The Fox's Walk Read online

  Mother did not, to my disappointment, again require my company on the days when Uncle Hubert brought this exotic creature to call. After awhile, my uncle stopped bringing Madame Tchnikov to the house. When he came again on his own, he seemed to suggest, although nobody could ask—actually my father would have had no difficulty with the question but still showed no inclination to become involved—that he had brought Madame Tchnikov rather as a novelty that would interest and amuse my family as much as it did him. My mother breathed a sigh of relief. Rather prematurely as it turned out.

  One damp April afternoon, as my mother was sitting in the drawing room, the maid announced Madame Tchnikov—Madame Tchnikov following close on her heels so there could be no question of my mother being not at home. Mother was at a disadvantage; she did not know if Madame Tchnikov was visiting at Uncle Huberts suggestion or if he had perhaps arranged to meet her at Palace Gardens Terrace.

  My mother, flustered, rose to greet her guest and glanced at me. I avoided her eye, fairly sure she would not insult Madame Tchnikov by immediately removing her daughter. And I knew, too, that Mother, guiltily, welcomed my presence as an inhibiting influence on the conversation.

  “Mara,” my mother said, “how nice. Is Hubert joining us later?”

  “I don’t know,” Madame Tchnikov said. It was not possible to tell from the way she spoke whether she was unsure of the exact nature of Uncle Hubert’s intentions for the rest of the afternoon or if she was declaring complete ignorance of his whereabouts and plans. It was not possible to rephrase the question, and my mother had no way of knowing if her guest was the vanguard of a fraternal visit or if she was acting as a free agent.

  I, at least, was pleased to see Madame Tchnikov. She swept me up into a dramatic embrace. She smelled of powder and not quite fresh scent. And of a dark, mysterious femininity that I had never before encountered. My mother smelled of powder, too, but in a way that suggested lavender and fresh white linen. Madame Tchnikov evoked less innocent flowers: dark orchids or overscented lilies.

  The grown-ups sat down and my mother poured Madame Tchnikov a cup of tea. I had a feeling that cups of tea were not much in my new heroine’s line. There was a moment of silence. My mother searched for some subject for small talk that did not involve Uncle Hubert.

  “I visited Paris once. With my mother, before the war. Did you live there long?”

  Even I could see that my mother’s Parisian experience—her mother, an English-speaking pension, Versailles, tea made with boiling water in a properly warmed teapot—was not that of a refugee from the unhappy Balkans. This knowledge, of course, was clarified and details added when later experience expanded childhood memory; I was a precocious child, but Swinburne and Montmartre were not yet among my terms of reference. Partly because I sensed the emotions and inferences that made this conversational gambit of my mother’s almost inflammatory, I listened, remembered, and puzzled over each word and nuance. All the while sitting quietly with an expression that suggested incomprehension, mild stupidity, and dreaminess.

  “It was a terrible time,” Mara, as I was beginning to think of her—said, her voice and face tragic.

  “I’m so sorry,” my mother’s social awkwardness now becoming sympathy. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I was so young,” Mara said, dabbing her eyes with a small handkerchief. I was fascinated but, like my mother, who seemed equally curious and embarrassed, I would have preferred to observe Mara from a distance.

  My mother made a sympathetic sound. The tragedy of Mara’s youthfulness was difficult to comment on, especially since, if she had, as she’d told us, just fled the oppression of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this youthful tragedy would have had to have taken place in the very recent past.

  “My———” Mara said, indistinctly, into her handkerchief.

  “Your family?” Mother asked, her sympathy fully engaged.

  Mara sniffed in a manner that suggested assent.

  “Your mother?” my mother asked gently.

  Mara said nothing, but shook her head behind the handkerchief.

  “Your father?” My mother tried again.

  Mara repeated her gesture. I watched, fascinated, prepared to have my mother run through every possible family permutation—I already had the feeling that, in some not yet imaginable way, Mother was on the wrong track—as far as second cousins once removed and the list of unlikely people one was, in the back of the prayer book, forbidden to marry. Fortunately for my mother, Mara preferred to avoid this ritual.

