DAISY STOOD IN front of a large, mottled looking glass. She held the diamond necklace up to her throat, holding the clasp together behind her neck without hooking it. The necklace was pretty, but sparse; a few perfectly respectable diamonds surrounded by diamond chips set into a band of dark silver, with some smaller stones set in strands that dropped from the neckband. Daisy thought it was probably several hundred years old.
“Trying it on for size?” Patrick’s reflection joined Daisy’s in the looking glass. Although his tone was light and amused, it lacked gentleness, and Daisy immediately felt defensive.
“I’m not trying it on, I’m just holding it up to see what it looks like.”
Patrick raised one eyebrow and Daisy knew what he was insinuating. He thought she was imagining herself wearing the diamonds, having first married James and then killed off his mother.
“Lady Nugent asked me to unpick it; it was mounted on a frame so she could wear it as a tiara. It’s been like that since the coronation.”
Patrick laughed and if she hadn’t been feeling offended and cross, Daisy would have laughed, too. But she was hurt by the insulting implication of his words and angry at the way she had been treated by James and his family that day.
“I don’t know if this is an example of upper-class hospitality, or if your family is simply lacking in good manners, but I have been rudely and unkindly treated by everyone since I got here.”
Patrick again raised an eyebrow, and Daisy once again read arrogance and pride in his expression. She would have liked to slap him, but though she was angry, her actions and even more important, her incipient tears, were under control. Daisy rarely cried, and when she did so, her tears were more often caused by repressed anger than by self-pity.
“You and James seemed to be getting along pretty well last night,” Patrick said, his tone light, but his face in the looking glass, over the shoulder of her reflection, was cold and disapproving.
Daisy said nothing. She assumed—and hoped—Patrick knew nothing of what had happened later that night; it was, of course, possible that he knew that James had visited her room, and also, more horribly, that he believed that his cousin had done so by arrangement or had not been rebuffed were the visit a surprise.
Daisy’s eyes met Patrick’s; she had no idea what to say.
“Here, let me.” And Patrick took the ends of the necklace out of her hands and held the diamonds high enough for them to be seen against the skin of her neck, rather than the hand-knitted jersey she wore.
Almost in spite of herself, Daisy looked again at her reflection. She nodded slightly as she saw for the first time the point of diamonds. It was not just that they were themselves beautiful, hard, sharp, brilliant, but they also lit up her face. Her skin, slightly brown from working outdoors, and lightly freckled, now seemed smoother and creamier; her eyes a deeper blue; and her hair, a pleasant but undistinguished brown, had developed richer, darker touches and a tinge of chestnut. She was aware of Patrick watching her.
“Can you see the northern lights from here? In the winter?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” Patrick said, blinking at this sudden change of subject. “I never have, anyway.”
Daisy saw that her expression was thoughtful as she met Patrick’s eye in the looking glass.
“Lovely,” she said, “but as you can see, it doesn’t fit.” She took the necklace out of his hands and returned it to a flat worn leather box lined in dark red silk. She shut the box and hooked the flimsy metal clasp.
“Perhaps,” she said, “you would like to return it to Lady Nugent. She needs it for this evening.”
DAISY SNEEZED. THE bedroom was cold and she felt a slight pressure in her forehead and a tenderness on one side of her throat. She was getting a cold. Already treated disdainfully by the Nugents, when they weren’t completely ignoring her, she would now be a pariah to the other guests at the dance that evening—a red-nosed wallflower, the other wallflowers edging away from her, alone and sniffling into a damp handkerchief. She wondered, for a moment, what kind of day she would have had, had she, the night before, whipped the “snood” off her hair, stuffed it under the pillow, and allowed James to make love to her.
She’d probably still have been getting a cold, but apart from that, would breakfast, for instance, have been different? Maybe not. But how much worse, she thought, it would have been, if having given her virginity to James—a man who knew her so little that the question of whether or not she were a virgin had not been raised—she had come down to breakfast and found he had already left for the day.
Lady Nugent had, at least, known her name; James’s sisters apparently did not. Of the five people eating breakfast, Patrick was the only one whom she had ever met before. It would, Daisy now thought, have been better if her entrance had frozen a conversation. The lack of reaction to her arrival and apology for being late was even more disconcerting. It seemed as though no one quite registered her presence; one of the girls did not even look up from her plate.
“Which of the Treaty Ports will the Germans invade? Queenstown, Berehaven, or Lough Swilly?” a gray-haired woman was asking Patrick.
“Since, although I’m Irish, I’m an officer in His Majesty’s Armed Forces, I probably wouldn’t be the first person the German High Command would confide in.”
Daisy hesitated, still unacknowledged and unwelcomed, at the door. Although their voices were not raised, and Patrick had replied with a smile, there could be no one in the room unaware that the woman was baiting him, that he was very angry but choosing not to show it. What was not so clear was whether the others were enjoying the woman’s attack through patriotic conviction, sycophancy, or just because it was Patrick’s turn to be bullied or teased.
Even though she was still standing awkwardly at the door, Daisy was curious about both the anger and the subject that had—ostensibly, at least—been the cause. And Patrick, with whom she felt quite cross herself for his cool and dismissive manner toward her the previous evening, would, she thought, probably be a good person, were the atmosphere less tense, to explain some of the more confusing aspects of Southern Irish neutrality. And it was confusing. She knew—or at least supposed—that Southern Ireland was behaving poorly, remaining neutral while Hitler threatened the future of Europe. And the IRA had exploded bombs in London just before the war. But she also knew that many men from neutral Eire had enlisted in the British army. And why had England, only two years before, the shadow of war already over Europe, so casually handed back to Ireland the naval ports that they had held under treaty? The ports that the gray-haired woman was now taunting Patrick about?
“Good-morning-I-hope-you-slept-well-breakfast-is-on-the-sideboard,” Lady Nugent said vaguely. Nothing fey about her vagueness; it was more that Daisy was an irritation that if given no more attention than deserved need not distract her.
“We call it Cobh. Queenstown’s now called Cobh. It’s spelled c-o-b-h, but it’s pronounced ‘Cove,’” Patrick said in a purely informational tone. “There’s no v in Gaelic.”
