This Cold Country Page 5

  “Look at the book, I’ll watch you.”

  “And answer questions?” Daisy asked, pleased but a little embarrassed.

  “Only if you show me your profile. Now.”

  Daisy turned obligingly.

  “Hold your hair up so I can see your neck.”

  Daisy did as he told her, stretching her neck and straightening her spine. She could feel a blush rising, but for once did not feel doubly embarrassed by the evidence of her embarrassment. James’s admiration made her feel beautiful. She was grateful, not only that he thought of her as a thing of beauty, but that his admiration was of her as she essentially was, not of an altered and idealized image of womanhood. It reassured her to know the world didn’t always work the way Valerie said it did.

  Daisy turned the pages. She had seen books as substantial before—in the library at school and the huge, leather-bound Bible with the brass clasp in her father’s church—but she had never had one to handle or read for pleasure. The book seemed to be a broad history of drawing and sketching. The beginning sketches were reproductions of a medieval monks’ pattern book. Daisy looked at the drawings of birds, animals—both real and fantastical—symbols, and emblems; she was aware of James watching her, but it did not detract either from her concentration or from the pleasure she felt. The drawings touched her in a way she did not quite understand.

  “The cats are wonderful,” she said.

  “Aren’t they? There must have been cats around the monastery or abbey to keep the rats and mice down. And some of the monks were amused by them, and some probably loved them.”

  “Sleeping beside the kitchen fires.”

  “Exactly.”

  Daisy turned over pages; the central pages were often of the Virgin and Child. She was surprised by the different ways artists had seen or imagined babies and small children. Some were drawn as though a child who Daisy herself might have held had sat for the sketch, some seemed to be miniature adults, some had heads strangely disproportionate to their bodies, others seemed a little too fat to represent the Christ child. Passing the original Corot sketch and some striking and slightly unsettling late-nineteenth-century self-portraits, Daisy found herself looking at an erotic drawing. It took her a moment to grasp the significance of the charcoal lines and to see the intertwining reclining bodies. It was the first time she had ever seen anything like it; she put her hand to the corner of the page to turn it, but hesitated, although she was keenly aware of James watching her.

  “Schiele,” he said. “That’s his self-portrait on the other page. He was a friend of Klimt’s—you saw his work a few pages back. They both died in 1918 in the influenza epidemic.”

  Daisy silently turned the page.

  “What do you think?”

  For a moment, Daisy considered replying, “About what?” But she knew the response would be coy, not quite honest. And that James, too, would know it. And surely the whole point—having been given the opportunities of the war—of escape from her father’s rectory, an independent life as a Land Girl, her temporary incarnation as a guest at an upper-class house party, was to make the most of those opportunities, to ensure she would not have to return to the limitations of the world she lived in before the war.

  “It’s not what I—expected,” Daisy said, waiting for James to ask, “What did you expect?” But he merely nodded, and she was grateful.

  Daisy continued to turn pages and James watched her silently.

  “Undo your blouse,” he said after a moment or two. “Just a couple of buttons, so I can see your collarbone.”

  Daisy was excited by his request. Her limited experience with male admirers had, up to now, been the urgent groping and pleas of overheated youths, far too close to home; their awkwardness and their ignorance inspiring neither desire nor affection, their lack of control so clearly putting her in charge. Even so, Daisy sometimes, for a moment, could imagine how it might be with someone she loved. The assuredness of James’s voice, the coolness of his request, was erotic. The distance at which he sat necessitated her keeping only her own actions and emotions in check.

  She took a deep breath and started to unbutton her blouse, pausing when the top two buttons were open. She drew back the fabric from her neck and turned her head a little to one side.

  “Lovely,” James said. He came no closer to her, but his eyes did not move from hers and the slight smile never left his lips. He said nothing, Daisy said nothing, and the silence continued, not uncomfortably, until the door behind her opened and a male voice said, “So there you are.”

  Daisy jumped a little and dropped her hands from the neck of her blouse to her lap. She felt a blush rise to her face, and shame at the blush rather than the act that had precipitated it-—which she still considered innocent—made her awkward.

