This Cold Country (18 page)

“Pull your knickers up, Agnes,” he said briskly. “Time to go home.”

To Daisy's impressed amazement, the girl, without opening her eyes, slowly rose to her feet and did as she had been told. But Ambrose had already turned and was looking at a large salmon mounted on a dull wooden board on the wall. He was peering forward, hands clasped behind his back, in the dim light to read the small plaque beneath it.

“And so to bed,” Daisy said, under her breath.

It had been a long and interesting day.

 

“WHO ARE THE
Black and Tans?” Daisy asked.

“A hunt on the Limerick and Tipperary borders,” Corisande said, her attention visibly not on Daisy.

There was a yip of laughter from Edmund.

“I think Daisy means ‘Who were the Black and Tans?'” he said.

Corisande's face was expressionless as she buttered a piece of toast, but Daisy sensed she would not quickly be forgiven for making her sister-in-law look foolish.

“English people,” Edmund said, “often say, rather defensively, that the Irish hold a grudge forever. And then they say something about Cromwell. The Black and Tans are a little harder to laugh off. They were twenty years ago.”

“They were a supplementary police force,” Mickey, sitting at one end of the dining-room table, said. “Pretty rough types—it wouldn't be inaccurate to call them mercenaries—recruited in England during the Troubles. With an unofficial charter to give the IRA more than a taste of their own medicine. Brutal, drunken, trigger-happy, and out of control.”

At least Daisy didn't have to ask what the Troubles were. She knew it to be a euphemism for the war of ambush, assassination, and house burning waged by the IRA against those who represented English power in Ireland. That war had taken place before Ireland had become a Free State in 1921. The official euphemistic term for the war now being fought in most other parts of the world was the “Emergency.”

“A completely indefensible moment in England's uneven relationship with Ireland,” Edmund continued. “We might as well try to make you feel guilty your first morning. Why do you ask?”

Daisy had descended to breakfast after a wakeful night during which her head had spun with a multitude of unanswered questions. Most of them—the more important ones—either because those present at the breakfast table were ignorant of the answers, or because the questions required a delicate approach, would have to wait. In the meantime, she was trying to fill in some of the enormous blanks and frightening gaps in her knowledge of Patrick and his family.

“Patrick said something about them—staying with your cousins—and I forgot to ask him afterward,” Daisy said, thinking about the overheard breakfast conversation at the house party in the Lake District. The courtship had been so brief and so urgent that she had never asked Patrick for an explanation of the ostensible—but clearly not actual—reason for the flare-up between him and Aunt Glad. And she had not asked him later about the real cause of the row. The spats between Patrick and the Nugent sisters she thought were the manifestation of invisible tensions—sexual or romantic-—but the animosity between Patrick and his honorary aunt seemed deeper and more mysterious.

Edmund laughed and even Corisande and Mickey smiled knowingly. Daisy looked to Edmund for an explanation.

“The usual trap. We all fall into it in England. Someone says something stupid or provocative and you find yourself defending positions that would be completely contrary to the ones you would hold in Ireland. The little I know of the Nugents, I would probably become an honorary Sinn Féiner in their presence,” Edmund said, adding, as Daisy still looked mystified, “The extreme Irish nationalist party.”

Daisy would have liked to question Edmund further, but Corisande sighed, so she crossed the room to the sideboard and helped herself to a large plate of bacon and eggs—breakfast apparently intended to be a more substantial meal than dinner at Dunmaine—and sat down. There was silence until Edmund put his napkin beside his plate, stood up, kissed Corisande on her forehead without any reciprocal gesture of affection on her part, and left the room.

Corisande seemed happy enough to allow Daisy to finish her greasy eggs and to chew her soggy toast in silence. The tea was hot and strong, and Daisy had enough to think about to be content to eat without talking. Nevertheless, she wondered a little at Corisande's lack of hospitable conversation; her sister-in-law had not even asked if she had slept well. It seemed that there was a similarity in manners between the Westmoreland and Irish Nugents.

