The Fox's Walk (25 page)

“Well, this isn't so interesting for our guest,” he said, with an extraordinary lack of perception, perhaps realizing further amusement at my uncle Hubert's expense was unlikely. For a moment, he did not propose a change of subject; his eyes sparkling with malice, he looked at us, each silent in her own distress.

“I am told,” he said eventually to Sonia, “you consider Alice to have psychic powers?”

Everyone now looked at me, although Sonia was the one under attack. I was surprised to learn that the brief reference to “a gift” some time ago, with only Aunt Katie as a witness, had been taken seriously and had had so wide a circulation.

“It's not unusual in a sensitive child of her age.” Sonia sounded exhausted, but her tone was matter-of-fact.

I wondered if Uncle William would say something about the increasingly scandalous Mrs. Hitchcock, surely the next step in reminding the old ladies that they were harboring an unsuitable guest. But instead, after some small talk while Bridie cleared away the tea tray, he continued in the same vein.

“Well now,” he said, rubbing his hands, “what shall we do? We're too many for a hand of bridge—so given the wealth of psychic powers at this tea party—what about a'séance? Or should we see if Aunt Molly's table has a message for us?”

“William, what a—a—an unsuitable idea.” Aunt Katie was not sure if she was being teased or not. “On a Sunday—with a child—and anyway you're an unbeliever so, of course, no good could come of it.”

“I have a completely open mind. I'm a little choosey about what I believe in, but I'm open-minded. Open-minded, not incredulous.”

Another small silence while the three women in the room unhappily resented the not very subtle insult to Sonia.

“In fact I've seen things in India that—that cannot be accounted for with a conventional Western explanation.”

A frosty silence greeted this offering. Grandmother, Aunt Katie, and Sonia were still offended. I, however, sat on the edge of the sofa, gaping admiringly at Uncle William, thrilled to find myself with someone who might be persuaded to describe the charming of snakes, the Indian rope trick; here was someone who had seen scantily clad natives walking on coals, sitting on beds of nails.

“Oh, Uncle William, tell us, please,” I piped up bravely when no one else spoke.

“One night in the Officers' Mess,” he started unpromisingly—I had supposed the tale would be set in the desert or at least the marketplace. “Chap there took the heaviest man in the room—Tiny Harrington—and four subalterns. He had them, the subalterns, make a sort of tower with their hands above Tiny's head. He was very careful that they shouldn't touch each other's hands because what they were doing was—ah—interrupting gravity. Then each of the four subalterns put a single finger under Tiny's arms and under both legs at the knee, and they lifted him high into the air. Tiny weighed all of eighteen stone, but he went up easily.”

I was surprised and pleased by Uncle William's story, with its suggestion that life, even among the dull kind of people we knew, might turn out to be more interesting than I had so far had any reason to imagine. Sonia and the two old ladies looked at him without expression.

“Did it again later with the Colonel, only he sat on a chair. Got him up high enough that he signed his name on the ceiling with a silver pencil.”

Despite my satisfaction with this story, it was followed by the final short silence—there would be longer ones—of the afternoon. Uncle William wanted to draw Sonia into the open; Grandmother and Aunt Katie were longing to communicate with a spirit from the other side; and I, although uneasy at being part of this adult recklessness, wanted to see what would happen next. Only Sonia's wishes remained unknown and, as she did not say anything, choosing instead to act as though none of this had anything to do with her, we quite soon found ourselves sitting around what Uncle William had referred to as Aunt Molly's table.

Aunt Molly was the elder sister of Grandmother and Aunt Katie; she had died many years before. Her table—various pieces of furniture around the house commemorated previous owners—normally stood with a Chinese shawl draped over it beside Aunt Katie's chair. Now that it was uncovered, I could see that it was pedestal-based and the papier-mâché top was black with an inlaid border of time-darkened flowers; there were small chips around the edge, and someone, a long time ago, had carelessly marked the surface with a wet glass.

