This Cold Country

by Annabel Davis-Goff

  Daisy walked slowly along the corridor, aware that the woman behind her had not moved from where she stood in the hall. But she did not feel as though she were being watched. The feeling of heightened awareness continued; she could feel the wooden floor beneath the thin rug—Indian?—and the increasing distance from the silent, but not seeing, woman behind her. And the decreasing distance between her and the man she had come to see. The man who would be astonished to see her and who would shortly react in a way she could not imagine, even in fantasy, to her arrival.

  What was he doing in this house? Could he still be on sick leave? It had been much easier than she had imagined to obtain his address; Daisy had found herself with her carefully rehearsed story unfinished. The hall porter at the Royal Overseas Club, apparently relieved that he did not have to make arrangements to forward the package had, Daisy thought, rather irresponsibly given her Andrew Heskith’s address. She remembered now the look on Heskith’s face, how his expression had become primitive, even to the extent of his jaw projecting a little, as desire removed the veneer of civilization from his face. Suppose he didn’t remember her at first, suppose she had to remind him who she was?

  The door to the conservatory was ajar, and Daisy, forgetting to breathe, pushed it open. She paused in the doorway, surprised. Daisy, with distracted parents and little in common with her sister, had read her way through the novels in the bookshelves that lined the walls of the upstairs corridor. Seeking a view of the world other than that presented by her mother’s favorite authors—whose eighteenth-century sensibility Daisy, as an early adolescent, found inadequate for her emotional needs—she had dipped into the romance and melodrama that had sustained her grandmother when she had been Daisy’s age. She had read Ouida and Marie Corelli, secretly, aware that her mother and grandmother, for quite different reasons, would disapprove. She had, she supposed, been searching for information about life, by which she probably meant love, and these novels, now too dated even to entertain, had failed her. But they had left romantic associations with conservatories. Conservatories were where the heroine was kissed by a guardsman, where she was proposed to by a hero with an impressive title. A conservatory suggested palm trees, a discreet fountain, flimsy evening dresses, champagne, men with moustaches (that association not so attractive to Daisy, who found facial hair on men repulsive), eluded chaperones, small secret bowers, rendezvous.

  If the woman in the hall had directed her to the lumber room, Daisy would have been more prepared for the furnishing of the room she was entering. That the room was not intended to serve purely for storage was evident only in two screens, to either side of the door, neither quite concealing furniture, trunks, packing cases, some large old-fashioned china jugs and basins, a cracked mirror, and a lamp with a torn shade. Daisy absorbed every detail of the room of piled junk. The atmosphere was depressing; the room suggested that when the family had moved into the house they had pushed their furnishings through it, using what they needed as they went, and that the residue had arrived, unsorted, in this room; there was an overall feeling this was caused more by despair than laziness or untidiness.

  Daisy glanced behind her. The woman still stood in the hall. Daisy had to assume that if she had failed to follow the simple directions she had been given, the woman would have reacted in some way.

  Ahead of her, between the temporary walls of the screens and discarded furnishings, there was light, and she moved toward it. As she rounded the corner she began to see plants. Nothing exotic: some geraniums whose dead leaves and flowers needed picking off; a malnourished vine; a straggling bougainvillea whose blossoms and light green leaves rose from the dead growth of the previous year. Not a palm tree in sight, although outside a monkey puzzle tree again suggested an Indian connection—but surely, since it was quite large, a connection from earlier than Heskith’s father’s generation. Maybe Heskith had come from a long line of Indian Army soldiers, and had, perhaps, spent his childhood in India. It didn’t seem likely to Daisy; she had been at school with girls who had been sent home to English boarding schools when they became too old to be educated in India; the girls, who won every prize for swimming or diving each sports day, had been in some way visibly different, although not in a way Daisy could have found words to describe. A texture of skin? A certain stoicism? A sense of their own separateness?

  Daisy moved quietly and slowly toward the light and plants; she could sense the presence of another person in the room.

  “Hello,” she called out, not loudly. Her voice was tight and nervous and, to her, sounded false. She tried again. “Hello.”

  No one replied, but there was a quiet creaking sound; it came from the other side of the tattered screen. Now, she thought, now. In a moment it will all be over and I’ll know. But during the seconds it took her to reach the end of the room, she knew that what was about to happen would only set her onto one of two equally unimaginable paths. Heskith would either accept her or he would not. In the first scenario, she would find herself under the protection—to use an old-fashioned term, but she couldn’t think of a more accurate contemporary one—of a man she scarcely knew; in the second, she was without any plan for her future. There might be, probably was, a third possibility, but she hadn’t imagined it.

  One deep breath and she turned the corner. The creak she had heard a moment earlier was repeated. A man she had never seen before sat on a time-darkened wicker chair, his feet on a footstool, and his knees covered by a plaid rug. He was no older than her father but, in the same way as had been the woman who opened the door to Daisy—and to a far greater extent—lacking in life.

  Shock, Daisy thought, and remembered she had had the same thought about Heskith on the evening of the night he had come to her room. The man who was looking at her, his expression devoid of curiosity, was, or had been, shocked; so had the woman who probably still waited, lacking volition, in the hall.

  “I’m Daisy Nugent,” Daisy said, after a moment. “I wanted to speak to Andrew Heskith.”

  The man nodded, but did not speak. He lifted one thin mottled veined hand as though he were about to make a gesture, then, helplessly, hopelessly, let it fall again.

  Daisy had the sense that she must choose her questions carefully, that she could only expect a limited amount of this man’s attention before he wandered back into the apathetic daze from which she seemed to have woken him. There was no book or newspaper on the wicker table beside him; only a glass of water, two bottles of pills, a framed photograph, and a small brass bell. He must, she thought, spend his days dozing or gazing out at the overgrown garden outside, its lawn unmown, its herbaceous border bedraggled, and its unstaked plants beaten down by the wind.

  “You are Andrew—Mr. Andrew Heskith?” she asked, aware there was probably a military rank by which she should have addressed him.

  The man nodded in the same manner he had a moment before, and she understood he had already answered her question.

  “Do you have a son?” she asked.

  Although he did not immediately answer, the expression in the man’s eyes changed. He glanced at the photograph on the table, an officer in uniform, dark, handsome, and unknown to Daisy.

  “Crete,” he said. The first word he had spoken. Then his attention wandered away from Daisy to the garden behind the cobwebby window.

  Chapter 20

  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.”

  Chapter 21

  DAISY 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.