The Fox's Walk Read online

  That afternoon the tide was out. It had left behind almost a mile of wet muddy sand, little streams, puddles, and ripples drawn by the retreating water. On the mud were small coiled heaps excreted by worms; beneath the sand lay the cockles. A few women, cockle-pickers, had been at work; they had walked bent, digging into the wet sand, reaching down to pick up the cockles and throw them into the wet sacks they dragged with them. Now they were leaving the beach.

  I felt helpless and guilty. Helpless because Grandmother; Aunt Katie, and my mother were stricken with grief. If I weren’t watching my mother pacing the strand at Woodstown, I would have been watching my Grandmother at Ballydavid, sitting on the bench beside the tennis court, gazing, without seeing, over the fields. Aunt Katie was not often visible, although I was always aware of her closed bedroom door. There had been tears in the kitchen when Maggie and Bridie had heard of my uncle Sainthill’s death. Maggie had known him since he was a little boy, and Bridie referred to him, through her sobs, as “a lovely gentleman.” The next day, although subdued, their tears were over, and they continued with their lives—their lives of serving and looking after us. My family, after Aunt Katie’s first moans as she lay at the foot of the stairs, grieved silently and separately. Alone, each lived with her grief, and, when one met another, after a blink of bare recognition, each veered off to return to her solitary mourning. I could do nothing to help or comfort; when I tried to show affection toward my mother, she barely saw me. And I felt ashamed because I could not remember my uncle. And since I couldn’t admit that I had forgotten him, I was left pretending to mourn the loss of someone who was only a name and a face in a silver-framed photograph.

  The sun went behind one of the puffy white clouds drifting slowly across the fading sky, and I was now cold enough to feel that some action on my part was necessary. My mother had reached the end of the strand where an outcrop of rocks extended into the bay, and turned. As she came in my direction, I stood, holding my sandals in one hand, showing myself clearly as a child waiting to be taken home. When she was almost abreast of me, I took a couple of steps toward her, ready to meet her if she came to join me. But she walked past without noticing me. I looked at the beach in the direction she was walking; there was more than half a mile before she would turn again. Now I began to be frightened. Since my mother seemed unable to behave as a mother should or even to register my presence, it was time for me to seek the help of another adult, someone who could look after me. And my mother.

  We were, by road, more than a mile away from Ballydavid, and even if I got myself there—I felt less confident about my ability to make the journey than I had about the far less justified excursion to Mrs. Coughlan—I would find two old women who were no more accessible or competent than my poor mother. The maids, it is true, would look after me, as they increasingly had while my mother mourned. But I had never seen either exercise authority outside the kitchen, and even there only over boys coming to the back door with messages or selling game. (Game that had probably been poached from the Ballydavid woods, according to Aunt Katie.) I tried, and failed, to imagine Bridie, with her starched muslin cap, white apron, and blue print dress, on the strand taking a firm line with my mother.

  Appealing to neighbors, I didn’t even consider. I knew my family’s grief was too private to expose to anyone not part of it. Then I thought of O’Neill. I had never seen a limit to his authority, and he even had a means of transporting my grief-frozen mother back to Ballydavid, where she would be given tea and a warm fire and the silent sympathy of the maids. Not that it would comfort her, since escape from the proximity of the two old ladies and the weight of their similar devastating emotions was the very reason for her sojourn on the strand. Be that as it might, neither she nor I could spend the night on the beach; the sun was now close to the cloudy horizon, and the wind colder on my legs.

  I knew that I was supposed to announce my intention to my mother. Walking on the main road alone was forbidden (a rule it had never been considered necessary to formulate before my elopement to the Coughlans), and I was proposing to travel more than a mile by myself. But my mother was a pale, small figure at the end of the strand still walking away from me; I knew a gesture in her direction would be pointless. Carrying my sandals, I walked along the dunes to where the beach road joined the main road that turned inland. I wanted to keep my mother in sight for as long as possible, just in case she came to her senses. But a light mist rolling off the sea made her seem even less substantial.

