by Maggie Wadey
As well they might ask. Aged ninety, my father is rarely at home, independent, fit, and maintaining a style of life that might tax a man twenty years younger. When the foxes step out of the bushes on to the lawn a security light on the wall comes on like a flash-photo, freezing them in its white glare like ghosts. The foxes squabble over their food. The cubs snarl and snap at one another and the mother always yields. My father puts the flat of his hands together and rolls his eyes. ‘Poor mothers! ‘Twas ever thus.’ Having eaten, they dig holes in the lawn and roll in the flower beds. One of the cubs always craps in his own feeding bowl. ‘That doesn’t make sense, my son,’ my father says indignantly.
How odd, almost outlandish their presence seems, these feral, stinking foxes in my father’s garden. The nearest open space is maybe a quarter of a mile away, alongside the motorway, a long narrow stretch of scrub and grass beside a stream, where blackbirds sing sweet as pie in the stinking May trees, where my mother used to walk my infant daughter amongst the daisies. As my father cleans away the fox crap he shakes his head and mutters:
‘Davey-boy, you must be going soft in the head.’
He claims heartily to dislike the wretched creatures with their filthy habits and their nocturnal shrieks and snickering, none of which had appeared to bother my normally fastidious mother. It was she who had begun the habit of feeding them, and my father tells me the only reason he continues to do so is out of deference to my dead mother’s memory.
There’s a whole lot of other things he does for the same reason. So many things he learned from her over the years: how to iron and fold linen, the correct way to lay a table for dinner, how to remove red wine stains from the carpet, the exact way to julienne carrots, to cut bread as thin as tissue paper and to butter it without having it crumble to pieces. My mother was no slacker. She had a tireless insistence on getting things right, and a quick sensitivity to what counted as ‘right’ – a characteristically feminine trait, perhaps. Now, if my father fails to dust behind the chair, or forgets to draw the blind to stop the carpet fading, he hears my mother’s voice chastising him. He knows that raw and cooked meats must be kept separately in the fridge, that vinegar and newspaper is better to clean windows with than hot water and a shammy. As he goes about the household chores, he reminds himself of these things and bows to my dead mother’s rule of law.
The house is as it was when she left it, and most of it was as she had wished, comfortable and pretty, with a small collection of silver and Venetian glass on display – though my father’s taste prevailed in the embossed green wallpaper for the dining room. My mother’s armchair is still ‘hers’. Her Marks and Sparks slippers are still where she kept them, placed neatly side by side at the top of the stairs. My father has shown no desire to get rid of her things but I have, of course, looked through her clothes and jewellery, giving away a few pieces to relations, and taking some to the Sue Ryder charity shop on New Malden High Street, where the personal effects of the dead are somehow rendered as harmless, as anonymous, as clothes on the factory rail. Some, I have kept for myself: a mohair shawl, my mother’s engagement ring (so-called, though my father didn’t in fact buy it for her until they had already been married for sixteen years) and two or three silk shirts which had been gifts from me. I genuinely like these things, but also want to possess a little bit of her. For weeks after her death I slept in the mohair shawl. I have kept a string of cultured pearls which I loved as a child. I remember knowing that ‘cultured’ meant they were in some way disappointing or inferior, in spite of which they were precious and beautiful. My mother and I certainly thought so.
I was allowed to wear them once. I was on holiday from boarding school, visiting my parents in Malaya where, as members of the local British community, we were guests at a party in the sultan’s palace in Johore Bahru. I was fifteen and this was my first adult party. Even with the pearls gleaming at my throat I was excruciatingly shy and appalled at the prospect of being asked by a stranger to dance – an art I’d only very imperfectly mastered. I was intimidated by the European women’s indecently bare backs and arms, by the womanly white nakedness of their skin, and by the grace of the Malay sarongs. My self-consciousness expressed itself in a naïve faux pas. I refused to dance with our host’s son, the Tunku, accepting instead the invitation of a handsome young Indian doctor. Against the formal backdrop of the palace, the touch of the doctor’s dark hand on mine became the perfect emblem of feral eroticism.
Tunku Mahmud was graciously tolerant of my childish rudeness – as were my parents, who might have been expected to be mortified and extremely cross. My parents’ tolerance was, in fact, characteristic of them: I was never forced to eat food I disliked, nor pushed to shine at school. In consequence, I ate adventurously and enjoyed examinations. As an adult I never danced with men I didn’t fancy.
