The Sundial (7 page)

“Drinking spirits,” Miss Ogilvie said, nodding wisely.

“Spirits indeed,” Aunt Fanny said. She smiled approvingly at Miss Ogilvie. “We are in a pocket of time, Orianna, a tiny segment of time suddenly pinpointed by a celestial eye.”

“Now, you cannot suspect
that
of being a prepared speech,” Essex said to Mrs. Halloran.

“I wish Aunt Fanny would stop babbling sacrilegious nonsense,” Mrs. Halloran said, and there was an ominous note in her voice.

“Call it nonsense, Orianna, say—as you have before—that Aunt Fanny is running in crazed spirits, but—although I am of course not permitted to threaten—all the regret will be yours.”

“I feel it already,” Mrs. Halloran said.

“The experiment with humanity is at an end,” Aunt Fanny said.

“Splendid,” Mrs. Halloran said. “I was getting very tired of all of them.”

“The imbalance of the universe is being corrected. Dislocations have been adjusted. Harmony is to be restored, inperfections erased.”

“
I
wonder if anything has been done about the hedges,” Mrs. Halloran said. “Essex, did you speak to the gardeners?”

“The ways of the gods are inscrutable,” Aunt Fanny said, her voice high.

“Inscrutable, indeed,” Mrs. Halloran said. “I personally would never have made such a choice. Put it, Aunt Fanny, since you will not be silent, that the first harmony to be established is that between you and myself.”

“I cannot be silenced,” Aunt Fanny said, shouting, “I cannot be silenced; this is my father’s house and I am safe here. No one can drive me away.”

“Distasteful,” said Mrs. Halloran, shrugging. “Essex, will you fill my glass? And I believe Aunt Fanny will have more sherry. We have time before dinner. Miss Ogilvie?”

_____

“She is doing it again,” Essex said later, coming to stand by Mrs. Halloran on the terrace. “Listening. Nodding.”

“If anything had been needed to perfect Aunt Fanny’s exquisite charm,” Mrs. Halloran said, “it would be this prophetic lunacy.”

“
I
believe she has lost her mind,” Essex said.

Mrs. Halloran turned to move slowly down the wide marble steps, and Essex came soundlessly beside her. “It is a lovely night,” Mrs. Halloran said. “Aunt Fanny may be certifiable, certainly. It is not impossible in my husband’s family. But it is irrelevant.”

“If Aunt Fanny is
not
mad,” Essex said. “Had it occurred to you? We may expect a world cataclysm in the very near future. Unless of course it is not impossible that in your husband’s family they may be mistaken.”

“What concerns me most is her defiance,” Mrs. Halloran said. “It is not usual in Aunt Fanny.”

“I suppose the destruction of the world will not turn on Aunt Fanny’s manners. I would not let her mingle freely with your friends, however, or at least not with strangers.”

“Essex,” Mrs. Halloran said. She stopped by the sundial and put her hand down gently; under her fingers the letters said WHAT IS THIS WORLD? “Essex, I am not a fool. I have gone for many years disbelieving most of what people told me. But I have never before been requested to take an immediate opinion on the question of the annihilation of civilization. I have never known my sister-in-law to get any message accurately, but I cannot afford to ignore her.”

“Does that mean that you find yourself believing Aunt Fanny’s claptrap?”

“I have no choice,” Mrs. Halloran said. She moved her finger caressingly along WORLD. “Authority is of some importance to me. I will not be left behind when creatures like Aunt Fanny and her brother are introduced into a new world. I must plan to be there. Oh, what madness,” she said, her voice agonized, “why could he not have come to
me?
”

After a minute Essex said, “I see. Then I suppose I must withdraw my word claptrap, and substitute something more politic.”

“Claptrap will do.” Mrs. Halloran laughed. “I am positive of it, but I insist upon being saved along with Aunt Fanny. I have never had any doubt of my own immortality, but put it that never before have I had any open, clear-cut invitation to the Garden of Eden; Aunt Fanny has shown me a gate.”

“Then I will have to book a ticket, too. I cannot believe Aunt Fanny, but I will not doubt
you
.”

Mrs. Halloran turned and started back toward the house. “I do wish Aunt Fanny had never thought of it,” she said, and sighed.

“At least we are not enjoined to live in celibate poverty,” Essex said.

“I agree that I would not be so willing to believe in Aunt Fanny if her messages dictated that I give away all my earthly possessions. But then, of course, Aunt Fanny would never accept such a message; it could not have been meant for
her
.”