Daisy looked at the substantial remains of breakfast set out in two chafing dishes. One contained, in a shallow pool of warm grease, fried eggs, fried bread, and fried tomatoes. The other was half filled with thick, solid porridge. For the first time since Daisy had enlisted in the Land Army, she looked at a meal with no wish to eat any of it. A little to one side there stood a silver toast rack with some damp, caved-in toast. Daisy helped herself to a triangle and then, because it looked so puny on her plate, another. She poured herself some tea from a large silver pot. Very strong and not quite hot enough.
At the breakfast table, the others were eating methodically; the daughter who had partially acknowledged Daisy’s presence glanced scornfully at the toast. Daisy sat down and, after slightly too long a pause, Lady Nugent introduced her to those present.
“My daughters, Lizzie and Kate. Patrick I think you have already met. This is my sister, Gladys Glynne.”
Mrs. Glynne. Gladys Glynne. Aunt Glad. Her name had come up as a frequent visitor, an integral part of the household, when Rosemary was describing the inhabitants of Bannock House. “Somewhere between Sergeant Cuff and the Grand Inquisitor,” Rosemary had said. Adding, with the inflection that reminded Daisy that some part of Rosemary’s family was Irish, “You’d want to mind yourself there. It won’t do you any good, of course.”
Mrs. Glynne now turned her attention to Daisy. In the background Daisy could hear the discussion, now openly tense, continue. The words “Black and Tans” spoken by both Patrick and Lizzie; Lizzie apparently standing in for the otherwise occupied Mrs. Glynne. Daisy would have liked to listen, but Mrs. Glynne demanded her full attention. In a kindly, interested way she drew Daisy out. Before Daisy had finished the first triangle of her soggy toast she had revealed her age, that she had been to boarding school, that she had one sister but no brothers, that her father was a rector—and a younger son—that Daisy’s mother was well educated and from a perfectly respectable but not rich Norfolk family. Daisy knew that she was being placed. She also knew that this placing was only in the details; the Nugents would, without Mrs. Glynne’s more vigorous approach—perhaps starting with Kate’s glance at her meager helping of toast—have had no difficulty in knowing as much as they needed about Daisy’s background and antecedents. Daisy knew there was nothing for her to be ashamed of; there was no suggestion that they thought her mannerless, ignorant, or vulgar. They saw her as she saw herself, as coming from what had once been minor landed gentry.
None of the others paid any attention to the interrogation; she was of no interest to them. Lady Nugent seemed preoccupied and, since the dance was to be held in her house that evening and Daisy had no reason to disbelieve James’s assessment of the servant problem, she probably was. James’s sisters were equally disengaged. Both were thin, pale; a reddish tinge to their hair suggested that freckles, rather than Daisy’s golden brown, would result from exposure to the sun. Lizzie glanced at Daisy with an almost complete lack of interest; it was the first time she had looked at her since Daisy entered the dining room. Patrick’s face was devoid of expression, although Daisy thought he was half listening.
Aunt Glad was rich, according to Rosemary, and had no children. There was a stepdaughter, but Aunt Glad was on record as considering the girl already to have more money than was good for her.
In return for her answers to Mrs. Glynne’s questions, Daisy learned only that James had eaten breakfast early and left to fish. He might or might not be home for lunch. Daisy understood that she now occupied the position of an inconvenient pet adopted by an irresponsible child and left in the care of his exasperated and otherwise occupied family.
DAISY SNEEZED AGAIN; her feet were still cold and her eyes were beginning to feel puffy. She had time to spare—had had too much time to spare all day—and putting on her heavy jersey, she crept under the eiderdown. To avoid brooding over the far from satisfactory day, her thoughts returned to the scene at breakfast. While she was sure the Nugents and Gladys Glynne were capable of a full-scale row about as academic a subject as what fly James was, or should be, using best to catch a trout, she was not sure if what had passed between Mrs. Glynne and Patrick, watched expressionlessly by the female Nugents, was an indication of deeply held beliefs—fears?—or was merely a line of teasing that had produced results in the past. Ireland was not a country Daisy had thought about much, beyond having the sense, reading between the lines of her school history book, that they’d had a pretty raw deal from their English neighbors. They were a neutral country; did Mrs. Glynne really fear that they would welcome a German invasion of England via their ports? Were there Irish people angry enough actively to aid the Germans? Daisy didn’t know, but thought it unfair to bait an officer, as Patrick had put it, in His Majesty’s Armed Forces. And Sir Guy Wilcox—close enough to home for Rosemary to have known his wife—would his Fascism really have been extreme enough for him to betray his own country to the Germans? Was it possible that there were still members of the English upper classes who admired Hitler? And she thought again about the beautiful Lady Mosley and her newborn baby.
After breakfast she had asked if there was anything she could do to help, but despite the staff shortage, Lady Nugent seemed to have delegated all tasks to a small troupe of women press-ganged from the village. And Aunt Glad traveled with a maid who had done the flowers. Lady Nugent managed, not unkindly, to suggest to Daisy that the most helpful thing she could do would be to relieve her hostess of the responsibility of entertaining her. Daisy said she would love to take a long walk. “If you really want to make yourself useful, you could take the dogs for a walk,” Lady Nugent said, her manner that of one ticking off two small items at the bottom of a very long list.
Daisy, wearing sensible shoes, set out with an overweight spaniel and an elderly Labrador. Since the dogs were both lazy and well trained, she stopped worrying about losing them by the time she reached the end of the avenue. Setting out along an unpaved road in the opposite direction to the one she had traveled the night before, Daisy followed the outer wall of the Nugent estate. Ivy-covered in parts, with glimpses of the woods showing through the broken-down bits, Daisy thought it beautiful. She also thought it a pity that James—the James who had met her at the station—was not with her. She wondered if she had, by rejecting him the night before, lost someone of great value, the only person with whom she had so far felt a complete sense of intimacy. Or had she merely been fooled by the charm of a practiced seducer, a practiced seducer who now couldn’t be bothered to go through even the motions of good manners?