  “We thought everyone had gone to bed,” James said easily.

  Daisy turned a little; Patrick was now in the room.

  “Hello, Daisy,” he said, his tone pleasant, but without a smile. He made for the fire, turned his back to it, and addressed James. “I was in the billiards room. Driven out by lack of opponents and incipient frostbite.”

  “Drink?” James asked, again as casually as though moments before Daisy had not held her blouse open for him to admire the way her neck sat on her shoulders.

  Patrick poured himself a glass of brandy and with a silent gesture ascertained that James wanted one, too. Neither offered Daisy another drink and after a moment she rose and said good night.

  The bedroom seemed even colder than before; she put on a heavier pullover to unpack and hang up her evening dress. In the bathroom, the chill from the uncovered tiles rose through the soles of her bedroom slippers; she washed her face, brushed her teeth, set her hair for the night and postponed washing and further unpacking until morning. The same pullover on top of her nightdress, her feet tucked up and the fabric wrapped closely around them, Daisy curled up in bed and waited to become warm.

  She wondered what else James might have said if Patrick had not come into the room. Patrick had seemed older than she remembered him. Older, tired, and grown-up. Perhaps it was just that he had seemed silently to convey disapproval. He had quite a nerve; her behavior had been completely innocent. But how delicately and skillfully James had handled the awkwardness of the moment. Her fingers, tucked between her arms and her breasts, relaxed although her toes were still cold as she fell asleep.

  She was warm when she woke. The room was completely dark. Daisy was not disconcerted by the darkness; the blackout was faithfully adhered to at Aberneth Farm, the bombing of the oil tanks fresh in everyone’s memory. Nor did she wonder where she was. Daisy woke every morning with a clear sense of where she had gone to sleep and what had happened the day before. She lay still and tried to work out what had awakened her. It was a feeling similar to that she had had after her mother’s cat died. The old tortoiseshell had been in the habit of sleeping on Daisy’s bed and, for some time after its death, Daisy used to wake up in the night sensing the absence of its inert weight at her feet. Now she was aware of a presence although the room in which she now lay was dark and silent; nothing stirred but somebody or something was close to her. Although James had been charmed by the drawings of the cats that evening, Daisy had seen no signs of a household pet. Without a sense of fear, she considered the possibility of a ghost. But a slight shift of weight at the foot of the bed and a faint smell of whisky suggested the presence was human—and most likely male. The probable maleness of her unseen companion did not add to Daisy’s very mild alarm; she had no reason to consider James, or even Patrick, more alarming than a so-far-unmet, night-walking, whisky-drinking female alternative.

  “James,” she said tentatively.

  “You’re awake. I was listening to you sleep.”

  “What’s the matter?” Daisy sat up.

  “I didn’t say good night to you properly downstairs.”

  And James came closer and took her in his arms. He did not move quickly or aggressively
and Daisy allowed him to hold her for a moment while she thought about what she should do. Wryly aware of her famed common sense—she didn’t think it the most admirable or romantic attribute for a twenty-year-old girl—she quickly considered the proper reaction to the presence of an attractive young man in her bedroom, sitting on her bed. A slightly drunken young man who was not only her host but her connection to the rest of the household. As a young unmarried woman, a virgin, what was the proper manner in which to deal with this unforeseen complication? Slightly to her surprise, Daisy found that she was also considering her own instinctive feelings, although she was well aware they should have little or no influence on how she now behaved. It seemed she could imagine James making love to her but, if such lovemaking did take place, it would not begin with her relinquishing her virginity in such a casual manner. She felt none of the desire she had experienced earlier, sitting fully clothed, a table between them, in the library. What had then seemed sophisticated and exciting had now become crass and presumptuous. What had then been flattering was now boorish. Before she had been in thrall to James; now she was embarrassed by him.

  “James, I don’t think you should be here. It’s the middle of the night and you shouldn’t be in my room.”

  James didn’t reply. Instead he stroked Daisy’s hair.

  “How charming. You’re wearing a snood.”

