This Cold Country (39 page)

A
FAMOUS SCANDAL
," Edmund was saying, "long before my time. In fact, I was young enough for my parents to try to conceal the entire story from me. It took me weeks to piece the bare outlines together. Of course, the aftermath and some of the ramifications went on for the better part of a year.”

Daisy glanced around the table; having missed the beginning of the story through her own inattention it seemed likely she would, like Edmund, have to piece together the missing parts.

It was Daisy's first evening back at Shannig. She was pale, tired, and inattentive, to an extent that she assumed was visible to the others. She had, the previous night, for the third time, crossed the Irish Sea. A journey she had made accompanied by the painful and humiliating knowledge that she had been in love—had believed herself to be in love—with a man whose name she didn't know. And that it wasn't only his name that was unknown to her, since he had been playing a part during the few days they had spent under the same roof. She knew what he looked like; she knew what he felt like; she knew the intensity and urgency of his sexual nature. And that he suffered. Nothing more. Pride made her think in terms of having believed herself to be in love, but it was as painful as though she had lost the love of her life.

There had been a gale that had allowed her to realize that the first two times she had crossed, the sea had merely been rough. Lying awake, not only sick but frightened, thinking of the eighteenth-century Nugent family drowned making the same crossing, Daisy had tried to reassure herself that the boat would not have embarked had there been any danger. That in 1941, despite the possibility of submarines lurking beneath the dark water, the crossing from Wales to Ireland was not a hazardous one. But she knew that her life, one of the most comfortable and secure in Europe, no longer held the expectations of safety to which she had been brought up. The boat had suddenly lurched in an unexpected direction and Daisy, trying to ignore a background of moans and prayer—the two other women in the cabin had had their rosaries in their hands for the past hour—was slammed against the metal wall on the inside of her bunk. She felt herself a small cork on a cold dark sea. An infinitely reduced, pale metaphor for the hundreds of thousands—the millions—of human beings thrown randomly from one side of their lives to the other then back, often to death. Refugees crossing and recrossing borders. The turmoil in her own life was caused by the farthest ripple at the edge of the pond of world events. And it wasn't going to get better until the war was over. How long could it continue? Everyone seemed to think it would be years; long enough to change everything. Long enough not to wait passively for it to end and to see then where she stood once the smoke cleared.

She had continued to be afraid until the boat reached the shelter of the Wexford coast, afraid but not in a way that prevented her thinking clearly. She was not by nature a complainer, and she understood that her life would seem—was—enviable by the standards of the great majority of the rest of the world; nevertheless, she was sad and deeply unhappy, and there was no one who felt it his business or responsibility to see to her happiness. Happy endings, she reflected, as the boat maneuvered to tie up at the dock at Rosslare, were a novelistic convention; in life, what was needed was a happy beginning or middle.

“Where did they go?” Corisande asked, more as though she were providing a cue than seeking information. Daisy made an effort to focus her attention; there was nothing in her thoughts she had not been over a hundred times.

“That was the depressing part. I thought they should have gone to Biarritz or Le Touquet—places I had never seen a photograph of, let alone been to, but the right kind of address if one were going to engage in wife swapping. But Scotland? St. Andrews? A hearty breakfast, eighteen holes of golf in the rain, drinks at the clubhouse, and then Sodom—well, not Sodom, I suppose, but Gomorrah. It sounded so middle-aged.”

Corisande laughed, and Daisy longed to ask who they were talking about, but it was Mickey who spoke.

“They were middle-aged,” he said, not raising his eyes from the excellent steak-and-kidney pie Edmund's cook had sent up. Daisy thought that he disapproved of the subject and, even more, of the lighthearted manner in which it was being discussed.

“Of course they were, although one of the women proved she was young enough to conceive a child,” Edmund said.

Daisy refused the second helping of the pie that a moment before she had been planning to take. It now occurred to her that this story was being told for her benefit. She wondered how the subject had been introduced while her thoughts were elsewhere. And if she had been imagining a little more weight put on Edmund's last words; she had not imagined Corisande's glance in her direction. At the same moment and for the first time she tried to imagine what would have happened if she had found herself pregnant after her night with the man she still thought of as Heskith.