Lunch, while neither festive nor delicious, was not as silent as breakfast had been. The Nugents talked amongst themselves, largely about arrangements and guests for that evening. Aunt Glad had a few details she wanted to clear up with Daisy and asked how she was traveling back to Wales. Daisy told her, mentioning the time her train departed; she had, for the first time, the attention of every person present. Patrick and Kate, at the far end of the table, talked quietly. Daisy could not hear what they were saying. James did not appear.
During lunch, it started to rain. Afterward they drank weak coffee from small cups in the library. Patrick, and then Lizzie, left the room; Daisy, now desperate, asked Lady Nugent for some task. Either in response to Daisy’s urgency or because she had just remembered that her necklace was wired onto a frame, Lady Nugent asked Daisy to unpick it carefully and had given her a small pair of sharp nail scissors with which to perform the operation.
The necklace had been professionally mounted. Sitting under a good light, Daisy had carefully edged the tip of the scissors under the thread that, tightly wound several times, held each strand in place. The thread was coarse and strong and had a stiff, wirelike quality. Daisy suspected she was causing irreparable harm to the scissors but wished neither to interrupt her hostess at her tasks, whatever they might be, nor to appear to question her judgment. She knew only that her own mother would have had a fit if Daisy had ever treated her nail scissors like that.
As Daisy cut the mounting away, the necklace grew pliant in her lap and a sprinkling of snippets of thread lay at her feet. She wondered where the necklace had been kept since the coronation. She didn’t imagine there was a safe in Bannock House, and it seemed unlikely that an object so old and so valuable would just have been stuffed in a cupboard. It had probably been kept at the bank; but would the local bank—presumably small and modest—have a procedure for storing jewelry, or would they make an exception for the Nugents? Daisy was considering the probabilities and details of the arrangement when she snipped the last thread. Then she stood in front of the looking glass to see what diamonds would look like. Then Patrick had come in.
Becoming gradually warm under the slippery eiderdown, Daisy now remembered that she had not picked up the small, stiff fragments of thread she had let drop onto the carpet. She felt irritated at herself, but did not consider returning to the library to tidy up. Her throat was tender and she suddenly was not looking forward to wearing the pretty, expensive, and low-cut dress Rosemary had lent her.
Her neck ached and her head was uncomfortable, possibly because she was cold, huddled, and unrelaxed and partly because she had put her hair in curlers. Reluctant to further interrupt Lady Nugent with irritating questions and becoming, by the hour, less concerned with the convenience of the Nugent family, she had run a shallow but hot bath and while she washed—soaking was not a possibility—she had kept her head close to the steam to encourage her hair to set. She crouched in the bathtub until the water cooled, listening all the time for steps in the corridor outside the unlocked bathroom door. Time and the occasional drip from the large brass taps had left an orange and green stain on the white enamel of the high tub. Daisy thought that when the war was over she would celebrate by lying, for an hour, in a bath as large as this one, filled to the top with hot water. Or, on a beach, until the sun became too hot to bear. The Mediterranean maybe; somewhere other than the North of England.
***
LADY NUGENT WORE the necklace at dinner. Her dress was black and, it seemed to Daisy, not new. The necklace was effective, even at the distance of the table. It had made Daisy prettier; it made Lady Nugent regal; the diamonds had lit up Daisy’s skin, they added authority and a suggestion of history to Lady Nugent’s erect posture.
Lady Nugent caught Daisy’s eye and smiled.
“My necklace is courtesy of Daisy, James’s little friend. She spent all afternoon unpicking it from its frame.”
Although it was toward the end of dinner, conversation was spasmodic and not animated, so most heads turned toward Daisy, some perhaps wondering why, if she were James’s friend, little or otherwise, she was not sitting closer to him. He was seated between a pretty girl Daisy had not been introduced to and Mrs. Glynne.
“I don’t suppose you’re interested in gardening?” the slightly deaf neighbor of the Nugents, sitting on Daisy’s left, asked.
“I am. Very,” she said firmly. During the course of the evening she had been forced to admit to him, and to a captain in the Fusiliers on her right, that she did not ride, fish, shoot, play bridge, and was not acquainted with any relative or friend of the Nugents not present. “I don’t know much about it, though.”
“A middle-aged pleasure, faute de mieux,” her companion said, a little sadly.
“Do you have a garden?” Daisy asked him, determined not to let another conversational gambit lapse.
“Wartime, strictly wartime,” he said, with another sigh. Daisy thought of the rectory garden, efficiently planted with rows of the less interesting vegetables, and wondered why it seemed less patriotic to plant artichokes and mange-tout than it was to cultivate cabbages and Swede turnips.
“I don’t know how well you know this part of the world?” he ventured, when Daisy failed to respond, dutifully embarking on another conversational tack. Daisy, who would have dearly loved to give her nose a good blow, was becoming guiltily aware that she was very heavy social weather for the men seated on either side of her. She could see that she and they ranked low in Lady Nugent’s placement. Since Daisy carried approximately the social weight of a governess brought down to avoid seating thirteen at dinner, the men on either side of her, though not perhaps quite so devoid of qualification, were unlikely to find themselves seated beside a Nugent. She wondered when Lady Nugent had reworked the placement and what James had said to her.
“Not at all, I’m afraid,” Daisy said.
“Perhaps the Nugents—”
“I have to go back to Wales tomorrow,” Daisy said, nipping in the bud the assumption that any Nugent would be prepared to go an inch out of his way to entertain her. “But,” she added a little desperately, “we did do the Lake District poets at school.”
There was another pause and Daisy realized that poetry was not the direction in which her companion had been hoping to steer the conversation.
“Yes,” he said at last. “Wordsworth and ... ah ... Coleridge...” his voice trailed off. Then, “And of course there’s Beatrix Potter.”
Daisy was attempting to formulate a not too discouraging sentence that suggested that while Beatrix Potter was not, strictly speaking, one of the Romantic poets, she had a certain lyrical enthusiasm for nature, which made the error a very understandable one, when she was distracted by James’s voice, quite loud, from farther up the table. He was speaking to Patrick.
“...great sport, we missed you today.”
“Why didn’t you go?” Kate asked. The note of teasing in her voice might have been flirtatious.
