The Other Side of the Sun Read online

  “Oh, Stella!” Aunt Olivia cried. “What a pretty dress! Did it come from Paris?”

  It was one which Cousin Augusta’s dressmaker had made for my trousseau, and it was one of my favorites. “From Oxford, Aunt Olivia. But it was copied from a dress Worth made for Cousin Augusta.”

  Aunt Olivia herself had changed to a blue-grey lawn, and wore a pendant set with moonstones. She rocked lightly, looking with her little smile first at me, then at Uncle Hoadley.

  “Irene enjoys the newfangled gin drinks,” Uncle Hoadley said, “but I thought we should have a mint julep in Stella’s honor.”

  Aunt Irene winced slightly, as though Uncle Hoadley’s words, which had not seemed critical, had hurt her. Aunt Mary Desborough said, “Gin! I don’t understand Irene.”

  Uncle Hoadley added a small quantity of sugar to the mint in the mortar. “To have left Terry so soon must have been painful for you, child.”

  “Yes. It was—is. But we knew that separations from each other went along with his work.”

  He snapped his fingers. Aunt Irene rang a little chased brass bell. Clive, changed from his coachman’s uniform to a white butler’s jacket, came through the screen door with five frosted silver mugs.

  Aunt Olivia clapped her tiny gnarled hands. “It’s been ages since you made us a julep, Hoadley. O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all whooping!”

  “Auntie!” Aunt Irene said. “Isn’t that a little excessive? Or are you at that idiotic game again?”

  “Celia, in As You Like It,” Aunt Mary Desborough said.

  “It’s not. It’s Rosalind. Point for me.”

  “I identified the play.”

  “I should hope so.”

  “Anyhow I still think it’s Celia.”

  “Look it up, then.”

  I started to say it was Rosalind, then decided I’d better keep out of it.

  “Ladies.” Uncle Hoadley calmly passed them each a silver mug. “Aunt Olivia, I was talking with my medical man at the club this noon, and he thinks all the lemonade you drink in summer is bad for your joints. A little whiskey before dinner, yes. He suggests a tumbler of water with a tablespoonful of whiskey.”

  “Hoadley!” Aunt Olivia wailed. “You can’t have more branch than bourbon. It would be vile. I’d vomit.”

  “Livia!” Aunt Mary Desborough reproved.

  “Branch?” I asked.

  “Water. Branch water,” Aunt Olivia said. “Just ordinary water. Branch means the branch of a river. Ugh. It would be awful. I’d just be sick all over every—”

  “Olivia!”

  From my new and small experience with sulphur water I thought Aunt Olivia was probably right.

  “Hoadley isn’t telling you to drink it, and he’ll make me, I know he will, just like old Moulton Barrett making Elizabeth drink porter—”

  “Aunties. That will be enough.” Uncle Hoadley was quiet, pleasant. “Your bickering can hardly be amusing to Stella on her first evening with us. Aunt Olivia, if you are going to be naughty, I shall tell you to stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once.”

  “Macbeth!” Aunt Olivia exulted. “Oh, Hoadley, it’s such fun when you play, too!”

  “That’s better, isn’t it?” Uncle Hoadley handed frosted mugs to Aunt Irene and me. “And I will make you mint juleps every Friday night, Aunt Livvy. That’s a promise.”

  I sipped mine and it was as cool and refreshing in this tropical heat as spring rain. “It’s lovely, Uncle Hoadley.”

  “Take it slowly.” He raised his mug to me. “It’s more powerful than it may seem. Any idea where young Theron is?”

  I looked into the cool depths of the silver mug. “No, Uncle Hoadley.”

  “None?”

  “He could be anywhere, things change so quickly. There was talk about an uprising in Kairogi, everybody was very concerned, but there was trouble in the Balkans, too. He could have been sent anywhere.”

  Aunt Irene poked at the sprig of mint in her julep. “Why should a lot of black savages fighting each other in an unimportant country in Africa upset us so? What’s it got to do with us?” She put her mug down with a clank. “Why can’t we let them fight? Good riddance. Why do we always have to butt into everybody else’s business?”

