The Fox's Walk Read Online Free Page A

what my mother would say. I could see that she was confused and upset.
    My mother was sweet natured and self-effacing. She was quiet, gentle, soft, and affectionate. Of the few times she had stood up for herself, the most dramatic was when she’d slipped out the side door of her parents’ house in Philimore Gardens to meet my waiting father. They had gone to a Registry Office where she had married him. It now seems possible her action may be more an illustration of his will than of hers. My grandmother, who had had dreams and ambitions, was even more upset at the elopement of her beautiful daughter with a brash young New Zealander come to seek his fortune in England than was her husband, the General. My grandfather, though initially angry and disappointed, was at least aware of my father’s strength of character and courage; he, himself, had had to make his own way. The elopement was now far enough in the past for the marriage to have become part of the pattern of our family, but my mother lived every day with a consequence for which she was entirely unsuited: a cultural—in this instance not only a euphemism for class—difference between her and my father, the difference more pronounced when witnessed by her friends and members of her family.
    So Uncle Hubert was not alone in being more comfortable visiting my mother before my father came home; my mother was also happier spending time with her brother while her husband was absent. Now Uncle Hubert had introduced someone of unknown antecedents into her drawing room; someone who might be a most courageous and deserving refugee but who might also be what my mother called an “adventuress.” And since my mother had given up the right to pronounce on unsuitable alliances when she had eloped with my father, she did not feel she could question Uncle Hubert’s choice. What she could ask, or rather attempt to ascertain, was to what extent this unfortunate creature—by this time my mother had noticed dark roots below Madame Tchnikov’s huge mound of red hair and color from her lip salve on her cup—had got her claws into Uncle Hubert.
    My father, appealed to when he came home, remarked that Hubert had always given the impression of being well able to take care of himself. Even I could tell this offhand remark was intended to put an end to the subject. My father tended to be unsympathetic to problems peculiar to the privileged.
    â€œIt’s just———” my mother said slowly, as she searched for the right euphemism, “in a few months he will be going back to China—for five years—and he doesn’t have a wife. Maybe he’s lonely———”
    My father laughed.
    â€œDo you think there aren’t women in China?” he asked.
    My mother drew in her breath, remembered my presence, and I was sent upstairs for my bath. But not before I had gathered, while not understanding the implications, that my father was suggesting for a man on his own, a beautiful, young, and undemanding Chinese woman might be more appealing than a shopworn and desperate Russian refugee. Or, I inferred, possibly even a suitable young Englishwoman of the right background.
    Mother did not, to my disappointment, again require my company on the days when Uncle Hubert brought this exotic creature to call. After awhile, my uncle stopped bringing Madame Tchnikov to the house. When he came again on his own, he seemed to suggest, although nobody could ask—actually my father would have had no difficulty with the question but still showed no inclination to become involved—that he had brought Madame Tchnikov rather as a novelty that would interest and amuse my family as much as it did him. My mother breathed a sigh of relief. Rather prematurely as it turned out.
    One damp April afternoon, as my mother was sitting in the drawing room, the maid announced Madame Tchnikov—Madame Tchnikov following close on her heels so