This Cold Country (38 page)

To her mother and grandmother Daisy had lied, leading them to believe she was going to visit a Nugent cousin with whom, despite never having mentioned her in letters home, Daisy had become friendly. She had also allowed them to believe she didn't have to worry about the cost of traveling. Of the two lies, the second came hardest; she was well aware that she could soon be dependent on her father. Unless—unless the action on which she was now embarked, this irresponsible long shot, paid off in some way she was unable to imagine.

The train—smoke, iron, and steam—came slowly out of a short tunnel in a low hillside and more slowly stopped in the station. Although Daisy had traveled many miles by train since she had stayed in Westmoreland, she now thought of the platform where Patrick and James had vied for her attention, and the train she had taken in triumph after a weekend of uncertainty, humiliation, and snubs. She thought, although it was not much more than a year ago, how young they had all been and, although both the men had been in uniform, as though it had happened before the war.

At Farnham, Daisy had to wait for a bus. She brushed her hair and removed a smut, courtesy of British Railways, from her forehead. She was bareheaded; two days before she had tidied herself in front of another waiting-room mirror, adjusting her hat and striving, not quite to her satisfaction, for the image of a young married woman of respectable family, possibly clergy. Today she was trying to look no less respectable, but young, attractive, and not too married. She glanced at her wedding ring; Patrick had put it on her finger and she had never taken it off. She wished, for a moment, she had brought gloves.

The bus stopped at every village and, often, several times in between. Daisy was in no hurry; she knew, although not precisely, where she was going but still did not know what she would do or say when she arrived. Without ever making a real plan, she had gradually been drawn toward a course of action, the result of which she could not, even in fantasy, imagine. For a long time Daisy had missed her husband; now she felt the need for a best friend.

Hayfields and hop pickers. Old-fashioned public houses with self-conscious traditional names. England. It was getting close to lunchtime and Daisy felt the first pangs of hunger. She thought how pleasant it would be, were circumstances different, to sit in a cool, dark pub and sip half a pint of beer and eat a cheese-and-chutney sandwich. But she was unable to imagine who her companion might be and, returning to the present, she remembered that with shortages and her nonexistent ration card she was lucky to have two apples in her bag.

Getting off the bus, she walked up a road, its hedges overgrown, with fields on each side. The first house was a working farm and, after looking carefully at it for a moment, Daisy continued. After the farm, the road became narrower and the surface rougher. Daisy looked at her watch; half past one, not a good time to arrive for an unannounced visit. She should probably wait an hour. She soon came to the gate of a field where the hay had been cut and was stacked into haycocks. She pushed the heavy gate open a little, squeezed past it into the field, and walked along the edge until she found a shady patch under the hedge. She sat down and slowly ate her apples, leaning against the grassy bank under the hawthorn hedge. The ground was dry. Despite the wind and rain over the Irish Sea, it had not rained for some time in southeast England. Daisy's frock was cotton and she was barelegged—she had laddered her last pair of nylon stockings getting onto the train on the way back from London two days before—so she didn't worry about sitting on the ground. The print on her dress had faded and her sandals were worn. For her expedition to London she had worn her Sunday clothes, but after much thought she had decided it would be better to make this journey informally clad than to arrive having hobbled through the countryside in high-heeled shoes and creased linen.

Daisy was tired and the sun was warm. She was excited, but not in a hurry. Sitting, taking pleasure from the sun on her face, she thought about her lack of urgency. She wanted to sit quietly, as Russians do—or, at least, as the fictional Russians that Daisy had read about did—before embarking on a journey. A moment of calm, of drawing together all the strands of herself that had become unraveled and extended by logistics, arrangements, nerves. Very soon her life would change forever; she should not allow this moment to be lost in a cloud of anxious activity. It was as it might feel, she thought, if she were playing roulette, in a foreign country, where she didn't speak the language and had no friends or acquaintances, and had just placed every penny she owned on a number. It might well be, in such a case, that one would be glad to have the wheel spin for a very long time to postpone the consequences of the result. She didn't know whether the thirty-five to one odds the roulette table offered was a level of probability for which she would be grateful.

