The Fox's Walk Page 4

  The tone of schoolboy adventure was set even before Casement and Christensen arrived in Germany. Traveling on a Norwegian ship, the Oscar II, they had several adventures before they arrived in Germany. Casement elected to disguise himself by shaving his beard and, even though there were United States citizens on board, posing as an American. His behavior drew attention, especially from the Americans, and it was assumed he was an English spy. The neutral ship was stopped by a British naval vessel, and several passengers who were German subjects were taken off for internment. Casement raised a small subscription for those taken away, diffusing the feeling against him but, of course, drawing even more attention to himself.

  In Norway, a neutral country, the dramatic stakes were raised. This story has two sides: one told by Findlay, an English diplomat, the other by Christensen and, secondhand, by Casement. Findlay reported to his superiors that Christensen had presented himself at the British Legation and had offered to sell information about “an Irish-American-German conspiracy.” Visits of this kind were, it seems, a frequent enough occurrence for a procedure, including a scale of remuneration, to be followed. Findlay interviewed Christensen who, without offering any concrete information, received encouragement and a small fee. Findlay afterward claimed that he had had no previous knowledge of Casement’s activities and had assumed that he was still a member of the British Consular Service.

  Christensen couldn’t wait to return to the gullible Casement with his improbable story. He said he had been approached by a stranger and, entirely in Casement’s interests, had gone with that stranger to the British Legation where he was offered money to watch and report on his traveling companion. The effect on the vulnerable, self-dramatizing Casement can be imagined.

  Encouraged by Casement, Christensen returned to the Legation the following afternoon. At this stage the story starts to build on itself; not only does Casement seem to have accepted without question Christensen’s penny-dreadful account of his dealings with a British career diplomat, but eventually that career diplomat, Findlay, was persuaded by Christensen to put in writing an offer to pay him £5,000 for the delivery of Casement into British hands.

  Assuming, as I think one must, that Adler Christensen acted as an agent provocateur, it does not seem that he did so from any more noble motive than self-aggrandizement or the wish for attention and small sums of money. Nevertheless, by persuading Findlay to put in writing their agreement, he placed the British in the position of having abused the hospitality of a neutral country and having provided evidence of their intention to assassinate or kidnap a former colleague of their own. It was a wrongdoing that Casement was to return to obsessively each time he failed to achieve one of the goals for which he had come to Germany or when he was disappointed in one of the increasingly unrealistic schemes he had developed once he got there.

  Findlay was embarrassed, his superiors angry. But in the end, who really cared? The war continued; Casement’s Irish-American comrades had more heinous crimes to lay at the feet of the British; and his new German allies soon became bored by his morbid insistence on the importance of this “outrage.”

  In the end, perhaps the saddest aspect of this farcical behavior is that it makes one question Casement’s previous achievements.

  Were his triumphs on the part of suffering humanity a result of his high-minded sense of justice? Or had he, casting about for something on which to focus his always smoldering sense of outrage, just happened to fix his sights on two noble causes? The kindest and most probable answer, I think, is that not only had the hardships of the Congo and Putumayo broken his physical health, but the horrors he encountered there had affected his sanity.

  Chapter 2

  I REMEMBER MY—OUR—next visit to Ballydavid more clearly than I do the summer when I met Oonagh on the avenue and Mrs. Coughlan came to visit. But I have come to understand that, as when we recount a dream we adjust the images, events, and emotions of which it is comprised into a neater narrative form, so do we, when our memory fails, without knowing that we do so, use the probable to bridge the gaps between those events we'remember clearly (although not necessarily accurately) and what is lost forever. Shortly after Uncle Hubert went back to China, without an unsuitable wife—or a suitable one either—we went to visit Grandmother and Aunt Katie.

  We traveled second class on the train. My father, who was not with us and therefore had no idea of what was involved in taking two small children on a long journey, thought traveling first class an affectation. We lived comfortably enough at Palace Gardens Terrace, but luxury and even the purchase of the nonessential was actively discouraged by my father. My mother bought good writing paper, scented soap, kid gloves, and made charitable contributions, well aware that Father would have forbidden the expenditure had he known about it. We had, fortunately for my mother’s self-respect, a large, solid, and well-situated house. Father had bought it cheaply before the war as an investment and because he thought possession of the house made him appear, as it did, solid and well situated.

  We boarded the train at Paddington in the early afternoon. At the outbreak of war, railway services had been taken over by the government and a reduced timetable had come into effect; travel by rail had become progressively less comfortable and more expensive. But it was a warm sunny day and for some time I, at least, was full of a sense of adventure. Edward was asleep but Mother, though putting a good face on it, was undoubtedly apprehensive. She suffered terribly from seasickness; and, apart from her anticipation of a miserable crossing, she must have worried about her ability to care for us while she was in that state.

