This Cold Country Page 4

  Daisy wore her uniform with some pleasure and pride. It was not by chance that Daisy had enlisted in the Land Army. Like many another girl, she understood at the outbreak of war that more than the future of Western Civilization was at stake. Daisy was not lacking patriotism, but her upbringing—as the younger daughter of a Church of England rector and his quietly desperate wife—had made her at once cynical about the civilization at stake, and utterly determined that she should never again be one of a group. A girlhood in which she had escaped neither the Girl Guides nor the choir and had watched her mother—a woman with a good degree in English Literature from Lady Margaret Hall—preside over the Women’s Institute and separate the appalling from the merely worn for the church jumble sale had made Daisy strong and stubborn. Two qualities that would not have saved her had the world not suddenly been thrown into chaos. Daisy consciously saw herself as one of the cards tossed into the air and was fairly sure that wherever she landed she would prefer it to the life she watched her mother lead.

  Daisy was grateful to belong to the Land Army. Unlike Valerie who, had her mother been a fraction less alert, would be driving senior officers around London, provocatively dressed in an ATS uniform, Daisy had sacrificed the possibility of a wartime romance for the countryside, the unlikelihood of being shouted at, long periods of silence, and her own room with a warm bed and the window open.

  Her uniform still had a certain novelty value. She did not wear it for everyday work, depending rather on practical gumboots with two pairs of socks, corduroy trousers, and a couple of heavy sweaters. Daisy was excited to be traveling to a dance and what was, she supposed, a house party; but a little out of her depth, she was very glad to arrive in uniform.

  She had brought Lorna Doone with her for the long journey. Although she was happy looking out the window at the unfamiliar countryside or occasionally sleeping, she was grateful to have a half-remembered novel with lots of story and not too many characters, in the chilly railway station waiting rooms when she twice changed trains.

  Daisy could see that people tended to read what gave them comfort. Since the outbreak of war, her mother had upped her intake of Smollett, drawing on the hardmindedness, the energetic sense of life, the bawdy lack of sentimentality, to help her get through days which had had, even before the war, an element of restriction, rationing, regimentation. Daisy, too, avoided sentimentality in any form; as a child firmly avoiding novels whose heroes were orphans or animals. Lorna Doone was perfect: the heroic aspect of farming, the masculinity of the farmer, enough familiar references to the history of the late seventeenth century to fix the story in a time and a place, and a certain timely suspicion of high life; Daisy felt it all. She regretted only that the train took her through Crewe and Lancaster to Windermere, and not by way of Exmoor.

  Mrs. Thomas had packed sandwiches for Daisy. The train, full leaving Crewe, emptied out at the next two stations, the first a market town, the next an insignificant stop that seemed to serve a military camp. There remained only one other traveler in the railway carriage: a middle-aged, gray-haired, gray-faced woman knitting a ribbed sock on four fine needles. She looked like one of Daisy’s father’s parishioners. Daisy was sorry not to be alone; she had hoped for a stretch of the journey by herself, and would have liked to put her feet up on the seat, lean back, and eat her sandwiches while she read or looked out the window.

  They sat, on opposite sides of the railway carriage, in silence. Although she never looked at Daisy, the woman managed, using only her expression and the occasional sniff, to convey her disapproval. It was an attitude with which Daisy was familiar, the assumption that youth and healthy beauty were the innocent exterior that covered rampant animal sexuality. This woman perceived Daisy as the enemy. Less threatening than Hitler, of course, but geographically more imminent.

  When Daisy finished her chapter—John Ridd’s harrowing quest into Monmouth’s battlefield—she got up and took her sandwiches from her bag on the overhead rack. She was aware that every move she made was being watched. Daisy unwrapped her generous wax paper package of sandwiches and offered one to the woman opposite. She watched her hesitate and then take one.

  “Thank you,” the woman said. “I’m much obliged.”