  “My husband,” Mara said, lowering her handkerchief a little.

  “And he-is he-?” My mother was sympathetic but also curious. I was too fascinated to feel sorry for such a dramatic figure.

  “He was a brute!” Mara said passionately.

  Unfortunately, at this point my mother sent me up to the nursery. I could see her beginning to attempt, unsuccessfully, to stem the flow of information, every new revelation seeming, in Madame Tchnikovs mind, to form a bond—by which she meant an obligation on my mother’s part—between the two women. I could see, as I dawdled toward the door, that Mara would have done better to reveal her story slowly, to have whetted my mother’s curiosity with hints and barely alluded to mysteries. She had overplayed her hand, as I now suspect she had done all her life.

  Although I was the one person who would have given my mother a sympathetic ear, she did not choose to confide in me. She, like all adults, assumed I understood less than I did. Even then this surprised me; would I, too, when I grew up, forget so completely what it was like to be a child? My parents underestimated my comprehension to the extent of sometimes saying in my presence, when one or the other glanced in my direction, the conversation having become interesting, “She’s too young to understand.” Useful though their belief sometimes was, it did nothing to allay my solitary moments of fear. I wanted information, but I also wanted reassurance. Not reassurance that my fears were groundless—I knew they were not, even when they were not specific but inferred from the unspoken or from conversations I did not understand—but I wanted some indication of the worst that could happen.

  Money and the death of my parents were the principal sources of my fears. I knew that my parents sometimes worried about money; my father, whose family had been badly off, worried more than my mother did. Sometimes they argued when my father thought my mother extravagant or careless. What would happen if we ran out of money? We would be poor, but how poor? Poor like my nursery maid who had, at least, a roof—ours—over her head and plenty to eat? Or poor like the old soldier who, an arm missing and a row of medals on his chest, sold matches from a tray beside the gate to the park? His professional cheerfulness, suggesting that there was nothing about his condition unusual enough to justify bitterness, did nothing to allay my fears. Then I would think about the beggar women trudging up the avenue at Ballydavid, always with a silent ill-nourished baby under their shawl. These women would go to the back door where they would be given food and a small sum of money. They came at what seemed to be self-regulated intervals. Some enjoyed a status superior to others, and I would from time to time see one sitting at the kitchen table with a plate and a cup of tea in front of her. But I never chanced upon anyone admiring the baby.

  This image of mother-and-child poverty, distressing though it was, was related to a consoling thought: if my father proved unable to provide for us, surely my grandmother would intervene and take at least me back to Ballydavid. My grandmother was also the image I invoked, late at night, when I imagined either or both my parents dead. She and Aunt Katie were still alive; surely that guaranteed the lives of my parents, who belonged to a younger generation. But in my heart, with the evidence of war around me, I knew this was not true.

  My mother came to fear and then resent Madame Tchnikov’s visits. She was unwise enough to complain to my father. He saw her problem as amusing and lacked sympathy for either my mother or her increasingly frequent caller.

  “Tell her to go away a
nd not come back,” he advised unhelpfully.

  “Oh, Bobby, I couldn’t possibly do that. You don’t know what the poor thing’s been through.”

  “So it looks as though you’re stuck with her.” My father, whose life had not been privileged enough to induce guilt, lacked imagination or sympathy for this kind of problem. “Just don’t ask her to dinner or give her money.”

  My father, having lost interest in what he considered a selfinduced problem of my mother’s, retired behind the Times. He missed Mother’s guilty expression; I knew that small sums of money had already passed from her to Madame Tchnikov.

  After a time Mother complained to her brother. Uncle Hubert had brought me a book. The book provided cover for eavesdropping, and I kept my head down as though I were puzzling out the difficult words while listening to the grown-up conversation.

  “But Hugh, she’s such a bore,” my mother said.

  My uncle laughed lazily and picked me up and put me on his knee. I continued looking at the pictures, and from time to time he would point out some detail. The book was about a Chinese family.

