...THERE WAS SOMEBODY coming up the avenue on a bicycle. At first, I thought he was coming to help—although I don’t know what good a boy on a bicycle could have been. He'd been given the package of letters and told to bring them on his way home. Mrs. Crowe knew we hadn’t had a letter from you since the first one. But he—it was never clear, he was evasive—I think been to a dance in the other direction and was on his way home. I suppose he’d planned just to push them through the letterbox but when he saw us he didn’t seem at all surprised. I took letters and Edmund sent the boy off to the village.
Daisy, once again writing from Shannig, had already described the fire and the extent of the damage. Not in huge or depressing detail. She had told Patrick that Dunmaine was intact but uninhabitable. She reassured him that everyone had a roof over his head and that she, Mickey, and Maud were staying with Edmund and—leaving this bit out—a visibly less enthusiastically hospitable Corisande.
First, of course, we looked at the dates. The postmarks on the envelopes. The last one was addressed to me and was dated six weeks ago. Mickey said I could open it first if I wanted, that I wasn’t to read it out to anyone, so that your letters could be read in the proper order.
She hadn’t opened it first, although she had held the letter in her hand, her eyes focused on the blurred postmark. She waited silently as Mickey sorted the other letters into the order in which they had been sent; it was the first time she had seen Mickey take charge, or assert himself in any way that did not involve sullenness, withdrawal, silence. When he had sorted them, he handed them out. Some of the letters written over Christmas were addressed to the family as a group; these he handed out in order, as though dealing cards for a primitive game. They opened them and took turns reading them aloud.
Now that I know you get my letters,—or have been getting my letters—it is easier to write.
She paused; it was true that it was easier to write, but not true, as she had implied, that it was now easy. Six weeks was a long gap; she didn’t know whether Patrick was still at the prisoner-of-war camp from which he had written.
Your last letter took six weeks to get here. Since they all came at the same time, that’s probably longer than they usually do. When you next write please let me know how long this one takes to get to you.
Daisy no longer sent the questions she needed answered to Patrick. Too long without a letter back made them feel demanding, and the letters that had arrived, all at once, the morning of the fire, contained little information and no direct answers. Maybe he had not had all her letters. By now Daisy knew these questions would have to be answered, although gradually, by herself. Through inference, instinct, and sometimes, as she understood more of the world of the Anglo-Irish, by a process of elimination.
I don’t know how much Philomena meant to you. I gathered from Corisande that she had at one time been a nurserymaid, but she didn’t go into details
No need to enlarge on that conversation; she had to assume that Patrick knew his sister better than she, Daisy, did. And that he knew Mickey to be a source only of information of his own choosing.
I am sorry another link to the past has been broken. At the very least she must have been a familiar face. It seems she died in her sleep. The fire had nothing to do with it, and she didn’t suffer. Nor was she alone. Your grandmother is being looked after by the wife of Edmund’s groom. She seems kind and quiet; it is hard to tell how Aunt Maud feels about her, but time will tell.
Still no one had speculated on the cause of the fire; it seemed to have been accepted as an act of God. But Daisy feared it had come from a spark in the dining-room fire, a fire lit for Andrew Heskith. She had lit it for the benefit of a paying guest, but her conscience made her feel she had burned Dunmaine to warm her lover.
“STRICTLY SPEAKING, IT’S not necessary for women to go to funerals,” Edmund said, “but, in this instance, I thought we should perhaps show the flag.”
“Which flag would that be?” Corisande asked sourly.
“Of course,” Daisy said quickly, her mind already turning toward suitable clothing.
“A large turnout is going to look more like curiosity than what you call showing the flag—” Corisande added, “although that’s certainly a better choice of phrase than solidarity.”
Corisande was right, of course. Daisy was pleased that she was going to the funeral, her pleasure that of drama and curiosity, and she was well aware a funeral such as Sir Guy’s could be one of the larger social events of the foreseeable future. And something she could write to Patrick about.
“You’re right,” Edmund said, his expression and voice pleasant, “of course. As usual, you’re right. You probably shouldn’t go, especially not from this house.”
Since she had come to stay at Shannig, the spats between Edmund and her sister-in-law had embarrassed Daisy, less by their content than by the implied subtext. Edmund, every time he and Corisande exchanged verbal blows, was silently saying I haven’t married you yet and if you don’t behave, maybe I never will and she, in return, was suggesting that she was holding her punches until after she was his wife, but that then there would be a day of reckoning. Daisy watched, horrified, as Corisande from a position of weakness habitually overplayed her hand. But now Daisy was beginning to realize that, as was so often the case, everyone was doing exactly what he wanted. Not that it made it less embarrassing for those who witnessed these outbursts of malice.