Uncle William carried the table to an open area of carpet and arranged the chairs around it; no one had rung for Bridie, who would have been the usual person to perform such a task. The seating required no discussion. Uncle William sat down and gestured firmly to Sonia that she should sit on his left where, it was inferred, he could keep an eye on her. Grandmother sat on his right, then Aunt Katie. I sat between Aunt Katie and Sonia.

None of us, except for Unde William, would have thought this attempt at table turning a good idea. We sat silently around the table, our fingers—following Uncle William's instructions—resting lighdy on the papier-mâché surface. Nothing happened for a while, and I had plenty of time to consider the awkwardness of Grandmother's and Aunt Katie's position. They knew that even my mild mother would have been shocked that I should be so exploited. What my father would have had to say beggared imagination; his complete skepticism would have in no way mitigated his outrage that I should have been exposed to the perils of this kind of irresponsible charlatanism. Even more than what my parents would have thought or said, the old ladies had their own consciences to face. They had been angling, without success, to enlist Sonia to help them communicate with the other side. She had not only shown no enthusiasm for such an enterprise but had seemed not to understand their hints. They had become aware that it would take Uncle William or someone else capable of a similarly blunt approach to force Sonia's hand.

Not only did I feel that it was cruel of Uncle William to press Sonia and to place Grandmother and Aunt Katie in a morally indefensible position while crudely trampling on the small flowering hopes and possibly necessary self-deceptions of the two grief-stricken old ladies, but he had offended me by coarsening the mystery that Sonia offered. He appeared to equate Sonia's subtle arts with the crude antics of an officers' mess and I, for the first time, saw the thoughtless, clumsy, literal-minded way that men destroy the fragile, not always rational, structures that women build and depend upon. The damage inflicted by my father and O'Neill, I now understand, was a condition of their masculinity as well as of their individual natures.

What would have happened had we sat down in a spirit of faith and cooperation? I imagine that some random letters would sooner or later seem to have been tapped by the table; that Grandmother and Aunt Katie would have divined from them some small and hopeful symbol; that Uncle William would have been bluffly dismissive and matter-of-factly triumphant; that Sonia would have remained detached and not quite interested. Instead we sat tensely around the little table—even I, the one with least responsibility for our dubious undertaking, more aware of the tension around me than of any tentative spirit hovering in the ether. Some more sparks fell through the grate. I was beginning to wonder who would call a halt to the proceedings, or whether someone in a spirit almost of social obligation should give the table a little nudge. Nothing. And then the silence was broken by a small cry from a source unseen to all of us, apparently close to the fire. Aunt Katie quickly rose from the table—I had a feeling that she was, perhaps dangerously, breaching spiritualist etiquette—and crossed the room.

“It's Oonagh,” she said, quickly scooping Grandmother's cat from the sofa. Banished for the afternoon, since Uncle William loathed cats, she must have slipped into the room when Bridie came for the tray. Aunt Katie took her to the door to the service passage and put her down outside. “She was asleep—dreaming,” she added, as she firmly closed the door.

Then something happened. Or rather nothing did, but I was filled with an unreasoning terror quite unlike anything I have since experienced. There have been moments of extreme fear and not inconsiderable danger during my life, both as an adult and as a child, but my memories of these occasions are quite different. When, for instance, crossing the Irish Sea during the Second World War, I watched the periscope of a German submarine cut through the cold dark waters, I froze, time slowed, the moment observed, as from a distance, with a horrible clarity. Or during the Blitz in London, my fear suspended in a manner not wholly dissimilar to how it had been on my first day on the hunting field, the full extent of my emotions to be understood only later. To fears of a longer lasting but less immediate nature—those, for instance, of loss and loneliness—my terror was even less similar.

That afternoon in the darkened drawing room, I experienced fear in its purest abstract form. It had no image and no object, its provenance only our invitation to the spirits of the dead—even though that invitation had apparently been ignored. I didn't move or make a sound, and it should have been some time—the lack of light in the room, all eyes on Aunt Katie, the stillness of the other three at the table—before anyone noticed my distress.

