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 them 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 was 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.

“It’s all right, Alice. He’s harmless.” Mother didn’t speak again until we reached the next station. As the train drew into the noisy, brightly lit platform, the man woke up and, without a glance at any of us, stood up and left the carriage. I looked out the window and saw him make his way slowly across the platform, through a gate, and out into the darkness.

I slept for most of what remained of our journey. When I awoke briefly, Mother was sitting as upright as she had been before. On her face was an expression I had never seen. Angry, resentful, and determined.

 

O’NEILL WAS WAITING for us on the Quay at Waterford. The warm, sunny day with a mild fresh breeze seemed to begin when we reached the dock. Tired, dirty, pale, we walked down the gangplank into paradise.

The crossing had not been particularly rough. But it had been unpleasant—particularly for my mother who, seasick herself, had had to look after an overtired infant. Even though I had tried not to be any trouble, I had, to my shame, vomited on the cabin floor. During the night, I had woken and heard my mother weeping quietly and, I thought, angrily. After the boat had turned into the early morning calm of the river, strong tea had been served. Our fellow passengers availed themselves of its dark reviving powers. My mother added some more milk to hers and told me to sip it. My stomach, still tender, revolted against the strong pale liquid, and I retched; to this day the idea of stewed milky tea in a thick white cup revolts me.

O’Neill welcomed my mother as though she were a returning princess. He seemed impressed by how I had grown and pronounced the pale and grizzling Edward “a fine looking lad.” O’Neill worshipped my mother. She had a good seat on a horse; and, on the rare occasions that she now enjoyed a day’s foxhunting, the overconditioned hunter still kept at Ballydavid was shown to O’Neill’s credit.

Patience, the pony that pulled the trap, was for me one of the great attractions of Ballydavid. I hoped to be allowed to ride this summer and I sometimes pretended that Patience was my pony. O’Neill found our luggage, loaded it into the trap, and we were on our way. There was a smell of salt in the air; noisy seagulls circled overhead, and pigeons, sidestepping horses’ hooves, pecked at spilled grain between the cobblestones.

Ballydavid was six miles from Waterford; in cold or wet weather it seemed a long journey, but on a sunny morning like this it was only pleasure. Color came back into my mother’s face as she questioned O’Neill about people and places and asked after his family—his son Tom was fighting in France—and about my grandmother and great-aunt.

It seemed to me—a minority view, I was aware—there was more of interest to look at in Waterford than in London. Soon we left the wide streets around the river and the Mall and drove past small gardens with monkey puzzles and the large stone gates of a school where I could see a games field; chestnut trees held large pink and white candles, and a cherry tree in pale bloom stood inside the gates of another large house set back from the road and partially obscured by trees. We passed children and dogs, and a middle-aged woman in a mackintosh, to whom Mother waved, walking two sleek greyhounds. Leaving the town behind us, we descended the steep hill, from which we could again see the river and the island in the wider part of it, home to a Hassard whom my great-aunt had once referred to as “Bluebeard.” I watched for the carved milestones on the side of the road, half-concealed by weeds, an unspecified superstitious advantage to be gained by seeing all six.

Then we drove up the avenue and saw Ballydavid in all its spring glory. The house was no more than a good Regency villa, but I thought it the most beautiful place in the world. That morning the sun on its ivy-covered walls, the spring grass, and the trees in new leaf made it seem magical.

Grandmother and Aunt Katie were waiting to welcome us. They stood in the shade of the veranda, tall and straight, the skirts of their dresses—Grandmother’s black, Aunt Katie’s a dark brown—touching the gray flagstones. They were both widows, and had been for some time, Aunt Katie for longer than Grandmother. Both seemed immeasurably old, but, looking back, I now realize that Grandmother, the elder by a year or two, was probably only in her late fifties.

I looked at the two old ladies and felt admiration, respect, a little fear, and certainty that there was no limit to their power, their authority, or their ability to make safe those within their keeping. Without glancing at my mother, I knew she felt the same way.

