This Cold Country (22 page)

When Daisy entered the drawing room—she had gone upstairs less to answer a call of nature or to powder her nose than to take a deep breath and compose herself—Aunt Glad was talking intensely to Fernanda.

“An operation for goiter!” she said. “She always wore a pearl choker like Queen Mary to cover the scar. But Kate said she knew it for a fact that she'd tried to—”

She paused, aware she had lost Fernanda's attention.

Fernanda raised an eyebrow slightly and Daisy shook her head. Fernanda had assumed that she would have knocked at Corisande's door while she had been upstairs, but Daisy had not even considered it. She had no intention of playing a minor role in the drama Edmund and Corisande were enacting: a slave to Corisande's exquisitely garbed Cleopatra, a drab governess to Corisande's enchanting—

The door opened and the men rejoined them before Daisy could find a suitable play or Fernanda had a chance to reassure Mrs. Glynne; evidently the presence of Mickey had discouraged a too long lingering over port. Corisande did not reappear.

 

THE NEXT DAY
Corisande sulked. The sulking was constant but the form it took varied, adapting itself to the occasion. At breakfast she was simply absent. Edmund inquired and was told by the maid who had taken up early morning tea that Miss Nugent was resting and would not be coming down to breakfast.

She was, however, in the hall, ready for church, when Daisy came downstairs. Daisy was wearing for the first time since her wedding the dress and jacket she had been married in. Corisande was dressed in a pale coat and skirt and another of her small hats with a veil that covered the upper part of her face. Her skin was pale and lightly powdered and her lips were moist and colored a light cyclamen. Her delicacy made Daisy feel like an overgrown schoolgirl. How strange it was that Edmund should appear to see Corisande as a teasable younger sister while others saw her as a delicate piece of porcelain.

Edmund ran downstairs tugging at his waistcoat and shouting for Mickey, who had been ready for some time and was now outside, hands in pockets, kicking gravel. Edmund seemed not to notice that Corisande didn't look up from the glove she was buttoning. He hurried them outside to where a groom stood, holding the bridle of the shaggy pony harnessed to the trap.

“Why don't you girls take the trap? Mickey and I will walk across the park and meet you there. How pretty you look, Daisy.”

Corisande did not speak as they rattled down the avenue. Daisy hoped Corisande did not know that she, Daisy, was wearing her wedding clothes—so much less smart than what Corisande had put on to go to church and out to lunch in the country—and rather suspected she did. Daisy knew she was supposed to say something sympathetic and tentative to Corisande. That she should allow her sister-in-law the choice of remaining coldly and rudely silent or of breaking that silence to complain. Instead, Daisy said nothing, looking about her at the scenery with a cheerful expression, leaving Corisande stuck with her sulk.

On either side of the avenue were well-clipped laurels and yews and, a little farther on, fields and then more laurels as they passed between the large, open gates and their substantial stone pillars. As the pony turned downhill into a narrow lane, Daisy noticed the public road was not only less wide but less well maintained than Edmund's avenue. On their left, the whole way to the village, was the high stone wall that surrounded his property; on their right, a tall hedge with trees growing out of it.

A few minutes later they passed what Daisy imagined to be the boundaries of Edmund's land, since there were signs of other habitations. An avenue, little more than a cart track, led from two plain stone pillars to an equally plain, but not insubstantial, slate-roofed two-storey house. Daisy would have liked to have asked who lived there, not seeking a name or the anecdotal gossip that seemed to be how such questions were usually answered, but to understand a little more of the social structure of the society in which she now lived. Mickey might have told her all she wanted to know, and probably a good deal more, but he was strolling over the fields with Edmund, and Daisy, as was so often the case, had to answer her own question as best she could with a mixture of guesses, observations, and generalities. It probably belonged to a farmer. The house appeared to be nineteenth century; the land was fully farmed, a field with some red and white cattle on one side of the stony track and on the other a low green crop that Daisy did not recognize. It was not, she understood, a farm whose owner Edmund would meet socially, although if the farmer were Protestant he would, like some of the shopkeepers and tradesmen, worship at the same church. These Protestants were part of a society that Daisy knew less about than she did the poorer Catholics who were employed by Edmund or the Nugents, or the inhabitants of the small cottages that were becoming more frequent as they neared the village. Whitewashed, thatched, a half door between two small windows. Behind, a field—overgrazed, with a few thistles and some ragweed—and a shed. Daisy knew that, unlike the farmhouse which would have indoor plumbing, these houses depended on a tap in the yard, if they were fortunate—she was already used to the sight of shawled women carrying buckets of water from the pump—and a privy; they were, as was the farmhouse, lit by oil lamps and candles. The cottages stood back a few yards from the road, with small gardens, a few flowers by the door, or fuchsia growing over a stone wall by the gate.