“I don’t think I’ll ever voluntarily kill anything larger than a horsefly again as long as I live,” Patrick said.
Apart from Daisy’s dinner partner, there was a silence around the table, the silence that follows an extreme lapse in taste, a silence that no one wished to take the responsibility of breaking.
“... The Tale of Jemima Puddle-duck and, of course, Tom Kitten.”
Every head at the table was now turned toward Daisy and the man attempting to engage her in conversation. Kate’s supercilious smile was followed by a disbelieving shake of her head; Daisy would have given a great deal to be able to smack her.
“You don’t seem to have any difficulty polishing off the salmon on your plate,” Lizzie said to Patrick in a tone that suggested to Daisy that she was less fond of him than Kate seemed to be.
“I didn’t say I was a vegetarian—in fact, I imagine I’m essentially a carnivore.”
“So?”
“If, after the war—and it seems more than possible I’ll be happy to have it—a butcher’s shop is my lot, I’ll be capable of slaughtering my own meat. And eating it. I won’t, however, be doing it socially. Or for sport.”
The exchange did nothing to lighten the gloom now spread fairly evenly over the dinner table; two maids cleared the plates, unnerved by the sudden interest the guests seemed to have developed in their every movement. Daisy now seemed to have the most enviable placement and her dinner partner had never had a more rapt audience.
“She lives at Near Sawrey; she’s an old lady now, of course.”
Daisy nodded mutely. The Nugents seemed even more dangerous to her than they had a moment before. She would have liked to say something that showed solidarity with Patrick, but didn’t know how. She had a pretty good idea that not only would he not welcome her support but a declaration of similar feelings would not have surprised her hosts. They would see her commonsense attitude toward the killing of rabbits and chickens and her distaste for blood sports to be a manifestation of her inferior birth.
“The inn is in the background of one of the illustrations in Jemima Puddle-duck," her companion finished triumphantly.
But Daisy was thinking that as much as she disliked Patrick, his aversion to spilling blood when the war was over was rather more admirable than her own determination to wallow chin high in a bubble bath.
ON WET AFTERNOONS at Daisy’s boarding school—an old, academically distinguished, and even rather grand establishment that offered generous scholarships to the daughters of the clergy—there used to be country dancing in the gymnasium. No one enjoyed it. The games mistress, who was in charge, was well coordinated but had a poor sense of rhythm, and the music available was limited to three gramophone records, none of them new: an English country dance whose name Daisy had forgotten, “The Walls of Limerick,” and a Highland reel.
Daisy had been not only bored but embarrassed by these afternoons. She was not graceful and felt ridiculous dancing with other girls, linking arms and spinning around, hopping up and down in her short, boxy, navy blue gymslip. Occasionally she would be sent out of the room and would while away the afternoon standing in the corridor, daydreaming and listening to the scratchy and repetitive music from the gramophone. Daisy tried not to spend too much time outside the door not because there was any further punishment involved—punishments and rewards at this high-minded school were largely theoretical—but because any visit to the headmistress’s study would involve the always unspoken reminder that Daisy, as the beneficiary of a scholarship, was expected to provide a good example to the more privileged girls.
Daisy remembered these afternoons as she watched the dancing and could now see the point of learning the steps. She thought her former headmistress would be too fine to say “I told you so,” either in words or by facial expression, but—as with the reduced fees—the thought would fill the room. The games mistress hadn’t been nearly so fine, and Daisy could imagine her satisfied smirk.
So far no one had asked Daisy to dance. While this might prove useful ammunition if either of these bygone school-day figures were to materialize, Daisy was embarrassed and humiliated. She wasn’t bored, and if no one could see her, she would have been content to watch the dancing. She liked the music; the tunes, familiar from the old gramophone records, now played by the small dance band were alive and energetic. Young women in long dresses, creamy whites and pinks—some of the men wearing kilts and the various traditional accoutrements—danced in the large, high-ceilinged, shabby room. The kilts reminded Daisy that they were not so far from Scotland; many of the guests must have traveled great distances. Bannock, she had the impression, was the only grand house in the neighborhood, and yet the room was full of young men and girls who had come from as far away as London. The gaiety and the carefree, noisy atmosphere of the ball were the result of complicated travel and logistical arrangements—of leave and of lodgings and hospitality provided by friends and neighbors of the Nugents. It explained why Lady Nugent might resent Daisy taking up a guest room but not why half a dozen other such rooms remained empty. Daisy and Mrs. Glynne—Lady Nugent’s sister—were the only house guests. She started to wonder why Lady Nugent would have chosen to add the burden of a difficult middle-aged woman to the hard work and arrangements of a dance, and then remembered that the Nugent children were apparently Mrs. Glynne’s heirs. It was not only a hastily reworked placement that had seated James beside his aunt.
Daisy had never before been in a house that had a ballroom; she didn't imagine that many still existed. It was a ballroom that could have done with new wallpaper; the original intricately designed colors had faded not unpleasantly into a subdued blended pattern, and the curtains, long, wide, threadbare, had once, it seemed, been a rich, dark brown velvet. Daisy rather liked the yellowish tinge they had now assumed. The gold cord sashes that held the curtains back had fared less well, as had the cords of a similar material that had once held in place the tired draped velvet on the pelmet. Daisy thought Lady Nugent would have done well to have removed the frayed, sad, gold bindings—rather as she, Daisy, had freed the diamond necklace from its frame—and given the curtains a good shake. In the meantime, the reel had ended and dancers were leaving the floor. After a moment the music started again; this time a waltz. No one asked Daisy to dance; no one had spoken to her since the family had finished their coffee and entered the ballroom. Feeling conspicuous and being ignored, Daisy reflected, were trials that should not be imposed simultaneously. Even making small talk with a friendly dowager—there was no shortage of dowagers seated, as was Daisy, at the end of the ballroom and in the adjoining anteroom—would have made her situation more tenable.
Daisy stood up; it seemed important to move with a purpose, and she drained the almost empty champagne glass that she held. She knew it was pathetic to have to fetch herself another drink, but she preferred to appear to lack a mannerly escort than to sit, smiling wanly, as the others danced. Especially since it seemed that she could remain there until the band went home without anyone even speaking to her.
