The Fox's Walk

by Annabel Davis-Goff

  Grandmother didn’t say anything and her expression remained one of polite interest, but I could see the idea that her only surviving son, from whom she received one letter a month, was inundating this ordinary young woman with “stacks” of what we were supposed to infer were love letters was not one that sat well with her.

  I wonder now to what extent Mrs. Bryce and Rosamund Gwynne had planned the course of conversation. I have to assume that Miss Gwynne had confided something close to the true state of affairs to her friend and that Mrs. Bryce had described to her—while glossing over Grandmother’s attitude of distant condescension toward herself and her family—the generally haughty and cold atmosphere of Ballydavid and the imperious character of the woman Miss Gwynne planned to have as a mother-in-law. I was very aware that no member of my family had so far mentioned the words “engagement” or “marriage” and that Uncle William was the first to volunteer a reference to Uncle Hubert. I saw Mrs. Bryce gather herself, much in the uncomfortable way that Patience did approaching a jump, for this opportunity to take the conversation to the next stage. It occurred to me that Grandmother would not have given either of her guests the cue they needed to make some reference to the unofficial engagement that, if unchallenged, would establish Rosamund Gwynne’s position in our family. Grandmother would score an enormous victory if she could get through the visit without ever acknowledging that my mother had written to her about the engagement. What she wished was to be able to say goodbye to Rosamund Gwynne on the doorstep, with the polite sentiment that she hoped they would meet again sometime. If she could succeed in that, she was capable of allowing Miss Gwynne to stay at Glenbeg for a month without any further contact. Uncle William’s approach was different. He believed in getting to the bottom of things, and since, once started, he was prepared to worry his quarry with the single-mindedness and lack of inhibition of a terrier, he often did, even if the process left bystanders bemused and embarrassed. Mrs. Bryce, of course, didn’t know this and consequently felt compelled to do something to advance her friend’s cause.

  “Rosamund has never been to the East,” she said.

  “When are you planning your visit, Miss Gwynne?” Uncle William asked.

  “Oh, please, do call me Rosamund,” Rosamund Gwynne said, as she had an hour before in the drawing room. “I don’t expect I’ll go until Hubert and I are married. But it’s such a long time until his next leave that maybe I won’t be able to wait———”

  Aunt Katie managed a polite and sympathetic smile; Grandmother stiffened as though Rosamund Gwynne’s hint that she might not be able to wait was faintly indecent; Uncle William was, or seemed, confused—but again no one picked up the cue.

  “But you will be married in London, won’t you?” Mrs. Bryce asked, a note of desperation in her voice. “I’m counting on it. St. Georges, Hanover Square and clouds of orange blossom.”

  The silence that followed this was broken only by Aunt Katie’s indrawn breath as she glanced involuntarily at Sonia.

  “Orange blossom,” she said eventually, then tried to collect herself. “June, then—that’s the season, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sure it’s grown in greenhouses now for London florists,” Uncle William said absentmindedly.

  Although each one of us who had been present on Easter Sunday remembered Sonia’s words, words that had come seemingly from nowhere, only I had heard Rosamund Gwynne since referred to—by Miss Kingsley at the Bryce’s dining-room table—as Mademoiselle.

  “Alice will be a dear little bridesmaid.” Mrs. Bryce seemed to have lost her head completely.

  “I don’t think Alice’s uncle much likes the scent of orange blossom.” It was the first time Sonia had spoken since we sat down to lunch. She said it quietly but clearly, the words hard and graceless.

  For a moment no one said anything, but it felt as if everyone in the dining room had been sucked away from the table to either end of the room to form two opposing teams: Rosamund Gwynne, Mrs. Bryce, and Clodagh at one end; my family, with Sonia as a visiting center forward, on the other; Miss Kingsley alone unallied, but no one in much doubt as for whom she would cheer (for her sake, I hoped, silently).

  “How do you know?” Clodagh asked in the same unpleasant and superior tone that had made me dislike her when we had first met at my birthday party.

  “How would you know?” Rosamund Gwynne asked simultaneously, and in much the same tone. I hated her.

