This Cold Country (16 page)

W
HEN DAISY WOKE
, the sea was calm. The small cabin was stuffy and smelled of unwashed bodies and clothing. Putting on her shoes and carrying her handbag, Daisy quietly left the cabin; it seemed important she should do so without waking her companions.

The air in the bathroom was foul; the floor, basins, and lavatories filthy. Daisy held her breath as she relieved herself and hastily brushed her teeth. All other washing would have to wait for cleaner surroundings.

The deck was wet and, apart from a couple of seamen, deserted. It had rained during the night and although the boat itself was redolent with the squalor of travelers—cigarette ends in the scuppers, beer bottles rolling with the mild swell, and a distressing smell of vomit—the wind from the Irish Sea was fresh, smelling of salt and rain. Daisy made her way to the bow and watched the gray outline of Rosslare harbor forming through the lighter gray mist. She watched small fishing boats setting out and listened to the shrieking gulls overhead. Although she was hungry, dirty, and tired, she felt her spirits rising.

This is it. The place I was always meant to be,
Daisy thought, her feeling more of recognition than of pleasure. The thought so clear that for a moment she thought she had spoken the words aloud.

 

RAIN BEAT AGAINST
the windows of Maud Nugent's bedroom, the panes a little thinner than they had been when the house was built a hundred and ninety years before, eroded by exposure to storms blowing in from the Atlantic. The wind rattled the window frames but the sounds, familiar to Maud, did not disturb her sleep. Nor did the rhythmic clicking of Philomena's knitting needles impinge on her dreams. It was not until an oak log, burning since just after breakfast, broke in two and slid down in the grate that she sighed and turned toward the sound. She had been dreaming of Princess Yusupov's black pearls and was once again eighteen and in St. Petersburg. She was wearing a ball gown that had been passed down from her eldest sister, and was waltzing with an undersecretary. He was neither good-looking nor charming; nor did he perform this social duty with much real or simulated enthusiasm. Her father was the ambassador; the ambassador had five daughters; if one of these daughters were short of a partner at a ball, the undersecretaries were obliged to dance with the wallflower. At least once.

Maud did not, in either her dreams or her memory, romanticize her place at these balls. She was there as a guest, but any pleasure she took was the pleasure of a spectator. The Yusupov black pearls adorned the princess's throat; around her own neck was a necklace of coral and seed pearls. Life at the British Embassy had been no more comfortable than it was here at Dunmaine; the beds had been no softer, the rooms rather colder, and there had always been the fear and possibility of rats. Maud had been awoken more than once by a rat running across her bed. She had not even been happier then. The past was not better; but it was more real.

Reassured by the glow of the fire, the soft light casting shadows of the fireguard onto the rug, the anticipation of the cup of tea and biscuit that Philomena would soon carry up from the kitchen, Maud settled down again to sleep. She had gone to bed at the outbreak of war and had no intention of getting up again until peace was proclaimed.

 

THE TRAIN JOURNEY
was as pleasant as the channel crossing had been nasty. Daisy had a carriage to herself. Although she suspected were she to beat the cushions on the upholstered seats, clouds of dust would have risen, train grime, after the squalor of a rough crossing, seemed cozy and cheerful.

She ate breakfast on the train and from the first sip of tea and mouthful of Irish railway bacon and eggs, she felt stronger and even more cheerful. The countryside outside her window was green and damp. The mist in which Rosslare had been shrouded had lifted a little, but enough of it lingered to soften the outlines of the hedges and fields, the overgrown ditches and stonefaced banks, the hills covered with gorse, the cattle on the road heavily plodding toward a farmyard to be milked. Coming into one of the many stations at which they stopped, Daisy had time to look at a pond in a field beside a road. It was surrounded by reeds and willows, rooted in the water. A moorhen with two chicks was making her way around the edge of the reeds, moving with sudden darts, ducking her head into the water. At the other end of the pond, water lilies were in bloom.

