The Fox's Walk by Annabel Davis-Goff Page B

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.
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    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