The Fox's Walk

by Annabel Davis-Goff

  My mother had taken little active part in my abandonment. That her condition did not allow questions, appeals, or explanations was maybe the strongest reason for me to do what I was told and hope that my acquiescence would gain me favorable treatment from the less indulgent Irish side of my family.

  I had also been, I soon realized, too easily seduced by the promises of material benefits and the pleasure of my new status. I had not understood that after I had enjoyed the novelty of being the pet of Ballydavid and the daughter of the house, everything would not snap back into its previous—if not comfortable, then at least familiar—mode.

  What I had been offered was not insubstantial. The nursery was to be made into my own bedroom, with rearranged furniture and a pretty bedspread; I would learn to ride and have a pony; Jock would be my companion on walks; there would be lessons rather than school and a little girl nearby I could play with; and, once I could ride well enough, I could go by myself on Patience to visit her. I seem not to have been aware of my parents’ and my brother’s departure although I had the evidence of trunks, suitcases, and tissue paper before me, or perhaps I understood that they were leaving but not that I could not simultaneously enjoy my new privileges and go home with them. While I was contemplating Patience and my new bedroom, my father packed up Mother and Edward and took them back to England.

  AT THE END OF JULY, approaching the Devil’s Birthday, as the anniversary of the outbreak of war was known, life at Ballydavid began again. It seemed as though the clocks again ticked, Oonagh again purred, Bridie’s broom again swept the flagstones in the hall, hooves and wheels could be heard on the gravel outside the front door, the sparks flew up from the turf fire that was lit every afternoon, and the swallows once more swooped over the summer lawn in search of evening insects.

  The resumption of something approaching everyday life was marked by two activities, each a futile refusal to admit the finality of an untimely death. The arrival of the artist who was to paint my uncle Sainthill’s portrait occurred in the same week as I became aware that Grandmother and Aunt Katie were attempting through spiritualism to bridge the gap between this world and the next.

  The painter came down from Dublin on the train. He was not a painter of the first water, and I suppose Grandmother must have been aware that his availability at short notice to paint a portrait from a photograph suggested both a lack of worldly success and a journeyman attitude toward his art. For a day or two before he arrived, he was the subject of several long discussions between Grandmother and Aunt Katie. Should he eat meals in the dining room or should he be fed separately? It was a tricky question that could not be resolved until Mr. McLeod arrived and they could see and hear him, but I think the feeling was that a painter bore the temporary status of a governess and would eat breakfast and lunch in the dining room and have his dinner on a tray in his room.

  The painter, when he eventually arrived, was Scottish, with a red nose and sandy beard. Before Grandmother and Aunt Katie could withdraw to reassess the placement, he managed—I no longer remember how, but doubtless he had had years of practice—to establish that he would eat his lunch (“with a bottle of stout, if you would be so good”) in the room where he would be working and the other two meals at a location chosen by his employer, but alone.

  Relieved, but vaguely insulted, this snub was quickly translated into a lecture to me by Grandmother about an artist’s need for quiet and privacy, and I was told not to bother Mr. McLeod while he was working.

  I was bored and lonely; the stretch between breakfast and lunch seemed interminable. The next morning, soon after Mr. McLeod set up his easel in the drawing room, I crept into the room with a book and, seating myself on the sofa at some distance from where he stood, settled down to watch.

  The photograph of Uncle Sainthill, from which Mr. McLeod was to paint, was a conventional studio portrait—my uncle in uniform, dignified, a little stiff, a row of medals on his chest. McLeods commission was not only to place my uncle at Ballydavid, but to alter the trimmings on his uniform to reflect his promotion to major during the last month of his life, and to include among the medals his Military Cross.

  I watched, holding my book on my knee and making no pretence of reading it—it was a dull book; the bookshelves at Ballydavid had little to offer me—as the painter angled his easel, attached the photograph a little above the canvas, placed his paints on a small table covered with a thick cloth to his right, and propped the other photographs he was to consult on grandmother’s desk to his left. He then stood back a little and looked out the window. The downstairs windows at Ballydavid were large, the upper and lower halves each divided into nine panes. Shutters, plainly carved, were drawn back into the wall on either side. As Mr. McLeod began to sketch the outline of the portrait, I crept a little closer. I remained silent and, as he appeared not to be aware of my presence, I considered myself technically obedient to Grandmother’s instruction not to disturb him.

