This Cold Country (19 page)

My dear Daisy,

By now you will be in your new home, and we are eagerly awaiting a letter from you telling us you arrived safely and giving us some sense of Patrick's family.

I imagine for a little while now your letters will be full of interesting news and descriptions of your new life and ours will be full of the dull and familiar. That won't stop me writing, however. I don't want you to be homesick and I miss you less when I am writing to you or planning a letter to you.

Daisy paused to see, in her mind's eye, her father at his desk in his study. The door, of course, closed. When at home, she was on the other side of that closed door. From the time she had gone away to boarding school, and during her year as a Land Girl, she had enjoyed a closer relationship with her father through the written word than she had since she had been young enough to sit on his knee. It did not make her happy to know that he required distance in order to express his affection, but it was one of the reasons she preferred to read his letters in private.

On a practical matter, loath though I was to forgo the traditional prospective son-in-law interview with Patrick, the war and your wishes seemed to make such a conversation irrelevant. So I have no way of knowing what your or, indeed, his circumstances are in the way of material things, money, and property.

Daisy paused and blinked, she knew no more than her father did. She had, during the course of the previous night, waking from an anxious dream—in which she had gone to a race meeting in a strapless cocktail dress—wondered about clothes, money to buy them, and then about her responsibilities as Patrick's wife. She assumed Corisande kept house after a fashion, but who, for instance, paid the bills? And then she wondered how her own—since her wedding—tiny savings would be replenished when they were spent. She had about five pounds left; although she imagined her day to day expenditure would be modest, she would have the normal small needs for money: postage stamps, toothpaste, the collection in church on Sunday morning, and presumably, in time, the occasional present. She and Patrick had never spoken about money and she felt he should have asked her if she had, for instance, enough money for her journey to Ireland. The conversation that had never taken place between him and her father would presumably have touched on Patrick's ability to support a wife, the peacetime questions of prospects and expectations being suspended for the duration. Daisy thought perhaps her father would have been inhibited by the likelihood that Patrick's family were rather better off than he was.

So money was another matter to be, perhaps, touched on lightly in her letter; although a difficult one for Patrick to respond to, if the letter were to be read first by the censor and then, as a group, by the family. Daisy sighed; it was the first sigh of her marriage.

I have been for some years the trustee of a very small bequest made to you by my mother just before she died. There are several reasons I have never mentioned it to you. You became a wage earner soon after you left school and joined the Land Army; although she did not specify it, I always felt your grandmother intended it for you on your marriage; and, most important, she chose to leave some money to you but not to Joan.

Daisy's father was the only person she knew who used semicolons in a letter. She was amused by his precision and at the thought that her life was, at last, shaping up the way she, as a faithful reader of the nineteenth-century novel, thought it should. Marriage, an old and beautiful house, now a will.

At the time I remonstrated with my mother, but she was a stubborn woman, at an age when she could take an unreasonable dislike to a two-year-old child not on her best behavior and disinherit her in favor ofa baby with a sunny disposition. She was, nevertheless, of sound mind in the legal sense. It seemed foolish to cause trouble between you and your sister and I am of two minds—although we should not, of course, resort to deceit—as to when or even whether we should mention it to Joan. It seems more than a little unfair that one unfortunate moment should have so influenced my mother.

Her father should not worry about his letters from the rectory being uninteresting to Daisy. She would now demand a full and complete account of how exactly Joan, at the age of two, had managed to get herself disinherited. Although the wording of her father's letter betrayed nothing, Daisy suspected him of not being devoid of humor about this as yet undescribed event.

The income from the bonds has, of course, been reinvested over the years. At present it comes to about forty pounds a year. Not a fortune, but what used to be called pin money. Unless you wish it to the contrary, I propose to draw last year's income and send you a check for forty pounds and will instruct the bank to credit the quarterly payments to your bank account as soon as you let me know where you have opened one. If you have no use or need for this money, it could be left to grow and would in time make something useful for a daughter or younger son. Please let me know what you decide.

