DEAREST PATRICK,” DAISY wrote, and paused. It was the twenty-first letter she had written to him from Ireland, the twentieth since she had received his last and only letter. Each letter was a little more difficult to write than the one before; very little happened each day, what happened tended to be the same as what had happened the day before, each time she described her impression of something new she was aware of describing something familiar to him, and each day it was a little harder to have a sense of her absent husband. And she was worried and trying not to show it in her daily letter; each one carefully dated since it seemed possible to her that he might receive a week’s worth all at once. Then she would think of how repetitious her letters must be and it would be harder still to embark on a new one.
She looked out her bedroom window, seeking inspiration in the unfamiliar view. At least this letter would be a little different; the writing paper had a different address. Corisande, Mickey, and she were staying at Shannig, Edmund Crighton’s house. They had just finished a late tea and Daisy had come upstairs to write to Patrick before she changed for dinner. The house was smaller than Dunmaine and quite a lot warmer; a fire burned in the small grate in her bedroom. She wrote quickly, describing the slow train journey and the drive in the pony and trap at either end. Daisy knew the journey must be familiar to Patrick, but it had taken most of the day to travel between the two houses and there was little else, apart from telling him which of her two dresses she planned to wear for dinner, to write about.
She had begun, during the past ten days, to fill a paragraph with a description of what she was reading. There seemed to be no book in the library at Dunmaine that had been bought during the past fifteen years; prior to that time, a sprinkling of novels of the period—The Green Hat, Of Human Bondage, The Constant Nymph—had been added by, Daisy imagined, a female Nugent. Among the older books were Dickens, Hardy, military memoirs, and the complete works of Charles Lever. Daisy rationed herself, reading the lighter, more romantic novels for an hour before she went to bed, and during the empty hours of the day reading the heavier, darkly bound, seemingly more masculine classics. For an hour every afternoon she read history and this most often filled her daily paragraph to Patrick.
Every day she read a chapter of the history of Ireland that Mickey had lent her. She began the unfamiliar story full of admiration for the country and people with whom she was now allied, and read it unquestioningly until she came to the sixteenth century, when some of the events described seemed familiar but different from how she remembered them being taught at school. During her exploration of the house, she had seen a copy of Our Island Story in the bookshelf of the empty and uninviting schoolroom. She now brought down the old illustrated English history book and read it in conjunction with the Irish version. Side by side, they made interesting reading. Elizabeth: the Virgin Queen, Sir Walter Raleigh laying down his cloak so that she shouldn’t dirty her shoe; the Spanish Armada; the tragic although possibly necessary execution of Elizabeth’s cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots—as a child, Daisy had been unable to read this passage without tears, mainly for the unfortunate and treacherous queen’s little dog. A parallel reading of the period in the Irish primer described the Ulster and Munster plantations and the Elizabethan scheme for wholesale extermination of the native Irish.
Our Island Story Daisy now saw as brilliant, but not necessarily cynical. Although she was only twenty-one and it was no more than ten years since she had last opened it, she knew that the stories and the dramatic and colorful illustrations were part of her memory and would be for life. And it was only because she had become part of another nation—living in another country would not necessarily have done the trick—that she questioned the truth of the images portrayed. The Irish history book—less interestingly illustrated in black and white and mostly maps—recounted an Irish version of the history of that period. Daisy had no way of gauging the truth, but knew the books accurately to reflect each nation’s attitude toward its own history. The Irish history book presented the Irish people as heroic and high-minded, crushed by the superior forces of a brutal invader, intermittently rebelling, often with no real hope of success but as gestures of brave, principled self-sacrifice. The English version, and this was what most interested Daisy, felt no need to justify any action. The emphasis was on the dramatic moment, often further impressed by effective, colorful illustrations: King Alfred, lost in thought, allowing the peasant woman’s cakes to burn; Henry I, told that the Black Prince had drowned, “never smiled again”; Drake finishing his game of bowls as the Armada appeared in the distance; Charles I on his way to the scaffold; Mary’s claim that the word Calais was engraved on her heart. The reader was not expected to, and probably wouldn’t, question the morality or motivation of the English people or their rulers.
Then Daisy filled a short paragraph telling Patrick how much she loved him and how much she missed him. She had written these sentiments before, every day for three weeks. They were less true than when she had first written them, when she could remember with more emotion how his body had felt touching hers. Now these memories had worn out and her words seemed to her, unconvincing. She wondered if his letters to her—the ones she had not yet received—were equally threadbare. Whether he regretted their hasty marriage, if he couldn’t always remember what she looked like. These fears preceded the one she struggled to keep at bay; what if there were no more letters, what if he were dead? She finished her letter quickly, addressed it, but left it unsealed; maybe there would be something further to write after dinner.
She stood for a moment, looking out the window, before she changed into her evening dress. Her room was at the back of the house and looked over a field running down to a river. Fat red cattle grazed slowly on the still-lush grass; two horses—one bay, one chestnut—stood, heads sleepily lowered on the dusty, hoof worn patch under an oak tree. Already the days were becoming shorter. Daisy thought of the long, silent winter ahead of her, and felt desperate.
“WHAT IS MRS. GLYNNE doing here? Why is she staying with Ambrose?” Daisy whispered to Corisande after lunch the next day, during a moment when Edmund was diverted by a letter brought in by a maid.
“It’s what she does. She travels around, staying with people.” Corisande didn’t whisper. “I’m not sure she has a home of her own.”
