This Cold Country Page 8

  They turned; as they went through the door, Lizzie attempted a face-saving final remark.

  “James was looking for you,” she said, choosing not to address anyone in particular and, therefore, leaving it a little ambiguous whether James was looking for Daisy or for Patrick.

  “Now you know where Daisy is, if he asks you again.” Patrick did not raise his voice, but Daisy was pretty sure Lizzie heard him. Once again they were left alone.

  “You’re quite good at defending your territory,” Daisy said, and laughed. The first time, it felt, that she had laughed during the past twenty-four hours.

  “I come from the Irish side of the family,” Patrick said; he seemed to feel no further explanation was necessary.

  “How are you all related? You and James and Rosemary?”

  “I don’t think we are really. Purely an affectation based on some very loose connections. Rosemary’s husband is a second cousin once removed of James’s. James and I are actually cousins, but very distant, fourth generation probably. At some stage a late-eighteenth-century Nugent married a Scottish heiress who brought Bannock into the family. He had managed to get through most of his own money, but there was still a house and a little land in Ireland left when he died. It went to his second son, from whom I’m descended. In other words—”

  “Don’t,” Daisy said faintly. “I’m sorry I asked.”

  She realized she’d imagined them to be more closely related than they were, not only because of the shared surname, but because they had been together on both the occasions she had seen them.

  “If you’re not twins, how do you manage to get leave at the same time?” she asked. The question was a little disingenuous since what she really wanted to know was how they had managed to get leave to come to a dance, and she was prepared to be disapproving of his answer.

  Patrick looked surprised; then he laughed.

  “James and I weren’t on leave when we first met you. I was giving him a lift. I was on what might be called official business—running an errand for my commanding officer—and it wasn’t far out of my way to take James where he wanted to go and to drop in and see Rosemary. The war hadn’t really started then—except for the navy—and we all had a fair amount of time on our hands. This weekend James had some leave coming to him before he’s off to wherever he isn’t supposed to tell us about, and I’m on a training course that allows for flexibility. We were lucky; the army isn’t really the non-stop party it seems to be.”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes. The part of the room near the fire was warm; Daisy gazed into the embers and felt reasonably content. Sitting beside a fire in a pretty dress was not what she had come all this way for, but it did make her failure less humiliating. After a moment the maid came back with two glasses of champagne and shortly afterward Daisy thought a gesture of grace on her part would be only fair.

  “I liked my Christmas card,” she said.

  “To ferrets,” Patrick said, raising his glass.

  “I like them, you know,” she said, laughing at the toast, but meaning what she said.

  “I know.”

  “I feel rather like a ferret in this house.”

  “I think I already mentioned I come from the Irish side of the family.”

  Daisy smiled, feeling the delighted leap of her spirits she always experienced when talking to someone with whom it was not necessary to bridge parts of a train of thought. Then she hesitated and was silent.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Daisy hesitated again for a moment before deciding, more for her own sake than for Patrick’s, to tell him what she had been thinking.

  “Yesterday evening I had just as cozy a chat with James—in the library.”

  “We’re a family famous for our easy charm and treachery. Historically it was the principal reason the main branch survived; that and an ability to convert from one devoutly held religious belief to another—overnight, if necessary.”

  “I was thinking more of the ease with which I succumbed to the effortless charm of the aristocracy.”

  Patrick didn’t respond. Then, after a moment he asked, “Do you know what the Sargasso Sea is?”

  “This isn’t going to be a geography quiz, is it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s where eels—all eels—go to mate.” As she spoke, it seemed to Daisy one of those beliefs, like old wives’ tales, that don’t bear too close examination. It seemed also as though Patrick had skipped—or skipped articulating—part of the thought that had taken their conversation from her susceptibility to masculine Nugent charm to some not yet revealed but distant area. “Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic?”