  Daisy saw her look at the sandwich. Homemade bread, freshly churned butter, farm-cured ham, and plenty of strong mustard. She saw the surprise on the woman’s face and watched her look more closely at the sandwich.

  “It’s well for some,” the woman said.

  “I work on a farm,” Daisy said. “We’re allowed to kill two pigs a year for ourselves.” She waited until her companion bit into the sandwich. “Of course, if you’d rather not.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” the woman said, embarrassed, and Daisy wished she hadn’t spoken. At the next station the woman gathered her things and left the compartment as though she had arrived at her destination, but when Daisy got off the train at Lancaster she saw her sitting, knitting, in another compartment. They pretended not to see each other.

  The evening papers were for sale at Lancaster; the headlines on the board read: LADY MOSLEY ARRESTED. Daisy bought a paper and read it while she waited for her train. She felt sorry for Lady Mosley; despite Diana Mosley’s open and enthusiastic membership in the British Union of Fascists, it was hard to believe she was really a traitor or a security risk. Daisy couldn’t believe that Lady Mosley was wicked; she paused and asked herself why she had been pleased when Sir Oswald Mosley was arrested and shocked when his wife was imprisoned. It was perhaps the baby that made his mother appear innocent; how could a woman with a ten-week-old baby be evil? And even if she were, it seemed very cruel to separate the baby who, Daisy assumed, was breastfed, from his mother. Not only was Lady Mosley a mother, but she was beautiful and upper class; it was unimaginable that she should be in jail.

  It was late evening when Daisy arrived at Windermere. James was waiting with a pony and trap.

  “At last,” he said, taking her suitcase and putting it in the trap. Then, before he opened the door for her to enter, he took Daisy’s upper arms in his hands and looked into her face.

  “Even more lovely than I remember,” he said. “Of course, last time you weren’t wearing that fetching khaki hat.”

  “There are,” Daisy said, “long periods of the day and night when I don’t wear it.”

  James sighed and Daisy laughed, although as she clambered into the trap she rather wished she had omitted the “and night” from her rejoinder.

  Daisy had never been to the Lake District before. Soon they left Windermere and turned off the main road onto one narrower and poorly maintained. Mist concealed the tops of the hills on either side. On the sparse verges beside the road and on the hills, damp sheep grazed. Daisy, who felt affection for some of her cows, didn’t much care for sheep.

  “Lots of sheep,” she said.

  “Pretty well all of Westmoreland that isn’t actually paved is ankle-deep in sheep shit,” James said, twitching the reins to encourage the pony. “I’m glad you’re a country girl; I’m tired of apologizing and telling girls to look where they step.”

  “And it’s still light,” Daisy said, with pleasure.

  The longer the evenings were, the happier she felt. She loved to go for a walk after dinner, strolling through the woods at Aberneth Farm, listening to the birds settling down for the night in trees that made patterns of the yellowing light. She did not even wish for a companion on these walks, although she sometimes thought it would be very pleasant to have someone waiting for her at home.

  “We’ll be home before dark. At this time of the year it stays light until after ten and soon after there’s a lovely slow dawn.” From the way James spoke she knew he felt the same way she did about the long light months of summer. Daisy smiled at him. “And,” he added, “in winter you can sometimes see the northern lights.”

  “The northern lights.” Daisy could feel her eyes open wide, but she was not so young that she felt the need to conceal her almost c
hildish enthusiasm.

  “So you’ll come back during the months of the long nights and I’ll show them to you.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Promise?”

  Daisy laughed. “Yes.”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise,” Daisy said happily.

  Daisy knew that the words exchanged between her and James were identical to those that would have been uttered if James had been indulging in heavy-handed flirtation. But the feeling was quite different. It was as though he were doing her the compliment of not going through the preliminary skirmishes to any friendship—even one that was not flirtatious—between a young man and a girl. She was happy to take her cue from him and to bask in the pleasure of James’s openly expressed admiration and the rare feeling of being with a kindred spirit. She loved not wasting time; and supposed his and her directness were the effect of war and its brutal suggestion that time was, even for the young, a commodity no one could afford to waste.