In the 1970s, when foxes first visited my parents’ garden, they were still a novelty in towns. My mother could scarcely believe her eyes. It was a bright early morning in spring and the pretty young vixen seemed proud to display her adorable cubs, playing with them on the lawn, then falling asleep in the sun. Later, the vixen became skeletal, the cubs infested with mange, and my mother’s pleasure in them turned to a fretful sort of pity. She bought expensive antibiotics from the vet to dose their feed with. It was impossible for her to believe that the vixen’s blood-curdling scream was lust, not pain. On summer nights, when the foxes loped out from under the shrubs, my mother would reach over to her reading lamp, turn it off and sit in the darkness, watching. Now, sometimes I sit in her place, faintly bored by the ritual which still pleases – or irritates – my father, who has never quite got over his astonishment at the animals’ proximity, their boldness, and their greed. Silently, I wonder what it was the foxes had meant to her. Infinitely adaptable creatures, native to woods and mountainsides, yet making successful new lives for themselves not just in suburban gardens, but in inner cities, too. As adaptable as man, but less changeable.
I know my father sensed something disproportionate in my mother’s pity for them. It had the same note of violence as her extreme hatred of war, her almost childlike recoil from the brutality of so much of life. Which is not to say she was sentimental. Her solution to repeated famine in Africa was not charity. ‘Why don’t these people stop having children if they can’t feed them?’ she would ask, with something like fury in her voice.
My mother was the eighth of nine children. It seems unlikely that her parents, Irish Catholics who married in 1899, would have stopped having children because they couldn’t afford to feed them, much as they might have wanted to. Poverty would not have prevented my mother’s birth, though she might have died of it. Did my mother’s fury faced with the intractable problem come from personal experience? I didn’t know the answer to that question, nor to many others I might have asked, and my mother volunteered only the minimum of information about her background. Her many brothers and sisters were a shadowy chorus I met only at funerals. And since my mother did not allow me to attend funerals until I was in my teens, I grew up knowing only her youngest, favourite sister, Nancy, the ninth and last of the Kavanagh children. ‘Nancy and I were like that,’ my mother used to say, holding up two tightly crossed fingers.
The Kavanagh funerals were always in North-West London: in Hanwell, Southall, Edgware, depressing places reached by a long tedious car journey in which, in my adolescence, I took a kind of masochistic pleasure. Our route took us through Willesden and Hendon on to the North Circular, and I threw myself deep into the angst of the post-war urban sprawl, in my mind composing poetic metaphors for the loneliness and ugliness of the place. This was the late 1950s. I had begun to read Sartre and Camus. I had come across the concepts of ‘existentialism’ and ‘alienation’ and in my egotistical immaturity, wrapped in moody silence on the back seat of our car, I was at the perfect age – sixteen – to understand them. The tabula rasa of existentialism especially spoke to me with its dizzying freedom of self-invention. I owned a p
recious 45 rpm record of Juliette Gréco singing ‘Sous les ciel de Paris’. Here was a woman who embodied both sexual and intellectual freedom, whose Parisian nonchalance and black eye make-up I took as my model.
Our destination was the Catholic church of St Michael and All Angels in Hanwell. Built in the 1930s to resemble an ark, it was, to my critical and would-be sophisticated eye, a shrine to embarrassingly bad taste. Here both the lengthy funeral service and the mourners were full-blown Irish in a way my mother was not. My mother’s voice still betrayed her origins – something in the cadence, in the way she pronounced ‘th’ and the short ‘o’ in donkey – but my aunts and uncles all spoke with unashamedly ripe brogues. I met them in damp cemeteries in north London in winter, standing under umbrellas with a steady drip from the trees behind us. They were watchful, white-skinned, garrulous. I felt the claim of their flesh but they remained foreign, unknowable. Like shadows in the underworld they seemed stranded there – for I could imagine them nowhere else – a chorus in black, murmuring together at the graveside or inside the dark interior of a north London pub. They sent a bolt of excitement through me, not of recognition, but of otherness.