“But why does Ambrose have her to stay?”
“God knows. It’s a sort of tradition. When she’s making a tour of her heirs she always stops with him for a day or two. And now she’s coming to tea and it’s your turn to entertain her.”
“Shouldn’t you be protecting your interests?”
“Aunt Glad would never leave her money to a woman. And, anyway, James has always been the pet. He can do no wrong.”
Daisy remembered Mrs. Glynne seated beside James at dinner at Bannock House and the way she had laughed when he teased her.
Two hours later she was sitting in front of the fire, being once again questioned by Mrs. Glynne. Daisy, putting a good face on her allotted task, had seen this as an opportunity to have a few questions answered. Unfortunately, she had been sidetracked into the “milk in first” question and was already regretting her own stubbornness in refusing to concede that a woman’s social future, if not her entire worth and character, should rest on the order in which she poured liquids into a teacup.
“Suppose I put the sugar in first?”
Aunt Glad looked interested but did not seem to make a connection to the subject under discussion.
“Suppose I put the sugar in first, then the tea, and then the milk, would that be all right?”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“I don’t, but suppose I did. Would it be”—and Daisy hesitated, trying to find the exact word that would make her question clear to Aunt Glad—“common? Awful?”
“No, it would be unusual, eccentric, perhaps a little clumsy, but not social suicide.”
It seemed to Daisy that she had succeeding in making Aunt Glad consider her point. Although it was far from the most important question Daisy had to ask, she had been determined to get to the bottom of one of the vague conventions that surrounded her, although it might mean postponing the solving of some of the larger mysteries. Her instinct told her there was a stronger, although invisible, connection between the two than the evidence would suggest.
“Let me put it another way. Given that we don’t pour the milk in first, what is it that causes those who do to do so?”
“I suppose,” Aunt Glad said after, for the first time in Daisy’s experience, pausing for thought, “they pour it in first because they’re frightened of staining the cups.”
“Yes?”
“And”—Aunt Glad’s face brightened, and her words came a little quicker and with the pleasure of making a clear point—“it shows they aren’t used to good things; they don’t know they should seem to take them for granted.”
Daisy nodded, not because she concurred with Aunt Glad’s explanation, but because she had been given one; the word “seem” might warrant some later consideration. They were quiet for a moment; Aunt Glad broke the silence.
“Do you play bridge?” she asked.
Daisy had been running through her list of unanswered questions—the mysteries she tried to solve in her head each night before she fell asleep—trying to find one she could ask Mrs. Glynne. When did Patrick’s mother die? Was it she or Maud who had made a shrine of his boyhood bedroom? What makes Corisande tick? What’s wrong with Mickey? Does Patrick love me?
“No. Tell me about old Mrs. Nugent. Does she know who I am?
Daisy had worried, ever since she had come to Dunmaine, at the reluctance her brother- and sister-in-law had shown to introducing her properly to the bedridden old lady.
Aunt Glad glanced at Daisy with more interest than she had shown during any moment of her previous cross-examinations. It didn’t prevent her answering Daisy’s question with another question.
“Have you met Maud yet?”
“Yes,” Daisy said. Aunt Glad had answered one of her unasked questions, the significance of days elapsing before Corisande had taken her to old Mrs. Nugent’s room to introduce her. “Corisande took me to see her, but she—Mrs. Nugent—didn’t say anything. She seemed to be asleep, but I wasn’t sure if she really was.”
“Sometimes she can surprise you.”
“SOME OF THE Wild Geese—some of the ones who settled in France—the ones with Patrick’s vineyards—the vineyards Patrick was writing about—were, in fact, going back to where they had come from originally. Although I don’t expect they, or anyone else, thought about it like that.” Mickey paused, looking at Daisy.
“They were originally Norman, you mean?” Daisy was having a harder time understanding why Mickey imagined they—he and she—should now continue a conversation that had begun in the library at Dunmaine almost three weeks before. Especially since everyone else at the table was weighing the merits and disadvantages of the current master of the local pack of foxhounds.
“Three daughters,” said Fernanda, a dark, well-dressed woman with a slight accent, whose surname Daisy had not heard clearly when Edmund introduced her and her husband.
Her husband, Hugh, as clearly homegrown as his wife was imported, looked at her as though she had said something in poor taste. But Aunt Glad nodded sympathetically.
“So unfair. Three girls, all of them pretty, all of them with money of their own. And no son.”
Fernanda opened her mouth as though she were going to protest that her own daughter—daughters?—was devoid neither of charms nor fortune nor likely to pursue the son—had there been one—of the MFH, and then changed her mind. Aunt Glad. Daisy thought that if she had married James, rather than Patrick, she would now be sitting in Westmoreland, in similar circumstances, with his family, rather than the comparatively friendly Irish Nugents, and was, once again, grateful for her lot.
“All of which has no bearing on his inability to exert any kind of control over horses, dogs, hunt servants, or the field. Or to get on with local farmers,” Corisande said crossly. She was looking lovely and was, as always, beautifully dressed, but she had been edgy all evening and Daisy thought it would not take much to reduce her to tears. Daisy found herself crying far too often; not only because she was separated from Patrick and feared for his safety, but over novels and, sometimes, minor frustrations.
