AUGUST BEGAN WITH a heavy threat of thunder, the dark skies and thick, oppressive air portentous. We waited for the storm to break. There was nothing to limit the named and unnamed fear we all felt. It semed now that anything might be possible.
Each sultry day, I was conscious that Casement was soon to be hanged. For others the war was about to enter its third ghastly year, and, although it had as long again to go, it could already be seen to be one of the great tragedies of the world’s history. Ahead of us, unsuspected in the specifics, lay the Russian Revolution and the influenza epidemic of 1918 that would kill more than the war and the revolution put together—with anything that would happen in Ireland thrown in for good measure.
Even though I was too young to read the newspapers and my family felt no need to dwell on the horrors of the moment in history in which we were living, I began to understand that, although the rules that governed my life still applied, they were no guarantee of consequence.
***
CROWDS GATHERED outside Pentonville on the morning of the third of August. There was no last minute reprieve, and, at about the time we sat down to breakfast at Ballydavid, Roger Casement was hanged. Severing another tie with his background, Casement died a Roman Catholic, received into the church during the weeks before his death. The English newspapers would carry the story of his execution the following day; the day after, the second anniversary of the outbreak of war, we would read it at Ballydavid. The Irish Sea put a buffer between the immediacy of the news and our sheltered drawing room; the Irish newspaper read in the kitchen would, of course, offer a somewhat different account a day sooner. Despite the lack of written confirmation, and, although we did not speak of it, the horror of what had happened in London that morning hung over the household. The kitchen no longer a haven for me, I spent much of the day alone, some of it praying that Casement would be granted a last minute stay of execution. That afternoon Rosamund Gwynne came to tea at Ballydavid.
If Mother had, as I suspect, pleaded Grandmother’s ill health as an excuse to escape her mother-in-law and for her sudden visit to Ireland, her letters home must have been full of half-truths, evasion, and omission. Not only was Grandmother as healthy, cheerful, and energetic as she was ever to be after Uncle Sainthill’s death, but she was engaged in a whirl of social activity. Rosamund Gwynne’s promised visit to Ballydavid was imminent; she had brought her trunks and hatboxes south and was now staying on the other side of Waterford with a friend whose father commanded the garrison.
“She seems to be rather a favorite with the young officers,” Aunt Katie had said at lunch, her tone benevolent.
Grandmother said nothing. I could imagine the weight of disapproval she would have conveyed with the same words. It seemed that Aunt Katie’s essential good nature and her reluctance to think ill of anyone with whom she was connected now included her prospective niece, Miss Gwynne. Grandmother, with one son dead and her daughter unsuitably married, did not share her charitable outlook; that the young woman who would in all probability become her daughter-in-law was apparently a flirt did not sit well with her.
Nevertheless, the Ballydavid tennis party was an annual event, and this year it was to be slightly expanded and to some extent in honor of Rosamund Gwynne. Although most invitations had already been sent out, Grandmother had not yet completely finished with the guest list.
When I came downstairs to tea, the sun was shining, and Mother, my grandmother, and my great-aunt were sitting outdoors with Miss Gwynne. I followed Bridie who was carrying the tea tray out to the veranda. My mother gestured for me to sit on a footstool beside her.
“So Alice, still on holiday—you must be missing Clodagh.”
With her first sentence, Miss Gwynne managed to offend me. While she had been in the north of Ireland and after it had seemed inevitable that she would become one of the family, I had considered the likelihood of being a bridesmaid when she married Uncle Hubert, and had gone so far as to prepare myself with a couple of suggestions as to how I might to the greatest advantage be dressed. Now I felt the wave of instant dislike that, looking back after all these years, I think Rosamund Gwynne managed to induce in most members of my family—with the presumable exception of my uncle. There were few people I wanted less to see than Clodagh, and, surely, it would have been more graceful—although equally improbable—to suggest that Clodagh was missing me.
I smiled politely, but said nothing.
“And that unusual woman—who was staying when we came to lunch—how is she?”
I resented not only her description of Sonia but also the amused superiority of her tone.
“Sonia?” Mother said. “I’m afraid we’ve rather lost touch.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Miss Gwynne said. “I was hoping to hear what she was up to now.”
“Yes,” Mother said. “I’m afraid I can’t help you. I saw her one afternoon at the Dorchester and wanted to thank her for her kindness to Alice, but she was having tea with Lady Dartmouth and I didn’t want to seem pushing.”
“Lady Dartmouth!” This was not good news for my adversary, but she recovered herself quickly. “The Dartmouths are relatives—distant—on my mother’s side.”
“Oh, good. Well, I’m sure you’ll see her there and you’ll be able to catch up.”
It is to my mother’s credit that she had made her fabrication on Sonia's behalf (whom she had never met, or if she had, I realized a moment later, entering my usual labyrinth of anxiety and confusion, it had been unbeknownst to her while Sonia was traveling under another name) seem less unlikely than what was probably only a slight exaggeration on Miss Gwynne’s part.
