I looked across the table to the portrait. “And I’m still meeting him.”
“That’s Hoadley over the sea chest,” Aunt Mary Desborough continued, “when he was at Harvard Law School. Terry looks a little like him, don’t you think? but all Hoadley’s features are elongated, like that painter you like, Livvy.”
“El Greco. What are we having for dessert? I do hope it’s something special.”
“Stella, honey,” Aunt Irene said, “you do know, don’t you, how happy we are to have you with us?”
“It’s too bad there aren’t any strawberries.”
“Auntie!”
“But we do have such good strawberries, and I thought Stella would like—”
“I love strawberries,” I said quickly, “and I do thank you, all of you, for taking me in this way, a stranger—”
Aunt Olivia rushed in, “—here in Gloucestershire: a stranger here in Gloucestershire: These high wide hills and rough uneven ways—”
“Shakespeare, and it is Richard II.” Aunt Mary Desborough thumped the table. “I am a stranger here in Gloucestershire. Twenty points for me.”
“Nineteen.”
“Twenty.”
Clive came in with a tray, which he set down on the sideboard; from it he took two saucers, the first for Aunt Irene, the second for Aunt Mary Desborough. Aunt Olivia peered at her sister’s plate. “Oh. Pineapple ice.”
Clive put another saucer in front of her, then, carefully, one before me.
“What’s that?” Aunt Irene asked. “What are you giving Miss Stella?”
“There were just enough figs for one serving, Miss Irene,” Clive Said.
Aunt Mary Desborough half rose in her chair. “But, Clive—”
“Sit down, Des,” Aunt Olivia said triumphantly.
Coffee was served on the veranda. We waved our palm-leaf fans back and forth, not so much against the heat now as against the insects which fluttered about, strange, delicate creatures with long legs and translucent wings, unlike anything I had ever seen in England.
“Sugar, honey?” Aunt Irene asked me. “Cream?”
Clive passed me the small white and gold cup. His jacket shone white; the rest of him faded into the shadows of the veranda.
“I’m going in to get my knitting,” Aunt Mary Desborough announced. “No, Clive, I want to do it myself. I’ll be right back. Three sugars, please, Irene. Two is not enough. You never remember.”
Aunt Irene leaned across the coffee table to me. “The aunties,” she whispered, “you’ll have to forgive them. They’re quite senile. Hoadley and I are only glad we can take care of them.”
Aunt Olivia had been rocking placidly, slowly waving her palm-leaf fan to and fro. She stopped. “Clive and Honoria take care of us.”
“Auntie—” Aunt Irene started.
“Clive and Honoria. Make no bones about that. This is Honoria’s house, Irene. I wouldn’t forget that if I were you. Honoria allows you to spend your summers here—”
Aunt Irene rose in agitation. “Auntie!”
Uncle Hoadley, lighting a cigar at the far end of the veranda, moved towards us.
“Miss Olivia.” Clive bent to the old lady. “Your coffee. Half hot milk.”
Illyria belonged to Honoria?
Aunt Mary Desborough returned to the veranda with her knitting. Heat lightning flickered over the ocean. The slow pounding of the waves mingled with a distant rumble of thunder—the storm Aunt Olivia had predicted was moving towards us. I sipped my coffee: it tasted odd: probably the sulphur water.
Beyond the shadows of the porch it was still light. The sun had gone behind the house, but the wet sand near the ocean shimmered with the rosy afterglow, and the ocean itself had a luminescent quality I had never seen in England. Honoria brought out a shallow dish of some kind of pungent oil with a wick in it and set it on the porch rail. The flame burned low, with blue-green flickerings.
Uncle Hoadley said, “I hope you don’t object to the odor, Stella? It does help to keep the insects away. And my cigar serves somewhat the same purpose. You will allow me?”
“When we had the hospital in Nyssa,” Aunt Mary Desborough said, “Mado brought in a woman from the town, from one of—one of those—places. We thought it was dreadful of Mado until she made us realize that Carrie was the best nurse we had. She had the gift of healing in her hands. She could touch a soldier who was delirious and screaming with pain, and he would become quiet and sleep like a baby all night—far more peacefully than if he’d been given morphine—and of course during the war drugs were hard to come by. After we’d had a particularly bad night Carrie used to smoke funny little brown cigarettes—it was your cigar made me remember, Hoadley—and they seemed to give her so much relaxation and pleasure, I envied her.”
