The Fox's Walk (10 page)

Then, still slowly, my mother drifted into the picture. Coming down the stairs, she saw what lay below her, raised her hand to her throat, and became, also, still. The tableau, the composition changed, again became static, broken only by the small movement and faint sound of her lapis beads trickling, bouncing, and rolling down the stairs, some of them becoming caught in the folds of Aunt Katie's dark clothing and some of them rolling across the stone flags of the hall until they were lost under the furniture or in the gray shadows of the corners of the hall.

I
SAT IN THE FINE SAND
, sheltered by the sea grass. Although the sun shone, it was beginning to be chilly as the late afternoon wind came in over the wet sand, and I hugged my arms around my legs in an attempt to keep warm. I was wearing a washed-out cotton dress and a cardigan that Aunt Katie had knitted; my legs were bare and I had taken off my sandals to walk on the beach. My mother was walking away from me, just above the line of shells the receded tide had washed up. She, too, wore a jersey over her dress. Her arms were folded across her chest, her head bowed. She had been walking all afternoon, back and forth the length of the beach—about a mile and a quarter. I had at first amused myself collecting shells, building canals, and damming streams in the mud, but now I was tired and hungry and becoming cold. Once or twice during the afternoon, I had tried to get her attention, but she had seemed not to recognize me; now I sat, as the sun sank, in the dunes and waited for her to remember me.

The texture of the sand at Woodstown varied, depending on how far one was from the sea. The sand on the crest of the dunes, blown about by the wind so that the resilient dark green sea grasses were sometimes buried halfway up their stems, was yellow and fine. On the strand the sand was an uneven coarse gray, gritty with pieces of broken shell; at the water's edge, swept up by the tide, the shells were often whole and sometimes pretty, though most of them were hard, sharp cockles.

That afternoon the tide was out. It had left behind almost a mile of wet muddy sand, little streams, puddles, and ripples drawn by the retreating water. On the mud were small coiled heaps excreted by worms; beneath the sand lay the cockles. A few women, cockle-pickers, had been at work; they had walked bent, digging into the wet sand, reaching down to pick up the cockles and throw them into the wet sacks they dragged with them. Now they were leaving the beach.

I felt helpless and guilty. Helpless because Grandmother; Aunt Katie, and my mother were stricken with grief. If I weren't watching my mother pacing the strand at Woodstown, I would have been watching my Grandmother at Ballydavid, sitting on the bench beside the tennis court, gazing, without seeing, over the fields. Aunt Katie was not often visible, although I was always aware of her closed bedroom door. There had been tears in the kitchen when Maggie and Bridie had heard of my uncle Sainthill's death. Maggie had known him since he was a little boy, and Bridie referred to him, through her sobs, as “a lovely gentleman.” The next day, although subdued, their tears were over, and they continued with their lives—their lives of serving and looking after us. My family, after Aunt Katie's first moans as she lay at the foot of the stairs, grieved silently and separately. Alone, each lived with her grief, and, when one met another, after a blink of bare recognition, each veered off to return to her solitary mourning. I could do nothing to help or comfort; when I tried to show affection toward my mother, she barely saw me. And I felt ashamed because I could not remember my uncle. And since I couldn't admit that I had forgotten him, I was left pretending to mourn the loss of someone who was only a name and a face in a silver-framed photograph.

The sun went behind one of the puffy white clouds drifting slowly across the fading sky, and I was now cold enough to feel that some action on my part was necessary. My mother had reached the end of the strand where an outcrop of rocks extended into the bay, and turned. As she came in my direction, I stood, holding my sandals in one hand, showing myself clearly as a child waiting to be taken home. When she was almost abreast of me, I took a couple of steps toward her, ready to meet her if she came to join me. But she walked past without noticing me. I looked at the beach in the direction she was walking; there was more than half a mile before she would turn again. Now I began to be frightened. Since my mother seemed unable to behave as a mother should or even to register my presence, it was time for me to seek the help of another adult, someone who could look after me. And my mother.