Oonagh, Grandmother’s tigerish cat, and Jock, the Highland collie, were waiting with them; Jock, enthusiastic and playful, rushed out to jump up at us while Oonagh, tail in the air, paraded back and forth, stroking herself on the skirt of Grandmother’s dress. Bridie, the housemaid, stood behind them, alerted to our arrival by one of the men, or perhaps she had been watching from an upstairs window. When we got out of the trap and were embraced by Grandmother and Aunt Katie, Bridie, smiling, stepped forward to help O’Neill with our luggage. Protocol dictated that her welcome should take place a little later. For me, it might be that afternoon when I crept into the kitchen or when she gave me my bath before I went to bed. My mother and she would exchange a few affectionate words when next they found themselves alone, perhaps when Bridie carried up a jug of hot water to my mother’s room. Mother would ask after Bridie’s family and accept her congratulations on how big and strong Edward and I were becoming.

After I had washed and changed my clothes, I found that I was ravenously hungry. Mother and I sat down to a late breakfast and Bridie swept Edward away to the kitchen. My mother and the two old ladies remained at the table; I was sent up to bed. I protested that I wasn’t tired, but minutes later, lying between the cool sheets in the saggy comfort of the old bed, with a feeling of utter, complete, and all-surrounding well-being, I fell deeply and blissfully asleep.

From time to time I woke up, once to find Bridie sitting on my bed, stroking my hair back from my forehead. She had brought my lunch up on a tray. I ate it gratefully and went straight back to sleep. When I next woke, the color of the light told me it was late afternoon. I lay still, lazy and happy. I wondered if Bridie would bring my tea. The feel of the old linen sheets, a down-filled pillow, and a horsehair mattress kept me in bed, although I was thinking of the pleasures that awaited me downstairs and, even more, out-of-doors. A cool breeze from the open window touched my face; it smelled of spring rain and the freshly opened buds green on the trees outside.

My dreamy laziness was interrupted by a crunch of feet on gravel. The crunch became footsteps followed by the scrape of a chair leg on stone. Whoever was below—two people—had stepped onto the veranda and sat down on the old wicker chairs below my window. I was surprised that I could hear them so clearly. It seemed likely that the footsteps were my mother’s and those of one of the old ladies.

After a moment I could hear the murmur of voices, although not clearly enough to hear what they were saying. Then something in my mother’s voice—I still could not tell which of the old ladies was sitting with her—caused me to listen more intently. It seemed to me I could hear a tightness in her tone that suggested she was worried, and it sounded as though she were asking a question.

If my mother had questions, I wanted to hear the answers. I climbed quietly out of bed and crossed the room to the open window.

“What will happen?” My mother asked.

“We don’t know.” The other voice belonged to Aunt Katie.

A wicker chair below creaked.

“But Redmond is sound?” My mother seemed to want to be reassured.

There was a pause before my great-aunt replied.

“Yes. He’s behaving well and bravely. But both sides have guns. How long can it be before they use them?

There was another silence, broken only by one of them sighing, and after a little while the chairs creaked again as they rose and went indoors.

From the window one could see the river estuary, a calm tidal body of water, and beyond it, in the distance, the Adantic. As I leaned on the windowsill, in the fading early evening light, I could hear the cry of a curlew. A flight of mallards came in low over the trees, on their way to one of the many small ponds that lay below us in the marshy ground close to the estuary. I could hear the companionable evening sounds they seemed to make to one another as they passed overhead.

 

AS THE LONG DROWSY summer began, I was aware of drama and tension in the air and, to some extent, I knew where it came from. There were four sources: the war, the unresolved future of Ireland, a quarrel between my mother and father, and the day-today pitfalls of living in my grandmothers house.

The war affected me less than did the other three. Every day the Morning Post arrived, a day late, from England. It was eagerly and anxiously read and then discussed by my mother and the old ladies. Occasionally, perhaps once a week, a letter would come from my uncle Sainthill serving in France. It seemed as though time stopped while Grandmother opened the letter and read it. Mother and Aunt Katie watched her closely, trying to deduce its contents from her expression. When she had finished reading her son’s letter, Grandmother would hand it to Aunt Katie and she, in turn, would read it and then pass it to my mother. Every fact, nuance, and inference of the letter would be discussed then and for the rest of the day.

