The Fox's Walk

by Annabel Davis-Goff

  Conventional introductions followed.

  “Countess,” Uncle William murmured, taking her hand and bowing over it so low that he could have kissed it.

  I could see, as could my visibly tense grandmother and great-aunt, that Uncle William was going to tease Sonia, while behaving in a manner upon which he could not be called.

  Sonia, who knew as well as the rest of us what he was doing, smiled modestly and sat down beside me on the sofa. She made no attempt to instigate conversation. I couldn’t help thinking she had come out of the introductory exchange rather better than Uncle William had.

  “Aunt Katie tells me you are from Manchuria?” Uncle William called his stepmother “Aunt Katie,” perhaps further confusing for Sonia a family tree already accommodating remarriage and, in my case, the apparent loss of a generation on its lower branches.

  “Yes,” Sonia said, her eyes lowered, her hands folded on her knees, her posture emphasizing her tall, slight figure. “I am.”

  “Never been there myself,” Uncle William said. He paused and looked thoughtful as Grandmother gave Sonia a cup of tea. All eyes remained respectfully on him as he nodded slowly; it was as though a respectable career in the Indian Army was to be considered the equivalent of having discovered the source of the Nile.

  “I hadn’t been aware that Count and Countess were tides in Manchuria, too?”

  Even I understood that he intended to expose Sonia to the old ladies. I don’t think he intended to do so from malice, but only in order to protect them. And to have a little fun. Sonia raised her eyes until she was looking at him.

  “My title is not a Manchurian one,” she said. “I was not a countess until I married.”

  “I see. Your husband...?” Uncle William left the question open enough for Sonia to volunteer information about her husband’s aristocratic antecedents, nationality, profession, or character—and whereabouts. Although I was as curious as I knew my grandmother and great-aunt to be, I—as I suspected they, too—would have been satisfied for that afternoon with the revelation that Sonia had, or at some time had had, a husband. In a relationship as fascinating and delicate as ours with Sonia, we, unlike Uncle William, felt each additional scrap of information should be mulled over and digested before the next question was asked.

  I knew that Sonia was not only the source of fascinating and pleasurable stories and of exotic information, but of a view of the world I was unlikely to encounter elsewhere. But I also knew—perhaps because I had seen Mara display her whole bag of tricks too quickly—that Sonia intended to reveal only as much as was completely necessary in order to keep a roof over her head. I appreciated the artistry of her small, well-timed revelations.

  “My husband was Polish; he’s dead,” Sonia said quietly, and her eyes once again turned to her immobile hands. Despite the embarrassment of the moment, I found myself wondering whether the Count had been murdered. Possibly by Mara, I thought in a moment of wild confusion.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Unde William said, possibly including the nationality Sonia had gained by marriage in his condolence.

  Not surprisingly, for a little time the silence was broken only by a log dropping a few inches in the fireplace and some sparks falling on the metal tray beneath the grate. There was unanimous agreement, requiring not even a quick glance between the females in the room, that it was up to Uncle William to be the next to speak.

  But before Uncle William was forced to retreat to a meaningless social banality, Bridie came in with a jug of hot water and the afternoon post. The passage of time makes necessary an explanation of the arrival of post on Sunday. In those days post, which was quick and reliable, arrived seven days a week.

  Aunt Katie took the silver jug and added a little water to the teapot while Grandmother waved away the post. Bridie hesitated long enough to allow Grandmother to see that the top letter was from my mother.

  Grandmother opened the letter as Aunt Katie refilled Uncle William’s cup. My attention was entirely on the letter; the others, too, remained silent.

  “Really, the most extraordinary thing,” Grandmother said after a little time, during which she read the letter and then parts of it a second time. “Mary says she’s had a letter and a call from a young woman who appears to claim to be engaged to Hubert.” We all stared at Grandmother, but no one said anything. Even Sonia seemed fascinated. Aunt Katie, the incurable romantic, was the only one who showed any sign of enthusiasm; Grandmother clearly thought that this roundabout way of learning her widower son was contemplating remarriage was at least disrespectful if not disreputable; Uncle William tended to disapprove of most decisions made without his advice.

  “Who is she?” Aunt Katie asked at last.

  “She seems to come from a respectable family. Gwynne. From Suffolk. Her name’s Rosamund.”

  “I was at school with a Gwynne,” Uncle William said. “I wonder if it’s the same family.”

  “Mary says she doesn’t much care for her. A rather bossy young woman.”

  Aunt Katie sighed while Grandmother reread the letter.

  “And it doesn’t seem quite clear that they are engaged. No ring, no announcement in the Times. She was, apparently, not willing to say definitively that there was an a engagement—of course, Mary could hardly question her———”

  I imagined my ineffectual mother, embarrassed, worried, her own disastrous lapse rendering her deeply conventional and reasonably sure she would be closely questioned by her mother and held responsible for the answers. No wonder she “didn’t much care for” this new complication to her life.

  “But she says Miss Gwynne gave the impression that she and Hubert would either be married on his next leave—well, that’s four years away—or that she would travel out to Canton next year and they would marry there.”