  That did it, and Daisy pushed him away. Her hair, thanks to one of Valerie’s beauty tips, was rolled around a sanitary towel and held in place by a stout hair net.

  “Daisy—”

  Daisy felt a sudden and deep resentment for all the slightly disgusting procedures to which women were obliged to submit themselves in order to make themselves attractive to men. Daisy filed her fingernails out of earshot of the nearest man, spat guiltily into her mascara box, and rolled her hair up at night secretly and usually uncomfortably. Now it seemed she might be humiliated for choosing a painless alternative to sleeping on lumpy curlers.

  James was not deterred by Daisy’s rebuff, and his hands on her shoulders were stronger and more urgent.

  “No, James, please.” Daisy deliberately raised her voice.

  “Shh,” he whispered.

  “Please don’t!” She spoke a little louder, allowing—contriving—a note of panic in her voice. James let go of her shoulders and rose to his feet.

  “Oh, very well. There’s no reason to call for help. I’m not going to force myself on you.”

  Daisy felt a wish to placate him, but she knew that was what he intended and she remained silent. After a moment she heard him move toward the door, stumbling against some unseen object on the way. Daisy suppressed an impolitic giggle and a moment later saw his silhouette outlined against the dim light of the corridor. Then he closed the door and she was once again in complete darkness.

  Chapter 5

  DAISY STOOD IN front of a large, mottled looking glass. She held the diamond necklace up to her throat, holding the clasp together behind her neck without hooking it. The necklace was pretty, but sparse; a few perfectly respectable diamonds surrounded by diamond chips set into a band of dark silver, with some smaller stones set in strands that dropped from the neckband. Daisy thought it was probably several hundred years old.

  “Trying it on for size?” Patrick’s reflection joined Daisy’s in the looking glass. Although his tone was light and amused, it lacked gentleness, and Daisy immediately felt defensive.

  “I’m not trying it on, I’m just holding it up to see what it looks like.”

  Patrick raised one eyebrow and Daisy knew what he was insinuating. He thought she was imagining herself wearing the diamonds, having first married James and then killed off his mother.

  “Lady Nugent asked me to unpick it; it was mounted on a frame so she could wear it as a tiara. It’s been like that since the coronation.”

  Patrick laughed and if she hadn’t been feeling offended and cross, Daisy would have laughed, too. But she was hurt by the insulting implication of his words and angry at the way she had been treated by James and his family that day.

  “I don’t know if this is an example of upper-class hospitality, or if your family is simply lacking in good manners, but I have been rudely and unkindly treated by everyone since I got here.”

  Patrick again raised an eyebrow, and Daisy once again read arrogance and pride in his expression. She would have liked to slap him, but though she was angry, her actions and even more important, her incipient tears, were under control. Daisy rarely cried, and when she did so, her tears were more often caused by repressed anger than by self-pity.

  “You and James seemed to be getting along pretty well last night,” Patrick said, his tone light, but his face in the looking glass, over the shoulder of her reflection, was cold and disapproving.

  Daisy said nothing. She assumed—and hoped—Patrick knew nothing of what had happened later that night; it was, of course, possible that he knew that James had visited her room, and also, more horribly, that he believed that his cousin had done so by arrangement or had not been rebuffed were the visit a surprise.

  Daisy’s eyes met Patrick’s; she had no idea what to say.

  “Here, let me.” And Patrick took the ends of the necklace out of her hands and held the diamonds high enough for them to be seen against the skin of her neck, rather than the hand-knitted jersey she wore.

  Almost in spite of herself, Daisy looked again at her reflection. She nodded slightly as she saw for the first time the point of diamonds. It was not just that they were themselves beautiful, hard, sharp, brilliant, but they also lit up her face. Her skin, slightly brown from working outdoors, and lightly freckled, now seemed smoother and creamier; her eyes a deeper blue; and her hair, a pleasant but undistinguished brown, had developed richer, darker touches and a tinge of chestnut. She was aware of Patrick watching her.

  “Can you see the northern lights from here? In the winter?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Patrick said, blinking at this sudden change of subject. “I never have, anyway.”

