The Fox's Walk (36 page)

Nevertheless, the Ballydavid tennis party was an annual event, and this year it was to be slightly expanded and to some extent in honor of Rosamund Gwynne. Although most invitations had already been sent out, Grandmother had not yet completely finished with the guest list.

When I came downstairs to tea, the sun was shining, and Mother, my grandmother, and my great-aunt were sitting outdoors with Miss Gwynne. I followed Bridie who was carrying the tea tray out to the veranda. My mother gestured for me to sit on a footstool beside her.

“So Alice, still on holiday—you must be missing Clodagh.”

With her first sentence, Miss Gwynne managed to offend me. While she had been in the north of Ireland and after it had seemed inevitable that she would become one of the family, I had considered the likelihood of being a bridesmaid when she married Uncle Hubert, and had gone so far as to prepare myself with a couple of suggestions as to how I might to the greatest advantage be dressed. Now I felt the wave of instant dislike that, looking back after all these years, I think Rosamund Gwynne managed to induce in most members of my family—with the presumable exception of my uncle. There were few people I wanted less to see than Clodagh, and, surely, it would have been more graceful—although equally improbable—to suggest that Clodagh was missing me.

I smiled politely, but said nothing.

“And that unusual woman—who was staying when we came to lunch—how is she?”

I resented not only her description of Sonia but also the amused superiority of her tone.

“Sonia?” Mother said. “I'm afraid we've rather lost touch.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Miss Gwynne said. “I was hoping to hear what she was up to now.”

“Yes,” Mother said. “I'm afraid I can't help you. I saw her one afternoon at the Dorchester and wanted to thank her for her kindness to Alice, but she was having tea with Lady Dartmouth and I didn't want to seem pushing.”

“Lady Dartmouth!” This was not good news for my adversary, but she recovered herself quickly. “The Dartmouths are relatives—distant—on my mother's side.”

“Oh, good. Well, I'm sure you'll see her there and you'll be able to catch up.”

It is to my mother's credit that she had made her fabrication on Sonia's behalf (whom she had never met, or if she had, I realized a moment later, entering my usual labyrinth of anxiety and confusion, it had been unbeknownst to her while Sonia was traveling under another name) seem less unlikely than what was probably only a slight exaggeration on Miss Gwynne's part.

“I hope Miss Critchley will be able to come on the twenty-third,” Grandmother said, the tennis party still in the front of her mind, as it would be until the guest list was completed. In front of us the tennis court, mowed, rolled, and the lines freshly painted by O'Neill, lay ready. The summer had been dry, and the court was baked hard and the yellowing grass in need of rain.

“Oh, yes, indeed, she is looking forward to it,” Rosamund Gwynne said, her friend's enthusiasm intended to flatter Grandmother. She did not understand that Grandmother was less seeking reassurance that Miss Critchley would be able to attend than airing her displeasure that no written response had yet arrived.

When Miss Gwynne had climbed into her dogcart and trotted briskly down the avenue, Grandmother returned to the table in the drawing room at which she wrote her letters. We sat in silence, Aunt Katie at one of her ritual games of patience, Mother watching as I played with Oonagh. After a little while, Grandmother stood up, two sheets of writing paper in her hands.

“The Bryces, of course, will have to be asked, but leave their invitation for a day or two. I've added Inez de Courcy, and she can bring that badly behaved little brother of hers to keep Alice company. And you should also write to Major and Mrs. Coughlan. You have already asked Rosamund's list from the garrison, all those young men?”

“Inez de Courcy?” Aunt Katie said, not questioning Grandmother but musing on the wit and originality of her choice. I assumed that since Jarvis was, to my delight, to be invited, Aunt Katie had given Grandmother a modified version of his behavior on the afternoon of my birthday party; certainly his discourtesy toward Oonagh must have been omitted. None of us remarked on the reinstatement of Major and Mrs. Coughlan on Grandmother's invitation list; we were relieved that the Bryces, whose invitation had been in doubt, were, after all, to be invited.

“She's a very pretty girl and the best tennis player in the neighborhood,” Grandmother said quietly, and we understood that she did not intend Rosamund Gwynne to have it all her own way.

