This Cold Country Page 6

  At the breakfast table, the others were eating methodically; the daughter who had partially acknowledged Daisy’s presence glanced scornfully at the toast. Daisy sat down and, after slightly too long a pause, Lady Nugent introduced her to those present.

  “My daughters, Lizzie and Kate. Patrick I think you have already met. This is my sister, Gladys Glynne.”

  Mrs. Glynne. Gladys Glynne. Aunt Glad. Her name had come up as a frequent visitor, an integral part of the household, when Rosemary was describing the inhabitants of Bannock House. “Somewhere between Sergeant Cuff and the Grand Inquisitor,” Rosemary had said. Adding, with the inflection that reminded Daisy that some part of Rosemary’s family was Irish, “You’d want to mind yourself there. It won’t do you any good, of course.”

  Mrs. Glynne now turned her attention to Daisy. In the background Daisy could hear the discussion, now openly tense, continue. The words “Black and Tans” spoken by both Patrick and Lizzie; Lizzie apparently standing in for the otherwise occupied Mrs. Glynne. Daisy would have liked to listen, but Mrs. Glynne demanded her full attention. In a kindly, interested way she drew Daisy out. Before Daisy had finished the first triangle of her soggy toast she had revealed her age, that she had been to boarding school, that she had one sister but no brothers, that her father was a rector—and a younger son—that Daisy’s mother was well educated and from a perfectly respectable but not rich Norfolk family. Daisy knew that she was being placed. She also knew that this placing was only in the details; the Nugents would, without Mrs. Glynne’s more vigorous approach—perhaps starting with Kate’s glance at her meager helping of toast—have had no difficulty in knowing as much as they needed about Daisy’s background and antecedents. Daisy knew there was nothing for her to be ashamed of; there was no suggestion that they thought her mannerless, ignorant, or vulgar. They saw her as she saw herself, as coming from what had once been minor landed gentry.

  None of the others paid any attention to the interrogation; she was of no interest to them. Lady Nugent seemed preoccupied and, since the dance was to be held in her house that evening and Daisy had no reason to disbelieve James’s assessment of the servant problem, she probably was. James’s sisters were equally disengaged. Both were thin, pale; a reddish tinge to their hair suggested that freckles, rather than Daisy’s golden brown, would result from exposure to the sun. Lizzie glanced at Daisy with an almost complete lack of interest; it was the first time she had looked at her since Daisy entered the dining room. Patrick’s face was devoid of expression, although Daisy thought he was half listening.

  Aunt Glad was rich, according to Rosemary, and had no children. There was a stepdaughter, but Aunt Glad was on record as considering the girl already to have more money than was good for her.

  In return for her answers to Mrs. Glynne’s questions, Daisy learned only that James had eaten breakfast early and left to fish. He might or might not be home for lunch. Daisy understood that she now occupied the position of an inconvenient pet adopted by an irresponsible child and left in the care of his exasperated and otherwise occupied family.

  DAISY SNEEZED AGAIN; her feet were still cold and her eyes were beginning to feel puffy. She had time to spare—had had too much time to spare all day—and putting on her heavy jersey, she crept under the eiderdown. To avoid brooding over the far from satisfactory day, her thoughts returned to the scene at breakfast. While she was sure the Nugents and Gladys Glynne were capable of a full-scale row about as academic a subject as what fly James was, or should be, using best to catch a trout, she was not sure if what had passed between Mrs. Glynne and Patrick, watched expressionlessly by the female Nugents, was an indication of deeply held beliefs—fears?—or was merely a line of teasing that had produced results in the past. Ireland was not a country Daisy had thought about much, beyond having the sense, reading between the lines of her school history book, that they’d had a pretty raw deal from their English neighbors. They were a neutral country; did Mrs. Glynne really fear that they would welcome a German invasion of England via their ports? Were there Irish people angry enough actively to aid the Germans? Daisy didn’t know, but thought it unfair to bait an officer, as Patrick had put it, in His Majesty’s Armed Forces. And Sir Guy Wilcox—close enough to home for Rosemary to have known his wife—would his Fascism really have been extreme enough for him to betray his own country to the Germans? Was it possible that there were still members of the English upper classes who admired Hitler? And she thought again about the beautiful Lady Mosley and her newborn baby.