  Sonia smiled faintly and looked at her plate. The Ballydavid team knew that Sonia’s pronouncements were never expanded upon or clarified. It now occurred to me that Sonia might be speaking metaphorically, and, although I enjoyed a challenge to the claims of Miss Gwynne, I feared for Sonia in the same way that I feared for Miss Kingsley when I saw her overplay her hand.

  “Really!” Mrs. Bryce said, her disapproval apparently aimed at Grandmother who she seemed to imply was not able to ensure the behavior of her dependents.

  It was Grandmother’s turn for a faint smile.

  “I’d forgotten,” she said. “How odd. Of course. Hugh doesn’t like orange blossom; it gives him hay fever—it makes him sneeze and his eyes water.”

  I wondered, and I wondered if everyone else wondered if what Grandmother said was true. Had she invented Uncle Hubert’s allergy to the flower on the spot? She was unlikely to be challenged: Uncle Hubert was on the other side of the world, and, even if Miss Gwynne wrote to enquire—and unless the engagement was somewhat more definite than it appeared to be, such a question might be hard to word—a denial of his distaste for Citrus sinensis could be some months away.

  In fits and starts, short silences and shorter banalities, we finished lunch. I ate the charlotte russe without quite tasting it. Soon we were crossing the hall to the drawing room where I imagined our guests would linger for a token moment or two before making their excuses, and then their pony and trap would be brought round to the front door. But it didn’t happen like that. The post had arrived while we were eating lunch, and a letter with my mother’s handwriting lay on top of two or three others. I saw Grandmother’s eye light upon it.

  “Katie,” she said to her sister. “Why don’t you show Mrs. Bryce and Miss Gwynne where they can wash their hands?”

  Aunt Katie and Mrs. Bryce turned obediently toward the stairs. The only downstairs water closet in a house inhabited solely by women, the owner not in her first youth, was designated the gentlemen’s cloakroom and, thus, women who needed to relieve themselves had to climb the stairs and avail themselves of one of the two drafty bathrooms on the upper floor.

  “I don’t———” Rosamund Gwynne started to say, before Grandmother interrupted her.

  “My room is at the top of the stairs on the right. You’ll find—” she said, making a vague gesture that suggested that her guest might wish to readjust her hairpins in front of the winged looking glass on her dressing table.

  After a moment, Miss Gwynne followed the others up the stairs. Grandmother picked up Mothers letter and took it into the drawing room. When Mrs. Bryce and Rosamund Gwynne came downstairs, Grandmother was waiting for them in the hall.

  “Would you like to see the garden?” she asked, with a quick glance at Miss Gwynne’s feet to make sure she hadn’t come to lunch in satin slippers. “It’s a little early for there to be much to see, but a stroll after lunch might be nice.”

  “I think I’ll just go and have a word with O’Neill about the wind charger,” Uncle William said. The excuse was more genuine than it seemed; Uncle Williams answer to political unrest was to improve his house and land: the Rising seemed to have lifted him to a level of determination that would allow him to overrule Grandmother and to install electricity at Ballydavid.

  Uncle William disappeared to the stable yard. Sunday afternoon was a time that O’Neill might well have thought his own, but he was always pleased to see Uncle William, and each found in the other an enthusiastic collaborator for his plans, schemes, and projects, both large and small.

  Clodag
h and I also went round to the stables, pausing only long enough for Miss Kingsley, not included in the original expedition, to run upstairs before we went to visit Patience, an animal that now spent a large part of the day at Glenbeg and was thus hardly a novelty. Somewhere between the dining room and the front door Sonia seemed to have evaporated.

  “I don’t see why we have to go and see Alice’s pony,” Clodagh said crossly.

  “What would you rather do?” Miss Kingsley asked.

  “I want to go home.”

  “Your mother and Miss Gwynne are in the garden with Lady Bagnold. If you like, you and I could walk home. I don’t know how suitable your shoes are, though, for such a long walk.”