  Sitting on the coarse grass beside the road, I did up my sandals. The wind had blown sand, yellow and fine against the asphalt, onto the road itself. A motorcar—still rare enough to be remarked upon—came down the Waterford road toward me. It looked very like the Ballydavid car, but, although I was always prepared to be interested in a car, I couldn’t tell the difference between one make and another. And Grandmother’s car was a vehicle I had rarely seen outside its garage. It was O’Neill’s proudest possession: He assumed that he was in a sense owner of anything used outdoors at Ballydavid as, on some level, did my family and the rest of the household. Polished to a high gloss, the Sunbeam was kept under a cover of old bed sheets in the garage. I realize now that O’Neill was not an accomplished driver and, for day to day outings or those (such as meeting us at the boat) where it was necessary to have completely reliable transport, the pony and trap was always dispatched. He preferred, I think, to drive my grandmother on her afternoon calls or her visits to the graveyard when he would have plenty of time to turn and have the car pointed in the right direction when she was ready to go home.

  I watched the motorcar pass me and turn along the beach road which, behind the dunes, followed the outline of the coast. O’Neill was at the wheel and there was someone beside him. Even in the moment of overwhelming relief—it was as though I had accidentally summoned the necessary genii from a bottle—I wondered who his passenger could be. It seemed equally as impossible that one of the family should be sitting in front beside him as it was that he might be giving a lift to either of the men who worked at Ballydavid. My relief turned to despair as I understood that he had failed to see me, or that he had seen me and thought me one of the local urchins sitting at the side of the road. There was no longer any reason for me to trudge back to Ballydavid. I sat despondently for a little while as I tried to think what to do; the road was sheltered from the wind coming in from the sea and was a little warmer than the strand. I had begun to think about going to the nearest farmhouse and knocking at the door, but what could I say? I didn’t know how to explain my predicament or to describe what was wrong with my mother.

  After a little while, not bothering to unbuckle my sandals, I climbed back up the dune behind me, the sand slipping away beneath me as I scrambled to the top. It seemed better to be able to see my mother than not, and, since I now could not think of anything to do, I thought I would sit in as much shelter as I could find and weep.

  At the very end of the strand I could now faintly sec two new figures. One was moving along the beach toward my mother who was walking away from him—both the new arrivals were men—while the other stood near an opening that led onto an area of thin grass and sand under a windswept sycamore. That opening was where we usually drove to if we came in a pony and trap; if we arrived on foot, as we had that afternoon, we gained the strand through the closer opening near where I now waited.

  It was the way he stood—straight backed, still, his weight on one foot—that made me to realize that the closer man was O’Neill. And I suddenly knew, although he was only a shadowy figure in the heavier mist rolling in, that the other man was my father. Magically, it seemed, transported from Tidworth, the officer training camp where he was now stationed.

  My father had been wounded and decorated for bravery during the early months of the war. He referred to his wound as a small one, and to his medal, too, as small. Even so, the wound and decoration must have been important and dramatic events in our family. I have no memory of them. My encounter w
ith Grandmother’s cat on the avenue at Ballydavid and my meeting with Mrs. Coughlan took place before my father was invalided home from France, yet I remember that afternoon—although nothing before or after—and not my father’s wound, my mother’s fears, or her relief at having him safely back in England. The wound had not been life threatening, but it kept him from seeing any further action. His decoration established his courage and no one could imagine him reluctant to “do his bit.” Since he had also seen action in the closing months of the Boer War, he did not have a romantic or unrealistic view of war and felt no particular regret that, through no fault of his own, he was unable to return to the battlefield. He had fought as a noncommissioned officer, and since he was tough, strong, intelligent—although not imaginative and completely lacking in an aesthetic sense—it should not have been difficult to find something useful for him to do. And for some time he had had a job connected with military supplies. He had a practical, tidy mind with a great capacity for concentrating on detail and the kind of determined common sense that can cut through, or circumnavigate, bureaucracy. I think that, in his way, he liked the work and I am sure he was good at it. But his father-in-law had been a general, and someone, though not Father, thought my father should become an officer. Strings had been pulled and that spring while we were staying with Grandmother, he had begun his training at Tidworth.