  After breakfast she had asked if there was anything she could do to help, but despite the staff shortage, Lady Nugent seemed to have delegated all tasks to a small troupe of women press-ganged from the village. And Aunt Glad traveled with a maid who had done the flowers. Lady Nugent managed, not unkindly, to suggest to Daisy that the most helpful thing she could do would be to relieve her hostess of the responsibility of entertaining her. Daisy said she would love to take a long walk. “If you really want to make yourself useful, you could take the dogs for a walk,” Lady Nugent said, her manner that of one ticking off two small items at the bottom of a very long list.

  Daisy, wearing sensible shoes, set out with an overweight spaniel and an elderly Labrador. Since the dogs were both lazy and well trained, she stopped worrying about losing them by the time she reached the end of the avenue. Setting out along an unpaved road in the opposite direction to the one she had traveled the night before, Daisy followed the outer wall of the Nugent estate. Ivy-covered in parts, with glimpses of the woods showing through the broken-down bits, Daisy thought it beautiful. She also thought it a pity that James—the James who had met her at the station—was not with her. She wondered if she had, by rejecting him the night before, lost someone of great value, the only person with whom she had so far felt a complete sense of intimacy. Or had she merely been fooled by the charm of a practiced seducer, a practiced seducer who now couldn’t be bothered to go through even the motions of good manners?

  Lunch, while neither festive nor delicious, was not as silent as breakfast had been. The Nugents talked amongst themselves, largely about arrangements and guests for that evening. Aunt Glad had a few details she wanted to clear up with Daisy and asked how she was traveling back to Wales. Daisy told her, mentioning the time her train departed; she had, for the first time, the attention of every person present. Patrick and Kate, at the far end of the table, talked quietly. Daisy could not hear what they were saying. James did not appear.

  During lunch, it started to rain. Afterward they drank weak coffee from small cups in the library. Patrick, and then Lizzie, left the room; Daisy, now desperate, asked Lady Nugent for some task. Either in response to Daisy’s urgency or because she had just remembered that her necklace was wired onto a frame, Lady Nugent asked Daisy to unpick it carefully and had given her a small pair of sharp nail scissors with which to perform the operation.

  The necklace had been professionally mounted. Sitting under a good light, Daisy had carefully edged the tip of the scissors under the thread that, tightly wound several times, held each strand in place. The thread was coarse and strong and had a stiff, wirelike quality. Daisy suspected she was causing irreparable harm to the scissors but wished neither to interrupt her hostess at her tasks, whatever they might be, nor to appear to question her judgment. She knew only that her own mother would have had a fit if Daisy had ever treated her nail scissors like that.

  As Daisy cut the mounting away, the necklace grew pliant in her lap and a sprinkling of snippets of thread lay at her feet. She wondered where the necklace had been kept since the coronation. She didn’t imagine there was a safe in Bannock House, and it seemed unlikely that an object so old and so valuable would just have been stuffed in a cupboard. It had probably been kept at the bank; but would the local bank—presumably small and modest—have a procedure for storing jewelry, or would they make an exception for the Nugents? Daisy was considering the probabilities and details of the arrangement when she snipped the
last thread. Then she stood in front of the looking glass to see what diamonds would look like. Then Patrick had come in.

  Becoming gradually warm under the slippery eiderdown, Daisy now remembered that she had not picked up the small, stiff fragments of thread she had let drop onto the carpet. She felt irritated at herself, but did not consider returning to the library to tidy up. Her throat was tender and she suddenly was not looking forward to wearing the pretty, expensive, and low-cut dress Rosemary had lent her.

  Her neck ached and her head was uncomfortable, possibly because she was cold, huddled, and unrelaxed and partly because she had put her hair in curlers. Reluctant to further interrupt Lady Nugent with irritating questions and becoming, by the hour, less concerned with the convenience of the Nugent family, she had run a shallow but hot bath and while she washed—soaking was not a possibility—she had kept her head close to the steam to encourage her hair to set. She crouched in the bathtub until the water cooled, listening all the time for steps in the corridor outside the unlocked bathroom door. Time and the occasional drip from the large brass taps had left an orange and green stain on the white enamel of the high tub. Daisy thought that when the war was over she would celebrate by lying, for an hour, in a bath as large as this one, filled to the top with hot water. Or, on a beach, until the sun became too hot to bear. The Mediterranean maybe; somewhere other than the North of England.

