The Fox's Walk Read online

  “Katie,” Grandmother said in the polite tone she used to give domestic instructions to her sister, “please tell Bridie to dust Oonagh with some Keating’s Powder.”

  Aunt Katie started to rise; the bell pull was on her side of the fireplace. But Grandmother waved her back to her seat.

  “Later,” she said.

  As though it were a signal, Mrs. Coughlan rose from her seat, and after a moment her husband got up also. Good-byes were exchanged while I stood w to one side. Aunt Katie accompanied the guests to the front door. As Mrs. Coughlan passed me, she paused.

  “I hope you will come and see me one day,” she said.

  As the door in the hall closed, Grandmother turned to my mother.

  “Mary,” she said, “ring for tea.”

  BETWEEN THE AFTERNOON of my first memory—Oonagh and Mrs. Coughlan and the tea tray withheld until after the Coughlans’ departure—and my next memory, this one not isolated but part of the jumbled montage I recall of early childhood, one chapter in the history of the world ended and another began.

  The summer months of 1914 before the outbreak of war were the last moments before everything changed forever. There was no sense that the world was about to embark on the most terrible war ever fought. Instead, in London, there was an atmosphere of uncomfortable adjustment, and, in Ireland, a time of uneasy anticipation. My parents, both of course born during the long reign of Queen Victoria (by then it was unlikely there was anyone alive who could remember a time before she had ascended the throne) had adapted—happily, I think—to the freer and more worldly atmosphere of Edwardian society. Now, the popular, diplomatic, sensible, and reassuringly human king was dead; and society had once again changed, becoming a little dull with a less exuberant monarch on the throne.

  In Ireland Home Rule seemed imminent; the question was when it would come and at what cost. My family waited and watched; we knew change was inevitable and hoped it would be peaceful and not immediate. Most of the Anglo-Irish tried not to think about it, and continued their lives as though their comfortable world would last forever. But there were exceptions.

  Two men, both Protestant and from privileged backgrounds, felt a greater sympathy to the nationalist movement than they did loyalty to their own class and upbringing. At a glance, Roger Casement and Erskine Childers might have appeared similar. Both had served England with courage and distinction, both had received public recognition for their achievements; each loved Ireland with a patriotism intense enough to give his life in the cause of Irish independence. Both were executed: one hanged in an English prison, the other shot at a barracks in Dublin. The path each took to his patriot’s grave could not have been more different.

  Erskine Childers was the author of The Riddle of the Sands, a novel published in 1903 that has been read ever since as a literate thriller particularly attractive to anyone fond of sailing. At the time it was published it was also—and this was Childers’ primary intention when he wrote it—a warning to England of her vulnerability to invasion from the North Sea should she engage in war with Germany.

  Childers’ wife, Molly, was an American from a good Boston family. She had been bedridden as a child and was never again to walk without a stick or to be free from pain. She adored her husband and loved sailing, and did not allow her disability to limit her more than was absolutely necessary. Childers’ childhood had also, in a different way, been painful. When he was six years old, his father died of tuberculosis. His mother had chosen to conceal her husband’s condition and to nurse him herself. After his death she contracted the highly infectious and, at that time, incurable disease and had to be separated from her children for the rest of her life. Erskine and his brother, Robert, were brought up by relatives in Ireland. As was usual at that time in Anglo-Irish families, the boys were educated in England. Childers served in the British Army during the Boer War and afterward became a hero in England for his gathering of the material—crucial to that country’s intelligence—contained in The Riddle of the Sands.

  A forty-foot ketch, the Asgard, had been given to Erskine and Molly Childers by her parents as a wedding present. On a July afternoon in 1914, just before the outbreak of war, the Asgard beat about Dublin Bay, waiting for a signal to dock at Howth; she was so laden with guns that she drew eighteen inches more water than she usually would.