I understood that the unstable political situation in Ireland was the subject of the conversation that had floated up from the veranda to my bedroom the afternoon of the day we’d arrived in Ireland. Redmond, I knew, was the leader of the Irish parliamentary party. He had succeeded Parnell, whose glorious political career and, with it, the prospect of Irish Home Rule, had disappeared when he was cited in a divorce case. Redmond was popular with the Anglo-Irish because although he supported Home Rule—the question of Home Rule for Ireland having been shelved for the duration of the war—he also supported Irish involvement in the war. At the beginning of hostilities he had suggested that the defense of Ireland should be left to the Volunteers (those of the North and South, both now illegally armed the first by the rifles landed at Larne, the second by the shipment brought into Howth by Erskine Childers in the Asgard) in order to leave the English soldiers stationed in Ireland free to fight. The offer had been declined—an insult similar to Kitchener’s resistance to forming specifically southern Irish regiments—and whole regiments of English soldiers, who, had the offer been accepted, would have been sent to the front, instead spent tours of duty safely and comfortably in Ireland. Young officers, instead of going to France, spent a season in Irish society, shooting and hunting in winter, attending race meetings in summer—a welcome resource for hostesses with unmarried daughters of a dancing age.

My parents’ quarrel was also conducted through the Royal Mail. It was a more private affair than the war. One morning I watched my mother take a letter, unopened, from the breakfast table. She went upstairs to her bedroom and she didn’t come down for some time. Three days later there was another letter; I recognized my father’s handwriting. When we rose from the table I followed the adults into the hall and watched my mother hesitate for a moment at the foot of the staircase. It was a warm day and the front door stood open. I did not follow her when she went outside but ran upstairs to my room to watch from the window where she would go, what she would do. I saw her standing on the gravel in front of the house, the letter in her hand still unopened; the black cat from the stable yard was setting off on a predatory errand to the woods and Mother was superstitiously waiting to avoid its crossing her path. When the cat disappeared into the dark of the woods, my mother sat down on the bench under the beech tree beside the tennis court. She paused a moment before opening the letter—one side of a single sheet of paper. Father came straight to the point and it was always his point; he didn’t have much interest in the opinions or reasoning of those who disagreed with him. My mother read the letter twice, then refolded it and put it back in the envelope. She sat still for some time, gazing out over the woods and fields toward the estuary, her expression sad, angry, and confused. And stubborn. A characteristic I think she had developed as a reaction to my fathers overbearing ways. She was gentle and not short of courage; a better or more sensitive man would not have reduced her to this state.

The fourth source of drama and tension, that of everyday domestic life at Ballydavid, affected me most directly, and, apart from the time spent lying awake in the pale darkness, frightened about what would happen to me if my parents’ quarrel continued forever, it gave me the greatest food for thought. And worry. My nervousness was most often caused by the lack of warning before an eruption or a cold reprimand for the infringement of some never-before-invoked rule. Ignorance of the law is at the best of times an inadequate defense, and at Ballydavid I could not plead it without raising the question of how my mother was bringing me up. I came to realize that she was often indulgent when she was distracted, preoccupied, or unhappy. It did nothing for my confidence, while negotiating the everyday, to discover—in addition to the Ballydavid rules that must be obeyed and those that could be discreetly disobeyed—another rule which forbade complaining or showing fear. And I was often afraid.

It was some time before I realized I could carry these fears to the out-of-bounds kitchen, where they would be listened to and taken seriously. Perhaps too seriously. I would go to the kitchen for company and to postpone the moment when I would have to make my way to bed, the Bickering light of my candle summoning looming shadows from the doorways and heavy dark furniture that lined the corridor. My fear was not specific and would disappear once I was safely in bed, reassured by light from the window and the sound of the rooks in the trees as they settled down for the night. In the kitchen, I was given a sympathetic ear; my fears were listened to, understood, and confirmed. Those that were vague were given form, shape, and provenance. The dark shadows were replaced by the ghost of a weeping woman apparently seen by both Maggie and Bridie, and I was told of the banshee who could be heard wailing when someone in the house was about to die. Both the maids volunteered that nothing would induce them to sleep in the room I occupied. I would leave terrified and with a glimmer of understanding why I was not encouraged to hang around the kitchen.

One cool early summer day I was standing by the window in the drawing room. It was shortly after breakfast, and I was watching my mother sitting alone on the bench by the tennis court. She was smoking a cigarette, something I had never before seen her do. It was, I knew, an act of defiance against my absent father. I noticed with some surprise when I next saw my mother light a cigarette, sitting on the veranda with my grandmother and great-aunt, that neither showed disapproval.

