This Cold Country (32 page)

Heskith slept on, Daisy holding him, stroking the back of his head and his neck gently so that she made his sleep more peaceful without risking waking him. She knew that when he woke he would leave and she knew also she would never see him again. She knew that when he left her room she would continue to feel the warmth of his body, that the smell of him would linger, exciting and satisfying, until she got up. Good-byes in the chill of morning would be awkward, bitter with the taste of lost opportunities. And then he would be gone and the lonely, guilty suffering would begin.

 

ANDREW HESKITH LEFT
soon after breakfast and Daisy, lonely as an abandoned dog, wandered the house. Cold with longing and lack of sleep, she huddled beside the dining-room fireplace, sitting on the rug and rocking her body gently to and fro. The fire smoldered and smoked slightly, tiny belches of paler smoke coming from the same crack under the mantelpiece. Daisy looked at it unseeingly and went upstairs to her room. On the low chair beside the dead fire lay the envelope Heskith had brought to her door the night before. It was sealed, and nothing was written on it. Daisy opened it; she had never seen Heskith's handwriting. Although he had mentioned a check, the envelope contained only the money he owed, banknotes and two half-crowns. Daisy set it down on her desk and wandered toward Heskith's now empty room, looking for traces of him. But Nelly, curious about her tip, had made an early start on the bedrooms and sheets and pillowcases now lay in a crumpled heap by the door. Daisy returned quietly to her room, closed her door, and lay on her unmade bed, burying her face in the pillows, searching for the smell of her lover.

 

THE FOLLOWING DAY
Nelly again came into the dining room while they were eating breakfast. Again with the air of someone with important news.

The meal was silent; Daisy, although aware she should still be jubilant about the Irish firefighters in Belfast—and, indeed, when she thought about them she felt close to tears and knew her voice would break if she attempted to speak-—was still shocked by the not yet quite understood night with Heskith. Shaken by the knowledge that she had, without it seemed a moment's hesitation, betrayed her husband, shaken by the tender places on her body and the bruise on her shoulder, shaken that the pale bruise seemed a small treasure and that she would regret its fading.

Nelly was sure of her audience and Daisy might have expected her to show some pleasurable sense of her own dramatic status, but the housemaid seemed, if not exactly frightened, unsure of herself, and as though what she was about to impart might have some not immediately apparent but unpleasant implications for herself.

“Mrs. Nugent,” she said, and paused. “Mr. Mickey—”

Patrick,
Daisy thought.
It's something to do with Patrick. He's dead and its all my fault.

“What is it, Nelly?” Daisy was surprised by the calm of her voice. Mickey was expressionless, but she suspected he too felt fear.

“It's Wilcox, m'am—they're saying down below he's been shot.”

Shot? Sir Guy seemed an unlikely person to get shot. Daisy had formed the impression of him as careful, methodical, meticulous, and most unlikely to find himself accompanied by anyone so irresponsible as to climb over a fence with a loaded gun.

“Is he badly hurt?” Mickey asked. Daisy could see he was as puzzled as she was.

“He's dead, sir.” Nelly now was puzzled, too. Daisy realized that “shot” to the housemaid meant an act of violence, not of carelessness. Or perhaps the shooting season was over and she was shocked at her employer's ignorance.

All three were silent. It was more Nelly's lack of pleasure in the drama than the fact of the death itself that suggested to Daisy there was something deeper and more sinister involved. Nelly looked as though frightening and painful memories and fears had suddenly been revived. English soldiers, unpopular landlords, the Black and Tans. Sudden deaths, acts of violence and revenge; more likely her parents' memories than her own, but Daisy had a quick glimpse of the troubled not so distant past of Ireland.

“It was, of course, an accident?” Mickey seemed to be firmly deflecting any suggestion of something awkward—suicide, perhaps?—before Nelly put words around whatever it was she was hinting at.

“He was shot,” Nelly repeated patiently. “Killed. Someone murdered him.”

This time the silence was a little longer, frozen with their fear and struggle to understand.

“When did it happen?” Mickey asked.

“They found him yesterday. He'd been missing.”