  With Childers aboard the Asgard were 900 rifles and 25,000 rounds of ammunition, and there were a further 600 rifles aboard the Kelpie, an accompanying yacht. Hardly enough to arm a revolution, but that was not Childers’ intention. The guns for the Irish Volunteers were intended as a show of Southern Irish nationalist strength and as an answer to the—also illegal—April landing at Larne of 30,000 rifles for the Unionist Ulster Volunteers.

  The crew of the Asgard—apart from two Donegal fishermen, ignorant until the last moment of the purpose of the journey—were Protestants sympathetic to the Southern Irish nationalist movement. Two of them were women. Despite a difficult and potentially dangerous voyage, there was an essentially English amateurism about the whole expedition. Gordon Shephard, a pilot on leave from the newly formed Royal Flying Corps, was at least an experienced yachtsman, although his attitude to their mission at times seemed less than serious. Mary Spring Rice, an inexperienced sailor but the innovator of the gunrunning scheme, kept a diary. In it she described Shephard’s tendency to sleep late in the mornings and his wish to go ashore for a decent meal. The tone of Mary Spring Rice’s account of the expedition is playful, but they all—Shephard the only one not to suffer from seasickness—made the twenty-three-day voyage and, during the night and while at sea, transferred the entire cargo of rifles and boxes of ammunition from the German tug to the Asgard.

  As Childers and his tired crew strained their eyes for the signal to dock, Sir Roger Casement, in New York, waited anxiously for news of the success or failure of the Asgard's mission.

  Roger Casement, an Anglo-Irish Protestant, had been knighted for work in South America where he had exposed, as he previously had done in the Belgian Congo, virtual slavery and other atrocities in the rubber trade. Since his resignation from the British Consular Service several years before, he, like Erskine Childers, had espoused the Irish nationalist cause.

  The arms were unloaded to the waiting Volunteers at Howth on the afternoon of July 26th. On the 5th of August war was declared. On the 17th Childers received a telegram from the Admiralty telling him that his offer of service had been accepted; he left that night for London.

  By then Casement, under a pseudonym and having shaved off his beard to alter his appearance, was on his way to Germany where he hoped to raise an Irish brigade to fight for Ireland against the British. With him traveled Adler Christensen, the man who was to become his nemesis.

  THE FIRST SPRING of the war Uncle Hubert came home on leave from China. I was seven years old. My brother Edward had, eighteen months earlier and unannounced to me, arrived to share the nursery quarters. One day he wasn’t there; the next he was. As far as I can remember, I accepted his presence without question and resigned myself to the inconvenience of living in close proximity to a baby with a loud voice and demanding habits.

  Uncle Hubert was an official in the Chinese Maritime Customs. Although staffed at the senior level by foreigners (over half of them British) the customs service—which was administered with extraordinary efficiency and integrity—answered to Peking. Originally the Chinese Imperial Customs, the service had been created in 1860 and, after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, was used to collect indemnities and to provide the Ch’ing Empire with about a third of its revenues. Over the years, the Customs had become a bureaucracy that, among other things, oversaw the postal services and waterways, and played a part in foreign affairs. Contemporary reservations about the connection between the Chinese Maritime Customs and Britain’s morally dubious role in the Opium Wars were not shared by Uncle Hubert’s family at Ballydavid.

  My uncle’s job was a reserved occupation that exempted him from military service
. The collection of revenues—mainly on salt—to repay a loan made in 1913 by England, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan was considered important enough to keep a young man who spoke fluent Chinese off the field of battle.

  Uncle Hubert had written two letters to his mother, each telling of a death. The first he sent after the death of a baby that had lived only two weeks—the letter that announced its birth arrived after it was already dead—in the second he told her that his wife, weakened by childbirth and grief, had not been strong enough to fight off a sudden recurrence of fever. Grandmother and Aunt Katie went into mourning, although the difference in dress—both were in permanent half-mourning for their respective husbands—would have been noticeable only to those initiated into the rigid but scarcely visible rules by which we all lived. My father, who liked his wife to look pretty and welcoming, put his foot down when my mother took her black dresses out of mothballs: he saw no need for the new mother of a healthy little boy to wear mourning for a sister-in-law she had never met.

