This Cold Country (8 page)

Lunch, while neither festive nor delicious, was not as silent as breakfast had been. The Nugents talked amongst themselves, largely about arrangements and guests for that evening. Aunt Glad had a few details she wanted to clear up with Daisy and asked how she was traveling back to Wales. Daisy told her, mentioning the time her train departed; she had, for the first time, the attention of every person present. Patrick and Kate, at the far end of the table, talked quietly. Daisy could not hear what they were saying. James did not appear.

During lunch, it started to rain. Afterward they drank weak coffee from small cups in the library. Patrick, and then Lizzie, left the room; Daisy, now desperate, asked Lady Nugent for some task. Either in response to Daisy's urgency or because she had just remembered that her necklace was wired onto a frame, Lady Nugent asked Daisy to unpick it carefully and had given her a small pair of sharp nail scissors with which to perform the operation.

The necklace had been professionally mounted. Sitting under a good light, Daisy had carefully edged the tip of the scissors under the thread that, tightly wound several times, held each strand in place. The thread was coarse and strong and had a stiff, wirelike quality. Daisy suspected she was causing irreparable harm to the scissors but wished neither to interrupt her hostess at her tasks, whatever they might be, nor to appear to question her judgment. She knew only that her own mother would have had a fit if Daisy had ever treated
her
nail scissors like that.

As Daisy cut the mounting away, the necklace grew pliant in her lap and a sprinkling of snippets of thread lay at her feet. She wondered where the necklace had been kept since the coronation. She didn't imagine there was a safe in Bannock House, and it seemed unlikely that an object so old and so valuable would just have been stuffed in a cupboard. It had probably been kept at the bank; but would the local bank—presumably small and modest—have a procedure for storing jewelry, or would they make an exception for the Nugents? Daisy was considering the probabilities and details of the arrangement when she snipped the last thread. Then she stood in front of the looking glass to see what diamonds would look like. Then Patrick had come in.

Becoming gradually warm under the slippery eiderdown, Daisy now remembered that she had not picked up the small, stiff fragments of thread she had let drop onto the carpet. She felt irritated at herself, but did not consider returning to the library to tidy up. Her throat was tender and she suddenly was not looking forward to wearing the pretty, expensive, and low-cut dress Rosemary had lent her.

Her neck ached and her head was uncomfortable, possibly because she was cold, huddled, and unrelaxed and partly because she had put her hair in curlers. Reluctant to further interrupt Lady Nugent with irritating questions and becoming, by the hour, less concerned with the convenience of the Nugent family, she had run a shallow but hot bath and while she washed—soaking was not a possibility—she had kept her head close to the steam to encourage her hair to set. She crouched in the bathtub until the water cooled, listening all the time for steps in the corridor outside the unlocked bathroom door. Time and the occasional drip from the large brass taps had left an orange and green stain on the white enamel of the high tub. Daisy thought that when the war was over she would celebrate by lying, for an hour, in a bath as large as this one, filled to the top with hot water. Or, on a beach, until the sun became too hot to bear. The Mediterranean maybe; somewhere other than the North of England.

***

LADY NUGENT WORE
the necklace at dinner. Her dress was black and, it seemed to Daisy, not new. The necklace was effective, even at the distance of the table. It had made Daisy prettier; it made Lady Nugent regal; the diamonds had lit up Daisy's skin, they added authority and a suggestion of history to Lady Nugent's erect posture.

Lady Nugent caught Daisy's eye and smiled.

“My necklace is courtesy of Daisy, James's little friend. She spent all afternoon unpicking it from its frame.”

Although it was toward the end of dinner, conversation was spasmodic and not animated, so most heads turned toward Daisy, some perhaps wondering why, if she were James's friend, little or otherwise, she was not sitting closer to him. He was seated between a pretty girl Daisy had not been introduced to and Mrs. Glynne.

“I don't suppose you're interested in gardening?” the slightly deaf neighbor of the Nugents, sitting on Daisy's left, asked.