No one was surprised when Corisande, exquisite in a black coat and skirt with a little gray hat and a long gray chiffon scarf was, uncharacteristically punctual, ready and waiting in the hall when the others assembled for the funeral. Mickey was wearing his usual Sunday tweed suit with the addition of a black tie. Edmund was dressed in his up-from-the-country-for-a-day-in-London dark suit. He, too, wore a black tie. It seemed possible to Daisy that elegance, as well as a love of good clothing, was one of the stronger bonds between Edmund and Corisande.
Corisande had made the wreath. The day before, the sink and draining board of what was still called the butler’s pantry, had been piled with greenery and clumps of wet moss. Corisande had taken a piece of chicken wire and twisted it into a large circle. Then she had stuffed it tight with moss; Daisy watched, fascinated not only by her sister-in-law’s skill but by the way her beautiful, pale fingers with their immaculate nails plunged into the cold muddy moss and forced it through the wire netting. Then she covered the moss-filled wire with larger, greener pieces of moss, binding them to the base with raffia. Corisande managed to tie the raffia so that it made a pattern and, at the same time, cut deep enough into the wet moss not to show. Next, tendrils of ivy were plaited and entwined, each piece pulled taut enough to remain a tight part of the wreath and for the leaves to appear to be growing from it. Sprigs of rosemary were pulled from their larger branch, the leaves at the base of the stalk stripped off, and the pantry filled with their evocative scent as Corisande threaded the rosemary into the moss and ivy. Once the base looked fat and solid and no longer even a little bare, Corisande added the flowers. She had a loose assortment in a bowl of water, white flowers of different sizes picked from the hedgerows between the fields and japonica from the garden wall. Daisy knew few of their names, though she was sure Corisande knew them all. Corisande, secateurs in hand, trimmed the stem or stalk of each flower and stuck it into the wreath, making sure it was securely placed and deeply enough embedded for it to stay damp. When the whole wreath was evenly, but not profusely covered, Corisande stopped.
“I’m going to leave it upstairs in the nursery bath,” she explained, “with a couple of inches of water. In the morning I’ll add a few last minute flowers and replace any that haven’t lasted. The trick is to remember to take it out of the bath tonight and allow it to drain; otherwise we’ll arrive at the funeral tomorrow with it dripping on our gloves and skirts.”
Daisy had been the one who had gone upstairs after dinner with a plate rack to take the wreath out of the bath. The water had already drained out, the perished rubber plug another of the small factors and adjustments that Daisy was learning to remember and allow for while performing the simplest task. The bath plug that wasn’t watertight, the doors that didn’t close, the windows with broken sashes, the dripping taps, the smoking fireplaces, the temperamental stoves—and those, she thought ruefully, were only the inanimate objects. If she started to consider the human factors, most of them now relatives of hers—the mute grandmother; the silent but not necessarily mysterious brother-in-law; the untrustworthy, wreath-making sister-in-law; the gun-carrying future brother-in-law; the husband she hardly knew—she would feel like a tired Alice slipped through a dark looking glass.
Daisy assuming that although the water had drained from the bath that the moss was now sufficiently wet—the alternative to backing her own judgment going to ask Corisande who had delegated the task when she had gone up to bed right after dinner with a headache—set the plate rack in the bath and put the wreath on it to drain.
The wreath maker of the family, a strange role for Corisande to assume. Daisy imagined that Corisande was not unaccomplished; she was sure that she could dance and, if necessary, play bridge, but wreath making seemed to be her sole domestic skill. Daisy had eaten too many inadequate meals at Dunmaine to imagine that Corisande was qualified to instruct Mrs. Mulcahy, and the unpaid dressmakers bills did not suggest that Corisande spent her spare time running up her own clothes. But somebody, at some stage, had taught her sister-in-law how to make a funeral wreath. Daisy shook her head, once again astonished by her new family, as she went downstairs; she paused before she reached the hall, struck by an uncomfortable thought. She, Daisy, didn’t know how to make a wreath, or strictly speaking—since she had watched Corisande carefully—she did know, in principle, how, but she had never, in practice, made one; so what was her own domestic skill? She, too, was unable to cook or sew or even run a household well enough to delegate such tasks successfully. What was she good at? She could milk cows, kill rabbits, but little more. She hadn’t even succeeded in being a faithful wife. She turned round and went up to her room to write her evening letter to Patrick.
The following morning, when they gathered in the hall the wreath had been drained and Corisande had made the necessary last-minute additions.
“Forget-me-nots,” she said, and smiled.
Now, she waited, in her still, unnerving way, holding a handbag Daisy could not remember having seen before, as the rest of them looked for gloves and prayer books. Mickey, presumably because a drop of muddy water, more or less, wouldn’t make any difference to his suit, had been given the task of carrying the wreath.