“I wonder if there are others. Other places, on the earth. Learning these same unbelievable things, right now.”

“That presupposes the existence of other Aunt Fannys. I cannot bear to think of it.”

“When we believe,” Essex said seriously, “we must do so wholly. I am prepared to follow Aunt Fanny because I agree with you: it is the only positive statement about our futures we have ever heard, but once I have taken her side I will not be shaken. If I can bring myself to believe in Aunt Fanny’s golden world, nothing else will ever do for me; I want it too badly.”

“I wish I had your faith,” Mrs. Halloran said.

3

The weather, of course, continued fair. No one could find the snake behind the bookcase, and the hedges, in particular the hedges along the walk to the secret garden, were clipped to bare bone. Aunt Fanny wore her mother’s diamonds every day, even at breakfast, and wore, besides, a look of quiet satisfaction peculiarly irritating to Mrs. Halloran. Maryjane’s asthma improved somewhat. Essex, who was skillful in slight arts, carved a tiny totem pole for Fancy’s doll house, with a recognizable likeness of Aunt Fanny at the bottom. Mr. Halloran asked that his nurse stop reading him weekly magazines and begin on
Robinson Crusoe
, and during the long afternoons anyone passing the doorway to Mr. Halloran’s sunfilled room might hear the flat level voice continuing, “A little after noon I found the sea very calm, and the tide ebbed so far out that I could come within a quarter of a mile of the ship, and here I found a fresh renewing of my grief; for I saw evidently, that if we had kept on board, we had been all safe . . .” Mrs. Halloran sketched out a rough plan for a tiny amphitheatre to be constructed on a little hill beyond the orchard, without announcing any particular design for its possible use, and one morning received word of the imminent arrival of guests.

“I am expecting guests,” she said at breakfast, folding the letter carefully and putting it back into its envelope.

“Here?” said Aunt Fanny blankly.

“Where else?” said Mrs. Halloran.

“This is still a house of mourning, Orianna. Had you forgotten?”

“You never remember Lionel, Fanny, except when he might be an inconvenience to me. I am expecting guests. A Mrs. Willow and her two daughters. Very old friends of mine.”

“From another walk of life, I suppose,” Aunt Fanny said with a little smile. “If they are such
very
old friends of yours.”

“No, Aunt Fanny, they will not please you. How delightful that I should be in a position to entertain them even if they do not please Aunt Fanny.”

“Two daughters?” said Miss Ogilvie. “Will they attend my little school for Fancy?”

“I hardly think so. The older of them must be nearly thirty, and I expect there is very little she can learn from you now, Miss Ogilvie.”

“At least,” said Aunt Fanny, with the same little smile, “we need not expect them to stay for long.”

“I have not seen Augusta Willow for nearly fifteen years,” Mrs. Halloran said with seeming irrelevancy, “but I cannot believe that she has changed
that
much.”

“When are they coming?” Miss Ogilvie asked.

“The sixteenth. That would be Friday, Essex, would it not?”

_____

A car was sent late Friday afternoon to meet Mrs. Willow and her daughters, and Maryjane finding herself unequal to meeting company so late in the day, Mrs. Halloran waited in the drawing room with Mr. Halloran by the fire, and Essex and Miss Ogilvie and Aunt Fanny to receive her very old friend, whose voice was heard from the driveway as she got out of the car, directing the disposition of numerous pieces of luggage. Mrs. Halloran smiled at Aunt Fanny, who seemed to be counting under her breath the severally designated little blue bags and large tan dress cases and hatboxes and jewelcases and overnight bags and dark red heavy cases, and said softly, “Aunt Fanny, how lucky that your father has set an arbitrary end to this visit,” and then, still smiling, rose to greet her friend.

Mrs. Willow was a large and overwhelmingly vocal woman, with a great bosom and an indefinable air of having lost some vital possession down the front of it, for she shook and trembled and regarded herself with such enthusiasm, that it was all the casual observer could do at first to keep from offering to help. Whatever she had lost and was hoping to recover, it was not her good humor, for that was unlosable, and seemed, in fact, as much a matter of complete insensitivity as of good spirits; Mrs. Willow was absolutely determined to be affable, and would not be denied.

“And you
have
gotten older, Orianna,” she said, entering, “how glad I am! The older we get ourselves the more we like to see it in our friends,” and she smiled amply around the room, as though prepared with only the faintest encouragement to gather them all to her bosom, that repository of lost treasures, and cherish them for having grown older every minute since they were born, “and I can’t say,” she continued happily, “that you’ve done anything to improve the looks of this old place.
And
I won’t say,” she went on, “that Richard Halloran looks well.” She nodded toward Mr. Halloran, in his wheel chair by the fire.