Edmund laughed; Daisy was, as usual, curious about him and what he and Corisande were to each other. During the weekend, as on the only other occasion Daisy had spent time in his presence, Edmund seemed to allow himself to be bossed around by Corisande and to be sent on little errands for her. Before dinner he had gone upstairs to fetch her cigarette case. During his absence the room had been silent, no one pretending that Corisande’s request was anything other than a test of her power over Edmund. Aunt Glad’s silence had been disapproving. Ambrose had whistled quietly, lying back in his chair, looking at the ceiling, his face devoid of expression. Corisande had been defiant and a little pinkfaced. Daisy embarrassed and, as usual, feeling some responsibility for the tension. Mickey, only, remained oblivious. He had offered his sister one of his own Senior Services from a crumpled pack; her only response had been a look of silent dislike which Mickey, again, showed no sign of noticing. When Edmund returned he had given Corisande the slender silver box and kissed the top of her head.
“There you are, my little Partlet. Happy now?”
Watching Corisande and Edmund, as a maid cleared away the plates on which had been served bread-and-butter pudding—flavored with kirsch and dotted with raisins worth their weight in rubies in England—Daisy wondered about them. Corisande was unhappy; Edmund was aware of it but seemed only amused. And yet he had not struck Daisy as being cruel. If he were, would she not herself have been an easy and novel target? But to her he had been kind, polite, thoughtful, and hospitable.
“So in one column,” Ambrose said, “we have a master who is at best a mediocre horseman, lacking in charm, authority, and sons of a dancing-partner age. In the other column, we have a substantial bank balance, albeit derived from what our grandparents—or, in the case of an old geezer such as myself, parents—would have called ‘trade.’ I’m not sure I see your problem.”
Edmund laughed. He, Ambrose, and Aunt Glad looked amused. Mickey seemed to be thinking about something else; Daisy was alert, watchful; the others—Corisande and Fernanda and Hugh Power—angry, Corisande to a degree that made Daisy uncomfortable. Watching Ambrose and Edmund working in concert, she thought they were like sophisticated schoolboys. Then she realized that it was more than a similarity; they were two men who had never grown out of a taste for teasing someone smaller and weaker than themselves. Edmund was simply teasing Corisande. No wonder he had been willing and amused to run upstairs for the cigarette case; it allowed him to make more of a fool of her later. In front of the same audience.
“Beggars can’t be choosers. He who pays the piper calls the tune,” Aunt Glad said cheerfully.
Daisy couldn’t tell whether Aunt Glad was joining in the men’s teasing of Corisande or if she was operating as an independent agent. Or maybe Aunt Glad just meant what she said; she was rich enough to be allowed to mouth banalities with impunity.
“I don’t see why you don’t hunt them yourself,” Corisande said, her voice unsteady. “It’s not like you have to join your regiment or anything.”
Edmund laughed; the rest of the table was silent and aghast. Even Mickey—for that matter, why had Mickey not enlisted in the English army as his brother had?
“The white feather,” Edmund said, and laughed again. “I don’t hunt the Lismore hounds because I don’t want to, and so far as enlisting in the English army, let me remind you I am a citizen of a neutral country. Even Ambrose here is a neutral volunteer.”
“One of the reasons I’m usually on leave,” Ambrose said lightly. “I really only serve until cubbing begins, and I have time off for major race meetings.”
“Cubbing is the beginning of the hunting season,” Mickey said to Daisy. “The Four Feathers is a novel by A. E. W. Mason. It’s about—”
“Shut up!” Corisande screamed, pushing back her chair. And she ran out of the room.
Once again a silence descended. Despite her embarrassment, Daisy wondered whether Edmund and Ambrose felt satisfied with the outcome of their teasing, or whether they felt they had gone too far. Did Ambrose really have a part time arrangement with his regiment? He must have been less casual than he seemed to have earned his Military Cross. And again she wondered about Irish neutrality: she strongly disapproved of it and of the stance of the Irish government; the attitude of the average Irish citizen was mysterious to her, incorporating, it seemed, both those fighting—or the families of those fighting—in the British Army; and those who hated England, seeing her as the enemy as long as the six counties in Ulster were not part of the Republic; now she began to see that even the attitudes of the Anglo-Irish varied, were unclear and inconsistent. After a moment, Aunt Glad rose heavily to her feet, as did Fernanda. Daisy thought, for a second, that the women were following Corisande in sympathy, and then realized they were leaving the men to their port. She got up, a little too quickly, and followed them. Ambrose smiled, although not unkindly; he knew she had missed her cue.
When Daisy entered the drawing room—she had gone upstairs less to answer a call of nature or to powder her nose than to take a deep breath and compose herself—Aunt Glad was talking intensely to Fernanda.
“An operation for goiter!” she said. “She always wore a pearl choker like Queen Mary to cover the scar. But Kate said she knew it for a fact that she’d tried to—”
She paused, aware she had lost Fernanda’s attention.
Fernanda raised an eyebrow slightly and Daisy shook her head. Fernanda had assumed that she would have knocked at Corisande’s door while she had been upstairs, but Daisy had not even considered it. She had no intention of playing a minor role in the drama Edmund and Corisande were enacting: a slave to Corisande’s exquisitely garbed Cleopatra, a drab governess to Corisande’s enchanting—
The door opened and the men rejoined them before Daisy could find a suitable play or Fernanda had a chance to reassure Mrs. Glynne; evidently the presence of Mickey had discouraged a too long lingering over port. Corisande did not reappear.
