This Cold Country (31 page)

“Patrick—my husband—likes his poetry,” Daisy said. For an instant she could recall, with the full emotion of the moment, Patrick saying some lines from the poem walking along a damp lane the afternoon he proposed to her. “‘Everyone suddenly burst out singing,'” she added.

Heskith said nothing but, instead, nodded; a small nod of acknowledgment, recognition.

“I wondered if I might borrow it,” he said. “Take it to my room.”

“Of course,” she said, “I'll have the fire lit for you.”

“I can do that myself,” he said, his tone polite but discouraging any further offers of hospitable solicitude.

And he was gone. Daisy remained by the bookshelf; she had spent a good deal of time since she had come to Dunmaine choosing books from the library but she had never noticed the small book in the poorly lit shelves. And yet Heskith had found it easily. She looked to see if there was another book by Siegfried Sassoon, but there wasn't.

 

MRS. MULCAHY, WITHOUT
descending to the use of words, allowed Daisy to know she had once again picked a poor moment to visit the kitchen. But this time Daisy had arrived prepared for a battle of wills.

“Captain Heskith would like sandwiches tomorrow instead of lunch. If you could have them ready soon after breakfast. And we'd better give him a proper meal in the evening, with a pudding.”

The cook's timing was off; she had chosen silence with which to cow Daisy and would now lose that advantage by questioning Daisy's instructions. And Daisy on the way to the kitchen had practiced not asking the instinctive question that would normally follow such an instruction: the modifying “I hope that won't be too much trouble” as well as the “Will that be all right?” plea for reassurance. After a short struggle with her own nature, Daisy strangled the apologetic confidence that only financial desperation would cause her to impose on Mrs. Mulcahy's good nature and, instead, she asked that when Nelly had finished making the beds she should join her at the linen cupboard.

She hadn't, of course, heard the last of it. Mrs. Mulcahy would even now be swelling with outrage, listing her arguments and complaints and preparing to bluster and bully. Daisy's hands were trembling when she left the kitchen. Transforming Dunmaine into a comfortable enough house to charge, with a clear conscience, for the pleasure of staying there might be an impossible task.

She had started off well: the best spare room in Dunmaine had been given a spring cleaning; a fire had been lit to dispel the constant hint of damp throughout the not regularly used parts of the house. The fire had had a tendency to smoke and Daisy had added a chimney sweep to her list of how the initial five guineas should be spent, ruefully aware that the total now came to just over sixteen pounds.

 

THERE WAS THE
sound of hooves on cobblestones and Daisy, arranging flowers in the pantry, went to the window. Heskith, leaving the stable yard, had ridden Osbert up the short laurel-bordered incline and was now riding away from the house, down the avenue. His back to her, Daisy could gaze at him, moved by the straightness of his spine and the fair hair that curled just over the collar of his jacket. Osbert was moving at a rather more lively pace than he did when Daisy was riding him away from his stable. She watched, aching with desire, until the horse and rider turned the corner. Then she sighed and went along the corridor to join Nelly in the linen room.

Apart from a lack of oxygen and Nelly's silence—half defensive and half resentful that her afternoon had been commandeered—the atmosphere in the small room was not unpleasant. It had stopped raining, but the day was damp and cold. Now she found herself warm enough to take off her cardigan; even the tips of her fingers and toes lost the feeling of coldness to which she had almost, but not quite, become used.

Daisy had known what to expect since the morning, earlier that week, when they had searched for an adequate pair of sheets for Andrew Heskith's bed. She supposed, had she been Nelly, and had Corisande been her employer, she might have used the same method and, instead of rotating the use of the linen, have kept the least damaged at the top of each pile and have allowed the unmended and unusable sheets and pillow cases to stand in neat misleading stacks. When they finished, the linen cupboard did not look much different, but on the bare wooden boards of the passage outside the door now lay a small heap of material to be used as cleaning rags. There were plenty more that were unmendable, but Daisy thought she would save them for later. The largest pile was that of napkins and sheets damaged and torn but not worn out; they could be darned and mended, but by whom? Daisy knew her own limitations and suspected those of Nelly.