Daisy was, as usual, reminded of her own worn handbag and aware that one of her gloves, not expensive in the first place, was coming apart at a seam. Her mother had bought them for her during her last winter at school.
“I’ve a letter for Patrick. I haven’t sealed the envelope yet—” Daisy said, looking about her inquiringly.
“Send him my love,” Corisande said, but not as though she imagined Daisy would take a fountain pen from her bag and add a postscript.
Daisy assumed she was not the only member of the family to write to Patrick, but supposed each did so, as with most other activities, in private.
“How did you learn how to make a wreath?” she asked, breaking a silence of several minutes. They were halfway down the avenue; Edmund held the reins and the pony was trotting briskly, its hooves clattering over the uneven stony surface.
“My mother taught me,” Corisande said.
Daisy nodded, and the silence resumed. Corisande had revealed more information in that sentence than Daisy sometimes gathered in a week. It was the first time she had heard either Corisande or Mickey refer to their mother. Patrick had, slipping it between two other pieces of information, so that it need not be acknowledged or commented on, told her that his mother was dead. Corisande and her mother, the passing on of family skills and secrets. Wreath making could not be the only one. Daisy, now also silent, wondered what the others might be and if she would ever know; and what, if anything, had his mother taught Mickey? His love of history and plants? Or had he been too young? When had she died? If Corisande was three years older than Mickey and she had learned to make a wreath, then Mickey should have been old enough—or did his adult preoccupations owe more to the loss of his mother than to her influence while she was alive?
It started to rain soon after they reached the end of the avenue. Corisande pulled a mackintosh cape from under the seat, put it over her shoulders, and pulled the capacious hood loosely over her head, pushing her hair into place as she did so. Edmund, the reins in one hand, pulled another waterproof from under his seat and, after a barely perceptible pause, handed it to Daisy. After a longer, slightly awkward pause, Daisy, fully aware that it was Edmund’s own waterproof she was taking, accepted it. It had a large, stiff collar that pulled up to protect the back of her head, but no hood. The rain was not heavy, but even with the partial protection of the mackintosh, Daisy could feel her hair becoming damp and curly. She pulled the heavy material gratefully over her knees and tucked her feet under the seat.
The funeral, despite the weather—gusts of wind were battering the rooks’ nests in the churchyard elms and shunting loosely shaped clouds across a paler gray sky—was well attended. Edmund effortlessly attracted the attention of a ragged ten-year-old boy, whose only protection from the elements was a too large flat cap, and handed him the reins.
Although the war had now entered its third year, Daisy had never before been to a funeral and her experience of Church of Ireland services was limited to morning prayer, either at the small church in Cappoquin, or as part of the congregation at the smaller and even less well attended church where Edmund sat in the front pew and read the lesson. The Church of Ireland seemed to Daisy close to the Church of England, the differences minimal and limited, in practice, to the omission of the prayer for the king (few parishes having the means to replace their prayer books, his name still appeared on the flimsy printed page) and, from fear of finding themselves swept into the outstretched arms of Rome, a rigid determination not to indulge in any ceremony or tradition even slightly High Church.
The church was full, as always more crowded at the rear. Daisy, accustomed to making for the front, and seeing a half-empty pew, started up the aisle; Corisande nudged her and indicated a not quite large enough space in the back row. Daisy, slightly embarrassed, followed Corisande past a damp, muddy-shoed farming family to the end of the pew. Corisande had taken her mackintosh off as soon as they had reached the shelter of the church porch; she now looked pretty, neat, and elegant as she knelt in prayer, eyes closed, her perfect hands pointing upward, showing her engagement ring to advantage and obscuring part of her smooth and flawless face. Daisy was aware that her own hair, damp and curly, did not sit neatly around her hat and suspected that her nose was pink and shiny and her lipstick worn. Reminding herself that such worldly thoughts were not only out of place but unconstructive—she could hardly take out her powder compact—she composed herself for concentrated prayer. She had been taught as a child by her father that prayer should be confined to praise, thanks, penitence, and a desire for knowledge of God’s will, but she knew, as did her father, that in wartime, prayer became more specific. Prayer rose like steam from grieving and frightened congregations all over England.
Daisy prayed for Patrick’s safety, for the well-being of her family, for strength. She prayed, as she did nightly on her knees by her bed. She did not pray for forgiveness for her adulterous night with Heskith, for her breaking of a commandment, because, although she understood the gravity of her sin, she knew that were the opportunity again to present itself, she would not hesitate to take it. That such an opportunity would not again occur could make no difference to the imperfection of her repentance.
