This Cold Country (13 page)

Daisy heard the drunken laughter before the man and woman came through the archway behind her. She heard them hesitate as though deciding in which direction to go and a loud, not humorous, laugh suggested that the man had taken advantage of the pause to take what Daisy's family, lacking an adequate word in the vocabulary of their own class, called “a liberty.”

She tensed, fearing they would come in their direction and, after a moment, they did. The woman stumbled over something in the dim light and laughed.

“Pardon,” she said to the unseen object, and laughed again.

The man spoke a few words in a language Daisy did not recognize. The couple did not, as Daisy feared they would, stop next to her and Patrick. But they did not go to the far end of the platform where three men and a woman sat smoking and talking quietly. Instead, the man steered the woman, unsteady on her high heels, into a white tiled corner where the platform became a few feet narrower. Leaning his body toward hers, he trapped her with his weight, and Daisy saw his hand, pale against the woman's black skirt, run down her thigh, his fingers catching and pulling the material up.

“Polish sailor,” Patrick said, “and, although perhaps I'm unfair to her, a tart. Time to turn over.”

Daisy wriggled herself around to face him. She was relieved not to have to witness whatever brutish moment was now being enacted; at the same time, since she had never consciously seen a tart before, she would not have minded, had Patrick not been present, taking a closer look.

“It's said Polish sailors bite girls' nipples off,” he said.

“No!”

“Probably not, but it's a prevalent and widespread belief. I've never met with any firsthand evidence or known anyone who has.”

“That doesn't prove anything—you probably just don't move in the right circles.”

“I imagine it's something made up by Cockney men to keep their women faithful while they're away at the war.”

“Or tarts whose business is off because of the drop in wartime morals.”

Patrick laughed.

“Maybe,” he said. “It's been a long day. We should try to get a little sleep.”

Daisy was tired but overexcited; she was not sure that she could sleep. Nevertheless, she sat up a little and carefully unhooked her precious stockings from her suspender belt, rolling each up, tucking it into its own thicker top to make a more protected package, and put them into the pocket of her jacket. After a moment she unhooked her suspender belt, which, no longer attached to her stockings, felt ridiculous. If Patrick were to run his hand up her thigh, she did not want him to encounter a lump of metal and rubber dangling on the end of an elastic suspender; that eventuality seeming more worrisome than his hand making the transition from her bare leg to inside her knickers.

She lay down again and snuggled beside him in a way suggesting sleep rather than an invitation to further intimacy. It had been a long day and Daisy wanted a little time to think about it. The train journey, the hotel, the theater, dinner at the Ritz—all were jumbled into one dreamlike image. Anticipation, awkwardness, childish excitement at sophistication and elegance, longing, love, and fear all seemed part of one continuous experience, an experience so intense she was unlikely fully to feel it until she had time to think about it later.

The train from Wales to London had been crowded and hot; Daisy stood in the corridor much of the way, her underwear becoming warm and damp and her hair and clothing absorbing the smell of tobacco and the gritty stale air of the railway carriage. Patrick, on the platform at Paddington, had seemed, for a moment, a stranger, barely identifiable in the sea of anonymous uniforms. Then his arms around her and his reassuring, although not yet quite familiar, smell made her feel safe and, best of all, not alone.

Then, again alone at the hotel, Daisy struggled to seem nonchalant as Patrick registered for them both. Once in the room, that nonchalance dropped and, her silence and tentative smile begging for reassurance, she became awkward and silent. Patrick's demeanor Daisy might, in the circumstances, have hesitated to describe as breezy, but she would have been hard put to come up with a better word. She understood that it was the approach to life that was supposed to win the war for England; even so, she would have been grateful if he could have dropped the almost brittle pretense that nothing remarkable or out of the ordinary was taking place. For the first time in her life Daisy felt a drink might help.