  “Rather closer to America. Think of Bermuda. It’s a sea, comparatively warm, named for sargassum—you know, the kind of seaweed you find on beaches after a storm. The Gulf Stream moves huge islands of sargassum around in a large drifting circle. Things live in the seaweed islands.”

  “Yes?”

  “Those clumps of seaweed are small maritime universes to fishes and snails. Complete with cycles of revolution and, I imagine, evolution.”

  Daisy thought about it for a moment; the image was pleasing. She considered the endless repetition of day and night, the hot sun warming the salt water, the clear star-filled nights, and she had a crude but pleasing comprehension of eternity. It seemed easier to imagine than her father’s devout belief in a more conventional but less easily described afterlife.

  “I am a minor fish—imagining I have choices or reactions when all I’m doing is living in an island of seaweed itself dependent on an ocean current,” Daisy said.

  “The seaweed is more substantial and longer lived, but it hasn’t more control over its own existence. Every now and then there is a storm a little more powerful than the ones that particular cycle of nature has come to expect. And the island is thrown out of the circle—the loop—its own version of what it imagines to be perpetual motion.”

  “And the fishes and things die.”

  “Or move on to another island. Everything goes on as before. Then, once in a thousand years, say, there is something that doesn’t fit the pattern. Or maybe it does, but it’s too large a pattern for us to see. A volcano, an earthquake, an ice age. What are you smiling at?”

  “I was admiring the way you kept your metaphors in place,” Daisy said, not untruthfully, but concealing the real reason for her smile. She was thinking of the educational opportunities she had had since she had arrived at Bannock: a lecture on art, another on ocean currents, and a glimpse of the social structure of the English upper classes at play. How much she had been told and how little her opinion had been sought.

  “All right. Sorry. The war isn’t a storm—it’s the equivalent of an ice age. What’s so strange is that no one else seems to see that when the war’s over nothing is going to be the same. The Great War got the vote for women and altered the social fabric of this country forever; do they imagine the Tommies will go back to the mines or unemployment lines as soon as there is peace? Are you planning to go back to whatever you were doing before you joined up?”

  “I’d just left school, so in a sense I’ll be back where I was—trying to decide what to do with my life. Of course, that in itself is a change—the idea that I might decide instead of just accepting what happens.”

  “And the choices will be different.”

  “Lord, I hope so. So, you see, I am an example—to your family—of the less affluent middle class forgetting its place. My father’s a rector—to them, I suppose, a sort of grown-up chaplain. No wonder they’re so snooty with me.”

  “You’ll find it much harder to get me on the defensive. The main bunch of Nugents, this lot here—my family can’t afford to be so picky—look down on the royal family as a little too recent, too German. Of course,” he added thoughtfully, “in terms purely of blood-lines, they can make a case.”

  They both were laughing when James came into the room; Daisy could not have chosen a better moment for
his entrance and she, an all too frequent victim of l' esprit d’escalier, felt a triumphant surge of delight.

  “Daisy, I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Dance with me—” James said, his arms invitingly open.

  Despite the triumph of the previous moment, Daisy felt her feet press the floor with an involuntary movement toward rising.

  “Daisy has promised this dance to me—and I think a few young bloods of the neighborhood are ahead of you. Get in line, Nugent.”

  Patrick rose and took Daisy by the hand. Daisy glanced back as they left the sitting room. She achieved a glance of amused helplessness, tinged with only the slightest suggestion of regret. It was not hard for her to simulate the lack of reproach; at that moment she had forgotten the humiliating events of the day.

  Daisy glanced at Patrick as they descended the stairs, very much aware of her hand in his.

  “James has always been very competitive. He was rather a spoilt little boy.”

  “Gulls,” she said. “Do you think seagulls circle the island of weed and the tiny fishes? Or would it be too far from land?”

  ***

  ALTHOUGH DAISY FELT a lot warmer toward the North of England and those who lived there than she had the previous morning, she thought when it came to singing hymns, they couldn’t hold a candle to the Welsh. Otherwise, matins was familiar.

