Known as Therro by everyone)
Between the two rooms was a wide staircase, which Honoria and I mounted; then we climbed another, narrower flight of stairs and went down a long, winding passage and into a large and airy room that I knew at once I was going to love. It was five-sided because one corner was cut off by long French windows that led to a triangular balcony overlooking sea and dunes. A tall brass bedstead, brightly polished, with a white Marseilles bedspread, stood to the left of the French windows, and over it, attached to a brass ring, was a roll of white netting, which my husband had told me I would have to let down at night to protect me from mosquitoes. A dark mahogany highboy was opposite the bed, a magnificent piece of furniture which had never been intended for ocean damp: the delicate veneer had cracked and buckled in several places. In one corner of the room, over a rattan chaise longue, was a daguerreotype of a young man and woman in sailing clothes, proudly displaying an enormous swordfish. Sun had burnished their skins, bleached their hair. They were smiling, and their eyes had the narrowed look I had seen on people who had spent many years in India and become accustomed to half closing their eyes against the glare. The young man with the engaging grin might almost have been—but was not—Terry. They were, I guessed, my husband’s father and mother, Therro and Kitty. I would have to learn to know them, these grandparents my children would never know. How long after that happy picture was taken had their little boat been caught in a swift and unexpected storm? All I knew about my husband’s parents was that they had loved the sea and died in it.
There was a sound outside my door. Clive, Honoria’s husband, and a young colored man came in with my boxes. Clive and Uncle Hoadley had met me in Jefferson, and Clive had driven me to Illyria, a drive so long and hot that despite my delight in the lush strangeness of the scenery, I had slept most of the way. Clive was considerably shorter than Honoria, thin as wire; strong as wire, too, I suspected. The younger Negro—he was much younger, was, perhaps, Terry’s age, was tall and thin, with steel-rimmed spectacles.
Clive lowered the heavy box he was carrying and smiled his dignified smile. “Miss Stella, I like you to make the ’quaintance of my grandson.”
The young Negro bowed. “I’m happy to meet you, Mrs. Renier. I’m Theron James.”
Theron.
It still came as a shock—although Terry had, in a sense, prepared me—that this tall, dark-skinned man, with a face as austere as his grandfather’s and a far more bitter twist to the mouth, should be another Theron.
‘Here’s another nursery rhyme for you,’ Terry had said.
‘Clive and Honoria, Honoria and Clive,
Keep Illyria’s light alive.
They had a son whose name was Jim;
Jimmy married, and from him
Came Terence Ronald, known as Tron,
Then little Theron, nicknamed Ron.’
Ron spoke to his grandmother. “I thought Miss Irene wanted Mrs. Renier downstairs.”
“I prefer Miss Stella here,” Honoria said.
Ron raised one eyebrow slightly.
“The room Miss Irene had in mind just across from Mr. Hoadley’s, and Mr. Hoadley, he snore. Just put that box there, please, Ron, so’s I can tend to it. If you’d like to bathe after your journey, Miss Stella, I’ll prepare a bath for you.”
A bath! Joy! I needed one.
Honoria left the room, simultaneously stiff and stately, indicating with one authoritative shoulder that Clive and Ron were to follow.
Ron paused in the doorway. “Mrs. Renier, if Honoria tells you to do something, do it. Honoria is to be taken seriously.”
“Well, yes—” I said. “Of course.” I did not understand him, or anything about him. Like Honoria, he moved like royalty, and he didn’t sound like any of the soft and sultry voices I’d heard at the harbor in Jefferson or since my arrival in Illyria. His voice was cool and sounded strangely British.
“Miss Stella, since you’re new here it might be better if you don’t eat anything Honoria doesn’t give you.”
At my look of surprise, he began to talk about change of diet, change of water bothering some people, but it seemed to me that there was a definite edge of warning to his words. Before he closed the door behind him, he said, “Your trunks will be on the train with Mr. Hoadley. Train gets in at six. Miss Irene may want you to change rooms, but you needn’t.”