  From the vertical lines on the right of the canvas and the lighter horizontal lines to the left, I could see that the portrait was to show Uncle Sainthill leaning against the shutters. The angle of the easel was such that he would not be shown in profile; he would be looking out the window, though not at the view shown in the background of the painting. Behind my unde, the carved white shutter, its line broken by the border of the dark velvet curtain on the right; to the left, the Ballydavid fields with the woods beyond and, in the far distance, the sea.

  Although the photograph was of conventional proportions (about five inches in height and three in width) the canvas on the easel was long and narrow. I watched and waited to see what Mr. McLeod would do next. After a little while he took a pipe and a pouch of tobacco from his pocket and, without looking away from his work, stuffed the tobacco into the pipe and pressed it down with his fingers.

  No one ever smoked in Grandmothers drawing room. I was unsure what I should do. Clearly it was no concern of mine, but I remembered how I had been held responsible for Oonagh’s destruction of Grandmother’s knitting. When Mr. McLeod lit his pipe, I cleared my throat gently. He appeared not to hear me. I stood up and crossed the room to where he stood.

  “Would you like me to open a window?” I asked.

  “Certainly not,” he said. “It’s bloody cold already.”

  I regarded him with some curiosity. I had heard Bridie telling Maggie that she had found an empty bottle in the wastepaper basket in his room that morning.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Waiting,” he said abruptly, drawing on his pipe.

  “What are you waiting for?” I supposed that I was disturbing Mr. McLeod in just the manner I had been told not to, but I sensed that this particular artist was a less sensitive flower than Grandmother had imagined.

  “Waiting for the light to change.”

  I looked out the window. A morning mist was rolling in from the sea. By eleven o’clock, it would burn off. Coming out of the mist at the bottom of the field, I could see a man, walking slowly up toward the house. After a moment or two, I saw that it was not a man but rather the red-haired youth who sometimes came to the kitchen door with messages.

  Leaving my book on the sofa—I would return later—I quietly left the room. Before closing the door I glanced back. Mr. McLeod had not moved; he stood gazing despondently out the window, a cloud of evil smelling black smoke drifting closer to the velvet curtains.

  In the kitchen, Maggie was reading tea leaves. I stood quietly beside Bridie, whose cup was being read, and watched happily, while listening for a knock at the kitchen door.

  I preferred the more social and usually more optimistic superstitions of the kitchen to those of my own family. Although Maggies tea leaves would sometimes warn against treachery or disaster, they more often foretold dark strangers, journeys across the water, or a letter. Whenever possible, I would creep into the kitchen to witness this magic; historical evidence to the contrary, the shadowy promises of good fortune suggested faith in distant
outside influences.

  The kitchen was pleasantly warm, and, even more than the heat thrown off by the range, I was aware of the soft comforting warmth of Bridie, against whom I was leaning. But there had not been a knock at the door. After a moment I let myself out the kitchen door into the yard. Even at the time I was surprised that I would leave the cozy atmosphere of the kitchen—where, although the reading of the tea leaves was over, I could perhaps have climbed into Bridie's lap—for the chilly damp of the yard and a chance to see the red-haired boy at closer quarters.

  But I was, apart from a red hen scratching about between the cobble stones, alone. It was too late in the morning for there to be activity in the dairy, and it was the wrong day of the week for laundry. The bleak gray of the morning—no colder than it had been in the drawing room—and the stillness and silence that surrounded me contributed to the illusion of a household, if not frozen, then lagging in time.