  Uncle Hoadley poured a generous amount of whiskey into his mug and swirled it around. “If we want to emerge from the destruction of our recent troubles—” he smiled slightly, “—as a country of any power, then the world is our business, my dear Irene, and Kairogi is part of the world. We would be blind indeed if we chose to ignore Africa at this point in our history.”

  “Well, it’s beyond me.” Aunt Irene shoved her mug a little closer to Uncle Hoadley, but if he noticed it he gave no indication. “And all this about the Balkans—I do believe they’re as savage there as in Africa.”

  “The Balkans are most definitely a cause for concern.”

  “Hoadley,” Aunt Olivia clasped her hands, “you can’t mean you think there’s going to be war?”

  “Of course there’s not going to be war!” Aunt Irene said. “The world is far too civilized for that.”

  Uncle Hoadley sighed. “You were not quite as affected by our own war as the rest of us were, Irene.”

  Again, he had hurt her. “I couldn’t help—”

  He held up his thin, authoritative hand. “I am afraid the world will never be too civilized for war. If war is to be averted, it will be only because of the intervention of foresighted leaders. There are too many royal navies being massed and reviewed; this does not happen when peoples are not preparing for war.”

  “But that’s in Europe—”

  “Ron says,” Aunt Olivia’s faded eyes were sharp as she looked across the brass tray at Uncle Hoadley, “that there are a lot of boats in the yacht basin at San Feliz.”

  Uncle Hoadley laughed. “That is hardly a royal navy preparing for war, my dear Auntie.”

  Aunt Mary Desborough gave a funny, sad little laugh. “Please don’t think I’m awful, but I was happy during the war, happier than before or since. Oh, it was all terrible, but when Mado and Theron brought us to Nyssa—that was our cousin James’s plantation, Stella—and we turned the house into a hospital, I—I was of use. Oh, I saw terrible things, terrible, but I was of use. People need to be of use.”

  I took a new look at Aunt Mary Desborough. Terry had tried to tell me something about the War Between the States. It did not mean much to me. ‘But it does to the family,’ he had said. ‘If you don’t know much abut the war now, you will. Wars don’t end, Stella, particularly for the defeated.’ ‘But it was so long ago!’ ‘Not to the great-aunts. Not to any Renier.’

  “Battlefields have changed, Auntie,” Uncle Hoadley said, “and you are of use here.”

  She snorted. “Faddle.”

  “You tell me all the news of Illyria and San Feliz, and it gives me a sense of balance and proportion. I tend to forget that it is the little things which have always held chaos at bay: the new kitten; or what Finbarr has managed to steal from the larder; or the latest quarrel among the ladies of the Daughters of the Confederacy.”

  “Mado was asked to be the first president of the Daughters of the Confederacy,” Aunt Olivia told me, “but she turned them down. She said we’d fought our war and lost it, and an organization like that could only make us hold on to resentments and keep our wounds from healing. She said for them never to come to her about it again.”

  “Mado was French,” Aunt Irene injected.

  “You are an Utteley,” Aunt Olivia said.

  At a time like this Aunt Mary Desborough evidently could be counted on to back her sister up. “Mado was an aristocrat. Olivia and I don’t belong to the Daughters of the Confederacy. We don’t need to. And as for you, Irene, you’d never have got into the Colonial Dames if it hadn’t been for us.”

  “Auntie,” Uncle Hoadley soothed, “come now, I was just complimenting you on keeping me up with
the kind of news that keeps the stars in their courses. What’s gone on in Illyria this week?”

  “Nothing,” Aunt Mary Desborough said.

  “Stella’s come,” Aunt Olivia said.

  Honoria came out onto the veranda.

  “Honoria,” Uncle Hoadley said, “did you do as I asked you to do?”

  “Sir?”

  “I asked you to change Miss Stella’s belongings down to the room next to Miss Irene’s as we originally planned. I don’t like the idea of Miss Stella sleeping alone up on the third floor.”

  “But she’s not alone, Hoadley,” Aunt Olivia said. “She’s with Honoria and Clive.”

  Uncle Hoadley ignored her. “Honoria: have you done as I asked?”

  Honoria stood motionless, facing him, a tall and commanding presence. “No, sir, Mr. Hoadley.”

  “Why not?”

  “Bin getting dinner.”

  “Then you will do it after dinner.”

  “Dishes to do. Ironing.”