Uncle Hoadley pulled out an engraved silver case. “I got a fresh supply today at the club. Like to try one, Auntie?”
Aunt Mary Desborough gave a little shriek of pleased laughter. “Oh, Hoadley, you are such a one for a joke!”
“I’m serious, Auntie.”
The old lady shrank back in her rocking chair. “Oh, no, Hoadley, I couldn’t. Not now. It’s too late.” Then she said to me, with a note of defiance, “We nursed Union soldiers at Nyssa, too. There was a lot of criticism, but Mado insisted. Everybody said there’d be trouble, but I guess when a man is badly enough hurt, he doesn’t care who’s in the next bed. Oh, we were happy there, all of us, we were a family, white and black, but we never got anything but brickbats. People are always suspicious of that kind of happiness.”
Aunt Irene sighed impatiently, and I guessed that Aunt Mary Desborough often favored them with her reminiscences.
“Ron has it,” Aunt Olivia said.
“Has what?” Aunt Irene asked.
“The gift of healing in his hands.”
Aunt Irene sighed again. “That’s enough, Auntie.”
But Aunt Olivia leaned toward me. “Ron is a doctor, a qualified medical doctor.”
“Ron? the one who carried my boxes upstairs?”
“A fine doctor.”
“Auntie! I said that is enough.” Aunt Irene’s voice held a note of inexplicable malice as she asked, “And what did you do, Auntie, while Aunt Des was so busy nursing the wounded?”
Aunt Mary Desborough sprang in swiftly. “Olivia has always been frail. She did what she could.”
My father, when I was a child, had tried to teach me perspective: I would need a lot of perspective to sort out all the unexpectedness since my arrival at Illyria. What, after all, had I expected? Something not quite so foreign and bewildering; something which would bring me closer to my husband. But the more I saw of this alien land and its people from whom he had come, the more he was becoming a stranger to me.
I needed, all at once, to be alone. I didn’t want to suggest going to bed, in case the argument about my room should come up again. I had no intention of shifting rooms; if I felt certain of one thing only, it was that my room was meant especially for me.
I rose, “Is it all right if I take a little walk on the beach?”
Uncle Hoadley looked surprised. “Of course, my dear. Irene and I will go with you.”
“No. Please. I would like to be alone.” I could not help it if I was rude.
But Uncle Hoadley, bless him, understood, as my father would have understood. He smiled his tired and gentle smile. “All this must be strange and confusing to you. You’d like to walk on the beach and sort things out in your lovely little head, wouldn’t you? Very well, my dear. But walk up the beach, rather than down, if you please. Sometimes we get an unpleasant element in San Feliz on weekends. And, Stella, don’t be long.”
“I won’t.”
“You’ll get used to our summer thundershowers; we have one almost every evening. Sometimes they are more violent than usual, and we seem to be brewing a big one for tonight. But don’t be afraid. We’re so accustomed to them that we pay very little attention.”
“I’m not afraid of s
torms.”
“Also, my dear, night falls very quickly here, not like your long English twilights.”
“Yes. Terry told me.” I ran down the ramp to the beach.
4
I ran down the ramp to the beach. The air was hot, heavy; new to me. I reached up and closed my fingers as though I could squeeze some of the steaming moisture from the atmosphere. When I got to the beach I sat down on the end of the ramp and took off my shoes and stockings. My feet burned in an acutely painful manner wholly new to me. The physical results of the Illyrian heat were going to take time for me to become accustomed to. I arched my feet, stretched my toes. I could not have stood shoes and stockings a moment longer. I buckled the straps of left and right shoes together, so that I could hang them over my arm. The soft sand at the foot of the ramp was still warm from the sun, and delicious as it sifted between my toes. I moved slowly to the firmer, damper sand at the ocean’s edge, then walked along the beautiful coolness close to the sea. As the waves were sucked out into the ocean I could feel a strange suction beneath my feet. Terry had warned me about the tides, the undertow, the treachery lurking beneath the beauty. ‘Check with Aunt Des about the swimming,’ he had told me. ‘She knows the beaches like the palm of her hand, where the undertow is dangerous, where the tide pulls hardest—at least she used to.’
