The Fox's Walk (33 page)

“I take it there was something germane in Mary's letter?” Uncle William said eventually, his tone expressionless, as if demonstrating exemplary calm in the face of disaster.

“Not entirely,” Grandmother said. “She had a letter from Hubert saying a young woman called Rosamund Gwynne might get in touch with her and that, if she did, Mary was to be nice to her.”

“‘Might get in touch'?”

“Yes.”

“Well, one thing's sure—that woman will have to go.”

“Yes,” Grandmother said, “but—I don't see quite how. Or where.”

“Oh, leave it to me.”

And so, casually, Sonia's fate was sealed. Even I saw it could not have been otherwise.

D
EATH BY WATER
.” Maggie, reader of tea leaves and an artist in both the interpretation and pronouncement of what she saw, nodded and sighed.

She held out the cup—mine—to show the sparse pattern of dark asymmetric leaves loosely stuck to the inside and repeated, “Death by water.” One or two leaves rested on some particles of dissolving sugar, and it seemed to me they might shift if given time. Could that small adjustment alter my fate? Changing death by water to perhaps a dark stranger from over the water? I knew better than to ask.

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
Years later when I read
The Wasteland,
the scene in the kitchen came back to me as vividly as though I could see and smell it: Maggie sitting at the head of the kitchen table, the threads in the wood scrubbed into bleached grooves; the dark brown kitchen teapot in front of her; a kettle hissing gently on the range; the room dimly lit by the window over the sink; and the smell of paraffin from the pale lamp on the dresser.

Death by water. The Hanged Man. Casement, transferred from the Tower of London, was awaiting trial in Brixton Prison. (Countess Markievicz, the unseen presence in my continuing nightmares, had by now had her death sentence commuted to penal servitude for life—she would be free of this, her first prison term, by the end of the following year—and my dreams and my conscious fears were now both focused on Casement.) I had that morning found in a drawer in the library a pack of tarot cards. The cards fascinated me, even though I understood only vaguely what they were. It required no special knowledge to guess that the picture on each card had a symbolic significance, and, since I saw Aunt Katie's conventional pack of playing cards used, if not to predict the future, as a conduit of omens and portents, I had a pretty good idea of how they might be employed in the right hands. That they lay neatly at the back of a drawer beside some pads for scoring bridge and half a stick of sealing wax suggested that the right hands were neither Grandmother's nor Aunt Katie's. I wondered if Sonia had been asked to read them, and if she had, with her practiced, vague incomprehension, avoided doing so. It had been the Hanged Man and the association with the fate of Casement that had driven me for company and comfort to the kitchen. I had for the moment forgotten that it was in the kitchen that I had first learned of the means by which Casement, when he had—as he undoubtedly would—been found guilty, would die. Until then, I had assumed he would be executed in the way that the revolutionaries in Dublin had and would face a firing squad—a grim enough prospect in itself but, in my imagination, far short of the hangman's rope.

And my fortune: death by drowning. I didn't immediately understand that it was my own fate that had been foretold. The reaction around the kitchen table to the reading was dramatic rather than serious. No time for my demise had been set. The prospect of death by water when I was an old woman, I was young enough to bear with comparative equanimity. But, even more, I believed that, although Maggie had the gift of reading tea leaves and what she saw in my cup would take place, it would affect me rather than happen to me. There would be in my life death by water, but it would not be my death. And until the situation became clearer or I had a reading that gave me six children or some other guarantee of longevity, I could with a little forethought remain on dry land. I wondered if Uncle William had a plan to send me, too, back to England the following night with Sonia. It seemed unlikely, not because I hadn't been told about it but because I knew my uncle capable of the expulsion of an unwanted guest without going to the trouble and expense of sending me as a companion across St. George's Channel.

