This Cold Country (11 page)

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.

D
AISY 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.

Supper, that evening, was a meal that showed no member of Daisy's family at his—or in this case her, since her father was a reliable known quantity—best. It was as though each were determined to play a caricature of herself. Daisy's grandmother sighed during grace. Her mother was particularly, as Daisy and Joan had in childhood deemed it, “hen-brained.” It took her several harried trips to the kitchen to produce the pie and the Brussels sprouts and several more to bring in the junket—which surely she remembered both her daughters had, from childhood, loathed—and stewed plums.

Daisy's grandmother watched this domestic ineptitude silently, allowing pursed lips and the speed with which the chutney was being ingested to speak for her. Not for the first time Daisy wondered whether her mother's inadequate housekeeping skills were partly a manifestation of her dislike for her own mother. If this were the case, Granny Cooper had a lot to answer for. Especially since she ate only breakfast and lunch with the family; supper, always a light meal, she ate on a tray in her warm room. When she moved into the rectory she had embarrassed Daisy's father and enraged her mother by installing a separate, coin-fed, electricity meter in her room, where she supplemented Mrs. Creed's cooking with small delicacies she kept in invitingly decorated tins. As a small child Daisy had spent many winter afternoons there, drawn by the heat of the electric fire and her grandmother's supply of biscuits. These afternoons infuriated Daisy's mother, thus presumably justifying her grandmother's expenditure of electricity and sugar.

A bottle of not terribly good wine had been produced to celebrate the engagement, but the atmosphere was far from festive. Her father's reservations about the marriage were many and not unreasonable. Daisy hardly knew Patrick; she would, after her marriage, be living among strangers in another country and worshiping at unacceptably low Church of Ireland services. Daisy was his favorite daughter, and he could have seen the now often unnervingly coarse Joan move farther from home with fewer qualms.

“Of course, one marries earlier in wartime,” her mother said, addressing one of her husband's unspoken reservations, “or during a plague.”

Patrick, who had been performing the delicate task of separating, with his fork, a piece of gristle from the more edible vegetal matter on his plate, shot her a startled glance. Granny Cooper closed her eyes briefly.

“You know, like Dr. Munthe and the nun—in Naples during the cholera epidemic.”

Daisy was the only one of her listeners who knew what Mrs. Creed was talking about; it had been to Daisy that Mrs. Creed had introduced
The Story of San Michele.
However, since no one at the table thought Axel Munthe had actually
married
a Neapolitan nun, they all pretty well got the gist of it.

“More sons born in wartime,” the rector murmured, attempting to drag the conversation back on track without offering too obvious a non sequitur.

“What Mother means—” Joan started, the note of truculence in her voice doing nothing to ameliorate the tense embarrassment around the table. Daisy wondered if the change in Joan's nature was—like more males being born in wartime and her mother's euphemistically vague point—itself an illustration of some natural law.

“I think, Joan, we all take your mother's point,” the rector interrupted mildly. “We are now, I think, moving on to practical arrangements, probably best decided by your mother and Daisy herself.”

“As long as you don't expect me to be a bridesmaid,” Joan said, not planning to be so easily subdued.

“Nothing was further from my mind,” Daisy said lightly, but with absolute sincerity.

The practical arrangements could hardly be simpler. A wartime wedding at short notice: a wedding dress, flowers, a service performed by her father, a reception, champagne, some food, a wedding cake. No bridesmaids, no wedding presents, no honeymoon. Nothing that couldn't be decided that moment—if Joan could be held at bay.

Two years older than Daisy, but less pretty, Joan was sullenly unhappy that her sister should marry first. She had learned to assert herself in the company of her fellow Wrens and the men with whom she worked. She had learned to curse and drink, but she had not learned to sit at her parents' table and behave like an adult. There had been an awkward moment before supper when she had accompanied Patrick and Daisy to the pub in the village. Daisy, a reluctant social drinker, had asked for a half pint of shandy and Joan, who really needed a drink, asked for a gin and orange. Patrick had looked at her kindly and had said in a mild, almost amused voice, “I'll get you a gin,
or
an orange juice—or even a glass of gin and a glass of orange, but I won't order a gin and orange.”

“Why not?” Joan had asked, not sure that there mightn't be a moment of flirtatious playfulness to follow.

“It's a tart's drink,” Patrick said, his tone purely informational. “It's like ordering a port and lemon.”

Patrick and Daisy had been alone for a moment before supper and Daisy, who thought he might have waited a little longer, at least until after the wedding, to embark on her sister's social education, had instead, with most uncharacteristic weakness, found herself apologizing for her family's eccentricity. Patrick had looked at her for a moment, puzzled, and then had laughed.

“Wait until you see mine,” he said, when he finished laughing. Even so, Daisy wished it had been possible to accept Rosemary's offer and that the wedding would take place at Aberneth Farm.

T
HE GREAT WESTERN
Hotel. Convenient to King's Cross. Maybe too convenient, Daisy thought, touching the ring borrowed from Valerie, unfamiliar and unconvincing, on the fourth finger of her left hand. King's Cross, gritty, damp, smelling of engine smoke and cheap tobacco; thinly coated with the smaller feathers and droppings of the resident pigeons, and the residue and debris of troops and tired travelers; did she really want to lose her virginity in the atmosphere of a railway station?

It was Patrick's next leave and—Daisy's time off delicately orchestrated by Rosemary, the clandestine aspects advised upon by a pruriently sympathetic Valerie—the betrothed couple were in London for what Valerie insisted on referring to as “a dirty weekend.”

Patrick had gone to take a bath; it seemed to Daisy he had been gone a long time. It took her rather longer than it should have, and threw her into a deeper state of ineffectual nervousness, to realize there had been a slight emphasis in the announcement of his bathing plans. Clearly she was supposed to—allowed privacy to—what? To wander about the room, to look at herself in the dressing-table mirror, to apply lipstick, and, on second thought, to wipe it off, to pull back the curtain and look out the window to find black-out material depriving her of further evidence of pigeons and grimy red brick. The bed she avoided, and she was sitting at the dressing table looking at her unconfident reflection when there was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” she called, her heart pounding, imagining a hotel detective. As she turned toward the door, she saw in the mirror that her face was white. After a short moment, the knock was repeated, this time a little louder and with a brisk impatience.

She rose and crossed the room, wondering if hotel detectives really existed or whether they were merely a convention of the comic novel; the possibility of being confronted by one an aspect of clandestine trysts unmentioned by the otherwise informative Valerie. Daisy wished Patrick were there to confront this one as she opened the door, and feared suddenly that his absence was hotel detective related.

Patrick, wearing a camel-colored dressing gown and looking at her quizzically, was standing outside. He held his sponge bag in one hand and his uniform, folded neatly with no socks or underclothing showing, over the other arm.