 

“I'M DAISY NUGENT.
I would like to speak to Andrew Heskith.”

The woman who opened the door looked at Daisy for a long moment, but her blank expression did not suggest any curiosity about her unexpected visitor. It was more as though the woman, who seemed to be a little older than Daisy's mother—in her early-to mid-fifties—was intensely preoccupied. The events of the next few moments took place so slowly that Daisy was able to notice, and later remember, every detail of the woman's appearance: her dark blue cotton dress, a prewar design, had a pattern of small sparse flowers. Her gray hair, a perm growing out, and a little yellow, was held back by the kind of hairnet that purports to be invisible. There were nicotine stains on the first two fingers of her right hand; and her hands were rough, swollen, and discolored in a way that suggested both outdoor work and the scrubbing of pots and pans.

“He's—in the conservatory—do you know your way? It's along the corridor, and turn right at the end.”

The house was larger than it had seemed from the front, extending back to a depth greater than its width. The corridor was unlit, but two doors opening from it spilled a little light, allowing Daisy to see a dark wooden chest, some sporting prints, a group of small brass objects—their function unclear and perhaps they were purely ornamental—that might have come from India. Had Heskith's father been in the Indian Army? And his mother? Even apart from an almost visible class difference, it did not seem possible the woman she had just met could be Heskith's mother, could have produced a son with such hard reserve, such depths of control and strength. Maybe a widowed aunt—she had worn a wedding ring.

Daisy walked slowly along the corridor, aware that the woman behind her had not moved from where she stood in the hall. But she did not feel as though she were being watched. The feeling of heightened awareness continued; she could feel the wooden floor beneath the thin rug—Indian?—and the increasing distance from the silent, but not seeing, woman behind her. And the decreasing distance between her and the man she had come to see. The man who would be astonished to see her and who would shortly react in a way she could not imagine, even in fantasy, to her arrival.

What was he doing in this house? Could he still be on sick leave? It had been much easier than she had imagined to obtain his address; Daisy had found herself with her carefully rehearsed story unfinished. The hall porter at the Royal Overseas Club, apparently relieved that he did not have to make arrangements to forward the package had, Daisy thought, rather irresponsibly given her Andrew Heskith's address. She remembered now the look on Heskith's face, how his expression had become primitive, even to the extent of his jaw projecting a little, as desire removed the veneer of civilization from his face. Suppose he didn't remember her at first, suppose she had to remind him who she was?

The door to the conservatory was ajar, and Daisy, forgetting to breathe, pushed it open. She paused in the doorway, surprised. Daisy, with distracted parents and little in common with her sister, had read her way through the novels in the bookshelves that lined the walls of the upstairs corridor. Seeking a view of the world other than that presented by her mother's favorite authors—whose eighteenth-century sensibility Daisy, as an early adolescent, found inadequate for her emotional needs—she had dipped into the romance and melodrama that had sustained her grandmother when she had been Daisy's age. She had read Ouida and Marie Corelli, secretly, aware that her mother and grandmother, for quite different reasons, would disapprove. She had, she supposed, been searching for information about life, by which she probably meant love, and these novels, now too dated even to entertain, had failed her. But they had left romantic associations with conservatories. Conservatories were where the heroine was kissed by a guardsman, where she was proposed to by a hero with an impressive title. A conservatory suggested palm trees, a discreet fountain, flimsy evening dresses, champagne, men with moustaches (that association not so attractive to Daisy, who found facial hair on men repulsive), eluded chaperones, small secret bowers, rendezvous.

