The Fox's Walk (15 page)

I pulled off the ribbon, and, while I tore open the paper, Aunt Katie undid the knot, smoothed out the ribbon, and wound it round her fingers into a neat coil. There was tissue paper inside the wrapping; I opened it carefully to find a small ornately embroidered reticule. I held it up, both delighted and baffled; I was very pleased to own it but knew that my chances of being allowed to carry it in public were very slight.

“Thank you very much, Mrs. Coughlan,” I said in the conventional way I had been taught, but my face showing my enthusiasm for this evidence of an exotic world into which she seemed to think I would fit. “It's beautiful. Is it from Cairo?”

Mrs. Coughlan looked surprised; Aunt Katie pursed her lips.

“No. Singapore. Look inside.”

From outside came the sounds of a pony's hooves on gravel, the creaking of wheels, and an impatient “Whoa.”

Aunt Katie rose and moved toward the door. I had just time to open the little bag, to see two half crowns nestling in an inside pocket, and to register Mrs. Coughlan's finger conspiratorially at her lips before I followed my great-aunt to the front door.

Fortunately all three of my guests arrived at much the same time. Two were neatly and uncomfortably dressed, the boy's hair slicked down, the girl's in finger ringlets at the back of her head; each carried a present. The third, Jarvis de Courcy, his hair already untidy, his sailor suit far from neat, was not carrying a present; his mother, an untidy harassed woman, delivered it from her own hand to Aunt Katie with the air of one who has learned not to take an unnecessary risk. Jarvis was a boy with an engaging expression and the confident smile of one who expects to have a good time in almost any circumstances, although well aware that he may have to provide his own fun. A moment's silence of the kind I had feared followed introductions. It was broken almost immediately by an angry meow, followed by a hostile hiss, from Oonagh. Jarvis had given her tail a tweak, hard enough to be unkind but still short of cruelty.

Oonagh was probably more shocked than hurt, but her reaction was unhesitating. Before Jarvis had time to let go of her tail, she had bitten his hand just below the thumb and, for good measure, scratched his wrist. Blood, although very little, had been spilt during the first minute of my party. The silence was broken as Mrs. de Courcy gave Jarvis a good smack on his bare leg; he reacted to neither attack and, still grinning, was led away by Aunt Katie to have iodine applied to his wounds.

The ice was broken. Mrs. de Courcy cut short her apologies and left; Aunt Katie was no longer there to receive them. I had the impression that his mother was more angry than surprised at Jarvis's behavior.

“The de Courcys are Catholics,” the little girl to whom I had not yet been introduced said.

“How do you know I'm not?” Mrs. Coughlan asked. She had come to the door of the drawing room in response to the disturbance in the hall. It was a good question. It didn't seem likely she had been brought up as a member of the Church of Ireland if she'd been born in Cairo.

Her question silenced the little girl—whose name I now'remembered was Clodagh. The only sound was that of Mrs. de Courcys pony and trap driving away from the house. I had the feeling that she was on her way before Jarvis did something that would require more of her than a passing slap. Or, maybe, she had to hurry home to care for her other children; since she was a Roman Catholic there were probably lots of them.

The silence—not awkward, we were all too pleasantly shocked by the dramatic start to the party—continued until Aunt Katie led the still grinning Jarvis back to us. Dark patches of iodine covered the bite and scratch; there were other small scars and nicks on his hands that seemed evidence that his sense of adventure was greater than his instinct for self-preservation.

“All right,” he said, rubbing his hands, “when's tea?”

Aunt Katie was rather taken aback by this forthright approach to the afternoon's entertainment.

“Don't you want to play a game before we have tea?”

“No,” Jarvis said firmly.

Clodagh's mouth was even more disapproving than Aunt Katie's, but the first part of the party was at least postponed. Jonathan, the other little boy, seemed nervous. I stole a glance at Mrs. Coughlan; she seemed very amused. Although I shared all their emotions, what I mostly felt was deep admiration. Especially since Jarvis appeared to have no sense of having behaved in an in-any-way-unusual manner.

“Chocolate biscuits. Good,” he said approvingly, and sat down on the chair closest to them. I sat beside him; Clodagh sat on the other side of the table, as far away from him as possible; Jonathan, without quite pulling his chair out from the table, slid into the other place beside Jarvis.

