“Please take up some tea and toast to Madame Debussy. And see if she needs any help with her packing.”
Grandmother and Aunt Katie had arrived at a graceful solution to the embarrassment of Sonia’s dubious title. “Madame” was to Bridie (who knew as well as Grandmother did that Sonia was still asleep) not only an appropriate way of describing a foreign, ostensibly widowed woman, but at least as distinguished a tide as “Countess,” since “Madam” was how the wife of the holder of one of the older Irish titles would be described.
IT WAS YEARS before I understood the mail boat was not called the Great Western but was merely one of several passenger ferries operated by the company that provided train service throughout the south and west of England. The Anglo-Irish families whose children traveled to and from school on it called it the “Pig Boat,” the basis of its nickname apparent as Uncle William and I stood on the Quay, seeing Sonia off at the end of a lovely summer day. Pigs, squealing in furious protest at the drovers’ switches, were being loaded into the holds. More pathetic and upsetting to a child or any imaginative adult were the cattle, panicked by the shouts and yells and cutting swipes from the drovers’ ash plants, slipping and falling, as they were herded into the bowels of the ship. A dark, airless, and terrifying night lay between them and an English slaughterhouse. I tried not to think about this example of everyday casual cruelty to animals. I glanced at Sonia, but she seemed to be thinking of something else.
Uncle William had, at the very least, paid Sonia’s travel expenses. Common sense, overheard sentences, and a later conversation with Aunt Katie allowed me in time a fairly clear picture of how Uncle William had dealt with the problem of Sonia. Once again a blunt masculine approach that ignored nuances, details, and areas of sensitivity had solved a problem far more efficiently than would have either of the more intelligent and thoughtful old ladies. Money, of course, was the key. Neither Grandmother nor Aunt Katie would have known even how to approach the subject; Uncle William understood that Sonia was staying at Ballydavid only because she lacked the means to get herself somewhere else. Life as a poor relation in a fairly comfortable country house was not her goal; preferable by far was a marginal existence in a rackety boarding house. There her charm, wiles, and flare for the dramatic would keep her head above water until she could charm the occasional gentleman caller, who would enliven her life with moments of luxury and the occasional present that could, if necessary, later be pawned.
Uncle William had, I must assume, in addition to Sonia’s fare, also pressed on her a small sum, in my mind ten guineas, to cover out-of-pocket expenses incurred by her sudden change of plan. I can only imagine the conversations that would have taken place if Grandmother and Aunt Katie had had to word the proposal, let alone decide how much it was appropriate to pop into the discreet envelope that clinched the deal. What did Uncle William demand in return? He would not have balked at the ten guineas, if that was indeed the amount, and it is hard to imagine casting Sonia adrift with less. But, even allowing for Uncle William’s being a little better off than his elderly female relatives, it was not an inconsiderable sum. With it he bought Sonia’s immediate departure and, although I cannot be sure of this, a conversation in which she told Grandmother and Aunt Katie that, although she had had small, comforting intimations of Uncle Sainthill’s existence in the afterlife and she was sure they would all be reunited after death, there was no way she or anyone else could help them communicate with him from this world.
Uncle William summoned a porter. I watched Sonia and realized that at some time in her life she had been in the habit of giving instructions. It is difficult now to separate what I really thought from the myth that I enjoyed. Manchuria and the tide of a dead husband I don’t think I even then took to be literal truth; if I had, I wouldn’t have been so taken by her new air of authority. She was as sure and confident as Uncle William himself, as she had the porter rearrange her baggage so that her portmanteau was on top, tipped him, and gave him the cabin number, in the time it would have taken Aunt Katie, in similar circumstances, to open her purse and gaze uncertainly at its contents.
Sonia and I embraced; she shook hands with Uncle William. It had been agreed that he and I would watch the boat go past from a field behind old Mrs. de Bromhead’s house, at the point where the Suir divided to flow on either side of a wooded island. Uncle William had brought an extra pocket handkerchief for me to wave.
