This Cold Country (20 page)

“As soon as there were two religions instead of intermarriage you got slaughter. Henry VIII was stuck with being a Protestant; Edward died before he could do much harm; Bloody Mary was a Catholic; Elizabeth I a fierce Protestant. Religion was brutal but unambiguous. Then came the Stuarts—mixed marriages, favorites, conflicts of private and official beliefs, and no one knowing quite where he stood. Cromwell and the Protectorate were clear enough, of course, but the Restoration, Charles II, and the Roman Catholic James II really did for Ireland. When the Protestant William of Orange beat the Catholic James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, Sarsfield—do you know who he was?”

Daisy shook her head.

“Patrick Sarsfield—one of our more satisfying patriots. The first Earl of Lucan?”

“Same family as in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade'?”

“Hm. Well, more or less.”

Mickey's usually expressionless face lit up and Daisy was encouraged to add a thought she had had before but never clearly enough to put into words.

“I imagine that's what a good—a really good—education feels like. That you can see how everything connects. For me it's only these odd threads that join and hint at a pattern I can't see.”

But she had gone too far. Mickey was looking at her nervously although she could see he was reluctant completely to let go of someone who might share his interests. Daisy wondered if this might be a good moment to ask about the bats.

“Yes, well—Lucan is close to Dublin. Soon after the Battle of the Boyne and the sieges of Limerick—you'll find all that in this history book—” and Mickey took a battered and worn book from the bookcase, “Irish soldiers went to France and later all over Europe. Some of them made good, although most of them ended sadly. So you get the occasional Irish name on a French vineyard.”

Daisy crossed the room and took the book. There were traces of a partially erased name on the flyleaf; an ill-formed hand had written the words “third form” deeply into the paper; the book seemed to have belonged to more than one person before it had become Mickey's. Unless he was in the habit of treating his books very shabbily.

“The local priest, Father Delaney, and I have talks about history and politics. He gave me this. It's a textbook taught in the national schools all over Ireland. If you start with the accession of Elizabeth I—”

“I'll start at the beginning, and then I'll try and connect it to the English history I learned at school.”

“You may be surprised how differently they read,” Mickey said. He was moving toward the door. “Some of the Irish in France were successful enough to get themselves executed during the French Revolution and there were some Nugents who did well in Austria—probably distant relations. Very distant.”

And he was gone. Daisy, still holding the shabby book, stood at the window looking out. At the end of the graveled area in front of the house, there was a chain looped between four stone pillars. Behind there was a steep drop, too deep for Daisy to see from where she stood; apart from the chain, presumably to prevent someone driving a car over the small cliff, there were no fences, hedges or visible barriers of any kind for as far as her eye could see. Mickey, now wearing muddy gumboots, crossed her line of vision. She watched him go around the end of the house and out of sight; he did not look up at the library window.

The library was cold; a fire had been set in the fireplace but Daisy hesitated to light it. Not only because there probably was some traditional time for fire lighting at Dunmaine, but because she suspected there might be a knack to opening the flue or warming the chimney and she feared filling the house with smoke. At home her father had firm opinions about how fires were set, lit, and maintained, and he did not encourage females—the rest of his household—to fiddle with his handiwork.

Daisy felt forlorn. Reminding herself her husband was away at war and the feeling perfectly natural but not to be indulged, she crossed the room and sat at the desk at the far end. A letter to Patrick and one to her father, then a walk to the village and the nearest post box.

Seated at the desk, aware of a draft about her ankles, Daisy drew a sheet of writing paper toward her and put it on the blotter. The blotting paper bore traces of previous letters, Daisy wondered if any of them had been written by Patrick. For a moment she considered taking the blotter to the looking glass over the fireplace and reading in the reflection the words and phrases from past letters, but instead she reached for the ornate stamp that impressed the address on the paper. Then the pen and the inkpot, but the nib was encrusted with dark blue rust and the ink dried out. She looked at the writing paper, the disused implements, and knew a moment of fear. As though she were Sleeping Beauty and the last in the palace to fall asleep.