  “Hugh,” my mother said, her casual tone abandoned. She was beginning to sound desperate.

  “I wonder if you would think her such a bore if I told you she had murdered her husband.”

  My mother’s gasp was the only sound for a moment or two. Then my uncle laughed. His laugh suggested Mother was being teased, but it didn’t necessarily mean that he had made up this shocking, to my mother, and thrilling, to me, piece of information.

  “Really, Hugh!” my mother said, predictably adding, “Alice, I think it’s time you———”

  “Nonsense, Mary,” Uncle Hubert said good-naturedly, “How do you ever expect the child to learn to read if you keep interrupting her lessons?”

  So I was allowed to stay a little longer, though my feelings were hurt. I did know how to read and had thought my uncle had been taken in by my occasional guess—inspired by the illustrations—at the harder words.

  “Are you sure, Hugh?” Mother asked, adding, to prevent his pretending she was asking a question about my education, “That she—that that’s what she did?”

  I remembered that Madame Tchnikov’s husband had been a brute, and admired her all the more for having dealt with her problem so decisively.

  “That’s what she told me—I’ve no reason to doubt her word. On that particular count, at least.”

  “Well,” my mother said, fussing with the hot water jug, “I don’t know what to say.”

  “I gained the impression that he was no great loss to society,” Uncle Hubert added.

  “But still,” Mother said.

  And Uncle Hubert laughed again.

  “Now, Alice, take your book upstairs. You can read with Nanny before your bath.”

  I looked up at my uncle for a further reprieve, but he seemed to have forgotten about me. I went as slowly as I could toward the door. Neither of the adults spoke; my uncle, relieved of my presence on his knee, took out his cigarette case and opened it. After I closed the door, I leaned against it, listening.

  “Really, Hugh, if you knew this, I think you should not have brought her here.”

  “I thought you’d be amused.”

  “Amused?” My mothers voice was a little higher, but I knew she was mostly outraged because she didn’t know how to get rid of this woman whom Uncle Hubert seemed effortlessly to have discarded.

  I heard footsteps coming from the kitchen. At the same time the front door opened and Kathleen went to help my father out of his wet overcoat. Here my memory fails me. Was my father in uniform? Was he home on leave? In my mind’s eye he is dressed as though he had come back from his job in the City, although this is not possible since the Stock Exchange had been closed for the duration of the war. I loitered silently. Kathleen took the damp coat and hat back to the kitchen quarters, and my father looked at me benevolently and slightly quizzically.

  “Hello, Blossom,” he said. “What’re you doing here?”

  “I was on my way upstairs,” I said. I hoped he might stop and talk to me, but he just asked, “Where’s your mother?”

  “In the drawing room.”

  “Is anyone with her?”

  “Uncle Hubert.”

  “Anyone else?”

  I shook my head. I wondered if I should tell Father that Madame Tchnikov was a murderess; I am afraid I was ready to sacrifice my heroine for my father’s attention, but he had already turned away.

  “All right, Blossom,” he said as he put his hand out to open the drawing-room door. “Run along upstairs.”

  For the next two weeks, my mother went to bed with a headache every afternoon. After a while Madame Tchnikov stopped coming to call.

  ***

  SIR ROGER CASEMENT was a homosexual, and he kept a diary. At the time I am describing, I had not heard of Casement and, equally unsurprisingly, homosexual was a word I would not come across for some years. I did, however, own a diary.

  As the first born, I was sometimes given presents which, though flattering, were more suitable for an older child. My first diary has my name in pencil, a couple of poorly written lines in January, and not much more. In subsequent years I developed the knack of recording events with a line or two. There was space for little more and no need for it: My day-to-day life was uneventful; I was not given to introspection; and, had I been, I would, I hope, not have been so foolish as to commit secret thoughts to paper. These diaries sometimes serve as an aide-mémoire as I attempt to reconstruct the events of the years I am trying to describe, but more often I turn to one of the books written about the early years of the war or about Casement himself. There are more of these than you might imagine. My nursery diaries and these books show me something that is always true but almost impossible to keep in mind, that our everyday lives—in the main part dull and lacking in important event—are lived in an historical context.

