During this silence, Bridie came in and announced lunch. Enough time had passed since the steaming potatoes were spooned from the huge saucepan for me to know that she had delayed lunch a few minutes so that I would be in time. I looked at her with silent gratitude.
“Not the worst thing that could happen,” Uncle William said when we were seated in the dining room. I knew him to be literal-minded and not particularly sensitive, but I was surprised to hear such a callous remark.
“It means that he’s safe—at least he won’t be killed in battle now. And he’ll come home. On some level his mother must be, even now, relieved. And perhaps it won’t be too severe a wound—and, of course, there’ll be a pension.”
I thought he was right. Mrs. O’Neill’s expressionless face could well have concealed mixed emotions, emotions she might not want to articulate, even to her husband: horror that her son had been wounded and was in pain, and full of hope that she would soon have him safe at home.
I was hungry and lunch—the food at least—held no pitfalls. Steak and kidney pie (Aunt Katie must have spent the morning in the kitchen), Brussels sprouts, and floury boiled potatoes, and then canary pudding with a sauce made from red currants bottled during the summer. When I finished eating, I was pleasantly sleepy and no longer cold; I stifled a yawn.
“You may be excused, Alice, dear,” Grandmother said. “Why don’t you go and sit by the drawing-room fire?”
There was a certain irony that this was the one afternoon I would have welcomed the usual instruction, following my dismissal from the luncheon table, to go straight upstairs for my afternoon rest. I thought it might mean another small change in my status, but no sooner had I curled up on the sofa beside the fire than Aunt Katie followed me into the room. I considered for a moment the possibility that she too had been “excused” by the two stronger personalities still lingering over the Stilton, and then, as she spoke, I realized that in a sense she had not been excluded from dining table conversation, but instead delegated to speak to me.
“Alice,” she said, sitting herself down beside me, “before you go upstairs for your rest I wanted to tell you that you have a new little sister.”
I looked at her blankly, unable to imagine what she could be talking about; the information proffered directly to me seemed more obscure than much of what adults, imagining their conversation incomprehensible to my immature ears, talked about in front of me.
“Your mother,” she added gently in explanation, “has a new baby—a little girl.”
I was still too young and too shielded to know the facts of life or even the barest principles of procreation and assumed—an assumption Aunt Katie probably would have confirmed had I asked—that my mother had had the baby delivered from one of the better department stores. This misunderstanding increased my sense that my mother had permanently replaced me. Now I would never go home. I had no home other than the one provided by my grandmother and great-aunt, the former at least as mysterious and frightening as she had been at the moment I was abandoned to her terrifying care. I started to weep quietly.
“It’s a baby, a sweet little baby. She’s your younger sister.”
Since this was unanswerable I blew my nose, tried to stop crying, and went upstairs to rest.
Unde William was still there when I came downstairs swollen eyed after two hours of deep sleep. Again I interrupted an adult conversation. This time the adults chose not to allow my presence to censor their conversation. Aunt Katie patted the sofa beside her and I sat down close to her. She stroked my hand and smiled.
“The priests speak against it, but it doesn’t make any difference.” Uncle William seemed as confused as he was outraged.
“O’Neill would———” Aunt Katie said tentatively.
Uncle William shook his head silently—a small gesture—and suddenly I remembered the exchange of glances outside the public house between O’Neill and Nicholas Rowe.
At that moment Bridie came in with tea and the subject was dropped. Uncle William turned to me.
“Next month we’re having a lawn meet at Ballinamona. Maybe you’d like to come. There’s a stall for Patience, so you could ride her over the night before.”
My usurping sister, fox’s blood, rumors of rebellion, falling off Patience and disgracing myself and O’Neill—all fears and unpleasant thoughts disappeared as I began to imagine my future as a brilliant horsewoman with an athletic and obedient Patience beneath me and about the admiration evoked by my courage and smart appearance. If there were any further references to the political unrest all over Ireland, I did not hear them. I had started to think of life at Ballydavid in the long term.