THE NEXT DAY Corisande sulked. The sulking was constant but the form it took varied, adapting itself to the occasion. At breakfast she was simply absent. Edmund inquired and was told by the maid who had taken up early morning tea that Miss Nugent was resting and would not be coming down to breakfast.
She was, however, in the hall, ready for church, when Daisy came downstairs. Daisy was wearing for the first time since her wedding the dress and jacket she had been married in. Corisande was dressed in a pale coat and skirt and another of her small hats with a veil that covered the upper part of her face. Her skin was pale and lightly powdered and her lips were moist and colored a light cyclamen. Her delicacy made Daisy feel like an overgrown schoolgirl. How strange it was that Edmund should appear to see Corisande as a teasable younger sister while others saw her as a delicate piece of porcelain.
Edmund ran downstairs tugging at his waistcoat and shouting for Mickey, who had been ready for some time and was now outside, hands in pockets, kicking gravel. Edmund seemed not to notice that Corisande didn’t look up from the glove she was buttoning. He hurried them outside to where a groom stood, holding the bridle of the shaggy pony harnessed to the trap.
“Why don’t you girls take the trap? Mickey and I will walk across the park and meet you there. How pretty you look, Daisy.”
Corisande did not speak as they rattled down the avenue. Daisy hoped Corisande did not know that she, Daisy, was wearing her wedding clothes—so much less smart than what Corisande had put on to go to church and out to lunch in the country—and rather suspected she did. Daisy knew she was supposed to say something sympathetic and tentative to Corisande. That she should allow her sister-in-law the choice of remaining coldly and rudely silent or of breaking that silence to complain. Instead, Daisy said nothing, looking about her at the scenery with a cheerful expression, leaving Corisande stuck with her sulk.
On either side of the avenue were well-clipped laurels and yews and, a little farther on, fields and then more laurels as they passed between the large, open gates and their substantial stone pillars. As the pony turned downhill into a narrow lane, Daisy noticed the public road was not only less wide but less well maintained than Edmund’s avenue. On their left, the whole way to the village, was the high stone wall that surrounded his property; on their right, a tall hedge with trees growing out of it.
A few minutes later they passed what Daisy imagined to be the boundaries of Edmund’s land, since there were signs of other habitations. An avenue, little more than a cart track, led from two plain stone pillars to an equally plain, but not insubstantial, slate-roofed two-storey house. Daisy would have liked to have asked who lived there, not seeking a name or the anecdotal gossip that seemed to be how such questions were usually answered, but to understand a little more of the social structure of the society in which she now lived. Mickey might have told her all she wanted to know, and probably a good deal more, but he was strolling over the fields with Edmund, and Daisy, as was so often the case, had to answer her own question as best she could with a mixture of guesses, observations, and generalities. It probably belonged to a farmer. The house appeared to be nineteenth century; the land was fully farmed, a field with some red and white cattle on one side of the stony track and on the other a low green crop that Daisy did not recognize. It was not, she understood, a farm whose owner Edmund would meet socially, although if the farmer were Protestant he would, like some of the shopkeepers and tradesmen, worship at the same church. These Protestants were part of a society that Daisy knew less about than she did the poorer Catholics who were employed by Edmund or the Nugents, or the inhabitants of the small cottages that were becoming more frequent as they neared the village. Whitewashed, thatched, a half door between two small windows. Behind, a field—overgrazed, with a few thistles and some ragweed—and a shed. Daisy knew that, unlike the farmhouse which would have indoor plumbing, these houses depended on a tap in the yard, if they were fortunate—she was already used to the sight of shawled women carrying buckets of water from the pump—and a privy; they were, as was the farmhouse, lit by oil lamps and candles. The cottages stood back a few yards from the road, with small gardens, a few flowers by the door, or fuchsia growing over a stone wall by the gate.
The church bell was still ringing as they arrived in the village; Edmund and Mickey were already there, talking to a very old man. The church bells had been silent in England since the evacuation of Dunkirk. The next time they rang would be to warn of invasion or to celebrate victory.
Edmund still refused to acknowledge that Corisande was sulking, although she had apparently not spoken a word to anyone since telling the maid she would not eat breakfast.
“There you are,” he said lightly, addressing them both. As they approached the church, and just after he had stood back to allow Corisande to enter ahead of him, he added, “I hope you’re not going to faint, Partlet, singing hymns on an empty stomach.”
The church was cool inside. Outside it was sunny and there was no breeze, but there was, nevertheless, a cold draft around Daisy’s ankles. Corisande followed the service with commendable attention, sitting upright, standing, singing, kneeling, praying, and listening to the conventional but short sermon, without taking her eyes off the vicar. Even while Edmund read the first lesson; particularly while Edmund read the first lesson. While he stood at the lectern, Daisy was free to look at him as long and as carefully as she wanted. He was younger than Ambrose, probably in his late thirties, a handsome man but now carrying a little more weight than he should. He was what Daisy’s grandmother called “a good trencherman,” and it seemed likely that as he got older he would become heavy. She wondered why he had not yet married.
During the service, Edmund glanced at Corisande once or twice, but she did not acknowledge his attention. Her face seemed attentive and serene, her profile flawless.