Corisande and Edmund prayed only briefly; Edmund leaning forward, one hand covering his face; Corisande’s more devout posture, Daisy suspected, a reflection of her grace than the depth of her belief. Mickey was still praying when Daisy sat back and picked up her prayer book. He remained on his knees until the service began. It had been apparent, from the first time she had attended church with the Nugents, that Mickey had a deep and possibly morbid religious streak. She would not be surprised if, when he grew older and if he remained unmarried, he affiliated himself with some not too extreme religious order.
The service began; Mickey straightened himself up and opened his prayer book. Daisy was immediately moved by the beauty of the language; it seemed to her possible that the Church of Ireland, perhaps even more than the Church of England, was better designed to comfort the bereaved than to celebrate the betrothed. A culture a little embarrassed by joy and the celebration of life was more comfortable—and hence more effective, comforting, and uplifting—when dealing with loss and restrained grief.
Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, Daisy thought, not of Sir Guy, but of James. James dead; Patrick a prisoner and wounded. Patrick’s letters had been, in the main, unsatisfactory; with all but the first and last one addressed to her—the one she had edited before reading aloud to the rest of the family—Daisy had been well aware the letters were written by a Nugent to other Nugents. Not quite evasive but lacking in detail; not quite secretive but reticent. Even months in a prisoner-of-war camp, part of it—how long not specified—in a hospital, either in that camp or elsewhere, had apparently not tempted him to take a more intimate tone in his letters. A wound, according to Patrick not serious, and now completely healed, would leave him with a slight limp. It was only in the letter that he had written on receiving the news of James’s death that he sounded to Daisy like the man she had married.
Despite the censor’s pen, by putting together details and allusions from all his letters, his family thought Patrick had been taken prisoner in North Africa.
I was so jealous of him and so angry with you. It was those feelings that made me see that I couldn’t behave in my usual guarded way, that I had to move quickly and fight for you. Not only the war but James forced me to show my hand in a most uncharacteristic way. I suppose that out of a lifetime—I don’t know if you even know that we were at prep school together— of memories of happier times it is the feeling of relief and triumph I felt when I knew that it was me you would love, that I will first think of when I remember him.
Daisy closed her eyes briefly, shutting out the people and sounds around her, hearing Patrick’s letter with the rhythm and intonations of his voice. She was overwhelmed with emotion, some of it love but most of it guilt.
Outside, a gust of wind slapped a sheet of hard rain against the stained glass window; the vicar, without pausing, flicked a glance toward the sound. What had been a light rain on the drive to the church was now heavy; there would be intermittent showers and heavy gray clouds blown in from the Atlantic for the rest of the day. Daisy’s feet were wet and the church was cold—and damp. To the side of the window, bubbles had formed under the pale yellow paint and the uneven patch was fringed with a white growth that looked like frost.
The first Lesson. Then a hymn. “Abide with Me.” As with the rest of the service, when the flat, emotionless tone of the vicar served to underscore the strength of the words, the hymn, not particularly well sung, and the organ taking it a little slowly, only emphasized the beauty and despairing sadness of the words.
“Abide with Me.” A hymn that had been sung countless times since the war began. And, perhaps, even more often during the Great War. Those who had survived that war once again sang it, once again prayed. And those who had not, like Patrick’s father, were commemorated on plaques in these small, cold, damp churches, with carved crests of regiments that were now, but hadn’t been then, part of the army of another country. And the others who had neither perished nor survived? Maud, who didn’t get out of bed, let alone go to church and, Daisy suspected, no longer put much faith in prayer. And why, Daisy thought, with a shiver, would she?
The second Lesson. The Collect. God be in my head... and... in my understanding—and then, quite quickly, it was over. The whole service had taken twenty-five minutes and had incorporated, as Daisy had known it would since the rattle of rain on the stained glass, some of the service that would usually have been read at the graveside.
The service over, there was a moment of shuffling, pews creaked as the congregation stood, someone sneezed, and then, tactfully orchestrated by the undertaker’s assistants and the vicar, the coffin was brought down the aisle followed by Lady Wilcox, Hugh Power holding her arm. Fernanda Power was part of a small group that followed them, a discreet step or two behind.
The farming family filled the pew between the aisle and where Daisy stood, and apart from Mickey, who had been sent into the pew first to form a human buffer between the women and the damp wall, she and Corisande were as far as possible away from the coffin and the principal mourners. This allowed Daisy to take an uninhibited look as they passed. Lady Wilcox looked as quietly elegant as she had the only other time Daisy had seen her, at the Powers’ lunch party again wearing a lovely coat and skirt—this one, of course, black—and a small black hat with a light veil that covered, but did not obscure, her face. Her face was immobile, expressionless, and the manner in which she held herself immensely dignified. Hugh Power, beside her, red-faced and glowering, seemed the more likely of the two to break down. He looked from side to side and Daisy found herself lowering her eyes, afraid of meeting his glance. A moment later they were past and Daisy was able to take a good look at the second wave of mourners, the one that included Fernanda Powers.