  My early childhood, which seemed, and was, a recurrent round of boredom, starchy meals, uncomfortable clothes, and rules of no apparent benefit to me, was lived in a terrible moment of history. The First World War. Men from almost every family in England were in France, fighting and dying in horrifying conditions. In London, the experience of war was not limited to fear and mourning; I have dim but thrilling memories of Zeppelins and the glow of night fires.

  And in Ireland a revolt against British rule was brewing. Since the fates of both islands were even more closely connected than they now are, the lives of the inhabitants of both countries were affected by the war and the incipient rising. Although my daily life in the nursery, at school, or on walks seemed as solidly settled in dullness as the only slightly more interesting lives of my family, history, intermittently and with no warning, would from time to time change or destroy some integral aspect of our lives.

  I now teach English literature and grammar at a Protestant girls’ school in Dunlaorighe—from which you may infer I am a widow of modest means; were I unmarried I should probably be a governess. I am grateful that teaching my pupils the history of their country is not among my duties, since my own life, suddenly and forever, was changed in a moment in history which I do not choose to expose to a partisan or politically expedient interpretation. Since I was not quite ten years old when Casement was executed, my description of the last years of his life and my thoughts about his behavior are those formed during the fifty years I have had to think about his actions. Fifty years to read about, as history, some of the events immediate to my childhood; to study the causes of those events and the random, fortuitous influences—largely human weakness and human error—that changed their course and altered their resolution; to consider my own choices; to form opinions and regrets.

  Casement was, as I have said, a homosexual. And he was unwise enough to keep a diary. Homosexuality was probably no less common that it is today, but it was considered by the greater part of the heterosexual population to be an odious sin. A surprising level of conspicuously effete appearance and b
ehavior was tolerated among the English upper classes and—perhaps because of the seriousness of the offence—not openly considered homosexual. Nevertheless, once the charge was leveled, the legal implications were, then as now, grave and the social consequences impossible to survive.

  Adler Christensen complemented Casement’s emotional weakness and shared his taste for drama. A Norwegian sailor, out of work and desperate, he had accosted Casement on the street in New York City. Christensen was young, tall, blond, and destitute; Casement was susceptible and sympathetic. He was habitually generous to those in need and, although short of money himself (the Foreign Office could have been more generous in the matter of his pension), told Christensen to visit him at his hotel the following day. He became the patron and employer of the manipulative young man; at what stage the relationship became a sexual one is not known.

  Casement didn’t speak German when he left for Berlin in the summer of 1914, and it seems he didn’t learn much during the increasingly unhappy sixteen months he spent in Germany. Adler Christensen traveled with him as his servant and translator. That Casement should have given the additional power that comes with the role of translator to his dubious companion seems not only self-destructive and unwise but in keeping with the extraordinary lack of judgment he displayed throughout this futile, depressing, and ultimately tragic mission.

  Casements journey and stay in Berlin were arranged and financed by the Clan na Gael, an Irish-American organization, formally connected to the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, whose aim was an independent Irish Republic. The most powerful member of the Clan na Gael was John Devoy, an Irish-born, well-organized, clearheaded revolutionary. He was a tough, bitter man who had spent two years in the Foreign Legion and five years in prison for his revolutionary activities in Ireland.

  One has the impression that the Clan na Gael was comprised of similarly well-organized, clear-headed Irish-Americans devoted to the cause of Irish freedom but devoid of that romantic, idealistic, unrealistic quality so often found—and almost as often with disastrous results—in the homegrown Irish patriot. It goes without saying that every member of the Clan na Gael was Roman Catholic. It is possible, though not likely, that one or more of these supporters of the revolution would have been tolerant of Casement’s choice of companion, but it is not possible that any of them would not have worried about his lack of judgment. Casement must have been aware of what they thought, and it is hard to imagine that efforts were not made to dissuade him when he insisted Christensen should accompany him on his mission to Berlin.