After church there was the usual brief gathering on the graveled area in front of the church door. Parishioners loitered, greeting one another and exchanging banalities. Without food, drink, or the imminence of blood sport, this could not be considered a social occasion, but it was a time and place where the small Protestant community found themselves gathered and many of them were reluctant to hurry away. There were somewhere between twenty and thirty people—ten or fifteen families—and it was unlikely that there were more than a couple of additional members of the congregation not present. Daisy wondered if the farmer whose house she had been curious about was among them. Even the members of this small community did not automatically meet one another socially; perhaps five or six of the families were Anglo-Irish, the others middle-class Protestant merchants and shopkeepers. For the latter, this was their opportunity to mix with the gentry; and even the landowning, or formerly landowning, classes were often isolated and starved for company.
Edmund’s groom was waiting with the pony and trap. It had been arranged that Edmund and his guests would eat Sunday lunch with the Powers before the Nugents caught a train back to Dunmaine. Edmund took the reins from the groom, who would walk back to Shannig while Edmund drove them to Corrofin, where the Powers lived, closer to the next small town, about five miles away.
Daisy sat in the front of the trap beside Edmund. She would have enjoyed the drive more if she had not been uncomfortably aware of Corisande’s silent presence behind her. The countryside was pretty, the day fine, and the road busy with other horse- or pony-drawn vehicles taking local farmers home from Mass.
“Corrofin used to belong to Corrofin Court,” Edmund said. Daisy had noticed he tended to give her a full description, both historical and architectural, of any house mentioned in conversation, but that he rarely added much detail about the families that lived in them. “Corrofin Court was ten miles away, on the other side of Stradbally. It was burnt down in 1920. The family took the compensation, such as it was, and Corrofin Lodge was sold to Hugh Power’s father. That’s its real name but everyone now calls it Corrofin.”
“Lodge?” Daisy asked, imagining the neat, well-built, but undeniably small lodge beside the main gate at Shannig that she and Corisande had driven past earlier that morning.
“Lodge in the sense of a hunting lodge. Although that wasn’t what the old marquess used it for. What it really was—” and Edmund laughed, “was a gardening lodge. The old boy was childless—part of the reason they didn’t stick it out—and what he was interested in was growing vegetables. There were, of course, gardens at Corrofin Court. Properly laid out in, I think, the mideighteenth century, around the time Corrofin was built. But that wasn’t what he wanted. He liked to grow asparagus and sea kale and all kinds of unusual potatoes, and he built the lodge overlooking the river and only a mile from the sea. Seaweed and silt from the river, that’s what he put on his gardens. And he used to give famous picnics; my father was taken to one when he was a small boy.”
They were now driving along a dirt road beside a wide river. Daisy could see, on the other side of the water, tall reeds growing out of the dark mud. She could imagine old-fashioned carts, drawn by donkeys, carrying loads of dripping mud to the gardens, and others, their wheels digging into the sand, as men with pitchforks loaded seaweed at low tide. The images, in her mind’s eye, were pale; the thin watercolor of the past.
Soon they turned in at a gateway, smaller, less imposing than that at Shannig, but the stone elegantly carved and the wrought iron delicate and ornate. The avenue was straight and not long, the house directly ahead, elms on either side. Moments later, the wheels of the trap crunched to a halt in front of the hall door.
Corrofin was not what Daisy had imagined. From Edmund’s use of the word “lodge,” she had imagined a compact building, but the house was low and graceful. Only the center, directly above the hall door, was built two storeys high, and on one side a conservatory added to the impression of glass, openness, and light. A house built for the spring and summer months, not as a permanent residence.
Hugh Power and a couple of golden retrievers, came out to greet them and he led them into the conservatory and introduced them to the other guests. Although Corisande had smiled and shaken Hugh’s hand when she had arrived, she still had not spoken a word. Daisy wondered if she planned to remain silent for the entire visit; even if Edmund were at fault—it was certainly possible the scope of his teasing had exceeded what Daisy had seen at dinner the night before—it put an unfair strain on her and on Mickey. The idea that Mickey might be seen as picking up the slack and shouldering more than his share of the social burden made Daisy want to laugh. She bit the inside of her lip and looked at the ground to steady herself. When she raised her eyes, she found herself looking at a handsome middle-aged man with the most charming smile she had ever seen.
“Daisy, this is Sir Guy Wilcox—Guy, this is Mrs. Nugent. She is married to Patrick Nugent, one of our neighbors. Sir Guy and his wife have taken a house a couple of miles farther up the river.”
Sir Guy Wilcox. Taken a house. Sir Guy Wilcox. The traitor who had fled England nearly a year ago. On Christmas Day.
Daisy’s mind raced. She felt as though she were a child who, dressed up in her mother’s clothes, had suddenly been called upon to assume adult responsibility. She would have liked to have had an explanation of what was happening, to have been told how to act, react, but she found herself unable to flicker her eyes away from Sir Guy’s almost hypnotic smile. She could feel herself being charmed and she now understood what the word “charming” meant; Sir Guy’s charm made her feel like a snake, devoid of a will of its own, slowly rising out of a woven basket, obedient to the sound of a pipe’s thin music. She found herself smiling and reaching out her hand in response to his.
He held her hand a moment longer than was usual—to emphasize and increase his power? What would Patrick have done? Daisy thought that he would refuse to shake a traitor’s hand and that he would have left; but if she were to emulate what she imagined he would have done, where would she go? How would she get home? Or even as far as Shannig? And what were the others doing? She could hear Edmund’s voice, loud and jovial, and someone laughing. Corisande seemed to be silent, but there was no reason to assume her silence was patriotic. And patriotism wasn’t the correct word; Corisande was not English, but the citizen of a firmly neutral country.