The champagne that the waiter poured for her was cooler than that she had just finished, but not really cold. It was the one thing in the chilly house that should have been colder. Although the large vases in the hall and drawing room were, thanks to Aunt Glad’s maid, filled with summer branches and tall flowers, a fire had been burning all day in the ballroom to take the damp chill off. Now, as the crush of energetically dancing bodies heated the room, it had been allowed to die down, presumably to prevent accidents caused by swirling inflammable dresses or the horseplay of drunken and overexcited young men as the evening wore on.
Sipping her fresh champagne, Daisy strolled into the hall, her gait more casual than she felt. Several men glanced admiringly, but none of them made a move toward her. Daisy might have paused to allow one to overcome his reserve, pluck up his courage, and compose a self-introductory sentence, had not Lizzie, surrounded by admirers, been holding court close to the door. That afternoon Daisy had wondered if there had been an expedition to a local hairdresser from which she had been excluded. But at dinner she had seen that Lizzie had done her own hair; reddish and tightly curled, it looked much the same as it had at lunch, except that a fine old jeweled comb held one side off her face. Her shoulders were bare, pale, and lightly freckled; she wasn’t very pretty: on a London street she would have turned few heads. But, in some way Daisy observed but didn’t understand, the Nugents believed, and seemed to have made others believe, that they were the criterion by which all excellence was measured.
Daisy kept moving and, since she was reluctant to double back to the ballroom, she found herself ascending the staircase. As she went, she glanced back at Lizzie. Lizzie’s dress was very pretty: limp, pale satin, the plain white bodice suspended by narrow straps over her thin shoulders, the color gradually, almost imperceptibly, becoming a warm pink and then, as the smooth line of the dress became an undramatic ruffle about eight inches above the ankle, a shade of deep, but not dark, raspberry. She wore it casually. Daisy’s dress, too, was pretty and probably had cost as much as Lizzie’s had, but she wore it as though it were—as it had been—borrowed. How had all the Nugents developed this impressive, almost shocking, level of self-assurance? Lizzie was only eighteen years old. And why did no one seem to question this superiority?
Halfway up the staircase there was a landing lit, during the day, by a large window that overlooked a shrubbery. It had stained glass borders and an ornate carved frame. To one side of the window, the landing extended into a small sitting room with another window, a fireplace, a small sofa, and two boudoir-sized armchairs. It was here that Daisy thought she might sit for a few minutes before again going downstairs.
The fire was blazing cheerfully, but the room was not empty. Although Daisy did not crave solitude, neither did she wish to act as a chaperone to the adolescent couple on the sofa. As she entered the little doorless room, they separated. The girl’s hair was untidy and her lipstick almost completely rubbed off. The boy’s face, now turned enquiringly toward Daisy, was flushed. Daisy, no expert in these matters, thought the flush a combination of drink and sexual arousal.
Daisy smiled vaguely and withdrew; she continued up the staircase and along the corridor to her room, thinking that she might as well use her own bathroom, apply fresh lipstick, and see how her hair was holding up. And blow her nose; the threatened cold had not yet arrived, but it was on its way and Daisy’s insubstantial dress had no pocket for a handkerchief.
Once inside the bedroom door, however, she sat down in the solitary armchair beside the unlit fireplace and considered her situation. It was already becoming chilly in her bedroom and after a moment or two she unhooked her dress, put her dressing gown on over her underclothes and stockings, tucked a fresh handkerchief into the pocket, switched off the light, made her way carefully across the dark room, and slipped under the eiderdown. She laid her head down carefully on the pillow, since she assumed she would, a little later, dress again and go downstairs.
Lying back and gazing upward into the darkness, Daisy tried not to weep. The last time she’d cried had been Christmas morning when her chilblain had burst. Then she had wept, not over a man, not over a slight, but from physical misery and pain. Her more than slightly puritanical streak—integral to her nature, not the influence of her father—considered the suffering of others to be the only proper reason to weep.
Her primary feeling during the day now drawing to a close had been one of embarrassment. Good nature, common sense, and a rectory upbringing had served her well since she had left home and joined the Land Army. Although she knew James had behaved badly, and the Nugents, aristocratic or not, had been unmannerly and inhospitable, she was not sure to what extent she was, if not to blame, responsible for what was clearly a misunderstanding.
Slowly and methodically she went over every moment of the afternoon she had met James, the invitation and letter from his mother, her conversation with Rosemary, her own conduct, limited conversational opportunities, and the way she had dressed since arriving at Bannock House. She found no clue and was once more embarrassed. Embarrassed and disappointed. It seemed a waste of saved money and days off. Daisy quickly nipped this self-pitying thought in the bud; again, while it might have pleased her father to think that her behavior had been guided by his precepts, more often it was Daisy’s wish to avoid some of the more egregious lapses of his parishioners. She checked her tears with the memory of Mrs. Hill, who was in the habit of making a perfectly legitimate complaint about some slight or disappointment and then diminishing the sympathy of her listener with some additional details along the lines of: “I took the 8:10 to King’s Cross, three and fourpence round trip, and when I got there she wasn’t even...” Daisy knew that the three shillings and fourpence was probably quite a lot of money to Mrs. Hill and didn’t quite understand why she, Daisy, despised her for making it part of the complaint. She just knew it was awful.
After lunch that day, when James had not returned, and she knew that something had gone very wrong with the visit, Daisy had thought about leaving Bannock House. Had the railway station been closer, she might have packed her bags, carried them to the station, and taken her chances on catching a train and making a connection that would take her back to Wales. But this simple if unambiguous course of action was not possible; she would have had to ask for transport and that would have forced a conversation that no one wanted. And a premature return would have been awkward to explain to Rosemary when she arrived at Aberneth Farm. Her affection and respect for her employer, who was related to this cold family, was an inhibiting and deciding factor in Daisy’s decision to stick it out.