“I hope Miss Critchley will be able to come on the twenty-third,” Grandmother said, the tennis party still in the front of her mind, as it would be until the guest list was completed. In front of us the tennis court, mowed, rolled, and the lines freshly painted by O’Neill, lay ready. The summer had been dry, and the court was baked hard and the yellowing grass in need of rain.
“Oh, yes, indeed, she is looking forward to it,” Rosamund Gwynne said, her friend’s enthusiasm intended to flatter Grandmother. She did not understand that Grandmother was less seeking reassurance that Miss Critchley would be able to attend than airing her displeasure that no written response had yet arrived.
When Miss Gwynne had climbed into her dogcart and trotted briskly down the avenue, Grandmother returned to the table in the drawing room at which she wrote her letters. We sat in silence, Aunt Katie at one of her ritual games of patience, Mother watching as I played with Oonagh. After a little while, Grandmother stood up, two sheets of writing paper in her hands.
“The Bryces, of course, will have to be asked, but leave their invitation for a day or two. I’ve added Inez de Courcy, and she can bring that badly behaved little brother of hers to keep Alice company. And you should also write to Major and Mrs. Coughlan. You have already asked Rosamund’s list from the garrison, all those young men?”
“Inez de Courcy?” Aunt Katie said, not questioning Grandmother but musing on the wit and originality of her choice. I assumed that since Jarvis was, to my delight, to be invited, Aunt Katie had given Grandmother a modified version of his behavior on the afternoon of my birthday party; certainly his discourtesy toward Oonagh must have been omitted. None of us remarked on the reinstatement of Major and Mrs. Coughlan on Grandmother’s invitation list; we were relieved that the Bryces, whose invitation had been in doubt, were, after all, to be invited.
“She’s a very pretty girl and the best tennis player in the neighborhood,” Grandmother said quietly, and we understood that she did not intend Rosamund Gwynne to have it all her own way.
GRANDMOTHER RETURNED to her books and letters; Aunt Katie sent out the remaining invitations, then rolled up her sleeves and set to work on the preparations.
Aunt Katie had planned, ordered, and helped make tea for the Ballydavid tennis party every summer—except for the year before when it had been postponed following the sinking of the Lusitania and cancelled after the news of Uncle Sainthill's death. Each year her guests had been offered bridge rolls filled with egg and cress, cucumber sandwiches, and the Ballydavid sponge cake. They had been refreshed with lemonade, barley water, tea, or a light punch, the mixing of which Uncle William supervised. This year the tennis party would run along the same lines, but there would be ten or more additional guests: Rosamund Gwynne, Miss Critchley—the friend with whom Miss Gwynne was staying—the Bryces, Inez de Courcy and Jarvis, and half a dozen officers from the Waterford garrison. The Dean and his wife, on the other hand, had been pointedly excluded from Grandmother’s list.
It was the inclusion of the young officers that prevented Aunt Katie taking the arrangements comfortably in her stride. A seemingly endless supply of perfectly presentable, young, unmarried men of good family arrived in Ireland, performed a modicum of military duty, and made themselves socially available. These young officers were a boon for the average hostess, especially for those with unmarried daughters. When one young officer married or transferred to other duties, a new one would immediately take his place. In time each officer, each man, each regiment would go to France; Ireland was for them a rural, unsophisticated, largely out-of-doors equivalent to the Duchess of Richmond’s ball on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo.
While there were certainly nationalists who regarded these soldiers as an occupying military force, and others with husbands and sons fighting in France who thought the officers were having a comparatively easy war—many of those who put down the Easter Rising had been enjoying a day’s racing at Fairyhouse when the General Post Office was seized—these were not views I ever heard spoken aloud. Officers were socially useful, and they had not previously been entertained at Ballydavid only because Grandmother had no young unmarried woman to launch into society and because she chose to limit her social circle to the county families she had known all her life.
Aunt Katie wasn’t used to entertaining strange young men; if she had known these officers from their childhood, she would have been in her element. She would have produced their favorite boyhood food—a preference for gooseberry fool or treacle tart, even in a small boy, was never forgotten. But these young men were unknown to her, and she worried that they might expect the fare to be more sophisticated or in a greater quantity than she had planned to provide. Uncle William was consulted, but, apart from allowing that the Colonel (he hadn’t been invited) should, if he stayed for any length of time after tea, be offered a whiskey and soda, he took the view that plying young men with rich food and strong drink was unnecessary and, if it were done simultaneously with encouraging them to play tennis in hot weather, an actively bad idea. Aunt Katie, who was unsure if he was hinting at the dangers of drunken and licentious soldiery, did not argue, which isn’t to say that she was reassured.