Irish neutrality. A subject on which Daisy had, thanks to the Irish Times and Mickey, most of the facts, if not all the nuances. Eire, the Republic of Ireland, at the beginning of the war, had existed for only three years. Barely time for Ireland to settle her internal differences and to design and agree on a method of government. Eamon de Valera, the Taoiseach—the Irish equivalent of Prime Minister—and Minister of External Affairs, had in 1916 been jailed and sentenced to death by the English following the Post Office Rising. Revolutionary turned statesman, his vision was of a self-sufficient, intensely Roman Catholic country, emphatically separate from England. And neutral. Daisy had to this moment assumed that the Irish who weren’t actively fighting the Germans as part of the English army were neutral in a pro-British way, and that the Anglo-Irish were entirely sympathetic to the Allied cause. So what were they all doing here, smiling and laughing and shaking hands with a notorious Fascist?
Now she was being introduced to Lady Wilcox. Tall, graying hair, no longer the beautiful young girl she had once been, now a handsome, elegant woman and, like her husband, a presence. She wore a black knitted coat and skirt that might have been made in Paris or one of the grander London houses. On the collar, an old-fashioned ruby brooch glowed dully. Country house jewelry.
A not unpleasant smell of roasting meat accompanied the glasses of sherry Hugh Power was now handing his guests. It blended with the unsweet scent of geraniums and a hint of mildew. The sun, warm through the glass of the conservatory, the domestic smells, and the view of cattle grazing in the field by the river made the atmosphere hospitable, benevolent, innocent. Daisy felt outraged, confused, then for a moment seduced into a sense of well-being, followed, as such a thought often was, by one of Patrick, and she found herself again outraged and confused. Mainly confused. Was Edmund, who seemed to operate under a more conventional set of rules than did either Corisande or Mickey, as surprised as she was to meet the Wilcoxes? Their presence in the neighborhood must have been general knowledge, so why had it never been referred to in her hearing? Because she was English and would feel differently to the way they did? Had the treacherous Wilcoxes been welcomed by the Irish Government, the native Irish, and, just as warmly, by the Anglo-Irish? Some of the Anglo-Irish? And was Sir Guy actually a traitor? He was a Fascist, and that was surely a dangerous and morally reprehensible political belief; but since he had flown the coop before he could be arrested, she couldn’t know if he would have been interned, or—like the Mosleys—would have gone to prison. But that didn’t necessarily make him a traitor. She remembered Rosemary suggesting not everyone shared Daisy’s black and white view of the execution, during the Great War, of Roger Casement for treason. Feeling uneasily disloyal and confused, Daisy took a glass of sherry, smiled, and accepted the fact that none of these questions could be asked or answered until the Shannig party left Corrofin.
Daisy sat between Edmund and Sir Guy at lunch. Corisande had been seated on Hugh Power’s left, between him and Sir Guy, with Lady Wilcox—Emily—on Hugh’s right. Then Mickey and Fernanda Power and back to Edmund to complete the circle. Corisande was now quite cheerful, smiling and chatting; something—the glass of sherry, the placement, sitting next to a new face—had cheered her up. Edmund caught Daisy’s eye as she turned back from observing Corisande and winked. Daisy smiled weakly.
They sat down to a prewar English Sunday lunch: a sirloin of beef; Yorkshire pudding; rich, smooth gravy; and roast potatoes. The vegetables presumably came from whatever remained of the famous garden. French wine in Irish cut glass. Daisy was fascinated by the pocket of cosmopolitan sophistication in this remote corner of the former British Empire. She knew that between these isolated instances of worldliness, of education and architectural distinction, lay the cultureless world of the landowning, fox-hunting Irish squires; the market towns, twice a month ankle deep in manure and the sidewalks hazardous with lurching, red-faced drunken farmers; and the relentless poverty of the rural poor. Between the Sunday lunch tables where salsify or purple sprouting broccoli was served, there were a lot of families to whom vegetables were cabbage and boiled potatoes, with an occasional carrot for variety. And many for whom potatoes were the greater part of their diet. And over it all lay, almost invisible, the remains of an old and completely separate culture. And a complicated and, to Daisy, obscure political present.
Sir Guy was entertaining Corisande—and since Daisy also sat next to him, he probably considered her part of his audience too—with a description of his and his wife’s domestic life.
“We both agreed it was terribly important not to let the side down, so we looked up our Somerset Maugham for hints about how not to go native and we change to eat our sardines on toast for dinner. I understand you’re English, too, Mrs. Nugent—Emily could give you some pointers, if you like. Otherwise you’ll wake up one morning and realize you’ve stopped washing your hair.”
The description was funny because it was true. There was something enervating about Ireland—the climate, the cultural gaps and lonliness, the tolerant attitude toward eccentricity, the lack of an imaginable future—that caused Englishwomen to sink to levels of disheveled despair they could never have previously envisioned.
“Corisande feels as you do,” Edmund said. Daisy had not realized he was listening to their conversation. “She wants to see me in uniform. Either in a pink coat as master of the Lismore Hunt or in khaki; she doesn’t much mind which.”
There was a moment’s silence while everyone looked at Edmund. Why, Daisy thought, oh, why couldn’t Edmund leave well alone? Even the Wilcoxes, who had not been present for the scene Corisande had made the night before, looked startled.
