The Fox's Walk (37 page)

The old ladies sat, their large, shady hats protecting their faces, on the newly painted, wrought-iron garden seats. Some wore silk dresses in pale, lighthearted colors; for others, half-mourning was their concession to a festive occasion. Among them were women who were seen in society only once or twice a year. They were either too poor or too old to go about much and, not able themselves to entertain, were usually forgotten. The tennis party at Ballydavid might well have been the social highlight of their year. Grandmother had arranged for some of her guests to bring one or two of these old ladies, and O'Neill had been dispatched to drive two elderly, impoverished sisters, who lived in a cottage with a lovely garden in a neighborhood not along the route of anyone with a spare seat.

Overhearing discussions on this aspect of the guest list had given me much solitary thought, reinforced by
Anna of the Five Towns,
much of it on the subject of money and the fate of women who did not marry. I had the sense that a great change was coming, although I did not then know that each generation sees itself as both the end of one way of life and the beginning of another. Not only was the Great War going to change the world forever, but it would in all probability be followed by some form of Home Rule for Ireland. I was dimly aware that, when Grandmother died and Uncle Hubert married Rosamund Gwynne (although he still had not given an entirely satisfactory answer to any of my mothers increasingly pointed letters), I would no longer live at Ballydavid. I was too young to have much of a sense of the future and, apart from moments of fear and self-pity when I woke during the night, the inevitability of my expulsion from paradise did not much occupy my thoughts. Still less did I dwell on an alternate, less probable scenario, although I had been, since I'd overheard Mrs. Bryce's “heiress” allusion, dimly aware of its possibilities. In it Uncle Hubert did not marry Miss Gwynne, and after his death—in the distant future, although I knew that in the East sudden death from a variety of deadly diseases was in no way unusual—I became chatelaine of Ballydavid. I would have liked to live the rest of my life at Ballydavid, but I could not quite imagine myself, a few years older and a couple of inches taller, dressed in long black garments similar to those Grandmother wore, giving orders to O'Neill and Maggie.

Since I was about to be, as it were, disinherited, a different view of my future had to be generated. One that included marriage—the only alternative to a life spent looking after my parents in their old age, followed by genteel poverty and the hope that someone would be as thoughtful to me as Grandmother was to the less fortunate of the old ladies sitting on either side of the tennis court. Much in the way that the youths who had come to Mrs. Hitchcock's house carrying a petrol container had anticipated the burning of the big houses (the first of these houses would not go up in flames until 1919), I knew that after the war growing Irish nationalism would change the way the Anglo-Irish lived and, in time, remove much of their privilege. I already knew I would never marry an English soldier, and Jonathan, the boy who had spent the greater part of my birthday tea party under the dining-room table, was the only Protestant male of my age I had met during my year at Ballydavid.

Jarvis and his pretty, athletic sister arrived as the first of the matches limped toward a close, the curate and one of the sisters hopelessly outclassed by the other sister and the young airman on leave who, in happier days, had been awarded his blue at Cambridge.

“Alice, dear, why don't you take Jarvis away and play with him. And Inez, maybe you'll play in the next set———” Grandmother paused, glancing down the avenue. “Or the one after.”

Her glance seemed to suggest that she expected to see a player worthy of Inez de Courcy arrive, and we all followed her eye. I most eagerly since I was playing for time, wondering where I was supposed to take this terrifying boy to play and what exactly it was we were intended to play at. I had the sense that anything short of robbing a bank would seem a tame afternoon's sport to Jarvis. Fortunately, at that moment a painful grinding of gears announced a sporty open motorcar driving up the avenue. All eyes, few of them approving, watched an unknown young officer drive past the front door of the house, spraying gravel on the grass, and come to a stop in the shade of the large beech. Rosamund Gwynne, laughing, dusty, and clutching a straw hat almost secured by a long, wide motoring veil, stepped out of the car. Under her motoring coat she wore tennis clothes, and she carried a racquet.

How to entertain Jarvis was no longer an immediate problem; hands in his pockets, he strolled over to take a look at the car. I followed him. Miss Gwynne, crossing our path, failed to notice me.