The church bell was still ringing as they arrived in the village; Edmund and Mickey were already there, talking to a very old man. The church bells had been silent in England since the evacuation of Dunkirk. The next time they rang would be to warn of invasion or to celebrate victory.

Edmund still refused to acknowledge that Corisande was sulking, although she had apparently not spoken a word to anyone since telling the maid she would not eat breakfast.

“There you are,” he said lightly, addressing them both. As they approached the church, and just after he had stood back to allow Corisande to enter ahead of him, he added, “I hope you're not going to faint, Partlet, singing hymns on an empty stomach.”

The church was cool inside. Outside it was sunny and there was no breeze, but there was, nevertheless, a cold draft around Daisy's ankles. Corisande followed the service with commendable attention, sitting upright, standing, singing, kneeling, praying, and listening to the conventional but short sermon, without taking her eyes off the vicar. Even while Edmund read the first lesson; particularly while Edmund read the first lesson. While he stood at the lectern, Daisy was free to look at him as long and as carefully as she wanted. He was younger than Ambrose, probably in his late thirties, a handsome man but now carrying a little more weight than he should. He was what Daisy's grandmother called “a good trencherman,” and it seemed likely that as he got older he would become heavy. She wondered why he had not yet married.

During the service, Edmund glanced at Corisande once or twice, but she did not acknowledge his attention. Her face seemed attentive and serene, her profile flawless.

After church there was the usual brief gathering on the graveled area in front of the church door. Parishioners loitered, greeting one another and exchanging banalities. Without food, drink, or the imminence of blood sport, this could not be considered a social occasion, but it was a time and place where the small Protestant community found themselves gathered and many of them were reluctant to hurry away. There were somewhere between twenty and thirty people—ten or fifteen families—and it was unlikely that there were more than a couple of additional members of the congregation not present. Daisy wondered if the farmer whose house she had been curious about was among them. Even the members of this small community did not automatically meet one another socially; perhaps five or six of the families were Anglo-Irish, the others middle-class Protestant merchants and shopkeepers. For the latter, this was their opportunity to mix with the gentry; and even the landowning, or formerly landowning, classes were often isolated and starved for company.

Edmund's groom was waiting with the pony and trap. It had been arranged that Edmund and his guests would eat Sunday lunch with the Powers before the Nugents caught a train back to Dunmaine. Edmund took the reins from the groom, who would walk back to Shannig while Edmund drove them to Corrofin, where the Powers lived, closer to the next small town, about five miles away.

Daisy sat in the front of the trap beside Edmund. She would have enjoyed the drive more if she had not been uncomfortably aware of Corisande's silent presence behind her. The countryside was pretty, the day fine, and the road busy with other horse- or pony-drawn vehicles taking local farmers home from Mass.

“Corrofin used to belong to Corrofin Court,” Edmund said. Daisy had noticed he tended to give her a full description, both historical and architectural, of any house mentioned in conversation, but that he rarely added much detail about the families that lived in them. “Corrofin Court was ten miles away, on the other side of Stradbally. It was burnt down in 1920. The family took the compensation, such as it was, and Corrofin Lodge was sold to Hugh Power's father. That's its real name but everyone now calls it Corrofin.”

“Lodge?” Daisy asked, imagining the neat, well-built, but undeniably small lodge beside the main gate at Shannig that she and Corisande had driven past earlier that morning.

“Lodge in the sense of a hunting lodge. Although that wasn't what the old marquess used it for. What it really was—” and Edmund laughed, “was a gardening lodge. The old boy was childless—part of the reason they didn't stick it out—and what he was interested in was growing vegetables. There were, of course, gardens at Corrofin Court. Properly laid out in, I think, the mideighteenth century, around the time Corrofin was built. But that wasn't what he wanted. He liked to grow asparagus and sea kale and all kinds of unusual potatoes, and he built the lodge overlooking the river and only a mile from the sea. Seaweed and silt from the river, that's what he put on his gardens. And he used to give famous picnics; my father was taken to one when he was a small boy.”