 

DAISY'S ARMS FELT
the cold of the night room; they lay, wrists upward, on the pillow beneath her head. The second pillow was adrift somewhere under the sheets. The dark room, the darkness a little thicker in the corners of the high ceiling, lit only by the dying red of the lumps of turf, glowing in the small grate.

Heskith, asleep, lay on top of her, inside her. Some time had passed; Daisy, open-eyed and choosing not to think, breathed slowly and was conscious of every inch of her body where his skin touched hers. Her own body felt as though it had changed its shape. She knew herself to be strong, healthy and rounded; now she felt as though she were several inches taller, her legs longer, her shape remolded by the thrusting of Heskith's hard, tense body. He slept, breathing almost imperceptibly through his nose, still and relaxed. Daisy felt as though she had given him some desperately needed relief. Relief quite apart from the urgency with which he had made love to her.

Her eyes, as they had every ten minutes or so, glanced toward the window, fearing the pale light of the dawn. Heskith would not stay in her bed until it became light, and he would leave Dunmaine that morning. Daisy forced herself not to waste the moment in anticipation of its loss and breathed deeply, inhaling the faint masculine scent of her lover's fair, too-long hair. She ran a hand gently over the back of his head, stroking his hair, his neck. He shuddered and muttered, Daisy held him closely, reassuringly, both arms around him, and he sighed and fell once more into a deep sleep.

The evening before had been tense, the atmosphere of the house permeated with silence and danger. Heskith had returned from his ride and had spent a commendable amount of time in the stable, rubbing down Osbert and brushing him after their afternoon on the moors. Daisy thought he had, or before the war used to have, horses of his own. Alerted by the returning hooves on the cobblestones reentering the yard below, she had watched and waited, unseen, by the window on the landing.

She was loitering in the hall when Heskith came in, ready to offer tea. But he brushed past her, muttering that he would, if he might, take a bath. Daisy spent most of the next ten minutes by the copper cistern in the airing cupboard, patting its sides and hoping there was enough hot water. Heskith did not come down until it was time for dinner. Mickey was silent, preoccupied, but, Daisy thought, unaware of the tension that thickened the air of the dining room.

“How was your ride?” she had asked to interrupt a silence broken only by Mickey's ingestion of the thin soup made from the too-well-picked carcass of the pullet they had eaten for Sunday lunch. Heskith had taken a spoonful; when Daisy spoke he put the spoon down and looked at her blankly for several moments before he replied.

“Very pleasant,” he said eventually.

Daisy found herself nervously continuing, although it was clear Heskith wished to be left in peace—perhaps she should offer paying guests the option of eating meals on a tray in their rooms.

“Where did you go?”

This time she had his complete attention. He gazed at her, apparently appalled, for a moment before he replied.

“Onto the moors, and then I just rode around. Looking at birds.”

Birds could have been a topic to take them through the next two courses, but Daisy was unnerved by the moment of horror she had seen in his eyes.
Shell shock,
she thought.
I suppose it happens in this war, too.
A pity almost maternal served only to increase the painful ache of desire.

The lamb chops were rather better than Mrs. Mulcahy's usual effort, but Daisy was unable to eat. Heskith, who had not taken up his soup spoon after Daisy had interrupted his thoughts, did not even help himself to the second course. Mickey ate solidly, oblivious to the silence and to the solitary nature of his own meal. As soon as dinner was over, Heskith excused himself, rose, and left the table. Daisy and Mickey sat for a moment longer, the silence unbroken.

“Odd chap, isn't he?” Mickey remarked, and Daisy, eschewing a too easy rejoinder, merely nodded.

Muttering an excuse, and irritated that she felt the need to account for her movements to the completely indifferent Mickey, Daisy went up to her room.

There was a small fire, flaky and gray, still just alive in the grate. Over the winter, Daisy had learned how to rescue the embers and give the fire enough life for it to burn until she fell asleep. She took off her dress, hung it up, and put on her dressing gown. It was still early and she thought she should do something useful before she went to bed.

On her desk was the modified menu she was planning; repeated every two weeks, it would allow her to feed the household more economically and it could be adapted, with no additional expense or waste, when they had a paying guest who wanted a picnic lunch.