A drink did help. So did the theater; Patrick had bought tickets to a show rather than a play. An escapist bit of wartime froth, the early, wartime curtain, as well as the content and the audience full of uniforms, emphasized how temporary was the moment of frivolity. At intermission in the bar, there were not only British uniforms, but also those of the Free French and of the listless and frustrated Canadian airmen who had been languishing in their camps in the English countryside. Daisy had been told all London theaters were full, although she suspected the audiences for the Shakespeare, Wilde, Shaw, and Congreve productions were less raucous at intermission. Daisy found herself moved by the singers of patriotic and sentimental songs and, moments later, laughing at a low comic, then dazzled by the glamour of the chorus girls behind the footlights.

Afterward, walking along Shaftesbury Avenue surrounded by the overexcited, pleasure-seeking crowds of Londoners and the servicemen and -women, all with the sense that every moment remaining to them should be made to count for something and the feeling that all rules were suspended, Daisy thought this was an evening she and Patrick would, in later life, recall as a strange and almost unreal night—a moment of gaiety and respite in the middle of the war.

Every taxi on Shaftesbury Avenue was full; they were to dine at the Ritz, not too far to walk. They passed a series of London landmarks, each significant and symbolic—although not clearly visible in the growing darkness—to the elated Daisy. Piccadilly Circus, Eros protectively boarded up for “the duration”; the Royal Academy, showing an exhibition of firefighters' art. On the other side of Piccadilly, Fortnum & Mason, quiet, elegant, and expensive, inside the shelves stocked with sauces, relishes, and chutneys—the accompaniments to food rather than food itself.

Then the Ritz, another institution Daisy had encountered in novels but never before seen. Any hotel grander than a boardinghouse had, since childhood, seemed to Daisy full of potential for drama and romance; the transient nature of such an establishment speeding up events and outcome, editing from time those long periods of uninterrupted boredom that largely comprise childhood. The transience suggested action, and if the stay turned out to be merely recreational, that in itself suggested a life unwilling to remain trapped in one location and with the resources to ensure that didn't happen. Those resources, Daisy imagined, were primarily financial, but wealth combined with a spirit of adventure or at least a need and desire for change. Daisy felt this way about every Grand Hotel facing a rainy promenade on the south coast of England, so she was slightly surprised to enter the Ritz and tread the carpet between the marble, palms, and uniformed staff of the hotel without witnessing any acts of passion or intrigue. The dining room was, however, all she could have wished. High velvet curtains hid the blackout shades on the windows overlooking St. James's Park, and inside, the uniforms and the sounds of diners determined to have a good time produced what seemed an almost tangible sense of excitement.

Patrick ordered a bottle of red wine. The name of the wine was not familiar to Daisy, but even she knew from the taste that it was old and good. Wine was now increasingly hard to come by, although George, Rosemary's husband, used every evening of his leave to descend to the cellar and bring up a bottle of claret and, every other evening, one of port.

The wine Patrick had ordered was, Daisy knew, expensive and more so now that even the Ritz was bound by the new rationing rules with limits to the price of a meal. The piece of meat on her plate was no larger than it would have been had she and Patrick eaten dinner at one of the new British restaurants, although the vegetables were less pedestrian, better cooked, and presented in a more ornate manner.

“If you were at Aberneth Farm this evening you would probably be eating a better meal,” Patrick said.

This statement was unanswerable unless Daisy was prepared to tie herself up in a longish and boring response. Was she supposed to deny the food at Aberneth Farm was better, although less interesting, than that at the Ritz? To reassure him that this weekend was not, for her, primarily about food?

She did not speak; instead she raised her glass to her lips, sipped her wine, and looked provocatively—she hoped—at him. Valerie would have been proud of her. But now what? Or was the ball firmly in Patrick's court?

He said nothing and smiled. His smile was not only affectionate but amused. He was, perhaps, smiling at her schoolgirlish attempt at flirtation. Daisy opened her mouth to say something to divert him, then closed it for want of inspiration. She could think of nothing to say that would not make her feel more foolish. After a moment, Patrick spoke.

“Daisy,” he said, “are you—” He broke off as his attention was drawn to a disturbance—what Daisy's father would have called a rumpus—at a table two away from the one at which they were sitting.

“You bastard.” The woman's voice was loud, angry, upper class, and, it seemed to Daisy, most likely drunken.