Having only a cultural connection with the Church of Ireland, no one in our family said grace before a meal, but even so the speed with which the first chocolate biscuit traveled—before he was quite settled on his chair and without pausing for it to touch his plate—to Jarvis's mouth was unusual. Clodagh took one of the small sandwiches with exaggerated delicacy and put it on her plate. Bridie circled the table, carrying a jug of milk and, as a special birthday exception, one of lemonade. When she had poured my lemonade, she moved on to Jarvis.

“Will you have milk or lemonade?”

“I'll have a cup of tea.” Jarvis pronounced the word differently from the way my family did. He said “tay” and it made me think that he was expecting something darker and stronger than the China tea that had been set out for Aunt Katie and Mrs. Coughlan in the drawing room.

Bridie glanced at Aunt Katie.

“I'll bring a cup of tea from the tray,” Aunt Katie said, and indicated with a wave of her hand that Bridie should continue serving those of us with more conventional tastes.

Mrs. Coughlan followed Aunt Katie back to the drawing room and the tea tray. Aunt Katie would have poured tea for her guest before she returned with a cup for Jarvis. Bridie may have also have taken another cup and saucer to the drawing room; if she did so, it would account for her longer absence from the dining room after she left to fetch more lemonade.

When Aunt Katie returned she found one child missing. The chair to the left of Jarvis was empty, the place in front of it leaving a convenient space for him to set the remaining half plate of chocolate biscuits. Clodagh was still nibbling her sandwich. She had asked for milk instead of lemonade and I despised her for her premature allegiance to adult values. Without quite understanding her point—and she may have merely been parroting what she had heard from her mother—I didn't like the suggestion that Jarvis's lack of discipline could be laid at the feet of his family's religion. Clodagh's hair was scraped back from her face; she looked like a middle-aged Protestant mouse.

Aunt Katie looked to me for an explanation of what had happened. Without emulating Clodagh, I was not brave enough to throw in my lot with the breathtaking Jarvis and I hid behind an expression of astonished lack of comprehension.

“Where is—ah—Jonathan?”

Clodagh permitted herself a downward glance, Aunt Katie not necessarily exempt from her extreme disapproval.

“Whatever is he doing there?”

Jarvis grinned; Clodagh and I remained silent. Even if I had wished to do so, I would have found it hard to describe what had happened. Jonathan, instead of playing it safe like Clodagh and eating the requisite number of sandwiches or pieces of bread and butter—in our family, two—before helping himself to something more interesting, had elected to follow Jarvis's lead and reached out for a chocolate biscuit. Although Jarvis had done nothing more than bare his teeth, Jonathan—not, I thought, without reason—had felt himself lucky to escape with his hand intact. Jonathan had frozen until Jarvis had growled some words I couldn't hear, although the sound was that of an aggressive warning, and Jonathan had slid slowly down in his chair until his head was just above the level of the table. Having seen Clodagh and me staring at him, his face had turned red and, still slowly, he had continued his descent until he had disappeared.

“Jonathan,” Aunt Katie said firmly but not unkindly; this was, after all, a festive occasion. “Please come back to the table.”

Clodagh and I looked at Aunt Katie; Jarvis helped himself to another biscuit from the now almost empty plate.

It was unusual for a day to go by at Ballydavid without my learning something about rules, manners, conventions, and behavior. I didn't think them as important as the war, death, or my fathers financial woes, but they were more immediate to my life. I also had begun to understand that small gestures, such as allowing a sandwich to rest for a moment on ones plate before picking it up again to eat it were more than meaningless conventions; they were the minute bricks that built a solid wall around our way of life. That protected us from the barbarians and the Protestant merchant classes.