Chapter 6
I DON’T BELIEVE IN psychic phenomena. I don’t believe in supernatural explanations for the inexplicable. I don’t have faith in séances and mediums, in clairvoyance or automatic writing. I don’t now, but I did then; and I have come to believe that what is untrue now may at times have been true then. That there may have been—during and for some time after the war—inexplicable answers and supernatural responses to the questions and searching of those who did believe.
In the spring of 1916 many events, not at first apparently connected, occurred more or less at the same time. The invisible ripples following each were enough to give me greater access to the adult world than I would otherwise have had. Winter lasted into the early weeks of spring that year, the cold keeping everyone indoors and as close to a fire as possible. This enforced proximity lent itself to indiscretion, to forgetting the presence of a child playing quietly out of sight.
To take the sequence of events loosely in order, one has to start with the medium. Her presence was first a rumor; then it was confirmed. To make her acquaintance without appearing importunate or crossing class barriers became a matter of strategy. All Waterford society wanted to meet the Countess, a tragic refugee from Manchuria with a Polish tide—not only a countess but a medium with extraordinary powers. An introduction should not have been difficult; hospitality and a helping hand for a deserving refugee would have obviated the need for formality, had it not been that her hostess was Mrs. Hitchcock, a woman pointedly ignored by the female Anglo-Irish.
This story I gathered over time from two sources: my usual way of solving a puzzle. I availed myself of inaccurate and often improbable information in the kitchen and modified it with the drawing-room version, censored but more reliable.
As it happened, chance intervened, and Grandmother and Aunt Katie were not obliged, as were so many of their neighbors, first to compromise themselves and then to be humiliated when their belated overtures to Mrs. Hitchcock were ignored. A rumor intended to console and save face began to circulate: that the medium was a fake. It was said that Mrs. Hitchcock looked upon'séances and the Ouija board as entertainment and that both were accompanied by the usual level of hard drinking believed to be maintained in her house.
On the day of the Ballinamona meet, when I returned from the stables where I had gone with a lump of contraband sugar to ingratiate myself with Patience, I saw, standing on the gravel in front of the house, Uncle Huberts unsuitable woman friend, Mara.
I had a moment or two to wonder what Mara could be doing at the lawn meet as I made my way to the front door, my new boots crunching the frozen gravel. I took a good but discreet look at the pale, dramatic woman who, although still Mara, appeared to be younger than the Mara I remembered from London—I was not old enough to be precise about ages—and more beautiful in a colorless, undefined way that the earlier Mara, despite the dyed hair and lip rouge that had so fascinated me, had not been. I also had enough time to realize that the subtly different Mara must be the Countess. I hadn’t known that Mara was a countess and I was certain my mother had not known she was a medium. And my uncle? He had, doubtless, known more that we did about his colorful friend’s past and talents—but if he had not felt the necessity to be discreet about a murder in her past (had her victim been the count?), why would he not have mentioned these other two
fascinating attributes?
Confused by the changes in Mara’s appearance and not sure how properly to address her, I lowered my eyes until I came close enough to greet her. When I looked up, I saw her attention was completely focused on me.
“Mara,” I said, my voice tentative and low.
She didn’t seem to hear me.
“I am the Countess Debussy, I’ve come all the way from Manchuria—what is your name?”
I felt myself start to blush, but, even while I was trying to decide whether Mara—the Countess—was snubbing me for addressing her by her Christian name or was telling me that I was mistaken in her identity, it crossed my mind that Grandmother, at least, would have considered it vulgar for the Countess to refer to herself by her tide. Doubtless things were done differently in Manchuria.
“I’m Alice. Don’t you remember———?”
“Alice. Alice in Wonderland.” My name appeared not to mean anything to her, but her expression was preoccupied and, it seemed to me, suggested recognition, not necessarily welcome. I thought it might account for the banality of her reply. That I still had her entire attention suggested it would be all right for me to take the conversation a step further.