A section of the dining room, eight or ten tables surrounding the couple, became quiet, although no one looked directly at them. Daisy, without turning her head, could see them over Patrick's shoulder. The couple at the table between, somewhat elderly, who had been paying their bill in a leisurely way, now rose, in an unhurried but purposeful manner. With their departure, Daisy had an uninterrupted view of the quarreling pair.

Everyone within earshot listened; the man was now speaking in a low tone to his companion. Daisy could not hear what he was saying, but she could see him run a placatory hand down the woman's arm. She was one of the few diners with an uninterrupted view of the drama; no one else turned his head an inch in that direction. Daisy wondered if anyone else had the intensely embarrassing sense of being in some way—although she didn't know either of the parties involved and presumably, as a firsttime diner at the Ritz, had even less connection with them than any of her neighbors—responsible for the behavior of the glamorous but uninhibited couple. The British diners probably, she thought, felt as she did, although perhaps the Blitz, bombs, death, grief, physical proximity with blood and fear, the camaraderie of patriotism and rationing had diminished the English sense of each man being an island. Or, probably, not.

“Don't touch me. Take your hands off me, you—you unspeakable cad.” Daisy could see the woman withdraw her hand—lovely red nails and a big diamond ring—from that of the man, who was wearing a uniform with a fairly impressive strip of ribbons on it. Quite a lot more than Patrick's, anyway.

The man, older than his companion and, it seemed, considerably less embarrassed than was Daisy, laughed. The woman, who appeared to be maddened beyond words, opened her mouth once or twice and closed it again. Her manicured hand was now on the bodice of her dress, elegant and sophisticated against the gathered crepe de Chine. The color of her nails and that of the dress—crimson, but soft, as though a touch of blue had been used to dilute the intensity of the color and make it more, but less obviously, dramatic—did not match but, instead, blended and complemented each other.

“What's happening?” Patrick asked.

Before Daisy could answer, the woman pushed her chair back violently and stood up. A waiter, who had been discreetly eyeing the table, stepped forward, swiftly and deferentially, to help with her chair, and found himself close enough to be splashed by the contents of the almost full glass of red wine that she threw in the man's face.

Half the dining room was now silent, heads were turning and even those at the farther end of the room, who could neither hear nor see the source of the drama, became quieter. An elderly woman, presumably deaf and unaware of both the sudden silence and the volume of her own voice, continued to confide in her companion some details of the trouble she was having with a new a set of dentures. After a moment, she, too, fell silent.

The woman in the crimson dress, ignoring the waiter, snatched her evening bag from the table, turned abruptly, and seemingly unaware of the eyes of the entire room on her, strode toward the door. She met Daisy's horrified eye as she came abreast with their table, but Daisy knew herself unseen. Then she paused, and for a moment—Daisy registered the possibility with a jolt of fear in her stomach—it seemed she might speak, or appeal, to her or Patrick. Then she turned and, as abruptly as she had left the table, returned to it. A waiter was mopping the apparently unperturbed officer with a napkin. He had dealt with the wine on the man's hair and face and was now attempting to blot the front of his uniform. At the woman's return, the waiter shifted himself almost imperceptibly away although his face remained expressionless. The officer rose an inch or two from his chair.

“My dear—” he started, but stopped as the woman, combining scorn with speed, swept her cigarette case—shagreen and silver, Daisy noticed, impressed and a little envious—from the table, turned again, and apparently unembarrassed, head held high, left the dining room.

Her former companion watched her for a moment, then waved away the waiter holding the wine-stained napkin. He caught the eye of the headwaiter, hovering at a discreet distance, and nodded. Then, thoughtfully, he lifted and drained his own glass; the other diners, recognizing the show was over, began again to murmur and then to talk.

Daisy, a little flushed, was explaining what had happened, behind him, to Patrick, interrupting herself to comment on subsequent events as they took place: “—then she went back and snatched her cigarette case—now he's paying the bill—without so much as looking at him. Who do you think she is? What did he do? He's standing up and taking a cigar out of a case and—he's—oh—”