We were, by road, more than a mile away from Ballydavid, and even if I got myself there—I felt less confident about my ability to make the journey than I had about the far less justified excursion to Mrs. Coughlan—I would find two old women who were no more accessible or competent than my poor mother. The maids, it is true, would look after me, as they increasingly had while my mother mourned. But I had never seen either exercise authority outside the kitchen, and even there only over boys coming to the back door with messages or selling game. (Game that had probably been poached from the Ballydavid woods, according to Aunt Katie.) I tried, and failed, to imagine Bridie, with her starched muslin cap, white apron, and blue print dress, on the strand taking a firm line with my mother.

Appealing to neighbors, I didn't even consider. I knew my family's grief was too private to expose to anyone not part of it. Then I thought of O'Neill. I had never seen a limit to his authority, and he even had a means of transporting my grief-frozen mother back to Ballydavid, where she would be given tea and a warm fire and the silent sympathy of the maids. Not that it would comfort her, since escape from the proximity of the two old ladies and the weight of their similar devastating emotions was the very reason for her sojourn on the strand. Be that as it might, neither she nor I could spend the night on the beach; the sun was now close to the cloudy horizon, and the wind colder on my legs.

I knew that I was supposed to announce my intention to my mother. Walking on the main road alone was forbidden (a rule it had never been considered necessary to formulate before my elopement to the Coughlans), and I was proposing to travel more than a mile by myself. But my mother was a pale, small figure at the end of the strand still walking away from me; I knew a gesture in her direction would be pointless. Carrying my sandals, I walked along the dunes to where the beach road joined the main road that turned inland. I wanted to keep my mother in sight for as long as possible, just in case she came to her senses. But a light mist rolling off the sea made her seem even less substantial.

Sitting on the coarse grass beside the road, I did up my sandals. The wind had blown sand, yellow and fine against the asphalt, onto the road itself. A motorcar—still rare enough to be remarked upon—came down the Waterford road toward me. It looked very like the Ballydavid car, but, although I was always prepared to be interested in a car, I couldn't tell the difference between one make and another. And Grandmother's car was a vehicle I had rarely seen outside its garage. It was O'Neill's proudest possession: He assumed that he was in a sense owner of anything used outdoors at Ballydavid as, on some level, did my family and the rest of the household. Polished to a high gloss, the Sunbeam was kept under a cover of old bed sheets in the garage. I realize now that O'Neill was not an accomplished driver and, for day to day outings or those (such as meeting us at the boat) where it was necessary to have completely reliable transport, the pony and trap was always dispatched. He preferred, I think, to drive my grandmother on her afternoon calls or her visits to the graveyard when he would have plenty of time to turn and have the car pointed in the right direction when she was ready to go home.

I watched the motorcar pass me and turn along the beach road which, behind the dunes, followed the outline of the coast. O'Neill was at the wheel and there was someone beside him. Even in the moment of overwhelming relief—it was as though I had accidentally summoned the necessary genii from a bottle—I wondered who his passenger could be. It seemed equally as impossible that one of the family should be sitting in front beside him as it was that he might be giving a lift to either of the men who worked at Ballydavid. My relief turned to despair as I understood that he had failed to see me, or that he had seen me and thought me one of the local urchins sitting at the side of the road. There was no longer any reason for me to trudge back to Ballydavid. I sat despondently for a little while as I tried to think what to do; the road was sheltered from the wind coming in from the sea and was a little warmer than the strand. I had begun to think about going to the nearest farmhouse and knocking at the door, but what could I say? I didn't know how to explain my predicament or to describe what was wrong with my mother.

After a little while, not bothering to unbuckle my sandals, I climbed back up the dune behind me, the sand slipping away beneath me as I scrambled to the top. It seemed better to be able to see my mother than not, and, since I now could not think of anything to do, I thought I would sit in as much shelter as I could find and weep.

