This Cold Country (36 page)

A moment later, the coffin and the group behind it passed through the church door and the congregation slowly followed them. The farmer's family with whom they had shared the pew, visibly torn between waiting for the rest of the congregation to leave and a reluctance to delay Edmund and the Nugents, filtered awkwardly into the flow, but Edmund did not follow them. There was only an old woman kneeling in prayer, two younger women conversing in whispers, and a man who appeared to have some connection with the church behind them when Edmund led his small party out onto the churchyard gravel.

The rain continued, although it was no colder than it had been inside the church, and those who did not intend to accompany the coffin to the graveside were moving toward the tall wrought iron gates as briskly as they could without seeming to hurry. Something not immediately visible to Daisy had caused a delay, and the coffin and those who were to accompany it to the graveside were gathered to one side of the churchyard and on the small path leading to the graveyard. Daisy found herself only a couple of feet away from Lady Wilcox and realized, with a rush of self-consciousness, that some words were necessary. Good manners dictated that she murmur some words of condolence; common sense told her that Lady Wilcox would not have the slightest idea who she was. She moved slowly forward, hoping that Corisande or Edmund would step in front of her and allow her to express her sympathy as an echo of theirs. Surely they both had known the Wilcoxes or if they had met them at the same time that she had—she couldn't now remember whether Edmund and Corisande had been introduced to the older couple or whether they seemed to already know them—at least the Powers were people they both knew.

There was a moment of awkward hesitation, during which Daisy wondered what Corisande and Edmund, behind her, were doing, and then she stepped forward, holding out her hand. Before she could speak, Lady Wilcox, accidentally, it seemed, catching her eye, looked at her coldly for a split second before turning away.

“Keep away from—” Hugh Power, his voice raised and his face even more flushed than it had appeared to be inside the church, seemed to be speaking to someone behind Daisy. Lady Wilcox placed a gloved hand on his arm and he broke off in midsentence. In the same moment, Daisy withdrew her outstretched hand, turned to see to whom Hugh Power had been speaking, and saw Edmund close his mouth on unspoken words. The whole incident had taken only a second or two and, Daisy thought, had probably not been fully witnessed by anyone else.

Lady Wilcox and Hugh Power stepped onto the path toward the graveyard, and Corisande, touching Daisy's arm, indicated that they should move toward the gate.

They regained the pony and trap in silence, conversation not necessary as Edmund tipped the boy, wiped off the seats, and flicked the reins to indicate to the pony it was time to go home.

“What was that all about?” Daisy asked, breaking the silence when it became clear that information was not about to be offered. “Did I do something wrong?”

“It was nothing to do with you,” Edmund said kindly.

It wasn't enough, but Daisy didn't ask a further question.

“Lady Wilcox is upset and irrational,” Corisande said after a moment. “And Hugh Power always tended toward selfdramatization.”

After this there was a long silence, then Corisande, speaking to her brother in an uncharacteristically encouraging manner, asked him about the arrangements for Philomena's funeral, which would take place the following day. His reply took them most of the way back to Shannig.

Daisy, hunched under Edmund's waterproof, thought about the scene in the churchyard. There was too little information for her to draw any conclusions, but she realized that her vague assumptions about Sir Guy's death were almost certainly inaccurate. She lacked information; although the murder had, of course, been headline news every day in the
Irish Times,
the reports—like the kitchen gossip that Daisy, although never soliciting, strained to overhear—not only lacked any new information but emphasized the mystery and contradictions surrounding the case. Daisy had assumed that the murder had been a random act of violence based on naïve nationalistic beliefs combined with inept larceny. She had also gained the impression, and the events in the churchyard did nothing to alter this belief, that it was in no one's best interests for the full facts to be disclosed. The government, with the strained relations between the two countries exacerbated by Irish neutrality, could hardly be happy that a well-known Englishman, however discredited in his own country, should be murdered on Irish soil. The local guards, although undoubtedly not wishing to appear incompetent, probably had mixed feelings about tracking down and arresting a local man for whose family the general population would feel more sympathy than they would for an upper-class Englishman. And the English authorities? They could hardly condone the murder, but surely it was far from inconvenient and with the daily desperation of the war, did anyone really care? Daisy remembered a story someone—probably Valerie—had told her. It had apparently taken place in London during the Blitz. A junior officer on leave, strolling back from dinner through Soho, is finishing his cigar; he lifts the lid of a garbage bin set out on the side of the street, stubs the end out on the inside of the lid and drops the butt into the bin. As he does so, he becomes aware that what seemed to be a bundle of old clothes is really a dead body, folded and stuffed into the garbage bin. He pauses, lid in hand, and as he does so, the siren starts to scream, and he carefully replaces the lid and makes his way to the nearest air-raid shelter. And in the case of Wilcox, even more than that of a minor London gangster, the authorities had more pressing things to think about.

