The Fox's Walk

by Annabel Davis-Goff

  “Chocolate biscuits. Good,” he said approvingly, and sat down on the chair closest to them. I sat beside him; Clodagh sat on the other side of the table, as far away from him as possible; Jonathan, without quite pulling his chair out from the table, slid into the other place beside Jarvis.

  Having only a cultural connection with the Church of Ireland, no one in our family said grace before a meal, but even so the speed with which the first chocolate biscuit traveled—before he was quite settled on his chair and without pausing for it to touch his plate—to Jarvis’s mouth was unusual. Clodagh took one of the small sandwiches with exaggerated delicacy and put it on her plate. Bridie circled the table, carrying a jug of milk and, as a special birthday exception, one of lemonade. When she had poured my lemonade, she moved on to Jarvis.

  “Will you have milk or lemonade?”

  “I’ll have a cup of tea.” Jarvis pronounced the word differently from the way my family did. He said “tay” and it made me think that he was expecting something darker and stronger than the China tea that had been set out for Aunt Katie and Mrs. Coughlan in the drawing room.

  Bridie glanced at Aunt Katie.

  “I’ll bring a cup of tea from the tray,” Aunt Katie said, and indicated with a wave of her hand that Bridie should continue serving those of us with more conventional tastes.

  Mrs. Coughlan followed Aunt Katie back to the drawing room and the tea tray. Aunt Katie would have poured tea for her guest before she returned with a cup for Jarvis. Bridie may have also have taken another cup and saucer to the drawing room; if she did so, it would account for her longer absence from the dining room after she left to fetch more lemonade.

  When Aunt Katie returned she found one child missing. The chair to the left of Jarvis was empty, the place in front of it leaving a convenient space for him to set the remaining half plate of chocolate biscuits. Clodagh was still nibbling her sandwich. She had asked for milk instead of lemonade and I despised her for her premature allegiance to adult values. Without quite understanding her point—and she may have merely been parroting what she had heard from her mother—I didn’t like the suggestion that Jarvis’s lack of discipline could be laid at the feet of his family’s religion. Clodagh’s hair was scraped back from her face; she looked like a middle-aged Protestant mouse.

  Aunt Katie looked to me for an explanation of what had happened. Without emulating Clodagh, I was not brave enough to throw in my lot with the breathtaking Jarvis and I hid behind an expression of astonished lack of comprehension.

  “Where is—ah—Jonathan?”

  Clodagh permitted herself a downward glance, Aunt Katie not necessarily exempt from her extreme disapproval.

  “Whatever is he doing there?”

  Jarvis grinned; Clodagh and I remained silent. Even if I had wished to do so, I would have found it hard to describe what had happened. Jonathan, instead of playing it safe like Clodagh and eating the requisite number of sandwiches or pieces of bread and butter—in our family, two—before helping himself to something more interesting, had elected to follow Jarvis’s lead and reached out for a chocolate biscuit. Although Jarvis had done nothing more than bare his teeth, Jonathan—not, I thought, without reason—had felt himself lucky to escape with his hand intact. Jonathan had frozen until Jarvis had growled some words I couldn’t hear, although the sound was that of an aggressive warning, and Jonathan had slid slowly down in his chair until his head was just above the level of the table. Having seen Clodagh and me staring at him, his face had turned red and, still slowly, he had continued his descent until he had disappeared.

  “Jonathan,” Aunt Katie said firmly but not unkindly; this was, after all, a festive occasion. “Please come back to the table.”

  Clodagh and I looked at Aunt Katie; Jarvis helped himself to another biscuit from the now almost empty plate.

  It was unusual for a day to go by at Ballydavid without my learning something about rules, manners, conventions, and behavior. I didn’t think them as important as the war, death, or my fathers financial woes, but they were more immediate to my life. I also had begun to understand that small gestures, such as allowing a sandwich to rest for a moment on ones plate before picking it up again to eat it were more than meaningless conventions; they were the minute bricks that built a solid wall around our way of life. That protected us from the barbarians and the Protestant merchant classes.

