This Cold Country

by Annabel Davis-Goff

  “In theory, Maud. They come addressed to her and the accounts are in her name.”

  “But she has abnegated responsibility for them?”

  “Basically she’s given up. She’s old and tired and sad—her only son is dead and she’s outlived most of her friends—and she’s gone to bed and closed her eyes and closed her mind. She’s had enough.”

  Daisy wanted, now that Ambrose had given her the opening, to ask about Patrick’s parents, but she knew she had to deal with the more immediate point.

  “Isn’t there some legal thing that one does when an old person is no longer capable of looking after her affairs?”

  “Power of attorney. Yes, Maud would be a prime candidate for such a procedure. She would welcome it, I imagine—if you got her on a day when she could understand.”

  “But?”

  “But—there’s a pretty good case to be made for letting sleeping dogs lie.”

  “And it is?”

  Now Ambrose was the one to draw a deep breath.

  “I don’t much like landing you with all this stuff at the same time. The rest of us have had years to get used to it. The house is mortgaged; Maud is very old; I am the trustee. We all know this can’t go on forever, but it’s probably better if it can go on until Maud dies and the war is over. We’re not talking about a long time, in either case.”

  “We haven’t heard from Patrick, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “What does it mean?”

  Ambrose was silent; he looked helpless.

  “This is your afternoon for answering questions.”

  “I really don’t know,” he said after a moment. “Obviously it’s not a good thing. But if he was known to be a prisoner or dead, or even officially missing, you would have been informed, of course. He could be—he may have been doing something a little more complicated.”

  “Complicated? You mean like spying?”

  Ambrose looked startled and then laughed.

  “Patrick a spy? Try and imagine it. No, I think what he was doing—he went, you know, on that course—was training to be part of the second wave after a Commando landing force. Anything like that could hold his letter up for months. Sometimes families get six or seven at a time. Really, I don’t know. If I did, I would tell you.”

  “So, what should I think?”

  “Cautious optimism and courage.” Ambrose spoke gently.

  “I see.” Daisy drew in a deep breath. “And about Dunmaine?”

  “I feel that as trustee I should try to keep the spirit of what Charley—Maud’s husband—intended rather than act as a sort of financial policeman.”

  “For as long as possible—until the war ends and Maud dies?”

  “If we can struggle on until then.”

  “Can we?” Daisy asked.

  “Probably. It’s in almost no one’s interest to speed the process along. The bank isn’t going to make a sudden move; they’re no better equipped to take on Dunmaine than anyone else. They’d sooner wait until the war is over.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, I suppose the place will be sold up, the bank and the other creditors paid, and—there’ll be, ah, death duties and—well, everyone’ll get on with their lives as best they can,” Ambrose ended lamely, not quite able to meet Daisy’s stricken gaze.

  “Does everyone except me know this? I mean, am I the only one this is news to?”

  “Everyone concerned—Maud, Corisande, Patrick, and Mickey—has this information. To what extent they have thought it through and come to a logical conclusion is another matter. Maud isn’t interested in the present, and less so in the future. Corisande has extricated herself; what she thought or knew, I couldn’t say. Mickey—who knows what he thinks, but since he is planting a maze or something on the grounds that will take ten years to mature, I have to assume he hasn’t quite faced up to facts.”

  A maze? Surely not. Daisy did not allow herself to follow this new distraction, although she added it to her mental list of unanswered questions.

  “And Patrick is—missing. That leaves me.”

  Ambrose shrugged lightly, sympathetically, but said nothing.

  “Well, now I have the broader view, but we still need to deal with some of the day-to-day practicalities. What we’re talking about is surviving until—things change. I paid last week’s wages myself and I have a stack of bills here. Where does the money come from to pay them and—ah—how much is there?”

  “There is some,” Ambrose said apologetically. “It’s just not quite enough. There is Maud’s pension—colonel’s widow—and a few shares that send a dividend once a year. Some of the land is let—but you shouldn’t think of that as cash; it goes straight to the bank against the mortgage.”

  “Against?”