The preparations began several weeks in advance. O’Neill tended the tennis court and painted the wrought iron chairs and tables that were arranged on either side of it. Aunt Katie told him how much butter and cream she would need and gave similar instructions to Pat, the gardener, about tomatoes and cucumbers. Bridie scrubbed the canvas deck chairs and left them to air in the sun. O’Neill’s underlings clipped hedges and waged war on dandelions.
Even I was set to work at small pleasant tasks. Churning butter on a summer day fifty years ago is a dear memory. The sound of that day: the wind—the end of a gale blowing itself out—in the elms, the lazy clucking of hens, the bees around the lavender hedge, and butter churning in the dairy. And the smell: the scent of flowers beside the gate to the kitchen yard, bread and cakes baking in the kitchen, the slightly unpleasant damp smell of the dairy. I remember that afternoon as an interlude of pure innocence, my fear, guilt, and horror suspended. The Clancy boy, like Casement, was dead; his brother, my red-haired hero, had not, Bridie told me, visited either Mrs. O’Neill or the Ballydavid kitchen door since his brother had been shot; Tom O’Neill was maimed; the war in France was going badly; but that afternoon everyone, except possibly Grandmother, was caught up in the excitement of preparation for the tennis party and the ritual of the churn.
Noreen, related in some way I no longer remember to Bridie, was the butter maker. The wooden churn stood on iron supports, away from the cool marble slabs over which hung the skimming pans and ladles. Turning the handle for the necessary length of time became hard work, but it was not only to relieve Noreen that I was pressed into service; it was believed that sometimes a change of hand would bring about the heavier sound inside the churn that told us the butter was about to come.
When at last we heard and felt the butter become solid, I was sent to tell Mrs. O’Neill and the men in the farmyard there was fresh buttermilk. The men came in and were given large mugs of the cool liquid, and Mrs. O’Neill filled an earthenware jug to make soda bread. I took a taste from my own small cup; I didn’t like it, but it was worth a sip or two to be part of the ritual.
THE TENNIS PARTY was to be held on the twenty-third of August. Even without whatever local excitement may have been generated by the festivities at Ballydavid, the twenty-third was an historic day for Ireland. It was the day the clocks changed—not changed in the sense of the daylight saving plan, which had that year, as a wartime measure, been enacted. On the twenty-third of August 1916, the Irish people were robbed—as some of them felt—of twenty-five minutes as their clocks, for the first time, were set to Greenwich Mean Time. There had been some discussion at Ballydavid about whether the invitations should be issued for new time or old time and if it should be specified. In the end Uncle William said that, since it was a tennis party not a horse race, twenty-five minutes wouldn’t signify one way or the other and that those who arrived first would play first and that tea would be served whenever it was ready and Aunt Katie chose to serve it.
Still, the day was felt to be special, and on the stroke of noon—the moment of enactment chosen by Grandmother rather than by the government in London—the hands of every clock at Ballydavid were moved to show twenty-five past twelve.
THE GREATER PART of Grandmother’s and Aunt Katie’s guests were of necessity spectators rather than players. There was one tennis court, and the convention was that mixed doubles, each match one set, would be played while the remaining guests watched. Some of them had little interest in tennis; a few were probably even vague about the rules or how the game was scored, but, of the forty or so invited to Ballydavid, a couple of dozen turned up with tennis racquets and the expectation of a game.
It would not have been unreasonable to have expected some rudimentary plan as to who should be partnered with whom and that, at least after the first match (in which players would be determined by their time of arrival), some thought should have been given to the level of skill of those playing before they were allocated partners and sent onto the sunbaked court—not only for their own sake but for that of the spectators. But this aspect of the tennis party did not seem to have been anticipated cither by Aunt Katie, who thought the afternoon was about food and drink, or by Grandmother, who had thought no further than who should, and who should not, be included in the party.
After the clock-adjusting ceremony and the realization directly afterward that there was not quite as much time as had been previously imagined for a quick and unambitious cold lunch, I had been sent upstairs to rest. No one seriously expected me to sleep and I was happy to lie on my bed with a book. I was reading Anna of the Five Towns. The day before, after my initial disappointment that, although by the author of The Grand Babylon Hotel, the novel was not a tale of glamour and intrigue, I had become sympathetically engrossed in Anna’s dreary life. But that afternoon I was too excited to concentrate.
The evening before, Bridie had washed my hair. She and I had gone with a large jug to the barrel in a corner of the stable yard into which rain water drained from the gutter. I had peered dubiously into the butt: Because of the drought, the water was low and didn’t look as clean as I might have wished. But I didn’t complain. My hair was long, and the washing and combing out of tangles afterward was a lengthy and a painful ordeal, and the rainwater was softer than the water pumped from the Ballydavid well.
The dress that I had been given for my birthday the summer before, the hem let down, was hanging, freshly laundered and starched, in my room. After my rest, as I put on my dress, I wondered where I should be for my birthday; it was not so far away. Then I thought that Jarvis de Courcy and his sister might be among the earlier guests, and I hurried downstairs.