Again a warning? Perhaps not, but how strange! I moved from his words, opened the shutters, and stepped out onto the wooden gingerbread balcony which looked out over the jungle between Illyria and the beach. The sun was moving westward now, but the air was still molten with heat. I leaned on the balcony rail; the ornamented and carved wood was weatherworn silver-grey, and had the fine texture of driftwood. The brilliant expanse of ocean darkened as a cloud moved across the sun. Breakers moved regally to the shore, rising, curving, falling in a hish of green foam. Mingling with the constant crashing of waves was the breeze in the palms. A cumbersome and clumsy bird with a large beak waddled along the edge of the water; it was so ludicrous in its ungraceful movements that I almost laughed; then, suddenly, it raised its head and soared up into the air in a glorious arc: and I was shamed.
There came a rap on the open door to the balcony. “Your bath is ready, Miss Stella.”
“Honoria, I just saw a bird, big and awkward and ugly, and then it flew—it was—it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”
“That would be a pelican, Miss Stella.”
I laughed with pleasure. “Oh, Honoria, I’ve never seen a pelican before except in the London zoo. I’d no idea they were like that!”
“Yes, Miss Stella. That is what a pelican is like.”
2
Honoria took me to a square room with a high, round window. In the middle of the floor was a big high-backed zinc tub from which steam rose. It was exactly like the tub brought to my nursery in Oxford when I was a small child. If I had been especially good, Nanny would let me soap the back and slide down it with a lovely splash into the warm water. I felt a great wave of homesickness, not so much for tidy and familiar England in this strange, wild land, as for my lost childhood. Suddenly I was not certain that I was ready to be a wife. It did not occur to me that all brides must feel like this, and particularly those who have to be separated from their husbands early in marriage, before they have had a chance to become accustomed to this new climate.
Honoria pointed out great fluffy white towels on a mahogany rack, and a bowl of powder on the low dresser. There was an oval cake of hand-milled soap in a china dish. “And here’s a pitcher of cold water if you need it. Mr. Terry tell you about our sulphur water?”
Yes, Terry had told me, and the smell indeed assailed my nostrils. ‘We’re used to it,’ Terry had said. ‘As a matter of fact, I like it, but perhaps that’s nostalgia. Some people say it stinks of rotten eggs, and I get the analogy, but that’s not it, because it’s a good, healthy smell. The Fountain of Youth—that’s sulphur water. Maybe that’s why Honoria and Clive never grow old. Illyria has its own fountain of youth. The old aunts don’t seem to change any, either. So you stay exactly as you are until I come for you, mica, mica, parva Stella. Don’t let anybody change you.’
I tested the water with my toes. I was lonely and strange and a little frightened. I was not quite certain I could bear it in Illyria without my husband. I cried a little then.
I was nineteen when I came to Illyria and I had been married less than two months. Theron Renier and I met at a dinner party. He had been sent to England by the Bureau of Navigation, the Navy’s Office of Intelligence and one of the first peacetime intelligence organizations in the United States. We fell in love immediately, idiotically, romantically, like Romeo and Juliet, except that there weren’t any family problems—not that kind. Perhaps the open enmity of the Montagues and Capulets would have been easier.
My father, who must have realized that his heart was giving out, gave us his blessing, and the Dowlers, distant cousins, but the nearest relatives we ha
d, threw a magnificent engagement party for us. Terry and I had met at the Dowlers in the first place: Lord Dowler, my Cousin Octavian, was retired from the Foreign Office, but still did something or other for the government—perhaps the same kind of thing Terry himself was to do in his later years. Cousin Augusta was still a handsome, if not intelligent woman, and it was her pleasure to give small dinner parties for the bright young men who were sent from all over the world to consult with her husband.
The week after the engagement party my father keeled over while he was giving a lecture. It was exactly the way he would have wanted to die, and though I grieved, it was a clean and proper grief. In a few weeks Terry and I were married very quietly in St. Aldate’s. Cousin Octavian gave me away, and I wore Cousin Augusta’s wedding dress, and then Terry and I had a short honeymoon in Paris.
We had expected to have perhaps six months together before he was sent off by his government on an assignment. When we got back to England his instructions were waiting. If I arrived in Illyria with no preconceptions that’s one reason—he didn’t have time to give me any.