  Bannock House was redbrick, early Victorian. Daisy was slightly disappointed and then ashamed of herself: disappointed because she had hoped for a castle, or a handsome Georgian house; ashamed of her disappointment since the house was grander than any she had so far entered as a guest. Around the house were tall, substantial, dripping trees and misty fields stretching away as far as she could see. Chinks of light showed at the front door, in a large room to the right, and at a couple of the upstairs windows.

  “Staff crisis, traditional at this time of the year for some reason and, of course, the war doesn’t help. My mother has already fed everyone except us. I’ve been detailed to feed you and billet you. You’ll meet the family in the morning.”

  The traditional staff crisis did not prevent a boy—not a child but too young to have been called up—appearing from the dark shadows of the house and leading away the pony. James picked up Daisy’s suitcase and carried it indoors.

  The hall of Bannock House was paneled in dark wood, double height, and divided at the top of the stairs by a landing that ran the width of the room. As James carried her suitcase upstairs, Daisy could see that the landing formed one of three sides of a gallery around the inner half of the hall, the center of which was made lighter by a stained glass domed ceiling. Although it was midsummer, the house was not warm and dying fires smoldered in two fireplaces, one in each half of the hall below. Daisy, no stranger to drafty corridors and cold bedrooms—the rectory in which she had been brought up reached a pleasant temperature during only two months in the year—considered what midwinter at Bannock House might be like. Although the prospect of a return visit to view the northern lights was still an attractive one, it would entail warm socks and woolen vests.

  “Here is your room. The bathroom is next door. Why don’t you come down when you’re ready and we’ll have a drink and something to eat.”

  James put Daisy’s suitcase at the foot of her bed and left the room. Daisy looked around with pleasure. The bedroom was larger than any in which she had ever slept, larger than any bedroom in her father’s rectory. Daisy enjoyed feeling like a heroine in a nineteenth-century novel and for a moment felt mildly self-congratulatory about her literary association with her whereabouts; a moment later she realized that the heroine with whom she had most in common was Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. She was laughing out loud as she went through the door from her bedroom into the also large, old-fashioned, tiled bathroom that adjoined it. At the far end a second door led, presumably, onto the corridor. Daisy tried the door and found it unlocked. There was no key or bolt on her side or, when she opened the door, on the other side. Although, she reflected, suppressing a giggle, a lock on the outside would move her quandary from the mild inconvenience and the potential embarrassment of upper-class domestic arrangements to one of being the potential victim of some Gothic weirdness. Being unable to lock others out of one’s bathroom seemed marginally preferable to being held a prisoner within it.

  Gratefully using the lavatory—the ones on the trains had left a great deal to be desired—and washing her hands in tepid water, Daisy changed her clothes and went downstairs. James came out of a room that opened off the hall to meet her; he had a heavy glass tumbler in his hand.

  “Let me get you a drink,” he said, leading her into a large dark library. “Then we’ll inspect the provisions. Whiskey?”

  Daisy glanced at the drinks tray. Whiskey was not a taste she had acquired and it had, in fact, never been offered to her before.

  “I’d rather have a glass of sherry, if I may,” she said.

  James raised one eyebrow.

  “I was brought up in a Church of England rectory,” Daisy said. “What do you expect?”

  James laughed and poured her a sherry.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  Daisy followed him through the halls, through a green baize door, along an uncarpeted wooden-floored corridor, and into a large kitchen, with a black and white tiled floor. There was a heavy tray, with settings for two people, on the kitchen table. Also a substantial slab of yellow cheese, a tin of biscuits, and a bowl of apples. Small, pink and gold; Beauty of Bath, Daisy thought.

  James lifted the lid of a heavy saucepan and peered inside. He said nothing and after a moment Daisy joined him and also regarded the contents.

  “Irish stew,” she said, her tone unconvincingly enthusiastic.

