The Fox's Walk

by Annabel Davis-Goff

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  September 1965

  May 1912–June 1915

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  July 1915–November 1915

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  December 1915–March 1916

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  April 1916

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  May 1916

  Chapter 10

  June 1916–August 1916

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Copyright © 2003 by Annabel Davis-Goff

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Davis-Goff, Annabel.

  The fox’s walk/Annabel Davis-Goff.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-15-603010-1

  ISBN-13: 978-0-15-603010-6

  1. Girls—Fiction. 2. Grandmothers—Fiction. 3. Country homes—Fiction. 4. Social classes—Fiction. 5. Children of the rich—Fiction. 6. Waterford (Ireland : County)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.A9385F695 2003

  813'.54—dc21 2003005400

  Text set in Granjon

  Designed by Cathy Riggs

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Harvest edition 2004

  A C E G I K J H F D B

  For My Mother,

  Cynthia O'Connor

  (1918–1999)

  Acknowledgments

  My mother spent part of her childhood at Ballydavid with her grandmother and great-aunt. When she died, she left an unfinished memoir that included an account of life at Ballydavid and a description of the lives of some of the local Waterford families. The background of this novel and a few of the characters and houses are taken from my mothers writing and from conversations in which she would recall childhood memories of life at Ballydavid. I have on two occasions, with great pleasure, borrowed a phrase from my mothers book.

  I am grateful to Susanna Moore, Coco Brown, Julia Goff, Jenny Nichols, Frank Woodhouse, Sheelagh Goff, Robert Goff, and Max Nichols for help, advice, and details of Irish life of the period.

  I am also indebted to David Hough at Harcourt for his tireless patience and attention to detail, and to my editor, Ann Patty, for her trust and support.

  I wish to acknowledge the following books that I have consulted: Ireland Since the Famine, F. S. L. Lyons (Fontana); Ireland 1912–1985, J. J. Lee (Cambridge); British War Administration, John A. Fairlie (Oxford); The Lives of Roger Casement, B. L. Reid (Yale); Roger Casement: A New Judgment, René MacColl (Norton); Roger Casement, Brian Inglis (Harcourt Brace); The Black( Diaries of Roger Casement, Peter Singleton-Gates and Maurice Girodias (Grove); Erskine Childers, Jim Ring (John Murray); The Riddle of Engine Childers, Andrew Boyle (Hutchinson); The Life of a Painter, Sir John Lavery, R.A. (Little Brown); Kitchener: The Man Behind the Legend, Philip Warner (Atheneum); and two articles about his father’s career in the Chinese Maritime Customs by Perry Anderson, published in the London Review of Books.

  September 1965

  ON A COLD DAY in March of this year, Sir Roger Casement was reburied at Glasnevin Cemetery.

  His remains—he’d been buried in lime almost fifty years ago; what could they now consist of?—had been disinterred at Pentonville where he had been executed in 1916. He had lain in state at the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin before his ceremonial reburial in that part of the cemetery where patriots and heroes of the struggle for Irish independence lie. His grave is close to that of Michael Collins; the Countess Markievicz, too, is buried at Glasnevin. So is Erskine Childers.

  The day on which Casement was reburied was (nature affirming the inconvenient character of the hero of the hour) not only bitterly cold but wet. Eamon de Valera, the Irish president, himself a former revolutionary, ailing, and now at the end of his long political career, ignoring his doctors advice, stood bareheaded beside the grave.

  Although I now live in Sandycove near the house where Casement was born and read about the ceremony in the Irish Times, I waited until the end of summer to visit his grave. The Republican graves are the frequent destination of nationalist pilgrims who consider that so long as the six counties in the north of Ireland remain part of the United Kingdom the struggle for Irish freedom is not over. For them, since I am a Protestant, I am English and therefore the enemy although my family has lived in Ireland for three hundred years. I am Protestant, Anglo-Irish, and I am not the enemy.

  Today—1965, only forty-three years since Ireland became a Free State, and sixteen since she has been a Republic—the writing of Irish history is just emerging from the party line to become a more scholarly endeavor. Even so, the approved history books have always been studded with leaders and revolutionaries of the Anglo-Irish, Protestant, landowning classes who gave their lives in the nationalist cause. Roger Casement was one of these.

  Casement's grave is marked by a slab of limestone, flat to the ground, inscribed in Irish. There is a tree beside it and the cemetery lies next to the Botanical Gardens. I think he would have been pleased. Despite a death cell letter in which he asked to be buried in the old churchyard in Murlough Bay, he might well have preferred Glasnevin; he could hardly have requested a hero’s grave, and I doubt at that lonely time that he could have imagined one.