  Aunt Irene spoke nervously. “Honoria reminded me that you snore, Hoadley, and your room’s right across from the room we thought Stella—and you do snore, Hoadley, quite loudly.”

  “Honoria: do you intend to disobey me?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Hoadley. My Powers told me what I has to do.”

  Uncle Hoadley rose.

  I, too, rose. “Uncle Hoadley, I prefer to stay where I am. I’m very happy in my room and I do not wish to move.” I tried to keep my voice light, courteous. It shook.

  “Dinner served,” Honoria said.

  3

  At dinner it was as though the tension between Uncle Hoadley and Honoria had never existed—on the surface, at least. I was not sure what lay under Uncle Hoadley’s pleasant manner, and Honoria’s impassive face was even more foreign and unfathomable. Uncle Hoadley talked lightly, amusingly, as though there had been no warring forces out on the veranda (but there had been; there had been): “When I was a small boy I used to spend weeks at a time with my Hoadley grandparents, my mother’s family. They had one of the fine old plantations in Summerville—that’s just outside Charleston, Stella, and has some of the loveliest places in the South. Most fine houses were built with the kitchen and house-servants quarters connected to the main house by a latticed breezeway. For a long time it didn’t seem quite decent to nice people to have either the kitchen or the bathrooms directly connected with the house, and certainly not in it.”

  “When you put it that way,” Aunt Olivia interrupted, “you make me feel bourgeois not to go outdoors to perform my natural functions.”

  “Olivia!” Aunt Mary Desborough cried.

  Uncle Hoadley continued, reaching out with one calming hand to press Aunt Mary Desborough’s fingers. “I used to love to go through the breezeway to talk to my grandmother’s cook, old Bounty. Everything about Bounty fascinated me. Grampa had an iron pump in the breezeway, where we got our water, and I remember seeing Bounty with a big tin dipper filled with cane syrup and kerosene, to which she added a little water from the pump. It was for her health, she said, and she lived to be over a hundred—nobody knew exactly how old she really was. I always wanted to try some of it, but she wouldn’t let me. Just outside the dining room and pantry there was a big storeroom for food. In one corner was a barrel of brown sugar—not the kind of dry rock we get today. It was always moist, and the sugar came out in chunks and oozing syrup. It was better than any candy and when I was good I was allowed a big spoonful …”

  I listened, delighted, absorbing this strange world from which Terry had come, which had nourished him, patted and shaped him into the man who had made me his wife.

  Finbarr, the old dog, walked through the dining room and paused beside Aunt Olivia. “No, Auntie. No, Finbarr,” Uncle Hoadley said, and the old beast, with a wistful sniff towards Aunt Olivia’s dinner, moved stiffly on out to the kitchen.

  “Now, Stella honey,” Aunt Irene said, “tell us all.”

  I smiled. “What kind of all?”

  “Everything.”

  “Every thing, saith Epictetus,” Aunt Olivia announced, “hath two handles, the one to be held by, the other not.”

  “A Winter’s Tale,” Aunt Mary Desborough responded.

  “No.”

  “Yes, it is, I’m positive it is.”

  “Look it up, then.”

  “I don’t need to.”

  “Well, it’s not. It’s Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.”

  “It doesn’t count, then. We’re playing Shakespeare.”

  “Aunties, a toast,” Uncle Hoadley intervened, and raised his wine glass. “To Stella: welcome.”

  “To Stella: welcome,” the aunts echoed.

  Something in me relaxed at the warmth of their words and the kindness in their eyes. Aunt Olivia whispered to me, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

  Aunt Irene, smiling warmly at me, began asking eager little questions about my father, about the Dowlers. I soon learned that Aunt Irene enjoyed being able to talk about ‘Lord and Lady Dowler, my niece’s kin, you know,’ or saying, ‘My niece’s father was a Fellow of All Soul’s. That’s in Oxford, you know. Oxford in England.’

  I answered her as best I could that first evening. “I really don’t know very much, Aunt Irene. Father and I lived alone, and he didn’t concern himself about ancestors or family trees.”

  “Since we all came from the same trees originally anyhow,” Aunt Olivia said, “I think your father was very sensible. It certainly doesn’t seem to me to be very important which branch of ape one has descended from.”

