This Cold Country (30 page)

A
NDREW HESKITH WAS
tall, slight, and fair. His eyes were blue and cold; he walked with a limp. Daisy's stomach contracted when she first saw him. Desire made her stop breathing for a moment before she greeted him and showed him up to his room.

Daisy waited in the drawing room, but he did not come downstairs for tea. He must, she thought, be resting. His hair was a little too long and she supposed he had been recovering from his wound, or whatever made him limp, for some time.

When she went upstairs to get ready for dinner, taking a little more trouble over her appearance than she usually did, she opened the book of Yeats poetry on the table beside her bed. She found quite easily the poem that Heskith made her think of. The final two lines—

     
...his hair is beautiful,
Cold as the March wind his eyes.

When she had first read the lines, not unaware of the implication of their context, she had felt the same erotic shock as she had when, an hour ago, she had shaken her new guest's hand.
Cold as the March wind.
Patrick, she thought, trying to summon up an image of her husband; but he had been gone too long and she had worn out the memories of their three nights together. Every word, every touch, every sensation had been taken out and held in her mind until, like an old photograph, they were faded and cracked and there were times when Daisy was not sure she could accurately summon his image. Although she could still remember the hard warmth of his body against hers.

 

MAUD COULD FEEL
there was someone new in the house. Not someone she could see or hear, not someone she knew. A soldier, she thought. Not Patrick, her favorite grandson, missing. Not James. How strange it was, she thought, as she sank deeper and even less communicatively into herself, that they kept information from her as though she would not be able to understand the horrors and implications of war. Why did they imagine Thomas's room was kept untouched since his last leave in the spring of 1918? Why, for that matter, did they suppose she had taken to her bed and more or less stopped talking when war had been declared? Not because she was old and senile and didn't understand what was happening, but because she was the only one who really knew. And because she knew she would not experience it twice.

The rhythm of the house, the subtle changes in the times and quality of the meals told her something had changed a little. She was not sure whether she smelled or imagined the distant scent of a cigar.

 

DAISY DECANTED A
bottle of port before dinner and opened a bottle of wine; she was for the first time grateful that Mickey was oblivious to the greater part of what went on around him. He drank a glass of what Daisy now slightly nervously assumed to be the best wine in the cellar, and ate his Irish stew—did it always have to be so gray?—with his usual somnambulistic mealtime methodical lack of concentration. Heskith ate the stew as unflinchingly and largely silently, although he raised one eyebrow slightly in appreciation as he tasted the wine and shot a quick surprised glance at the label on the bottle.

The dining-room fire smoked. Daisy noticed, to her surprise and horror, that there was a small stream of dirty white smoke coming from just under the mantelpiece. It suggested a small outlet on the side of a volcano that occasionally emits threatening but not necessarily dangerous gusts of sulfur.

Heskith said little and his expression did not encourage small talk. He and Mickey seemed equally preoccupied and Daisy broke the silence only to offer food and drink. The former invitation was largely rhetorical; she had never seen anyone take a second helping of any food offered at Dunmaine. Heskith took some more wine and a glass of port afterward. Daisy felt a nervous compulsion to offer him something further and by the end of the meal it had been arranged that Osbert should be made available each afternoon for the week; Daisy blushed when she offered the cob, self-consciously aware that she might appear to be alluding to Heskith's wounded leg.

After dinner, the entire meal—even with the glass of port that Daisy had left the men to drink, presumably in total silence—taking less than an hour, Heskith went upstairs to his room. Daisy was restless, filled with nervous energy. What she really wanted to do was to have a stern conversation with Mrs. Mulcahy; dinner the following evening would be better, she promised herself, even if it meant holding a gun to the cook's stubborn, untalented head.

Instead she went to her room, lit the small fire, and sat at her desk in the nest she had made for herself in a corner of her new home.

