of soldiers' charities. The other difference—which is why that silly woman was confused—is that there would also be a bit of a class thing. You see—”

They were interrupted by the arrival of a maid. A maid who, Daisy noticed, looked more cleanly and neatly turned out in this bachelor establishment than did either of those employed at Dunmaine.

“If Hugh Power shows up, see if you can get that woman to try and sell him a poppy,” Ambrose said, over his shoulder, as he followed the maid back to the house.

Daisy rather hoped Hugh Power would come to the meet, but she suspected that he didn't hunt, that he thought of hunting as English, a decadent sport of a decadent former enemy. She thought it unlikely he would disapprove of it as a blood sport; she suspected, given the right circumstances, Hugh Power could shed blood.

Reluctant to search out Mickey, the only person, other than Ambrose or Sir Guy, familiar to her, Daisy strolled away from the front door to look at the horses.

The horses were nervous, anticipating the excitement of the hunt. They danced about, their weight crunching the gravel, and Daisy was careful to avoid being either trodden on or kicked by one of their cold steel-shod hooves. A hard-faced woman on an overexcited gray mare swore at her when she got in the way and Daisy, rather shocked, went to look at the hounds.

The hounds seemed undoglike and independent. Daisy knew that each, as a puppy, had for a time lived with a family, separated from the pack. Mickey, always reliable with hard facts, had told her that this was called “walking” a hound, and that hounds were referred to as couples even to the extent that a single hound was half a couple. Despite this exposure to humans and domestic life, they appeared to remain pack animals, aware of, but not subservient to, their human masters, obedient only when the rules were enforced by the hunt servant's whip.

Daisy was lost in thought when Ambrose came back. She was thinking about Patrick and what he had said about blood sports, about whether she would ever ride well enough to hunt, what it would cost to keep a hunter—a great deal, she suspected—and whether she would, in some distant postwar time, be among the frighteningly competent women on horseback that surrounded her.

“Daisy—”

“Patrick said he never wanted to indulge in a blood sport again as long as he lived,” Daisy said, wincing inside at the “as long as he lived” bit.

“Did he?” Ambrose said thoughtfully. “He's a good chap—bit more imagination than I have.”

“But it looks as though it must be exciting,” Daisy said tentatively, even a little longingly.

“It is,” Ambrose said firmly. “Daisy, I need—come with me.”

He took her by the arm and steered her back toward the house. Two people tried to get his attention on the way but he waved them away. Daisy felt curious, then frightened, as she began to understand the urgency implied in his actions.

“Let's go into the study,” he said, indicating a door on the other side of the hall from the dining room and a little past where the staircase swept into the hall. He closed the door behind them.

“Sit down, Daisy,” he said, although he remained standing himself, his back to the unlit fire. From the corner of her eye, Daisy could see Mickey sitting immobile in an armchair; she was too agitated to acknowledge his presence.

“What is it?”

“Corisande just telephoned—” Daisy could see that Ambrose's ruddy complexion was paler than usual.

“Tell me, Ambrose. Quickly,” Daisy said, her mind running through the full gamut of disaster. From the most terrifying, news of Patrick, through the possible illness of either of her parents, a domestic disaster at Dunmaine, to the most probable—news of Maud's sudden sickness or death.

“It's James Nugent. He was killed. Rufisque. Covering the re-embarkation. A hero's death—he's being recommended for a decoration.”

It didn't seem possible. Although she was sad, her primary reaction was not one of grief; it was more one of incomprehension. James was someone she hadn't, when she lay awake at night, fearing and anticipating the deaths of others, ever imagined dying.

“James,” she said. “Oh, his poor mother.”

Pity now mingled with the dislike Daisy felt, to a degree that varied with her own mood, for every member of the English Nugent family and for the condescending, shabby, and humiliating way they had treated her.

“How did you find out?” she asked at last.

“Corisande telephoned,” the first words that Mickey had spoken since she entered the room. His tone and face as devoid of expression as ever.

Corisande had telephoned Dunmaine and a maid had told her they were at Ambrose's lawn meet? Corisande had telephoned Ambrose, who was not related to the Nugents, before she had telephoned her own family? Corisande's first instinct on hearing of James's death was to use it to have Ambrose's complete attention in the form of sympathy? What difference did it make?

“I have—ah—there are people—the meet,” Ambrose said, after a moment.

“Yes, of course,” Daisy said. “Your guests, you must look after them.”

“I thought I'd—ah—send them on their way. No point in telling them something like this—what good would it do anyone?”

Ambrose left the room, his hunting boots noisy on the parquet floor, and Daisy and Mickey were left alone.

He was rather a spoilt little boy.
Daisy could hear Patrick's voice and his casual summing up of James as they had walked down the stairs at Bannock House to dance together for the first time. She remembered how aware she had been of his closeness to her, how his hand had brushed against hers, how she had glowed with his attention.