The earliest guests were mostly old ladies. But soon the first game of the afternoon was underway: the curate, who had still to discover that his dean and the deans wife had not been invited; two middle-aged sisters who lived near Corballymore who came to Ballydavid once a year for this very gathering; and a young Waterford airman home on leave. Their game was the backdrop for the arrival of the greater part of the guests.
The old ladies sat, their large, shady hats protecting their faces, on the newly painted, wrought-iron garden seats. Some wore silk dresses in pale, lighthearted colors; for others, half-mourning was their concession to a festive occasion. Among them were women who were seen in society only once or twice a year. They were either too poor or too old to go about much and, not able themselves to entertain, were usually forgotten. The tennis party at Ballydavid might well have been the social highlight of their year. Grandmother had arranged for some of her guests to bring one or two of these old ladies, and O’Neill had been dispatched to drive two elderly, impoverished sisters, who lived in a cottage with a lovely garden in a neighborhood not along the route of anyone with a spare seat.
Overhearing discussions on this aspect of the guest list had given me much solitary thought, reinforced by Anna of the Five Towns, much of it on the subject of money and the fate of women who did not marry. I had the sense that a great change was coming, although I did not then know that each generation sees itself as both the end of one way of life and the beginning of another. Not only was the Great War going to change the world forever, but it would in all probability be followed by some form of Home Rule for Ireland. I was dimly aware that, when Grandmother died and Uncle Hubert married Rosamund Gwynne (although he still had not given an entirely satisfactory answer to any of my mothers increasingly pointed letters), I would no longer live at Ballydavid. I was too young to have much of a sense of the future and, apart from moments of fear and self-pity when I woke during the night, the inevitability of my expulsion from paradise did not much occupy my thoughts. Still less did I dwell on an alternate, less probable scenario, although I had been, since I’d overheard Mrs. Bryce’s “heiress” allusion, dimly aware of its possibilities. In it Uncle Hubert did not marry Miss Gwynne, and after his death—in the distant future, although I knew that in the East sudden death from a variety of deadly diseases was in no way unusual—I became chatelaine of Ballydavid. I would have liked to live the rest of my life at Ballydavid, but I could not quite imagine myself, a few years older and a couple of inches taller, dressed in long black garments similar to those Grandmother wore, giving orders to O’Neill and Maggie.
Since I was about to be, as it were, disinherited, a different view of my future had to be generated. One that included marriage—the only alternative to a life spent looking after my parents in their old age, followed by genteel poverty and the hope that someone would be as thoughtful to me as Grandmother was to the less fortunate of the old ladies sitting on either side of the tennis court. Much in the way that the youths who had come to Mrs. Hitchcock’s house carrying a petrol container had anticipated the burning of the big houses (the first of these houses would not go up in flames until 1919), I knew that after the war growing Irish nationalism would change the way the Anglo-Irish lived and, in time, remove much of their privilege. I already knew I would never marry an English soldier, and Jonathan, the boy who had spent the greater part of my birthday tea party under the dining-room table, was the only Protestant male of my age I had met during my year at Ballydavid.
Jarvis and his pretty, athletic sister arrived as the first of the matches limped toward a close, the curate and one of the sisters hopelessly outclassed by the other sister and the young airman on leave who, in happier days, had been awarded his blue at Cambridge.
“Alice, dear, why don’t you take Jarvis away and play with him. And Inez, maybe you’ll play in the next set———” Grandmother paused, glancing down the avenue. “Or the one after.”
Her glance seemed to suggest that she expected to see a player worthy of Inez de Courcy arrive, and we all followed her eye. I most eagerly since I was playing for time, wondering where I was supposed to take this terrifying boy to play and what exactly it was we were intended to play at. I had the sense that anything short of robbing a bank would seem a tame afternoon’s sport to Jarvis. Fortunately, at that moment a painful grinding of gears announced a sporty open motorcar driving up the avenue. All eyes, few of them approving, watched an unknown young officer drive past the front door of the house, spraying gravel on the grass, and come to a stop in the shade of the large beech. Rosamund Gwynne, laughing, dusty, and clutching a straw hat almost secured by a long, wide motoring veil, stepped out of the car. Under her motoring coat she wore tennis clothes, and she carried a racquet.
How to entertain Jarvis was no longer an immediate problem; hands in his pockets, he strolled over to take a look at the car. I followed him. Miss Gwynne, crossing our path, failed to notice me.
“That’s a Lancia,” Jarvis said to me, looking at it judiciously. “It should be able to do more than fifty miles an hour. Although probably not with yer man driving it.”
I said nothing but stood beside him, looking at the motorcar. It was green, a more interesting color for a car than the stately black of the Sunbeam, a vehicle I had never seen driven at more than fifteen miles an hour. With its canvas top laid back flat, and lacking even a windshield, the Lancia was open to the elements. There was a good deal of brass trimming around the radiator and headlamps. I could imagine that it was capable of tremendous speed.
