This Cold Country (42 page)

Daisy looked at her reflection with more care and interest than she had done in some time. Her face had changed. It was still young, pretty, unlined; her hair was still dark brown and curly. She weighed perhaps three or four pounds more than she had when she had spent most days in hard physical labor. But that weight did not show in her face; it had served only to slightly round her body, to make her less of a girl.

Her own was not the only image in front of Daisy. There was a framed photograph of Patrick; it had been taken a year or so before she met him. When she was not looking at this portrait, she always imagined him in uniform rather than the tweed jacket, lightly striped shirt, and countrified tie that he had put on to have his picture taken. There were also some smaller photographs and snapshots of her family; one, framed, of her parents, the others stuck into the side of the looking glass. And a chalk drawing of Patrick. It was newly framed and stood a little apart from the others.

When Patrick's letters had stared to come again, four months after the delivery of fourteen letters at once—all but one that he had written home since he and Daisy had married—they came one by one. The second long silence had been broken with a letter from a new prisoner-of-war camp. The wound that he had written of so casually had become infected and he had been transferred to a camp with better medical facilities. Although Daisy was well aware that his letters were censored, she believed his assurances that he had received good, if fairly primitive, care. He walked, he had written reassuringly, with a slight limp but was otherwise completely healthy again.

His portrait suggested otherwise. From the beginning of December, post had come more frequently; frequently enough for those writing not to feel that every question answered, every event commented on, every wish for a birthday or festival was hopelessly out of date and largely meaningless. In the most recent letter, Patrick had enclosed the drawing that a fellow prisoner had made of him—the portrait that now stood on Daisy's dressing table. The paper had been smoothed out as carefully as possible, but the lines from where it had been folded into four were still visible.

The style, as well as the medium, were similar to the drawings Daisy had spent long afternoons looking at in the
Illustrated London News,
the publication now subscribed to, ostensibly for the paying guests, at Dunmaine.

Daisy was often surprised by the level of talent of the amateur artists who depicted the prison camps. A line or two would sometimes show a detail that would tell her more about the men and their limited, makeshift surroundings than any of the breezy, rather banal, captions beneath could hope to. It was such an amateur artist who had drawn Patrick. The differences between the portrait and the photograph on the other side of the looking glass were considerable, but they were the result of the artist's expertise rather than his lack of it. It was clearly the same person; the bone structure was unchanged, as were the eyes and the shape and expression of the mouth, but the portrait was of an utterly changed man. The physical differences were startling, although only part of the overall effect. Patrick had lost weight and his face was gaunt. His hair had started to recede on both sides of his head and there were new lines on his forehead. His nose, from loss of weight, had become more prominent, and his eyes seemed to have sunk deeper into their sockets. Since the drawing had arrived, Daisy had tried to find in it the Patrick she had, not so long ago, watched shaving; suffused with desire, she had watched him draw his mouth in, his lips over his teeth, and scrape the shaving soap off with a cutthroat razor. Instead, she could see what he would look like when he became old. And he was already shockingly older.

She looked back at her own reflection. She had not aged in the dramatic way that Patrick had, but she was not unchanged. Looking with a new awareness, she could see that the harder line of her mouth had changed her face more than she had imagined. She glanced at the drawing and then back to her reflection, trying to see what Patrick would see when he came home. If he were to come home now, if the war were to end that day. But it wouldn't, and when he came home he would not be as he appeared in the drawing. The changes she could see would still be there, but in a more extreme version. And she, how would she be? Not physically as changed as her husband, and probably not psychologically as changed, but not the girl he had said good-bye to on the second day of their honeymoon at Aberneth Farm. While one could argue that the firmer line of her mouth might denote strength, there was something lacking of the old Daisy. In the eyes, perhaps, there was no longer a readiness for fun, the awareness of infinite possibilities, an openness, a welcome that would spread to a smile. She knew that she still longed for affection but willingness to love no longer showed.
I have learned to compromise,
she thought,
and it shows.