  The Nugents occupied two pews toward the front of the church on the right-hand side. Originally, Daisy thought, these pews would have been theirs, not only because the pews nearer the front were “better seats” but so that the Nugents would be visible to a larger proportion of the congregation to whom they provided an example. Since the Crimean War, their right to the second and third pews were further established by a memorial, on the wall above the pews, to a nineteen-year-old Nugent slain in battle.

  Daisy spent most of the rather dull sermon thinking about the boy killed in the Crimea, the slaughter of young men, and a generation cut down before they could procreate. An officer, of course; that was to be expected, a product of his class. He would, Daisy imagined, have accepted the privileges of rank as his due. Gold braid, better food, greater privacy, a servant to keep him clean and polished—all that would seem an extension of his public school education. He would have been used to deference and obedience, but in a society with rules adhered to and actions having largely foreseeable consequences. To take responsibility for men, many older than himself, in a disastrously mismanaged campaign in an alien climate and to die there—what had he thought during his last moments? Assuming, of course, he had not died instantaneously. But Daisy, remembering descriptions of hospital tents, dying soldiers, Florence Nightingale, and of wounds cleaned with salt water for want of a better disinfectant, wanted to know whether the young captain had questioned his fate, his country, the values and beliefs of his family and class, as he lay dying.

  Daisy was wearing her uniform as were, on either side of her, Patrick and James. On Lady Nugent’s dark, no-nonsense hat was pinned a small brooch with her absent husband’s regimental crest, and her black coat had a functional and almost official, although not military, cut. Daisy could imagine her wearing it as she performed organizational duties pertaining to the war around the neighborhood.

  The pony and trap that carried them to church had continued to the railway station, where the boy who’d held the reins was to leave Daisy’s suitcase in the care of the stationmaster.

  After the service ended, while the congregation loitered, chatting, in the churchyard and enjoying the mild, sunny day, Daisy thanked Lady Nugent for her hospitality and set out on foot for the railway station. Both young men walked with her. Daisy thought that James was accompanying her because Patrick was there, but she thought Patrick would have come with her had she been alone.

  The stationmaster greeted them deferentially. The train was already in the station. Daisy wondered if he would have held the train had they been late, and she would have asked Patrick, were she alone with him. But Patrick had followed the stationmaster to retrieve her suitcase from the left-luggage room. James was silent while left alone with Daisy, but she didn’t ask him. They had danced together twice the night before but had not had a conversation since James’s late-night visit to her room.

  Patrick returned with Daisy’s suitcase, and she and James followed him along the platform until he found an empty carriage. He stepped up onto the train and hoisted the suitcase onto the luggage rack.

  “Window seat, facing the engine,” he said, leaning out the open window. “With some tasteful views of Torquay.”

  After a moment, he rejoined them on the platform. The stationmaster, holding his green flag and a whistle, glanced at them expectantly and Daisy turned to James and Patrick to say good-bye.

  James, stealing a march on Patrick, took Daisy loosely in his arms.

  “Bon voyage,” he said, and kissed her lightly on both cheeks.

  Patrick merely took her hand, but he held it for a long moment.

  “May I write to you?” he asked quietly.

  Doors were slamming all down the train; Daisy released his hand and climbed on board. She closed the door behind her and answered him through the window.

  “I’d like that,” she said, as the stationmaster blew his whistle and the engine hissed a cloud of steam. In case Patrick had not heard her, she smiled and nodded.

  The train started to move and Daisy went to her seat. By the time she had gained it, the tracks had curved away from the station and both men were out of sight.

  Chapter 6

  DAISY SAT AT THE kitchen table, peeling potatoes. Her mother, glasses slipping down her nose, was trying to find enough lean meat on the remains of the Sunday joint to make a shepherd’s pie.

  Daisy waited until her mother had tightened the screws on the sturdy metal mincer, so that it gripped the end of the kitchen table cruelly, before she spoke.

  “Patrick is talking to Father,” she said.