“I am. Very,” she said firmly. During the course of the evening she had been forced to admit to him, and to a captain in the Fusiliers on her right, that she did not ride, fish, shoot, play bridge, and was not acquainted with any relative or friend of the Nugents not present. “I don't know much about it, though.”

“A middle-aged pleasure,
faute de mieux,
” her companion said, a little sadly.

“Do you have a garden?” Daisy asked him, determined not to let another conversational gambit lapse.

“Wartime, strictly wartime,” he said, with another sigh. Daisy thought of the rectory garden, efficiently planted with rows of the less interesting vegetables, and wondered why it seemed less patriotic to plant artichokes and
mange-tout
than it was to cultivate cabbages and Swede turnips.

“I don't know how well you know this part of the world?” he ventured, when Daisy failed to respond, dutifully embarking on another conversational tack. Daisy, who would have dearly loved to give her nose a good blow, was becoming guiltily aware that she was very heavy social weather for the men seated on either side of her. She could see that she and they ranked low in Lady Nugent's placement. Since Daisy carried approximately the social weight of a governess brought down to avoid seating thirteen at dinner, the men on either side of her, though not perhaps quite so devoid of qualification, were unlikely to find themselves seated beside a Nugent. She wondered when Lady Nugent had reworked the placement and what James had said to her.

“Not at all, I'm afraid,” Daisy said.

“Perhaps the Nugents—”

“I have to go back to Wales tomorrow,” Daisy said, nipping in the bud the assumption that any Nugent would be prepared to go an inch out of his way to entertain her. “But,” she added a little desperately, “we did do the Lake District poets at school.”

There was another pause and Daisy realized that poetry was not the direction in which her companion had been hoping to steer the conversation.

“Yes,” he said at last. “Wordsworth and ... ah ... Coleridge...” his voice trailed off. Then, “And of course there's Beatrix Potter.”

Daisy was attempting to formulate a not too discouraging sentence that suggested that while Beatrix Potter was not, strictly speaking, one of the Romantic poets, she had a certain lyrical enthusiasm for nature, which made the error a very understandable one, when she was distracted by James's voice, quite loud, from farther up the table. He was speaking to Patrick.

“...great sport, we missed you today.”

“Why didn't you go?” Kate asked. The note of teasing in her voice might have been flirtatious.

“I don't think I'll ever voluntarily kill anything larger than a horsefly again as long as I live,” Patrick said.

Apart from Daisy's dinner partner, there was a silence around the table, the silence that follows an extreme lapse in taste, a silence that no one wished to take the responsibility of breaking.

“...
The Tale of Jemima Puddle-duck
and, of course,
Tom Kitten
.”

Every head at the table was now turned toward Daisy and the man attempting to engage her in conversation. Kate's supercilious smile was followed by a disbelieving shake of her head; Daisy would have given a great deal to be able to smack her.

“You don't seem to have any difficulty polishing off the salmon on your plate,” Lizzie said to Patrick in a tone that suggested to Daisy that she was less fond of him than Kate seemed to be.

“I didn't say I was a vegetarian—in fact, I imagine I'm essentially a carnivore.”

“So?”

“If, after the war—and it seems more than possible I'll be happy to have it—a butcher's shop is my lot, I'll be capable of slaughtering my own meat. And eating it. I won't, however, be doing it socially. Or for sport.”

The exchange did nothing to lighten the gloom now spread fairly evenly over the dinner table; two maids cleared the plates, unnerved by the sudden interest the guests seemed to have developed in their every movement. Daisy now seemed to have the most enviable placement and her dinner partner had never had a more rapt audience.

“She lives at Near Sawrey; she's an old lady now, of course.”

Daisy nodded mutely. The Nugents seemed even more dangerous to her than they had a moment before. She would have liked to say something that showed solidarity with Patrick, but didn't know how. She had a pretty good idea that not only would he not welcome her support but a declaration of similar feelings would not have surprised her hosts. They would see her commonsense attitude toward the killing of rabbits and chickens and her distaste for blood sports to be a manifestation of her inferior birth.

“The inn is in the background of one of the illustrations in
Jemima Puddle-duck
," her companion finished triumphantly.