“Corisande thinks Edmund should join up,” Mickey said helpfully.
“On which side?” Fernanda Power asked with a smile.
“Since my brother—Daisy’s husband—is serving in the English army, it would probably make some sense for us to break the habit of a lifetime and all fight on the same side.”
Daisy was impressed by the lightness of Corisande’s tone; she had been expecting another outburst, another chair pushed back, another door slammed, more all round embarrassment. Not that the air was now clear of tension.
“My brother, who wore the Italian uniform, is missing in action,” Fernanda said, although without rancor. Again there was a moment of silence.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Corisande said. “It must be terrible for you.”
“It is,” Fernanda said, “and worse for him.” She paused, then shrugged and smiled. “But—what can I do? And, anyway, here we all are.”
It seemed the storm had been avoided, or at least a corner of it weathered. Daisy turned toward Edmund with no idea what she was going to say. She was willing to embark conversationally on any safe subject, however banal; even those her mother considered the bane of parochial life, poultry and the servant problem. Or she could regress further and ask him how old he was, and if he had any brothers or sisters; anything to stop him teasing Corisande or forcing his fellow guests to declare their colors and personify a different protagonist and fight the war out over the unusually delicious apple pie.
“The accident of origins, the irony of war,” Sir Guy said, drawing her attention back from Edmund. “Mrs. Nugent, may I call you Daisy?”
It didn’t seem possible to say no—as a guest not only of the Powers, but of the mysteriously complaisant Edmund—but Daisy was damned if she was going to say yes. But before her silence could become uncompromisingly insulting—and Daisy was very unsure of what would happen once it did, though Sir Guy would clearly come out of the confrontation the winner—they were interrupted by the first voice raised in anger, that of Hugh Power. He was standing, having started to refill the wineglasses from a bottle he now held like a potential weapon. His normally ruddy face was dark.
“Sympathy for my wife and her brother, who is a very decent chap, doesn’t make me pro-German. I was born in Ireland, I am an Irish citizen, and I can’t think of a reason in the world why I should fight on either side. Enough Irish blood has been spilt fighting for England, and even more fighting against her for our freedom. Hitler’s a dangerous madman and Mussolini—Fernanda knows how I feel—is not much better, but neither of them is likely to behave worse to Ireland than England has already done.”
Daisy thought about the atrocities being perpetrated by the Germans even as they spoke, but then she remembered the Irish history book she had been studying. She thought Hugh Power was wrong but was not sure she would win an argument if she were to take him on. Anyway, shouldn’t one of the men be making her point? She glanced around the table. Edmund appeared calm and mildly sympathetic. Mickey—who knew what he might be about to say? Sir Guy was a Fascist, dangerous enough for the English Government to want him interned, or even imprisoned, for the duration of the war, but that did not necessarily make him proGerman. Surely the point of a British Fascist party was that it had a different vision for the future of England; any connection with Fascism in Germany or Italy would have ended with the outbreak of war. Or would it? Now would be the moment for the Wilcoxes to state their position, to make their case. But both Sir Guy and his wife were silent, and both completely expressionless.
For a moment no one spoke. No one moved; even Hugh Power seemed frozen in his semiheroic pose. The silence only lasted an instant and was broken by the person least likely to defuse the incipient explosion.
“Power—Poer, probably de la Poer at some time,” Mickey said. “Norman in origin and Hugh here is a good example of what I was talking about. More Irish than the Irish themselves.”
“I am one of the Irish themselves, Goddamn it,” Hugh said, but his anger seemed to be already less dangerous. “My family got here five hundred years before yours did, and there are about eight of what you think of as the original Irish left.”
“Who themselves came—”
“Mickey!” Corisande’s tone was its most elder-sisterish, and Mickey stopped in midsentence. He seemed content enough with his performance, although whether it was because he had ridden his hobbyhorse a little farther than he had expected or because he had diverted a full-scale row, it was impossible to tell.
Fernanda Power was the one who broke the brief but significant silence.
“Ireland,” she said, “the history is so—” and she paused as if searching for a word.
“Sad,” Lady Wilcox said. She seemed grateful for an opportunity to rejoin the conversation with a sympathetic observation provocative to no one at the table.
“Depressing,” Fernanda said firmly, but it was her husband, not Lady Wilcox, that she was having a go at.
“Goodness,” Corisande said, glancing at her wristwatch. “It’s dreadful, but I think we should leave in a moment if we’re going to make the ten to four.”
“She thinks we live in a country where the trains run on time,” Edmund remarked, but his heart wasn’t in it.
DAISY COULD HARDLY wait for the pony and trap to take them out of earshot of the Wilcoxes and the Powers, who stood, waving good-bye, on the steps of Corrofin. She was unable to imagine how Edmund would explain and excuse the circumstances that had led them to sit down to a delicious friendly lunch at the same table as the Wilcoxes, as though most of the world was not engaged in bloody combat. Surely affiliations in the largest and most savage conflict in history was not something on which even the most polite could agree to differ.
The pony’s hooves crunched the gravel and then clip-clopped down the avenue; the trap had passed through the gates and out onto the winding country road before Edmund spoke.
“Hugh had to put down that old retriever of his; turns out she was sloping off to kill sheep.”