It was Sonia, then, who would drown—and with her the passengers and crew of the mail boat. It was with a sense of great responsibility that, later in the afternoon, I entered the drawing room. And it was with a sense of shame that I allowed tea to end without my having broached the subject. It seemed as impossible that I should add to the awkwardness of Sonia's not entirely voluntary departure with the suggestion that Grandmother and Aunt Katie were sending her to her death as it would be to ask about the tarot cards in the desk drawer. Uncle William, with masculine cowardice, or perhaps feeling he had done his bit, was not at Ballydavid that afternoon.

I have in recent years thought just how dangerous those wartime crossings of the Irish Sea were, and wondered how dangerous they had, at the time, been perceived as being. Just before the end of the war the
Leinster
was torpedoed a few miles from where I now live with the loss of hundreds of lives, and on one night in December, 1917, two steamers—the
Conningbeg
and the
Formby
—both out of Waterford, were sunk without survivors. Contemporaries of mine, recalling childhood crossings, remember spending the entire night on deck wearing cork life jackets.

I, perhaps alone in the Allied countries, felt relief rather than grief when, next morning, the day of Sonia's departure, the
Morning Post
arrived, its entire front page and large black headlines devoted to the disaster that had befallen England: Kitchener was dead. Drowned.

Two nights before, the
Hampshire,
carrying the hero of Omdurman to Russia, had struck a mine a little west of the Orkneys. His body was never found. Grief, loss, and fear (many believed he was a military genius who would lead the country to victory) followed Kitcheners sudden and dramatic death. The nation, stunned, mourned the loss of the man whom, although he died as Secretary of War, they knew better as the face on the recruiting poster. It seemed a personal as well as a public loss.

I sat quietly at the breakfast table. From time to time Grandmother read aloud from the newspaper. I looked at the large black headlines and listened.

“Broad daylight,” Grandmother said. “Eight o'clock in the evening. The seas were very high and the lifeboats couldn't be launched.”

Aunt Katie glanced at the window. In the distance we could see white crests on the estuary. She turned to Bridie who had brought in some fresh toast.

“Please take up some tea and toast to Madame Debussy. And see if she needs any help with her packing.”

Grandmother and Aunt Katie had arrived at a graceful solution to the embarrassment of Sonia's dubious title. “Madame” was to Bridie (who knew as well as Grandmother did that Sonia was still asleep) not only an appropriate way of describing a foreign, ostensibly widowed woman, but at least as distinguished a tide as “Countess,” since “Madam” was how the wife of the holder of one of the older Irish titles would be described.

 

IT WAS YEARS
before I understood the mail boat was not called the Great Western but was merely one of several passenger ferries operated by the company that provided train service throughout the south and west of England. The Anglo-Irish families whose children traveled to and from school on it called it the “Pig Boat,” the basis of its nickname apparent as Uncle William and I stood on the Quay, seeing Sonia off at the end of a lovely summer day. Pigs, squealing in furious protest at the drovers' switches, were being loaded into the holds. More pathetic and upsetting to a child or any imaginative adult were the cattle, panicked by the shouts and yells and cutting swipes from the drovers' ash plants, slipping and falling, as they were herded into the bowels of the ship. A dark, airless, and terrifying night lay between them and an English slaughterhouse. I tried not to think about this example of everyday casual cruelty to animals. I glanced at Sonia, but she seemed to be thinking of something else.

Uncle William had, at the very least, paid Sonia's travel expenses. Common sense, overheard sentences, and a later conversation with Aunt Katie allowed me in time a fairly clear picture of how Uncle William had dealt with the problem of Sonia. Once again a blunt masculine approach that ignored nuances, details, and areas of sensitivity had solved a problem far more efficiently than would have either of the more intelligent and thoughtful old ladies. Money, of course, was the key. Neither Grandmother nor Aunt Katie would have known even how to approach the subject; Uncle William understood that Sonia was staying at Ballydavid only because she lacked the means to get herself somewhere else. Life as a poor relation in a fairly comfortable country house was not her goal; preferable by far was a marginal existence in a rackety boarding house. There her charm, wiles, and flare for the dramatic would keep her head above water until she could charm the occasional gentleman caller, who would enliven her life with moments of luxury and the occasional present that could, if necessary, later be pawned.