“She must once have been a different person,” Uncle William said thoughtfully as he turned the motorcar into the Mall. I had noticed earlier that he was capable of driving and conducting a conversation at the same time.
“Yes,” I said. “Uncle Hubert———”
“How much did you tell her about Uncle Hubert?”
I hesitated, aware that we had been at cross purposes. “Nothing,” I said.
“Did she ask you about him, or about Uncle Sainthill?”
“No.” I realized he had taken my hesitation for a prevarication, and, since providing Sonia with information about those uncles was not on my conscience, I answered with the firmness of relief. It seemed a moment when frankness might pay off with some reciprocal information, and I added, “She asked me about you, though.”
“Did she, by Jove.” Uncle William sounded interested and rather pleased. “What did she ask?”
“She asked me the name of your dog and if you were married.” I thought, without quite understanding why, that I would not mention her curiosity about how much land he owned.
Soon we drew up beside the wrought iron gates of Mrs. de Bromhead’s villa. A dower house, it was small with pretty proportions and a view of the river as far as Waterford. The mail boat was not yet in sight, and I picked a bunch of cowslips while Uncle William strolled over to look at some rust-colored bullocks.
“Tom O’Neill is come home,” I said, when we had chosen the highest part of the field clear of the trees and stood, handkerchiefs in hand, watching the boat steam slowly down the river toward us.
“I’ll come over and see him next week. See if we can find him a job. There’ll be some kind of pension, of course.” Uncle William tied a knot in one corner of his silk handkerchief to remind himself.
“He lost his leg,” I said.
“I know. Terrible business. Gangrene.”
There was more I wanted to say, but I didn’t know how. I sensed that my uncle, too, was awkward. Now the boat was abreast of us, and we waved our handkerchiefs and tried to spot Sonia among the people at the rail. Unfortunately, we had not agreed upon a specific place for her to stand. We waved affectionately to a figure in a dark coat near the bows until the boat disappeared gradually behind the trees on the north end of the island.
We were again in the motorcar before I plucked up courage to ask my uncle a question about something that had been troubling me since that morning.
“They said in the kitchen”—Uncle William raised an eyebrow; he knew I was not supposed to hang around the kitchen—“that Tom O’Neill said a boy who worked on Mr. Rowe’s farm was shot in France.”
“Yes?” Uncle William said. “I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Tom O’Neill said an English officer shot him.”
“He was shot by an English officer?” Uncle William asked, his voice grave.
“Yes, Tom O’Neill said.”
“I see. I’m afraid he may have been a deserter.”
I looked at him and he, reluctantly, went on.
“If a soldier runs away under fire, he is shot. It’s horrible, but necessary. So that other soldiers don’t run away when they’re afraid.”
“He was shot for being afraid?”
“Everyone’s afraid in a war. It’s a horrible thing. But this war is necessary.”
“But his mother—his brother———” I was afraid I would cry, but I needed an answer and I pressed on. “His brother is the boy who comes to the door with pheasants.”
“The boy with red hair?”
“Yes. He had red hair, too.
Tom said.”
“One of the Clancys, then.” Uncle Williams voice was cold and sad. I knew that he was horrified, too, but I thought he understood the terrible thing that had happened. I didn’t.
“It’s horrible for the man who does the shooting, too,” he said after a moment.
I hadn’t thought of that. I wondered, from the flatness of his tone, whether he had ever been the one who had done the shooting. I didn’t ask. I was already too ashamed to go into the kitchen.
As we drove through the gates of Ballydavid, Uncle William broke the silence.
“I hope Sonias a good sailor. She’s out on the estuary now. It could be quite rough tonight.”
“Is she going to be all right?” I forced myself to ask. It was rare for me to be alone with Uncle William, and there were so many questions I couldn’t ask my grandmother and Aunt Katie.
“Oh, yes,” he said, and laughed. “Don’t worry about Sonia, she’ll always land on her feet.”