  I buttoned up my cardigan and waited. After a moment I began to stroll about the kitchen yard, since I didn’t want the boy—who should have been there by now, had this been his destination—to find me standing pointlessly by the kitchen door. But even in motion I began to feel silly. If he had come into the yard and asked me what I was doing, I could not have answered him in a way that wouldn’t have made me appear half-witted. My situation had a certain familiarity: on cold afternoons Grandmother would send me outside for fresh air and exercise, and invariably I would be asked by one of the men who worked at Ballydavid what I was doing—as though I didn’t have enough sense to stay indoors and keep warm.

  But this time I had gone outside through my own volition. And I had not, even in my imagination, taken my acquaintanceship with this boy so far as a conversation. I had, I suppose, wanted to see him at close quarters, maybe to smile at him and to have him acknowledge my existence. I was lonely enough for this to seem important.

  There was a shortage of children in the neighborhood of Ballydavid—by which I mean there seemed to be only one Protestant child of my age among the local families with whom Grandmother was on visiting terms. The child’s name was Clodagh, and, in September, soon after my birthday, I would be sharing a governess with her and taking lessons each day at her parents’ house. In the meantime, Ballydavid in indefinite mourning, social life was suspended, and no one considered whether I, just separated from my family and without a friend or playmate, might be unhappy and lonely.

  It now seemed that, if the boy had come up to Ballydavid, he had not come to deliver a message to the kitchen door. I wandered, as nonchalantly as I could, into the stable yard. The stables were separated from the smaller courtyard behind the kitchen by a covered passageway, to either side of which lay the O’Neill’s house. As I hesitated in the dry sheltered area, I heard a voice behind the door of the room where the O’Neills lived and ate. The sleeping quarters were on the other side of the passageway and above their house were haylofts and, what had been during more affluent times, the attic quarters of grooms and stable boys. When I visited Mrs. O’Neill, I could sometimes hear the surprisingly loud movements of what I liked to imagine were squirrels but which were more likely rats, overhead. The voice I heard was Mrs. O’Neill’s, but I assumed it was O’Neill to whom she was speaking, so I hurried on toward the stable yard. It, too, was deserted. Rather than retrace my footsteps—with the possibility of finding myself face to face with O’Neill as he came out his front door—I left the yard by the main gate and strolled past the bleaching garden and onto the back avenue.

  I understood, although I didn’t wrap the thought in specific words, that now Grandmother was bereaved, O’Neill stood at the moral center of Ballydavid. He said very little about anything that took place beyond the boundaries of his small kingdom; after the frank and respectful traditional words of condolence, “I’m sorry for your trouble, your Ladyship,” he showed by word or expression no reaction to the permanent grief following my uncle’s death. Nor did he ever volunteer any information about his own son, Tom, who had now been in France for almost a year. In the same respectful way that he had acknowledged Uncle Sainthill’s death, he would reply briefly to enquiries about the well-being of his elder child. The lack of emphasis with which he did so did not encourage further conversation on the subject. He knew, as well as we did, that Tom’s life expectancy was even shorter than had been Uncle Sainthill’s. I imagine he maintained this distance among his social equals, some of whom would have been strongly opposed to Irish men enlisting in the English Army. Conscription for Ireland was in the air and threatened to fan the smoldering violence of nationalism, always beneath the surface, to flames.

  I glanced toward the passageway as I reentered the kitchen yard from the avenue. But the yard was still empty. I scurried across it, now aware I was more likely to have an awkward encounter with O’Neill, whom it was my intention to avoid until my riding lesson, than to meet the red-haired boy.

  I was about halfway across the yard, the cobbles slippery from the early mist and uncomfortable beneath my indoor shoes, when the door to the O’Neill kitchen opened. I considered retreat, and, as I hesitated, the boy with red hair came out of the O’Neill’s house. He paused for a moment at the entrance to the passageway, as though drawing a deep breath, then he slipped an envelope into the inside pocket of his jacket and put his cap on.

  Although this was the moment for which I had been waiting, I felt deeply embarrassed and foolish. I could not look at the boy as I muttered, “Hello.”

  When I raised my eyes I saw that he was still standing, hands in pocket, balancing on the edge of the step.