  Uncle Hubert had six months’ home leave every five years. Apart from a visit to Ballydavid and his mother and aunt, he spent this time in London. He used to come to tea; the timing of his visit, I now suspect, planned so he could spend time with his sister while my father was absent and to leave his evenings free for more amusing or livelier social arrangements.

  My uncle was of greater interest to me in London than he would have been if I had met—or, more accurately, been shown or presented to—him at Ballydavid. The shape and constrictions of a London childhood made any departure from the dull and repetitive cycle of my days memorable. The rules at Ballydavid fell far short of anarchy, but there was a physical freedom that made me aware of the constraints of life at our house in Palace Gardens Terrace. The house was not small; by London standards it was open, light, and spacious, but the nursery quarters on the top floor were where Edward, Nanny, and I spent the greater part of our day. When we went for our afternoon walk, I was not allowed to stray from my place beside Edward’s pram; and, if I had been permitted to do so, I could have wandered only along the paved paths, the grass and flower beds on either side a prohibited area, marked by a low edging of green-painted iron hoops. The clothing I was buttoned into before leaving the house restricted any spontaneous expression of energy or imagination—any possibility of play. Even in summer I wore black stockings and tightly buttoned boots; when the weather was cold, I also wore a stiff high-collared coat, gloves, and buttoned gaiters. I wore a hat throughout the year; it varied with the season, but it usually had an elastic band under the chin.

  Uncle Hubert fascinated me. I had been shown in the schoolroom adas where he lived when he was not home on leave, and my mother had traced with her finger the course of the voyage he had taken back to England. He was the eldest of three children and treated my mother with a teasing affection that both startled me and revealed a completely new aspect of her nature. I already knew that my mother loved Sainthill, her younger brother, to an extent that would not allow her feelings for Uncle Hubert to be described as more than a very strong affection. How did I know? I now think that because I was an eldest child, most of my instinct and a good deal of time and energy went into working out how the world—at that stage exemplified by my family and our household—worked. I already understood the realities of the nursery and had made a good start on the kitchen. Childhood is a time when one is presented with the pieces of a large and complicated jigsaw puzzle. I struggled to fit the interlocking parts together without knowing what the eventual completed picture was supposed to look like. And the picture changed with each new observation I made. Soon after Edward was born, I realized it was a puzzle he would never solve on his own, and I made it my business to inform him of some important aspects and to shield him from others.

  Uncle Huberts cigarette case was a good example of a piece of the puzzle that I recognized as significant without knowing, or having any way of knowing, its import. I still remember that case and the way his graceful fingers took a cigarette from it, closed its silver lid, and tapped the cigarette lightly before striking a match. It was not until my uncle Sainthill’s personal effects were returned to his mother during an irony-filled Christmas visit by a fellow officer that I discovered the significance of these cigarette cases both as a gift and as a charm against the evil forces personified by a German bullet or shrapnel. The slim metal case, slightly curved to follow the outline of the body, was inscribed—usually by a woman—and kept in the breast pocket of the uniform of the man whose heart it was intended to protect. Did it ever save a life? Could it save a life? I don’t know. And without knowing this, either, I imagine that the officers—and surely for so many reasons this was a phenomenon only among the younger ones—knew the cases would provide little protection but felt safer having them anyway.

  Uncle Hubert: his moustache, his cigarette case (my father was clean shaven, regarding facial hair as an affectation and tobacco as a waste of money), his bantering tone with my mother, her difficulty in knowing what was a tease and what was not, and how he enjoyed testing her gullibility and humor. I remember, in particular, a Russian woman whom Uncle Hubert brought to visit.

  Edward and I were with my mother in the drawing room. Edward, sweet and fat, sat on Mother’s knee, and I perched on the edge of the sofa, brushed, curled, and uncomfortably dressed for tea. I don’t know if my mother was expecting Uncle Hubert in the sense that an engagement had been made, but she was ready for him or any other visitor who might call.