Daisy sat, rubbing one stockinged leg against the other, trying to generate a little warmth in her lower extremities.
Stewed apples,
she read,
baked apples, apple Charlotte. Suet pudding, canary pudding with red currant sauce. Chicken fricassee, chicken hash, chicken soup.
She made a note against chicken soup; the chicken soup needed a lot of work.

There was a gentle but firm knock at her door. Tying the cord of her dressing gown more tightly around her and slipping the foot with which she was massaging her calf back into its shoe, Daisy rose and crossed to the door. She felt suddenly tired and not able for the domestic emergency, minor she hoped, that a knock at that hour presaged.

Andrew Heskith, paler and more tense, stood at the door.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I am going to have to go back to England tomorrow. I'm packing and I wanted to give you a check and ask if you can arrange transport to the station.”

Daisy looked at him for a moment. Had there been a telephone call? Or a telegram? Or was this not, more likely, the thin excuse of a man no longer able to bear the boredom and bad food of a stay at Dunmaine?

“I'm sorry,” she said, scarlet with embarrassment, “I'm afraid I am a very poor housekeeper.”

Heskith looked at her with, it seemed, genuine surprise. The landing outside Daisy's door was dimly lit and his silhouette was easier to see than was the expression on his strained face. Daisy realized that she, too, was only faintly visible in the half-light. Their proximity; the growing darkness; her cold bed, in the background, turned down for the night; Heskith's low voice, made it impossible for Daisy to continue. What would she have said, anyway? A reiteration of her previous apology, meaningless since Heskith had no choice but to deny the truth obvious to both of them.

“I have to go,” he said. “It's nothing to do with not liking it here, I—”

He stopped, Daisy waited for him to continue.

“Mrs. Nugent,” he said at last, and paused again. “Daisy—”

He stepped forward and Daisy almost involuntarily took a step backward. In one continuous movement, fluid and it seemed effortless, Heskith was inside the room, the door closed behind him, an arm behind Daisy's waist, drawing her to him.

“No,” she said, “I—”

“Don't say anything,” he said, and Daisy found herself instinctively obeying him, as though he had relieved her of all responsibility for what was going to happen.

“It's all right,” he said, “it's all right.”

Those were the last words they spoke for a time; he untied the sash of her dressing gown and opened it, pushing the shoulders back so that it slid down her arms and dropped on the floor. He stood back a little and looked at her. Cold and helpless in a satin slip she had bought for her trousseau, Daisy found herself moving closer to Heskith, not so much to touch him as in order not to feel so visibly undressed; he was still clothed as he had been at dinner, a meal that now seemed to Daisy to have taken place a week ago.

His hands resting on her hipbones, he held her away from him and continued to look, unsmiling, at her half-dressed body. After a long moment, still holding her waist, he drew her to him, supporting her and helping her to balance, while she stepped out of first one, then the other, of her shoes. His jacket felt hard and scratchy against her skin and Daisy felt smaller, shorter, delicate. Heskith crossed to the foot of the bed and sat down.

“Now take off your clothes.”

Daisy paused for a moment, but she did not consider disobeying him. Slowly, awkwardly, even a little clumsily, she unhooked a stocking from her suspender belt. She felt fear, and slightly cold, but none of the excitement that she would have imagined, even an hour ago, accompanying the touch of his hand on hers. Heskith watched her, expressionless, and she undid her other stocking and slid it down over her foot. Reaching under her slip, she unfastened her suspender belt and dropped it to the floor. Still, Heskith remained expressionless, although his attention fully on her, his gaze unwavering. Daisy hesitated again, and he nodded a little impatiently; she pulled her slip up over her head, stepped out of her knickers, and scurried to the bed.

He watched as she slipped under the cold sheets, drawing them with both hands up to her chin. A belated and ineffectual protection from the man who was, even then, switching off the light, crossing the room, and approaching where she lay. The sheets chill against her naked skin, Daisy thought that she was still at an age and level of inexperience that should entitle her to a modicum of reassurance before seduction or lovemaking, although neither word began to describe what was happening. He undressed quickly, neatly, and efficiently and slid into bed beside her. She was aware that he still had not kissed her when she felt him spread her body out on the sheet and a moment later he was on top of her and then, urgently, painfully, inside her.