 

GRANDMOTHER RETURNED
to her books and letters; Aunt Katie sent out the remaining invitations, then rolled up her sleeves and set to work on the preparations.

Aunt Katie had planned, ordered, and helped make tea for the Ballydavid tennis party every summer—except for the year before when it had been postponed following the sinking of the
Lusitania
and cancelled after the news of Uncle Sainthill's death. Each year her guests had been offered bridge rolls filled with egg and cress, cucumber sandwiches, and the Ballydavid sponge cake. They had been refreshed with lemonade, barley water, tea, or a light punch, the mixing of which Uncle William supervised. This year the tennis party would run along the same lines, but there would be ten or more additional guests: Rosamund Gwynne, Miss Critchley—the friend with whom Miss Gwynne was staying—the Bryces, Inez de Courcy and Jarvis, and half a dozen officers from the Waterford garrison. The Dean and his wife, on the other hand, had been pointedly excluded from Grandmother's list.

It was the inclusion of the young officers that prevented Aunt Katie taking the arrangements comfortably in her stride. A seemingly endless supply of perfectly presentable, young, unmarried men of good family arrived in Ireland, performed a modicum of military duty, and made themselves socially available. These young officers were a boon for the average hostess, especially for those with unmarried daughters. When one young officer married or transferred to other duties, a new one would immediately take his place. In time each officer, each man, each regiment would go to France; Ireland was for them a rural, unsophisticated, largely out-of-doors equivalent to the Duchess of Richmond's ball on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo.

While there were certainly nationalists who regarded these soldiers as an occupying military force, and others with husbands and sons fighting in France who thought the officers were having a comparatively easy war—many of those who put down the Easter Rising had been enjoying a day's racing at Fairyhouse when the General Post Office was seized—these were not views I ever heard spoken aloud. Officers were socially useful, and they had not previously been entertained at Ballydavid only because Grandmother had no young unmarried woman to launch into society and because she chose to limit her social circle to the county families she had known all her life.

Aunt Katie wasn't used to entertaining strange young men; if she had known these officers from their childhood, she would have been in her element. She would have produced their favorite boyhood food—a preference for gooseberry fool or treacle tart, even in a small boy, was never forgotten. But these young men were unknown to her, and she worried that they might expect the fare to be more sophisticated or in a greater quantity than she had planned to provide. Uncle William was consulted, but, apart from allowing that the Colonel (he hadn't been invited) should, if he stayed for any length of time after tea, be offered a whiskey and soda, he took the view that plying young men with rich food and strong drink was unnecessary and, if it were done simultaneously with encouraging them to play tennis in hot weather, an actively bad idea. Aunt Katie, who was unsure if he was hinting at the dangers of drunken and licentious soldiery, did not argue, which isn't to say that she was reassured.

The preparations began several weeks in advance. O'Neill tended the tennis court and painted the wrought iron chairs and tables that were arranged on either side of it. Aunt Katie told him how much butter and cream she would need and gave similar instructions to Pat, the gardener, about tomatoes and cucumbers. Bridie scrubbed the canvas deck chairs and left them to air in the sun. O'Neill's underlings clipped hedges and waged war on dandelions.

Even I was set to work at small pleasant tasks. Churning butter on a summer day fifty years ago is a dear memory. The sound of that day: the wind—the end of a gale blowing itself out—in the elms, the lazy clucking of hens, the bees around the lavender hedge, and butter churning in the dairy. And the smell: the scent of flowers beside the gate to the kitchen yard, bread and cakes baking in the kitchen, the slightly unpleasant damp smell of the dairy. I remember that afternoon as an interlude of pure innocence, my fear, guilt, and horror suspended. The Clancy boy, like Casement, was dead; his brother, my red-haired hero, had not, Bridie told me, visited either Mrs. O'Neill or the Ballydavid kitchen door since his brother had been shot; Tom O'Neill was maimed; the war in France was going badly; but that afternoon everyone, except possibly Grandmother, was caught up in the excitement of preparation for the tennis party and the ritual of the churn.