  I watched, full of anticipation and excitement, as the train seemed to come to life, sigh, and roll slowly out of the busy station. It was not the first time I had been on a train, but it was the first rail journey that I can remember. Soon we were passing through poor neighborhoods with rows of small houses backing onto the railway line. Behind each house was a small sooty backyard that contained nothing but the occasional sooty washing line. I remember a large black-and-white cat lying on a fence between two houses, self-contained and seemingly oblivious to the discomfort of its narrow perch and the proximity of the noisy train passing only yards in front of its face.

  Then came the beginning of the suburbs, the houses a little more prosperous, although well short of substantial or handsome; no one who could afford to do otherwise was likely to live beside a railway track. The train stopped at suburban stations. Commuters got off and other passengers boarded, some with serious luggage and probably also traveling to Ireland. A few were in uniform—soldiers on leave.

  A station at a small rural town. Then the beginning of the open countryside: fields, crops green and still close to the soil, and small farmhouses. When I had finished admiring the scenery—inferior in my opinion to what we would see in Ireland, but a step in the right direction—I turned to my illustrated storybook. Edward slept on, and my mother sat quietly, her hands in her lap, a small smile on her lips; I had no idea what she might be thinking.

  After a while, the train stopped, but not at a station. I leaned out the window to see what was happening. Some passengers, men in tweeds, women in beautiful clothes, got off the train and stood on a small platform. From further down the train came men and women in plain dark clothes—valets and lady’s maids—who fussed around the luggage as it was loaded onto a smartly painted horse-drawn cart. As well as suitcases, there were gun cases; hatboxes; and dressing cases that I imagined contained jewelry and sets of glass, silver, and enamel jars of powder, hairbrushes, and chamois nail buffers that the maids would arrange on dressing tables when they arrived. The younger women were beautiful or at least pretty, the older women handsome or distinguished, the men well fed, confident—all completely indifferent to the gaze of the passengers still on the train, many of whom clustered at the windows in open curiosity.

  “It’s Badminton,” my mother said. “The Duke of Beaufort is having a house party. When he has guests, the train stops here to let t
hem off.”

  She didn’t rise from her seat to look out the window, but she was watching the activity outside as much as she could without betraying curiosity. It is a moment that I can remember with complete clarity and in minute detail; although all the activity and all the most interesting characters were outside and the well-dressed guests were now getting into a series of smartly turned-out horse-drawn vehicles, it is my mothers attentive, expressionless face that is for me the center of the scene. I realized later that, had my mother not nipped out the side door of her parents’ house and gone to Caxton Hall, throwing in her lot with my overbearing New Zealand-born father, she might have been one of the women on the platform. At that moment, too, I learned that to show curiosity about the lives of those more privileged than oneself was to suggest that they were in some way superior. Mother had learned this—by example or osmosis, it is not possible that words would have been employed—from her mother. Grandmother would never show, or I imagine feel, interest in the life of anyone who would not be equally curious about her own circumstances. She showed no more interest in the aristocratic Irish families who had retained their money and estates than she did in the day-to-day life of the solicitor’s wife who spoke with a thick Cork accent. Grandmother acted as if the world in which she lived, that of the landed gentry, was the most admirable and desirable; to think otherwise would be to admit inferiority to someone. Although my mother may have been secretly wistful when she looked out the window of the second class carriage, I believed—believe—Grandmother to have been right.

  After a minute or two—no one was boarding the train at this stop—we continued. I slept for a while; I was still young enough for the motion of the train to have a soporific effect. When I woke up we had the carriage to ourselves; and my mother unpacked our picnic basket, a handsome wicker affair, the kind people then used to give as wedding presents, although wedding presents were probably something else my mother had missed out on when she eloped with my father. There were ham sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, barley water, and a thermos of tea for Mother. And apples—their skin wrinkled by winter storage—to clean our teeth and freshen our mouths afterward.

  The spring evening became night. It started to rain. Wind, foretelling a rough crossing, spattered large drops against the grimy windows. Outside there was nothing but rushing darkness broken by occasional lights, glittering in the wet night. The lights inside the carriage were dim and I alternately dozed and listlessly looked at my book.

  “Don’t strain your eyes,” my mother said. She sat with her head resting on a neat, white antimacassar attached to the dark plush upholstery, as beautiful as the women we had watched alighting at Badminton—pale, tired, but not relaxed enough to sleep.

  “Are we nearly there?” I asked.

  My mother glanced at her watch and then outside at the darkness.