  “It pays part of the mortgage.”

  “And the rest—of the mortgage payments?” Daisy could feel the beginnings of a headache, and she felt very, very tired.

  “They sort of get added to the overdraft. As I said, the bank is helpful because in a way, their interests are not so different from ours.”

  “And the bills and wages?”

  “That’s a kind of juggling act. You’ll always be a bit short at the end of the month, but in the end everyone knows they’ll get paid. Probably.”

  AFTER AMBROSE HAD left, Daisy returned to the desk. Again feeling a little like Pip, she set out the new financial facts of Dunmaine as best she could. She had no knowledge of bookkeeping, but since she had a logical mind and the facts themselves seemed to fall into easily recognizable separate categories, she set out the figures on three separate sheets of paper.

  The weekly wages; the total of the monthly bills for the household; the bank overdraft, mortgage, rates, taxes, and other not yet identified expenses connected with Dunmaine.

  Then she set the income that Ambrose had described against those figures, setting, as he had, the rental for the land let to the farmer against the bank column, and the other income against wages and bills. The result was illuminating; in every category Dunmaine was sinking further into debt, but not by much. Daisy could see why the bank was content to wait; why the shopkeepers understood that they had to take turns being paid, and never in full. It was an example of the principle set out in David Copperfield—the one that supposes an annual income of twenty pounds, and defines happiness as being an annual expenditure of nineteen pounds, nineteen and sixpence, and misery as one of twenty pounds, ought and sixpence. Daisy did not find it reassuring that Dickens was the author who again came to mind when she was pondering her financial affairs.

  There were two overdue bills that Daisy did not include in her accounts. One was from a milliner’s in Dublin; Corisande’s appearance was not apparently only the result of an innate elegance, but required considerable expenditure. Daisy firmly marked it “opened in error” and, putting it in a new envelope, forwarded it to Corisande at Edmund’s address. The other, almost as substantial and also dating back six months, was from a nursery garden and largely for shrubs. Mickey’s maze? Daisy thought she might leave it to one side and deal with it another time.

  She fell asleep that night thinking that if she were to contribute her small income to the Nugent housekeeping and find a way to reduce expenses a little, she could make that economy settie at no greater an indebtedness than had existed at her arrival. She awoke—from a dream in which Maud had become a heavy ornate clock with a loud, ominous tick, her life span and the distant war predicating Daisy’s life and the future of Dunmaine—to the sound of someone stepping on the gravel outside. Daisy leaped out of her warm bed, her heart pounding and adrenaline rushing through her body, and moved quietly and quickly to the window. She carefully drew the corner of one curtain back to see outside.

  At first she could see nothing. Then the hollow sound of the cattle grid into the pasture on the side of the house led her eye to a man setting off down the field toward the village below. Daisy could tell from the time elapsed during which she had hea
rd him cross the gravel that he had come from the avenue rather than from the house, and she thought he must be someone taking a shortcut home. There was, at any rate, nothing clandestine about his bearing; he seemed, rather, oblivious to the house—as though he were an animal that would avoid humans during the day but followed at night the path his ancestors had since before the house had been built.

  Daisy returned to bed, but not to sleep. It occurred to her that she had not allowed any kind of contingency or reserve in her calculations of the housekeeping economy of the Nugent family. Nothing for repairs or medical bills. Nothing for clothes, veterinarians, entertaining, presents, or charitable contributions; as a rector’s daughter, Daisy knew well that the latter were not always completely voluntary.

  Next, she wondered how Corisande had paid her previous dressmakers’ bills. Did she have some money of her own? Had Maud Nugent paid them? Had they come out of the housekeeping money? If old Mrs. Nugent had paid, was it the same as them coming out of the housekeeping? What was going to happen to her, to any of them? Was she responsible for Mickey’s long overdue bill for the shrubs? If not, who was? Did Mickey have any money of his own? Or did he just charge anything he needed to the estate? How did they all manage to live in a world in which realities were never addressed? Was her anxiety a sign that she was hopelessly bourgeois? Would she, in time, become like them and waft through life disregarding her obligations? She rather thought she would not; it seemed possible that she might be unable to meet those obligations, but unlikely she would ever do so with the insouciance of the rest of the family.