If the woman in the hall had directed her to the lumber room, Daisy would have been more prepared for the furnishing of the room she was entering. That the room was not intended to serve purely for storage was evident only in two screens, to either side of the door, neither quite concealing furniture, trunks, packing cases, some large old-fashioned china jugs and basins, a cracked mirror, and a lamp with a torn shade. Daisy absorbed every detail of the room of piled junk. The atmosphere was depressing; the room suggested that when the family had moved into the house they had pushed their furnishings through it, using what they needed as they went, and that the residue had arrived, unsorted, in this room; there was an overall feeling this was caused more by despair than laziness or untidiness.

Daisy glanced behind her. The woman still stood in the hall. Daisy had to assume that if she had failed to follow the simple directions she had been given, the woman would have reacted in some way.

Ahead of her, between the temporary walls of the screens and discarded furnishings, there was light, and she moved toward it. As she rounded the corner she began to see plants. Nothing exotic: some geraniums whose dead leaves and flowers needed picking off; a malnourished vine; a straggling bougainvillea whose blossoms and light green leaves rose from the dead growth of the previous year. Not a palm tree in sight, although outside a monkey puzzle tree again suggested an Indian connection—but surely, since it was quite large, a connection from earlier than Heskith's father's generation. Maybe Heskith had come from a long line of Indian Army soldiers, and had, perhaps, spent his childhood in India. It didn't seem likely to Daisy; she had been at school with girls who had been sent home to English boarding schools when they became too old to be educated in India; the girls, who won every prize for swimming or diving each sports day, had been in some way visibly different, although not in a way Daisy could have found words to describe. A texture of skin? A certain stoicism? A sense of their own separateness?

Daisy moved quietly and slowly toward the light and plants; she could sense the presence of another person in the room.

“Hello,” she called out, not loudly. Her voice was tight and nervous and, to her, sounded false. She tried again. “Hello.”

No one replied, but there was a quiet creaking sound; it came from the other side of the tattered screen. Now, she thought, now. In a moment it will all be over and I'll know. But during the seconds it took her to reach the end of the room, she knew that what was about to happen would only set her onto one of two equally unimaginable paths. Heskith would either accept her or he would not. In the first scenario, she would find herself under the protection—to use an old-fashioned term, but she couldn't think of a more accurate contemporary one—of a man she scarcely knew; in the second, she was without any plan for her future. There might be, probably was, a third possibility, but she hadn't imagined it.

One deep breath and she turned the corner. The creak she had heard a moment earlier was repeated. A man she had never seen before sat on a time-darkened wicker chair, his feet on a footstool, and his knees covered by a plaid rug. He was no older than her father but, in the same way as had been the woman who opened the door to Daisy—and to a far greater extent—lacking in life.

Shock, Daisy thought, and remembered she had had the same thought about Heskith on the evening of the night he had come to her room. The man who was looking at her, his expression devoid of curiosity, was, or had been, shocked; so had the woman who probably still waited, lacking volition, in the hall.

“I'm Daisy Nugent,” Daisy said, after a moment. “I wanted to speak to Andrew Heskith.”

The man nodded, but did not speak. He lifted one thin mottled veined hand as though he were about to make a gesture, then, helplessly, hopelessly, let it fall again.

Daisy had the sense that she must choose her questions carefully, that she could only expect a limited amount of this man's attention before he wandered back into the apathetic daze from which she seemed to have woken him. There was no book or newspaper on the wicker table beside him; only a glass of water, two bottles of pills, a framed photograph, and a small brass bell. He must, she thought, spend his days dozing or gazing out at the overgrown garden outside, its lawn unmown, its herbaceous border bedraggled, and its unstaked plants beaten down by the wind.

“You are Andrew—Mr. Andrew Heskith?” she asked, aware there was probably a military rank by which she should have addressed him.

The man nodded in the same manner he had a moment before, and she understood he had already answered her question.

“Do you have a son?” she asked.

Although he did not immediately answer, the expression in the man's eyes changed. He glanced at the photograph on the table, an officer in uniform, dark, handsome, and unknown to Daisy.

“Crete,” he said. The first word he had spoken. Then his attention wandered away from Daisy to the garden behind the cobwebby window.