  “No word from Hugh himself?” Uncle William asked.

  “You know how the post is. And yet this must have been going on for some time. They met when he was last on leave, but he didn’t introduce her to any of the family or even mention her.”

  Grandmother read the letter again, for the third time, while we watched, waiting for her to find an overlooked detail that would offer some explanation. Beside me, Sonia seemed to have turned to stone.

  Grandmother looked up and shook her head.

  “For all we know she’s a madwoman and making this up. Or perhaps Hubert———”

  Even I knew what she meant. Perhaps Uncle Hubert had led this unfortunate woman on and then gone back to China without proposing marriage, assuming his five years’ absence would make clear his lack of intentions. Leaving his family—in this case my mother—to deal with any mess he had left behind.

  “Mary says he brought a woman with him to visit once or twice. But not this one.”

  “Definitely not?” Uncle William said, as though he thought my mother couldn’t be trusted to tell the difference.

  “Definitely not, quite a different situation. The woman was a refugee, not young, rather painted, Mary said. And she said Hubert had suggested she’d had rather a—an adventurous past.”

  I glanced at Sonia. Her lips were pressed together; she did not seem to be breathing.

  “I liked her very much. She was pretty and very nice,” I said, astonishing myself with my own daring. I could feel that something was happening that I should try to stop before any more damage was done.

  Only Sonia seemed to hear me. Her hand crept out and touched mine.

  “Better than that, anyway,” Uncle William said.

  “I suppose so.” Grandmother sounded discouraged.

  “What does she look like?” Aunt Katie asked. “Is she pretty?” “Plump. But pretty. Mary said she asked a lot of questions.” “And the adventuress? What happened to her?”

  Uncle William’s bluff, man-of-the-world tone and his evident amusement in the whole situation was now in one way or another painful to everyone else in the room, and Grandmother merely shrugged.

  “Well, this isn’t so int
eresting for our guest,” he said, with an extraordinary lack of perception, perhaps realizing further amusement at my uncle Hubert’s expense was unlikely. For a moment, he did not propose a change of subject; his eyes sparkling with malice, he looked at us, each silent in her own distress.

  “I am told,” he said eventually to Sonia, “you consider Alice to have psychic powers?”

  Everyone now looked at me, although Sonia was the one under attack. I was surprised to learn that the brief reference to “a gift” some time ago, with only Aunt Katie as a witness, had been taken seriously and had had so wide a circulation.

  “It’s not unusual in a sensitive child of her age.” Sonia sounded exhausted, but her tone was matter-of-fact.

  I wondered if Uncle William would say something about the increasingly scandalous Mrs. Hitchcock, surely the next step in reminding the old ladies that they were harboring an unsuitable guest. But instead, after some small talk while Bridie cleared away the tea tray, he continued in the same vein.

  “Well now,” he said, rubbing his hands, “what shall we do? We’re too many for a hand of bridge—so given the wealth of psychic powers at this tea party—what about a'séance? Or should we see if Aunt Molly’s table has a message for us?”

  “William, what a—a—an unsuitable idea.” Aunt Katie was not sure if she was being teased or not. “On a Sunday—with a child—and anyway you’re an unbeliever so, of course, no good could come of it.”

  “I have a completely open mind. I’m a little choosey about what I believe in, but I’m open-minded. Open-minded, not incredulous.”

  Another small silence while the three women in the room unhappily resented the not very subtle insult to Sonia.

  “In fact I’ve seen things in India that—that cannot be accounted for with a conventional Western explanation.”

  A frosty silence greeted this offering. Grandmother, Aunt Katie, and Sonia were still offended. I, however, sat on the edge of the sofa, gaping admiringly at Uncle William, thrilled to find myself with someone who might be persuaded to describe the charming of snakes, the Indian rope trick; here was someone who had seen scantily clad natives walking on coals, sitting on beds of nails.

  “Oh, Uncle William, tell us, please,” I piped up bravely when no one else spoke.

  “One night in the Officers’ Mess,” he started unpromisingly—I had supposed the tale would be set in the desert or at least the marketplace. “Chap there took the heaviest man in the room—Tiny Harrington—and four subalterns. He had them, the subalterns, make a sort of tower with their hands above Tiny’s head. He was very careful that they shouldn’t touch each other’s hands because what they were doing was—ah—interrupting gravity. Then each of the four subalterns put a single finger under Tiny’s arms and under both legs at the knee, and they lifted him high into the air. Tiny weighed all of eighteen stone, but he went up easily.”

  I was surprised and pleased by Uncle William’s story, with its suggestion that life, even among the dull kind of people we knew, might turn out to be more interesting than I had so far had any reason to imagine. Sonia and the two old ladies looked at him without expression.

  “Did it again later with the Colonel, only he sat on a chair. Got him up high enough that he signed his name on the ceiling with a silver pencil.”

