The Fox's Walk (9 page)

But there was another way that information arrived, a Gaelic form of bush telegraph. Sometimes this news was local; sometimes it came from as far away as Dublin; sometimes it was secret (secret in the sense that it was communicated gradually and by hints); sometimes it was what we would read in the newspaper the following day.

The first rumor of a disaster—brought by a stableboy returning with a horse from the blacksmiths and not given much credence—came during the early evening. It was followed by others after I had been taken up to bed.

The evening was still light and, aware of the excitement below, I could not sleep. Bridie, who had been turning down the old ladies' beds, catching sight of me peeping around the door of my room, told me there had been a terrible shipwreck. The horrors of war had come closer to Ballydavid than any of us could have imagined. The
Lusitania
had sunk only seventy miles away, just out of sight of the Irish coast, torpedoed by a German submarine in the full sunshine we had seen over the sea on our way back from my unofficial visit to the Coughlans.

The liner, flying the American flag (America was then still a neutral nation), sank in circumstances that should have made possible the survival of the greater part of her passengers and crew. She went down quickly, only eleven miles off the Old Head of Kinsale in three hundred feet of water. The sea was not so cold that those who survived the explosion need have died of exposure for several hours. There were enough lifeboats for everyone, but the angle at which the ship tilted prevented the launching of those on the starboard side, and several of the lifeboats that could be lowered were, in the panic, launched so ineptly that the passengers already in them were spilled into the water. Half those on board perished, the number proportionately equal between passengers and crew.

Immediately after the explosion, fishing boats set out from Kinsale and, shortly afterward, larger boats were launched from Queenstown, some miles farther east. These boats at first rescued those clinging to wreckage and later carried back the bodies. The dead were laid out in lines on the quays; the resources for caring for the survivors were stretched far beyond the capacities of the small fishing villages such as Kinsale, or even Queenstown, the port adjacent to Cork, where transatlantic liners—although not the
Lusitania,
which was making for Liverpool—sometimes called. For weeks later, the tide would wash up bodies on the beaches and rocks along the coast.

At the time of the shipwreck, horror and outrage at the tragedy prevented questions being asked, but not for long. When they were, too many were unsatisfactorily answered. The Admiralty had set out a procedure designed to minimize the danger from submarines: full speed ahead and a zigzag course. The captain of the
Lusitania
had taken a bearing on the Old Head of Kinsale and steered a direct course at a speed that did not employ all the boilers, in what was afterwards described as an economy measure. Unanswered, also, was the question of the second explosion. Most eyewitnesses described only one torpedo, and the inference was that something stored below deck had exploded when detonated by the torpedo. Since the
Lusitania
had been flying the neutral American flag, arms or weapons of war would have been contraband, and she would have forfeited the protection of her neutral status. If this had been the case, the German U-boat that had sunk her would, under the articles of war, have been, however horribly, technically within her rights. Since one hundred and twenty-four citizens of the neutral United States had died that afternoon, these unanswered questions were of some importance.

By the time I said my prayers and climbed into bed, the first fishing boats would have reached the lifeboats rowing toward land, and as I lay in bed, listening to the rooks noisily settling down for the night, fishermen were dragging cold, shocked, sodden survivors from the water.

Twelve hundred men, women, and children perished in the disaster. Some are buried at Saint Multose, the twelfth-century church in Kinsale; some in small, close-by parish cemeterics; others at Queenstown where a long grave was dug and coffins marked with chalk—some with names, others only with numbers—were arranged like a macabre puzzle. Many of the dead, their bodies disregarded while the living were rescued, were never found and drifted or sank, eventually eaten by fishes; others, killed by the explosion or trapped inside the liner, went down with it; a few, already in the water, were sucked down when the ship, fourteen minutes after the second explosion, released her last breath and, with a sigh, sank to the ocean floor.