  I was well aware of the inadequacy of the entertainment I was offering, and, after I had given Patience a quartered apple and stroked her lovely, soft nose, we turned back toward the house. A cloud-laden wind was blowing from the west and I could feel a light drizzle on my face.

  “Why do you have that woman living with you?” Clodagh asked. “My mother says she’s some kind of fortune teller.”

  “Clodagh,” Miss Kingsley said warningly.

  “Your grandmother doesn’t go to church, does she?”

  I muttered something about Sonia being a guest rather than a permanent feature of our household, but Clodagh’s last question cast an entirely new light on how Sonia was seen by some of our neighbors. I was worldly enough to have gathered on my own that Sonia was rackety, down on her luck, inconvenient; now I understood that the Bryces and presumably other of our narrowminded and generally disapproving Protestant neighbors considered Sonia’s powers and our exploitation of them wrong and possibly sacrilegious. A grossly exaggerated version of her capabilities had probably circulated through the parish, and doubtless her earlier connection with the scandalous Mrs. Hitchcock had not been forgotten.

  The drizzle also brought the grown-ups back to the house, and shortly afterward Grandmother was offering Mrs. Bryce and Rosamund Gwynne tea. The invitation was not intended to be accepted. (I could see on the hall clock that it was not quite three o’clock.) Soon Bridie was dispatched to have the pony and trap brought to the front door.

  “Well, this has been delightful,” Grandmother said. “We must see each other again soon. Is there any possibility that you might come and stop with us after your visit with Mrs. Bryce?”

  Uncle William came into the hall from the door behind the stairs in time to hear this invitation. I flickered a glance at him, but his face was as politely and pleasantly expectant as I hoped mine was.

  Rosamund Gwynne was going a few days later to Tipperary and after that to stay with another friend in Queen’s County and then back again to Waterford—she seemed to have a large range of hospitable acquaintances—but she would be delighted to visit us in August.

  We stood, protected from the light rain by the veranda, as the Glenbeg party got into their trap. Good-byes and thank-yous were mingled with the polite pleasant anticipation of the longer summer visit as Mrs. Bryce took the reins. We waved until they had left the graveled sweep and the pony was trotting down the avenue. For several moments after they had left earshot and after even an unusually long-sighted lip reader could have interpreted our conversation, no one said a word.

  “I take it there was something germane in Mary’s letter?” Uncle William said eventually, his tone expressionless, as if demonstrating exemplary calm in the face of disaster.

  “Not entirely,” Grandmother said. “She had a letter from Hubert saying a young woman called Rosamund Gwynne might get in touch with her and that, if she did, Mary was to be nice to her.”

  “‘Might get in touch’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, one thing’s sure—that woman will have to go.”

  “Yes,” Grandmother said, “but—I don’t see quite how. Or where.”

  “Oh, leave it to me.”

  And so, casually, Sonia’s fate was sealed. Even I saw it could not have been otherwise.

  June 1916–August 1916

  Chapter 11

  DEATH BY WATER.” Maggie, reader of tea leaves and an artist in both the interpretation and pronouncement of what she saw, nodded and sighed.

  She held out the cup—mine—to show the sparse pattern of dark asymmetric leaves loosely stuck to the inside and repeated, “Death by water.” One or two leaves rested on some particles of dissolving sugar, and it seemed to me they might shift if given time. Could that small adjustment alter my fate? Changing death by water to perhaps a dark stranger from over the water? I knew better than to ask.

  The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. Years later when I read The Wasteland, the scene in the kitchen came back to me as vividly as though I could see and smell it: Maggie sitting at the head of the kitchen table, the threads in the wood scrubbed into bleached grooves; the dark brown kitchen teapot in front of her; a kettle hissing gently on the range; the room dimly lit by the window over the sink; and the smell of paraffin from the pale lamp on the dresser.

