The Fox's Walk (19 page)

I changed my clothes quickly, brushed my hair, washed my hands and face, and was in the drawing room five minutes later. My fingers and toes were still cold and, since I had forgotten my handkerchief, I sniffed surreptitiously to keep my cold nose from dripping. But I did not place myself in front of the smouldering turf fire. Instead I kissed Uncle William, avoiding as best I could his prickly gray moustache.

Grandmother, having noticed that I had changed properly and was in time for lunch, gave me a small nod. She did not ask how I had enjoyed the meet or even if I had managed not to disgrace the family. I perched on the edge of a chair and waited for the grown-ups to continue with their conversation.

There was the short silence that told me my arrival had necessitated a change of subject. I looked sideways and saw the suggestion of an enquiry on my uncle's face, and then in the other direction to witness an even slighter shake of my grandmother's head.

Uncle William turned to me and smiled; I knew then that whatever they had been talking about pertained to me, rather than it having been one of the myriad largely innocuous subjects that were either none of my business or from which I had to be sheltered.

“Not blooded yet?” he asked; it was a rhetorical question.

I shook my head shyly, thinking that the previous subject was less likely to upset me than was the reminder of the ritualistic smearing of fox's blood on my face that would take place the first time I had ridden well enough to keep up with the hounds and be in at the kill. I preferred not to think about the blood-spilling aspects of blood sports and reminded myself that it would take some time and many riding lessons to gain the proficiency that would bring me to the point of that disgusting ritual. To change the just-changed subject I offered a small piece of news of my own.

“Mrs. O'Neill was waiting for O'Neill when we got back.” I knew what I had seen held a significance that I would not be able to work out for myself.

The short silence was broken by Aunt Katie when she realized that neither her sister nor her stepson, to both of whom she was in the habit of deferring, was going to comment or explain.

“Tom O'Neill has been wounded,” Aunt Katie said. “Mrs. O'Neill got a letter while O'Neill was at the meet.”

“Oh,” I said, surprised and confused.

Again no one spoke for a little while. Straining to remember, I thought that the last time I had seen Tom O'Neill had been when I'd seen Oonagh on the avenue and described her as a tiger. My memories of him were clear but limited. I knew that, while Grandmother and Aunt Katie wished the O'Neill family no misfortune, they were imagining a life in which my uncle Sainthill had been wounded, rather than killed.

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.

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.