  Her mother concentrated on the mincer, her right hand turning the stiff handle, the left adding small chunks of pale brown beef and steadying the machine. A strand of graying hair escaped from her bun.

  “Your father was going to show him the churchyard. I’d have thought the grass would still be too wet. Did Joan go with them?”

  Joan, Daisy’s elder sister, had joined the WRNS at the outbreak of war, cheerfully embracing the discipline and physical hardship of the naval docks at which she was stationed, unfazed by the foul language, appearing to enjoy the heavy-handed flirtation of the men she worked with, and revealing a hitherto-concealed, unsubtly dirty mind.

  Daisy didn’t imagine her mother really thought Joan would have accompanied Patrick and her father to the graveyard, and even spent a moment wondering what would be the minimum inducement necessary for her sister to form part of such a tour. That her mother seemed to be playing for time meant she sensed something was in the air. Something with which she would rather not cope. Daisy recognized her mother’s plea not to involve her in any unpleasantness, any embarrassment, conflict, moral stand, or unpopular decision, but time was running out. Patrick had to return to his unit that night and Daisy herself needed to be back in Wales for milking the following evening.

  “He is,” she said, trying to keep her tone light, and not altogether succeeding, “asking for my hand in marriage.”

  Her mother flinched; she did not release her hold on the handle of the mincer, but her expression showed she expected to be told something that would throw her already difficult day further into disarray. Mrs. Creed never asked questions; Daisy always had the impression that she was just trying to get through the day and return to some other private and, presumably, more satisfying existence. A rich dream life perhaps—a generation before, one might have suspected laudanum.

  “We want to be married next month.”

  Her mother darted a frightened glance at her, and Daisy was grateful to be able to reassure her.

  “No, nothing like that. There has,” and she laughed, �
�been nothing ‘improper’ in our relationship. Patrick is a man of principle.”

  After she had spoken there was a pause. It might, Daisy thought too late, have been more comforting for her mother to think her daughter’s principles, rather than her apparently betrothed’s, the foundation of the chaste nature of their relationship. But that kind of reassurance would not serve the argument she was about to make.

  “Surely you should take a little more time. An engagement—”

  “The war. Who knows how much time anyone has?”

  “But—if anything happened to Patrick—”

  “If anything happened to Patrick, I’d rather be a young widow than an old maid.”

  The argument was almost, but not quite, unanswerable. Daisy knew what her mother was thinking, but would never ask: What if he survives the war? What if you find yourself married for the rest of your life to someone you chose without really knowing him? What if he comes back from the war crippled? Or maimed?

  Instead, her mother said, “Yes, but...” and her voice trailed off. She fed what was left of the lunchtime parsnips into the mincer to stretch the meat a little. Her unspoken question left, also unspoken, Daisy’s answer: Do you think I haven’t thought of that?

  Instead, Mrs. Creed poured hot water onto a teaspoon covered with Bovril in a chipped white cup and stirred it thoughtfully. Daisy thought how much simpler and more helpful had been a similar conversation with Rosemary three nights earlier at Aberneth Farm. She knew her parents would unhappily agree to a marriage they were, in a changing world, unable to prevent. But that wasn’t going to make dinner any easier.

  THE SHEPHERD’S PIE—there hadn’t really been enough left on the joint—was almost saved by the green tomato chutney. Daisy’s grandmother, at the end of summer, scoured the greenhouse and bartered with their neighbors for the small green tomatoes that had grown too late to ripen. The kitchen had smelled pleasantly of the chopped tomatoes and simmering rationed sugar (there was an additional ration for jam-making, and the family feeling was that chutney came under the spirit of that heading) and spices as Daisy’s grandmother made the chutney that would render palatable the cold beef or mutton—rationed, but rarely a luxury. Her grandmother, in the same spirit, made capers from the pickled seeds of the nasturtiums that bordered the caterpillar-ravaged vegetable garden behind the rectory.