I waded up to my ankles in the warm water, the undertow pulling strongly now. I bent down and dabbled my hot hands in the lacy foam. Splattering salt water I moved up the beach, then turned to look back at Illyria.
The old house was set back on the dunes, an extraordinary monstrosity—though I soon came to see it as beautiful—built up on stilts filled in with wooden latticework. There were towers and chimneys and wings and elbows and little balconies, and the great, many-angled veranda which surrounded the whole thing like a moat. The dunes raised themselves all about, so that the house seemed to float like an unwieldy ark on a sea of sand. The long wooden ramp, made of the same sea-grey wood as the house, led up from the beach, over a jungle of scrub and wild undergrowth, up onto the veranda.
Oh, Illyria, Illyria. The home place. The place of love. The place where living taught me something about dying, and where death taught me even more about life.
Illyria: always the smell of the sea, of mustiness. Always wind: the wind of the Spirit, even if it sometimes blew in odd nooks and crannies. Wind moving across the face of the water, over the great pale stretch of beach, through the veranda, and into the house, so that the heavy linen damask curtains stirred constantly, rugs undulated, doors slammed.
In the wet sea wind wood swelled. Everything was sticky. Doors were hard to open and close. Shoes left too long unworn became covered with green mold. Little beach ants ate our silk stockings unless we kept them in tightly closed preserving jars. Our clothes were always damp to put on unless they’d just come in out of the sun. In winter nothing dried. Clothes were constantly and ineffectually draped over the fenders, and the smell of warm, damp cloth added itself to the other Illyrian odors.
In the nature of my husband’s work with the State Department we were away most of the time, in Africa, China, Rome, St. Petersburg, Paris, London. Our home leaves of course were spent at Illyria, but only our first child, our Theron, was born there, or even in the United States. But Illyria was always home, the place of love—and why? I have been more afraid, more filled with anguish, in Illyria than any place on earth. The answer has something to do with love. Love that has to go through darkness and pain and endurance and a stark acceptance before it can come out into the far light of the sun. Love I hadn’t dreamed of, and wouldn’t have wanted to dream of, before my husband sent me to Illyria to wait for him.
‘Illyria is my home,’ he had told me. ‘Not Jefferson, not Uncle Hoadley’s and Aunt Irene’s pretentious house. Uncle Hoadley was my father’s most intimate friend—that’s why I went to him. But Mado was all the mother I ever knew or needed. And the great-aunts and Honoria and Clive are my true family—though Aunt Irene tried to love me, and I admire and respect Uncle Hoadley. They are your family now, Stella-Star; they’ll take good care of you while I’m gone. And you take care of them. The old aunts need you. Aunt Olivia’s letters—I’m worried. She tends to dramatize, but still I’m worried. And do whatever Honoria and Clive tell you to do. You must promise me this.’ Over and over he had warned me: obey Honoria and Clive.
I will, I promised Terry silently.
The drumming of the ocean seemed to reiterate the warning.
Thinking only of Terry, I wandered from the water’s edge towards the dunes, and walked directly into a swarm of tiny insects, almost invisible until I felt the fierce heat of their bites, heard the shrill of their cry. No wonder mosquito netting was needed in Illyria! I ran back to the ocean and into the water, dabbling my toes in the foam. Relieved of the stinging cloud, I looked up from the small, lapping waves. Far ahead of me on the beach a man was walking with the strange, a-rhythmic gait which was peculiarly Terry, which was uniquely and only Terry. I began to run along the ocean’s edge, trying to call, but my voice was caught somewhere within me, lost in the frantic pounding of my heart.
Terry, here!
I ran to meet him, stumbled, righted myself, ran faster.
It was not Terry. It was someone with black hair, dark skin: Ron James.
He turned, saw me, stopped.
I slowed down, my heart pounding in my throat, my mouth dry. Swallowing hurt as it might with a very sore throat.
“Mrs. Renier,” he said, “is something wrong?”