  “No,” she said, “We’ve only just crossed into Wales. Why don’t you try to sleep a little?”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  But I must have fallen asleep again, although I had no sense of having been woken when I became aware that we had stopped at a large station. The noise outside also woke Edward: doors slamming, the stationmaster shouting, porters loading and unloading baggage, good-byes. My mother was stiff with tension; I knew she dreaded crossing the Irish Sea, but her present disquiet seemed more immediate. As the train started to pull out of the station, she seemed to relax a little. We heard the hiss of steam, a clank of metal as the wheels engaged, a slow chunk-chunk-chunk that became faster, and then the familiar rhythm of wheels on tracks. We had left the noise and light of the station and were rushing through the unbroken dark of the Welsh countryside when the door of the carriage was pushed open. Again my mother’s sigh of relief had been premature. It occurs to me now that this may have been more than just bad luck; she had, I think, a tendency to focus only on the problems of the next moment. It would have accounted for her marriage to my father. As she had slipped out of the house in Philimore Gardens, her heart had pounded with fear that she would be caught and prevented from making an unsuitable marriage, not that she would one day find herself looking out the window of a train at what her life could have been and wasn’t.

  A man stood in the doorway of the compartment. In one hand, he held a brown beer bottle; with the other he supported himself against the swaying of the train. He stood there for a moment, surprised and pleased, as if he had come across friends in an unexpected place. He smiled a weak, slightly guilty smile and came into the carriage. My mother glanced past him at the corridor, hoping for the conductor or fearing the man might have a companion. But we were alone, just the four of us. Edward had gone back to sleep.

  Our new traveling companion sat down beside my mother. He lifted his bottle to his lips, drained it, and put it with exaggerated care on the floor. Although I was a little nervous, I was also curious. This was not a situation where Mother could send me upstairs when it began to be interesting. My mother sat up a little straighter, an aloof half-smile on her lips and an expression that, while not encouraging our new traveling companion, would not provoke his belligerence. I flicked my glance from my mother to the man; he caught my eye and winked. It was a friendly wink; I thought he might have children of his own. I looked down, simulating shyness; although I had been taught to stand up straight and be polite to those adults who acknowledged my presence, my mother’s silence told me that this was an exception to the rule.

  As I pretended to study my book, hoping that this interesting stranger would be impressed by my ability to read, he spoke. I could not understand him and I looked up, startled.

  “He’s speaking Welsh,” my mother said. “I don’t think he speaks English.”

  This was even more interesting than I had imagined. It was my first exposure to a foreign language. And my mother seemed more open to conversation than she sometimes was.

  “Of course,” she added hastily in a low voice, “he may understand it.”

  I studied the man’s face. I did not have the impression that he comprehended my mother’s words, but I could tell that his lack of reaction might be a result of his condition—I understood the principle of intoxication, although not to the extent of being able to recognize it; but in this case the brown bottle was a clue—rather than an ignorance of the English language. As I watched, his eyes began to close; they half-opened once or twice, and then he sank into an uncomfortable sleep.

  I was free now to study our traveling companion. Before I did so, I glanced toward my mother. She smiled a half-hearted, reassuring smile and put her finger to her lips. I understood that she hoped the man would continue to sleep, at least until the conductor came. He was dressed in dirty clothes, but I could see that his clothing and the grime on his hands and face were the consequence of work, not of vagrancy.

  We continued silently on for a long time. Edward slept; I stared at the unconscious man; my mother sat up straight with a benevolent expression, her demeanor confirming that she was a pillar of respectable society. From time to time, the whistle blew; the train left the blackness of the open, raining night and passed under hills though dry, dark tunnels. I began to feel the need to visit the WC at the end of the corridor, but I said nothing.

  We passed though a dimly lit small station without stopping, and as the train slowed down to follow a curve of the tracks, the empty brown beer bottle toppled over and rolled across the carriage and under my seat. The man sat bolt upright, said something in his mysterious language, smiled apologetically at my mother, and patted her reassuringly on her knee.

  I was already adept at pretending not to notice awkward moments or inconvenient facts. Partly because I gathered that was how one was supposed to behave, and partly because the less I seemed to notice or understand the more likely I was to be in a position where I could watch interesting things happen and gather necessary information. Nevertheless, my mouth opened in astonished disbelief at this extraordinary liberty, and I felt, for the first time, a twinge of fear. It w
as not often that the conventions of society did not work, and if they didn’t, it meant that other rules—the kind that guaranteed safety—also might not hold true.

  My mother, without relinquishing her protective ladylike posture, shrank as far as she could into the ungiving upholstery of the Great Western seat. Our traveling companion patted her knee again. I looked at his hand, its ingrained dirt, the black under and around his fingernails, the grimy, frayed cuffs of his shirt; despite his unnerving behavior, I still had the impression that he was a laborer and that his appearance was not a result of an intrinsic lack of cleanliness. The man also regarded his hand, resting on the lavender gray of my mother’s spring coat. My mother, dignified and frightened, looked above my head, seeing nothing.

  After a moment, the man lifted his hand and looked at it with a puzzled expression. Then he turned to look at my mother. At first it seemed as though he were about to apologize; then his expression changed and he began to smile. I thought, and I am sure my mother thought, that he was about to kiss her. We both froze, holding our breath, my mother, I am sure, as frightened as I was. The man sighed, his eyes began to close, and he once again fell asleep. This time with his head on my mothers shoulder.