The window by which I stood was open a few inches and my bare legs were cold. Watery sunshine shone on my mother; she had a light shawl around her shoulders. I was hoping she would come indoors and wondering if it would be all right to join her, when there was a ping of metal touching wood, the bounce of something soft on the carpet, and Oonagh darting, in simulated self-induced fear, across the room.

I turned quickly to see the no longer young cat lightly touch the arm of the sofa as she leapt onto the cushions, continue over the farther arm, turn sharply, and return to the small Turkish rug in front of the fire. On the hearthrug lay Grandmother’s knitting: three inches of the ankle of a gray sock, one needle no longer attached, and a ball of gray wool. I was still laughing at Oonagh’s progress around the room when she made a dive at the ball of wool, leaping on it and sinking in her claws as though she were slaughtering a small, soft, gray animal. I laughed again, and was still laughing when the door from the hall opened and Grandmother entered the room. She was carrying a small branch of blossom. She often returned from her walks with booty that was usually turned over to someone else to take care of—Aunt Katie, in this instance, since it was she who arranged the flowers for the house. I stopped laughing, aware—as I should have been a moment later even had I not been reminded by an adult presence—that Oonagh had damaged or destroyed Grandmother’s work.

There was a short silence. I looked aghast ait the gray mess on the hearthrug. Oonagh gave the ball of wool another tap with her paw and then again leaped on it. Grandmother’s face was cold and set. Aware suddenly that my presence had apparently made me responsible for what had happened, that I had been found a spectator entertained at the scene of the disaster, I darted forward. Oonagh, startled, but incorporating my action into her game, leaped onto Aunt Katie’s chair, a strand of wool caught between her claws. All three needles were now separated from Grandmothers knitting, and every move Oonagh made unraveled what remained of the sock a little further.

“Really, Alice,” Grandmother said, and left the room, closing the door behind her. I was in disgrace.

The rest of the morning passed slowly. I felt ashamed but not guilty. I knew that I had done nothing wrong, and I thought that the grown-ups, even Grandmother, understood that I had not caused or encouraged Oonagh’s moment of wanton destruction. Nevertheless, as scapegoat, I had to keep a low profile until some time had passed.

I remained silent and scarcely visible for two or three hours without even my mother coming to look for me to say a reassuring word. I considered visiting the kitchen but was afraid that the instinct there to dramatize would leave me feeling even more of a pariah than I already did. It also occurred to me that, if I were caught creeping into that forbidden territory, I might seem defiantly to be breaking another rule before I had been forgiven my last infringement.

I went outdoors. There was no one in sight; a bored Jock lying half-asleep by the front door opened one eye as I passed. I thought that if I went for a little walk he would accompany me and I should not be so alone. I started to stroll away from the house, down the avenue that led to the front gate. After a moment, Jock heaved himself up and ambled after me. I reached the corner where I had once watched Oonagh emerge from the laurels and remembered that day and the fuss that had been made of me by the grown-ups in the drawing room. I remembered the completely admirable Mrs. Coughlan and her words as we had parted. “I hope you will come and see me one day.” Surely there could be no better time.

Large trees and bushes grew on either side of the avenue, with areas of carefully mown grass between them. Soon we came to where the wood began; it lay at the base of the hill and ran along the southern and eastern boundaries of Ballydavid. Jock and I turned off the avenue onto a footpath. The trees, with fresh green foliage, gave the narrow path the daytime darkness of a fairy tale; to either side there were brambles and stretches where dead leaves lay under sunless, bare, brown lower branches. I began to feel afraid and was glad to have Jock’s company. My fears were based on nothing specific, but they were not nameless. Jock and I were on the Fox’s Walk.

The Fox’s Walk—I don’t know how it came by its name and there is now no one left alive who might know—was a path that ran through the woods from the front gate to Rowe’s Lane at the other end of Grandmother’s property. Rowe's Lane wandered between high thick hedges to a large farm and an unpretentious farmhouse belonging to Nicholas Rowe, the most prosperous of Grandmothers Roman Catholic neighbors; to either side of the lane stood the cottages of the men who worked on the Rowe farm and of some who worked at Ballydavid. The Fox’s Walk was a little more than a quarter of a mile in length, and its terrain was uneven. Part of it had once been landscaped, and although brambles and indigenous scrub now largely obscured the exotic flowering shrubs that been planted during a more affluent period in the family’s past, this stretch of the walk was wider than the footpaths that lay at either end. It was the first time I had been on the Fox’s Walk by myself.