The heroines whose adventures Daisy most enjoyed reading all had private incomes. It wasn't necessary for them to be rich: too much money, for example, made Emma Woodhouse a little unsympathetic. Daisy read accounts of Dickensian poverty or of the lives of Mrs. Gaskell's Industrial Revolution mill workers with sympathy and pity, but not with the pleasure she experienced knowing that Catherine Morland had set off for Bath with ten guineas in her reticule. Now she, too, was a woman of means, however modest. She felt grateful to her unremembered grandmother, and to her father for his well-timed letter and for his thoughtful decision to start her off with a whole year's income. She would write to him and walk down to the post office after lunch. Taking, of course, a letter to Patrick.

 

“GRANDMA, IT'S CORISANDE.”

Maud was half asleep. Every bone in her body felt loose and warm; her bed held her as comfortably as though she were floating in warm water, the pillows on which her head rested soft and comforting. Last night the rheumatism in her leg had been acting up and her sleep had been intermittent and restless; now she was dozing, in the ideal state between sleep and wakefulness, her body free of pain in a way it never was while she was fully awake, her mind able to steer her thoughts, avoiding unhappy memories in favor of the half-dreams in which she now chose to live.

“Grandma, it's Corisande,” she heard again, a long moment after the now almost forgotten interruption. “I've brought Daisy to meet you.”

Daisy. There had been a Daisy—a daughter of the consul in Copenhagen—or Berlin—a girl with curly hair and freckles, but the young men had liked her. The third secretary, a young man from Norfolk, had danced attendance
—What was his name? Never mind
—and at the embassy picnic by the lake...

“Daisy,” the voice, probably her granddaughter's, repeated, “Patrick's new wife?”

A short silence and then she heard a door close quietly and she sank further into sleep.

***

MAUD NUGENT, DAISY
thought, must once have been beautiful. Her hair, now thinning, was a pure white. A whiteness devoid of the yellowish tinge usual in gray hair, or of the tint of blue employed to counteract that yellowness. Her nose was thin, straight, distinguished, and her skin pale and unmarked. Since Maud's eyes were closed, Daisy could not see what color they were, but she imagined they were clear and blue. One hand, longfingered, slender, heavily veined, lay across her neck; the fingernails were short and buffed.

Daisy could not tell whether the old lady was asleep or whether her lack of consciousness had some other significance. No one had told her anything about Mrs. Nugent, but they had all managed to suggest there was something unusual that Daisy would see for herself. But all she could see was Patrick's grandmother asleep and failing to react to Corisande's thoughtless interruption. And she could think of no reason other than rudeness or apathy that had caused Corisande to wait almost a week before attempting this surely no more than ritual introduction.

What did the hints, the half sentences, signify? Was Maud—and even here Daisy hesitated. What was she supposed to call the old lady? Mrs. Nugent, she supposed. But normally there would be a response asking her to call her—what? Grandma, like Corisande had? Surely not. Was Maud—Mrs. Nugent—in a coma? Terminally ill? Senile? And who, in heaven's name, would tell her? Another question for Patrick? Or Ambrose? Or should she first ask Patrick if she could question Ambrose about his—their—family? Daisy followed Corisande out of the room, by far the warmest in the house, holding back a silent, interior fit of hysteria. As they crossed the landing, an old woman carrying a tray came out of the corridor that led to the back stairs.

“Ah, Philomena,” Corisande said vaguely. She did not introduce Daisy. Corisande started downstairs; Daisy had the impression that her sister-in-law had forgotten about her. She went to her own bedroom for a Nugent-free half hour before lunch.