They were now driving along a dirt road beside a wide river. Daisy could see, on the other side of the water, tall reeds growing out of the dark mud. She could imagine old-fashioned carts, drawn by donkeys, carrying loads of dripping mud to the gardens, and others, their wheels digging into the sand, as men with pitchforks loaded seaweed at low tide. The images, in her mind's eye, were pale; the thin watercolor of the past.

Soon they turned in at a gateway, smaller, less imposing than that at Shannig, but the stone elegantly carved and the wrought iron delicate and ornate. The avenue was straight and not long, the house directly ahead, elms on either side. Moments later, the wheels of the trap crunched to a halt in front of the hall door.

Corrofin was not what Daisy had imagined. From Edmund's use of the word “lodge,” she had imagined a compact building, but the house was low and graceful. Only the center, directly above the hall door, was built two storeys high, and on one side a conservatory added to the impression of glass, openness, and light. A house built for the spring and summer months, not as a permanent residence.

Hugh Power and a couple of golden retrievers, came out to greet them and he led them into the conservatory and introduced them to the other guests. Although Corisande had smiled and shaken Hugh's hand when she had arrived, she still had not spoken a word. Daisy wondered if she planned to remain silent for the entire visit; even if Edmund were at fault—it was certainly possible the scope of his teasing had exceeded what Daisy had seen at dinner the night before—it put an unfair strain on her and on Mickey. The idea that Mickey might be seen as picking up the slack and shouldering more than his share of the social burden made Daisy want to laugh. She bit the inside of her lip and looked at the ground to steady herself. When she raised her eyes, she found herself looking at a handsome middle-aged man with the most charming smile she had ever seen.

“Daisy, this is Sir Guy Wilcox—Guy, this is Mrs. Nugent. She is married to Patrick Nugent, one of our neighbors. Sir Guy and his wife have taken a house a couple of miles farther up the river.”

Sir Guy Wilcox. Taken a house. Sir Guy Wilcox. The traitor who had fled England nearly a year ago. On Christmas Day.

Daisy's mind raced. She felt as though she were a child who, dressed up in her mother's clothes, had suddenly been called upon to assume adult responsibility. She would have liked to have had an explanation of what was happening, to have been told how to act, react, but she found herself unable to flicker her eyes away from Sir Guy's almost hypnotic smile. She could feel herself being charmed and she now understood what the word “charming” meant; Sir Guy's charm made her feel like a snake, devoid of a will of its own, slowly rising out of a woven basket, obedient to the sound of a pipe's thin music. She found herself smiling and reaching out her hand in response to his.

He held her hand a moment longer than was usual—to emphasize and increase his power? What would Patrick have done? Daisy thought that he would refuse to shake a traitor's hand and that he would have left; but if she were to emulate what she imagined he would have done, where would she go? How would she get home? Or even as far as Shannig? And what were the others doing? She could hear Edmund's voice, loud and jovial, and someone laughing. Corisande seemed to be silent, but there was no reason to assume her silence was patriotic. And patriotism wasn't the correct word; Corisande was not English, but the citizen of a firmly neutral country.

Irish neutrality. A subject on which Daisy had, thanks to the
Irish Times
and Mickey, most of the facts, if not all the nuances. Eire, the Republic of Ireland, at the beginning of the war, had existed for only three years. Barely time for Ireland to settle her internal differences and to design and agree on a method of government. Eamon de Valera, the Taoiseach—the Irish equivalent of Prime Minister—and Minister of External Affairs, had in 1916 been jailed and sentenced to death by the English following the Post Office Rising. Revolutionary turned statesman, his vision was of a self-sufficient, intensely Roman Catholic country, emphatically separate from England. And neutral. Daisy had to this moment assumed that the Irish who weren't actively fighting the Germans as part of the English army were neutral in a pro-British way, and that the Anglo-Irish were entirely sympathetic to the Allied cause. So what were they all doing here, smiling and laughing and shaking hands with a notorious Fascist?