The cork of another champagne bottle popped. Daisy and Patrick cut the cake. Photographs were taken. It was as though time were now moving at twice its normal speed. Daisy had just started to wonder what Patrick was feeling and whether he was as bemused and confused as she was at the momentous step and solemn vows they had, less than an hour ago, taken together, when all faces turned toward James.
The best man’s speech. James, a glass in his hand, stepped forward half a pace—the size of the rectory sitting room did not allow for dramatic movements—and without any apparent nervousness began to speak. Daisy, after a moment, reminded herself to breathe; her strongest emotion embarrassment—for them all, including, surprisingly, James—rather than fear of what he, with the license implicit in a best man’s speech, might say.
But it seemed to be all right. James, easily and amusingly, recounted a harmless anecdote of his and Patrick’s childhood; said the conventional things about her family; about how happy his—completely absent—family was to have Daisy as one of their own, and ended, his voice as light as before, but his eyes only for Daisy.
“We both saw Daisy at the same time, but I was too stupid to see what a jewel she is. The better man won, the one she deserves, but I shall always think that if I were a better man than I am that Patrick might have been making this speech and I might have been standing proudly beside her.”
Daisy’s fingers on Patrick’s arm tightened. She understood that she, with her family, although not necessarily Patrick, was being charmed. But she thought that, in order to be so charming, he must recognize some special quality in her. The thought was flattering until she understood that that was what charm is. Even so, for a moment, she found herself wondering what it would have been like if James, rather than the better man, had won.
Chapter 9
DAISY WOKE WITH an early morning breeze from the open window playing on her face. She lay, eyes closed, holding on to the feeling of intense pleasure and a sense of well-being. This, she thought, might be what heaven is like.
Patrick lay beside her; they had spent the night in the spare room at Aberneth Farm. Daisy listened to his even breathing and knew him to be asleep. She did not open her eyes, and lay still and relaxed, aware of the texture of the sheet lying lightly over her naked body. Birds were chattering in the gutter above the open window.
I am happy, she thought. I am married and I love my husband and I am happy. Remember this moment.
Patrick shifted slightly, drew in a deep breath as though he were about to wake, expelled it and sank into a deeper sleep. Daisy slipped quietly out of bed, wrapped herself in her dressing gown, shuffled her feet into her slippers, and silently padded to the door. She opened it with exaggerated care; the doors and floorboards at Aberneth Farm tended to creak, and it was her intention to be back in bed, bathed, with clean teeth and brushed hair before Patrick awoke. Closing the door carefully behind her, Daisy became aware of a small, still presence at the end of the corridor.
“Sarah,” she said. “Good morning.”
“Mummy said I wasn’t to disturb you,” the child said. “Why are you sleeping in the spare room?”
“Because I am married.” Daisy knew this was explanation enough for Sarah, that the child only wanted to confirm, to her own satisfaction, that Daisy and Patrick now shared a bedroom.
“Is Uncle Patrick going to live here, too?”
“No, he’s a soldier; he has to go back to his regiment, and now I am his wife I’ll go and live in our house in Ireland.”
Sarah nodded. She had been told all this before, but since she didn’t really understand or accept the changes around the small world of Aberneth Farm, she tended to ask the same questions, hoping for a different or, at least, more comprehensible answer. Daisy sympathized with the child and wanted to give her an explanation she could understand; failing that, she was prepared to repeat the information until it was accepted, if not understood.
“Are you coming down to breakfast?”
“No. I’ll come when Uncle Patrick wakes up.”
“You have to wait for him because you’re married now?”
“Yes,” Daisy said firmly.
“I already had my breakfast. There’s a letter for Uncle Patrick.”
“A letter? Did the postman bring it?”
“A man rang the doorbell.”
“I’ll come down when I’ve washed my face,” Daisy said. She went into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. Without even a passing thought of rats—or ferrets.
A telegram. Rosemary’s heart must have dropped at the sight of it.