I MISSED MY MOTHER and I longed for her visit to Ballydavid that summer. It was now more than a year since I had last seen her, and since my Uncle Sainthill’s death. I scarcely missed Edward and had no particularly warm feelings toward my so far unmet younger sister; I missed my father not at all. London was to me inferior in every way to the small part of County Waterford that I now thought of as home. Unusually for a child my age (and it probably does not reflect well on my nature), place seemed as important as people. Ballydavid, the old and slightly shabby house and farm, fields and woods that I was, that glorious summer, old enough and independent enough to explore and enjoy by myself, took first place in my affections. I did not want to be in London now that the eggs in the blackbird’s nest had hatched, while the hedgerows were in bloom, during the time that Miss Kingsley and I, trailed by a sullen Clodagh, looked for wild orchids in the undrained boggy fields behind Woodstown Strand. And there was Patience. And Jock.
I missed my mother not only because I was a little girl and it was a year since I had seen her, but also because I was guilty and confused. I was guilty and confused for a whole range of reasons, some of them not logically connected to me. I would lie awake at night and worry. I would think about the brother of the redhaired boy, who had been shot because he was afraid. I would think sadly of his family. Then I would wonder if Bridie and Maggie blamed me as part of the society responsible for the boy’s death. How could they? And yet, since I was a beneficiary of that society, how could they not? I felt guilty about Sonia and worried about her future. Uncle William had said she would be all right, but he was given to broad definitive statements. And should I have told Grandmother and Aunt Katie that Sonia and Mara were the same person? They were too alike in too many ways not to be, but at the same time they were different. I had never—apart from a Christmas pantomime in which most of the characters had been animals—been to the theatre, and so I had no experience of seeing a great actress, whose face was familiar to me and thousands others, play one dissimilar but completely convincing role after another. Had I failed Sonia—now adrift in a world I increasingly understood to have little respect or compassion for the underdog? Or had I failed my family by keeping silent about her identity? What would have happened if my mother had arrived before Sonia left and if she had looked at her and said, “Why, Mara, whatever are you doing here?” But maybe Sonia would be a complete stranger to her with only a similarity—common perhaps to every female between the ages of thirty and fifty born east of the Balkans—to someone she had once known briefly. I would have been less uneasy if I had not heard Uncle Hubert tell my mother that Mara had murdered her husband. If Sonia were Mara, then I had been party to Grandmother having harbored, if not literally a fugitive from justice, then someone who was clever and devious enough to avoid that unenviable state. But then again, as my mind went round and round, perhaps England was awash with slightly desperate, aging adventuresses with Slavic cheekbones, any one of whom might easily drift off course and find herself in the rural south of Ireland.
I worried, too, whether my mother would come to see me that summer. My paternal grandmother was in London, visiting her son. (Raising the question, unanswerable at this distance of time, of how and when she had made this wartime voyage from New Zealand. Or had she already been in England when war broke out? Perhaps visiting another long-forgotten relative?) I even worried, although in this instance confusion played a larger part, about my sleepwalking and its supposed connection to a “gift” that I knew I did not have. But I had not known I walked in my sleep, itself something that suggested I was unusual; might I not also have psychic powers of which I knew nothing? And what about Tom O’Neill, who would live out his days with a wooden leg? I now guiltily avoided the stable yard as well as the kitchen.
The guilt and confusion I felt closer to home did nothing to alleviate my morbid fear and increasing preoccupation with the fate of Sir Roger Casement. It seemed to me that Kitchener’s death and Casement’s trial filled the summer. I heartily disliked Kitchener; I connected the wave of patriotic emotion following his death with a greater emotional determination to see Casement also dead. Nothing I have learned about Kitchener since has moved my opinion; the man who gave us concentration camps during the Boer War turned out to be more adept at recruiting soldiers than at keeping them alive once he had them in uniform.
At the time I felt uneasy about my lack of patriotic grief for Kitchener, but it was nothing compared to the guilt I felt for my unpatriotic sympathy for the man being tried and for my horror at his trial—Casement pale, handsome, sad, dignified, and sick; his persecutors smug and brutish bullies. I hated them, and I feared them.