Daisy pushed the chair away from the desk and got to her feet. She reminded herself of her exultation on the train traveling through Ireland, of the excitement of her first evening, spent in that very room. She told herself she was English, had been a member of His Majesty's Forces, that she was the daughter of a Church of England rector. That was a new one, and it made her smile. She would write her letters upstairs. She would commandeer a chair for her desk. She would explore the house, have some questions answered, and if no one was willing to introduce her to Patrick's grandmother at a time when the old lady was not asleep, she would take the law into her own hands, find her new relative, and introduce herself. She did not consider Mickey, or even Corisande, hostile, but that did not prevent them being dangerous to her. She could feel apathy, like the damp draft at her ankles or the Virginia creeper on the front of the house, ready to subsume her, freeze her, bind her, deaden her, and render her passive.

“No,” she said aloud. “I'm too young, too healthy, too English, too much in love.” The first two, at least, sounded convincing. She took most of the writing paper and all of the envelopes and went upstairs to her room.

 

AFTER LUNCH EACH
day the household retired. Daisy didn't know what the servants did, but they disappeared until shortly before tea was brought in. Mickey went outdoors, Corisande and Daisy to their rooms. The house was never completely silent. It creaked as the wood expanded and contracted with the seasons; the wind shook windows and whistled in the chimneys on stormy days. But no sound was made by a human between two and four o'clock.

Corisande, Daisy assumed, was resting. But what did that mean? Neither she nor Daisy was young enough or old enough to need a nap. Maybe Corisande slept to shorten the day, to reduce the time she had to wait until her real life began. Daisy wrote to Patrick and then lay on her bed reading until it was time to go downstairs for tea. Sometimes in the mornings she went for a walk: sometimes it seemed too great an effort. She was aware of a lassitude creeping over her. She, too, was marking time, waiting for the war to be over and for her husband to come home.

The afternoon of the day she had been to some extent introduced to Maud Nugent, Daisy thought it was time to make a more extensive tour of the house than the one Corisande had taken her on when she arrived at Dunmaine. Leaving her room quietly—tell herself as she might that this was her house, the exploration felt clandestine—she tiptoed across the landing.

She knew which were Corisande's and Mickey's bedrooms. Corisande had indicated them with a casual hand toward the closed doors as they had passed. It was the other closed doors that now interested Daisy. She opened the door to a schoolroom, a box room, a bathroom—all containing nothing that would suggest any of them had been used, or even entered, by anyone in the recent past. The rectory in which Daisy was brought up was Victorian and large. Even so, she was startled by the amount of unused and wasted space. It would have been different if the rooms had been completely empty, or clean, or if the contents were neat though sparse. But each room seemed to have been used as a depository for pieces of damaged furniture, battered suitcases with missing locks and handles, or basins with chipped jugs standing in them. Objects that a person more energetic than any of the Nugents would have thrown away. Daisy suspected that, although damaged, most of the furniture was to some extent functional, and she could imagine Corisande saying vaguely that perhaps one could be mended, another would do in a pinch, and that any amount of them might come in handy someday. And relegating them to somewhere outside her view.

Daisy felt discouraged and depressed. The future was hard to imagine, so much depended on events outside her control, on history, but it seemed reasonable to suppose she and Patrick would, one day, live at Dunmaine and that she would be mistress of this house and its spirit-sapping contents. She tried for a moment to imagine what she would do. In her mind's eye she emptied the room she was looking at, ruthlessly dispatching everything in it to the rubbish heap. Then what would she have? A large room with a cracked windowpane; peeling paint; a patch of damp; drooping and dirty curtains, all lit by one overhead lightbulb partially shaded by a cheap and dusty shade. It could be pretty—the windows were large and graceful, despite the cracked pane and the knob missing from one of the shutters—if someone spent quite a lot of money on it. Which brought her back to the question of how well off was the family. Were these rooms of broken and worn objects a symptom of comparative poverty or was it merely lack of energy? Or both?

Although now understanding Corisande's reluctance to show her over the house properly, and with a suspicion that she'd be well advised to return to her bedroom, Daisy opened the door to another room.

She stood for a moment, surprised, in the doorway. Then she stepped into the room and, sensing she had now come upon something private and secret, she pulled the door almost closed behind her. But not shut; it seemed, by some rule or instinct drawn from the fairy tales that had frightened her as a small child, important to draw a distinction, should anyone come upon her, between someone who had chanced upon something private, perhaps not understanding what it was, and one who was concealing herself in order to pry.