Jock and I passed overgrown azaleas and crowded tufts of pampas grass and entered an alley of overgrown yews. At the end of it we took a path, no wider than the one we had taken from the avenue, which ran downhill toward the Woodstown road. I knew the path beneath my feet and Jock's paws might once have been a trail used by animals, but now it was human feet—workmen and maids using it as a short cut to the farm or house—that had packed down the mud beneath our feet. I knew what a fox looked like, and I also knew that, in the unlikely event Jock and I met one, the fox would flee and Jock would chase him. Even so, I was aware that I had left the world of houses and humans and had invaded the territory of unseen woodland life and nocturnal animals. And of mythic beings. I glanced nervously at Jock, but he was still slouching along behind me, his head down, too lazy to sniff at the scent of small animals.

After a while it became lighter and I could see a space between the trees beyond. In it was a stile, built into the overgrown bank that was the boundary of Grandmother’s land—low on the Ballydavid side but with a drop of four or five feet down onto the road below. I climbed over the stile and scrambled down into the ditch and onto the main road. Jock squeezed himself under the low branch of a sapling that had taken root in the bank and jumped down beside me. We set off along the road toward the house where Major and Mrs. Coughlan lived, leaving behind the unfairness of being held accountable for the misdeeds of Grandmother’s cat.

As we turned the corner, Jock, for the first time, began to react to his surroundings. He growled. A low, provisional, warning growl—the kind he might make if a familiar but infrequent beggar were coming up the avenue. But now we were in full sunlight and I had no fears. I was in a hurry to present myself to Mrs. Coughlan, to be fussed over and offered refreshment.

We continued along the deserted road—we had seen no one since we had left the house—and Jock growled again, this time deeper in his throat. And he slunk a little closer to my side, as though afraid, or at least apprehensive, in the presence of the unknown.

At first I could see nothing, but I began to become aware of an unpleasant but not identifiable smell. Soon the smell became stronger, and I put my hand over my nose and mouth and breathed through my fingers. The wide grassy area on the side of the road was where the tinkers had camped.

I had heard the maids talking about the tinkers: They were afraid of them. A fierce tinker woman had come to the front door, begging, a day or two before. Aunt Katie had given her money, but had avoided the further ritual conversation—sympathetic inquiries on her part and promises that she would be remembered even more fervently than she already was in the prayers of the recipient. The woman had whined, pulling back her heavy black shawl to reveal a pale and comatose baby, her thanks quickly becoming an aggressive demand for more money. Aunt Katie had tightened her lips, looked coldly at the woman, wished her a good morning, and closed the door firmly. She had watched from the drawing-room window until the woman turned the corner of the avenue and went out of sight. O’Neill had reported two pullets missing from the hen house and, listening to his talk with Pat and Ned, I had gathered that the local farmers were getting close to the moment when they would unite to move the tinkers on. The tinkers, whose senses, it is likely, were tuned toward such a moment, had made a round of last-minute thievery and disappeared during the night.

They left behind—like pieces of cloth on a bush beside a holy well—scraps of rags on the hedgerow, the ashes of their fires, some animal droppings, and the lingering and unidentifiable smell. And, mysteriously, among the cold ashes of their fires, I saw the burned shells of fifteen or twenty snails. Did they eat snails, I wondered, or had they burned them as a gratuitous act of cruelty? Or did the snails have some practical use of which I was not aware? Or perhaps the charred shells were the remains of a ritual or had a superstitious significance. Each possibility was disquieting, and, although I wondered, I knew I would never ask about it for fear the answer would be one of those previously unimagined distressing facts that, once heard, I could not dismiss from my mind.

We hurried past the site of the encampment. The road ran uphill and the day was growing warmer; I began to feel tired and thirsty. At last we reached the gates to the Coughlans’ house. They were closed.

I was taken aback by this unforeseen obstacle. The gates were large and heavy. With no anticipation of success, I tried to lift the black, paint-encrusted latch; I could not move it. The obvious thing would have been to return home and to say nothing about my clandestine and premature attempt at adult social life. But I was tired and full of the anticipated pleasure of a visit to the gaudy world of Mrs. Coughlan. I was also reluctant to repass the place where the tinkers had camped. I sat down on the sparse gravel and leaned against the closed gates; after a moment Jock slumped, bored, beside me and closed his eyes. Without a plan, I waited to see what would happen next.