Fernanda Powers, eyes cast down, was also expressionless. But not expressionless as Lady Wilcox was expressionless; her lack of visible emotion suggested, rather than dignified grief, the ability to play a strong poker hand to the maximum advantage. With her were four men Daisy had never seen before. It was not impossible that there should be four men, apparently close to the Wilcoxes, who were unknown to her, but it was surprising. There was a small enough population of Anglo-Irish—and it did not seem likely that Sir Guy’s coffin would be followed by members of the Protestant shopkeeper middle class—for Daisy to know, by sight, almost everyone not rendered invisible by extreme youth or age who attended any of the occasional local parties or who worshiped at either the Nugents’ or Edmund’s church. And, although Daisy had originally met the Wilcoxes while staying with Edmund, they lived a little closer to Dunmaine than he did. It seemed probable these men were strangers, family or friends from another part of Ireland or perhaps from England. All wearing dark suits, no uniforms, but that wasn’t a clue, since wearing the uniforms of another country was not permitted in Ireland. As when she had first met the Wilcoxes, Daisy felt these men could not be fitted into any of the easily identifiable categories that defined almost everyone she had ever encountered.
A moment later, the coffin and the group behind it passed through the church door and the congregation slowly followed them. The farmer’s family with whom they had shared the pew, visibly torn between waiting for the rest of the congregation to leave and a reluctance to delay Edmund and the Nugents, filtered awkwardly into the flow, but Edmund did not follow them. There was only an old woman kneeling in prayer, two younger women conversing in whispers, and a man who appeared to have some connection with the church behind them when Edmund led his small party out onto the churchyard gravel.
The rain continued, although it was no colder than it had been inside the church, and those who did not intend to accompany the coffin to the graveside were moving toward the tall wrought iron gates as briskly as they could without seeming to hurry. Something not immediately visible to Daisy had caused a delay, and the coffin and those who were to accompany it to the graveside were gathered to one side of the churchyard and on the small path leading to the graveyard. Daisy found herself only a couple of feet away from Lady Wilcox and realized, with a rush of self-consciousness, that some words were necessary. Good manners dictated that she murmur some words of condolence; common sense told her that Lady Wilcox would not have the slightest idea who she was. She moved slowly forward, hoping that Corisande or Edmund would step in front of her and allow her to express her sympathy as an echo of theirs. Surely they both had known the Wilcoxes or if they had met them at the same time that she had—she couldn’t now remember whether Edmund and Corisande had been introduced to the older couple or whether they seemed to already know them—at least the Powers were people they both knew.
There was a moment of awkward hesitation, during which Daisy wondered what Corisande and Edmund, behind her, were doing, and then she stepped forward, holding out her hand. Before she could speak, Lady Wilcox, accidentally, it seemed, catching her eye, looked at her coldly for a split second before turning away.
“Keep away from—” Hugh Power, his voice raised and his face even more flushed than it had appeared to be inside the church, seemed to be speaking to someone behind Daisy. Lady Wilcox placed a gloved hand on his arm and he broke off in midsentence. In the same moment, Daisy withdrew her outstretched hand, turned to see to whom Hugh Power had been speaking, and saw Edmund close his mouth on unspoken words. The whole incident had taken only a second or two and, Daisy thought, had probably not been fully witnessed by anyone else.
Lady Wilcox and Hugh Power stepped onto the path toward the graveyard, and Corisande, touching Daisy’s arm, indicated that they should move toward the gate.
They regained the pony and trap in silence, conversation not necessary as Edmund tipped the boy, wiped off the seats, and flicked the reins to indicate to the pony it was time to go home.
“What was that all about?” Daisy asked, breaking the silence when it became clear that information was not about to be offered. “Did I do something wrong?”
“It was nothing to do with you,” Edmund said kindly.
It wasn’t enough, but Daisy didn’t ask a further question.
“Lady Wilcox is upset and irrational,” Corisande said after a moment. “And Hugh Power always tended toward selfdramatization.”
After this there was a long silence, then Corisande, speaking to her brother in an uncharacteristically encouraging manner, asked him about the arrangements for Philomena’s funeral, which would take place the following day. His reply took them most of the way back to Shannig.