  ***

  LADY NUGENT WORE the necklace at dinner. Her dress was black and, it seemed to Daisy, not new. The necklace was effective, even at the distance of the table. It had made Daisy prettier; it made Lady Nugent regal; the diamonds had lit up Daisy’s skin, they added authority and a suggestion of history to Lady Nugent’s erect posture.

  Lady Nugent caught Daisy’s eye and smiled.

  “My necklace is courtesy of Daisy, James’s little friend. She spent all afternoon unpicking it from its frame.”

  Although it was toward the end of dinner, conversation was spasmodic and not animated, so most heads turned toward Daisy, some perhaps wondering why, if she were James’s friend, little or otherwise, she was not sitting closer to him. He was seated between a pretty girl Daisy had not been introduced to and Mrs. Glynne.

  “I don’t suppose you’re interested in gardening?” the slightly deaf neighbor of the Nugents, sitting on Daisy’s left, asked.

  “I am. Very,” she said firmly. During the course of the evening she had been forced to admit to him, and to a captain in the Fusiliers on her right, that she did not ride, fish, shoot, play bridge, and was not acquainted with any relative or friend of the Nugents not present. “I don’t know much about it, though.”

  “A middle-aged pleasure, faute de mieux,” her companion said, a little sadly.

  “Do you have a garden?” Daisy asked him, determined not to let another conversational gambit lapse.

  “Wartime, strictly wartime,” he said, with another sigh. Daisy thought of the rectory garden, efficiently planted with rows of the less interesting vegetables, and wondered why it seemed less patriotic to plant artichokes and mange-tout than it was to cultivate cabbages and Swede turnips.

  “I don’t know how well you know this part of the world?” he ventured, when Daisy failed to respond, dutifully embarking on another conversational tack. Daisy, who would have dearly loved to give her nose a good blow, was becoming guiltily aware that she was very heavy social weather for the men seated on either side of her. She could see that she and they ranked low in Lady Nugent’s placement. Since Daisy carried approximately the social weight of a governess brought down to avoid seating thirteen at dinner, the men on either side of her, though not perhaps quite so devoid of qualification, were unlikely to find themselves seated beside a Nugent. She wondered when Lady Nugent had reworked the placement and what James had said to her.

  “Not at all, I’m afraid,” Daisy said.

  “Perhaps the Nugents—”

  “I have to go back to Wales tomorrow,” Daisy said, nipping in the bud the assumption that any Nugent would be prepared to go an inch out of his way to entertain her. “But,” she added a little desperately, “we did do the Lake District poets at school.”

  There was another pause and Daisy realized that poetry was not the direction in which her companion had been hoping to steer the conversation.

  “Yes,” he said at last. “Wordsworth and ... ah ... Coleridge...” his voice trailed off. Then, “And of course there’s Beatrix Potter.”

  Daisy was attempting to formulate a not too discouraging sentence that suggested that while Beatrix Potter was not, strictly speaking, one of the Romantic poets, she had a certain lyrical enthusiasm for nature, which made the error a very understandable one, when she was distracted by James’s voice, quite loud, from farther up the table. He was speaking to Patrick.

  “...great sport, we missed you today.”

  “Why didn’t you go?” Kate asked. The note of teasing in her voice might have been flirtatious.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever voluntarily kill anything larger than a horsefly again as long as I live,” Patrick said.

  Apart from Daisy’s dinner partner, there was a silence around the table, the silence that follows an extreme lapse in taste, a silence that no one wished to take the responsibility of breaking.

  “... The Tale of Jemima Puddle-duck and, of course, Tom Kitten.”

  Every head at the table was now turned toward Daisy and the man attempting to engage her in conversation. Kate’s supercilious smile was followed by a disbelieving shake of her head; Daisy would have given a great deal to be able to smack her.

