Free This Cold Country by Annabel Davis-Goff Page B

would be prepared to go an inch out of his way to entertain her. “But,” she added a little desperately, “we did do the Lake District poets at school.”
    There was another pause and Daisy realized that poetry was not the direction in which her companion had been hoping to steer the conversation.
    â€œYes,” he said at last. “Wordsworth and ... ah ... Coleridge...” his voice trailed off. Then, “And of course there’s Beatrix Potter.”
    Daisy was attempting to formulate a not too discouraging sentence that suggested that while Beatrix Potter was not, strictly speaking, one of the Romantic poets, she had a certain lyrical enthusiasm for nature, which made the error a very understandable one, when she was distracted by James’s voice, quite loud, from farther up the table. He was speaking to Patrick.
    â€œ...great sport, we missed you today.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you go?” Kate asked. The note of teasing in her voice might have been flirtatious.
    â€œI don’t think I’ll ever voluntarily kill anything larger than a horsefly again as long as I live,” Patrick said.
    Apart from Daisy’s dinner partner, there was a silence around the table, the silence that follows an extreme lapse in taste, a silence that no one wished to take the responsibility of breaking.
    â€œ...
The Tale of Jemima Puddle-duck
and, of course,
Tom Kitten
.”
    Every head at the table was now turned toward Daisy and the man attempting to engage her in conversation. Kate’s supercilious smile was followed by a disbelieving shake of her head; Daisy would have given a great deal to be able to smack her.
    â€œYou don’t seem to have any difficulty polishing off the salmon on your plate,” Lizzie said to Patrick in a tone that suggested to Daisy that she was less fond of him than Kate seemed to be.
    â€œI didn’t say I was a vegetarian—in fact, I imagine I’m essentially a carnivore.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œIf, after the war—and it seems more than possible I’ll be happy to have it—a butcher’s shop is my lot, I’ll be capable of slaughtering my own meat. And eating it. I won’t, however, be doing it socially. Or for sport.”
    The exchange did nothing to lighten the gloom now spread fairly evenly over the dinner table; two maids cleared the plates, unnerved by the sudden interest the guests seemed to have developed in their every movement. Daisy now seemed to have the most enviable placement and her dinner partner had never had a more rapt audience.
    â€œShe lives at Near Sawrey; she’s an old lady now, of course.”
    Daisy nodded mutely. The Nugents seemed even more dangerous to her than they had a moment before. She would have liked to say something that showed solidarity with Patrick, but didn’t know how. She had a pretty good idea that not only would he not welcome her support but a declaration of similar feelings would not have surprised her hosts. They would see her commonsense attitude toward the killing of rabbits and chickens and her distaste for blood sports to be a manifestation of her inferior birth.
    â€œThe inn is in the background of one of the illustrations in
Jemima Puddle-duck
," her companion finished triumphantly.
    But Daisy was thinking that as much as she disliked Patrick, his aversion to spilling blood when the war was over was rather more admirable than her own determination to wallow chin high in a bubble bath.
    Â 
    ON WET AFTERNOONS at Daisy’s boarding school—an old, academically distinguished, and even rather grand establishment that offered generous scholarships to the daughters of the clergy—there used to be country dancing in the gymnasium. No one enjoyed it. The games mistress, who was in charge, was well coordinated but had a poor sense of rhythm, and the music available was limited to three gramophone records, none of them new: an English country dance