The Fox's Walk (28 page)

Grandmother and Aunt Katie thought Casement a traitor. Uncle William at this stage held the same opinion as Casement's friend, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle maintained and would maintain—long after the explanation was acceptable to the British public (it always enraged Casement himself)—that Casement, his health destroyed from exposure to the climate of the Congo and the Putumayo, had also suffered mentally and emotionally from the horrors he had witnessed and could no longer be held accountable for his actions. Even now, with Casement's sparse remains in their hero's grave at Glasnevin Cemetery, I am sure Conan Doyle was right.

Sunday had been the afternoon of our attempt to contact a spirit on the other side. Monday, Uncle William had been turned back at Mullingar; and although we still did not know it, revolutionaries had seized the General Post Office on Sackville Street. On Tuesday, Uncle William had invited himself to lunch and warned us that a revolution might have broken out.

During lunch on Wednesday, having sifted through the rumors we chose not to believe—as much, I now think, on aesthetic grounds as those of probability—for any aspect that might contain plausible fact, Grandmother and Uncle William discussed what the English government would do with Casement now that it presumably had him under lock and key in Dublin. Uncle William said that, whether or not Dublin was in the throes of a rising, the authorities would get him across the Irish Sea to face justice in England as quickly as possible.

“The last thing they need at Dublin Castle right at this moment is a man like Casement as a prisoner,” Uncle William said. Although he had spoken with the authoritative tone he used when delivering an opinion on political or military matters, he now paused. His thought—that none of us knew whether Dublin Castle was still in government hands—was implicit, unspoken, but shared by every member of the family. And, probably, by the subdued and completely silent Sonia. During the lull in the conversation, a policeman bicycled up the avenue.

I was the first to see him. The local representative of day-today law and order was a handsome young man with curly hair. The son of a Fermoy farmer, he was, I had been told, a great favorite at the local dances. I expected him to go around the side of the house to the kitchen entrance. But when he reached the part of the avenue where the slope became steeper, he got off his bicycle and pushed it up the remaining few yards of the avenue onto the gravel and past the dining-room window to the front door.

Aunt Katie, I think, must have seen him go by, but Uncle William, having expressed himself fully on Casement and having little interest in dissenting views, was now lecturing Grandmother on the benefits of installing a wind charger at Ballydavid. I listened for the knock on the front door. Beside me, Aunt Katie stiffened her neck and turned her head. Several moments passed. I imagined the policeman dismounting his bicycle, adjusting the small metal stand that would allow him to leave it upright without leaning it against one of the pillars of the veranda, removing the bicycle clips from the cuffs of his trousers, fishing a notebook and pencil out of his pocket, and taking a moment to compose himself before knocking too loudly on the front door.

“Whoever can that be?” Grandmother asked, ready to be irritated by a tradesman's delivery boy who should have gone to the back door, or by a call from a neighbor naive enough to eat her midday meal at some outlandishly early hour and ignorant enough to assume that the denizens of Ballydavid also did.

A long pause followed the knock; this time we all waited, listening. I imagined Bridie coming from the kitchen, tying her apron, crossing the hall, opening the front door. I thought Bridie, who could be stern, might be lecturing the policeman on his misguided approach and timing. If this was the case, she failed to carry her point.

“It's the police, Your Ladyship.”

“The police, Bridie?”

Grandmother became a full inch taller. It was not clear to me whether she was expressing disapproval of the breach of etiquette in the time and place of this visit or if she were about to rephrase the question in the manner she would, in the future, expect Bridie to employ the next time she found a policeman on our doorstep.

“I'll deal with this, Verena,” Uncle William said, wiping his mouth and moustache with his napkin as he stood. Although Grandmother and Uncle William were not closely related, they were part of the same family—not only because her sister was Uncle William's stepmother but because he was a distant cousin of her dead husband—and he occasionally addressed Grandmother by her Christian name. I'm not sure he was ever entirely comfortable doing so; at any rate, he didn't do it often.