 

MICKEY NUGENT PROPPED
a folded copy of an old
Illustrated London News
against the garage window and pushed a spanner against the bottom of the page to stop it sliding off. The corners of the window were darkened by rags of old cobwebs, but the dead flies on the sill seemed to have died of old age or starvation. A fine coating of barnyard dust covered both window and sill.

The shower outside dictated an indoor task, but Mickey would have preferred to potter in the garden shed, prodding the damp earth around seedlings, smoking and thinking, or even rearranging pots and tools into a semblance of order. He planted living things in the potting shed and they thrived; the dry dust of the garage, even without the desiccated bluebottles supine on the ledge, gave a less encouraging message. And Mickey mistrusted machinery. Still, the imminent arrival of his brother's new wife predicated embarking on this task, even if—and Mickey's life was full of unfinished tasks—he did not complete it that day. “The motor car is out of commission for the duration” would do the trick, although “up on blocks” made the possibility of meeting Daisy at Clonmel absolutely out of the question. Mickey had squirreled away a couple of gallons of petrol, not with any specific objective in mind, but he was sure that before the war ended he would find a better use for it than meeting a stranger at a railway station.

Wash, especially under wings and running board. Polish.
That part was clear enough, and Mickey, who liked simple repetitive tasks that allowed him to think about other things, had done the job thoroughly.

Grease and oil all chassis lubricating points, road springs, brake operating mechanism, and engine controls.
Mickey wished there was someone helping him. He knew in theory what a chassis was, road springs were presumably the things that prevented spine jarring and teeth grinding when the car went over a bump; the terms “brake” and “engine” did not present a problem, but “operating mechanism” and “controls” seemed to be rather blithely thrown in. Perhaps he should come back to that part later. He returned to the window ledge and read the next instruction.

Run engine until warm; drain radiator and cylinder block.
The irony was that this information was not from a government pamphlet but part of an advertisement for an expensive motorcar. The manufacturers, who had no means of selling another car until after the war, kept their name in the public's mind with instructions on how to care for the model they had until a later one came on the market. After the war, Mickey thought, advertisements would hardly be necessary in order to induce any member of the British public with two coins to rub together to buy the now unavailable goods they hankered after.

The elegantly framed advertisement was for a Hawker Siddeley. Mickey had assumed the same principles would hold true for the modest Ford Standard that stood, gleaming, in the garage; now he was not so sure. He felt the need to consult another person; he didn't want assistance and he probably wouldn't take any advice proffered, but talking it through with somebody else often clarified his thoughts. In the meantime he would consult the encyclopedia in the library.

 

DAISY DOZED; OUTSIDE
the window, fields and trees sped by. She had been delighted by them and enchanted by glimpses of castles and ruined mills standing, in silhouette, on distant hills. Closer, old stone bridges crossed small rivers and streams and Daisy had admired them all, loved them with the mysterious feeling of recognition she had felt at the moorhen's pond. The feeling of coming home.

I am coming home,
she thought contentedly.
A new home, but my home now.
After a while she slept, tired from the uneasy night on the boat and the strain of the previous days. Her sleep was, not unpleasantly, interrupted by stationmasters' voices calling out the names of the stations at which they stopped—Wellington Bridge, Campile, Waterford, Mooncoin, Carrick-on-Suir, Kilsheelan— followed by the slamming of train doors, and the
che-che-che
of the engine leaving the station, and then the rhythmic click of the wheels on the tracks, lulling her back to a deeper sleep.

 

PHILOMENA FINISHED A
row and reversed her needles. She was warm, comfortable, and a little sleepy in the armchair by the fire. She was older than Maud, but did not think in terms of retirement, nor did she think it particularly unfair that her employer slept while she worked. The room in which she now spent most of her days was larger, warmer, and more cheerful than her own kitchen and seemed like the nursery that she had both worked and lived in when she had come to Dunmaine as a fifteen-year-old girl. The light that she knitted by was dim and strained her eyes, but since she did not have electricity in her cottage at the gate, she did not feel the lack of adequate light. Two more rows and she would go down the back stairs to bring up the tray with tea and biscuits for elevenses.