Ever since I could remember, I’d been uncomfortably aware of a whiff of anti-Irish feeling. I’d picked up on the fact that the Irish were seen as comic, or stupid, or untrustworthy. Sometimes a romantic gloss was added, where it did no harm: in the way, for instance, my father referred to Nancy as a ‘colleen’, or in the way that even English eyes filled with sentimental tears when they sang ‘Danny Boy’. But my English family wasn’t above exchanging ‘Irish’ jokes in my mother’s presence: ‘Did you hear the one about the Irishman who fell down a mineshaft and his friend called out to him: “Paddy, did you break anything?” And Paddy called back: “No! there’s nothing down here.”’ My mother would sit with a very faint, fixed smile on her face, eyes downcast, not unlike a woman enduring male jokes about her own sex, little acts of cruelty licensed in some way by the intimacy between the two parties: man and woman, English and Irish. Sometimes my English family only exchanged glances, or kept a significant silence. Later, during the Troubles in the 1970s, the anti-Irish jokes turned sour, the silences deeper. At such times my unspoken loyalty, passionate and totally uninformed – unthought, almost – was to my mother.
Still, whenever I actually met up with them, when my Irish relations looked searchingly into my face, I resisted their familiarity. In the crowded pub after the graveside ceremonies I was made uneasy by the sense that they knew things about me I didn’t know, deep, clannish, sticky things they were too polite to mention. Where my English relations, in their outspoken Sussex way, would have teased and challenged, I was aware of my Irish family thinking a good deal more than was said. My Uncle Dan had a devilish smile and broad, pale hands. A strong erotic charge crackled around him and he, more than the others, with his sly smile and his pale hand on my shoulder, suggested that I was in some way a fake. Of course I was a fake: I was in my late teens, hot with the desire to escape everything in the background I knew about and not at all keen, as I might have been, to embrace the other side, the side about which I knew nothing, but nothing at all.
It was always my mother who wanted to leave the funeral breakfast first. As the noise levels rose she embraced her sisters with diffident graciousness, murmuring something about the long drive home. My father and I were relieved to be freed to follow her out of the smoke-choked pub where the mythical companions of her childhood stayed on, their black suits gently steaming in the heat, to finish their ham sandwiches and their whiskey. She was always silent on the way home, her face turned away from us, eyes glazed. She was full to the brim with otherness. Amongst my parents’ possessions from Egypt, Cyprus, Malaya, there were scattered items inherited from my father’s mother – a gilded rose-vase, a silver inkstand, a dark oak coffin-stool – but nothing from Ireland. During my childhood I took this for granted. Only when I was adult did my mother wistfully express her regret that the lovely copper pots and brass lamps she remembered from home had ‘vanished’, and that nothing had come down to her. Not a chair she might have sat in as a child. No books, no jewellery, no knick-knacks. Not even a photograph. I grew up without touching a single thing my Irish grandparents had ever touched, without a single photograph of them, or of their home, or of my mother as a child or as a very young woman. That is to say, no photos from her life before she met my father.
But then, in 1996, after the death of one of her sisters, my mother finally received her inheritance. It’s a photograph, a single black-and-white photograph – taken in the late 1920s to judge by what the women are wearing – of the Kavanagh home. I have the photograph in front of me now. On the reverse I’ve written, ‘The house on Knigh Hill, Tipperary, approx. 1928.’ It is a pretty, stone house with a slate roof and trailers of some kind, roses, perhaps, or wisteria, rambling over the walls. There are six windows in what can be seen of the front of the house – not quite all of it is contained within the frame of the snapshot – the front door stands open and there’s an archway, part stone, part trellis, leading into a walled front garden. It looks substantial, comfortable, and charming. Behind the house is a stand of trees, thinly leaved, as if winter is approaching. A smudge rises at an angle above the chimney, possibly windblown smoke. In front, a dog lies on the gravel path, his tongue out, looking keenly towards two women and a small boy who stands stiffly by the garden wall. The boy, who is perhaps five or six – too young to be one of my mother’s brothers – has bare forearms, his hands are clasped in front of him, his face averted. The older woman, my grandmother, is in profile, arms crossed on her chest, her features indiscernible. Beside her stands a strong-looking young woman who faces directly into the camera but is made unidentifiable by her twenties bob and twenties ‘uniform’ of white knee socks and low-slung waist.