First she wrote to Patrick; the letters now were not so hard to write. Form, ritual, superstition were invoked and drawn upon. They were written in a vacuum and sent into a void. She no longer believed he received them, but equally she believed if she stopped writing that she would allow him to float away from her, to die, that she would kill him. Dutifully she wrote a description of the day, of the weather, of the buds on the trees in the lane behind the walled garden. She described Heskith's arrival, and by alluding to his reserve, avoided much description. She told her husband that she loved him, that she was reading
Bleak House,
that his family was well, that there was a small patch of damp under the window in the library but she was keeping an eye on it.

She sealed the envelope; any afterthoughts she might have before she posted it would be gratefully included in the following day's letter. Then, quickly and without much consideration, she wrote to her grandmother. She wrote a letter similar to the ones she sent home each week: full of description, short on event, devoid of any reference to the doings of her new family. She was silent on the subject of her lack of news from Patrick, of her financial worries, of her grandmother-in-law's apparent senility, of Mickey's eccentricity, of her scheme to take in paying guests.

Then she got into bed and stretched her legs under the cold sheets until her feet found the now tepid earthenware hot-water bottle.

 

A SPRING DAY
shone outside the landing window. Daisy gazed dreamily out, putting off the moment when she should go down the main staircase to the hall. She felt a reluctance to speak or to be spoken to. Words or, in fact, sound that was not part of the rhythm and pattern of the now largely silent natural world outside seemed an intrusion on her confused feelings and aroused senses. Gradually, she became aware of activity below. Distant but animated voices, oddly lacking the usual gloomy, almost sullen, sounds of morning. No sound of silver on china, no double clink of cup clumsily returned to saucer. Instead voices, urgency, the energy of emergency. Daisy was by now too well aware of the pleasure the bored servants took in any kind of drama to find comfort in the cheerful tone of the voices below.

Mickey and Heskith were already sitting at the dining table when she came in. Daisy was not hungry; she was pouring herself a cup of weak tea when Nelly came into the room. The housemaid stood for a moment, struggling for the words to explain her presence in the dining room and for maximum dramatic effect.

“Begging your pardon, Mrs. Nugent.” She paused, apparently considering including Mickey and Heskith in her greeting, then deciding not to spoil the timing of her announcement. “They've gone and bombed Belfast.” She had their full, shocked attention now. Mistaking their silence for incomprehension or a request for elucidation, she added: “Hitler's bombed Belfast. Last night.”

Mickey and Daisy just stared at her, but Heskith rose quickly and left the room. After a moment, they could hear the wireless begin to hum as it warmed up, then a high-pitched atmospheric whine that quickly changed to crackling and then the reassuring, convincing voice of a BBC newsreader. An account, general and lacking in detail, of the bombing followed: the docks had been the target; the extent of the damage not revealed. Soon the news moved to the war in Europe, an encounter at sea. None of them moved. Daisy thought of the afternoon in Wales when they had listened to an account of the sinking of the
Royal Oak
at Scapa Flow.

“How do you get the Southern Irish news?” Heskith asked, his tone a little impatient.

“Radio Eireann”—Radio Eireann was the station the wireless was tuned to in the kitchen, the station on which the maids had heard news of the night's raid. The Nugents listened to it only for race meetings—“It's on the other band; let me.” And Mickey, slowly but accurately, moved the dial until the station was clear. “Why do you want the Irish news?”

Heskith shot a quick look at Mickey; Daisy, who had been wondering the same thing, was grateful it had not been she who had asked.

“I wondered what the official Irish reaction was.”

The wireless crackled, then a man's voice, speaking Irish. After a moment or two, Daisy picked up the word “Finisterre”—a weather report. While they waited, Daisy considered the implications of Heskith's thought. While Eire was neutral, the six counties of Northern Ireland—in a sense another country—had remained loyal to England and were at war with Germany. Ireland might be neutral, but Irish families—Irish although not citizens of Eire—had been victims of the bombing. De Valera's adamant neutrality would be tested; the hatred and distrust of a large part of the Irish for England, at whose hands they had suffered in the recent past, would be weighed against Germany, who had bombed the northern part of their own island.