Edmund, instead of handing over the pony and trap to the boy desultorily attacking the young dandelions in the gravel with a hoe, dropped the Nugents off at the hall door and continued around to the stable yard. Mickey, without even a murmured excuse, wandered off in the direction of the billiards room, although that, Daisy thought, was unlikely to be his ultimate destination. Corisande and Daisy silently entered the house. Corisande put down her gloves and prayer book on the side table by the front door and riffled casually through the post awaiting Edmund's attention.

Daisy waited a moment and then, as Corisande continued to ignore her, crossed the hall and started up the stairs. She had barely set her foot on the second step when her sister-in-law's voice stopped her.

“Daisy, just a second.”

Daisy waited, one hand on the smooth wooden banister, as Corisande crossed the hall and paused at the foot of the stairs, looking up at her.

“Daisy,...I don't want you to be upset by what happened at the church.”

“I don't understand. Lady Wilcox cut me—she saw me and she looked away. Quite deliberately. I was surprised she even knew who I was.”

“It was because you were with us.”

“I don't understand.” Daisy paused, allowing her silence and her look to be almost a direct question. She could see that Corisande wanted, at least partly, to explain the incident.

“She thinks Edmund had something to do with her husband's death.”

“But why should she think that? You and Edmund weren't even here when Sir Guy was killed.” Daisy noticed that both she and Corisande had avoided using the word “murder.”

“Not that he, ah, shot him. Himself. More that he knows who did and has some, ah, connection with that person.”

“But why?” Daisy tried to sound as though she were questioning Lady Wilcox's sanity rather than asking for information; she sensed that Corisande didn't plan to tell her any more.

“Politics. Wilcox's Fascist connections—just the sort of thing that ass Hugh Power would be attracted to. Lady Wilcox thinks Edmund and Ambrose are outposts of the British army.”

“Ambrose?”

But Corisande had said more than she had intended. Daisy was aware that her mention of Ambrose's name, almost certainly inadvertently, was the element of indiscretion that finally checked the confidence.

Corisande turned away and went into the small study that Edmund used as an office. Daisy hurried up the stairs; she thought that Corisande was probably only waiting for her to leave so that she could go upstairs herself.

Once Daisy was in her room, she took off her hat, changed out of her damp shoes and stockings, and tried to subdue her hair before descending for lunch. Considering what Corisande had said would fill a good deal of time; apart from the content of the brief conversation, there were two mysteries unexplained. Why had Corisande, to whom it was almost a point of pride never to apologize, never to explain, felt the need to account for the incident outside the church? And what was it that had made her look so frightened on the way home afterward?

Her expression, had changed after she had mentioned Ambrose. It now seemed as though her own enunciation of his name had shocked Corisande not only by her indiscretion, but by a sudden realization of something that had caused her to curtail the explanation she had begun.

 

THE
ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS
was taken at Shannig. The day after she and Mickey had started their stay, yet to be determined in length, at Edmund's house, Daisy had sat on the sofa and idly leafed through the most recent issue. A month later the study of the magazine had become of central importance and took up much of her day.