  The Irish maid announced Uncle Hubert.

  “Mr. Bagnold to see you, ma’am, and Madame—” she hesitated as though she might attempt the name but changed her mind “—and Madam.”

  Uncle Hubert stood back at the door to allow a woman to enter. Although not as exotic as Mrs. Coughlan, of whom I still quite often thought, this was a creature who bore an encouraging similarity to her.

  “Mary,” my uncle said, “this is Madame Tchnikov.”

  My mother, putting Edward down on the hearthrug, rose slowly and approached the visitor. I could see that the time she was taking was designed to allow my uncle to add something—an explanation of who this strange woman was, of why she was accompanying my uncle, above all of why she was being introduced to my mother. But Uncle Hubert merely smiled; he looked as though he had arrived with a treat—something on the order of an ornately decorated tin of sweet biscuits. I, at least, was appreciative.

  Tea was poured; small talk followed. The conversation remained general and superficial. Nevertheless, by the time my uncle and Madame Tchnikov left, we had gathered that she had lived in the Balkans, that she was of aristocratic birth, a refugee (someone close to her—not specified but referred to as he—had been political), and a widow. And that she had “suffered.” I was curious to see how my mother would describe the visit to my father when he came home. Most events I witnessed gained a valuable dimension when I heard them described to someone else. I remained the epitome of a well-behaved little girl, silent and without fidgeting, in order to hear what my mother would say. I could see that she was confused and upset.

  My mother was sweet natured and self-effacing. She was quiet, gentle, soft, and affectionate. Of the few times she had stood up for herself, the most dramatic was when she’d slipped out the side door of her parents’ house in Philimore Gardens to meet my waiting father. They had gone to a Registry Office where she had married him. It now seems possible her action may be more an illustration of his will than of hers. My grandmother, who had had dreams and ambitions, was even more upset at the elopement of her beautiful daughter with a brash young New Zealander come to seek his fortune in England than was her husband, the General. My grandfather, though initially angry and disappointed, was at least aware of my father’s strength of character and courage; he, himself, had had to make his own way. The elopement was now far enough in the past for the marriage to have become part of the pattern of our family, but my mother lived every day with a consequence for which she was enti
rely unsuited: a cultural—in this instance not only a euphemism for class—difference between her and my father, the difference more pronounced when witnessed by her friends and members of her family.

  So Uncle Hubert was not alone in being more comfortable visiting my mother before my father came home; my mother was also happier spending time with her brother while her husband was absent. Now Uncle Hubert had introduced someone of unknown antecedents into her drawing room; someone who might be a most courageous and deserving refugee but who might also be what my mother called an “adventuress.” And since my mother had given up the right to pronounce on unsuitable alliances when she had eloped with my father, she did not feel she could question Uncle Hubert’s choice. What she could ask, or rather attempt to ascertain, was to what extent this unfortunate creature—by this time my mother had noticed dark roots below Madame Tchnikov’s huge mound of red hair and color from her lip salve on her cup—had got her claws into Uncle Hubert.

  My father, appealed to when he came home, remarked that Hubert had always given the impression of being well able to take care of himself. Even I could tell this offhand remark was intended to put an end to the subject. My father tended to be unsympathetic to problems peculiar to the privileged.

  “It’s just———” my mother said slowly, as she searched for the right euphemism, “in a few months he will be going back to China—for five years—and he doesn’t have a wife. Maybe he’s lonely———”

  My father laughed.

  “Do you think there aren’t women in China?” he asked.

  My mother drew in her breath, remembered my presence, and I was sent upstairs for my bath. But not before I had gathered, while not understanding the implications, that my father was suggesting for a man on his own, a beautiful, young, and undemanding Chinese woman might be more appealing than a shopworn and desperate Russian refugee. Or, I inferred, possibly even a suitable young Englishwoman of the right background.