  Daisy saw that her expression was thoughtful as she met Patrick’s eye in the looking glass.

  “Lovely,” she said, “but as you can see, it doesn’t fit.” She took the necklace out of his hands and returned it to a flat worn leather box lined in dark red silk. She shut the box and hooked the flimsy metal clasp.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “you would like to return it to Lady Nugent. She needs it for this evening.”

  DAISY SNEEZED. THE bedroom was cold and she felt a slight pressure in her forehead and a tenderness on one side of her throat. She was getting a cold. Already treated disdainfully by the Nugents, when they weren’t completely ignoring her, she would now be a pariah to the other guests at the dance that evening—a red-nosed wallflower, the other wallflowers edging away from her, alone and sniffling into a damp handkerchief. She wondered, for a moment, what kind of day she would have had, had she, the night before, whipped the “snood” off her hair, stuffed it under the pillow, and allowed James to make love to her.

  She’d probably still have been getting a cold, but apart from that, would breakfast, for instance, have been different? Maybe not. But how much worse, she thought, it would have been, if having given her virginity to James—a man who knew her so little that the question of whether or not she were a virgin had not been raised—she had come down to breakfast and found he had already left for the day.

  Lady Nugent had, at least, known her name; James’s sisters apparently did not. Of the five people eating breakfast, Patrick was the only one whom she had ever met before. It would, Daisy now thought, have been better if her entrance had frozen a conversation. The lack of reaction to her arrival and apology for being late was even more disconcerting. It seemed as though no one quite registered her presence; one of the girls did not even look up from her plate.

  “Which of the Treaty Ports will the Germans invade? Queenstown, Berehaven, or Lough Swilly?” a gray-haired woman was asking Patrick.

&nbs
p; “Since, although I’m Irish, I’m an officer in His Majesty’s Armed Forces, I probably wouldn’t be the first person the German High Command would confide in.”

  Daisy hesitated, still unacknowledged and unwelcomed, at the door. Although their voices were not raised, and Patrick had replied with a smile, there could be no one in the room unaware that the woman was baiting him, that he was very angry but choosing not to show it. What was not so clear was whether the others were enjoying the woman’s attack through patriotic conviction, sycophancy, or just because it was Patrick’s turn to be bullied or teased.

  Even though she was still standing awkwardly at the door, Daisy was curious about both the anger and the subject that had—ostensibly, at least—been the cause. And Patrick, with whom she felt quite cross herself for his cool and dismissive manner toward her the previous evening, would, she thought, probably be a good person, were the atmosphere less tense, to explain some of the more confusing aspects of Southern Irish neutrality. And it was confusing. She knew—or at least supposed—that Southern Ireland was behaving poorly, remaining neutral while Hitler threatened the future of Europe. And the IRA had exploded bombs in London just before the war. But she also knew that many men from neutral Eire had enlisted in the British army. And why had England, only two years before, the shadow of war already over Europe, so casually handed back to Ireland the naval ports that they had held under treaty? The ports that the gray-haired woman was now taunting Patrick about?

  “Good-morning-I-hope-you-slept-well-breakfast-is-on-the-sideboard,” Lady Nugent said vaguely. Nothing fey about her vagueness; it was more that Daisy was an irritation that if given no more attention than deserved need not distract her.

  “We call it Cobh. Queenstown’s now called Cobh. It’s spelled c-o-b-h, but it’s pronounced ‘Cove,’” Patrick said in a purely informational tone. “There’s no v in Gaelic.”

  Daisy looked at the substantial remains of breakfast set out in two chafing dishes. One contained, in a shallow pool of warm grease, fried eggs, fried bread, and fried tomatoes. The other was half filled with thick, solid porridge. For the first time since Daisy had enlisted in the Land Army, she looked at a meal with no wish to eat any of it. A little to one side there stood a silver toast rack with some damp, caved-in toast. Daisy helped herself to a triangle and then, because it looked so puny on her plate, another. She poured herself some tea from a large silver pot. Very strong and not quite hot enough.