Daisy knotted the cord of her dressing gown more tightly as she left the bathroom; she had never gone downstairs before in her nightclothes. How clear it was sometimes, she thought, as she descended the stairs, how one was meant to behave. To have appeared in the dining room, fully dressed and with lipstick, half an hour later, would have been cold and vain, but to have dashed downstairs with sleep-filled eyes, wild hair, and a full bladder would have been overdramatic, hysterical, impractical, and, well, not English. The appearance of calm and order was next best to order itself, as if knowing what one was expected to do made possible continuing one’s life in the chaotic, frightening, and lonely times of the war.
Rosemary was still at the breakfast table. In the same way that Daisy had instinctively washed her face before coming downstairs, Rosemary had remained in the dining room. Ready to welcome Daisy or Patrick and ready to commiserate over the contents of the telegram.
“Good morning,” Rosemary said.
Daisy leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.
“Good morning,” she said. “Sarah told me there’s a telegram.”
Rosemary hesitated, a little off balance, her prepared words no longer necessary.
“Have a cup of tea before you take it up,” she said.
Daisy sat down.
“He has to go back?” she asked.
“I imagine that’s it,” Rosemary said. “So unfair.”
Daisy shook her head. She knew what Rosemary must have thought when the telegram arrived. Any telegram that didn’t notify the recipient that a next of kin was dead or missing had, now, to be counted a mercy.
“Have you ever met any of Patrick’s family?” Rosemary asked. Daisy understood she was not referring to James or any of the Westmoreland Nugents.
“Not one of them. Now might be the time to tell me the worst.”
“I only meant—you can stay here as long as you like. If Patrick has to go back, there’s no need to go to Ireland on your own.”
“Thank you.” Daisy smiled, and repeated her words to Sarah, “But I’m married now.
FISHGUARD TO ROSSLARE. Daisy caught a train at Crumlin and made a connection to the train originating from Paddington and ending at the dark, cold, damp port. It was raining and windy when she got off the train and dragged her luggage to the boat. An overnight crossing and then a train journey on the other side. Would someone have come to meet them had Patrick been with her, she wondered.
She wasn’t alone in the cabin. Two women had come in after Daisy was already in her bunk. She had turned her face away and pretended to be asleep, wanting to avoid the false intimacy of travel.
Daisy felt the gentle swell of the boat leaving harbor become a slower, stronger rhythm; there was no reason to imagine this rougher motion would abate—the contrary far more likely—before they reached the shelter of the Irish coast. She was afraid of being seasick; she was afraid of becoming tearful. Even as a child, Daisy had not wept easily.
Now, as then, she attempted to divert herself. The trouble was that almost anything she thought about increased her feeling of being alone, abandoned, bereft. There was little in the not uneventful past few weeks that did not concern someone not now with her. Primarily, of course, her husband of four days, now with his regiment and, Daisy imagined, on his way overseas. If she could fall asleep it might be possible to wake up the following early morning as the boat docked at Rossl
are. She allowed herself to think about Patrick, about the three nights they had spent together. Such thoughts were rationed; she did not know how long they would have to last her, to console her. In her darker moments she knew it was possible it could be forever. But like women all over England, she banished, as best she could, such thoughts from her mind. Patrick’s body on hers, the feel of his skin—warm, alive, an intimacy beyond anything she had ever imagined—against hers; his hands, with the same restrained strength as when he had helped her cut the wedding cake, holding her head as he kissed her. The weight of his stomach against hers. The feeling of being not alone, of being part of him, and the pleasure, the newly found and barely explored pleasure, of sexual love. And more even than love or pleasure, there was a feeling of relief.
Daisy knew, but chose not to dwell on it, that this love had developed after Patrick had taken her to bed; that love had followed sexual pleasure, in the opposite order to that prescribed by conventional morality and literature.
Eyes closed, she lay on her bunk in the airless cabin, melting with love and gratitude. Patrick would come back, safe and whole, and in the meantime she would hold the thought of him close to her and try to be brave.