These invisible rules would be hard to explain, and harder still to justify, to anyone who did not from early unquestioning childhood subscribe to them. That was, to some extent, the point. It would be easy and inaccurate to equate the resting-the-sandwich-on-the-plate convention or the emphasis on good posture with the idea of female delicacy or an empty life; late-Victorian women were tough. Grandmother had traveled to India, a journey that in those days took several weeks, and I don't for a moment imagine she loosened her stays when she reached the tropics. She would have taken in her stride seasickness, the squalor, and the heat of the subcontinent with her hair in place and a starched blouse. She had lost her eldest child, and though she mourned her little girl I am sure she wore her mourning without any display of emotion; as she now, an old lady, mourned the death of her youngest son. The small conventions weren't a substitute for life; they held those lives in place in the same way that the whalebone in the women's corsets defined their figures.

I had not, needless to say, thought this out by my ninth birthday, and it is only now that I see how illogical it was for any of us—me, Aunt Katie, or Clodagh (Jonathan having other things on his mind)—to expect Jarvis to subscribe to, or even to have been taught, these conventions. They weren't protecting his way of life—to the contrary. It was thrilling nonetheless to see the total disregard with which he trampled underfoot social maxims unquestioned by us.

I saw Aunt Katies eyes flicker to the plate on which there now remained two biscuits before she addressed her more immediate problem. Jonathan had not answered when she called him, and she had only Clodagh's gesture on which to base her belief that he was hiding beneath the long linen table cloth. She tried again.

“Jonathan,” she said, this time with a note of exasperation. “Jonathan, please come back to the table immediately.”

I was delighted; my party was turning out far better than I could ever have hoped. I cared nothing for Clodagh's disapproval and was very interested by my aunt's lack of a secondary plan to which she could fall back if she were not immediately obeyed. That Jarvis did not see me as, if not an ally, an admirer and supporter of his anarchy only impressed me further. Not only did he not care that he had driven a fellow guest under the table; he seemed not to find it interesting.

After a moment, my aunt descended to her hands and knees and out of my sight. Inspired by my hero's nonchalance, I pulled up a large handful of table cloth and, without getting off my chair, leaned down to peer under the table. Aunt Katie's head and shoulders were draped in starched folds of white linen. Jonathan was crawling toward her. She withdrew and stood up; I watched for a moment longer. As Jonathan came into range, Jarvis kicked him. Not particularly brutally, but hard enough for him to squeal and scurry closer to Clodagh's feet. It was not impossible for him to emerge at a point outside the range of Jarvis's foot, but this attack by his oppressor, Aunt Katie's wrath, and his loss of face all combined to keep him in what I now suspected was a familiar retreat.

“You'd get him out fast enough with a yard brush,” Clodagh said in a matter-of-fact tone.

My great-aunt ignored this callous but practical suggestion. I had, for a moment, an image of O'Neill summoned with the stiff-bristled brush he used around the stables and thought that he could probably deal with not only Jonathan but with Jarvis as well.

Aunt Katie did not intend to spend the rest of the tea party on her no longer supple knees, and there was Mrs. Coughlan, another unpredictable guest, abandoned in the drawing room. So Jonathan stayed put until we left the table; I could hear Jarvis's heels from time to time kicking the crossbar of the chair, but I thought this was merely a bad habit unchecked by his mother, who undoubtedly had more immediate problems on her mind.

“Where do you go to school?” Jarvis asked me.

I was flattered that it was my, rather than Clodagh's, education about which he was curious.

“I'm going to be sharing lessons with Clodagh,” I said, realizing that my romantic anticipation of a best friend in my schoolmate was less than realistic. “I used to go to school in London.”

“Kindergarten,” Clodagh said, helpfully and inaccurately; but since my school catered only to younger children, it was close enough to the truth to sting.

Jarvis ignored her. He seemed somewhat interested in both my pieces of information, and I risked a question of my own.

“Where do you go?”

“Christian Brothers.”

The Christian Brothers provided a good, if often brutal, education; I didn't know it then, but their schools were considered the breeding grounds of nationalism. Jarvis seemed philosophic about the undoubted hardships of his schooling. I wondered if the Brothers were confounded by his cheerful resilience.

I don't remember a birthday cake, although there must have been one, and I must have blown out nine candles, with Jarvis and Clodagh as witnesses and Jonathan silently cowering at my feet. But I do remember Jarvis, his tea drunk and the biscuits finished, getting to his feet. After a moment I, too, slid down from my chair, not something I usually did without a murmured "
Puis-je m'en aller?”
to Grandmother or Aunt Katie.