“That's a Lancia,” Jarvis said to me, looking at it judiciously. “It should be able to do more than fifty miles an hour. Although probably not with yer man driving it.”

I said nothing but stood beside him, looking at the motorcar. It was green, a more interesting color for a car than the stately black of the Sunbeam, a vehicle I had never seen driven at more than fifteen miles an hour. With its canvas top laid back flat, and lacking even a windshield, the Lancia was open to the elements. There was a good deal of brass trimming around the radiator and headlamps. I could imagine that it was capable of tremendous speed.

Despite the novelty of the Lancia, Jarvis remained the center of my attention. It seemed unlikely, though possible, that he would spend the afternoon inspecting the motorcar. I feared that he would jump into the driver's seat and simulate driving it; fortunately these were the days before the self-starter, so there was no question of Jarvis making a sudden Mr. Toad-like move and the Lancia disappearing into the Ballydavid woods, leaving me to explain. I began to remember that, however heroic Jarvis seemed to me, being responsible for him was exhausting.

After a minute or so, Jarvis having done nothing more provocative than stroll around the Lancia and kick its tires, I again became aware of the progress of the party behind me. The first set was finished, and Grandmother was organizing Inez and Rosamund to play in the second match. Rosamund Gwynne was—if she were indeed to marry into our family—rather too much the center of attention. The noisy arrival of the car, her companion, her loud and unattractive laughter now followed by the demand that Captain Blaine should be her doubles partner, were earning her disapproving looks from the old ladies. Inez, well able to take care of herself and better acquainted with the conventions of provincial Irish life, summoned the Resident Magistrate—a middle-aged bachelor whom I recognized from the meet at Herald's Cross, the owner of the horse with the red ribbon on its tail—from the shade in which he was standing with some other men, smoking to keep away the midges. He arrived at Inez's side as Grandmother glanced around randomly for a partner for her, and a moment or two later all four were on the court.

Grandmother was now free to greet Mrs. Coughlan, to whom she had not spoken a word since the day I had run away from Ballydavid and found myself a favored guest in her house. Mrs. Coughlan was dramatically dressed, but as I remember it, not in a contemporary fashion. There was always a suggestion of a costume party in her choice of clothing; it seems to me now that at some point in her life—most likely before Major Coughlan married her and brought her home to Ireland—she had admired a picture of an eighteenth-century portrait in an illustrated paper and decided that, if she ever found herself in a position to dress in such a manner, she would. Which is not to say that, when the opportunity presented itself, she abandoned such other dramatic possibilities as her crimson mourning dress or the widow's weeds she had worn for Kitchener.

I wondered if I should say how-do-you-do to Mrs. Coughlan, but guests were arriving all at once, among them the Bryces. Aunt Katie indicated my presence to Clodagh, and she and Miss Kingsley came to join Jarvis and me beside the Lancia.

Clodagh and I greeted each other with tepid enthusiasm—moral cowardice on my part and, I think, an already ingrained conventional streak on hers. Jarvis glanced at her and said nothing, although he answered some question Miss Kingsley asked him about the car politely enough.

“Mrs. Martyn said we should go and play rounders on the other lawn,” Clodagh said. Her voice seemed unenthusiastic, and I remembered how deliberately she could refuse to be entertained.

“Did she say we had to?” Jarvis asked.

“No.” Clodagh was startled. “She thought we might like to.”

“Well,” Jarvis said, “then I'll just stay here and watch my sister win the Brits.”

“‘Beat', I think you mean, Jarvis,” Miss Kingsley said. “One wins a race, one beats one's opponent.”

I glanced at Miss Kingsley and saw she was going to correct only Jarvis's choice of words. She sat down beside Jarvis on the grass at the top of the incline that enclosed the tennis court and the area in which the spectators were sitting. We had the equivalent of balcony seats and the advantage of a cool breeze.