Despite the novelty of the Lancia, Jarvis remained the center of my attention. It seemed unlikely, though possible, that he would spend the afternoon inspecting the motorcar. I feared that he would jump into the driver’s seat and simulate driving it; fortunately these were the days before the self-starter, so there was no question of Jarvis making a sudden Mr. Toad-like move and the Lancia disappearing into the Ballydavid woods, leaving me to explain. I began to remember that, however heroic Jarvis seemed to me, being responsible for him was exhausting.
After a minute or so, Jarvis having done nothing more provocative than stroll around the Lancia and kick its tires, I again became aware of the progress of the party behind me. The first set was finished, and Grandmother was organizing Inez and Rosamund to play in the second match. Rosamund Gwynne was—if she were indeed to marry into our family—rather too much the center of attention. The noisy arrival of the car, her companion, her loud and unattractive laughter now followed by the demand that Captain Blaine should be her doubles partner, were earning her disapproving looks from the old ladies. Inez, well able to take care of herself and better acquainted with the conventions of provincial Irish life, summoned the Resident Magistrate—a middle-aged bachelor whom I recognized from the meet at Herald’s Cross, the owner of the horse with the red ribbon on its tail—from the shade in which he was standing with some other men, smoking to keep away the midges. He arrived at Inez’s side as Grandmother glanced around randomly for a partner for her, and a moment or two later all four were on the court.
Grandmother was now free to greet Mrs. Coughlan, to whom she had not spoken a word since the day I had run away from Ballydavid and found myself a favored guest in her house. Mrs. Coughlan was dramatically dressed, but as I remember it, not in a contemporary fashion. There was always a suggestion of a costume party in her choice of clothing; it seems to me now that at some point in her life—most likely before Major Coughlan married her and brought her home to Ireland—she had admired a picture of an eighteenth-century portrait in an illustrated paper and decided that, if she ever found herself in a position to dress in such a manner, she would. Which is not to say that, when the opportunity presented itself, she abandoned such other dramatic possibilities as her crimson mourning dress or the widow’s weeds she had worn for Kitchener.
I wondered if I should say how-do-you-do to Mrs. Coughlan, but guests were arriving all at once, among them the Bryces. Aunt Katie indicated my presence to Clodagh, and she and Miss Kingsley came to join Jarvis and me beside the Lancia.
Clodagh and I greeted each other with tepid enthusiasm—moral cowardice on my part and, I think, an already ingrained conventional streak on hers. Jarvis glanced at her and said nothing, although he answered some question Miss Kingsley asked him about the car politely enough.
“Mrs. Martyn said we should go and play rounders on the other lawn,” Clodagh said. Her voice seemed unenthusiastic, and I remembered how deliberately she could refuse to be entertained.
“Did she say we had to?” Jarvis asked.
“No.” Clodagh was startled. “She thought we might like to.”
“Well,” Jarvis said, “then I’ll just stay here and watch my sister win the Brits.”
“‘Beat’, I think you mean, Jarvis,” Miss Kingsley said. “One wins a race, one beats one’s opponent.”
I glanced at Miss Kingsley and saw she was going to correct only Jarvis’s choice of words. She sat down beside Jarvis on the grass at the top of the incline that enclosed the tennis court and the area in which the spectators were sitting. We had the equivalent of balcony seats and the advantage of a cool breeze.
For the first time in the annals of the Ballydavid tennis party, the attention of the guests was completely focused on the game. The symbolic aspects of the match were apparent to everyone, although what it symbolized may have varied slightly, depending on the spectator. From where we were sitting, it seemed clear enough. The brash, unquestioningly self-confident interlopers were being challenged by a member of a no longer powerful old Irish Catholic family whose children showed a tendency to revert to a former primitive natural state, and by a representative of the Crown who, although charged with upholding the law and supervising the dispensation of justice, understood his place in the subtle hierarchy of Irish society. Major Spenser, the RM, lived a quiet life, largely devoted to sport, in a plain, gray, famously cold house on the Dungarvan road. He was a good fifteen years older than Captain Blaine, but he had kept fit and knew how to pace himself.
Rosamund Gwynne played well; I was surprised how well. I had expected her to be less physical. I had, I suppose, thought her strength to be that of the will. We watched the game silently. Clodagh, I assume, was on the side of Rosamund—her mothers friend, a woman who made no bones of preferring her to me—and her partner, upholders of the standards in which she believed and which, if they lasted, would benefit her. Jarvis, of course, supported his sister, but with an intensity I would not have expected. Miss Kingsley and Mother, who drifted over during the second game, remained on the surface neutral, applauding volleys and the better shots of both sides, but I knew they wanted Inez and the RM to win and, even more, for Rosamund Gwynne to lose.