I tried not to cling, not to weep, but it was hard. He was being sent somewhere, urgently, and nobody, certainly not his bride, was allowed to know where. There was, as usual, trouble in the Balkans, and I knew that there were still problems in the United States left over from the Civil War. ‘Wars like ours don’t end when they’re over, Stella,’ Terry had told me. ‘Think: aren’t you still suffering from the time of Cromwell?’
I didn’t want to think about Cromwell. ‘You’ve been talking with Cousin Octavian!’ I cried. ‘And you’ve been studying Kairogian. Are you being sent to Africa?’ Archaeology and Africa—particularly the section of Africa known as Kairogi—were Cousin Octavian’s special fields.
‘Stella. Parva Stella.’ Terry held me close. ‘Don’t try to guess. It will just make it harder for both of us.’
He sent cables home to his family to confirm his long, preparatory letters, booked me a passage on the Boadicea, and left the day before I sailed. The Dowlers saw me off with a basket of fruit and trunks’ worth of trousseau, and I waved and waved and left my childhood behind me in England.
For better or for worse, alone or together, I was married; I was Mrs. Theron Renier and I wore the Renier ring. I loved mu husband passionately; I hoped that I was already pregnant—of course one didn’t talk about that kind of thing in those days, though my father had brought me up to speak freely on taboo subjects. Perhaps this atypical and un-Victorian—or even un-Edwardian—lack of inhibition was one thing which drew Terry to me. I understood, with absolute rapture, what it is to be one with another human being. Naturally we were married to the words of the English Prayer Book, and my husband did worship me with his body, and for me there was never any problem about obeying him—ever—even when I wholeheartedly disagreed with him.
‘In Illyria,’ Terry had said, ‘you will learn to know me.’ I did realize that my own family, which consisted of my father and the Dowlers, was incredibly simple in comparison with Terry’s. I was an only child; my father had been an only child. The Dowlers had no children, and my father and I were the only relatives they claimed. But in the American South, Terry had told me, kin mattered. ‘To the point of absurdity. People fill in whole evenings tracing relationships. It’s a parlor game that doesn’t cost anything but memory and time, and there’s plenty of both in the South, and not much else. Just relax about it and try to think of the family as characters in one of those new Russian novels you’re so fond of. We may not have patronymics, but all the ladies are “Miss” whether they’re married or not, and Chekhov or Tolstoy would have been quite at home at one of the St. Cecilia Balls.’
But I was not a character out of Chekhov or Tolstoy, and I felt a stranger in an alien land as I lay back in the steaming tub Honoria had prepared for me, and tried to relax after my long journeying.
The strange-smelling water was deliciously warm (yes, it did remind one of rotten eggs); I even had to add a little cool water from the pitcher; and I learned early in Illyria that a warm bath is much more refreshing in hot weather than a cold one from which you emerge into the heat with an unpleasant shock.
Outside the bathroom door I heard a voice which I recognized as Aunt Irene’s, warm and rhythmical and a little wistful. “Honoria, I thought I told you to put Miss Stella downstairs in the yellow room.”
Honoria’s voice was calm. “Mr. Hoadley snores, Miss Irene.”
“He’s only here on weekends.”
“You be less disturbed this way, Miss Irene. Nobody walking about the halls when you take your afternoon nap.”
“I know what you’re afraid of, but surely that’s all over now?” There was a long silence, then Aunt Irene said, “All right. I know there’s no use arguing with you. So will you—” she dropped her voice—“will you read the cards for me after dinner?”
“You know I won’t, Miss Irene.”
“But I need—”
“No, Miss Irene. You don’t. And don’t go back to her.”
“Why not, if you won’t help?”
“Help? It’s never led to anything but misery. Misery. You know that.”
“But I’m frightened, Honoria. What else can I do?”
“You can pray.”
Aunt Irene’s voice went thin, and somehow hard. “Mr. Hoadley will want some ice before dinner, please.”
“Very well, Miss Irene.”
Their footsteps moved away.