So the news had traveled the distance from the Wilcoxes' house—the house on a good stretch of river—to Dunmaine by word of mouth; there would be nothing about the murder, if murder it had indeed been, in the newspapers until the following day's
Irish Times.
There might be something on the six o'clock news.

“I see,” Daisy said eventually. “Thank you, Nelly. That will be all.”

E
DMUND AND CORISANDE
arrived late the following afternoon. They had been staying with his cousins in Westmeath. Mickey went to meet the train; Daisy, lonely, lacking occupation, though hardly bored, would have liked to accompany him, but knew it would overload the trap for the return journey, some of it uphill. Her own driving skills were still uncertain enough for her to prefer them unwitnessed, least of all by Corisande.

Mrs. Mulcahy sent up an above average beef stew; the effort, Daisy thought, less motivated by her own lecture of two days ago than by the excitement in the air. First the feeling of pride that de Valera had, spontaneously, without counsel or advice, sent firemen north to fight the fires on the docks of Belfast; then the frisson and uncertainty caused by a shooting that had connotations of a diametrically different national mood.

Mickey had, on the way back from the station, told Corisande and Edmund everything he knew about the death, the probable murder, of their neighbor. Edmund was silent, thoughtful. Corisande, after a longish absence and complete change of scenery, had returned to the level of irritation with her brother that she had apparently felt at the time of her departure.

“But why?” Daisy asked, addressing Edmund. Now, surely, the attitude of the Anglo-Irish in general, and that of the Nugent family in particular, toward the displaced Fascist Wilcoxes would become clear or, at least, clearer.

“I don't know.”

“Because he's English?” she asked. “It's not as though he was a landlord or anything. The Powers told us they'd just rented the house.”

“They didn't even farm the land,” Corisande said thoughtfully. Daisy could tell that Corisande was uncomfortable with some unexpressed thought, some implication she wasn't going to explore, even at a family dinner. Daisy assumed that Corisande's discomfort related to the unaddressed question of the Wilcoxes' politics and why, if they were close to being considered the enemy in England, he should have become the victim of what seemed to be a belated nationalistic assassination. She wondered if Corisande would talk more frankly to Edmund about whatever it was in bed; they would have separate rooms, but Edmund had been promoted from bachelor's quarters to a spare room with a double bed.

“Is that why they didn't burn the house down?” Daisy asked. “Because it didn't belong to the Wilcoxes?”

Edmund shrugged.

“Probably whoever it was had learned something from the past. They tried to burn down Winter Hill in 1919, but it was too damp.”

“What was he—were they—doing here anyway?” Daisy asked, feeling justified in pressing the question a little. Corisande's discomfort—embarrassment—might be based only on Daisy being English, but whatever it was, surely now was the time to drag it into the open.

“Avoiding rationing, I expect. All those little dogs.” Corisande sounded surer of herself, as though she had avoided something unpleasant.

“But—” Mickey said, and earned a look of blank dislike from his sister.

“There'd been a spot of trouble in England,” Edmund said, with a calmness that made Daisy think she might have been mistaken about Corisande, “a few of his friends interned and some ‘detained as security risks' in actual prisons. So it was probably easier and less all round embarrassing for everyone if he left the country.”

The ease that Edmund spoke with and his frank open manner seemed so natural that it took Daisy a moment to realize that he had only volunteered something known to them all and already voiced, on the way home from the Powers' lunch party, by Mickey.

“It's not as though these things don't happen,” Edmund continued, after a pause. “Admiral Somerville shot on his own doorstep—probably because he'd written a couple of letters for local boys who wanted to join the English navy. That's four or five years ago and no one ever charged with the murder. It happens, although less often than it did; de Valera takes a pretty hard line these days. Still, I wouldn't count on anyone getting charged.”

“Mickey tells me you've been taking in guests?” Corisande said to Daisy, giving her words no weight but coating them with a suggestion of mild amusement. It was an abrupt change of subject, but Daisy had the impression Corisande was following her own convoluted train of thought.

“We have,” Daisy said calmly, giving a small emphasis to the first word. She would have been annoyed by the note of amusement had she not felt so guilty; the events of her first effort as a landlady representing a far stronger argument against the scheme than Corisande could have come up with in a month of Sundays.