Silence greeted this remark. Corisande seemed to have resumed her sulk. Edmund’s eyes flickered toward her and his lips twitched with a suppressed smile. Mickey was quiet also, but Daisy knew his thoughts could be about anything and that there was no reason to attribute significance to his gloomy and preoccupied air. That he and his sister had remained mute for almost five minutes was probably coincidental. Daisy supposed the equanimity with which she was beginning to regard long, loaded, gloomy silences meant she was settling into Patrick’s family, becoming a Nugent. Nevertheless, she required some kind of explanation from Edmund.
“Is this the first time you’ve met the Wilcoxes?” she asked, giving the question no particular weight.
“Yes,” he answered, his tone matching hers. “They took what was the dower house for Winter Hill. Winter Hill doesn’t exist any longer; the Moores sort of let it fall down around them—it took less time than you might imagine—but the dower house is very pretty. It’s on a good stretch of river.”
“Did you know, ah, that they were going to be at lunch?” Daisy kept her voice as pleasant and her words as unemphasized as before, while making it clear she wasn’t going to let the subject drift off in another direction.
“No—Hugh didn’t mention it. But I think the Powers helped them find their house when they first came over—”
“They did arrive”—Corisande now broke her silence—“rather unexpect—”
“I thought you were sulking, darling.”
Corisande stopped speaking and pressed her lips firmly together.
“What Corisande was about to tell you,” Mickey said, leaning forward, “is that the Wilcoxes got out of England about five minutes before he would have been arrested. If they were lucky, they’d have spent the rest of the war in an internment camp on the Isle of Man. Or else in prison, like his pal Mosley.”
Edmund’s expressionless silence prevented Daisy asking him a direct question; she felt as though she had forfeited that right by approaching the whole subject of the Wilcoxes in such a tentative manner. That she might engage Mickey on the subject in the presence of the stiff silence of Corisande and Edmund seemed equally impossible.
As they approached the station, the road crossed the railway line. The barriers that prevented traffic, such as it was, from crossing the tracks were down, and the pony stopped and danced, as far as the constraints of the shafts of the trap would allow, nervously.
“Damn,” Edmund said. “She’s not mad about trains.”
At that moment, a man appeared on the steps of the very small but solid brick house beside the crossing. He glanced at Edmund, laughed, glanced quickly up and down the line, and went back into the house. A moment later the barriers lifted and they drove through. Daisy looked back, carefully avoiding the eye of either Nugent, and saw the barriers come down again behind them.
“Mosley, you know,” Mickey said, “was one of the people who took a stand against the organization of the Black and Tans.”
No one spoke the rest of the way to the station. Mickey had said his piece and settled back into silence. Corisande continued sulking and Daisy felt herself effectively silenced. That Edmund had chosen to describe one more crumbling Anglo-Irish house rather than discuss the presence of an eminent Fascist—two eminent Fascists?—at the lunch party, suggested that he, for his own unimaginable reasons, did not want to discuss it.
Daisy, sinking into the Nugent silence, wondered if Edmund was embarrassed that he had brought them to meet such a person. It was hardly his fault since he couldn’t have known the Wilcoxes would be there. And the Powers? They were apparently on good terms with the Wilcoxes. Fernanda Power’s nationality and Hugh’s anti-English feelings might well account for such a friendship. Which left Daisy wondering about Edmund’s acquaintanceship with the Powers. It occurred to her—especially after his “citizen of a neutral country” speech of the night before—that he might not, as she had assumed, share all her English views and feelings. But Ambrose and Patrick were officers in the English army, so surely Edmund felt as they did. Or did he?
At the station Edmund busied himself retrieving their luggage from the stationmaster’s office and made small talk to Daisy until they could hear a vibration on the rail. All eyes looked along the track and soon they could hear the engine, then see smoke above the small stone bridge that crossed the cut into the side of the hill, and the train chuffed into the station.
“You know, Daisy,” Edmund said, as the train hissed to a halt, “I’m really very pleased with Partlet. The way she behaved at lunch. You know, I think any man might be proud to have her as his wife. I know I would myself, but unfortunately I have no way of asking her. She doesn’t hear me when I speak to her and I’m no great hand at writing letters.”
Before Daisy could answer him—she would have liked to slap him and, while she was about it, give Corisande a good shake—the stationmaster blew his whistle and began slamming doors farther down the train. Corisande mounted the step; Daisy followed her and stood on one side to allow Mickey to take their luggage from Edmund.
“I don’t think this is the sort of thing you should joke about,” Daisy said, with uncharacteristic severity. “It’s not kind and later on it’ll seem like a—like a waste.”
But Edmund was looking toward the window of the first compartment. Irritated, Daisy sighed and followed Mickey through the narrow door, past the grimy windows of the corridor, to join Corisande.
Corisande was standing by the open window. She was still silent, but from the angle of her head Daisy thought she was looking at Edmund. He was certainly looking up at her, his head a little on one side and with a small closed-mouthed smile. As the train lurched, a preliminary to drawing out of the station, Edmund nodded. Corisande remained immobile for a split second, then turned, and pushed her way past Daisy.
“Get out of my way,” she snarled at Mickey, who was trying to put her suitcase onto the rack, and dashed out into the corridor.
“Don’t you want your—” Mickey dithered with the heavy suitcase and then carried it to the window.
“Give it to me,” Edmund said to him and reached up to take the suitcase. “What about her dressing case?”
Mickey turned back to the rack where the rest of the luggage was stacked, but the train was gathering speed and Edmund only just managed to catch Corisande as she threw herself into his arms.