PART TWO
Autumn 1940
Chapter 10
WHEN DAISY WOKE, the sea was calm. The small cabin was stuffy and smelled of unwashed bodies and clothing. Putting on her shoes and carrying her handbag, Daisy quietly left the cabin; it seemed important she should do so without waking her companions.
The air in the bathroom was foul; the floor, basins, and lavatories filthy. Daisy held her breath as she relieved herself and hastily brushed her teeth. All other washing would have to wait for cleaner surroundings.
The deck was wet and, apart from a couple of seamen, deserted. It had rained during the night and although the boat itself was redolent with the squalor of travelers—cigarette ends in the scuppers, beer bottles rolling with the mild swell, and a distressing smell of vomit—the wind from the Irish Sea was fresh, smelling of salt and rain. Daisy made her way to the bow and watched the gray outline of Rosslare harbor forming through the lighter gray mist. She watched small fishing boats setting out and listened to the shrieking gulls overhead. Although she was hungry, dirty, and tired, she felt her spirits rising.
This is it. The place I was always meant to be, Daisy thought, her feeling more of recognition than of pleasure. The thought so clear that for a moment she thought she had spoken the words aloud.
RAIN BEAT AGAINST the windows of Maud Nugent’s bedroom, the panes a little thinner than they had been when the house was built a hundred and ninety years before, eroded by exposure to storms blowing in from the Atlantic. The wind rattled the window frames but the sounds, familiar to Maud, did not disturb her sleep. Nor did the rhythmic clicking of Philomena’s knitting needles impinge on her dreams. It was not until an oak log, burning since just after breakfast, broke in two and slid down in the grate that she sighed and turned toward the sound. She had been dreaming of Princess Yusupov’s black pearls and was once again eighteen and in St. Petersburg. She was wearing a ball gown that had been passed down from her eldest sister, and was waltzing with an undersecretary. He was neither good-looking nor charming; nor did he perform this social duty with much real or simulated enthusiasm. Her father was the ambassador; the ambassador had five daughters; if one of these daughters were short of a partner at a ball, the undersecretaries were obliged to dance with the wallflower. At least once.
Maud did not, in either her dreams or her memory, romanticize her place at these balls. She was there as a guest, but any pleasure she took was the pleasure of a spectator. The Yusupov black pearls adorned the princess’s throat; around her own neck was a necklace of coral and seed pearls. Life at the British Embassy had been no more comfortable than it was here at Dunmaine; the beds had been no softer, the rooms rather colder, and there had always been the fear and possibility of rats. Maud had been awoken more than once by a rat running across her bed. She had not even been happier then. The past was not better; but it was more real.
Reassured by the glow of the fire, the soft light casting shadows of the fireguard onto the rug, the anticipation of the cup of tea and biscuit that Philomena would soon carry up from the kitchen, Maud settled down again to sleep. She had gone to bed at the outbreak of war and had no intention of getting up again until peace was proclaimed.
THE TRAIN JOURNEY was as pleasant as the channel crossing had been nasty. Daisy had a carriage to herself. Although she suspected were she to beat the cushions on the upholstered seats, clouds of dust would have risen, train grime, after the squalor of a rough crossing, seemed cozy and cheerful.
She ate breakfast on the train and from the first sip of tea and mouthful of Irish railway bacon and eggs, she felt stronger and even more cheerful. The countryside outside her window was green and damp. The mist in which Rosslare had been shrouded had lifted a little, but enough of it lingered to soften the outlines of the hedges and fields, the overgrown ditches and stonefaced banks, the hills covered with gorse, the cattle on the road heavily plodding toward a farmyard to be milked. Coming into one of the many stations at which they stopped, Daisy had time to look at a pond in a field beside a road. It was surrounded by reeds and willows, rooted in the water. A moorhen with two chicks was making her way around the edge of the reeds, moving with sudden darts, ducking her head into the water. At the other end of the pond, water lilies were in bloom.