  These invisible rules would be hard to explain, and harder still to justify, to anyone who did not from early unquestioning childhood subscribe to them. That was, to some extent, the point. It would be easy and inaccurate to equate the resting-the-sandwich-on-the-plate convention or the emphasis on good posture with the idea of female delicacy or an empty life; late-Victorian women were tough. Grandmother had traveled to India, a journey that in those days took several weeks, and I don’t for a moment imagine she loosened her stays when she reached the tropics. She would have taken in her stride seasickness, the squalor, and the heat of the subcontinent with her hair in place and a starched blouse. She had lost her eldest child, and though she mourned her little girl I am sure she wore her mourning without any display of emotion; as she now, an old lady, mourned the death of her youngest son. The small conventions weren’t a substitute for life; they held those lives in place in the same way that the whalebone in the women’s corsets defined their figures.

  I had not, needless to say, thought this out by my ninth birthday, and it is only now that I see how illogical it was for any of us—me, Aunt Katie, or Clodagh (Jonathan having other things on his mind)—to expect Jarvis to subscribe to, or even to have been taught, these conventions. They weren’t protecting his way of life—to the contrary. It was thrilling nonetheless to see the total disregard with which he trampled underfoot social maxims unquestioned by us.

  I saw Aunt Katies eyes flicker to the plate on which there now remained two biscuits before she addressed her more immediate problem. Jonathan had not answered when she called him, and she had only Clodagh’s gesture on which to base her belief that he was hiding beneath the long linen table cloth. She tried again.

  “Jonathan,” she said, this time with a note of exasperation. “Jonathan, please come back to the table immediately.”

  I was delighted; my party was turning out far better than I could ever have hoped. I cared nothing for Clodagh’s disapproval and was very interested by my aunt’s lack of a secondary plan to which she could fall back if she were not immediately obeyed. That Jarvis did not see me as, if not an ally, an admirer and supporter of his anarchy only impressed me further. Not only did he not care that he had driven a fellow guest under the table; he seemed not to find it interesting.

  After a moment, my aunt descended to her hands and knees and out of my sight. Inspired by my hero’s nonchalance, I pulled up a large handful of table cloth and, without getting off my chair, leaned down to peer under the table. Aunt Katie’s head and shoulders were draped in starched folds of white linen. Jonathan was crawling toward her. She withdrew and stood up; I watched for a moment longer. As Jonathan came into range, Jarvis kicked him. Not particularly brutally, but hard enough for him to squeal and scurry closer to Clodagh’s feet. It was not impossible for him to emerge at a point outside the range of Jarvis’s foot, but this attack by his oppressor, Aunt Katie’s wrath, and his loss of face all combined to keep him in what I now suspected was a familiar retreat.

  “You’d get him out fast enough with a yard brush,” Clodagh said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  My great-aunt ignored this callous but practical suggestion. I had, for a moment, an image of O’Neill summoned with the stiff-bristled brush he used around the stables and thought that he could probably deal with not only Jonathan but with Jarvis as well.

  Aunt Katie did not intend to spend the rest of the tea party on her no longer supple knees, and there was Mrs. Coughlan, another unpredictable guest, abandoned in the drawing room. So Jonathan stayed put until we left the table; I could hear Jarvis’s heels from time to time
kicking the crossbar of the chair, but I thought this was merely a bad habit unchecked by his mother, who undoubtedly had more immediate problems on her mind.

  “Where do you go to school?” Jarvis asked me.

  I was flattered that it was my, rather than Clodagh’s, education about which he was curious.

  “I’m going to be sharing lessons with Clodagh,” I said, realizing that my romantic anticipation of a best friend in my schoolmate was less than realistic. “I used to go to school in London.”

  “Kindergarten,” Clodagh said, helpfully and inaccurately; but since my school catered only to younger children, it was close enough to the truth to sting.

  Jarvis ignored her. He seemed somewhat interested in both my pieces of information, and I risked a question of my own.

