The Fox's Walk by Annabel Davis-Goff

the approaching evening.
    â€œThe nine of spades,” Aunt Katie said dramatically. She stood up and left the room quickly.
    â€œOh 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.
    â€œKatie—” she said, and then, noticing for the first time that her sister was no longer in the room, turned to Mother.
    â€œI 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.
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    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