This Cold Country (3 page)

The rector had three surplices, none of them new; the household economy of the rectory did not lend itself to reserves of linen of any kind, either for divine worship or for bedding. Mrs. Creed tried to make the surplices last. She darned, snipped frayed edges, and tried not to launder them too often. During the summer it was easier; she left the drying laundry out to bleach in the sun. Bewildered bees would be thwarted on their journeys to the purple and blue flowers on the rosemary bushes by the voluminous stretches of white cloth, with embroidered and lace cuffs, that now covered them. The surplices, her father used to say, had a pleasant herbal scent that sometimes inspired—or distracted—him while conducting services.

Daisy leaned her forehead against Duchess's flank, feeling a little comfort from the sensation of life beside her; her hands were too cold to draw any feeling of warmth from Duchess's teats. Her fingers seemed as thick as the teats and she saw that one of her chilblains had split open; it was raw and oozing. She started to cry, without pausing in the rhythm that drew the last drops of milk from the independent cow's teats. Two or three of her tears dropped into the milk.

Rosemary greeted Daisy on her return to the hall.

“Happy Christmas, Daisy dear,” she said, and then noticing the misery behind Daisy's smile, although the tears had long since been conquered, “What's the matter?”

“My chilblain burst,” Daisy said, sounding to herself like a child. “And, like most of the population, I'm cold.”

“Take off your gloves and boots, and I'll paint them for you.” Rosemary had already given Daisy the medicine that ameliorated the symptoms of, but didn't cure, chilblains. But she knew that being taken care of would to some extent make up for Daisy not being allowed to warm her hands or feet by the fire or to immerse them in hot water, either temporary relief being the worst thing one could do for chilblains. The liquid that Rosemary dabbed on Daisy's toes and fingers was blue and seemed both old-fashioned and magical. When her toes were dry she slipped them into her bedroom slippers and went in to breakfast.

“Coffee,” Rosemary announced proudly. “The last pound from before the war. And marmalade. Coffee and Seville oranges are going to be one of the great pleasures of peace.”

Valerie was on leave, so there were only Daisy, Rosemary, and an overexcited Sarah at the breakfast table. Sarah was bouncier than usual.

“The smell of marmalade, the smell of freshly ground coffee—after the war I'll keep the door to the kitchen open.”

“Look at Sarah,” Daisy said. “She's the only one who doesn't think about ‘after the war.'”

“She was awake all night—weren't you, darling?—I have to keep myself from apologizing to her for this modified Christmas.”

“It doesn't seem modified to me,” Daisy said politely, sincerely. “A fire at breakfast, holly on the mantelpiece, and real coffee and marmalade.”

“I know, but I feel guilty and responsible and at the same time rather like a character out of
Little Women.”

“Little Women.
It was the first chapter book I read for myself. My mother gave up in disgust just after the Christmas scene you're thinking of—I can see, now, it embarrassed her. I finished it on my own and wept over it.”

“I'm afraid I might weep over it now with George away at the war and the small sad presents I'm giving this year.”

“Presents,” Sarah said. She gestured with her spoon, smiling and overexcited.

“After breakfast,” her mother said, with unconvincing firmness. “When you've eaten all your porridge.”

Sarah patted her food happily with her spoon, but did not use it to carry any to her mouth.

“Presents,” she said again, this time almost in a whisper.

Daisy was reminded of the comparative privilege of Rosemary's life when she saw the presents for which Rosemary had, not only from good-mannered modesty, apologized. And again she thought how gracefully Rosemary carried that privilege. Sarah tore off the paper that wrapped her presents; the garish reds and crude greens of the botanically incorrect holly pattern, on any other day, would not have been found in the library. Sarah was the only one to tear into the paper and, even so, her mother managed to salvage most of it and sat, absentmindedly refolding it, as she watched her daughter's delight.

The Christmas tree was in the library. A wartime Christmas tree, a little smaller than the ones that had stood in the hall in the years before Daisy had come to Aberneth Farm. There was no practical reason for a smaller tree—regardless of the size, it would be cut from the woods at Aberneth Farm and the morning after Twelfth Night chopped up for firewood—but Rosemary had made Christmas a smaller, cozier celebration than it had been in the past. A more intimate, feminine affair.