“Are you———?” I am still not sure what my question would have been had I not been interrupted. I think I might have been going to ask her if she were Mara’s sister.
“Yes,” she said, as Aunt Katie arrived at my side. “Yes, I am. And, I think, so are you. Even though you are a little girl, I can see you have the gift.”
“Alice,” Aunt Katie said, and then, turning toward the Countess, extended her hand. “I’m Katie Martyn.”
The Countess neither took her hand nor offered her own name to complete the introduction. Instead, she looked at my great-aunt for a moment and nodded her head.
“Yes,” she said, “the cigarette case.”
As we stared at her, she smiled with an otherworldly sweetness, turned, and drifted away from us toward the hall door. We watched her go.
The way the Countess had chosen to dress was original, almost eccentric. I was conscious that she had in some way managed to look exotic, elegant, and ladylike. No mean feat when one considers that the conventions of how one dressed not only to hunt but even to attend a lawn meet were strict, class defining, and not flexible.
Women, to hunt, wore black riding costumes, top hats or bowlers, fat white stocks, and riding boots largely obscured by their long black skirts. The exception to this rule was Mrs. Hitchcock, who immodestly rode astride, and dressed accordingly. The women on foot seemed dowdy in comparison: tweed coats and skirts, attractive only on a young woman with an eighteen-inch waist, sensible boots, and an equally sensible hat.
The Countess, a second but contrasting exception to the rule of dress, was wearing a skirt of soft beige; it was of a thinner, more fluid material than were those of the other women, and her boots were not sensible. She did not wear a jacket but instead was draped in a variety of shawls. There was nothing flashy about her appearance; it was just that she wasn’t dressed for outdoors. It seemed that, stepping through the French windows from the drawing room for a moment, she had thrown something warm over her shoulders. The effect seemed foreign although not contrived; the soft drapery of subdued colors was flattering to her tall, straight figure and small waist. Her face was pale and her hair a light brown. She seemed oblivious to the fact that she was the center of attention.
I glanced up at Aunt Katie, not knowing whether I had broken some rule by being found in conversation with a stranger. But Aunt Katie was still gazing after the Countess.
Shortly afterward, O’Neill brought Patience up from the stables, and I stopped thinking about Aunt Katie or the Countess as I concentrated on coordinating my scramble onto Patience's back with O’Neill’s leg up and my pony’s determination to practice a complicated dance step. Although there was an instant when it seemed as though I had turned into a sack of potatoes, O’Neill saved the day with a second shove, and I landed, if not lighdy, at least in the saddle. Soon we were moving off.
It is difficult to make interesting an account of one’s sporting experiences, and rather than describe my first day’s hunting field by field, bank by bank, ditch by ditch—all of which I remember with the clarity that the old reserve for certain magical or terrifying events in their childhoods—I will try to describe what it felt like. And my first day’s hunting was both magical and, at first, terrifying. During the next few hours—I was only out for half a day—I shed two fears. Both were lost during the first run. The fox broke covert soon after the hounds had gone into the bracken to flush him out. I had ridden up an overgrown boreen, frightened and excited. But, hearing the baying of the hounds and the huntsman’s horn, I felt a new kind of exhilaration. I had tucked myself and Patience a little away from the other horses and riders, determined neither to be in anyone’s way nor to be hurt by a sudden move from one of the huge, overexcited horses. The hounds, following the scent and encouraged by the hunting horn and the whips of the hunt servants, set off—tails up and noses down—across the frosty field into a stony lane with heavy, bare hawthorn growing on its banks. Soon we turned into another field and the pace picked up. It was then I understood that Patience was a pony whose more usual work was to pull a trap and that I was in no danger of being in at the kill or being blooded. By the time I had arrived at the first five-barred gate, I found it open; Patience and I were not the only ones incapable of jumping such a barrier, or the only ones happy to avoid ridiculous risks. I began to realize I would not be called upon to make death-defying and foolhardy attempts to emulate the experienced riders on large athletic horses. As I urged Patience to gallop as fast as she could, I felt my fear slip away. By now I was trailing behind, but I was not alone. Clodagh, who I knew hunted—one of the many sources of unexpressed envy on my part—but whom I had not seen at the meet, was also among the five or six of us who were not keeping up with the better-mounted, hard-riding group. We could see them, Mrs. Hitchcock among them, disappearing over the hill. I followed some older women and a courteous middle-aged man on a sturdy cob who dismounted to open gates or to lower the top pole barring the entrance to a field. I was so excited by this time that when I miscalculated a narrow grass-topped bank on which Patience touched down before clearing the ditch on the other side and I tumbled off, I felt neither fear nor pain. Before I knew it, I had got myself back on board and was galloping after my reassuring companions. I had fallen and not been hurt, and I had remounted; I had felt excitement, not fear. I knew that I would make mistakes and would take more serious falls, but I would not again fear the hunting field, and, if I were to disgrace Ballydavid, it would not be there.