When I returned to my room, wrapped in a great white towel, Honoria had unpacked for me. On the bed table were my books, the ones I had brought to read on the ship: the latest French translation of Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (the Oblonskys, I thought, were simple in comparison with the Reniers); one of my father’s marked volumes of Plato; some poems. Under these was a book which was not mine: Pascal’s Pensées. I opened it. On the fly-leaf, in firm but delicate hand, was written Marguerite Dominique de la Valeur. My husband’s grandmother, his dearly loved Mado. Marking one of the pages was a slip of paper with some verses carefully copied out:
In this parched place of desolate wilderness,
This war-torn, hate-split world, oh, who will bless,
Bless and redeem the blood-stained, tear-drenched ground
So once again the healing sun will blaze,
The small birds sing, the flowers be found,
And lion and lamb in loving joy may graze?
Who is there left the truth of love to guess?
How shall we stand the violence of the sun?
How hate redeem, how brother’s love confess?
What will be left when wind and fire are done?
Only on love’s terrible other side
Is found the place where lion and lamb abide.
by Marguerite Dominique de la Valeur Renier, translated by Olivia Hugeot Renier.
I did not understand the verses, but I felt the pain out of which they had been written, and for the first time Marguerite Dominique de la Valeur Renier began to be a real person for me, and I could share my husband’s regret that she had died before I had a chance to know her and be guided by her, for I, too, was Mrs. Theron Renier and in a strange land.
I lay down in the big brass bedstead, covered loosely by the towel, and slept.
Honoria called me a little after seven. “Your aunts and Mr. Hoadley are on the veranda, and would be pleased for you to join them.”
I woke up, not quite knowing where I was, my conscious mind waking not to the present moment but to the conversation overheard between Honoria and Aunt Irene while I was bathing. “Honoria, is there some kind of problem about my room?”
“Don’t you fret, Miss Stella.”
I sat up, wrapping the towel around me. The old woman looked gravely into my eyes. I looked back, smiling just a little. At last Honoria’s face relaxed into a wide, radiant return of my smile.
“Miss Mado right about you, Miss Stella.”
“What?”
“Don�
�t mind me, Miss Stella. Talking things over with Miss Mado the way I used to do is just one of my old woman’s ways. There wasn’t nothing Miss Mado and I didn’t share. Nothing. We glad you come. Maybe now the angels will come back to Illyria.” She smiled again, and left me.
I reached for Anna Karenina in which I had put the hastily drawn-up family tree which Terry had made for me.
“There’s not enough time, Stella. I’m sending you to Illyria without any armor, except perhaps your very ignorance. If I try to tell you now, I’ll just confuse and upset you. There are things you ought to know. All I request is that you ask your questions of Honoria and Clive. Not anybody else. You won’t need to ask the great-aunts. They’re bound to bend your ears with their nanny goats.’
‘What!’
‘Anecdotes, my darling,’ and we collapsed into the wild laughter which was all that got us through those last hours of parting.
I studied the family tree now, written in my husband’s swift and definite hand, preparing myself before going downstairs.
When I got out to the veranda, Uncle Hoadley was sitting on a bamboo settee, a folded newspaper lying beside him. Honoria or Clive had drawn up the chairs around a huge brass tray on a low bamboo stand. On the tray were set out bottles of spirits and a cut-glass jar of fresh mint and a silver ice bucket. Uncle Hoadley was crushing mint with mortar and pestle, and the aunts sat hovering around him, watching the ritual.
At the sound of my footsteps he rose to greet me, and then returned to preparing the libation. He looked, I thought, as though he had stepped from a Renaissance painting, was, perhaps, a monk—no, no, at least a cardinal—performing his priestly oblations. I was grateful for Uncle Hoadley, overwhelmingly grateful, because he reminded me most comfortably of my austere and gentle father. His deep-set grey eyes were calm and thoughtful; the hot wind from the sea touched and faintly stirred his soft silver hair. Without looking up from his ceremony he nevertheless directed his smile at me.
“I trust you had an adequate rest after the long drive, Stella?”
“A lovely rest, and a sleep, thank you, Uncle Hoadley.”
The Other Side of the Sun Page 3