What, if anything, did they think of her? Of the sudden marriage? Of this stranger parked with them for the duration of the war? And Patrick, what had he thought? Why had he married her? She felt that he loved her, but with a love that would in peacetime have been the preliminary to a courtship. A courtship, during which, as they grew to know each other better, their love would have grown into something more mature or, if it didn't, they would have gone their separate ways and avoided a terrible mistake. She didn't ask herself why she had married him. She had made a choice—not quite consciously—between marrying Patrick and a future in which she had not married Patrick. A future that would not necessarily offer many choices. She would be part of the second generation left short of men by two world wars. Daisy knew that the idea of girls having much say about the direction their lives were to take was a relatively recent one. And that choice—for men or women—tended to be inextricably entwined with privilege.

What choices, if any, had Maud Nugent made to end up thus?

 

“
WHY DO THE
vineyards in Patrick's letter have Irish names?”

Corisande stared at Daisy for a moment; her expression, as usual, lacked warmth. Daisy, although she would have welcomed a greater feeling of affection from her sister-in-law, did not take her coldness personally.

“Because of the Wild Geese.”

The wild geese? Daisy waited, but Corisande's mouth had closed in its usual discontented line and her eyes looked at something far away; it was as though she were listening for the telephone, a knock at the door, the sound of hooves on cobblestones. Daisy glanced toward Mickey and found him leaning forward in his chair, in the manner of a shy child who knows the answer to a question posed, perhaps rhetorically, by the teacher. After a moment, and a flick of his eye toward his tensely daydreaming sister, he began.

“The Wild Geese were Irish exiles—after the Treaty of Limerick—well, actually the first Wild Geese were the Earls—the Flight of the Earls after the Battle of Kinsale in 1601?” He paused to see how much of what he was telling her was familiar to Daisy. None of it was and she felt ashamed.

“I went to school in England; we didn't really learn any Irish history.”

“Why don't you find her something in the library after lunch?” Corisande asked impatiently. She glanced with distaste at the uneaten remains of the rhubarb crumble on her plate, and stood up. “God, I'd kill for a cup of real coffee,” she said under her breath and, apparently oblivious to the other two, left the dining room.

The library was darker than the dining room. Mickey switched on the overhead light, a heavy chandelier; Daisy noticed, as she had not the night she'd arrived, that two of the bulbs were burned out.

“I don't know how much history—English history—you know,” Mickey said.

“Just what I learned at school. I remember most of it pretty well. We tended to do some parts more than others. The Tudors and Stuarts seemed to get a lot of attention.”

“Good, good.” Mickey's animation made her feel slightly uncomfortable. Surely history, unless of course one was living in it, as she supposed they all were, was a dryer subject than Mickey apparently considered it?

“If you take the Reformation as a starting point—I know it's impossible to draw a line in history and say it all starts here; but if you could, the Reformation is the place to do it.”

“All right.” Daisy was thinking back to fifth-form history. Henry VIII, six wives, taking on the Pope, England becoming Protestant.

“As soon as there were two religions, it was all over for Ireland,” Mickey said. “Until then the conquerors and colonists became enthusiastically Irish in about five minutes. There was a banal phrase in our history books about how they ‘became more Irish than the Irish themselves' and most of the old families in Ireland, the pre-English families, are Norman. But as soon as there were two religions instead of intermarriage, you got slaughter.”

“And the Wild Geese? The Earls?” Daisy asked. “They were fleeing religious persecution?”

Mickey paused, for a moment distracted, he gave his head a little shake before he started to speak again. How old, Daisy wondered, was Mickey. Corisande, she thought, might be twenty-eight, twenty-nine, a year or two older than Patrick. Mickey, despite an eccentricity of manner she associated with middle or old age, could not be more than three years older than she herself was.

Daisy missed the first part of Mickey's explanation. She was realizing that Mickey wasn't considering what path in life he would take, preparing—perhaps a tad lethargically—to spread his wings, deciding what his future would be. This was it. Mickey's plan, or lack of it, for the rest of his life, was a continuation of what was in front of her eyes. This was Mickey's home. They would grow old together. And Corisande—Daisy put off thinking that one through. She was not, under any circumstances, going to live out her life in the same house as Corisande Nugent.