  Casements is a long and bitter story—some of which I am about to tell. Not because I ever saw him—I was nine years old when he was hanged—nor because anyone in my family had known him personally—which would have been unlikely but not impossible—but because he, as the personification of the Anglo-Irish nationalist patriot and martyr, outraged the values of the Protestant privileged class and also confused it. The Ascendancy—the aristocracy, landowners, and politically powerful stratum of society—already knew their days to be numbered. They saw Casement as a traitor, pure and simple, but they also saw the government in London, the government they thought represented them, behave in a manner not only stupid but dishonorable. That behavior—the stupidity and lack of honor, not the treachery—was one of the causes of an unpremeditated choice that changed my future and would have affected the lives of those around me had not the course of history swept away the very foundations of the way we lived. In the end, the only life I changed was my own; my choice largely invisible in that utterly altered world.

  May 1912–June 1915

  Chapter 1

  AS IN MOST HAPPY childhoods, my life consisted of long periods of boredom interspersed with moments of drama that did not have far-reaching consequences. The summer of my first memories I was five years old and still an only child. My mother was with me at Ballydavid—we were visiting my grandmother and great-aunt—and she must have been pregnant, carrying my brother Edward. Of her pregnancy, I remember nothing.

  Instead, I remember moments of that summer—small scenes full of meaning that I couldn’t then, with my limited vocabulary, convey to the grown-ups. I am not confident I can do so now. The largest of these fragments of memory begins on the avenue at Ballydavid. It says something about the benevolence of the Irish countryside in those days, and even more about the casual
attitude toward children in my not overindulgent family, that no one noticed I had wandered away from the house—along the avenue almost to the wrought-iron and stone-pillared gates, on the other side of which lay the road leading south to the sea or north toward Waterford.

  The entertaining of children was not, either in my family or in society at large, given the importance that it now is. There was nothing unusual about my being turned out of doors alone on a cold dark day with an airy instruction to play. The front door would then be closed, and the adult who had so instructed me would go back to sit by the drawing-room fire.

  Usually I would loiter for a moment or two, hoping for a reprieve, before making the best of it. Ballydavid was not lacking in opportunities for the adventurous child I later became, but at five years old I was not tall enough to open the gates to the walled garden, nor was I encouraged by O’Neill to hang about the farmyard, under his feet or the hooves of the animals he cared for. I would be hard pressed, even now, to define in a couple of words O’Neill’s exact position at Ballydavid, but all power over the farm lay in his hands, and his influence, although in a way not immediately apparent, possibly even to Grandmother, his employer, spread much farther afield. Very often Jock, the Highland collie, would be loitering around the front door, but that day he had found somewhere warmer and more cheerful to spend his afternoon. When it became clear I would have to amuse myself as best I could for the next hour or two, I wandered down the avenue with no destination in mind. And, with no particular enthusiasm, killing time until tea.

  The avenue at Ballydavid curved and sloped gently downhill, disappearing around a bend where the mown-grass verges were interrupted by a clump of laurels. The house had been built on a hill overlooking the estuary of the river; the avenue, and then the road it led to, with stone bridges over streams and even a small hill on the way, gradually descended to the strand, a mere foot or two above the level of the sea at high tide; there it joined the narrow, sand-bordered road that followed the outline of the coast.

  On either side, behind the neatly kept verge, were fields enclosed by iron railings. Only the tennis court in front of the house was not part of the small farm and garden that supplied most of the household needs. O’Neill and the two men who worked under his supervision maintained the avenue, raking the thin gravel and removing any weed that tried to take root in the stony earth. Although there was very little motorized traffic—the Sunbeam might travel up and down the avenue once or twice a week if Grandmother decided to call on her neighbors, or if the occasional visitor, reversing the process, called at Ballydavid—two worn, shallow parallel furrows lay on either side of the higher central ridge. The donkey dragged the water cart, full and heavy, up to the house every day; the wheels of the cart were metal and each day they wore a little deeper into the ground.

  It was a gray dull afternoon at Ballydavid, but the sun lit the water of the estuary and as far out into the ocean as my eye could see. When I reached the bend in the avenue, I hesitated and glanced back at the house to see if anyone was watching me. But the house was closed and still, a column of gray smoke rising into the windless air from the fireplace in the library.

  There was no explicit rule about being out of sight of the house, but my sense was that I was being slightly disobedient. And disobedient without any immediate benefit from my daring. I paused, considering a return to loiter outside the drawing-room window, hoping someone would take pity on me, when there was a rustling in some dry leaves under the laurels. Oonagh, my Grandmother’s brindle cat, who had been prowling in the undergrowth, sauntered out. Normally, indoors, she ignored me, allowing herself to be stroked but, like most cats, not meeting my eye or quite acknowledging my presence. Now, however, she arched her back, stretched, and inclined her head toward me. I was suddenly aware of her feline grace and the shades of gray in the striped markings of her coat. It was, I suppose, the moment when I became aware of beauty; until then I had taken pleasure in the appearance of certain things—my mother when she came to kiss me goodnight, my first sight of the house as we turned the bend in the avenue, the garden in the blaze of midsummer glory—but implicit in these pleasures was their connection to me. Oonagh lying, as she now was, on the loose sandy soil at the edge of the avenue was beautiful in herself. Beauty—and, as I now understood, Oonagh—existed without me as a witness.