  Despite my satisfaction with this story, it was followed by the final short silence—there would be longer ones—of the afternoon. Uncle William wanted to draw Sonia into the open; Grandmother and Aunt Katie were longing to communicate with a spirit from the other side; and I, although uneasy at being part of this adult recklessness, wanted to see what would happen next. Only Sonia’s wishes remained unknown and, as she did not say anything, choosing instead to act as though none of this had anything to do with her, we quite soon found ourselves sitting around what Uncle William had referred to as Aunt Molly’s table.

  Aunt Molly was the elder sister of Grandmother and Aunt Katie; she had died many years before. Her table—various pieces of furniture around the house commemorated previous owners—normally stood with a Chinese shawl draped over it beside Aunt Katie’s chair. Now that it was uncovered, I could see that it was pedestal-based and the papier-mâché top was black with an inlaid border of time-darkened flowers; there were small chips around the edge, and someone, a long time ago, had carelessly marked the surface with a wet glass.

  Uncle William carried the table to an open area of carpet and arranged the chairs around it; no one had rung for Bridie, who would have been the usual person to perform such a task. The seating required no discussion. Uncle William sat down and gestured firmly to Sonia that she should sit on his left where, it was inferred, he could keep an eye on her. Grandmother sat on his right, then Aunt Katie. I sat between Aunt Katie and Sonia.

  None of us, except for Unde William, would have thought this attempt at table turning a good idea. We sat silently around the table, our fingers—following Uncle William’s instructions—resting lighdy on the papier-mâché surface. Nothing happened for a while, and I had plenty of time to consider the awkwardness of Grandmother’s and Aunt Katie’s position. They knew that even my mild mother would have been shocked that I should be so exploited. What my father would have had to say beggared imagination; his complete skepticism would have in no way mitigated his outrage that I should have been exposed to the perils of this kind of irresponsible charlatanism. Even more than what my parents would have thought or said, the old ladies had their own consciences to face. They had been angling, without success, to enlist Sonia to help them communicate with the other side. She had not only shown no enthusiasm for such an enterprise but had seemed not to understand their hints. They had become aware that it would take Uncle William or someone else capable of a similarly blunt approach to force Sonia’s hand.

  Not only did I feel that it was cruel of Uncle William to press Sonia and to place Grandmother and Aunt Katie in a morally indefensible position while crudely trampling on the small flowering hopes and possibly necessary self-deceptions of the two grief-stricken old ladies, but he had offended me by coarsening the mystery that Sonia offered. He appeared to equate Sonia’s subtle arts with the crude antics of an officers’ mess and I, for the first time, saw the thoughtless, clumsy, literal-minded way that men destroy the fragile, not always rational, structures that women build and depend upon. The damage inflicted by my father and O’Neill, I now understand, was a condition of their masculinity as well as of their individual natures.

  What would have happened had we sat down in a spirit of faith and cooperation? I imagine that some random letters would sooner or later seem to have been tapped by the table; that Grandmother and Aunt Katie would have divined from them some small and hopeful symbol; that Uncle William would have been bluffly dismissive and matter-of-factly triumphant; that Sonia would have remained detached and not quite interested. Instead we sat tensely around the little table—even I, the one with least responsibility for our dubious undertaking, more aware of the tension around me than of any tentative spirit hovering in the ether. Some more sparks fell through the grate. I was beginning to wonder who would call a halt to the proceedings, or whether someone in a spirit almost of social obligation should give the table a little nudge. Nothing. And then the silence was broken by a small cry from a source unseen to all of us, apparently close to the fire. Aunt Katie quickly rose from the table—I had a feeling that she was, perhaps dangerously, breaching spiritualist etiquette—and crossed the room.

  “It’s Oonagh,” she said, quickly scooping Grandmother’s cat from the sofa. Banished for the afternoon, since Uncle William loathed cats, she must have slipped into the room when Bridie came for the tray. Aunt Katie took her to the door to the service passage and put her down outside. “She was asleep—dreaming,” she added, as she firmly closed the door.

  Then something happened. Or rather nothing did, but I was filled with an unreasoning terror quite unlike anything I have since experienced. There have been moments of extreme fear and not
inconsiderable danger during my life, both as an adult and as a child, but my memories of these occasions are quite different. When, for instance, crossing the Irish Sea during the Second World War, I watched the periscope of a German submarine cut through the cold dark waters, I froze, time slowed, the moment observed, as from a distance, with a horrible clarity. Or during the Blitz in London, my fear suspended in a manner not wholly dissimilar to how it had been on my first day on the hunting field, the full extent of my emotions to be understood only later. To fears of a longer lasting but less immediate nature—those, for instance, of loss and loneliness—my terror was even less similar.

  That afternoon in the darkened drawing room, I experienced fear in its purest abstract form. It had no image and no object, its provenance only our invitation to the spirits of the dead—even though that invitation had apparently been ignored. I didn’t move or make a sound, and it should have been some time—the lack of light in the room, all eyes on Aunt Katie, the stillness of the other three at the table—before anyone noticed my distress.

  Beside me Sonia sighed; then she drew in a breath and I felt, rather than saw, her body stiffen.

  “I fear———” Her voice was not quite her own, so deep it might have been a man’s, the accent, too, not completely hers. “I fear there will be no orange blossoms for Mademoiselle.”