In Mother’s wake came Noreen, sent by Aunt Katie with a rug for us to sit on, although it had been a good week since the grass had last approached dampness, and, soon after refreshments had been served to the more formally seated spectators below us, Bridie brought us a tray loaded with tomato sandwiches, cake, and lemonade. I remember the next hour and a half, sitting on the rug in the sun with Mother and Jarvis, watching the match, as one of my life’s moments of pure uncomplicated happiness. I was comfortable beside my gentle mother and happy in Jarvis’s unspoken approbation—happy with the picnic and the warm summer afternoon and the excitement of being part of a festive grown-up party. I was proud of Ballydavid at a moment when the house and household was shown at its old-fashioned hospitable finest.
This memory marks for me the beginning of loss: an hour or two on a sunny afternoon of pure happiness of a kind we would never again find. I am not yet sixty years old, but of that afternoon Clodagh is the only one that I know still to be alive; we, perhaps because of that, still exchange unenthusiastic Christmas cards. The happiness of the moment is not even an entirely accurate memory; much had already been lost. Although I remember Grandmother and Mother both taking pleasure in the party, they had already lost my uncle Sainthill and pure happiness could never again exist for them. The Great War had taken him; when it ended—a little more than two years after that August afternoon—the way we lived would change forever with the Anglo-Irish War, a time popularly and euphemistically referred to as the Troubles, a time of assassination and the burning of houses. Then would come the Civil War. There was already a foreshadowing of these unhappy times in the isolated incidents of violence—or the threats of violence—that occurred in the wake of the Rising. Even if all that had not lain before us, even without a second great world war to slaughter the finest of another generation of young men, the best it seems to me we can, even in the happiest of times, hope for is gradual loss.
Inez and the RM prevailed. It was a popular victory, although, apart from Jarvis, the spectators were too polite to appear partisan. I don’t think that Rosamund and her partner were beaten only by their opponents’ greater experience of the uneven local court. The two couples were more evenly matched than was usually the case at Grandmother’s tennis parties. Rosamund may also have become gradually aware, as the excitement of the drive from Waterford in the open Lancia wore off, that her appearance on the court with the dashing young officer was not admired by the intolerant and judgmental old cats who were watching. Her tennis dress, the height of fashion in England and even perhaps in closer Dublin, was shorter and more revealing of the outlines of her attractive young figure than County Waterford was used to; it seemed immodest beside that of Inez, by local standards a modern young woman, who wore a skirt long enough to reveal only her slim ankles and buckskin shoes. The old ladies thought Rosamund fast. I now think she was, instead, arrogant and had seen no reason to sacrifice the fun of flirtation and attention to make a good impression on a bunch of shabby old ladies. Rosamund was from a good family, but a good English family. It cut less ice in County Waterford than she supposed.
She didn’t, I think, imagine that the old ladies’ opinion would make any difference to her life, and, as it turned out, she was right. But it makes me wonder how much she really cared for my Uncle Hubert. Was her less than discreet behavior that afternoon merely the manifestation of high spirits? Or was she, without Uncle Hubert completely hooked, prepared to entertain the possibility of another choice? Or was she merely flirting?
Inez and her partner thanked each other and separated after they left the court. Captain Blaine fetched a glass of lemonade for Rosamund; I saw a silent moment between them before they became part of a larger group that almost immediately dispersed as the new game, of a staid and known middle-aged quantity, began. There was a general movement, further refreshments were offered, and some of the guests wandered toward the garden.
Major Spenser, still tightening the screws on the press of his racquet, came over to greet my mother who congratulated him on his game. Clodagh, discontented, went to look for her mother; Miss Kingsley did not rise to accompany her. Instead, she and I lazily picked daisies from the less recently mown grass behind us, and she made them into a chain she draped around my neck. She was, I could see, aware of Major Spenser’s presence.
“Cubbing begins next week,” Major Spenser said to my mother. “I hope you’re planning to come out with us.”
I glanced up at Mother. The question was of some interest to me and I wanted to read her expression as well as hear her reply. Cubbing began the following week; my birthday was the week after. So was the beginning of the new school term. I didn’t know whether I—wc—would still be in Ireland for my birthday. If we were, I hoped that in recognition of my greater maturity and as part of my birthday celebrations, I would be allowed to go cubbing.
Mother laughed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “O’Neill has clipped my hunter and the pony, but they’re both a long way from being fit.”
I was trying to pluck up courage to add my voice to that of Major Spenser’s when I became aware of Mrs. Coughlan’s approach. She was carrying a lovely pink parasol. I stood up to greet her.
“My little girl,” she said. “It’s been a long time since I last saw you. Wherever have you been?”
“Hello, Mrs. Coughlan,” I said breathlessly. I had not seen Mrs. Coughlan since my birthday party, and I was not sure of the current state of relations between her and my grandmother. Jarvis slid silently past me; he seemed to be going in the direction of the front door.