It was profoundly, uncompromisingly dark in the bedroom; Daisy’s watch was on the dressing table and she had no idea what time it was. It felt a little after ten o’clock. She put her hands behind her neck and made a plan. Ten o’clock and her train left at quarter to eleven the next morning; were she Cinderella there would be time enough to change her life but, since her expectations were fewer and more mundane, it was merely a manageable number of hours. She would lie there for a while and in an hour or so either she would undress completely, brush her teeth, and go to bed properly or she would put on her dress, return to the dance—very faint sounds of music from below alternated with the silence—circulate for a few minutes, drink another glass of champagne, return to her bedroom and then go to bed. Breakfast the following morning, she imagined, would be a subdued affair—the Nugents silently shoveling down quantities of bacon and eggs, strong tea, and nursing hangovers, except, perhaps, for Lizzie, who might be radiant, triumphant, even in love—and she was quite sure that her one need, a pony and trap to take her to the railway station, would have been anticipated.
After a little while it became quite cozy under the eiderdown. Daisy told herself there would be other opportunities; her complete failure that weekend did not guarantee a lonely old age. Except for what she read in the final pages of novels, Daisy had no examples of what she did want; she knew she did not want to be an old maid or a lonely and defeated wife. The war had given the girls in her generation more freedom than ever before in the history of English womanhood, but it threatened a whole generation of young men. Innocent and twenty, Daisy was prepared to be a young widow but she was not prepared to submit to a life of utter and hopeless dreariness.
There was a tap at the door. Daisy did not know how long she had been in her room; she would have guessed three-quarters of an hour.
“Who is it?” she called a little awkwardly. Taps at the door were not part of her plan.
“It’s Patrick.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to open the door.”
“It’s not locked.”
“I’d still like you to come to the door.” His voice was slightly testy.
Daisy got out of bed, pulled her dressing gown modestly around her, belted it, crossed the pitch-dark room, and opened the door. Patrick stood outside. There was a short awkward silence.
“I had a headache. I was lying down for a moment.”
“Oh, I thought perhaps you were sulking.”
“I never sulk,” Daisy said coldly and very nearly truthfully. “What do you want?”
“I want you to put your dress on and come back downstairs.”
“Why?”
“I want to talk to you and then, depending on how it goes, we might dance.”
“I don’t need to put my dress on again to talk,” Daisy said, not feeling obliged to make it easy for him.
“Yes, you do. We can’t stand like this in the corridor—of course, if you wait until I find a maid or someone’s aunt as a chaperone, I could come and talk in your room. Better put your dress on.”
Daisy looked at him coldly for another moment, then nodded and closed the door. Without hurrying, she went into the bathroom and arranged her hair and powdered her face. Then she brushed her teeth and put on fresh lipstick. She rolled her stockings, which had become a little baggy at the ankles and knees, straightened the seams, and made them taut, reattaching them to her suspender belt. Then she put on her dress, stepped into her shoes, and joined Patrick in the corridor.
“You might just do up the two hooks at the top,” she said, turning her back to him.
He was, as she had imagined he would be, a little clumsy with the tiny hooks and eyes. The lighting in the corridor was dim and she suspected he made himself slower in his desire not to be found doing up her dress by someone coming upstairs. But they met no one until they were halfway down the staircase. Then, a neatly uniformed middle-aged woman carrying a salver with empty glasses came out of the little sitting room off the stairs. She bobbed her head to Patrick; the gesture, Daisy thought, some kind of racial memory of a curtsy.
“Mrs. Parsons,” Patrick said. “The very woman I was looking for. Could you bring us up a couple of glasses of champagne.”
The woman nodded and hurried away before Daisy had a chance to tell Patrick that the little sitting room might not be the ideal place for a quiet talk. He entered confidently, Daisy trailing a little behind him.
“Ah,” he said, apparently pleased to see the young couple. Daisy noticed they were rather more disheveled than when she had last seen them. Patrick apparently noticed nothing.
“Lady Nugent is keen to set up a bridge table in here. I wonder if you would be interested in making up a four.”
As soon as they left, Patrick gestured toward the sofa just vacated, and Daisy sat down. The cushions were still warm. Patrick sat in the small armchair on the other side of the fire. It was not quite large enough for him and he sat forward in it, resting his arms on his knees and looking at her.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I told you—I had a headache and I thought I would lie down until the aspirin started to work.”
He looked at her silently, not bothering to voice his disbelief. Daisy said nothing; she had no intention of appearing defensive.
“Lover’s tiff?” he asked after a moment.
“No. I don’t have a lover and apart from the words you and I exchanged this afternoon, I haven’t had a tiff with anyone in this house.”
“I can’t help noticing that you and James seem—well, I haven’t seen you exchange a word all day.”
“Except for Mrs. Glynne, no one has had much to say to me all day. And nobody has spoken a single word to me since the dance began.”
“I would have asked you, you know. As soon as I had taken care of a couple of duty dances.” And then, as Daisy said nothing, he added, “Your dress is very pretty.”
“It belongs to Rosemary.”
“I wondered—”
Daisy raised her eyebrows, ready to be indignant or offended all over again. Patrick laughed.
“Don’t look like that—your dress is pretty; it suits you perfectly and it has a look of Rosemary. It also clearly was expensive, but not like a major investment for, say, a coming-out dance.”
Daisy nodded. Patrick was right; the dress was the choice of a young married woman with good taste, not what one of the dowagers might have ordered from a couturier for a seventeen-year-old girl. She wasn’t sure what material it was made of, but it felt silky; it looked as though thousands of tiny diamond-shaped snippets had been attached to one another to make the fabric. Each diamond contained a pale green, white, and pale pink. Daisy could not decide if the pattern suggested Columbine or Lamia.
“And I’m not saying it’s too old for you,” Patrick added. “As always, Rosemary got it just right.”
“Rosemary thought it all right for me to come and stay here—I asked her.”
“You did?”
“Of course: not only if I could take the time off—I do work for her after all—but when Lady Nugent sent the invitation and asked me to stay, I asked how she felt about me accepting; all of you being relatives and in-laws of hers and George’s.”
“Aunt Hilda wrote and invited you to stay?”
“If you thought I was a gatecrasher, it goes a good distance toward me understanding why you have been so unpleasant,” Daisy said, but her heart wasn’t in it. She suspected there had been a misunderstanding although she could not imagine what it might be.