  “Where do you go?”

  “Christian Brothers.”

  The Christian Brothers provided a good, if often brutal, education; I didn’t know it then, but their schools were considered the breeding grounds of nationalism. Jarvis seemed philosophic about the undoubted hardships of his schooling. I wondered if the Brothers were confounded by his cheerful resilience.

  I don’t remember a birthday cake, although there must have been one, and I must have blown out nine candles, with Jarvis and Clodagh as witnesses and Jonathan silently cowering at my feet. But I do remember Jarvis, his tea drunk and the biscuits finished, getting to his feet. After a moment I, too, slid down from my chair, not something I usually did without a murmured "Puis-je m'en aller?” to Grandmother or Aunt Katie.

  “Right,” Jarvis said, in a businesslike voice. “Where are those presents?”

  ***

  THE EVENING OF the day after my birthday Grandmother and I went for a walk. To be taken for a long walk by a forbidding old lady might not seem to a modern child much of a treat, but to me it was an indication of my place in the household. Grandmother would not herself have taken a child for a walk in order to make sure that child was getting enough exercise.

  As I went upstairs to change my shoes, I considered my apparent new status. The cause seemed simple: my age and my appearance. I was uncomfortably aware that this benefit—if benefit indeed it were—had not accrued through any action or virtue of my own. I had been living at Ballydavid for some months and enough time had passed for my birthday to occur. How I looked was again an aspect of myself over which I had little control. Grandmother had, the day before, held my face to the light in search of a resemblance to her dead son. Over the years I used to study my face—age would now make it a fruitless exercise—comparing my features with those of Uncle Sainthill in old photographs. Beyond a mild family resemblance I cannot find what it was that she saw there, the quality that persuaded her that I could, if brought up under her auspices, in some ways take his place.

  Since I had come to live at Ballydavid, I had gathered evidence with far greater urgency than I had ever found necessary in London, and now two overheard words seemed to me to provide significant clues—both to my present domicile and to my invitation to accompany Grandmother on her evening constitutional. The words were “pretty” and “heiress”; the former overheard at Ballydavid, the latter—with an ironic overtone—at Glenbeg.

  That my future—if I were to have one at Ballydavid—depended so little on my own effort or moral worth was a circumstance not individual to me. There was no virtue to which Grandmother ascribed greater value than she did to family or, in a woman, to classical features. On the latter qualities she had definite opinions: A short upper lip and straight features were her criteria. She had no time for the jolie laide or for standards of beauty valued by other cultures. Nor was she among those who valued simple faith over Norman blood. Family backgrounds were also judged by her rigid standards; a tide was an asset, more so if it were an old one. She considered a good family to be one who had lived in the same house for four or more generations. The house did not need to be architecturally distinguished, but a certain amount of land was a requirement. What she admired, I suppose, was the landed gentry. Money was not a factor she took into consideration. Unless it had been too recently acquired.

  Unimaginable—and, in reality, unlikely—benefits seemed implicit if Grandmother were to develop the habit of evening strolls during which she might solicit my advice on small decisions to be made at Ballydavid. I came downstairs with a few words already prepared on O’Neill’s disregard for my safety during my riding lessons, and on Patience’s shortcomings as a suitably obedient mount.

  We did not, to my surprise, set off down the avenue but instead turned to the left when we came out the front door. Jock raised himself indifferently from where he lay on the porch and followed us. The graveled area in front of the house extended about twenty yards to a narrow strip of lawn and the edge of the Ballydavid woods. To our left, a flat, beaten-earth track led to the stables and the farmyard beyond, and, for a little time after we entered the woods, I could hear cows lowing and the clucking and crowing of barnyard fowl.

  The path was wide enough for me to walk beside Grandmother. Although the sun was setting, the sky would be light for some time, and the woods were gloomy but not dark. I did not speak, partly because I knew Grandmother felt children should not speak until spoken to and partly because I thought there might be something special she wanted to talk about.