Casements trial began on 26 June. The proceedings were short, sharp, and to the point. There was an assumption of guilt that made the trial little more than a formality. Soon after Casement had been brought to England and incarcerated in the Tower of London, a member of the House of Commons had asked Asquith if it was true Casement was in custody and whether the Prime Minister could assure him that Casement would immediately be shot for treason. The question had been greeted with cheers. The newspapers, as soon as Casements arrest was made public, had referred to him as a traitor, and the combination of evidence and the emotions of a country at war left little doubt as to his eventual fate. It seemed inevitable that he should be executed.
But Casement still had a few friends, and there were also those who remembered his work in the Congo and with the Putumayo Indians; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had known Casement socially during happier times, contributed £700 to his legal expenses. Bernard Shaw, staying in character, did not give any money but drafted a line of defense that argued that Casement, as an Irishman, had no allegiance to the Crown and could therefore not be a traitor. It was a line of argument, one of several, that for a moment appealed to Casement.
Many of Casements notes and suggestions to his counsel were concerned with the peripheral, much in the way that he had frittered his time and the patience of the German authorities on the Findlay-proposed kidnapping scheme. His pride was hurt by the suggestions that he had been too grateful for his knighthood, that he had taken money from Germany, or that he had been drawing his English pension. Understanding that he would certainly be found guilty, he concentrated on defending himself from painful sneers and slights on his honor.
On the fourth day of his trial, Casement was found guilty and condemned to death. Horridge, one of the three judges, had a nervous tic that made him appear to grin as the black cap was placed on his head. The newspapers made much of this macabre touch. The execution was set for 3 August.
There was still the appeal to come, but before that Mother came to visit. On the morning of her arrival I was allowed to postpone my breakfast and accompany O’Neill to the mail boat. There followed the tradition of O’Neill’s welcome, the drive through Waterford and the countryside, with the smell of hay and the summer sounds of birds and insects, meadowsweet in the hedges and larks above us, through the gates of Ballydavid and up to the front door. Ed
ward and Emily were, I assume, with her, but I remember nothing of them, not even my first impression of the baby whom I no longer felt so keenly to be an interloper.
Even I, uncritical and with the eyes of childhood adoration, could see that my mother looked older and very thin; new lines had appeared on her forehead and to the sides of her mouth. But that morning she was happy to see me, happy to see her mother and aunt, happy to be at Ballydavid.
Grandmother and Aunt Katie were happy to have my pretty, amusing mother home; their talk and laughter in contrast to their dark clothing. Mother, since she had a husband to please and a year had passed since Uncle Sainthill’s death, was no longer in mourning; Grandmother and Aunt Katie were in the black each would wear for the rest of her life.
Mother was happy to be home and, perhaps because Grandmother had lost one child, was now forgiven for her unsuitable marriage. And I, clinging to her side, was rarely sent away when they talked. Sometimes Uncle William was there; sometimes he wasn’t. Sometimes they would recall my presence, and a subject would be changed or an opinion withheld. But usually the conversation would circle around, and, with a glance in my direction, Mother—for it was usually she who offered the indiscretion—would pause in midsentence to substitute a word or phrase and then, with a laugh, continue. Away from her literal-minded husband and her visiting unsympathetic mother-in-law, she bloomed. And it was most often of her mother-in-law that she spoke indiscreetly.
“I took her,” Mother said, laughing, “to see the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, and Kew Gardens. Bobby took her to lunch at Roehampton Golf Club and to a music hall. Then I took her to see the Albert Memorial, Nelson's Column, the National Gallery, and a concert at the Albert Hall. Then I found out that what she really wanted to do was to see Casement tried.”
“Madame Defarge,” Grandmother said.
“Madame Defarge,” Mother said, and laughed again, happy to be with people for whom simple literary allusions did not require explanation. Then, after a moment, she realized that this one, in my case, did. “Madame Defarge is a character in A Tale of Two Cities. It’s a novel about the French Revolution by Charles Dickens.”
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