  Death by water. The Hanged Man. Casement, transferred from the Tower of London, was awaiting trial in Brixton Prison. (Countess Markievicz, the unseen presence in my continuing nightmares, had by now had her death sentence commuted to penal servitude for life—she would be free of this, her first prison term, by the end of the following year—and my dreams and my conscious fears were now both focused on Casement.) I had that morning found in a drawer in the library a pack of tarot cards. The cards fascinated me, even though I understood only vaguely what they were. It required no special knowledge to guess that the picture on each card had a symbolic significance, and, since I saw Aunt Katie’s conventional pack of playing cards used, if not to predict the future, as a conduit of omens and portents, I had a pretty good idea of how they might be employed in the right hands. That they lay neatly at the back of a drawer beside some pads for scoring bridge and half a stick of sealing wax suggested that the right hands were neither Grandmother’s nor Aunt Katie’s. I wondered if Sonia had been asked to read them, and if she had, with her practiced, vague incomprehension, avoided doing so. It had been the Hanged Man and the association with the fate of Casement that had driven me for company and comfort to the kitchen. I had for the moment forgotten that it was in the kitchen that I had first learned of the means by which Casement, when he had—as he undoubtedly would—been found guilty, would die. Until then, I had assumed he would be executed in the way that the revolutionaries in Dublin had and would face a firing squad—a grim enough prospect in itself but, in my imagination, far short of the hangman’s rope.

  And my fortune: death by drowning. I didn’t immediately understand that it was my own fate that had been foretold. The reaction around the kitchen table to the reading was dramatic rather than serious. No time for my demise had been set. The prospect of death by water when I was an old woman, I was young enough to bear with comparative equanimity. But, even more, I believed that, although Maggie had the gift of reading tea leaves and what she saw in my cup would take place, it would affect me rather than happen to me. There would be in my life death by water, but it would not be my death. And until the situation became clearer or I had a reading that gave me six children or some other guarantee of longevity, I could with a little forethought remain on dry land. I wondered if Uncle William had a plan to send me, too, back to England the following night with Sonia. It seemed unlikely, not because I hadn’t been told about it but because I knew my uncle capable of the expulsion of an unwanted guest without going to the trouble and expense of sending me as a companion across St. George’s Channel.

  It was Sonia, then, who would drown—and with her the passengers and crew of the mail boat. It was with a sense of great responsibility that, later in the afternoon, I entered the drawing room. And it was with a sense of shame that I allowed tea to end without my having broached the subject. It seemed as impossible that I should add to the awkwardness of Sonia's not entirely voluntary departure with the suggestion that Grandmother and Aunt Katie were
sending her to her death as it would be to ask about the tarot cards in the desk drawer. Uncle William, with masculine cowardice, or perhaps feeling he had done his bit, was not at Ballydavid that afternoon.

  I have in recent years thought just how dangerous those wartime crossings of the Irish Sea were, and wondered how dangerous they had, at the time, been perceived as being. Just before the end of the war the Leinster was torpedoed a few miles from where I now live with the loss of hundreds of lives, and on one night in December, 1917, two steamers—the Conningbeg and the Formby—both out of Waterford, were sunk without survivors. Contemporaries of mine, recalling childhood crossings, remember spending the entire night on deck wearing cork life jackets.

  I, perhaps alone in the Allied countries, felt relief rather than grief when, next morning, the day of Sonia's departure, the Morning Post arrived, its entire front page and large black headlines devoted to the disaster that had befallen England: Kitchener was dead. Drowned.

  Two nights before, the Hampshire, carrying the hero of Omdurman to Russia, had struck a mine a little west of the Orkneys. His body was never found. Grief, loss, and fear (many believed he was a military genius who would lead the country to victory) followed Kitcheners sudden and dramatic death. The nation, stunned, mourned the loss of the man whom, although he died as Secretary of War, they knew better as the face on the recruiting poster. It seemed a personal as well as a public loss.

  I sat quietly at the breakfast table. From time to time Grandmother read aloud from the newspaper. I looked at the large black headlines and listened.

  “Broad daylight,” Grandmother said. “Eight o’clock in the evening. The seas were very high and the lifeboats couldn’t be launched.”

  Aunt Katie glanced at the window. In the distance we could see white crests on the estuary. She turned to Bridie who had brought in some fresh toast.