Free This Cold Country by Annabel Davis-Goff Page A

returning to the library to tidy up. Her throat was tender and she suddenly was not looking forward to wearing the pretty, expensive, and low-cut dress Rosemary had lent her.
    Her neck ached and her head was uncomfortable, possibly because she was cold, huddled, and unrelaxed and partly because she had put her hair in curlers. Reluctant to further interrupt Lady Nugent with irritating questions and becoming, by the hour, less concerned with the convenience of the Nugent family, she had run a shallow but hot bath and while she washed—soaking was not a possibility—she had kept her head close to the steam to encourage her hair to set. She crouched in the bathtub until the water cooled, listening all the time for steps in the corridor outside the unlocked bathroom door. Time and the occasional drip from the large brass taps had left an orange and green stain on the white enamel of the high tub. Daisy thought that when the war was over she would celebrate by lying, for an hour, in a bath as large as this one, filled to the top with hot water. Or, on a beach, until the sun became too hot to bear. The Mediterranean maybe; somewhere other than the North of England.
    ***
    LADY NUGENT WORE the necklace at dinner. Her dress was black and, it seemed to Daisy, not new. The necklace was effective, even at the distance of the table. It had made Daisy prettier; it made Lady Nugent regal; the diamonds had lit up Daisy’s skin, they added authority and a suggestion of history to Lady Nugent’s erect posture.
    Lady Nugent caught Daisy’s eye and smiled.
    â€œMy necklace is courtesy of Daisy, James’s little friend. She spent all afternoon unpicking it from its frame.”
    Although it was toward the end of dinner, conversation was spasmodic and not animated, so most heads turned toward Daisy, some perhaps wondering why, if she were James’s friend, little or otherwise, she was not sitting closer to him. He was seated between a pretty girl Daisy had not been introduced to and Mrs. Glynne.
    â€œI don’t suppose you’re interested in gardening?” the slightly deaf neighbor of the Nugents, sitting on Daisy’s left, asked.
    â€œI am. Very,” she said firmly. During the course of the evening she had been forced to admit to him, and to a captain in the Fusiliers on her right, that she did not ride, fish, shoot, play bridge, and was not acquainted with any relative or friend of the Nugents not present. “I don’t know much about it, though.”
    â€œA middle-aged pleasure,
faute de mieux,
” her companion said, a little sadly.
    â€œDo you have a garden?” Daisy asked him, determined not to let another conversational gambit lapse.
    â€œWartime, strictly wartime,” he said, with another sigh. Daisy thought of the rectory garden, efficiently planted with rows of the less interesting vegetables, and wondered why it seemed less patriotic to plant artichokes and
mange-tout
than it was to cultivate cabbages and Swede turnips.
    â€œI don’t know how well you know this part of the world?” he ventured, when Daisy failed to respond, dutifully embarking on another conversational tack. Daisy, who would have dearly loved to give her nose a good blow, was becoming guiltily aware that she was very heavy social weather for the men seated on either side of her. She could see that she and they ranked low in Lady Nugent’s placement. Since Daisy carried approximately the social weight of a governess brought down to avoid seating thirteen at dinner, the men on either side of her, though not perhaps quite so devoid of qualification, were unlikely to find themselves seated beside a Nugent. She wondered when Lady Nugent had reworked the placement and what James had said to her.
    â€œNot at all, I’m afraid,” Daisy said.
    â€œPerhaps the Nugents—”
    â€œI have to go back to Wales tomorrow,” Daisy said, nipping in the bud the assumption that any Nugent