For what seemed like a long time, nothing did. Then a small cart drawn by a shabby donkey came along the road. It travelled slowly. There was a large milk churn on the cart, and the donkey was old, with worn misshapen hooves. A man sat on a front corner, paying no attention to the donkey. A daily routine: The donkey knew where it had to go, and the man knew that no action of his would get them there any faster. He had plenty of time to observe me and Jock as they came closer. Without any instruction to the donkey, he stepped down from the cart; the animal took a couple more paces and then stopped. Jock woke up.

“Locked out, are ye?” the man asked. He sounded amused. He spoke, of course, with a local accent. It is not possible to put in writing what he sounded like, and an attempt at an approximation tends to read like the dialogue of a stage Irishman. Without waiting for an answer, he opened the gates and allowed Jock and me to proceed up the avenue.

Although I had often passed the gates on the way to Waterford and knew who lived behind them, I had never seen the Coughlan house before, and I was, for a moment, disappointed that it looked like the other houses in the neighborhood that belonged to the gentry. The avenue was shorter than that at Ballydavid and, unlike Ballydavid, where the gardens were enclosed in faded red brick at the rear of the house, there was to one side of the avenue a lawn with a narrow gravel path and flower beds, to the other a tall hedge that presumably concealed the kitchen entrance and outbuildings such as the laundry and dairy that serviced the house.

We approached the front door. This should have been another moment when I hesitated to ponder the wisdom of my unannounced visit, but instead I wondered how I was to make myself known. I was not tall enough to reach the door knocker, and it seemed unlikely that the noise of my small soft knuckles on the door would attract the attention of the inhabitants, whom I imagined as pale attentive beings in thrall to Mrs. Coughlan, circling in her colorful orbit.

The door was slightly ajar. First I knocked, but, as I had anticipated, this produced a less than adequate sound. Then I called out. This presented two problems: I was not sure what words would be appropriate and, were I to keep my voice at a polite level, it was unlikely that I would be heard.

“Hello, Mrs. Coughlan. Is anybody there?” I called out, selfconscious and ineffectual.

There was no reply. I could hear the ticking of a grandfather clock in the hallway and the pleasant early summer sound of birds behind me. Leaving Jock outside, I pushed open the heavy green door and stepped into the hall and looked around. The furnishings of the hall were exotic, but in a way that, since I came from a military family that had served in India, were familiar to me: a brass gong, a carved wooden chest, even a python skin, similar to the one at Ballydavid, mounted over one of the two doorways that, on either side, led off the hall. A tiger-skin rug lay on the large stone flags. I went over to it and looked down; it stared back at me with yellow glass eyes.

Outside, Jock began to bark. I recrossed the hall and reached the door just in time to call off my dog and welcome the rightful owners of the house.

“Hello,” Mrs. Coughlan said with a smile. She didn’t recognize me.

“I’m Alice,” I said. “I’ve come to visit you. This is Jock.”

Mrs. Coughlan’s smile became even more welcoming.

“It’s the little girl from Ballydavid, dear,” Major Coughlan said. The only words I heard him speak that day. When Major Coughlan had married the woman I heard Grandmother once refer to as “a Jewess he picked up in Cairo,” he had committed himself to living forever in his wife’s colorful shadow.

“You’re just in time for lunch,” Mrs. Coughlan said. She was wearing a dress in two shades of deep pink, with a fringed Chinese shawl over her shoulders. She carried, unopened, a parasol she clearly hadn’t bought in Waterford which she now put into a brass umbrella stand beside the front door. Crossing to the looking glass over the hall table, she pulled out her hatpins and took off a large shady hat with dark pink feathers that had brushed one of her shoulders.

“Why don’t you tell Norah there will be one more for lunch,” she said in a kindly tone to her husband, who disappeared through a green baize door that led off the hall. He was shorter than she was.

“Well,” she said, “you must tell me all about yourself.” And she took my hand and led me into the drawing room.

My life seemed pathetically banal beside hers; besides, who knew when I would again have an opportunity to talk to her? I was wondering how best to frame a question about her experiences as a Jewess in Cairo when a door, not the one we had entered through, opened and an Indian servant, in a white jacket and a turban, announced: “Luncheon is served.”