The terms of her employment had never been fully spelled out. She took full charge and responsibility for Maud Nugent, but the Nugents did not imagine she spent every moment in the chair beside the fire. They understood she would delegate the duty to a daughter or even a granddaughter, and no one was surprised if there was a not quite familiar face on the body in the chair. Even Maud thought of her nurse or companion—although she did not think of her by either not quite accurate description—as Philomena or one of Philomena's daughters. Preoccupied and self-absorbed as she was, Maud did not bestow on any of them an identity other than being an extension of the person of the old nanny.

***

WHEN MICKEY RETURNED
—the encyclopedia had been very helpful; it was old and the description and illustration of a motor car was basic, uncomplicated, and assumed no prior knowledge on the part of the reader—he found his sister standing outside the garage.

Corisande was wearing a light tweed coat and skirt and her hat was small, fashionable, and sported a small wispy veil. Over one shoulder she had her binocular case, tags of different colors and degrees of fadedness attached to one worn, brown side. She looked elegant and very pretty, but Mickey did not for a moment consider telling her so.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, his question, as was so often the case, a play for time. Mickey was not quick thinking—the slowness of his thought caused by neurosis rather than stupidity—but even he had no difficulty in guessing what Corisande, with binoculars and a hat, was doing standing by the motor car.

A lifetime of being Mickey's sister, rather than any inherent good nature, stopped Corisande from pointing out that all the evidence of her intentions was before her brother's eyes. Any interruption to Mickey's train of thought caused a momentary startled look, followed by his return to the beginning of the conversation or monologue. Sometimes, when Corisande was bored and waspish she would tease him by setting him in motion before sending him back to go. It always took Mickey a while to realize what she was doing; when he did, he would silently leave the room and not be seen until the family reassembled for the next meal.

“Clonmel,” she said briskly. “Our new sister-in-law is arriving and coincidentally there's racing this afternoon.”

Mickey regarded Corisande silently for a moment while he assembled his arguments in order of validity, then effectiveness, self-interest, and moral indignation—the last two overlapping—and eventually he said, “You want me to drive you to Clonmel so that you can go racing?”

“I'd like you to take me to Clonmel, where I would, in fact, go racing, while you meet what's-her-name and bring her home. I'll come to the station with you, if you like.”

“We don't have enough petrol,” Mickey said, weakening already at the prospect of Corisande taking the responsibility of welcoming this new and, to him, very unsettling addition to their family. It didn't mean he had to make it easy for his sister. As he spoke he became aware of a faint smell of petrol and, simultaneously, of the two-gallon can at Corisande's feet. There was also, he noticed irrelevantly, on the garage floor a small patch of oil, possibly of his own making, and a sprinkle of very old sawdust.

“I've thought of that.”

“Where did you get it?” Mickey asked, his voice rising as it occurred to him that his sister had discovered and raided his tiny stash.

“You know.”

“What?”

Corisande did not repeat herself; she knew, and she knew that Mickey knew. He had heard her. Instead she waited until he had thought her reply through.

“I borrowed some from the farm,” she then said.

“Borrowed?”

Corisande chose not to dignify this quibble with an answer. They both knew that the green-tinted petrol was designated by the government for farm machinery and vehicles.

Aware that he was all but defeated and suddenly bored by the process, Mickey extended a hand to the petrol can.

“All right. Just this once.”

Corisande did not move. She had expected a longer battle of wills with her brother and had budgeted time for it.

“I said all right. I'll bring the car round to the hall door when I'm ready.”

Corisande glanced at him sharply. He had given in too quickly and some piece of information was missing. Then, remembering she had more important things to do than score points off her brother, she smiled and turned to leave.

“The car is lovely and clean,” she said.

Mickey said nothing; he was waiting for her to leave so he could substitute the green farm petrol for one of the cans of legal petrol in his secret stash. He couldn't that moment imagine the circumstances in which he would use the green petrol, but he had no intention of being had up for using the green either on the way to collect his new sister-in-law or, worse still, with her as a witness and without Corisande to charm the garda on the return half of the journey.