“Let us go for a little walk,” she said, twirling her lowered parasol so that I could admire it. The pink silk was covered with white embroidered rosettes; I wondered where she had come by it. “You can tell me all about what is going on in London. Have you seen any good plays?”
I experienced my usual mixture of flattered delight and confused alarm at Mrs. Coughlan’s assumption that she and I would converse on equal terms; after a moment I remembered that my part of the conversation, not a significant one, was largely ignored by her. Instead of being forced to admit that we hadn’t seen each other for almost a year not because I had been leading a busy social life in London but because Grandmother had not considered herself to be on speaking terms with Mrs. Coughlan, I was, a moment later, listening to an account of a concert at which she herself had sung and after which attention had been paid to her by a duke. I longed to ask where—in a drawing room or at Wigmore Hall? Waterford or St. Petersburg? They all seemed equally probable. And when? A week ago or when she was a girl? And if the latter, how long ago was that? Then we were interrupted by Captain Blaine.
“Seraphina,” he said, kissing the back of her lace-gloved hand. “How enchanting and cool you look. Who is your little friend?”
“My name is Alice,” I said quickly, in case she hadn’t remembered.
“The last time we met,” Mrs. Coughlan said, “you promised to take me for a ride in your motorcar.”
“So I did,” said Captain Blaine. “Why don’t we go for a spin now? We’ll take—Alice as a chaperone.”
Mrs. Coughlan’s cries of girlish laughter—I wonder now how old she was; maybe she was still young enough to have been attractive to Blaine—were interrupted by the arrival of Rosamund. She was red in the face and her hair was damp and frizzy. Her expression told me she was still suffering from defeat, and she looked more determined than usual.
“Good afternoon, Miss Gwynne,” I piped up politely, but, when she seemed not to hear me, I added, not quite so innocently, “I am sorry you were beaten.”
She glanced at me briefly, her expression more one of distraction than dislike.
“And Rosamund, of course,” Blaine said.
Introductions took place; it seemed the Bryces and the Coughlans did not know each other socially. I took note of that fact and of Mrs. Coughlan’s first name and that Captain Blaine had addressed her by it and stored it at the back of my mind for consideration later. Then we all strolled toward the Lancia.
There was a pause, slightly awkward, while Blaine decided how to accommodate two large egos and a superfluous little girl in his motorcar.
“You,” Captain Blaine said to Mrs. Coughlan, “will sit here”—he indicated the back seat—“like the Vicereine. Alice will sit beside you. Rosamund, you sit next to me.”
He opened the doors and a moment later we were all seated. Despite the heat, Rosamund allowed him to drape his khaki greatcoat over her shoulders so that she should not catch a chill after her exertions. While Captain Blaine went round to the front of the car to start it, Rosamund turned the collar of the coat up and put on his uniform cap, adjusting it to a saucy angle. She looked very fetching in a boyish way, but I knew her action would earn her a couple more black marks from the critical eyes of the old ladies. It was not until Blaine had swung the starting handle vigorously a couple of times that anyone seemed to notice what we were doing. He leapt into the car as the engine caught, found the gear, and the car lurched forward; all eyes turned to us as he drove across the gravel. I saw O’Neill and Jarvis just outside the hall door, O’Neill’s expression stern as he addressed Jarvis. A moment later, Jarvis launched himself across the gravel and, like a monkey, gripped the canvas of the folded down roof of the Lancia, and, with a foot on the fender, attached himself to the back of the vehicle before it gathered speed. As we swung onto the slope of the avenue, I saw Miss Kingsley still sitting on the rug with Major Spenser beside her.
Patience and Mother’s hunter, grazing in the field by the avenue, raised their heads for a startled moment before turning and dashing to the far end of the pasture; I imagined O’Neill would have something to say on that subject when we came home. I wondered how far we were going and for a nervous moment whether Captain Blaine was planning to return. Perhaps he would leave me with Mrs. Coughlan at her house, while he and Rosamund Gwynne, sulky from their defeat, returned to the garrison in Waterford. Maybe Grandmother and my mother would again have to come and take me home.
We passed out of sunshine into the shade of the avenue as we turned the bend and drove out of sight of the house. The speed was exhilarating, but the noise of the motorcar and the lack of any barrier between me and outside made me afraid; that Jarvis was insecurely attached to the back also terrified me. I sensed, when we came out onto the road, that Captain Blaine would drive faster and that his other two companions, competing with each other, would encourage him to show off. I began to wish I had stayed at home.
Rosamund Gwynne laughed and with one hand held her military cap in place. Mrs. Coughlan, upright, towered above me; she had taken Blaine’s reference to the Vicereine to heart. I turned to look at Jarvis, unsure whether it would be more dangerous for him to try to clamber over the back into the seat with me and Mrs. Coughlan or to continue hanging onto the back while Blaine gathered speed. That the folded canvas projected more than a foot from the back of the Lancia made his position more vulnerable and less easy to negotiate.