  “Bloody sheep everywhere. Would you like some?”

  “I think an apple and some cheese is all I want,” Daisy said. “It’s late and I ate on the train. Sandwiches—from Aberneth Farm.”

  “In that case, we’ll eat by the fire.”

  James loaded the tray and Daisy helped him carry their meal back to the library, doing her best to quell a suspicion that the meals at Bannock House might bear some similarity to those served at her boarding school.

  Soon she started to feel a pleasant glow as her second glass of sherry warmed and relaxed every part of her body and lifted her spirits. The logs James had added to the smoldering embers in the fireplace began to burn brightly and he rose and switched off the overhead lights. The darkness made where they were sitting seem part of a festive, sensuous secret. As James returned to his seat—an armchair at the other side of the small table that held their plates—he paused by the large, round silver tray on which stood a selection of bottles.

  “Ah,” he said. “An open bottle of wine.”

  He pulled out the cork and sniffed the contents.

  “Recent enough, I think,” he said, “to suffice. Particularly since another glass of sherry will make you rather liverish in the morning. Enough here for a glass each to finish our cheese with.”

  Daisy had never before had three drinks on the same occasion, and she paused for a moment to be sure she wasn’t becoming drunk. But she experienced only a feeling of warmth and wellbeing and felt no urge to giggle or show off, the only symptoms of inebriation she had so far witnessed.

  “I should like to draw your head,” James said. “Charcoal—or maybe chalk would do you more justice.”

  “I didn’t know you were an artist,” Daisy said, regretting her words as soon as they were out of her mouth. “I didn’t know you drew” would have sounded less naive. But James didn’t seem to notice.

  “Before the war I studied at the Slade. When it’s over—well, what’s the point of thinking about that? Time enough when—” And he raised his wine glass. “Peace.”

  “Peace,” Daisy echoed, thinking that “Victory” was the toast she more usually heard, and that “Peace” sounded more thoughtful, more hopeful, less exclusively masculine. “I’d never thought it before, but I haven’t made plans for when the war is over. I don’t seem to be able to imagine it.”

  “Plans will be necessary only if we win,” James said. “Although that’s not why I don’t make them.”

  “I know,” Daisy said. “That’s harder still to imagine. Losing.”

  “We won’t.”

  And she believed him.

 
; “One thing’s sure,” James said. “Whatever happens, those who survive won’t take up where they left off. Everything’ll be changed ... forever.”

  They were silent for a moment. Daisy thought about what James had said. She was too young to imagine that she would not survive the war. And, unlike James, she was in no danger—less, in fact, than many civilians. The idea that they—she—would emerge into a new, utterly changed peacetime world was an exciting one.

  “So—you’ll sit for me, when all this is over?”

  “Yes,” Daisy said happily.

  James got up again, threw another log on the fire, and picked up the tray and put it on a sideboard. He pulled a large book from one of the shelves in the almost unlit part of the library—Daisy thought he must know its place, and that the room must be noticeably colder where he was standing—and came back and sat beside Daisy on the sofa. He set the book on the low table in front of them.

  “May I?” he asked. Daisy nodded; she was not sure whether he was asking her permission to sit beside her or to show her the book.

  James opened the book. Text and black and white illustrations, the lighter and finer lines suggesting paler or intermediary colors. James turned a few pages and then pointed to a sketch of a seated girl.

  “Corot,” he said. “You know, the prolific French nineteenth-century painter—landscapes, small leaves—lovely French countryside light.”

  Daisy nodded, not quite honestly. The name was familiar and she hoped that as James continued she would remember a little more. She looked at the reproduction of the sketch.

  “Look at the base of the neck and the collarbone.”

  Daisy looked at where the collarbone would be and saw it, although it was not drawn; it was, rather, suggested, although she was not sure how.

  “I don’t know—quite understand—how much is him—I mean actually drawn—and how much is me—my eye—filling in for him.”

  “Very good,” James said. He picked up his glass and returned to where he had been sitting before.