Uncle William had, I must assume, in addition to Sonia's fare, also pressed on her a small sum, in my mind ten guineas, to cover out-of-pocket expenses incurred by her sudden change of plan. I can only imagine the conversations that would have taken place if Grandmother and Aunt Katie had had to word the proposal, let alone decide how much it was appropriate to pop into the discreet envelope that clinched the deal. What did Uncle William demand in return? He would not have balked at the ten guineas, if that was indeed the amount, and it is hard to imagine casting Sonia adrift with less. But, even allowing for Uncle William's being a little better off than his elderly female relatives, it was not an inconsiderable sum. With it he bought Sonia's immediate departure and, although I cannot be sure of this, a conversation in which she told Grandmother and Aunt Katie that, although she had had small, comforting intimations of Uncle Sainthill's existence in the afterlife and she was sure they would all be reunited after death, there was no way she or anyone else could help them communicate with him from this world.

Uncle William summoned a porter. I watched Sonia and realized that at some time in her life she had been in the habit of giving instructions. It is difficult now to separate what I really thought from the myth that I enjoyed. Manchuria and the tide of a dead husband I don't think I even then took to be literal truth; if I had, I wouldn't have been so taken by her new air of authority. She was as sure and confident as Uncle William himself, as she had the porter rearrange her baggage so that her portmanteau was on top, tipped him, and gave him the cabin number, in the time it would have taken Aunt Katie, in similar circumstances, to open her purse and gaze uncertainly at its contents.

Sonia and I embraced; she shook hands with Uncle William. It had been agreed that he and I would watch the boat go past from a field behind old Mrs. de Bromhead's house, at the point where the Suir divided to flow on either side of a wooded island. Uncle William had brought an extra pocket handkerchief for me to wave.

“She must once have been a different person,” Uncle William said thoughtfully as he turned the motorcar into the Mall. I had noticed earlier that he was capable of driving and conducting a conversation at the same time.

“Yes,” I said. “Uncle Hubert———”

“How much did you tell her about Uncle Hubert?”

I hesitated, aware that we had been at cross purposes. “Nothing,” I said.

“Did she ask you about him, or about Uncle Sainthill?”

“No.” I realized he had taken my hesitation for a prevarication, and, since providing Sonia with information about those uncles was not on my conscience, I answered with the firmness of relief. It seemed a moment when frankness might pay off with some reciprocal information, and I added, “She asked me about you, though.”

“Did she, by Jove.” Uncle William sounded interested and rather pleased. “What did she ask?”

“She asked me the name of your dog and if you were married.” I thought, without quite understanding why, that I would not mention her curiosity about how much land he owned.

Soon we drew up beside the wrought iron gates of Mrs. de Bromhead's villa. A dower house, it was small with pretty proportions and a view of the river as far as Waterford. The mail boat was not yet in sight, and I picked a bunch of cowslips while Uncle William strolled over to look at some rust-colored bullocks.

“Tom O'Neill is come home,” I said, when we had chosen the highest part of the field clear of the trees and stood, handkerchiefs in hand, watching the boat steam slowly down the river toward us.

“I'll come over and see him next week. See if we can find him a job. There'll be some kind of pension, of course.” Uncle William tied a knot in one corner of his silk handkerchief to remind himself.

“He lost his leg,” I said.

“I know. Terrible business. Gangrene.”

There was more I wanted to say, but I didn't know how. I sensed that my uncle, too, was awkward. Now the boat was abreast of us, and we waved our handkerchiefs and tried to spot Sonia among the people at the rail. Unfortunately, we had not agreed upon a specific place for her to stand. We waved affectionately to a figure in a dark coat near the bows until the boat disappeared gradually behind the trees on the north end of the island.

We were again in the motorcar before I plucked up courage to ask my uncle a question about something that had been troubling me since that morning.

“They said in the kitchen”—Uncle William raised an eyebrow; he knew I was not supposed to hang around the kitchen—“that Tom O'Neill said a boy who worked on Mr. Rowe's farm was shot in France.”