“Last night, when I went up to bed, I saw James coming out of your room.”
“So you assumed he had been there by my invitation,” Daisy said flatly, hurt and this time deciding not to let him off lightly. “And even if he had been, is that a good enough reason for the way everyone has treated me today? What did you think when James disappeared for the day and when he didn’t speak a word to me at dinner?”
“I didn’t—” Before Patrick could continue, Lizzie came into the little sitting room, slightly ahead of a young man with a flushed face, who held the hand she extended behind her. Both were laughing; Lizzie saw Daisy and Patrick first and stopped in her tracks. She stopped laughing and her companion, slightly behind her both geographically and in awareness of the room’s other occupants, stopped abruptly on her heels. For once, Daisy saw a Nugent at a momentary disadvantage.
“Oh,” Lizzie said, recovering herself. “We were looking for—”
“He’s downstairs. In the hall.” Patrick said, cutting in on her hesitation, a not entirely warm smile on his lips.
“Oh,” Lizzie said, suddenly looking very young. Then, with an irritated glance at her companion, whose hand she still held. “Come on, Ian.”
They turned; as they went through the door, Lizzie attempted a face-saving final remark.
“James was looking for you,” she said, choosing not to address anyone in particular and, therefore, leaving it a little ambiguous whether James was looking for Daisy or for Patrick.
“Now you know where Daisy is, if he asks you again.” Patrick did not raise his voice, but Daisy was pretty sure Lizzie heard him. Once again they were left alone.
“You’re quite good at defending your territory,” Daisy said, and laughed. The first time, it felt, that she had laughed during the past twenty-four hours.
“I come from the Irish side of the family,” Patrick said; he seemed to feel no further explanation was necessary.
“How are you all related? You and James and Rosemary?”
“I don’t think we are really. Purely an affectation based on some very loose connections. Rosemary’s husband is a second cousin once removed of James’s. James and I are actually cousins, but very distant, fourth generation probably. At some stage a late-eighteenth-century Nugent married a Scottish heiress who brought Bannock into the family. He had managed to get through most of his own money, but there was still a house and a little land in Ireland left when he died. It went to his second son, from whom I’m descended. In other words—”
“Don’t,” Daisy said faintly. “I’m sorry I asked.”
She realized she’d imagined them to be more closely related than they were, not only because of the shared surname, but because they had been together on both the occasions she had seen them.
“If you’re not twins, how do you manage to get leave at the same time?” she asked. The question was a little disingenuous since what she really wanted to know was how they had managed to get leave to come to a dance, and she was prepared to be disapproving of his answer.
Patrick looked surprised; then he laughed.
“James and I weren’t on leave when we first met you. I was giving him a lift. I was on what might be called official business—running an errand for my commanding officer—and it wasn’t far out of my way to take James where he wanted to go and to drop in and see Rosemary. The war hadn’t really started then—except for the navy—and we all had a fair amount of time on our hands. This weekend James had some leave coming to him before he’s off to wherever he isn’t supposed to tell us about, and I’m on a training course that allows for flexibility. We were lucky; the army isn’t really the non-stop party it seems to be.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes. The part of the room near the fire was warm; Daisy gazed into the embers and felt reasonably content. Sitting beside a fire in a pretty dress was not what she had come all this way for, but it did make her failure less humiliating. After a moment the maid came back with two glasses of champagne and shortly afterward Daisy thought a gesture of grace on her part would be only fair.
“I liked my Christmas card,” she said.
“To ferrets,” Patrick said, raising his glass.
“I like them, you know,” she said, laughing at the toast, but meaning what she said.
“I know.”
“I feel rather like a ferret in this house.”
“I think I already mentioned I come from the Irish side of the family.”
Daisy smiled, feeling the delighted leap of her spirits she always experienced when talking to someone with whom it was not necessary to bridge parts of a train of thought. Then she hesitated and was silent.
“What’s the matter?”
Daisy hesitated again for a moment before deciding, more for her own sake than for Patrick’s, to tell him what she had been thinking.
“Yesterday evening I had just as cozy a chat with James—in the library.”
“We’re a family famous for our easy charm and treachery. Historically it was the principal reason the main branch survived; that and an ability to convert from one devoutly held religious belief to another—overnight, if necessary.”
“I was thinking more of the ease with which I succumbed to the effortless charm of the aristocracy.”
Patrick didn’t respond. Then, after a moment he asked, “Do you know what the Sargasso Sea is?”
“This isn’t going to be a geography quiz, is it?”
“No.”
“It’s where eels—all eels—go to mate.” As she spoke, it seemed to Daisy one of those beliefs, like old wives’ tales, that don’t bear too close examination. It seemed also as though Patrick had skipped—or skipped articulating—part of the thought that had taken their conversation from her susceptibility to masculine Nugent charm to some not yet revealed but distant area. “Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic?”
“Rather closer to America. Think of Bermuda. It’s a sea, comparatively warm, named for sargassum—you know, the kind of seaweed you find on beaches after a storm. The Gulf Stream moves huge islands of sargassum around in a large drifting circle. Things live in the seaweed islands.”
“Yes?”
“Those clumps of seaweed are small maritime universes to fishes and snails. Complete with cycles of revolution and, I imagine, evolution.”
Daisy thought about it for a moment; the image was pleasing. She considered the endless repetition of day and night, the hot sun warming the salt water, the clear star-filled nights, and she had a crude but pleasing comprehension of eternity. It seemed easier to imagine than her father’s devout belief in a more conventional but less easily described afterlife.
“I am a minor fish—imagining I have choices or reactions when all I’m doing is living in an island of seaweed itself dependent on an ocean current,” Daisy said.
“The seaweed is more substantial and longer lived, but it hasn’t more control over its own existence. Every now and then there is a storm a little more powerful than the ones that particular cycle of nature has come to expect. And the island is thrown out of the circle—the loop—its own version of what it imagines to be perpetual motion.”
“And the fishes and things die.”
“Or move on to another island. Everything goes on as before. Then, once in a thousand years, say, there is something that doesn’t fit the pattern. Or maybe it does, but it’s too large a pattern for us to see. A volcano, an earthquake, an ice age. What are you smiling at?”