My mother had no recollection of when the photograph was taken or why. Incredibly, it was only now, when she was in her eighties and I had this photograph in my hand – and to be honest when certain things were happening in my own life – that I began to ask her to tell me more. For the first time since I’d left home more than thirty years ago, we began to have a regular period of time each week together, alone. On Monday evenings my father was out playing bridge. My mother used to partner him, but latterly the game had become too competitive for her and she no longer enjoyed it. My father had found a new partner, a young married woman with small children, keen to keep her brain and her killer instincts sharp. So, on bridge evenings, it became my habit to keep my mother company.
After supper we went into the sitting room. My mother sank into the armchair with the kind of exhaustion which suggested she was unable to resist the over-upholstered chair’s gravitational force, that at any moment the cushions would swallow her, leaving only a sigh. As if acknowledging this fancy, she gave me a lopsided grin. She kicked off her slippers then leaned her head back, mouth ajar, hands dangling over the arms of her chair. Silence and darkness lapped all around the house. We were adrift. My mother’s eyes seemed curiously large, almost black, as if the pupils were dilated. The light went on outside. My mother flicked off her reading lamp and parted the blinds so that we could watch the little drama of the foxes on the lawn, the struggle amongst the cubs to be top dog. After a moment she remarked dreamily, ‘My father used to feed the foxes. He’d put out chicken bones for them, and sometimes he blocked their holes so the dogs couldn’t get at them.’
I didn’t think that could be right. Foxes’ holes are blocked to prevent them going to ground, to keep them out in the open for the hunt. But I said nothing. If I didn’t contradict her, maybe she’d continue talking. She was silent. Then I saw a faint inward smile fleet over her face. Was she finally going to tell me more?
Part One
CHILDHOOD
1
My grandfather, John Kavanagh, was born in Borrisokane, north Tipperary, some time in the second half of the nineteenth century. My mother doesn’t remember the date of
his birth, or rather, she never knew it, only that he was his parents’ firstborn and, as such, was destined to live out his life in the cottage where he was born. My mother, who adored her grandmother, described her home as ‘a darling little thatched cottage’, standing on its own land where ‘Grammy’, as she was known, kept goats and grew vegetables: potatoes, of course, and, in spite of the goats, leeks and cabbages too.
Behind the little thatched cottage was my great-grandmother’s bog, a precious resource from which my grandfather would have been able to harvest enough peat to keep himself – and his children, God willing – warm for the rest of his life. Here on this rather flat, upland area the furze comes into such abundant blossom it sets the land ablaze, a forest of burning bushes shrill with birds, droning with bees. In marshy places cotton grass puts up its little white flags and pale pink bog-flowers flare like stars.
One late afternoon in May, 1887, my grandfather, John, goes walking up here alone. He knows and loves every inch of this place. But today he’s filled to the brim with a woman, with her face, her voice, with the question in her eyes, and with her name which he murmurs to himself from time to time. Today – in spite of the fact that some indefinable quality in Kate Buckley tells him she will be forever beyond his reach – he has asked her to meet him, there where the gorse gives way to ancient heather, where remoteness provides a sense of privacy under the vast sky. And he expects to have to wait. Of course he has to wait. Even so, he’s almost given up when at last he sees her figure approach, straight, unhurried, unmistakable. He doesn’t move to meet her until he can read the look in her eyes. An hour later, having touched no more than her strong, dry hand, John turns back to the cottage where he will have to face – and face up to – his mother. He has decided to reject what she’s always assured him will be his and his alone: the cottage, the land, the bog, a place forever at her side. He shrinks from delivering such a blow, but knows he must. Kate has said, ‘Yes. Yes, I will.’ John’s mother, as he’d known she would be, is deeply distressed. As he speaks, she occupies herself with folding the washing, smoothing each article of clothing with the flat of her small hand. She frets that, by rejecting what he has in hope of more, John will end up with nothing. She frets at the idea of losing the son she had expected to be her companion until her death. Of course in principle she wants her son to marry. In practice it’s a different matter. This young woman whom John had feared was ‘too good’ for him will, of course, not be good enough in the eyes of his mother. Never mind that Kate Buckley – daughter of the coachman to the Bishop of Killaloe – is generally considered ‘a natural born lady’. It’s also widely known she will come to the man she marries with nothing. Five months later, that man is John Kavanagh.