“Really, William, I think I———”

But Uncle William was already almost at the dining-room door. Grandmother expressed her disapproval of his high-handed manner with a sniff and by saying “really” once more.

Again we waited. I thought, inconsequentially, that if we were to have the wind charger that Uncle William was advocating—repeating his arguments at each visit as though it were only Grandmother's inability fully to grasp its benefits that prevented its immediate implementation—there could be, instead of the door knocker, an electric bell by the front door that rang in the kitchen. The idea seemed appealing, but I would have found it difficult to say in what way it would be an improvement over our present arrangement.

I could hear male voices in the hall, but not clearly enough to have a sense of the tone of the conversation. Beside me Aunt Katie fidgeted nervously.

“It's not—it couldn't be about—anything to do with those—those pheasants?” she said at last.

“What
are
you talking about?” Grandmother said crossly.

I think she knew as well as I did that Aunt Katie had a bad conscience about the pheasants she from time to time bought at the kitchen door, usually from my red-haired hero. Aunt Katie used to make an uncomfortable joke about their having been poached from the Ballydavid coverts; she was now, I think, considering the possibility that it wasn't she who had been robbed but that she had instead been a receiver of stolen property.

Grandmother was as well aware as I was that it had been some time since a pheasant had been bought at the kitchen door and that no local boy would offer us game after the end of the shooting season. But her irritation at having been treated as a child or an incompetent by her younger sister's stepson rankled, and she felt no need to reassure that sister that she was unlikely to face arrest as an accessory after the fact to poaching.

I listened and waited. There was the disquieting association of an unexpected knock at the front door with death and violence: the telegram that told us my uncle Sainthill was dead, the men with guns and petrol cans arriving at Mrs. Hitchcock's house late at night. I did not think the policeman himself a threat, but I was afraid his arrival might mark another dramatic change in our lives in some not specified but unpleasant way. I knew his visit had nothing to do with pheasants.

I thought also about how Grandmother's seemingly boundless power had been checked—casually, in her own house, by one of her guests—because he was the eldest male member of the family. I had thought of Grandmother in the same way that I thought of Queen Victoria; it had not occurred to me there could be a limit to her power and moral authority. At Ballydavid she was Victoria, O'Neill her Melbourne.

“He—your son—liked to shoot pheasants?” It was the first we had heard from Sonia for several days, her tone as much an observation as a question.

As she spoke, she indicated Uncle Sainthill's portrait with a movement of her head, looking from Grandmother to the painting. Her eyes did not return to Grandmother but remained thoughtfully looking at the man whose loss even I now felt. Grandmother did not reply but made a small nod.

“He, ah, had a gun? He was a good shot.” Neither was quite a question, it was more as though she were leading Grandmother's thought gently in some not specified direction.

“Of course,” Grandmother said, and waited for Sonia to reveal her thoughts.

Uncle William returned to the dining room, closing the door behind him and bringing his hands together in a gesture that told us he had dealt with the policeman in a satisfactory manner.

“He came for the guns. I told O'Neill to take Saint's and Hugh's guns down to the police station—and his own shotgun; he'll have to give the crows a temporary cease-fire—keep them safe until this all blows over.”

My uncle then sat down and readdressed himself to his bread-and-butter pudding, apparently unaware of the chilly silence that greeted his words. Sonia nodded slightly and thoughtfully; Aunt Katie looked at her plate; Grandmother drew herself up another half inch and stared at Uncle William. I watched carefully while sitting quiet and still; it was a moment when I would have welcomed being excused from the table.

“You told O'Neill to take the guns to the police station? Without consulting me?”

“It's dangerous to have guns in the house. You know that. It's just asking for trouble. Much safer if everyone knows you don't have any.”

“And your Greeners? Are they at the police station?”

Uncle William colored slightly. But he recovered himself.

“They'll be taken over this afternoon.”