Beside me Sonia sighed; then she drew in a breath and I felt, rather than saw, her body stiffen.

“I fear———” Her voice was not quite her own, so deep it might have been a man's, the accent, too, not completely hers. “I fear there will be no orange blossoms for Mademoiselle.”

And that was all. Her words froze us in place. Then she sighed again and we all seemed to know that she was finished. Aunt Katie returned to the table.

It wasn't completely dark. The curtains had not been drawn—not only, I now think, because the light outside was fading but because of the undignified necessity of opening them again before ringing for Bridie to bring in the lamps and close the curtains. There was also a glow from the fire that faintly lit the area around it.

I sensed, though, that Aunt Katie knew something was wrong before she could see my face. She hesitated as she reached the table, but she may have been unsure whether the natural interruption—at that stage no one was giving any particular significance to Oonagh's cry and not much to Sonia's cryptic but apparently irrelevant utterance—might not serve as a way to extricate the group from their failed attempt without further fuelling Uncle William's ridicule or admitting the defeat of those whom he had bullied into testing, under unfavourable conditions, dearly held beliefs.

“Alice———” Aunt Katie said, her voice low but strained.

Grandmother and Uncle William were, I could feel—I did not dare turn my head or move in any way—also looking at me. Perhaps they could hear the change in my breathing. Neither moved; of Sonia's presence I was unaware, it was as though she were no longer in the room.

Slowly Grandmother and Uncle William stood up as Aunt Katie approached me.

“Alice———” she said again, and stretched out a hand toward my shoulder.

I shrank away from her. I still can't explain why I was afraid of her touch. I felt as though there were something amorphous that, without touching me, floated around me and that Aunt Katie's hand would disturb it, endangering and contaminating both of us. I could not see it, feel it, hear it, but I knew that nothing in our real, visible world could protect me or anyone else from it. I remained in the position I had withdrawn into when I flinched, and Aunt Katie took a step backward.

Uncle William stepped back noisily from the table.

“Where's the light, damn it?”

Then, remembering he was not in his own modernized house, he crossed the room and tugged at the bell rope beside Aunt Katie's chair.

“William———” Grandmothers voice was uncharacteristically tentative.

Even in my frozen state I knew Grandmother wanted to avoid Bridie witnessing this unfortunate scene. She need not have worried on that score. Uncle William might be crass in his dealings with the psychic world, but his understanding was perhaps greater than Grandmothers of the lives and minds of those he employed. He intercepted Bridie at the door.

“Would you bring some brandy?” he said, taking the two oil lamps she had been carrying.

Uncle William put one lamp in its usual place on the table behind the sofa in front of the fire and rested the other, the one that usually sat on Aunt Molly's table, on the sideboard. I hadn't until then been aware of how cold I was but, now that the room was lighted and the furniture was efficiently restored to its usual place by Uncle William, I felt suddenly warm and completely restored to safety. Aware that I was still the center of attention, I stood up. I didn't know what to say and I didn't have the words to describe what had just happened. I also had the sense that it would not be a good idea to attempt an explanation—that whatever it was I feared would not wish me to speak of it.

Bridie came back at that moment with a decanter of brandy, the soda siphon, and a bottle of white port. As she closed the curtains, Uncle William poured glasses of port for the two old ladies, a stiff brandy for himself and Sonia, and, as Bridie closed the door behind her, a small amount in a sherry glass for me.

 

ON EASTER MONDAY
, we sat in the library after lunch. Throughout the colder months of the year Grandmother and Aunt Katie alternated where they spent the greater part of each day between the library and the drawing room. On the first of every month Bridie would set the fire in the room that had been left largely unused the month before. In this manner the damp was kept at bay, if not dispelled. The arrangement was flexible: A small morning fire would be set in the library if Grandmother wanted to write letters or review her accounts; if visitors were expected we would have tea in the drawing room; and sometimes in the middle of the month Grandmother, on a whim or for some never questioned reason of her own, would decree the change.