“I was admiring the way you kept your metaphors in place,” Daisy said, not untruthfully, but concealing the real reason for her smile. She was thinking of the educational opportunities she had had since she had arrived at Bannock: a lecture on art, another on ocean currents, and a glimpse of the social structure of the English upper classes at play. How much she had been told and how little her opinion had been sought.
“All right. Sorry. The war isn’t a storm—it’s the equivalent of an ice age. What’s so strange is that no one else seems to see that when the war’s over nothing is going to be the same. The Great War got the vote for women and altered the social fabric of this country forever; do they imagine the Tommies will go back to the mines or unemployment lines as soon as there is peace? Are you planning to go back to whatever you were doing before you joined up?”
“I’d just left school, so in a sense I’ll be back where I was—trying to decide what to do with my life. Of course, that in itself is a change—the idea that I might decide instead of just accepting what happens.”
“And the choices will be different.”
“Lord, I hope so. So, you see, I am an example—to your family—of the less affluent middle class forgetting its place. My father’s a rector—to them, I suppose, a sort of grown-up chaplain. No wonder they’re so snooty with me.”
“You’ll find it much harder to get me on the defensive. The main bunch of Nugents, this lot here—my family can’t afford to be so picky—look down on the royal family as a little too recent, too German. Of course,” he added thoughtfully, “in terms purely of blood-lines, they can make a case.”
They both were laughing when James came into the room; Daisy could not have chosen a better moment for his entrance and she, an all too frequent victim of l' esprit d’escalier, felt a triumphant surge of delight.
“Daisy, I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Dance with me—” James said, his arms invitingly open.
Despite the triumph of the previous moment, Daisy felt her feet press the floor with an involuntary movement toward rising.
“Daisy has promised this dance to me—and I think a few young bloods of the neighborhood are ahead of you. Get in line, Nugent.”
Patrick rose and took Daisy by the hand. Daisy glanced back as they left the sitting room. She achieved a glance of amused helplessness, tinged with only the slightest suggestion of regret. It was not hard for her to simulate the lack of reproach; at that moment she had forgotten the humiliating events of the day.
Daisy glanced at Patrick as they descended the stairs, very much aware of her hand in his.
“James has always been very competitive. He was rather a spoilt little boy.”
“Gulls,” she said. “Do you think seagulls circle the island of weed and the tiny fishes? Or would it be too far from land?”
***
ALTHOUGH DAISY FELT a lot warmer toward the North of England and those who lived there than she had the previous morning, she thought when it came to singing hymns, they couldn’t hold a candle to the Welsh. Otherwise, matins was familiar.
The Nugents occupied two pews toward the front of the church on the right-hand side. Originally, Daisy thought, these pews would have been theirs, not only because the pews nearer the front were “better seats” but so that the Nugents would be visible to a larger proportion of the congregation to whom they provided an example. Since the Crimean War, their right to the second and third pews were further established by a memorial, on the wall above the pews, to a nineteen-year-old Nugent slain in battle.
Daisy spent most of the rather dull sermon thinking about the boy killed in the Crimea, the slaughter of young men, and a generation cut down before they could procreate. An officer, of course; that was to be expected, a product of his class. He would, Daisy imagined, have accepted the privileges of rank as his due. Gold braid, better food, greater privacy, a servant to keep him clean and polished—all that would seem an extension of his public school education. He would have been used to deference and obedience, but in a society with rules adhered to and actions having largely foreseeable consequences. To take responsibility for men, many older than himself, in a disastrously mismanaged campaign in an alien climate and to die there—what had he thought during his last moments? Assuming, of course, he had not died instantaneously. But Daisy, remembering descriptions of hospital tents, dying soldiers, Florence Nightingale, and of wounds cleaned with salt water for want of a better disinfectant, wanted to know whether the young captain had questioned his fate, his country, the values and beliefs of his family and class, as he lay dying.
Daisy was wearing her uniform as were, on either side of her, Patrick and James. On Lady Nugent’s dark, no-nonsense hat was pinned a small brooch with her absent husband’s regimental crest, and her black coat had a functional and almost official, although not military, cut. Daisy could imagine her wearing it as she performed organizational duties pertaining to the war around the neighborhood.
The pony and trap that carried them to church had continued to the railway station, where the boy who’d held the reins was to leave Daisy’s suitcase in the care of the stationmaster.
After the service ended, while the congregation loitered, chatting, in the churchyard and enjoying the mild, sunny day, Daisy thanked Lady Nugent for her hospitality and set out on foot for the railway station. Both young men walked with her. Daisy thought that James was accompanying her because Patrick was there, but she thought Patrick would have come with her had she been alone.
The stationmaster greeted them deferentially. The train was already in the station. Daisy wondered if he would have held the train had they been late, and she would have asked Patrick, were she alone with him. But Patrick had followed the stationmaster to retrieve her suitcase from the left-luggage room. James was silent while left alone with Daisy, but she didn’t ask him. They had danced together twice the night before but had not had a conversation since James’s late-night visit to her room.
Patrick returned with Daisy’s suitcase, and she and James followed him along the platform until he found an empty carriage. He stepped up onto the train and hoisted the suitcase onto the luggage rack.
“Window seat, facing the engine,” he said, leaning out the open window. “With some tasteful views of Torquay.”
After a moment, he rejoined them on the platform. The stationmaster, holding his green flag and a whistle, glanced at them expectantly and Daisy turned to James and Patrick to say good-bye.
James, stealing a march on Patrick, took Daisy loosely in his arms.
“Bon voyage,” he said, and kissed her lightly on both cheeks.
Patrick merely took her hand, but he held it for a long moment.
“May I write to you?” he asked quietly.
Doors were slamming all down the train; Daisy released his hand and climbed on board. She closed the door behind her and answered him through the window.
“I’d like that,” she said, as the stationmaster blew his whistle and the engine hissed a cloud of steam. In case Patrick had not heard her, she smiled and nodded.
The train started to move and Daisy went to her seat. By the time she had gained it, the tracks had curved away from the station and both men were out of sight.