  What did Patrick think ? Or did he, perhaps understandably, assume that the financial problems of Dunmaine were something he would consider after the end of the war. Which Ambrose had said would be soon. She had believed him, but was it because he was better informed than she was, or just because he had spoken with masculine authority? What would happen if Patrick never came back and she, apart from the devastation of his loss and the sadness of widowhood, were to live out her days at Dunmaine, in the company of Maud and Mickey, with the estate gradually sinking into the quicksand of irreversible debt.

  For a brief middle-of-the-night moment, she even considered returning to England, making the pretense of being part of the war effort, and living with her family until Patrick, God willing, came home. Even with the war effort excuse, it seemed dishonorable. Daisy knew what “for better or worse” meant. She had made a commitment—taken vows, even—to throw her lot in with these frozen people. With this cold country.

  Daisy was about to slide back into a sleep she knew would be troubled by anxious dreams, when a cry outside left her rigidly, wide-eyed awake. The sound was loud, painful, extravagantly sad, like a baby suffering dreadfully. It came again, more primitive—and louder. A cat. This logical explanation stopped her heart racing, but was otherwise little consolation. That the mating cry of a cat should contain such depths of devastation, loss, longing, and broken-heartedness suggested that human suffering could be infinitely greater than she had observed or imagined. That suffering could hardly find a more probable locale than among the victims and participants of the war being fought too far away for her to witness or be part of, but not so far away that it would not affect her life and those of everyone she knew or loved.

  The cat stopped in the middle of an ambitious yowl; it had been interrupted by something in the dark. Outside it was now completely silent. Daisy lay, breathing slowly and deeply, trying to relax.

  The silence was now broken by the creaking of a floorboard on the landing outside her room. The timber in the old house still settling after almost two hundred years? Mickey crossing the landing, as he often did at night, going to observe his bats? Or that unnamed and in no way frightening presence she often felt, and occasionally caught a glimpse of, in the upstairs corridors of Dunmaine? What would happen if they actually ran out of money? If the bank decided to cut its losses? When Maud died and her pension with her? If the creditors got together and forced the issue? If the staff became tired of wages always a little late, and left?

  For all the discomfort of Dunmaine, its old-fashioned amenities required labor. Daisy’s mind led her unwillingly down a line of questions, all of them beginning with “what if?” What if there were no staff? No cook, no maids? Not even the scarcely visible boy who acted as a part-time gardener and groom; so rarely seen that Daisy had not remembered to include him in her original calculation of household expenses. What would happen then? She would not, as millions of people all over the world even now did, face the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, nor would she or those around her experience hunger, cold, exhaustion, or fear on any level greater than extreme discomfort. Nevertheless, Daisy had difficulty imagining Dunmaine functioning without the help of what she had once thought of as an unnecessarily large staff. She could, she thought, learn to cook, and presumably she could learn to humor the vagaries of the old-fashioned kitchen range. But could she also look after the bedridden old lady upstairs? And the pony and old cob in the stables, their only means of transport? Could she also chop and carry the wood necessary to keep the house minimally heated and grow the vegetables and fruit that, with the hens and eggs, made up a large part of their diet? She could not. There might be a way to reduce the weekly wages, but she could not see it now. It was equally difficult to see how the monthly bills could be reduced; Daisy had got as far as rationing alcohol and introducing two vegetarian meals into the weekly menu when a fox, in the distance, began to bark.

  A minute or two later, the fox barked again. Daisy had been listening for him; she was young enough and hopeful enough to find the sound pleasing. Without a thought for the henhouse, she took a deep breath and fell into a comparatively dreamless sleep.

  THE NEXT DAY was sunny but cold. Maud could see the leaves on the Virginia creeper around her window had turned the golden brown of autumn.