Noreen, related in some way I no longer remember to Bridie, was the butter maker. The wooden churn stood on iron supports, away from the cool marble slabs over which hung the skimming pans and ladles. Turning the handle for the necessary length of time became hard work, but it was not only to relieve Noreen that I was pressed into service; it was believed that sometimes a change of hand would bring about the heavier sound inside the churn that told us the butter was about to come.

When at last we heard and felt the butter become solid, I was sent to tell Mrs. O'Neill and the men in the farmyard there was fresh buttermilk. The men came in and were given large mugs of the cool liquid, and Mrs. O'Neill filled an earthenware jug to make soda bread. I took a taste from my own small cup; I didn't like it, but it was worth a sip or two to be part of the ritual.

 

THE TENNIS PARTY
was to be held on the twenty-third of August. Even without whatever local excitement may have been generated by the festivities at Ballydavid, the twenty-third was an historic day for Ireland. It was the day the clocks changed—not changed in the sense of the daylight saving plan, which had that year, as a wartime measure, been enacted. On the twenty-third of August 1916, the Irish people were robbed—as some of them felt—of twenty-five minutes as their clocks, for the first time, were set to Greenwich Mean Time. There had been some discussion at Ballydavid about whether the invitations should be issued for new time or old time and if it should be specified. In the end Uncle William said that, since it was a tennis party not a horse race, twenty-five minutes wouldn't signify one way or the other and that those who arrived first would play first and that tea would be served whenever it was ready and Aunt Katie chose to serve it.

Still, the day was felt to be special, and on the stroke of noon—the moment of enactment chosen by Grandmother rather than by the government in London—the hands of every clock at Ballydavid were moved to show twenty-five past twelve.

 

THE GREATER PART
of Grandmother's and Aunt Katie's guests were of necessity spectators rather than players. There was one tennis court, and the convention was that mixed doubles, each match one set, would be played while the remaining guests watched. Some of them had little interest in tennis; a few were probably even vague about the rules or how the game was scored, but, of the forty or so invited to Ballydavid, a couple of dozen turned up with tennis racquets and the expectation of a game.

It would not have been unreasonable to have expected some rudimentary plan as to who should be partnered with whom and that, at least after the first match (in which players would be determined by their time of arrival), some thought should have been given to the level of skill of those playing before they were allocated partners and sent onto the sunbaked court—not only for their own sake but for that of the spectators. But this aspect of the tennis party did not seem to have been anticipated cither by Aunt Katie, who thought the afternoon was about food and drink, or by Grandmother, who had thought no further than who should, and who should not, be included in the party.

After the clock-adjusting ceremony and the realization directly afterward that there was not quite as much time as had been previously imagined for a quick and unambitious cold lunch, I had been sent upstairs to rest. No one seriously expected me to sleep and I was happy to lie on my bed with a book. I was reading
Anna of the Five Towns.
The day before, after my initial disappointment that, although by the author of
The Grand Babylon Hotel,
the novel was not a tale of glamour and intrigue, I had become sympathetically engrossed in Anna's dreary life. But that afternoon I was too excited to concentrate.

The evening before, Bridie had washed my hair. She and I had gone with a large jug to the barrel in a corner of the stable yard into which rain water drained from the gutter. I had peered dubiously into the butt: Because of the drought, the water was low and didn't look as clean as I might have wished. But I didn't complain. My hair was long, and the washing and combing out of tangles afterward was a lengthy and a painful ordeal, and the rainwater was softer than the water pumped from the Ballydavid well.

The dress that I had been given for my birthday the summer before, the hem let down, was hanging, freshly laundered and starched, in my room. After my rest, as I put on my dress, I wondered where I should be for my birthday; it was not so far away. Then I thought that Jarvis de Courcy and his sister might be among the earlier guests, and I hurried downstairs.

The earliest guests were mostly old ladies. But soon the first game of the afternoon was underway: the curate, who had still to discover that his dean and the deans wife had not been invited; two middle-aged sisters who lived near Corballymore who came to Ballydavid once a year for this very gathering; and a young Waterford airman home on leave. Their game was the backdrop for the arrival of the greater part of the guests.