The thought, the realization, made her sad. Sad, but she accepted the truth without self-reproach. The changes to her life, a life that was not turning out the way she had expected, were similar to those she saw around her. She knew that people lived with secrets, with small guilts, with shame. She hadn't thought she would be one of them. When Patrick came home it would be as difficult for him to recognize in her the girl he had married as it would be for her to accept the stranger in the drawing as her husband. And they had promised to spend the rest of their lives together.

She had no doubt that they would. They were both decent people, of goodwill, and they had loved each other once. The war, far from over, was drawing a thick black line through their lives, through the century, through history. After it, nothing would ever be the same.

I am grateful to Max Nichols, Frances Kiernan, Hope Dellon, Mike Nichols, Susanna Moore, Anne Grubb, and Jenny Nichols for their help and advice. I am also indebted to Desmond Fitzgerald, the Knight of Glin, for his assistance with geographical details of the South of Ireland. And to my mother, the late Cynthia O'Connor, who was a Land Girl in Wales at the beginning of World War II.

The title of this novel is taken from
The Family Reunion
by T. S. Eliot.

1. The characters in
   This Cold Country
   are kept apart by differences in class, nationality, religion, and political belief, but not by money. Why do you think this was the case? To what extent do we now believe ourselves to belong to a classless society? Or has our society replaced class with money as a measure by which people are judged?
   
2. The year is 1940; we know who won the war, but it is easy to forget that the characters in this, and other novels with similar settings, do not have the advantage of foresight. Their lives are a delicate balance of the immediate and personal existence of the individual and their responsibilities as citizens of a nation at war. How do the feelings of the characters in this book compare to the sense of national and personal vulnerability felt for the first time by many people in this country?
   
3. When James comes to Daisy's bedroom do you think of him as a hot-blooded young man who doesn't consider the consequences of his actions toward Daisy? Or is he a cold-blooded seducer, a cad? Or do you think that he is aware of “war and its brutal suggestion that time was, even for the young, a commodity no one could afford to waste”? How do you think war changes people's view of conventional morality?
   
4. Do you think Daisy is unwise to marry a man she hardly knows? Or do you think that she is right to have taken marriage and temporary happiness where she could? How limited do you think her chances of either would be if she had waited until after the war?
   
5. After the war, many people looking back said it was one of the happiest times of their lives. Do you believe this to be true? Does each of us have a place where we belong, a right time and place in history?
   
6. Daisy recites “Dover Beach” to herself when she is afraid. But the message of Matthew Arnold's poem is not so optimistic. What is he telling us?
   
7. The Anglo-Irish family that Daisy marries into represents the generations after Irish independence who once were the privileged classes. Now they have neither political power nor money. How do you think they managed to live? And why do you think the shopkeepers and merchants allowed them credit for so long?
   
8. Mickey and Corisande have, in different ways, flawed characters. Are they a product of their historical environment? Does this background account for certain gaps in Patrick's character?
   
9. “You may be surprised by how differently they read.” Mickey is speaking about two history books, one English the other Irish, that describe the same events. What does Daisy learn by comparing the two?
   
10. Maud lives in the past. Daisy thinks happy beginnings and middles are worth more than happy endings. How do these attitudes compare with your own?
    
11. Ireland was a neutral country during the Second World War. How much does this neutrality owe to Ireland's previous relationship with England?
    
12. The population of the Republic of Ireland is approximately three-and-a-half million; yet the Irish have written a disproportionate amount of the world's great literature. Wilde, Shaw, Sheridan, Joyce, Beckett, O'Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, Maria Edgeworth, William Trevor, Goldsmith, Yeats, Frank O'Connor, Swift, Synge and Seamus Heaney—four of them Nobel Prize winners—are among the most famous. Why has such a small island produced such a wealth of literature? Why has the Anglo-Irish minority produced such a large proportion of Irish literature?