But Daisy was thinking that as much as she disliked Patrick, his aversion to spilling blood when the war was over was rather more admirable than her own determination to wallow chin high in a bubble bath.

 

ON WET AFTERNOONS
at Daisy's boarding school—an old, academically distinguished, and even rather grand establishment that offered generous scholarships to the daughters of the clergy—there used to be country dancing in the gymnasium. No one enjoyed it. The games mistress, who was in charge, was well coordinated but had a poor sense of rhythm, and the music available was limited to three gramophone records, none of them new: an English country dance whose name Daisy had forgotten, “The Walls of Limerick,” and a Highland reel.

Daisy had been not only bored but embarrassed by these afternoons. She was not graceful and felt ridiculous dancing with other girls, linking arms and spinning around, hopping up and down in her short, boxy, navy blue gymslip. Occasionally she would be sent out of the room and would while away the afternoon standing in the corridor, daydreaming and listening to the scratchy and repetitive music from the gramophone. Daisy tried not to spend too much time outside the door not because there was any further punishment involved—punishments and rewards at this high-minded school were largely theoretical—but because any visit to the headmistress's study would involve the always unspoken reminder that Daisy, as the beneficiary of a scholarship, was expected to provide a good example to the more privileged girls.

Daisy remembered these afternoons as she watched the dancing and could now see the point of learning the steps. She thought her former headmistress would be too fine to say “I told you so,” either in words or by facial expression, but—as with the reduced fees—the thought would fill the room. The games mistress hadn't been nearly so fine, and Daisy could imagine her satisfied smirk.

So far no one had asked Daisy to dance. While this might prove useful ammunition if either of these bygone school-day figures were to materialize, Daisy was embarrassed and humiliated. She wasn't bored, and if no one could see her, she would have been content to watch the dancing. She liked the music; the tunes, familiar from the old gramophone records, now played by the small dance band were alive and energetic. Young women in long dresses, creamy whites and pinks—some of the men wearing kilts and the various traditional accoutrements—danced in the large, high-ceilinged, shabby room. The kilts reminded Daisy that they were not so far from Scotland; many of the guests must have traveled great distances. Bannock, she had the impression, was the only grand house in the neighborhood, and yet the room was full of young men and girls who had come from as far away as London. The gaiety and the carefree, noisy atmosphere of the ball were the result of complicated travel and logistical arrangements—of leave and of lodgings and hospitality provided by friends and neighbors of the Nugents. It explained why Lady Nugent might resent Daisy taking up a guest room but not why half a dozen other such rooms remained empty. Daisy and Mrs. Glynne—Lady Nugent's sister—were the only house guests. She started to wonder why Lady Nugent would have chosen to add the burden of a difficult middle-aged woman to the hard work and arrangements of a dance, and then remembered that the Nugent children were apparently Mrs. Glynne's heirs. It was not only a hastily reworked placement that had seated James beside his aunt.

Daisy had never before been in a house that had a ballroom; she didn't imagine that many still existed. It was a ballroom that could have done with new wallpaper; the original intricately designed colors had faded not unpleasantly into a subdued blended pattern, and the curtains, long, wide, threadbare, had once, it seemed, been a rich, dark brown velvet. Daisy rather liked the yellowish tinge they had now assumed. The gold cord sashes that held the curtains back had fared less well, as had the cords of a similar material that had once held in place the tired draped velvet on the pelmet. Daisy thought Lady Nugent would have done well to have removed the frayed, sad, gold bindings—rather as she, Daisy, had freed the diamond necklace from its frame—and given the curtains a good shake. In the meantime, the reel had ended and dancers were leaving the floor. After a moment the music started again; this time a waltz. No one asked Daisy to dance; no one had spoken to her since the family had finished their coffee and entered the ballroom. Feeling conspicuous and being ignored, Daisy reflected, were trials that should not be imposed simultaneously. Even making small talk with a friendly dowager—there was no shortage of dowagers seated, as was Daisy, at the end of the ballroom and in the adjoining anteroom—would have made her situation more tenable.