  She was aware of the changes of season outside although she did not favor one season over the others. She observed the progress of the year without preference or emotion and had learned to accept the small pleasures each brought. The blue skies of autumn, small white clouds blown briskly across her limited horizon. The dark storms of winter, the sound of wind and rain against the window, the fire glowing in the grate. Spring—in the warmer months she sometimes broke her silence to ask Philomena to open the window wide enough for her to feel the breeze on her face as she dozed. The sensation appealed to her dreams and memories, to the past rather than the old lady pleasures and comforts she sometimes enjoyed in her waking moments. During the warmer days of the summer, without her having to ask, Philomena would open the window and Maud would smell the pleasant and evocative scents of that season.

  She looked at the vine and thought she would live to see the leaves become brittle and dead, to see them tear and fall in a winter storm and, perhaps, to unfurl and grow, a pale and then darkening green, the following spring. She knew she would live a little longer and she knew that Philomena and the maids thought she would die. Perhaps that very day. She had heard, as they had, the cries in the past two nights; the animal-like cries they, and she, thought of as the banshee, foretelling a death. Or two deaths. Maud didn’t doubt there would be a death although she was sure it would not be her own. This war brought death to families of the young men who had gone to be soldiers, as the cold weather would kill some of the old people, as tuberculosis, rife in the damp valley below, killed men, women, and children. She did not doubt the announcement of death; she doubted only it would be her own. But she would know whose it was. Every one of her visitors told her what was happening in the world outside. Some, her family, thought she did not understand much of what they said; others, Philomena or a visitor from below stairs, knew she understood but imagined her more interested in what interested them. Ambrose was her most satisfactory occasional visitor; he tended to give her the headlines of world news and then would talk about the past. Sometimes he told her about people and events that, although the information did not
interest her, she thought he was not meant to speak about. Neither he nor Philomena would mention the banshee. Although Philomena and she would listen again that night.

  Chapter 14

  THE DAY OF THE lawn meet began bright and sunny, the air cold and sharp. The traces of a light frost had disappeared by the time Daisy and Mickey set out for Ambrose’s house.

  As the crow flies, Dysart Hall was about five miles away, over some tall hills, or low mountains—Daisy could not decide which—and a river. By road, with the pony trotting briskly most of the way, it took them an hour and a half. Daisy had wrapped up as warmly as was compatible with the first social event since the weekend they had all stayed at Shannig, but by the time they had reached the end of the avenue her toes and fingers were aching. Mickey didn’t seem to feel the cold; the top button of his overcoat was open and although he wore a scarf, it hung loosely over his lapels. An acquired Darwinian hardiness, Daisy wondered, or was her brother-in-law merely as oblivious to the natural elements as he was to the niceties of day-to-day social behavior? It wasn’t that he was rude—he said please and thank you and good morning and stood up when a woman came into the room—it was just that preoccupation—melancholia? having been dropped on his head as a baby?—had made him seemingly oblivious or deaf to the tensions and subtext of most human conversation. Oblivious, too, to a greasy stain on his trousers that irritated Daisy.

  Dysart Hall was larger than Daisy had expected, and in worse repair. The avenue was longer than at Dunmaine, but with bigger and deeper holes and puddles. On either side, behind railings, horses and bullocks desultorily grazed. The house itself was gray-stoned, early Georgian, the pleasingly plain lines of the front of the house emphasized by a wing, set back a little, on either side. At even a first glance, Daisy could see cracked tiles and sagging gutters and that all the windows of one wing were shuttered. There were similar shutters at Dunmaine: painted white, heavy wood, with a metal bar that slotted into place, the bar when swung up and attached made a distinctive sound, not loud, but one that could be heard several rooms away. Inside such a room it was heavily dark, the gloom only emphasized by the cracks of light between the folds of the shutters. Daisy knew that at least a wing of Ambrose’s house was closed up; closed up, she suspected, in the sense of being shuttered and the doors closed on it, not sealed and secured against the day it would once again be opened. Damp, cold, and neglected, it would be deteriorating at an even faster rate than the rest of the house. The rest of their houses.