  Naturally I lacked the ability to express this idea. Not only to communicate what I had discovered to someone else, but even the vocabulary to think it clearly. But I didn’t consider that and, with one more glance at Oonagh, now scratching herself, I turned and trotted up the avenue toward the house. Instinctively avoiding the front door—knocking at it with my knuckles since I wasn’t tall enough to reach the door knocker, waiting for a grown-up, and formulating an explanation for the necessity of coming indoors immediately—I made for the off-limits, but more accessible, kitchen door.

  Tea was being prepared in the kitchen. Maggie, the cook, was standing in front of the large black iron stove, holding a skillet in her hands. I noticed a plate to one side, heaped with drop scones she had already made. Bridie, neatly uniformed, was waiting to carry the tea tray into the drawing room. Both women knew I was not allowed to visit the kitchen, but I had noticed that neither had much interest in enforcing rules when unwitnessed by adult members of the family. Neither really noticed me, but their lack of interest in the doings of children was different from the way I was ignored by Grandmother, or even by my mother. The maids included me, on a minor, powerless level, in whatever was going on; my presence, provided I was safe and well behaved, did not require any special acknowledgment. With my family, there was more often a feeling that I had not yet attained the right to be part of their self-contained and privileged society.

  As I reached up to the china knob on the tall dark door to the drawing room, some part of me remembered my own insignificance, but I was still too excited by my discovery to contain myself. It took me a moment or two to open the door, and as I entered, my mother, having risen from her seat by the fire, was crossing the gloomy drawing room toward me. Most of the light in the room came from three long windows that looked out over the damp tennis court and fields to the river estuary. The fire, combating the cold of a rainy afternoon, was the only interior source of light; it would be another hour or two before Bridie brought in the lamps that marked the moment when I would be taken upstairs to bed.

  My mother, graceful though she must have been in the sixth month of her pregnancy, looked rested and relaxed at Ballydavid in a way that she rarely did in London. She was by nature somewhat indolent and now, pregnant and in Ireland, took even longer afternoon rests than she did at home while my father was at the office. Her face still bore traces of amusement: Great-Aunt Katie often made her laugh; Grandmother, though insightful and witty, less frequently.

  “Alice,” my mother said, absentmindedly surprised to see me.

  I realized that I needed to justify my presence, and I tried to recount the moment of such importance that had just taken place.

  “Mama, Mama, I saw a tiger on the avenue.”

  I knew, of course, that I hadn’t seen a tiger, but the importance of what I had experienced could not be conveyed with the words, I saw Oonagh on the avenue. It now seems to me—a memory recalled recently by an Etruscan mosaic of a pair of exotic, predatory animals on either side of a tree whose fruit was large and not concealed by leaves—that in one of the nursery books, a tiger standing beside a tree heavy with brightly colored oranges was smaller and less threatening than was another illustration of a large black cat with long claws and teeth, hissing with a savagely red tongue. It is possible that these illustrations may have misled me into thinking that substituting a tiger for a brindled cat was a less extreme exaggeration than it, in fact, is.

  There was a sound of amusement, something a little lower and less than a laugh, from the end of the room near the fire, and I realized that Grandmother had visitors and that I had the attention of everyone in the room. Ch
ildren should be seen and not heard was a familiar phrase in those days, the unoriginality of the remark equaled only by its sincerity. But my mother opened the door a little wider and I understood that I was meant to enter.

  Grandmother and Aunt Katie were sitting in their accustomed high-backed chairs on either side of the fireplace. Sitting up straight in another chair—my mother had been sitting on the sofa beside a small and, at that stage unnoticed by me, elderly man—was a woman whose charms I could see, even at first glance, would be inexhaustible. The unrelieved, though by no means dowdy, darkness of my grandmother’s and great-aunt’s clothing—my mother was dressed in a loose pale blue frock and a cream silk zouave—only accentuated their guests colorful and dramatic clothing. Blue, pink, gray, and red. Her gestures, too, were dramatic. As she turned to look at me—I had the impression that she had been the one doing all the talking—the osprey feathers in her large hat waved wildly, and a gesture of her hand agitated the strings of beads around her neck. I was utterly charmed and would have been happy to sit quietly and gaze at her.

  But it seemed as though I would, for a moment or two longer, be the center of attention.

  “A tiger, Alice?” my grandmother asked, her manner showing more interest than I was used to receiving when I spoke. I had the impression that my presence was welcome, though not because Grandmother had suddenly discovered my true worth.

  “A tiger,” she repeated. “On the avenue. Come here, Alice.”

  I crossed the room, now the recipient of rather more attention than I wished.

  “And what did the tiger do?” she asked when I stood in front of her.

  “It sat down and scratched itself,” I said.

  Adult laughter, affectionate and not too loud, made me regret having allowed myself to get so far out of my depth. After I had been introduced to Major and Mrs. Coughlan, my mother patted the sofa and I sat down beside her. She put her arm around me and drew me closer to her. I wondered why the tea tray I had seen in the kitchen had not yet arrived.