Life at Shannig was comfortable although a little tense. Daisy was always aware that her presence was an inconvenience to Edmund and she tried to keep herself from under his feet, knowing that she would never see far enough beneath the layer of his good manners to know when she was intruding. She knew, also, that her—and Mickey's—presence was an irritant to Corisande and feared, even more, her sister-in-law's less inhibited reaction.

The days passed slowly; a chilly wet April became a mild May. Relieved of the pressure and anxiety of trying to run Dunmaine, Daisy found she had long empty hours, devoid of responsibility and containing only minimal planned activity. She ate more—the food was better than she had been used to—and took long naps in the afternoon.

It would have been very pleasant if there had been a clear plan for the future. Three weeks or a month at Shannig would have been a holiday, a welcome respite. Living there indefinitely made Daisy feel like a maiden aunt or, she thought guiltily, as Mickey probably did much of the time. Dunmaine was not inhabitable, but the damage was reparable and the house had—miraculously, it seemed to Daisy—been insured. When these repairs would begin was not clear; from time to time Daisy asked Edmund, a little awkwardly, aware that his future in-laws were rather more trouble than she would have wished. Each time it seemed to be a matter of waiting. Waiting for the insurance claim to be completed, for it to be submitted, approved, waiting for an estimate from a builder, waiting for him to finish another job.

The
Illustrated London News
came by post. It arrived two days after it had been published in England and, since it was a weekly magazine, some of what it reported or depicted could be as much as ten days after the fact. Daisy's imagination adjusted to remove the time lapse, and she opened each edition as though it were an illustrated bulletin from the BBC. For the first week or so she waited until Edmund opened the solid roll that came in the post, but by the time she began to become obsessive, she waited for the postman, tore open the tightly bound label, and took it somewhere quiet to read.

She would sit at a table so she could hold the magazine flat as she read it. The illustrations formed her images of war. Apart from the very occasional newsreels she had seen in cinemas in England at the beginning of the war, until now she had had to rely on her imagination to picture the scenes and locations referred to but not described by the announcers on the BBC news. Between issues she would study the back numbers of the magazine that stood in neat stacks on the library table.

Some of the illustrations were photographs; others were drawings. The tone of each was different. The photographs were of the Queen, plump, soft, always smiling, comforting and reassuring, pearls, fur, and powder; the King, slight and sensitive; the princesses, a little embarrassed, awkward; factory workers doing their bit; bombed buildings, rubble, and shocked, brave families rising to the occasion or, at least, to the photograph; and portraits of those in the news that week.

The most dramatic pictures were the drawings, in shades of gray: battleships in the North Sea, steel and high salt waves, wind and the bitter cold, imminent death by drowning and freezing; interiors of ships and submarines, neat in a way only possible with men living in close quarters, totally lacking in privacy. Sketches by prisoners of war of their camps were among the most cheerful, small evidences of humanity, of the individual, of inner resources. They gave Daisy some comfort. Although she knew they had been drawn and reproduced with a view to keeping everyone's spirits up, she was also, at times, able to imagine Patrick in those surroundings.

The photographs of the war in North Africa, often bleached and yellow like old snapshots in an album, hot metal, sand, heat, flies, showed a world that Daisy could see was brutally hard, but it did not move her the way the pictures, in the old issues of the magazines, showing bitter cold, did. The photographs of the partisans in the Greek mountains filled her with horror, their flimsy shelters in the snow, their inadequate clothing, their frigid hands on cold weapons, and the distance and unlikelihood of survival.

The bombing of Belfast was not portrayed in the
Illustrated London News.
Daisy was disappointed; it would—although the event had taken place at some distance, and at the other side of a border—have made a connection between her own life and the world she so eagerly scanned once a week. And brooded over the other six days.

At the beginning of April, the magazine had reported Virginia Woolfs suicide. Although Daisy knew her name, she had never read any of her books. But her face, a small oval photograph on a page of such photographs, caught Daisy's attention. She tended to spend more time studying the photographs of women or the younger men, most, although not all, suddenly dead. And never again referred to: the following week their places taken by a fresh wave of news and fatalities.