Daisy, hunched under Edmund’s waterproof, thought about the scene in the churchyard. There was too little information for her to draw any conclusions, but she realized that her vague assumptions about Sir Guy’s death were almost certainly inaccurate. She lacked information; although the murder had, of course, been headline news every day in the Irish Times, the reports—like the kitchen gossip that Daisy, although never soliciting, strained to overhear—not only lacked any new information but emphasized the mystery and contradictions surrounding the case. Daisy had assumed that the murder had been a random act of violence based on naïve nationalistic beliefs combined with inept larceny. She had also gained the impression, and the events in the churchyard did nothing to alter this belief, that it was in no one’s best interests for the full facts to be disclosed. The government, with the strained relations between the two countries exacerbated by Irish neutrality, could hardly be happy that a well-known Englishman, however discredited in his own country, should be murdered on Irish soil. The local guards, although undoubtedly not wishing to appear incompetent, probably had mixed feelings about tracking down and arresting a local man for whose family the general population would feel more sympathy than they would for an upper-class Englishman. And the English authorities? They could hardly condone the murder, but surely it was far from inconvenient and with the daily desperation of the war, did anyone really care? Daisy remembered a story someone—probably Valerie—had told her. It had apparently taken place in London during the Blitz. A junior officer on leave, strolling back from dinner through Soho, is finishing his cigar; he lifts the lid of a garbage bin set out on the side of the street, stubs the end out on the inside of the lid and drops the butt into the bin. As he does so, he becomes aware that what seemed to be a bundle of old clothes is really a dead body, folded and stuffed into the garbage bin. He pauses, lid in hand, and as he does so, the siren starts to scream, and he carefully replaces the lid and makes his way to the nearest air-raid shelter. And in the case of Wilcox, even more than that of a minor London gangster, the authorities had more pressing things to think about.
Edmund, instead of handing over the pony and trap to the boy desultorily attacking the young dandelions in the gravel with a hoe, dropped the Nugents off at the hall door and continued around to the stable yard. Mickey, without even a murmured excuse, wandered off in the direction of the billiards room, although that, Daisy thought, was unlikely to be his ultimate destination. Corisande and Daisy silently entered the house. Corisande put down her gloves and prayer book on the side table by the front door and riffled casually through the post awaiting Edmund’s attention.
Daisy waited a moment and then, as Corisande continued to ignore her, crossed the hall and started up the stairs. She had barely set her foot on the second step when her sister-in-law’s voice stopped her.
Daisy waited, one hand on the smooth wooden banister, as Corisande crossed the hall and paused at the foot of the stairs, looking up at her.
“Daisy,...I don’t want you to be upset by what happened at the church.”
“I don’t understand. Lady Wilcox cut me—she saw me and she looked away. Quite deliberately. I was surprised she even knew who I was.”
“It was because you were with us.”
“I don’t understand.” Daisy paused, allowing her silence and her look to be almost a direct question. She could see that Corisande wanted, at least partly, to explain the incident.
“She thinks Edmund had something to do with her husband’s death.”
“But why should she think that? You and Edmund weren’t even here when Sir Guy was killed.” Daisy noticed that both she and Corisande had avoided using the word “murder.”
“Not that he, ah, shot him. Himself. More that he knows who did and has some, ah, connection with that person.”
“But why?” Daisy tried to sound as though she were questioning Lady Wilcox’s sanity rather than asking for information; she sensed that Corisande didn’t plan to tell her any more.
“Politics. Wilcox’s Fascist connections—just the sort of thing that ass Hugh Power would be attracted to. Lady Wilcox thinks Edmund and Ambrose are outposts of the British army.”
“Ambrose?”
But Corisande had said more than she had intended. Daisy was aware that her mention of Ambrose’s name, almost certainly inadvertently, was the element of indiscretion that finally checked the confidence.
Corisande turned away and went into the small study that Edmund used as an office. Daisy hurried up the stairs; she thought that Corisande was probably only waiting for her to leave so that she could go upstairs herself.
Once Daisy was in her room, she took off her hat, changed out of her damp shoes and stockings, and tried to subdue her hair before descending for lunch. Considering what Corisande had said would fill a good deal of time; apart from the content of the brief conversation, there were two mysteries unexplained. Why had Corisande, to whom it was almost a point of pride never to apologize, never to explain, felt the need to account for the incident outside the church? And what was it that had made her look so frightened on the way home afterward?
Her expression, had changed after she had mentioned Ambrose. It now seemed as though her own enunciation of his name had shocked Corisande not only by her indiscretion, but by a sudden realization of something that had caused her to curtail the explanation she had begun.
THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS was taken at Shannig. The day after she and Mickey had started their stay, yet to be determined in length, at Edmund’s house, Daisy had sat on the sofa and idly leafed through the most recent issue. A month later the study of the magazine had become of central importance and took up much of her day.