She had slept deeply rather than well—her mind had been racing even while asleep—not only exhausted but heavily sedated with alcohol. Perhaps Corisande was hung over; Daisy glanced sideways at her and decided this was not the case. She recognized the look—less than an expression—on Corisande's face. It was one her mother habitually wore. Just getting through the moment, the day, until she could get back to and concentrate on whatever it was that held her entire interest. Which was? There were more important facts to be uncovered, but Daisy thought they all tied together, and that she was unlikely to be given any answers before breakfast was cleared away.

Daisy's mother was tired, defeated, and disappointed; none of these descriptions fit Corisande. But the bored, irritated, sealed-off, intensely preoccupied look was the same. Corisande's complete lack of interest in Daisy suggested the preoccupation did not pertain to family or home. Nor did it suggest—it was not soft enough and far too restless—a life ruled by love or sexual passion. Daisy recalled Corisande's response to Edmund's quietly cleared throat the night before and knew Corisande was determined to marry him. She also knew, with absolute certainty, that Corisande wanted to marry Edmund because she needed to be married. She needed to be married, and she had no alternative suitable man in her sights and no plan for how to live out the rest of her life if she did not marry. It also seemed quite possible that Edmund was aware of this.

“Who is Agnes?” Daisy asked, both to break the silence and as a preliminary to a further question about how Ambrose and the drunken girl had got home. Petrol, other than the farm issue, Daisy had learned the night before, being available only for doctors and priests.

During Corisande's silence it occurred to Daisy that Corisande might be jealous of any girl Ambrose brought to the house.

Corisande sighed again—there had been a long enough pause for Daisy to assume that Agnes was not the cause of the sigh—then she got up and crossed to the side table where the remains of breakfast were being kept warm in two chafing dishes. Turning a small knob at the base of the wicks, she extinguished the squat blue flames. On her way back toward the table, she reacted to something, unseen by Daisy or Mickey, outside the window. Mickey got up and left the room. Shortly afterward there was a hollow metallic sound similar to the one made by the car the evening before when it had driven over the grid of hollow pipes that prevented cattle in the unfenced pasture from wandering up to the house. Soon there came the crunching of a bicycle on gravel.

A moment or two later, Mickey came in.

“Post,” he said.

Corisande's eyes followed Mickey as he handed two letters to Daisy and tossed the rest—thin, buff envelopes—onto the sideboard where a pile of perhaps ten or twelve similar missives lay. Daisy could see that the arrival of the post was an important moment in the day for Corisande. Not because she expected a letter from Edmund—he had left Dunmaine only minutes ago—but because it was the moment most likely to offer surprises, opportunities, invitations, and news from the outside world.

Daisy's letters were addressed to Mrs. Patrick Nugent. She was for a moment startled; it was the first time she had seen her new name on an envelope. Both letters bore English stamps. One was in Patrick's handwriting, the other in her father's small, elegant scrawl. If Corisande and Mickey had not been looking at her with uninhibited expectation, she would have taken both letters back to her bedroom, settled herself comfortably in the armchair and, after a moment of concentration and readying herself, she would have slowly opened Patrick's envelope and even more slowly read the letter. Now she found herself having unceremoniously to tear open and read her husband's letter under the scrutiny of strangers—even if those strangers were his brother and sister.

She read through the letter swiftly, resentful that the moment should be taken from her, skimming, so that she could read an edited version to Corisande and Mickey and then take her letter upstairs to read in the manner it deserved. But the letter, although affectionate and long, contained nothing she could not have read aloud. There was no reminder of passionate or tender moments shared, no extravagant declarations of love, no longing for the moment they would once more find themselves in each other's arms. Wordlessly, she handed the letter to Corisande; her father's letter, at least, she could read privately.

Patrick's letter sounded quite different when read aloud by his sister; Corisande caught his tone in a way her own reading of it had lacked. Corisande's inflection made it sound conversational, but conversational in a way that addressed the whole family; the letter had not been intended solely for Daisy.