 

THE TENNIS PARTY
was to have taken place in the second week in June, rather earlier than was usual for an outdoor entertainment; it was now postponed until the middle of July. Also postponed was Grandmother's intended snub to the Coughlans; deprived of immediate revenge and wound up for social intercourse, she became restless. One morning, she announced that Nicholas Rowe was coming to tea—the announcement not an invitation to the rest of her family.

Nicholas Rowe was a neighboring strong farmer with openly nationalist sympathies; he was said to be the local head of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood. When he came to tea, once Bridie had carried in the heavy tray, the door to the drawing room was closed. It is difficult to imagine what he and Grandmother talked about. Their opinions, I should have thought, were not only diametrically opposed but lacking any common premise upon which to base an argument or discussion. Tea itself would have underlined the difference in their assumptions. For Grandmother, tea took place at half past four in the drawing room. A maid wearing a neat apron and a small cap carried in a tray, on it a silver teapot, cucumber sandwiches, and whatever cake Maggie had baked that day—a light sponge with a raspberry jam filling, perhaps. Nicholas Rowe, whom I now realize owned more land than Grandmother and was materially better off than she was, would have been served tea at six o'clock on his own kitchen table. The only refreshment in common would have been the tea they drank, his being a good deal stronger and without a slice of lemon offered as an alternative to milk. Tea as a meal took the place of dinner, so, although the main meal of the day for the Rowes, confusingly also called dinner, took place at midday, tea would have been substantial enough to see them through to breakfast. Cake also would have been served at his meal, but it was cake in the rural Irish sense of the word: a round flat unleavened cake of soda bread.

Grandmother was the daughter of one man, and the widow of another who had both distinguished themselves in the service of the British Empire. It would be unreasonable—especially at that moment in history—to expect her to question the merits of the Empire or of its colonial history. Although at that moment a number of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy were embracing the image of a glorified Hibernia, my grandmother was not among them.

Nicholas Rowe would have seen that the end of direct English government of Ireland was in sight, the statute for Home Rule already on the books in Westminster and theoretically waiting only for the war to end for it to be enacted. He was a man who had managed to prosper under what he would have considered a foreign government, but that did not prevent him holding extreme nationalist views.

What were the subjects Grandmother and Nicholas Rowe would have found to agree upon? I think they might have argued about history and morality but would have agreed pragmatically, unemotionally, and with a not overexamined respect for habit and tradition that any alteration to the delicate equilibrium of the farming and agricultural economy and culture would have unforeseen dangers. Both of them knew how the world worked and how dangerous theory, sudden change, and sentimentality could be; the sentimentality in particular would have been distasteful to both. (Sir Roger Casement, still unhappily and ineffectually in Germany, had maddened Devoy, the hardheaded Clan na Gael leader in New York, by his habit of referring to Ireland as “the Poor Old Woman”; Grandmother and Nicholas Rowe would have been equally appalled and for not dissimilar reasons.) Both knew that the beliefs they held exacted a high price and the occasional extreme sacrifice.

My grandmother's insistence on observing conventions had prevented me from considering whether she had had any experience of the tragic or dramatic. I imagined her life had always been as it then was, rigid and uneventful. I was too young and lacked the imagination and information to understand that experience, as well as observation, had taught her that the tragic and unthinkable might occur at any moment. As a young army wife in India, her husband away on a tour of duty, her first child, a little girl, had suddenly developed a fever. Grandmother, with only servants to provide help or comfort, had waited through the night for a doctor summoned from a distant station. He arrived too late; the child, who had been happily playing on the grass in front of the house that morning, was already dead. Grandmother, young and heartbroken, had understood that, although the loss of her child was the single most horrible thing she could imagine, it was in no way unusual.

And Nicholas Rowe. His name tells me he was of Norman origin; like many of the Catholic Irish, his family was descended—the ancestral blood over the years somewhat diluted—from the tough, hard-minded, and energetic Normans who had in the twelfth century invaded Ireland and, almost simultaneously, adapted to and been assimilated into the life and customs of that country. It would be naïve to imagine that the Rowes, while holding their Catholic beliefs, had managed to retain or replace their land without compromise, hardship, sacrifice.