  I stood on the beach, still, with my arms wrapped around me in an unconscious imitation of my mother, watching Father, in the distance, stride after her. She was still walking away from him and I thought she had not seen him; it seemed unlikely that even in her grief and shock she would ignore him. My mother was a little afraid of Father, her attitude not quite that of a normal wifely deference, since on some, perhaps many, levels she would have considered herself superior to him. She knew herself to be better educated, better bred, better mannered, better connected, and she knew that he thought these qualities mere female attributes and secondary to her beauty and sweet nature. When Mother was with her family, she was in the position of silently defending him from their silent criticisms, these unspoken thoughts batting around the room like shuttlecocks, inhibiting and coloring even the occasional remarks of day to day family life. It was only when Father was safely in England and Mother had settled in at Ballydavid that everyone relaxed.

  In London, at Palace Gardens Terrace, my father’s values ruled. He had come from New Zealand, his family originally farmers from the north of Ireland who had emigrated during the nineteenth century. He had returned to the British Isles with values learned from two generations of brutally hard work and poverty: frugality; common sense; infrequent, inexpensive, simple, and unsophisticated pleasures (he had a weakness for music halls and would on occasion quote catchphrases from comics he had seen there); and a lack of frills or airs. The moment he was out of the house, my mother’s suppressed gentility sprang back into place. Because I spent most of my day in the nursery and because of my father’s time as a soldier, he had so far played a comparatively minor part in my life.

  Although I was never quite at ease with him, his attitude to me at best momentary benevolence, I now welcomed another approach to life—one with clearer rules and fewer surprises—than that which ruled Ballydavid; I was relieved to see an adult who had not abnegated authority to grief. It seemed, as I warmed to consideration of my role, that the advent of a sentient adult would be followed by a full appreciation of my courage and stoicism and by the realization that I had been neglected by the matriarchal side of my family. I turned over some phrases in my mind—modest disclaimers that in no way suggested that I had not suffered—and prepared myself to be congratulated, apologized to, and, in some manner, rewarded. I started to walk toward my parents.

  My father had now caught up with Mother. Their movements seemed part of an informal dance; although I was slowly getting closer, a new wave of mist drifted over the beach. My father in silhouette turned toward my mother, both of them still walking. Then they stopped, Father gesticulating, as though he were trying to get her attention—I knew what that felt like—Mother motionless as if she had not quite noticed his presence. He laid a hand on her arm; she seemed for a moment as though she were going to continue her pacing. I was now close enough to see her shoulders suddenly slump, and my father put his arm around her and lead her slowly, as though she were immensely frail, toward the opening where the car was waiting. It seemed to me the spell had been broken and that I could now claim my father’s attention and be looked after myself. No longer frightened, I felt the full extent of my cold, hunger, and exhaustion. I looked forward to being petted, cosseted, admired, congratulated, lifted up into the motorcar onto my mother’s knee, and driven back to Ballydavid, where I would be made a fuss of by the maids. Tea and a bath in front of the nursery fire and then an adult member of my family, perhaps even my newly restored mother, would read to me before I climbed into bed.

  I followed as fast as my tired legs could carry me over the loose sand; ahead of me my parents disappeared into the dark opening that led to the Sunbeam. The early summer foliage had formed walls and a roof of leaves that reduced the now faint light of early evening. O’Neill had disappeared and I could now hear him cranking up the engine of the Sunbeam.