When Sarah stopped tearing open packages to play with a dolls' tea set—tiny china plates, cups, and saucers that, without being antique or valuable, clearly had not come from a toy shop—Daisy and Rosemary opened their own packages. It had been suggested by Rosemary, and gratefully agreed to by Daisy, that not only all presents but also Christmas letters and cards should be saved for Christmas morning. Not for the first time, Daisy marveled that Rosemary—a grown-up married woman and a mother, but not so many years older than herself—should have such finely developed instincts and tact.

As though reading Daisy's grateful thoughts, Rosemary smiled at her.

“I'm glad you're here,” she said. “For your sake, I'm sorry you're not with your family but, selfishly, for Sarah and me, I'm happy you're here. I'm not quite sure I could have pulled it off without you.”

Sometime around the beginning of November, Daisy had started to worry about Christmas. She knew Rosemary would get it right, but she was less confident in her own part in the festivities. She gave a good deal of thought to presents, to what she should give Sarah and Rosemary. In the end, the problem had solved itself almost effortlessly. On leave, at home with her family, her grandmother—her mother's mother, who lived at the rectory, ignoring her son-in-law and quarreling with her daughter, more often the cause of problems than the solution to others not of her own making—had asked Daisy what she planned to give Rosemary and Sarah for Christmas. Without waiting for a reply, her grandmother told her that she would make Sarah one of her patchwork pigs. She added that she was already embroidering six small linen handkerchiefs with Rosemary's initial. When Daisy had tried to thank her, her grandmother had dismissively waved her gratitude away.

“It isn't as though your poor mother can be much help to you,” she said, and Daisy, still thankful, realized she had once again become a pawn in her grandmother's battle with her daughter. Daisy's mother didn't need pawns or hostages since she was, most of the time, actually or tactically unaware of her mother's barbs.

Sarah was now unwrapping her pig. Daisy's grandmother had taken fragments of pink and red, some of them patterned—checked and floral—from her patchwork bag and had fashioned them into a loosely stuffed pig. When Daisy had wrapped it for Sarah, she had found it mysteriously evocative. After a moment she had realized that some of the patches were familiar, and she sat down on her bed and looked carefully at both sides of the pig. She recognized a patch from a dressing gown she had worn as a small child, a hand-me-down from her sister; she had loved its pink warmth and the white bunny rabbits patched onto the small pockets. There was also a scrap from a slightly later velvet party dress and a summer skirt of her mother's. The other patches were less familiar, some not at all; her grandmother had cast a wide net in her quest for material for her pigs. She had completed the stuffed animal with a small tail made from strands of wool, and the eyes were covered buttons. The pig was soft enough for a little girl to put her head on as she went to sleep.

Her grandmother had knitted Daisy a pair of thick socks, the kind that came up to the knee. Rosemary had given her two pairs of fine stockings; stockings were now hard to come by and Daisy found it hard to imagine a circumstance that would justify her wearing them.

Rosemary was silent as she read her Christmas letters; she spent a little time and a sad smile on the two pages from her husband that she had, with admirable self-control, kept unopened for four days. Daisy thought perhaps George was capable of a little more sentiment in the written word than he appeared to be in person. He seemed, to Daisy, middle-aged and a little rough. At the end of a recent weekend leave, Daisy had been shocked that his parting endearment to his wife had been “old girl” and his last physical gesture an affectionate pat on the bottom.

Daisy opened the cards and letter from her family. There were two others; one from a girl with whom she had been at school, now a nurse in a hospital in the Midlands, and one that bore the stamp of a military origin. Inside the second was a card—a good quality reproduction on thick, stiff white paper of a portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth with a rather affecting little ermine, its neck circled by a small, ornate, gold coronet, on her lap.

Daisy opened the card. Inside was written:

This made me think of you.

Happy Christmas,
    
Patrick

 

Daisy laughed and Rosemary looked up. Daisy handed her the card.

“Ah, Patrick,” she said, smiling also. “He's my favorite and also my most distantly related cousin. There's probably a connection that doesn't bear going into.”

Rosemary, Daisy, and even Sarah were going to evensong, so after breakfast, Daisy went up to her room. One of her presents was a copy of
Cold Comfort Farm
and she was going to read in bed and then sleep until lunchtime.