Daisy felt angry and jealous, and when Corisande read, “‘last letter for a while that I'll have the luxury of writing without the censor peering shortsightedly over my shoulder and breathing adenoidally in my ear,'” she realized all future letters she received from Patrick would not only have been read by one more person but have been written in even more inhibiting circumstances than had this one. Perhaps next time, she thought, already composing her reply although she had not yet read his letter properly, he could enclose a separate missive for her. But surely that possibility would have already occurred to him. Or would it? How little she knew of him. Maybe he had decided to give all members of his family equal attention. Maybe he was right to do so. Daisy's time—it might be years—at Dunmaine without him would pass more smoothly without dissension, jealousy, and perceived favoritism. And if he never came back? Daisy brushed that thought from her mind and started to compose a numbered list of questions for her own letter as she half listened to Corisande.

“‘ ... training we thought we would be sent to France. I'm looking forward to seeing the vineyards with incongruous Irish names and the trees with clumps of mistletoe.'”

Do you love me?
she would write.
Is the house haunted?
Would that really be her second question? France—not France, of course—but where? That it was not a safe posting she had inferred from his complete silence about where he was going.
Why is everyone so curious about whether I've met your grandmother yet?
Probably it would be more efficient to ask only questions with a yes or no answer. Or ones with a choice of possible answers composed by herself; he could finish his letters with a series of numbers. Or would the censor cross out anything that seemed to be—that was—a secret code? Maybe one question a letter; she was now unbearably impatient to take her letter and go up to her room. At that moment Corisande stopped reading and Mickey put down his teacup and got up.

“Back to work,” he said, rubbing his hands.

Work? Another question. Mickey seemed to work outside; his clothes were earth-stained and Daisy noticed he had left a small lump of fairly dry mud from his boots on the dining-room carpet. But it seemed to be something he was pleased about, so it was probably not a chore. Daisy was confident this, at least, she would have had explained by the end of the day. She imagined it was a subject he would be happy to discuss, although no doubt Corisande's eyes would glaze over while Daisy was being enlightened.

Taking her letters in her hand, Daisy went upstairs. Her bed had been made and the room looked tidy. One of the two bedrooms separated by the landing with the Venetian window at the front of the house, it seemed to have been the best spare room. Now, she supposed, it was hers and Patrick's. The evening before she had found Patrick's old room with its simple bed, some photographs, worn silver-backed hairbrushes, some mementos meaningless to Daisy, and a saucer with keys, buttons, and low denomination coins—their design still unfamiliar. She had opened the door of the wardrobe and sniffed the tweed jackets and solitary, worn gray suit, hoping for a trace of his smell, but there was only the camphor scent of old mothballs. She'd wondered who had put them there.

Their new room was large, with a big bed and an inadequate reading lamp. There was a chaise longue, Edwardian, a little lumpy but designed for the bedroom or boudoir of a married woman.

Daisy took a pillow from her bed and settled comfortably with her letters. A couple of cushions and a shawl would make the chaise a place she could happily recline and read. A window behind it provided enough light, at least during the day, and presumably she was meant to spend her evenings downstairs with the family. Against the wall between the two windows overlooking the fields—park?—there was a small, rather pretty, writing desk. All it needed was a chair. She assumed no one would object to her making small changes in this room although it would probably be polite not to turn it into a bed-sitting-room; she imagined for a moment a gas fire and a hot plate, and it occurred to her that during a southwestern Irish winter such additions might not be unwelcome.

Wriggling herself comfortable, Daisy opened her father's letter, saving Patrick's to read again a little later when she had settled herself enough to read it at her own pace and to try to have a sense of Patrick as she did so. Her father's letter covered both sides of a single sheet. She wondered how he had filled so much space; she had left home only four days ago. Her life had changed immeasurably but, as most children do, she imagined not much happened when she wasn't present.