My head was turned toward him when the first shot was fired. It didn’t have an immediate significance for me; it seemed one more loud noise emanating from the engine of the Lancia. I felt the car swerve and saw that we were not going to clear the gateposts that marked the end of the avenue, behind which lay the Waterford-Woodstown road. I huddled down instinctively for protection and found my face in the lace of Mrs. Cochlan’s dress as I heard the second, third, and fourth shots.
WHEN I BECAME conscious again, I was lying on the grass verge that Pat had so carefully mown the day before. Since I could see the greater part of the tennis party streaming down the avenue—only three or four men, two of them in uniform, and Inez de Courcy were already with us—I knew that very little time had passed. I was most aware that sound had begun to come back into the summer afternoon. After the car had bounced off the open wrought iron gate, it skidded across the stony packed earth of the avenue before hitting the opposite gatepost and turning on its side. And after the crash there was silence; only a hiss of what might have been steam escaping from the damaged engine filled the silent afternoon, taking the place of the usual, hardly noticed sounds of birds and the countryside. I felt an intense awareness of every detail of my surroundings; of every passing moment, which seemed to take place at half the speed of normal time, before I floated away into the feeling of a slow, calm dream.
I was lying on the grass, a man’s jacket over my legs. I could hear Jarvis’s voice close by. Although the words he was speaking did not at first arrange themselves to have much significance, I knew—long before I understood what he was saying—that Mrs. Coughlan, Captain Blaine, and Rosamund Gwynne were dead.
A moment later I opened my eyes again and saw my mother crouched, wild-eyed and pale, above me.
“Are you all right, darling?” She gasped breathlessly, one hand on my shoulder, the other supporting herself on the grass.
I nodded and smiled a little to reassure her. I felt as though I were somewhere else, floating over the scene, and that the physical effort of speaking was for the moment beyond me.
“There were three men. They were wearing masks,” I heard Jarvis say. I allowed my head to fall a little to one side so that I could see him. He was sitting on the grass. The side of his face was grazed and bleeding. Someone had given him a large white handkerchief. The skin had been scraped off both his knees and the side of one leg. He was shivering as though he were very cold, and the way he held one arm I would later, on the hunting field, come to recognize as a broken collar bone, but his voice was clear and confident.
That Jarvis had chosen to lie about what had happened did not in my dreamlike state seem surprising. Nor was I surprised that he knew I would not betray him. I closed my eyes again, as much to avoid having to speak, even to continue reassuring my mother I wasn’t hurt, as to have to answer questions about what had happened. I wasn’t even playing for time; I knew what I would say: I would, a habit already invisibly in place, follow Jarvis’s lead but, as always, I would be one step behind. I would not contradict his lie; he already knew that. Instead I would say I had seen nothing. It would prevent a good deal of questioning; or, if it did not, it would at least simplify my answers. I closed my eyes because I wanted to prolong a little the time before it would all become noisy and urgent and confusing. And if I said and did nothing, I knew that, after the noise, urgency, and confusion, I would be put quietly into my bed where I could lie still and think about what had happened.
There had been two boys, not three men—it had all taken place in a moment, and then they were gone. Through the bushes, onto the Fox’s Walk and into the woods. And, although they had worn masks, it now seems to me—I have had a long time to consider every aspect of those moments—the masks had been worn more to dramatize the event, to give them courage, than as an effective disguise. They had surely not expected to leave a witness—or witnesses—alive. One of them was the red-haired Clancy boy. I wondered if he had seen Jarvis and me. I had seen him, but maybe he hadn’t seen us. But if he had, he must in that moment—having already shot at two khaki uniforms—have decided not to kill us. And who was his companion? And if he had seen us, why had he, too, spared us?
And during the time I have spent thinking about what happened, there is another question I have had to consider. If Jarvis had not lied, if he had not been there, what would I have done? I am fairly sure I would have said I had seen nothing. Three people, one of whom I had been oddly fond, were dead. I, through halfdosed eyes, had seen their blood-stained bodies being covered with jackets, a shawl, a rug from the motorcar. But I was a child and, although I understood what had happened, there were limits to my understanding. And my instincts and reactions were those of a child. And my loyalties and values were not as clear as they once had been. While I wouldn’t side with the assassins, I no longer trusted the forces that would hunt them down if I spoke up. And if he had seen me—surely he had—the red-haired boy had spared my life; did I not now owe him his? And Jarvis, why did he lie? Not often, but from time to time, until his death early in the second war, we would talk about that afternoon. But I never heard him say anything more concrete than that he wasn’t an informer.
I kept my eyes closed and breathed in the smell of mud and crushed grass. I listened to Jarvis tell his story once again. It felt as though everything was still and at a great distance, even my breathing had become so slow that it seemed a conscious effort. I thought I would lie still and feel the short grass on my cheek and my mother’s hand stroking my hair. I knew that as long as I did not open my eyes I would have a little time.