“This is a house of mourning, ma’am,” Aunt Fanny said.

“And
this
is Aunt Fanny. My sister-in-law,” Mrs. Halloran said. “I had forgotten what a disturbance you make, Augusta.”

“Don’t I?” said Mrs. Willow. She turned slowly, to regard with individual speculation each person in the room. “Who’s that young man?” she asked, as one going directly to the heart of a problem.

“Essex,” Mrs. Halloran said, and Essex bowed, speechless.

“Miss Ogilvie,” Mrs. Halloran said; Miss Ogilvie fluttered, looked for help to Richard Halloran, and made a weak smile.

“You remember my gels?” Mrs. Willow asked, gesturing. “That one’s Arabella, the pretty one, and the dark one’s Julia. Curtsey to your Aunt Orianna, pets.”

“Do try to call me Mrs. Halloran,” Mrs. Halloran said to the two girls. These, accustomed to the manners of their mother, tended clearly to underestimate the rest of the world; the dark one, who was Julia, nodded gracelessly, said, “Hello,” and turned away. Arabella, who was the pretty one, smiled prettily, her eye falling—as perhaps it had not before—upon Essex, behind Mrs. Halloran’s chair. “How do you do?” she said.

“Well.” Mrs. Willow, having surveyed the room and the people in it, turned back to Mrs. Halloran. “Pretty dull here, are you? You like my gels, Orianna?”

“Not so far,” said Mrs. Halloran. “Of course, it is not impossible that they may improve upon further acquaintance.”

“Richard,” said Mrs. Willow, going to him by the fire, “you remember me? Do you keep well? I can’t say you
look
fit.”

“My brother is grieving, ma’am,” said Aunt Fanny.

“It’s Augusta, is it not?” Richard Halloran said, looking up. “They think I am unable to remember, Augusta, but I remember
you
clearly; you wore a red dress and the sun was shining.”

Mrs. Willow laughed hugely. “I’ve come back to cheer you a little, Richard.”

“Do
you
remember,” Richard Halloran asked, raising his eyes to Mrs. Willow, “when we rang the bells over the carriage house?”

“Do I not,” said Mrs. Willow comfortably. “Ah, you used to be a gay one, Richard. Plenty of pranks in
your
time, I’ll be bound. But you’re too warm here by the fire; you,” she gestured to Essex, “come and help me move his chair.”

“If you please,” Aunt Fanny said, coming forward with dignity, “my brother is perfectly comfortable here. This is my father’s house, ma’am, and my brother may sit where he pleases within it.”

“Of course he may, dear,” Mrs. Willow patted Aunt Fanny on the shoulder. “Just as soon as I have him a little bit away from the fire.”

“
This
is what you bring into a house of mourning,” Aunt Fanny said bitterly to Mrs. Halloran.

Mrs. Willow was not listening; she had moved Richard’s chair enough away from the fire to allow her to stand wholly in front of the fireplace, and she lifted her skirt in back to warm her legs.

“I shall expect you to keep away from the servants, Augusta,” Mrs. Halloran said.

“Well, now,” and Mrs. Willow laughed, and the chandelier jingled. “Just because of one time I could tell you about,” and she turned to include the room in her confidential smile. “Imagine old Orianna remembering—I’ll tell
you
,” she added pointedly to Essex, “when my gels aren’t around. Now,” she said, “why don’t we get caught up on old times? Orianna, tell me everything that’s happened since I saw you last.”

Arabella, who was the pretty one, was already whispering confidentially into the ear of Essex, and Julia, who was the clever one, was listening to Miss Ogilvie’s whisper; “Someone to
talk
to around here,” Arabella was saying, and “Snake behind the bookcase,” Julia was hearing.

“I think you have quite enough company without me,” Aunt Fanny said to Mrs. Halloran. “Perhaps I might be permitted to spend the evening privately with my brother?”

“Splendid,” Mrs. Willow said heartily. “Poor Richard badly wants cheering. You give him a few good laughs, my dearie, and he’ll perk up a wonder.”

“Orianna?” said Aunt Fanny remotely.

“Of course, Aunt Fanny.” Mrs. Halloran looked without fondness upon Arabella. “Richard,” she asked, “shall we take you back to your room now?”