“They weren't all as attractive as I first imagined. Two of the women were beautiful—I spent hours poring over the family album and the illustrated papers, hoping for a photograph—but the men were ordinary. Hunting types. I'd been imagining thin moustaches and sleeked-back hair.”

“I remember being frightfully cross when I was eighteen and asked to stay by Peg Daley for a hunt ball,” Corisande said. “Grandmother wouldn't let me go. And she wouldn't say why.”

“Wasn't she was the one that caused all the trouble?” Edmund asked. “Was she was the one that got pregnant?”

“No, it was her husband—her original husband, Willie Power, who was supposed to have got Jimmy Musgrave's wife pregnant. Whether he did or not, we'll never know. Their son—if he is—has red hair and doesn't look like either of them.”

“So there were three messy English divorces and two low-key English remarriages and a permanent place for all six of them in Anglo-Irish folklore.”

“One of the couples survived the scandal?” Daisy asked, unable to imagine how, after this holiday during which wife swapping—premeditated? unpremeditated?—had occurred, the couple who had stayed married had managed to go on together.

“Not at all,” Edmund said. “When the reshuffle was over, Jimmy Musgrave and the original Mrs. Daley got the short end of the stick. Skimper Daley married Peg, Willie Power married Nan Musgrave, and—It sounds like one of those conundrums people try to confuse you with after a heavy lunch on Christmas Day.”

“Where are they all now?” Daisy asked, mainly because she didn't want her silence to suggest any association with the characters described.

“The Powers—he's some kind of a relation of Hugh Power—an uncle or cousin—”

“First cousin, once removed,” Mickey said, his disapproval not preventing him from providing accuracy where it was lacking.

“So, Hugh Power's first cousin, once removed,” Edmund continued, “his new wife, and the red-haired child all went to Kenya. They live in Happy Valley and I'm sure they fit in there very well.”

“Peg Daley hunts a pack of hounds over the most barbed wire in Ireland and curses at her husband in front of the entire field if he gets in her way,” Corisande added. “Jimmy Musgrave gets up late, has lunch six days a week at the Cork Club, and stays in the bar until they throw him out when they close. Ann Daley is still as cross as she was at the time, but she has rather a lovely garden. She lives in Westmeath. Ambrose is good to her; he sometimes takes her racing at the Curragh.”

Daisy understood she had been told that a scandal involving sexual misconduct remained alive even in the memories of those too young to have heard it as news; that if you were quick enough and tough enough to weather the storm and brazen it out, some kind of future, possibly in another country, was possible; and that if you ended up with what Edmund called “the short end of the stick,” you might as well be dead.

It was Daisy who broke the short silence that followed Edmund's story; a silence, she thought, allowed to linger while she was supposed fully to grasp its message.

“I wonder if it might be possible for me to take the pony and trap over to Dysart Hall tomorrow afternoon?” And added, as Corisande opened her mouth and drew breath, “I need to discuss some business with Ambrose.”

D
AISY GAVE THE
tired pony a flick of the reins to encourage her to trot smartly up the avenue. Yellowing sunlight warmed Dysart Hall and the approach of autumn was in the air. The house, with its closed, shuttered wing. Armistice Day. The day they had learned of James's death.

Daisy had rehearsed what she planned to say to Ambrose. He was not a man often held accountable for his actions. A quick wit, social skills, and his air of authority seemed to allow him to skim above not only awkward social situations, unreliability with women—Daisy still wondered what had taken place between him and Corisande-—but also, it now seemed, complicity in a murder. She noticed that it was Ambrose whom she held responsible for both his and Edmund's actions. She knew it was Ambrose's gun—where else would Edmund have got the gun left for Heskith at Dunmaine? She knew instinctively that Edmund answered to Ambrose not only because Ambrose had greater presence and personal authority, but because she believed, without any evidence—since she was hardly going to invoke Maud as a witness—that Ambrose was his superior in some hierarchy, in some secret, probably unacknowledged, possibly informal, part of wartime English intelligence. She tried not to consider the possibility that the assassination was something they had dreamed up themselves and carried out on their own initiative.