For the first time in the annals of the Ballydavid tennis party, the attention of the guests was completely focused on the game. The symbolic aspects of the match were apparent to everyone, although what it symbolized may have varied slightly, depending on the spectator. From where we were sitting, it seemed clear enough. The brash, unquestioningly self-confident interlopers were being challenged by a member of a no longer powerful old Irish Catholic family whose children showed a tendency to revert to a former primitive natural state, and by a representative of the Crown who, although charged with upholding the law and supervising the dispensation of justice, understood his place in the subtle hierarchy of Irish society. Major Spenser, the RM, lived a quiet life, largely devoted to sport, in a plain, gray, famously cold house on the Dungarvan road. He was a good fifteen years older than Captain Blaine, but he had kept fit and knew how to pace himself.

Rosamund Gwynne played well; I was surprised how well. I had expected her to be less physical. I had, I suppose, thought her strength to be that of the will. We watched the game silently. Clodagh, I assume, was on the side of Rosamund—her mothers friend, a woman who made no bones of preferring her to me—and her partner, upholders of the standards in which she believed and which, if they lasted, would benefit her. Jarvis, of course, supported his sister, but with an intensity I would not have expected. Miss Kingsley and Mother, who drifted over during the second game, remained on the surface neutral, applauding volleys and the better shots of both sides, but I knew they wanted Inez and the RM to win and, even more, for Rosamund Gwynne to lose.

In Mother's wake came Noreen, sent by Aunt Katie with a rug for us to sit on, although it had been a good week since the grass had last approached dampness, and, soon after refreshments had been served to the more formally seated spectators below us, Bridie brought us a tray loaded with tomato sandwiches, cake, and lemonade. I remember the next hour and a half, sitting on the rug in the sun with Mother and Jarvis, watching the match, as one of my life's moments of pure uncomplicated happiness. I was comfortable beside my gentle mother and happy in Jarvis's unspoken approbation—happy with the picnic and the warm summer afternoon and the excitement of being part of a festive grown-up party. I was proud of Ballydavid at a moment when the house and household was shown at its old-fashioned hospitable finest.

This memory marks for me the beginning of loss: an hour or two on a sunny afternoon of pure happiness of a kind we would never again find. I am not yet sixty years old, but of that afternoon Clodagh is the only one that I know still to be alive; we, perhaps because of that, still exchange unenthusiastic Christmas cards. The happiness of the moment is not even an entirely accurate memory; much had already been lost. Although I remember Grandmother and Mother both taking pleasure in the party, they had already lost my uncle Sainthill and pure happiness could never again exist for them. The Great War had taken him; when it ended—a little more than two years after that August afternoon—the way we lived would change forever with the Anglo-Irish War, a time popularly and euphemistically referred to as the Troubles, a time of assassination and the burning of houses. Then would come the Civil War. There was already a foreshadowing of these unhappy times in the isolated incidents of violence—or the threats of violence—that occurred in the wake of the Rising. Even if all that had not lain before us, even without a second great world war to slaughter the finest of another generation of young men, the best it seems to me we can, even in the happiest of times, hope for is gradual loss.

Inez and the RM prevailed. It was a popular victory, although, apart from Jarvis, the spectators were too polite to appear partisan. I don't think that Rosamund and her partner were beaten only by their opponents' greater experience of the uneven local court. The two couples were more evenly matched than was usually the case at Grandmother's tennis parties. Rosamund may also have become gradually aware, as the excitement of the drive from Waterford in the open Lancia wore off, that her appearance on the court with the dashing young officer was not admired by the intolerant and judgmental old cats who were watching. Her tennis dress, the height of fashion in England and even perhaps in closer Dublin, was shorter and more revealing of the outlines of her attractive young figure than County Waterford was used to; it seemed immodest beside that of Inez, by local standards a modern young woman, who wore a skirt long enough to reveal only her slim ankles and buckskin shoes. The old ladies thought Rosamund fast. I now think she was, instead, arrogant and had seen no reason to sacrifice the fun of flirtation and attention to make a good impression on a bunch of shabby old ladies. Rosamund was from a good family, but a good English family. It cut less ice in County Waterford than she supposed.

She didn't, I think, imagine that the old ladies' opinion would make any difference to her life, and, as it turned out, she was right. But it makes me wonder how much she really cared for my Uncle Hubert. Was her less than discreet behavior that afternoon merely the manifestation of high spirits? Or was she, without Uncle Hubert completely hooked, prepared to entertain the possibility of another choice? Or was she merely flirting?