  “You don’t seem to have any difficulty polishing off the salmon on your plate,” Lizzie said to Patrick in a tone that suggested to Daisy that she was less fond of him than Kate seemed to be.

  “I didn’t say I was a vegetarian—in fact, I imagine I’m essentially a carnivore.”

  “So?”

  “If, after the war—and it seems more than possible I’ll be happy to have it—a butcher’s shop is my lot, I’ll be capable of slaughtering my own meat. And eating it. I won’t, however, be doing it socially. Or for sport.”

  The exchange did nothing to lighten the gloom now spread fairly evenly over the dinner table; two maids cleared the plates, unnerved by the sudden interest the guests seemed to have developed in their every movement. Daisy now seemed to have the most enviable placement and her dinner partner had never had a more rapt audience.

  “She lives at Near Sawrey; she’s an old lady now, of course.”

  Daisy nodded mutely. The Nugents seemed even more dangerous to her than they had a moment before. She would have liked to say something that showed solidarity with Patrick, but didn’t know how. She had a pretty good idea that not only would he not welcome her support but a declaration of similar feelings would not have surprised her hosts. They would see her commonsense attitude toward the killing of rabbits and chickens and her distaste for blood sports to be a manifestation of her inferior birth.

  “The inn is in the background of one of the illustrations in Jemima Puddle-duck," her companion finished triumphantly.

  But Daisy was thinking that as much as she disliked Patrick, his aversion to spilling blood when the war was over was rather more admirable than her own determination to wallow chin high in a bubble bath.

  ON WET AFTERNOONS at Daisy’s boarding school—an old, academically distinguished, and even rather grand establishment that offered generous scholarships to the daughters of the clergy—there used to be country dancing in the gymnasium. No one enjoyed it. The games mistress, who was in charge, was well coordinated but had a poor sense of rhythm, and the music available was limited to three gramophone records, none of them new: an English country dance whose name Daisy had forgotten, “The Walls of Limerick,” and a Highland reel.

  Daisy had been not only bored but embarrassed by these afternoons. She was not graceful and felt ridiculous dancing with other girls, linking arms and spinning around, hopping up and down in her
short, boxy, navy blue gymslip. Occasionally she would be sent out of the room and would while away the afternoon standing in the corridor, daydreaming and listening to the scratchy and repetitive music from the gramophone. Daisy tried not to spend too much time outside the door not because there was any further punishment involved—punishments and rewards at this high-minded school were largely theoretical—but because any visit to the headmistress’s study would involve the always unspoken reminder that Daisy, as the beneficiary of a scholarship, was expected to provide a good example to the more privileged girls.

  Daisy remembered these afternoons as she watched the dancing and could now see the point of learning the steps. She thought her former headmistress would be too fine to say “I told you so,” either in words or by facial expression, but—as with the reduced fees—the thought would fill the room. The games mistress hadn’t been nearly so fine, and Daisy could imagine her satisfied smirk.

  So far no one had asked Daisy to dance. While this might prove useful ammunition if either of these bygone school-day figures were to materialize, Daisy was embarrassed and humiliated. She wasn’t bored, and if no one could see her, she would have been content to watch the dancing. She liked the music; the tunes, familiar from the old gramophone records, now played by the small dance band were alive and energetic. Young women in long dresses, creamy whites and pinks—some of the men wearing kilts and the various traditional accoutrements—danced in the large, high-ceilinged, shabby room. The kilts reminded Daisy that they were not so far from Scotland; many of the guests must have traveled great distances. Bannock, she had the impression, was the only grand house in the neighborhood, and yet the room was full of young men and girls who had come from as far away as London. The gaiety and the carefree, noisy atmosphere of the ball were the result of complicated travel and logistical arrangements—of leave and of lodgings and hospitality provided by friends and neighbors of the Nugents. It explained why Lady Nugent might resent Daisy taking up a guest room but not why half a dozen other such rooms remained empty. Daisy and Mrs. Glynne—Lady Nugent’s sister—were the only house guests. She started to wonder why Lady Nugent would have chosen to add the burden of a difficult middle-aged woman to the hard work and arrangements of a dance, and then remembered that the Nugent children were apparently Mrs. Glynne’s heirs. It was not only a hastily reworked placement that had seated James beside his aunt.