O’Neill was following the hunt in Mrs. Hitchcock’s motorcar with her groom. The groom carried refreshments—sandwiches and a flask of Irish whiskey—and probably her lipstick and face powder; O’Neill was keeping an eye on me and ready to take me home at the end of the run closest to one o’clock. To follow a hunt by car successfully requires not only a good driver (less in terms of attaining great speeds or taking sharp corners than judgment as to where one can or cannot take a car) but a knowledge of the geography of the narrow roads, small lanes, and mud tracks of the countryside, the coverts, the fox’s habits, and the place to where he was most likely to make his run once he had broken covert. It was no surprise to me that O’Neill, who knew the countryside like the back of his hand, should be comfortably ensconced in the front seat of Mrs. Hitchcock’s motorcar, but I was interested to see, when we assembled at the next covert to be drawn, that one of the grooms following with remounts was also leading Benedict.
It was time to go home. I was tired, muddy, and very happy. Clodagh wasn’t going home after half a day, so I muttered something about Patience not yet being fit. We were now some miles from Ballinamona and O’Neill and I set off across the fields and down the lanes until we came to the road. I knew enough not to burble or boast, and O’Neill was a man of few words, none of them employe
d in compliments. But his slow, judicious nod confirmed that I had done well enough in his eyes. And, when we rode into the stable yard at Ballinamona Park, he said he would brush down Patience and feed her himself and that it would be better to leave her at Ballinamona overnight—thus excusing me the otherwise mandatory long hack home.
I brushed as much mud as I could off my boots on the doormat before I went into the house. Aunt Katie had stayed at Ballinamona—indeed she had no way of going home since O’Neill was out following the hunt—and had presided over lunch from her former place at the head of the dining-room table. Now she sat beside the fire in the library with the Countess. They looked up as I came into the room, though I did not feel that I was interrupting an intimate conversation. The Countess had her feet tucked up under her and was reclining in the corner of the sofa nearest the fire. Her back was to the window and I couldn’t see her face clearly. It occurred to me I still didn’t know how to address her.
“There you are,” Aunt Katie said. “You must be exhausted. Come closer to the fire and we’ll get you something to eat before O’Neill takes us home. Now tell me all about it.”
Although no less self-centered than the next child, I was far more curious about what had taken place between Aunt Katie and the Countess at Ballinamona while I had been gone. I gave them a short account of the hunt, ending with a grateful reference to my new boots; I knew them to be a generous extravagance on the part of Grandmother since I would outgrow them by the following year.
A little later, after I wolfed a boiled egg, fingers of toast, and a pot of tea, I climbed into the Sunbeam with Aunt Katie. Apart from her smile and an expression of interest while I’d briefly described the hunt, I had had no further conversation with the Countess. I would have liked to ask Aunt Katie about her but thought I would wait. I was fairly sure my great-aunt would have something to say on the subject.
The Fox's Walk Page 15