Life at Shannig was comfortable although a little tense. Daisy was always aware that her presence was an inconvenience to Edmund and she tried to keep herself from under his feet, knowing that she would never see far enough beneath the layer of his good manners to know when she was intruding. She knew, also, that her—and Mickey’s—presence was an irritant to Corisande and feared, even more, her sister-in-law’s less inhibited reaction.
The days passed slowly; a chilly wet April became a mild May. Relieved of the pressure and anxiety of trying to run Dunmaine, Daisy found she had long empty hours, devoid of responsibility and containing only minimal planned activity. She ate more—the food was better than she had been used to—and took long naps in the afternoon.
It would have been very pleasant if there had been a clear plan for the future. Three weeks or a month at Shannig would have been a holiday, a welcome respite. Living there indefinitely made Daisy feel like a maiden aunt or, she thought guiltily, as Mickey probably did much of the time. Dunmaine was not inhabitable, but the damage was reparable and the house had—miraculously, it seemed to Daisy—been insured. When these repairs would begin was not clear; from time to time Daisy asked Edmund, a little awkwardly, aware that his future in-laws were rather more trouble than she would have wished. Each time it seemed to be a matter of waiting. Waiting for the insurance claim to be completed, for it to be submitted, approved, waiting for an estimate from a builder, waiting for him to finish another job.
The Illustrated London News came by post. It arrived two days after it had been published in England and, since it was a weekly magazine, some of what it reported or depicted could be as much as ten days after the fact. Daisy’s imagination adjusted to remove the time lapse, and she opened each edition as though it were an illustrated bulletin from the BBC. For the first week or so she waited until Edmund opened the solid roll that came in the post, but by the time she began to become obsessive, she waited for the postman, tore open the tightly bound label, and took it somewhere quiet to read.
She would sit at a table so she could hold the magazine flat as she read it. The illustrations formed her images of war. Apart from the very occasional newsreels she had seen in cinemas in England at the beginning of the war, until now she had had to rely on her imagination to picture the scenes and locations referred to but not described by the announcers on the BBC news. Between issues she would study the back numbers of the magazine that stood in neat stacks on the library table.
Some of the illustrations were photographs; others were drawings. The tone of each was different. The photographs were of the Queen, plump, soft, always smiling, comforting and reassuring, pearls, fur, and powder; the King, slight and sensitive; the princesses, a little embarrassed, awkward; factory workers doing their bit; bombed buildings, rubble, and shocked, brave families rising to the occasion or, at least, to the photograph; and portraits of those in the news that week.
The most dramatic pictures were the drawings, in shades of gray: battleships in the North Sea, steel and high salt waves, wind and the bitter cold, imminent death by drowning and freezing; interiors of ships and submarines, neat in a way only possible with men living in close quarters, totally lacking in privacy. Sketches by prisoners of war of their camps were among the most cheerful, small evidences of humanity, of the individual, of inner resources. They gave Daisy some comfort. Although she knew they had been drawn and reproduced with a view to keeping everyone’s spirits up, she was also, at times, able to imagine Patrick in those surroundings.
The photographs of the war in North Africa, often bleached and yellow like old snapshots in an album, hot metal, sand, heat, flies, showed a world that Daisy could see was brutally hard, but it did not move her the way the pictures, in the old issues of the magazines, showing bitter cold, did. The photographs of the partisans in the Greek mountains filled her with horror, their flimsy shelters in the snow, their inadequate clothing, their frigid hands on cold weapons, and the distance and unlikelihood of survival.
The bombing of Belfast was not portrayed in the Illustrated London News. Daisy was disappointed; it would—although the event had taken place at some distance, and at the other side of a border—have made a connection between her own life and the world she so eagerly scanned once a week. And brooded over the other six days.
At the beginning of April, the magazine had reported Virginia Woolfs suicide. Although Daisy knew her name, she had never read any of her books. But her face, a small oval photograph on a page of such photographs, caught Daisy’s attention. She tended to spend more time studying the photographs of women or the younger men, most, although not all, suddenly dead. And never again referred to: the following week their places taken by a fresh wave of news and fatalities.
At the beginning of May, again unphotographed by the magazine, Belfast was bombed for the second time. By then, Daisy was drifting around Shannig in a waking dream. Or two dreams, for she spent much of the day in bed, sleeping deeply. Day-to-day life at Shannig seemed no more real than the photographs reproduced in the Illustrated London News. She felt as though she were passing from one dream bubble to another, the only moments when she felt awake were those spent lying sleepless in the dark. While the rest of the household slept, Daisy, who had been resting and napping all day, lay brooding on her bed. Then she understood that her husband was a prisoner of war, that his last letter was dated eight weeks earlier, that she had betrayed him, that her life now consisted of little other than waiting. And, for the first time ever, she lacked the energy, willpower, or ability to do anything to alter her circumstances, even if she knew what she should do.