Once or twice a year, Grandmother and Nicholas Rowe reached over the chasm of class, religion, and political thought. On one side, the waning Protestant Ascendancy and on the other, the understated strength of the Catholic farmer. I think Grandmother and Nicholas Rowe each may have been, for the other, the only adversary with whom it was worth arguing—or, it is possible, negotiating. But what did they talk about? They could not have spent the whole of each visit debating the current and future political situation. Crops, the families, and the welfare of their employees—a form of enlightened feudalism might have been one of the few beliefs they shared. After all this time, I am still unable to imagine their conversations. Or at least the conversations they had in the summer of 1915. Later, there would be plenty for them to talk about—a time when their friendship, if friendship it indeed was, would have allowed them to help, or possibly endanger, each other, a time when it was not always easy to tell the difference. Or perhaps theirs was only an inarticulate form of intelligent friendship, like two old men who, without much in common, meet regularly and wordlessly to play chess.

My predilection for eavesdropping was hampered by a strong streak of timidity. The afternoon of Nicholas Rowe's visit, I was loitering in the no man's land of the passage that ran behind the drawing room. Parallel to the front of the house, it led from a dining-room service door on the east side of the house all the way to the back stairs on the west. The doors on one side led to the kitchen, butler's pantry, and a small room next to the side door where we left our muddy boots and wet coats; on the other side lay the dining room, the drawing room, and access to the hall and front stairs. I was listening and watching, scurrying along the corridor whenever I heard a sound, since I was reluctant to be asked to account for myself and sent off to do something that was supposed to be improving. I knew instinctively that this was not a day to sidle into the kitchen, the maids far less likely to be colorfully and imaginatively indiscreet about a Roman Catholic neighbor than they were about the affairs of one of Grandmother's heretic visitors.

After a long and uneventful wait, there came, simultaneously, the sound of the kitchen door opening and of someone descending the front stairs. Cut off from the bolt hole of the back stairs, I quietly opened the door to the empty dining room and slipped in. The advantage of my position now was that I could spy on the hall from a room no one was likely to visit; the disadvantage was that, if someone did happen to come in, I had not even the flimsiest reason for being there. I could no longer keep an eye on the kitchen to drawing room connection—it seemed likely that Grandmother had rung for more hot water—but now I could hear someone hurrying downstairs and then footsteps crossing the stone flags of the hall. There was a pause, and I considered opening the door to the hall a crack to see what was happening, but a crunch of feet on gravel drew me to the window. A boy, adolescent but not fully grown, was walking down the avenue away from the house; I did not recognize him, but his flat cap and shabby clothing suggested that he had come on an errand. I was still puzzling about why he would have come to the front door rather than the kitchen entrance when a combination of muted sounds drew me back to the door to the hall. I heard a moan, as though an old animal were in pain, and the rustling of clothing that meant the presence of either Aunt Katie or Grandmother, a muffled thud, and another moan.

It was the silence that followed the second moan that made me carefully open the door enough to see what was happening.

Aunt Katie lay crumpled over the lower steps of the stairs; Grandmother, followed by Nicholas Rowe, was coming out of the drawing room. They seemed to move very slowly, as though they were floating in one of my dreams. Grandmother eventually reached the foot of the stairs and crouched beside her sister, Nicholas Rowe standing to one side. It seemed to me that they were frozen in a dark and strangely beautiful tableau. It was one of those moments when time hesitates before everything is changed forever. Aunt Katie, even I could see, was unconscious. Grandmother's immobile back was to me; Nicholas Rowe's was the only face that I could see; it lacked all expression. I, too, remained motionless, as detail after detail of the tableau became clearer. The crumpled piece of paper in my great-aunt's fist, the light of the spring day from the open hall door, the ticking of the grandfather clock.