Apart from the faint sadness of being young and unmated, which Daisy often felt when she was alone and not engaged in physical work, and the itching of her chilblains, she was happy.

“Marmalade,” she murmured happily, just before she drifted off to sleep.

 

AT ANY GIVEN
moment of the day Daisy had a reasonable expectation of being able to picture her family, or at least her parents and grandmother—her sister Joan's life, since she had enlisted in the WRNS, was a little harder to imagine and not one evoked by Daisy during her rare moments of homesickness—going about their everyday lives. They were creatures of habit and her father's parochial duties provided milestones of obligation throughout the day and week. Christmas Day was easy to imagine. Daisy could be reasonably sure that her mother's domestic ineptitude and lack of interest would have, as it had even before the shortage of many of the imported ingredients of a traditional Christmas lunch added to the problem, produced an overcooked and unappetizing meal; that her grandmother's disapproval had been voiced or mimed; that her tired father was attempting to maintain his Christmas spirit until evensong.

At that moment in the afternoon, though, she could have been reasonably sure of accurately picturing the greater part of the population of England; they were listening to the King's Speech.

The King's Speech; just a trace of his stutter. Daisy imagined him and the rest of the royal family, the Queen, the little princesses, Queen Mary, at Buckingham Palace. Their subjects drew more and more comfort and reassurance from the presence and example of the royal family, and newspapers and magazines were full of photographs and accounts of their life. A mixture of intimacy and example, the little princesses engaged in minor war work, their mother visiting wounded sailors, the family spending Christmas Day together, while sharing some form of deprivation with the rest of the populace.

Daisy dozed in front of the fire, when she woke up she realized that she had missed the end of the speech. It was an hour later and tea was being brought in. The wireless was still on; Rosemary was knitting and half listening to the seasonal programming of the BBC.

“Tea,” she said.

“Sorry,” Daisy said, “I must have dropped off. The fire and overeating at lunch.”

Nevertheless, Daisy allowed Rosemary to cut her a large slice of the Aberneth Farm Christmas cake with her cup of tea. Since rationing was imminent, the heavy cake, with its rich and exotic ingredients, might be the last they would eat until the war was over. Soon even tea would be scarce. Eight eggs had gone into the cake; Daisy was grateful and a little guilty.

The afternoon concert ended and the news began. Both Rosemary and Daisy increased their level of attention; Rosemary sat forward a little in her chair. The news was, in the main, good. More about the
Graf Spee
hunted by British cruisers and scuttled off Montevideo. The Finns valiantly pushing back their Russian invaders. Daisy did not underestimate the importance of the news she was listening to, but she sometimes had difficulty remembering where specific places were located, or their comparative strategic importance. The third news item was easier to understand since it required no geographic knowledge and felt a little like gossip. Sir Guy Wilcox, a founding member of the British Union of Fascists, had fled the country, just hours before he was to be arrested for treason. The whereabouts of Lady Wilcox was not known.

“I was at school with her,” Rosemary said.

“You were? Really?”

“She was in the sixth form, just about to leave when I arrived as a very small new girl, so I wasn't the recipient of any girlish confidences. But there weren't any visible indications that she would marry a Fascist and become chummy with Hitler.”

“So what was she like?”

Rosemary closed her eyes for a second, remembering.

“She had a cruel streak,” she said after a moment, “—at least if the rumors that circulated her last summer term had some basis of truth. There was a curate who took some kind of responsibility for the spiritual well-being of the school, like preparing the girls for confirmation. He used to come to lunch on Thursdays and we were given a somewhat better meal that day. He was very handsome, or at least we thought so. Looking back I can see that he was unsure of himself in lots of ways—the school was rather grand and full of little snobs and he hadn't quite managed to lose his suburban accent. He was the object of giggling but not serious admiration—it was rumored that he got a special delivery of post on St. Valentine's Day. Anyway Emily Haverley set her cap at the poor curate. First she developed some religious doubts and he was consulted. They had long discussions and at the end of it he was in love with her. She apparently led him on for the remaining few weeks of the term, then school broke up. She went on to be the most beautiful deb of her year while he had some kind of nervous breakdown.”