MICKEY NUGENT PROPPED a folded copy of an old Illustrated London News against the garage window and pushed a spanner against the bottom of the page to stop it sliding off. The corners of the window were darkened by rags of old cobwebs, but the dead flies on the sill seemed to have died of old age or starvation. A fine coating of barnyard dust covered both window and sill.
The shower outside dictated an indoor task, but Mickey would have preferred to potter in the garden shed, prodding the damp earth around seedlings, smoking and thinking, or even rearranging pots and tools into a semblance of order. He planted living things in the potting shed and they thrived; the dry dust of the garage, even without the desiccated bluebottles supine on the ledge, gave a less encouraging message. And Mickey mistrusted machinery. Still, the imminent arrival of his brother’s new wife predicated embarking on this task, even if—and Mickey’s life was full of unfinished tasks—he did not complete it that day. “The motor car is out of commission for the duration” would do the trick, although “up on blocks” made the possibility of meeting Daisy at Clonmel absolutely out of the question. Mickey had squirreled away a couple of gallons of petrol, not with any specific objective in mind, but he was sure that before the war ended he would find a better use for it than meeting a stranger at a railway station.
Wash, especially under wings and running board. Polish. That part was clear enough, and Mickey, who liked simple repetitive tasks that allowed him to think about other things, had done the job thoroughly.
Grease and oil all chassis lubricating points, road springs, brake operating mechanism, and engine controls. Mickey wished there was someone helping him. He knew in theory what a chassis was, road springs were presumably the things that prevented spine jarring and teeth grinding when the car went over a bump; the terms “brake” and “engine” did not present a problem, but “operating mechanism” and “controls” seemed to be rather blithely thrown in. Perhaps he should come back to that part later. He returned to the window ledge and read the next instruction.
Run engine until warm; drain radiator and cylinder block. The irony was that this information was not from a government pamphlet but part of an advertisement for an expensive motorcar. The manufacturers, who had no means of selling another car until after the war, kept their name in the public’s mind with instructions on how to care for the model they had until a later one came on the market. After the war, Mickey thought, advertisements would hardly be necessary in order to induce any member of the British public with two coins to rub together to buy
the now unavailable goods they hankered after.
The elegantly framed advertisement was for a Hawker Siddeley. Mickey had assumed the same principles would hold true for the modest Ford Standard that stood, gleaming, in the garage; now he was not so sure. He felt the need to consult another person; he didn’t want assistance and he probably wouldn’t take any advice proffered, but talking it through with somebody else often clarified his thoughts. In the meantime he would consult the encyclopedia in the library.
DAISY DOZED; OUTSIDE the window, fields and trees sped by. She had been delighted by them and enchanted by glimpses of castles and ruined mills standing, in silhouette, on distant hills. Closer, old stone bridges crossed small rivers and streams and Daisy had admired them all, loved them with the mysterious feeling of recognition she had felt at the moorhen’s pond. The feeling of coming home.
I am coming home, she thought contentedly. A new home, but my home now. After a while she slept, tired from the uneasy night on the boat and the strain of the previous days. Her sleep was, not unpleasantly, interrupted by stationmasters’ voices calling out the names of the stations at which they stopped—Wellington Bridge, Campile, Waterford, Mooncoin, Carrick-on-Suir, Kilsheelan— followed by the slamming of train doors, and the che-che-che of the engine leaving the station, and then the rhythmic click of the wheels on the tracks, lulling her back to a deeper sleep.
PHILOMENA FINISHED A row and reversed her needles. She was warm, comfortable, and a little sleepy in the armchair by the fire. She was older than Maud, but did not think in terms of retirement, nor did she think it particularly unfair that her employer slept while she worked. The room in which she now spent most of her days was larger, warmer, and more cheerful than her own kitchen and seemed like the nursery that she had both worked and lived in when she had come to Dunmaine as a fifteen-year-old girl. The light that she knitted by was dim and strained her eyes, but since she did not have electricity in her cottage at the gate, she did not feel the lack of adequate light. Two more rows and she would go down the back stairs to bring up the tray with tea and biscuits for elevenses.
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