  “Good morning, miss,” he said, taking his cap off with a flourish and a slightly mocking but, I thought, good-natured smile. Then, putting his hands back in his pockets, he set off across the kitchen yard, whistling as he went. I watched him go. He seemed to me in that moment infinitely valuable, heroic. Desirable.

  It was my first experience of romantic love. It would be easy to disown that description of my feelings with a laugh and an affectionate backward glance at a child too young to know what love is except by what she had overheard in adult conversation. But then I could ask myself at what age such a love would not seem laughable; unsuitable affection before the age of eighteen in those days was dismissed as “puppy love.” And soon after that, in our world, girls married suitably, and romantic love was either repressed, discreetly handled within the conventions of Edwardian society, or became a scandal. One might also say that I didn’t know the boy—his name was Michael, but I didn’t know that yet, and looking back I find that I still think of him as the redhaired boy—well enough to love him. I loved him on the basis of inadequate available knowledge, a similar basis to that of most people of our class in those still chaperoned days. Physical appearance and a moment of charm: Many hearts have broken for no more than that.

  My love was, of course, a product of my fear and loneliness. And because—although no one, except perhaps O’Neill, treated me badly—I was starved of affection. I was, I suppose, casting around for someone to love. And the red-haired boy had stood still for a moment.

  BY THE END of the week, Uncle Sainthill’s portrait was finished. I have it now, hanging in the front room of my little villa overlooking Dublin Bay, where each day the tide uncovers a flat, wet, muddy expanse and I am reminded of Woodstown strand. The painting has stood the test of time; Mr. McLeod had been better than any of us thought. In my house it looks larger than it did on the wall of the drawing room at Ballydavid—the sole object from childhood that in life is not smaller than in memory.

  The choices the uncouth Scottish painter made at the time had seemed daring. It was as though he had abandoned the attempt to re-create the photograph before him in oil and had, instead, tried to give an impression of his subject—a man whom he had never seen. It was, I now know, less of a gamble than it had seemed at the time. He had known what he was doing.

  Although the background of the portrait shows an interior—the window and shutters I had watched
Mr. McLeod sketch—Uncle Sainthill is wearing his military greatcoat over his uniform. The coat hangs open, the collar turned up. My uncle stands leaning against the shutter, looking out the window; in one hand he holds a silver cigarette case, in the other a cigarette he has just taken from it. McLeod had elected to paint the portrait in the darker light of early morning—he had at one moment had me stand on a footstool against the shutter while he looked at me with an expression of critical attention. The expanse of khaki and my uncle’s air of prescient restlessness make the portrait unsettling.

  To everyone’s surprise, Grandmother liked the painting. When it was finished, she looked at it for a long time, then nodded, said “Yes,” and left the room abruptly.

  By now spiritualism—the other symptom of Grandmothers and Aunt Katies inability to accept that Uncle Sainthill was not only dead but gone—had become part of life at Ballydavid. The drawing room, dominated by the portrait, would be darkened on sunny afternoons, the heavy velvet curtains drawn to provide an atmosphere that would coax the spirits to visit or, at least, to assist a suspension of disbelief. Grandmother and Aunt Katie experimented with table turning and automatic writing. “ Ectoplasm,” “aura,” “the other side” became part of the vocabulary at Ballydavid. The old ladies once even traveled to Dublin to consult a medium. Mother, I gathered later, was kept abreast of the results of these activities by post; she in turn wrote about the stances she attended in London and about the celebrated mediums she had seen or consulted there.

  This activity was, in theory, kept from the maids whom, they supposed, would regard it as devil’s work. It scared the wits out of me when I first discovered its existence; and even more so when I improved my reading with literature from the Society for Psychical Research, which arrived regularly by post at Ballydavid. I even dipped into one or two books by the society’s founder, Sir Oliver Lodge, and found the descriptions of communications from the other side alternatively frightening and boring. The women of my family—along with women and some men all over the British Isles—were searching for evidence or, at least, hope that there might be a life beyond this one. And that that life would offer a reunion with a lost son or husband—more often a son, the unnatural reversal of the generational order inspiring these desperate measures. And, in the meantime, they looked for a message or some other form of reassurance.