  “Olivia!” Aunt Mary Desborough protested. “If you’re going to be sacrilegious—”

  “All right, all right, you go right on thinking you’re an act of God created in his image, and I’ll go right on thinking I’m descended from an ape. When you look in the mirror I should think you’d feel pretty discouraged; I wouldn’t be happy to look at myself and think that my face is an Imago Dei. It wouldn’t make me feel I’d done very well by God. But when I look in the mirror and think that I’m descended from an ape, I feel I’ve done remarkably well.”

  “Auntie! That is enough!” This was the first time Uncle Hoadley had raised his voice. And here he differed from my father, who would have been amused and delighted by Aunt Olivia.

  She subsided momentarily, then pointed to the portrait over the sideboard, an austere-looking gentleman with white side whiskers. “That is our father, Theron Renier. He was ambassador to the court of France under the third Napoleon, before the war, of course. It was while we were there that our brother Theron met the young noblewoman, Marguerite Dominique de la Valeur, and married her.”

  “Olivia,” Aunt Mary Desborough said, “for one who has been discussing the unimportance of the family apes, you are showing an inordinate interest in genealogy.”

  “Who ever said apes were supposed to be consistent? We learn by paradox and contradiction. And why not get Stella acquainted with her new family? I’ll wager all Terry did was confuse her.”

  “He didn’t have time to do much else,” I said. “He had to leave so much sooner than we expected.”

  “Did he tell you about James?”

  “Yes, but I’m not sure who—”

  “James is our cousin. He and Theron were like David and Jonathan.”

  “Nyssa belonged to James,” Aunt Mary Desborough said wistfully. “You’ll meet James on Sunday, Stella. He has a place a few miles up the beach from us—Little Nyssa.”

  “Nyssa is gone.” Uncle Hoadley sounded sharp, a sharpness for which I was not prepared.

  “No!” Aunt Olivia cried. “Not while Des and I are alive. Not while James and Xenia are alive. Not as long as Illyria stands.”

  Clive moved silently around the table, breaking the tension, holding a silver serving dish out to Aunt Olivia. “All Terry’s favorite things,” she said. “Honoria’s eggplant—I do hope you like eggplant?”

  “I’ve never
had it before. This is magnificent.”

  “And stuffed mushrooms—we were always afraid Terry and Ronnie would find a poisoned mushroom some time and eat it, but they never did. Honoria picked these, didn’t she, Clive?”

  “No, Miss Livia. Ronnie pick them.”

  Aunt Irene turned the conversation back to my father. “You say he was considerably older than you, Stella, honey?”

  “He was almost eighty-three when he died, though that was hard to believe.”

  “I’m eighty-three,” Aunt Mary Desborough said.

  “That’s hard to believe, too.”

  “And he was in Holy Orders?”

  Wherever did she get that idea? “He was a philosopher, Aunt Irene, and an atheist.”

  Aunt Irene looked shocked, but continued bravely, “Then your upbringing was a little—unusual?”

  “It was happy.”

  “Clive,” Aunt Olivia asked, “would you be kind enough to bring me a saucer of cream, please?”

  “Auntie! What do you want cream for?”

  “Not for me, Irene, I assure you. Nor for you. The kitten’s hungry. He’s nibbling my toes, and his little teeth are sharp.”

  Clive bent down to pick up the kitten. He whispered so that the others could not hear—but I was sitting next to Aunt Olivia. “Put you slippers back on, Miss Livia. At once.”

  I decided that I was going to enjoy getting to love this old lady.

  In a louder voice Clive said, “I’ll give the kitten something in the kitchen, Miss Irene.” The kitten nuzzled into the old man’s neck and they went through the swinging door.

  Aunt Mary Desborough pointed to a charming portrait of a small boy in a sailor suit. “Look, Stella, that’s Terry over the serving table. Aren’t his eyes beautiful?”

  I looked at the portrait of the blond and solemn little boy, at the vague, myopic eyes which came into focus only behind the thick lenses of his spectacles: the Renier shortsightedness hadn’t been discovered until he went away to school. But yes: his eyes were beautiful; the child in the portrait was a promise of the man I had married.

  “It was only this past winter, wasn’t it,” Aunt Irene pursued, “that you met Terry?”