At the very end of the strand I could now faintly sec two new figures. One was moving along the beach toward my mother who was walking away from him—both the new arrivals were men—while the other stood near an opening that led onto an area of thin grass and sand under a windswept sycamore. That opening was where we usually drove to if we came in a pony and trap; if we arrived on foot, as we had that afternoon, we gained the strand through the closer opening near where I now waited.

It was the way he stood—straight backed, still, his weight on one foot—that made me to realize that the closer man was O'Neill. And I suddenly knew, although he was only a shadowy figure in the heavier mist rolling in, that the other man was my father. Magically, it seemed, transported from Tidworth, the officer training camp where he was now stationed.

My father had been wounded and decorated for bravery during the early months of the war. He referred to his wound as a small one, and to his medal, too, as small. Even so, the wound and decoration must have been important and dramatic events in our family. I have no memory of them. My encounter with Grandmother's cat on the avenue at Ballydavid and my meeting with Mrs. Coughlan took place before my father was invalided home from France, yet I remember that afternoon—although nothing before or after—and not my father's wound, my mother's fears, or her relief at having him safely back in England. The wound had not been life threatening, but it kept him from seeing any further action. His decoration established his courage and no one could imagine him reluctant to “do his bit.” Since he had also seen action in the closing months of the Boer War, he did not have a romantic or unrealistic view of war and felt no particular regret that, through no fault of his own, he was unable to return to the battlefield. He had fought as a noncommissioned officer, and since he was tough, strong, intelligent—although not imaginative and completely lacking in an aesthetic sense—it should not have been difficult to find something useful for him to do. And for some time he had had a job connected with military supplies. He had a practical, tidy mind with a great capacity for concentrating on detail and the kind of determined common sense that can cut through, or circumnavigate, bureaucracy. I think that, in his way, he liked the work and I am sure he was good at it. But his father-in-law had been a general, and someone, though not Father, thought my father should become an officer. Strings had been pulled and that spring while we were staying with Grandmother, he had begun his training at Tidworth.

I stood on the beach, still, with my arms wrapped around me in an unconscious imitation of my mother, watching Father, in the distance, stride after her. She was still walking away from him and I thought she had not seen him; it seemed unlikely that even in her grief and shock she would ignore him. My mother was a little afraid of Father, her attitude not quite that of a normal wifely deference, since on some, perhaps many, levels she would have considered herself superior to him. She knew herself to be better educated, better bred, better mannered, better connected, and she knew that he thought these qualities mere female attributes and secondary to her beauty and sweet nature. When Mother was with her family, she was in the position of silently defending him from their silent criticisms, these unspoken thoughts batting around the room like shuttlecocks, inhibiting and coloring even the occasional remarks of day to day family life. It was only when Father was safely in England and Mother had settled in at Ballydavid that everyone relaxed.

In London, at Palace Gardens Terrace, my father's values ruled. He had come from New Zealand, his family originally farmers from the north of Ireland who had emigrated during the nineteenth century. He had returned to the British Isles with values learned from two generations of brutally hard work and poverty: frugality; common sense; infrequent, inexpensive, simple, and unsophisticated pleasures (he had a weakness for music halls and would on occasion quote catchphrases from comics he had seen there); and a lack of frills or airs. The moment he was out of the house, my mother's suppressed gentility sprang back into place. Because I spent most of my day in the nursery and because of my father's time as a soldier, he had so far played a comparatively minor part in my life.

Although I was never quite at ease with him, his attitude to me at best momentary benevolence, I now welcomed another approach to life—one with clearer rules and fewer surprises—than that which ruled Ballydavid; I was relieved to see an adult who had not abnegated authority to grief. It seemed, as I warmed to consideration of my role, that the advent of a sentient adult would be followed by a full appreciation of my courage and stoicism and by the realization that I had been neglected by the matriarchal side of my family. I turned over some phrases in my mind—modest disclaimers that in no way suggested that I had not suffered—and prepared myself to be congratulated, apologized to, and, in some manner, rewarded. I started to walk toward my parents.