The room was small, Spartan; it contained a bed, a chest of drawers, a chair, and some shelves. The bed had a plain iron frame, the kind Daisy had slept on at boarding school, and on the shelves were some worn books. G. A. Henty, Rider Haggard,
The Just So Stories
and
Kim,
the Bible, and, Daisy noticed with pleasure,
Loma Doone.
But it was not only a boy's bedroom. By one of the two windows there was a stand that suggested that at some time the room had become also a man's dressing room. The top was shaped to hang a jacket on with a press below for a pair of trousers; on a narrow shelf in front were a shoehorn and a buttonhook, and at the base a pair of hunting boots, a man's size, carefully polished.

Daisy looked around the room. It was spotlessly clean. The sheets on the bed were fresh and crisply starched, the pillow plump, and the blanket at the foot of the bed neatly folded. No personal objects were visible and Daisy didn't open the wardrobe or look inside the drawers. On top of the chest, in an open, silk-lined box, lay two medals, their striped colored ribbons flat and parallel behind them.

It didn't take Daisy long to understand that this room was kept as a shrine to Patrick's father who must have died in the Great War. It took her a little longer to realize that the room she now occupied—the room that should be hers and Patrick's—had in all likelihood been that of his parents.

D
EAREST PATRICK,” DAISY
wrote, and paused. It was the twenty-first letter she had written to him from Ireland, the twentieth since she had received his last and only letter. Each letter was a little more difficult to write than the one before; very little happened each day, what happened tended to be the same as what had happened the day before, each time she described her impression of something new she was aware of describing something familiar to him, and each day it was a little harder to have a sense of her absent husband. And she was worried and trying not to show it in her daily letter; each one carefully dated since it seemed possible to her that he might receive a week's worth all at once. Then she would think of how repetitious her letters must be and it would be harder still to embark on a new one.

She looked out her bedroom window, seeking inspiration in the unfamiliar view. At least this letter would be a little different; the writing paper had a different address. Corisande, Mickey, and she were staying at Shannig, Edmund Crighton's house. They had just finished a late tea and Daisy had come upstairs to write to Patrick before she changed for dinner. The house was smaller than Dunmaine and quite a lot warmer; a fire burned in the small grate in her bedroom. She wrote quickly, describing the slow train journey and the drive in the pony and trap at either end. Daisy knew the journey must be familiar to Patrick, but it had taken most of the day to travel between the two houses and there was little else, apart from telling him which of her two dresses she planned to wear for dinner, to write about.

She had begun, during the past ten days, to fill a paragraph with a description of what she was reading. There seemed to be no book in the library at Dunmaine that had been bought during the past fifteen years; prior to that time, a sprinkling of novels of the period
—The Green Hat, Of Human Bondage, The Constant Nymph
—had been added by, Daisy imagined, a female Nugent. Among the older books were Dickens, Hardy, military memoirs, and the complete works of Charles Lever. Daisy rationed herself, reading the lighter, more romantic novels for an hour before she went to bed, and during the empty hours of the day reading the heavier, darkly bound, seemingly more masculine classics. For an hour every afternoon she read history and this most often filled her daily paragraph to Patrick.

Every day she read a chapter of the history of Ireland that Mickey had lent her. She began the unfamiliar story full of admiration for the country and people with whom she was now allied, and read it unquestioningly until she came to the sixteenth century, when some of the events described seemed familiar but different from how she remembered them being taught at school. During her exploration of the house, she had seen a copy of
Our Island Story
in the bookshelf of the empty and uninviting schoolroom. She now brought down the old illustrated English history book and read it in conjunction with the Irish version. Side by side, they made interesting reading. Elizabeth: the Virgin Queen, Sir Walter Raleigh laying down his cloak so that she shouldn't dirty her shoe; the Spanish Armada; the tragic although possibly necessary execution of Elizabeth's cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots—as a child, Daisy had been unable to read this passage without tears, mainly for the unfortunate and treacherous queen's little dog. A parallel reading of the period in the Irish primer described the Ulster and Munster plantations and the Elizabethan scheme for wholesale extermination of the native Irish.