She glanced at Heskith; he was alert, attentive, not so tense. Now she could see that there was and probably had been for a long time, beneath the surface tautness, a look of deep sadness, of a loss she could not imagine.

The newscaster continued to speak in Irish—farm prices, Daisy thought. She, Mickey, and Heskith continued to listen as carefully, struggling to understand. It was de Valera's goal, already implemented in the schools, for the country to revert to its native tongue. Would it be possible, in the unimaginable future after the war, Daisy wondered, that she would live in a country whose language she didn't speak?

“Do you speak Irish?” Heskith asked Mickey.

Daisy glanced at her brother-in-law and saw why a stranger might have assumed Mickey was following every word with rapt attention. As usual, Daisy had no idea of what he might be thinking.

“Only a few words. The news in English will follow in a minute.”

And moments later they were listening to an account of firefighters, fire engines, and equipment from Ireland moving north toward Belfast, where houses near to the docks were still burning.

“Thank God,” Heskith said under his breath. Daisy glanced at him and saw that he had tears in his eyes.

“Thank God,” Mickey said, a little more loudly. Daisy thought he might mean it literally.

“Thank God,” Daisy echoed silently; she, too, was close to tears. Grateful to de Valera for the spontaneous gesture of humanity and solidarity with the Irish families on the other side of the border, she felt a wave of love for the Irish people and less alone than she had been since she had arrived in Ireland.

 

A GUST OF WIND
flung raindrops as loud as pebbles at the window on the landing as Daisy came downstairs. The storm had gathered speed over the dark surface of the Atlantic and was now meeting the west coast of Ireland, the first obstacle in its path.

If the gale continued, the next day also would be spent largely indoors. Some form of entertainment, as well as better food, warmer rooms, and hotter water would be required if Daisy were to depend on paying guests to keep the old house afloat. Maybe subscriptions to
Country Life
and
Punch
were part of the overhead in running a guest-supported household; she was nervously aware that the last issue of
Country Life
was from just before the war.

In the meantime, that day's copy of the
Irish Times
should be put in the library, the lights turned on, and the fire lighted. Daisy crossed the hall at the foot of the stairs, the central overhead low-wattage bulb, its light diffused by a dusty opaque glass shade, doing little to alleviate the gloom.

The library was almost as cheerless although a little lighter; wind rattled the windows and rain was now heavy and regular on the panes. Daisy switched on a lamp and was looking for a box of matches on the mantelpiece before she became aware of Heskith. He stood, immobile, with a small book in his hand, the dim light from the streaming window behind him, his stillness rather than the lack of illumination rendering him for a moment invisible. Daisy gasped when she saw him.

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you.”

“It's so dark in here; I was just coming to light the fire,” Daisy said, a little breathlessly. She knelt, struck a match, and set fire to a corner of the crumpled newspaper in the grate. A sprinkling of damp soot lay over the logs and kindling. The paper caught, flared and, after a moment, burned out. The sparks on the sticks that Daisy had gathered on one of her walks turned black and soon all that remained of the fire was smoldering ash and smoke. Daisy crumpled some more paper from the basket beside the fireplace and pushed it under the wood with a poker. She struck another match, pushed the poker between the logs, and lifted one to allow some air to feed the flame. Slowly the fire caught and, as Daisy continued to kneel by the fireplace, it established itself as a dull glow rather than a cheerful blaze. Heskith had not moved from where he stood by the bookshelf.

“What are you reading?” she asked at length, standing up and dusting off her knees.

He didn't reply and instead held the book out. It was small, red, clothbound. Even had the room been brightly lit, Daisy could not have read the title from that distance and she crossed the library to where he was standing.

"
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man,
” he said when she was still five or six feet away from him. “Siegfried Sassoon.”