“Keeping the wolf from the door,” Mickey said cheerfully. “Surprised we didn't think of it years ago.”

Corisande's eyes flicked nervously toward Edmund, and Daisy, who knew her sister-in-law wouldn't really feel safe until after her wedding, thought her reluctant to have it pointed out to Edmund that he was marrying into a family of Johnny-come-lately lodging-house keepers. Mickey, of course, did not catch the nuance and seemed eager to continue to follow his subject until he had beaten it to death.

“Interesting chap,” he continued, rather to Daisy's surprise since she couldn't remember Mickey and Heskith exchanging so much as a word. Perhaps they had had a fascinating, albeit brief, exchange over port the evening of Heskith's arrival.

“So long as he didn't pack the silver,” Corisande's laugh was brittle and tinkly. That laugh, Daisy thought, might have proved a greater obstacle to marriage than her lack of fortune or her relatives. And Edmund and Corisande still weren't married. His proposal had not made her more secure; quite the contrary, she was now hopelessly compromised, unable to retreat and dependent on him to advance to respectability and position. Daisy now thought that her early impression of him and of Ambrose as teasing, or perhaps bullying, schoolboys was not accurate; Edmund at least, had a cruel streak.

“It was either that or hock the silver,” she said lightly, for the first time asserting herself in the face of Corisande's habitual dismissal. “Bills to pay, taxes, overdrafts, mortgages.” She paused significantly. “Wages.”

Corisande blushed; Edmund laughed. Startled, Daisy looked up and caught Mickey shooting her a quick and, she thought, sly glance. From, it seemed, nowhere, she remembered a patch of wallpaper in the bedroom that was never used, the room that seemed to have belonged to a boy or young man, and to have been left unchanged, although clean and dusted, since the end of the Great War. The patch, centered over the neatly laid, but unlit, fireplace was rectangular, clearer, darker, fresher than the paper around it, and surrounded by a border of dust stains; the dust stains had rounded corners. Corisande had been selling off bits and pieces from around the house. Daisy's first thought was to wonder why she hadn't at least thought of that solution herself; her second was that if Corisande were trading in partially stolen goods—even after her grandmother's demise she would be entitled only to a third—it would have been better form if she had paid the household wages as well as her dressmaker.

During the silence that followed, prolonged by Kathleen clearing away their plates and bringing in the rice pudding, Daisy realized that Corisande had thought Edmund and her brother ignorant of her pilfering. And that she would never entirely forgive Daisy for innocently causing her ridicule.

 

DAISY LAY HALF
asleep, her head buried in the pillow, dozing, dreaming, thinking of Heskith; reluctant even to have the linen on her bed changed. Soon he would exist only in her memory. His bedroom now housed, or seemed to house, Edmund. Or maybe Corisande was the one who padded across the cold landing. Heskith, she assumed, was now on the way back to his regiment; Daisy didn't know what regiment, let alone where he might be going. Into the void of war, to disappear as her husband had. Patrick, she cried silently, but she could hardly remember his face or his voice. His hands, the flat nail on the middle finger of his left hand the truest memory she could summon.

There was a creak from the landing outside her door. Edmund on his way to Corisande's room? Corisande visiting him? Mickey visiting his bats? Or the house protesting the damp spring air? Had the landing creaked in the same manner when Heskith had crossed it, coming to her bed, leaving her bed, two nights ago? If she felt this much pain and loneliness two nights after she had slept with a warm, hard body next to hers, how would she feel in a month? Another quieter creak, followed by a small crackle and the sound of soot falling from the chimney. And how faint the feelings of guilt compared to the pain of loss; she knew she would never see Heskith again....
that his hair is beautiful,/Cold as the March wind his eyes.

A little smell of smoke, as though Edmund had thrown the butt of his cigar into the fireplace after dinner and it had set the hard ends of the knotty wood alight again. Without enough upward draft, all the fireplaces at Dunmaine smoked. In fact, her own fireplace, no longer glowing, seemed to be smoking a little.