I was, fortunately as I now realize, speechless in the face of this new and exotic sight. I had never seen a male house servant before. I hadn’t known that they existed. I knew that there were such things as Indians and I had seen pictures of them in books, but I had never expected to have the great good fortune of seeing one in the flesh.

I followed Mrs. Coughlan back through the hall. The dining room, the one with the python skin over the door, was a room of the same size and shape as that we had just left. Major Coughlan was there already, standing by the sideboard, sharpening the carving knife.

“Sit here,” Mrs. Coughlan said, putting a cushion on one of the three chairs at the end of the dining-room table. “Now, what would you like to eat?”

It was the first time I had ever been consulted about what food I would prefer; unfortunately, since all the choices were unknown to me, I could not take full advantage of the opportunity. I looked at what I now know to be curry, a bowl of rice—at Ballydavid more often met in a milk pudding—and many little dishes filled with interestingly colored chutneys, relishes, and the other traditional accompaniments. I didn’t know how to answer and remained silent.

“How about a little of everything? You don’t need to eat anything you don’t like. Unless, of course, like my Ancient Husband, you’d prefer cold mutton and pickles.”

I shook my head and glanced at Major Coughlan. The knife and sharpener still in hand, he was sizing up the cold meat as though considering how best to go about carving it. His lack of reaction to his wife’s description of him suggested that the nomenclature might be a nickname.

Mrs. Coughlan helped me to the colorful food, carefully keeping each portion separate on the plate. The spicey smell made me look forward to trying the curry. But it was not to be.

The door of the dining room was flung open. Grandmother came in, in her wake Mother and the Indian manservant. I glanced at Mrs. Coughlan; her expression was one of mild surprise and welcome. But before she could speak, Grandmother had crossed the room.

“Alice,” she said, her voice cold and angry as she took my arm and slid me off the chair. No one spoke as she led me to my mother who clasped me in her arms, then followed Grandmother to the hall door. Behind us I could hear only the rhythmic sound of the bone-handled knife being drawn once again over the steel sharpener.

 

WE MARCHED SILENTLY back to Ballydavid. My grandmother, head in air, drew ahead of us, although my mother, holding my hand, was already walking too fast for me. “We thought the tinkers had taken you,” she said, quietly enough for Grandmother not to hear her.

I didn’t reply. It thought it likely that if I spoke I would draw Grandmother’s wrath, and it seemed wise to allow a little time to elapse before the full extent of my transgressions were discussed.

They never were. I was sent up to bed as soon as we reached Ballydavid. That I hadn’t had my lunch was an oversight rather than a punishment. I was tired and overexcited—as were Grandmother and my mother—and I shouldn’t be surprised if they both had retired for a prolonged rest that afternoon.

Their fears were real, although I didn’t then understand their source. When I woke up from my nap, I wondered—there was no clock in my room—if enough time had elapsed for me to go downstairs. I lay in bed for a little time, not reluctant to put off the moment when I would face the reproaches of the adults I had inconvenienced and, apparently, frightened. I considered my mother’s words and thought her fear that I had been stolen by the tinkers illogical. When we had driven past the tinker encampment several days before, I had observed them as carefully as was possible while obeying the injunction against staring. It seemed to me they already had more children than they needed. So why had my mother been afraid? Had they some other use—unknown to me—for children? Did they sell them? Or was it possible that I might have served the same unidentified purpose as the snails whose charred shells had suggested some sinister meal or ritual? Might they have eaten me? I had now frightened myself enough to get out of bed, dress quickly, and go downstairs.

I opened the door of the drawing room a little and slipped in. Mother was sitting on the sofa, Edward crawling around at her feet. She smiled at me and beckoned. I crossed the room quietly and sat beside her, close enough to feel her warmth. Neither Grandmother nor Aunt Katie seemed to notice my arrival, but I did not have the feeling that I was being pointedly ignored. Avoiding my mothers habit of premature relief, I waited to see what would happen next. Tea had been brought in some time before, and empty teacups and small plates with crumbs had been put back on the tray. My mother put two cucumber sandwiches on a plate. The upper side of the sandwiches had become dry and started to curl at the corners, but I was hungry and ate them happily. When I finished, Mother silently cut a slice of Madeira cake which she handed to me with a gesture that cautioned me not to drop crumbs on the sofa.