I tried to laugh. “I thought you were—were my—husband—”
He waited.
“You walk the way he does. I’ve never known anybody else walk that way.”
Ron’s voice was harsh, as though he were angry with me. “Mrs. Renier, I have nothing in common with your husband but our rather distinctive name. And I don’t walk differently from anybody else.”
My heart was still banging painfully. “People—people do walk differently. Like—like different rhythms in music. Aunt Olivia walks like the old dog, Finn—Finbarr. My father walked like a stork. So does Uncle Hoadley. Terry and—and you—” I was stuttering in reaction. Ron waited. I managed to swallow, to take in a great gulp of fresh salt air. “Please. Let’s sit down.”
We walked a few yards up the beach to where a broken-down half dock jutted out from the bulwark across the sand; on a dark piling crouched an even darker bird. As we approached, it jumped down and hovered over something on the beach which looked like the remains of a fish. The bird stretched out a long neck, pink, repulsively bare of feathers. I shuddered. “What’s that?”
“A buzzard. Better get used to them, Mrs. Renier. There are plenty around.”
“But pelicans, too?”
He walked past the dark piling on which the bird had brooded, and leapt up onto the remains of the dock. He held his hand out to help me. “Perhaps.”
I sat beside him on the rotting wood, still swinging my shoes and stockings over my arm, totally unthinking of my bare feet and ankles. There were no insects here on the dock, except for a small and unexpected galaxy of fireflies. Ron held out his hand, cupped one, let it go. He did not look in the least like Terry. Terry was stocky, with a kind of golden, lion-like strength. Ron was not only a Negro, he was taller than Terry, thinner, more graceful. To have fancied that he walked like my husband was only a mirage brought about by my longing.
“Why did Terry send you to Illyria?” he asked.
“Where else? My father’s dead.”
“What do you make of us?”
I thought for a moment. My heart was beginning to beat normally. “I don’t suppose I make anything of you.”
“Stop it, Mrs. Renier. Let the old ladies have the games. The rest of us can’t afford them.”
I said on impulse, “The great-aunts and their game—What country, sir, is this?”
He responded without hesitation, “This is Illyria, madam.”
“
And what should I do in Illyria? My husband is in—where, Ron? Kairogi?”
He was suddenly tense. “Why Kairogi? What would he be doing there?”
I did not understand his reaction. “It’s—it’s just one of a number of places he might be.”
“But you don’t know that he’s there?”
“I haven’t any idea where he is. I really don’t. I just—I just said that.”
“Mrs. Renier, maybe it’s safe to go around just saying things in England. It isn’t in Illyria.” He made an odd noise, half groan, half anger. “How did you meet Ter—your husband?”
“Through the Dowlers. They’re cousins, though not very close ones, and friends of my father’s. Lord Dowler was with the government, and did a lot of archaeology. He spent years in Africa, and he’s one of the experts on Kairogi. I think that’s why Terry was sent to talk to him. I’m not sure.”
A firefly lit briefly in Ron’s short, crinkly hair, and almost seemed to illuminate his thin face with high cheekbones and finely arched nose. “Mrs. Renier, when you go putting two and two together, no matter what number you come up with, keep it to yourself.”
“Why?”
“Innocence!” Ron said loudly. “Is that what Terry thought he was sending us? Innocence? It is not innocence. It’s blind idiocy.”
“I am capable of learning.”
“Who’s going to teach you?”
“You?” He did not respond, and I said, “Terry told me about you. You’ve been in England.”
“I’m not in England now.”
“But you were. Why? Terry didn’t tell me—we had so little time.”
“My grandmother—Honoria—saw to it that I got away from my mother when I was very small.” The bitterness in his voice was dull and dry. “I was sent to England to school—to Lancing, by a patron who wished—wishes—to remain anonymous. I was given a white man’s education, much good may it do me. I stayed on, after Lancing, went to Durham, then St. Andrews, and all for what? No white man’s hospital will let me darken its door. As for your husband, we haven’t seen each other since we were small boys playing together under the chinaberry tree and in the bamboo grove. Terry—sorry—Mr. Renier—”
The Other Side of the Sun Page 5