  Clambering, although the slope at the top of the beach was not in fact steep, I was now really tired, and, despite my intention of presenting myself as brave and uncomplaining, qualities given great value in my family, a wail escaped my lips. It was not quite loud enough; I reached the scrub that separated the strand from the road just in time to watch the car turn the corner and drive away toward Ballydavid.

  FOR A LONG TIME I harbored an unjust yet understandable belief that it was during those hours that I had been abandoned on the beach that my family hatched the plot for a greater abandonment. Since, as usual, I was neither consulted nor informed of the plan as it developed, I don’t feel any remorse for my suspicions. It was a time when the convenience of children was not taken into account and their wishes rarely solicited. In my family and, I imagine, most others of that time and place, this cavalier attitude—one that I sometimes consider when I wonder how one small island nation managed, without any apparent moment of self-questioning or loss of confidence, to rule half the world—was accompanied by the assumption that those without power had little need for information. I look back now and see, without much surprise, that my parents, whose boat was in low emotional and financial waters, decided to lighten their load by throwing me overboard. Especially since there was a comfortable lifeboat alongside—or, at least, in a nearby country, one not at war.

  It was Bridie who noticed that I was missing and I was lucky it was not longer before she did so. The Sunbeam came up the avenue more quickly than did a pony drawing a laden trap, and, by the time she came out on the porch, the motorcar door was open, and she had assumed that I’d already been let out and had gone about my business elsewhere. It was not until she carried the tin bath into the nursery that she realized it was some time since she had last seen me. Instinct rather than logic—there were many places I could easily have been—told her that I was missing.

  My father came to look for me. He came by himself, driving the Sunbeam. Later, when I understood how much he enjoyed being at the wheel (he was a beginner and it is just possible this was his maiden voyage), I thought it likely that he experienced neither anxiety about my loss nor imagination about what I must be feeling. It was an unexamined belief that, since children hadn’t the information that caused fear in adults, they neither understood nor feared those dangers. At the same time, they were supposed to be able to apply adult logic and not indulge in childhood terror of the dark, of ghosts, of abandonment. I wonder if my father would have been worried if, when he arrived at the beach, he had found it deserted and dark. As he would have, had he not seen me sitting on the back of a cart about to turn in at a farmhouse gate.

  He stopped the car, briefly and casually thanked the farmer who had found me wailing on the sea road, and che
erfully told me to hop in. I had never ridden in the front of the Sunbeam before, and I hesitated, unsure whether to get in beside him or to climb into my accustomed place in the back. My hesitation was long enough for me to catch a flicker of impatience cross his face and to see the queer look the farmer gave this unnatural English parent.

  Nothing was said during the first few moments of our reunion. I was silent because I felt I was due either praise or an apology; my father was silent because he had overestimated his driving skills and underestimated the width of the country road on which he was now attempting to turn the Sunbeam. The farmer, who had stopped to open the gate, now stood watching while his horse pulled the cart far enough along the stony track to allow his master to close the gate behind it.

  An already disapproving audience did nothing for my father’s performance. He had misjudged the width of the road, not understanding that the lushest, darkest green part of the grassy verge grew out of a drain from the marshy field behind the hedge. Father turned the wheel sharply and drove the Sunbeam onto the verge; he had intended, I suppose, to back up to the farm gate, turn sharply again to the right, and return to Ballydavid. Instead there was the strange sensation of the car in motion without a corresponding forward progress as the wheels failed to engage in the wet earth of the ditch.

  My father became red in the face and I sat very still; whatever moral advantage I had earned by my ordeal at this moment counted for nothing. Father ground the gears into reverse and put his foot on the accelerator. The wheels spun, digging themselves deeper into the boggy soil. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the farmer who had rescued me leisurely close the gate, bolt it, and take a clay pipe from the pocket of his jacket. He, at least, was enjoying himself. Father had, in a dramatically short period of time, shown himself as unmannerly, neglectful, and arrogant; the farmer would have seen him, not in any way accurately, as rich, upper-class, and Protestant.