Ambrose was in the stable yard, talking to the vet, when Daisy drove in. He watched approvingly as she brought the pony to a halt outside the stable doors and handed the reins to a groom who stood waiting for instructions from Ambrose or the vet. The two old Labradors loitered at Ambrose's side. Although she had no wish for even a minimal additional responsibility, it occurred to her it was unusual there was no gun dog or cat living, indoors or out, at Dunmaine.

Daisy had not anticipated a witness to her meeting with Ambrose and she found herself returning his greeting just as warmly and, soon afterward, laughing at an entertaining account of some domestic disaster entirely of his own making. She told herself she was waiting for the moment they were alone to call him to account for embroiling her in his machinations and—although she would not use these words—ruining her life.

In Ambrose's study, sitting by the fire, as Daisy literally and metaphorically drew in breath to begin, he interrupted to offer her tea. She said she didn't want any, but he rang the bell. Now she had to wait until his elderly parlormaid arrived. But while the kettle boiled on the old range, while the potato cakes were browning in the cast iron skillet, while Ambrose continued to be as witty and amusing as though he had a large and appreciative audience, while Kitty carried the heavy tray along the flagged corridor and across the hall, Daisy had time to think.

Kitty set down the tea tray on a low table in front of the fire. Daisy waited until Ambrose leaned down to put the silver hot water jug on the hearthstone before she spoke.

“Guess who I ran into in London? A friend of yours.”

***

AFTER DAISY'S FAILURE
to find Heskith at the defeated and dying house near Farnham, she had gone home. Afterward she had no memory of the journey back to her parents' house.

“Are you all right, dear? You look very pale,” her mother asked, her usually preoccupied expression now one of concern.

“I'm fine; I have a bit of a headache.”

“Too much sun. Why don't you go upstairs and I'll bring you an aspirin.”

Ever since Daisy could remember, her mother, seemingly oblivious to the dangers of tuberculosis, infantile paralysis, or diphtheria—the not common but always possible and often fatal illnesses of childhood—had protected her and Joan against sunstroke and from indigestion caused by eating cucumber and freshly baked bread.

Now, for the first time, Daisy agreed that she might have overdone the sun, and allowed herself to be sent upstairs to bed. The next morning she claimed a residual headache and, by the evening, was composed enough to rejoin the subdued tempo of rectory life.

Dinner was silent until Daisy's father asked her about her plans. To cut off a renewed discussion of her ration book, Daisy, speaking without thought, said that she was looking forward to spending a week with her family and that then she must return to Ireland. It was only as she spoke that she realized that this was what she was going to do, should do, had no choice but to do. She felt guilty and deceitful returning to the house she had left—fortunately not announcing her departure as permanent—as though returning to a betrayed husband after she had been rejected by a lover. Being rejected by a lover, she thought, would be a couple of steps up from finding out that the identity of that lover was not substantial enough for her to consider herself rejected.

Daisy allowed herself to be lazy and indulged by her parents for the rest of the week. She lay on a sofa in the study pretending to read as her father wrote letters and dealt with parish business; she sat on a stool in the kitchen, doing small pleasant tasks—podding beans, chopping parsley—while her mother cooked; afternoons were spent in her grandmother's sitting room, listening to the wireless and eating biscuits. She went to bed early and then woke in the night and tried to think of one moment in the future for which she felt any enthusiasm.

She left the rectory in the late morning of the following Tuesday to take a train to London in order to take the boat train from Paddington. On Monday morning she had gone to the post office and withdrawn the remains of her pre-war savings account—thirty-five shillings—just enough to make up the difference between what she had in her purse and the fare back to Ireland. Having so little money made her feel young, vulnerable, and frightened.