I ate and watched. The room was very quiet, the silence broken by the scratching of Grandmother’s pen and the cards that Aunt Katie was laying out for one of her ritual games of patience. Grandmother, at the table beside the window, engrossed in her task, had covered several sheets of writing paper. I glanced at my mother. Her face was calm and relaxed, the expression one of the near happiness she attained when not faced with the demands of others. I, too, was happy that I seemed to have been forgiven or forgotten, grateful for the peace of the late afternoon, the day winding down, the changing color of the light, the quiet of the approaching evening.

“The nine of spades,” Aunt Katie said dramatically. She stood up and left the room quickly.

“Oh dear,” mother said sympathetically, but not as though she shared her aunt’s sense that something tragic had occurred. Grandmother did not even look up from her task. I had the impression that she was now writing more quickly and with greater urgency.

Mother, Grandmother, and Aunt Katie were intensely superstitious, but each had her own taste in superstition. What seemed to one a portent of great weight was merely indulged by the other two, each having some more reliable method of her own to ward off disaster or to predict the future. Grandmother would not allow hawthorn or marigolds inside the house, the stricture against the former at least having a good pagan origin. Aunt Katie depended on cards and symbolic messages from a wide variety of inanimate objects that came unexpectedly into her line of vision. My mother’s foible was a series of small anxious rituals, superstitious and neurotic, the rewards of their observance as unspecified as the disasters that would surely befall if they were ignored.

Grandmother laid down her pen and read through her list. When she finished she nodded with the satisfaction of one completing an arduous, subtle, and physically exhausting piece of work.

“Katie—” she said, and then, noticing for the first time that her sister was no longer in the room, turned to Mother.

“I thought,” she said, “we might have a tennis party. I’ve made a list.”

Mother smiled, a little weakly I thought. Later I would understand the principles and procedure for entertaining at Ballydavid. Grandmother drew up the invitation list. If one took into account geography, religion, and Grandmothers social beliefs and prejudices, there were a finite number of people who could be invited. For most families living close to Waterford, the cast and characters of their modest and occasional parties would be fairly consistent; there would be a wider range of those asked to, say, a garden party than to dinner. The guest list varied only when the young English officers stationed at the garrison behind the city were posted elsewhere and a new wave of young men took their place. Grandmother’s variation on this otherwise unquestioned social procedure was to take the conventional list, add a name or two—nothing dramatic, something on the lines of allowing a person who could expect nothing more than a garden party to come indoors—and, this her main contribution to the entertainment, to strike off the names of one or two neighbors who might have expected to be invited. The withholding of an invitation might be temporary, but, since entertaining among the far from affluent Anglo-Irish was not constant, it might be months or even a year before the offending—and not unreasonably offended—party was restored to his rightful place. Having drawn up the list, Grandmother turned all other arrangements over to the capable hands of Aunt Katie.

Aunt Katie had had time only to instruct O’Neill to prepare the tennis court and to read through the invitation list—the Coughlans the only omission, a cousin to whom Grandmother had not spoken in several years restored in order to make the omission more pointed—before rumors began to arrive of an unimaginable disaster.

 

NEWS AND INFORMATION from the outside world came a day late—or sometimes two if the mail boat was delayed by weather—from the Morning Post. In addition to the war news so carefully read by my family, the conservative English newspaper often contained a leading article about the trumped-up grievances of the ungrateful Irish.

More personal communications came by mail. There were two mails a day, though the second post was not delivered, and someone would have to ride or walk for it to the post office at Rossduff, a cottage three miles away on the side of the Waterford—Dunmore road. There was a telephone in the hall at Ballydavid, but the connections took time and were generally unsatisfactory. I never heard it used socially. The maids were afraid of it and ignored the ringing; even Grandmother, on the rare occasions she used the instrument, held it a little away from her ear and raised her voice to the loudest level consistent with ladylike behaviour.

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.

Then, still slowly, my mother drifted into the picture. Coming down the stairs, she saw what lay below her, raised her hand to her throat, and became, also, still. The tableau, the composition changed, again became static, broken only by the small movement and faint sound of her lapis beads trickling, bouncing, and rolling down the stairs, some of them becoming caught in the folds of Aunt Katie’s dark clothing and some of them rolling across the stone flags of the hall until they were lost under the furniture or in the gray shadows of the corners of the hall.