  For a long time she did not say anything, but paused occasionally to drag at ropes of ivy that were strangling trees close to the path. We came out of the woods and found ourselves at the edge of a steeply sloping field. There was a view over the top of the trees below us of the estuary of the Suir. A narrow path on the outside of the fence had been beaten down by the feet of workmen and anyone else approaching Ballydavid over the fields. I had not known of its existence and had thought that the path Jock and I had taken when I visited the Coughlans was the only shortcut used by the household staff and men who worked on the farm.

  The path was narrow and Grandmother walked quickly; my bare legs were scratched—leaving white marks on my dry skin—by the stubble of the weeds and grasses that I trotted through to keep up with her.

  “A fine old beech,” Grandmother said, indicating a tree a little larger than the one beside the tennis court and not to my eye remarkable. “See how light the leaves are. Soon you will find beechnuts under it.”

  I regarded the tree without expression and glanced up at her to see if a response was required. I decided that it probably wasn’t and instead nodded and tried to look as though I understood why she was telling me this.

  “This oak is the oldest tree at Ballydavid,” she said, pointing to another tree, when we had walked down the length of the field. “It is more than two hundred years old. They can live for longer than that. After the first frost there will be acorns.”

  This time my interest was not entirely simulated. Acorns suggested squirrels—small, reddish brown, and seen rarely enough to be remarked upon. An English king had hidden from his pursuing enemies in an oak tree. I remembered the story which had been read at the little school that I attended—had attended—in London, although not well enough to remember which king. I had been relieved that he had not been caught. I assumed—with an almost complete ignorance of geography, botany, or probability—that the tree from which Absalom had been fatally suspended by his hair was also an oak.

  At the bottom of the hill, a loosely constructed arrangement of stones allowed a small stream, at this time of the year no more than a wide strip of darker colored grasses growing out of wet black soil, to run under the path, which was about to end in the wider one that we were now approaching. As we crossed this crude bridge, I became aware of an unpleasant smell. The stream was most likely fed in part by the stable yard drains.

  Grandmother spat. I was astonished. And deeply shocked. Spitting, until that moment, was an activity confined to poor; disgusting old men—not only a revolting habit but one associated with disease. Tuberculosis was not unusual in those days; it was incurable and usually fatal.

  “A
lways spit when you pass a bad smell,” Grandmother said. “Germs.”

  For some moments I imagined the dramatic effect to which I could put this newly authorized activity when I returned to London.

  The path we were now taking was wider than the one we had left and seemed older, although that may merely have been because it was better defined, the shade of the trees—we had reentered the woods—inhibiting the growth of encroaching vegetation. We passed an overgrown clump of pampas grass, and then another; we were on the Fox’s Walk.

  “I used to come to Ballydavid for parties when I was a child,” Grandmother said, breaking a silence of several minutes.

  I looked up at her with unfeigned interest and equally genuine apprehension, certain that there had been no teasing of cats or fugitives under the table at the parties she had attended. I had thought that Aunt Katie, for everyone’s sake, would have kept some details of the party from Grandmother. The offcial position at breakfast that morning had seemed to be that the party had been a great success and all three guests appropriately cognizant of the honor bestowed by an invitation to Ballydavid. I thought of Jarvis and tried not to smile. But when I looked up, Grandmother was smiling, too.

  “It was where I first met your grandfather,” she said. “My mother—your great-grandmother—brought me. Grandfather was, of course, too grown up for a children’s party; but it was the‹ that we first met.”

  For one wild moment I thought she might be inviting a confidence, or telling me that my birthday party had been the first step toward finding me a suitable husband. I wondered whether Grandmother could really be the one in whom I would confide my affectionate admiration for Jarvis de Courcy.

  “These woods must never be cut,” she continued in what seemed to me a non sequitur but probably wasn’t. “If necessary, grazing can be let, but we don’t sell land.”

  I nodded solemnly.

  “When my ship comes home,” Grandmother said, “I would like———”