“So,” Sonia said thoughtfully, “all the guns will be in the same place.”

Two nights later, four men in a stolen car, already well armed, raided the police station and met little resistance. They took away with them a good selection of sporting guns and ammunition. Grandmother, when she was told about it, did not comment, although one side of her mouth twitched in the beginning of an angry smile.

 

UNCLE WILLIAM WAS NOW
constantly at Ballydavid. He came every day for lunch, arriving in the late morning and staying until after tea. I wonder now if in this protective mode he had offered to stay overnight at Ballydavid or if he had suggested we should all move temporarily to Ballinamona. I think it unlikely that he did for a variety of reasons, among them an unwillingness to admit the possibility of danger as well as the greater vulnerability of a house whose occupant was away from home. He may also have felt a reluctance to show lack of confidence in the authorities, the social order, or the position of either householder in his respective community.

In the meantime, it was necessary for everyday life to be carried on as though nothing were out of order. Some small changes in routine and a greater carefulness about how one talked and in front of whom were the only outward signs of watchfulness. The short Easter holidays were over, and on the Monday morning a week after the Rising, Clodagh and I were to resume lessons in the Glenbeg schoolroom.

Grandmother did not usually concern herself with arrangements, and it was rare for her to issue instructions herself rather than delegating them to Aunt Katie. I was surprised when she announced a change in my daily routine while we were sitting in the drawing room, engaged in the minor pastimes that made up our daily lives. Sonia's lack of handiwork during these stretches of time seemed to emphasize how temporary her status was within the household.

“Tomorrow morning you'll be riding over to Glenbeg. Patience will be ready for you at quarter to nine.”

As with all changes at Ballydavid, particularly ones that entailed some aspect of privilege or promotion, a whole range of questions was raised, but I did not ask any of them.

“O'Neill will accompany you,” Grandmother added.

That answered my first question, and my feeling was one of relief. The prospect of riding a couple of miles along the road without an adult to intervene on my behalf if Patience took it into her mind to go her own way seemed better addressed in the future. I was also, most of the time, afraid—in an unspecified way—of revolutionaries. These fears were at their most extreme at night, while I was lying in the dark, the only person upstairs, listening to the old house settling on its timbers and to unidentified noises caused by the wind or small animals outside. The sound of a mouse in the attic overhead would leave me rigid with fear, imagining a troop of rough men armed with my uncles beautifully made guns, each carrying petrol and rags, waiting only for me to fall asleep before descending to kidnap me and burn down the house. It would have seemed almost willful to have given them the opportunity of scooping me up, and possibly Patience, too, as, conveniently alone, we trotted along the Woodstown road.

“Times are uncertain, but there is nothing for you to be afraid of. I'd like you to be careful of what you say to O'Neill or in front of the maids.”

This was an unnecessary instruction but, remembering my tactlessness on the subject of Roman Catholicism on the way to the graveyard at the Abbey Church, I blushed.

“Yes, Grandmother.”

I would have liked to have known how I was to be dressed when I came down to breakfast the following morning, but I thought I would ask Aunt Katie about that later. It was hard to imagine that I would spend the day at Glenbeg dressed much as I would for a day's hunting, but it was equally hard to imagine hopping up on Patience in a neat skirt with woolen stockings and my new shoes that buttoned across the instep.

“And it would be better to be seen and not heard if you eat lunch in the dining room at Glenbeg.” Grandmother's tone was not the warning against bad or ignorant behavior that her words might have suggested. I understood her to be advising me about how to behave in the presence of people less worldly than she and, by implication, I were.

Uncle William came in and all discussion of domestic arrangements stopped. I had come to dread his arrival since he was the one most likely to have some new and unsettling news, announcing it in a semi-humorous manner that only accentuated its horror and his anger. I had begun to think wistfully of the boredom of our recent uneventful lives. But that afternoon his amusement seemed, if not entirely good natured, genuine.