Later in May, Hess parachuted into Scotland and brought a new element—mysterious farce—into the news. For days Daisy found herself surrounded by others as fascinated by the news as she was; she even temporarily moved her focus to the BBC and the Irish Times. For a while it was all anyone talked about; four meals a day were accompanied by fruitless speculation. Then it became clear that the mystery would not be explained or, perhaps, that there was no rational explanation, that Hess, disappointingly, had acted in an impulsive, naïve, and almost random way. Interest faded and Daisy once again found herself alone in her preoccupation. And her lethargy.
The sinking of the Hood and, three days later, that of the Bismarck. The loss, fear, grief, and pity followed by drama, excitement, the chase, bloodlust. Daisy was astonished that anyone could pay attention to day-to-day life at Shannig while such events were played out on the world stage. She was overexcited, tired, and tearful: like a child, she would weep and then fall asleep.
Dublin was bombed at the end of May; thirty-four citizens of a neutral country were killed. On the fourth of June, the Kaiser died. That day Ambrose came to lunch, the first time Daisy had seen him since Dunmaine had caught fire. He was full of war news, teased Corisande, flirted with Daisy, and gave her a short history lesson about the Great War.
Daisy, by now, skipped some meals, preferring sleep or the long solitary hours she spent curled up in her warm nest of sheets, blankets, and eiderdown. After the meals she ate in the dining room, she would sometimes sit in the library or, if the day was mild and sunny, walk down the avenue as far as the gate and back again. Then she would return to her room to rest and dream again.
A MONTH WENT by at Shannig before Daisy started to read to Maud again; a month during which both settled into the new pattern of their lives: Maud adapting to life without Philomena, to the new bedroom, to better food; Daisy, fueled by the Illustrated London News, sunk into a dreamlike state. Then Daisy appeared one afternoon in Maud’s bedroom carrying a copy of Can You Imagine Her? Daisy’s demeanor was the same as it had always been, polite, respectful, not expecting a response, although her opinion of Maud’s mental capabilities had changed substantially. The night of the fire, Maud had surprised her.
Four afternoons a week, all through the end of May and through June, Maud failed to acknowledge Daisy’s presence in any way. Daisy was beginning to wonder if the shock of the fire had finally moved Maud’s mind to a place from which it could no longer return, when one warm afternoon in early July, Maud laughed. It was not clear to Daisy whether or not the laughter was a response to the book.
The next afternoon she spoke.
“A Nugent ancestor was drowned, in a shipwreck. In 1782. He was crossing the Irish Sea—he was drowned, there was a storm and he was drowned. And his wife and son, and the coachman and the horses.”
“Oh?” Daisy said encouragingly. But Maud, having nodded thoughtfully once or twice, closed her eyes. Daisy waited a long moment and then continued reading. The passage she was reading did not involve travel but it was not impossible that Maud’s reflection had been caused by some association with the story of the book.
“If he had lived,” Maud said, a little later, interrupting a scene where there was the first glimmer of hope that the novel would have a happy ending, “all our lives would have been different. There is no reason to suppose that either of us would have lived in this house.”
Daisy thought about this for a moment. While she and Maud would have existed—they had, after all, been born independently of the Nugents—the Nugent family would have taken a different path. Maud had married into the line of a younger brother, a line that probably would not have existed but for the unexpected inheritance of the estate. And if Maud’s destiny had been dependent on an eighteenth-century shipwreck, so had her own.
Daisy marked her place and closed the book. She sat quietly for a moment, watching Maud out of the corner of her eye and waiting to see if she said anything more. She was beginning to understand that Maud was not merely the delicate scale on which the legal and financial present and future of the Nugent family balanced so precariously, but that she was the silent force and will from which the life of the family emanated. And she felt that she, Daisy, was merely an agent and tool of that indifferent force.
After a little while, Daisy rose and made her way quietly to the door. Her hand was on the doorknob when Maud spoke again.
“Edmund always loved playing spies, even as a child. He’d do anything Ambrose told him.”
Daisy felt her whole body stiffen. Then, slowly, conscious of every movement, she carefully released the doorknob, allowing the mechanism to slip quietly back into place, and turned toward Maud. But Maud, her eyes closed, drew in a deep, sighing breath, and turned her head and shoulder toward the window and the yellow late-afternoon summer sunlight.
Walking along to the corridor toward the landing and her bedroom, Daisy was unsure, because of Maud’s uneven breathing, whether Maud had said “Edmund always loved playing spies. Even as a child, he’d do anything Ambrose told him,” or if she had said “Edmund always loved playing spies, even as a child. He’d do anything Ambrose told him.”