The Age of Water Lilies (23 page)

“A lizard, Tessa, like the ones your brothers occasionally bring home. From the Moss Rocks, was it? Yes, I think certainly a lizard. Probably the western alligator lizard. They like the warm rocks and places where they can hide away for winter.”

But then he came to her a day later with a puzzled look on his face.

“It's not quite true, what I told you about the lizard, Tessa. Farther south, they do lay eggs. Or least a related species does. But here—” and he showed her the field guide he was looking in . . . “—here, it says that this far north, they produce young by means of ovoviviparity. The female carries the eggs in her body but rather than lay the eggs externally, the young come out of the shell while still inside their mother's body. It seems that they're born live, but in fact it's a slightly different process. So I've no idea what might have laid the egg that you found on the Rocks.”

Another mystery to set upon her windowsill, along with a green feather, a tiny rib cage found at the high-tide line, a black arrowhead from a family camping trip to the Nicola Valley, a tooth that had fallen out of her kitten's mouth into her palm when she was tickling its tummy. These objects charmed and perplexed her. Most days she would touch them reverently, wanting to know more. Why a kitten tooth curved, how an arrowhead ended up in a little graveyard by a wooden church, how something as fragile as a rib cage could ride in on the tide, miraculously whole. And as for the egg case, she would never forget waking from a nightmare to that smell, dark and warm, like the very earth itself was alive and breathing under the moss.

TWENTY-TWO

February 1918

Ann stopped singing in mid-phrase. It was the opening aria of a Bach cantata, “Ich habe genug,” and she was pouring the day's irritations and joy into it. “‘Ich habe genug, Ich habe den Heiland . . .'” She had begun her day with her usual disciplined scales and exercises, but this was opening her throat for the pleasure of singing. “‘Ich hab' inh erblickt, Mein Glaube hat Jesum ans Herze ge . . .'” And now she stopped.

“Flora, whatever is wrong?”

For Flora had come through the door in tears. Grace was in bed, and the house was still, a few chords from the stopped piano almost audible.

“Didn't the meeting go well? I thought the client was very happy with your work?”

Flora brushed her eyes hastily with one glove. “Yes, I think he is. In fact I'm certain of it. Ann, I didn't mean to interrupt your singing. I love that cantata. Please continue?”

“How can I when you stand here in tears, Flora? My dear, I can't imagine anyone not wanting that lovely panel on their wall, though I said from the beginning it deserved a grander placement than a bathroom wall, however luxurious the chamber . . . So is that it, then—have they decided against it?”

“No, no, it's nothing like that, Ann.” She turned her head so her friend wouldn't see that she was still weeping.

“Oh, whatever is it? Have you had bad news of some sort? Did someone shun you on the street? You know how I feel about that—you must simply smile and lift your chin a little higher. But what, what?” She held Flora by the elbows and looked seriously into her eyes.

Flora gently removed Ann's hands. She wrung her own hands in consternation. “It's just . . . ah, I realized on the way home that what I have done is set into tile my childhood, of all things. Its passing. My loss of it. My father's water lilies. My old life. I have buried myself in the making of this work and now it's over and my father has given up on his love for his flowers. He has given up on any hope he had for the future. And my future . . .  well, I haven't given up on it, but it won't be what I so dreamed of all those months ago, years now, when I lay with Gus in our little box canyon and thought he would come home to me. To us, although I didn't know then that there would be Grace. All these lilies floating in their pools of water . . . I've put them down the only way I could, and now it's over. Oh, dear, am I making any sense at all?”

She wept as she took off her coat and hung it on its hook and put her pocketbook down on the table in the hall. Then she went into the sitting room and stood by the window, looking out at the trees of the cemetery, their boughs dark in the falling light.

“I don't think I will ever see Watermeadows again. Nor my parents. My brothers are dead. My love is dead. And there are only momentary glimpses of Gus in Grace's face. There's nowhere to go to mourn him.”

“Well, there is your heart, of course. You have the notebooks, the letters. I think that with time you will realize that we make our memorials out of such things. They keep the person intact in ways that I doubt any stone cross or obelisk could.”

“I know that, Ann, I do. But so many have died over the past few years. Too many. I am resigned, I suppose, to never being able to visit the graves of my brothers. But I feel so lonely sometimes, as though there will never be anyone who knew me as a child or a young girl to tell me little stories of that time. I feel so far from my roots and so far from being the woman who was loved by Gus and who expected to have a life with him. And then I feel ungrateful for thinking this because you have been so kind to me, and to Grace.”

Ann ran her fingers along the keyboard, finding a consoling chord. “But I do understand what you're saying, I think. And it is still early days. It would be unusual for you to have put all this behind you, though I think you are doing admirably. The tile work, your new-found success as a designer—the architects will beat a path to your door now, mark my words—the obvious health and happiness of Grace . . .”

Flora refused to take solace. In a very small voice, she said, “I think I would be grateful for even a stone in one of the leafy places across the road. Maybe one of the little areas where I always imagine I can hear water. A place to sit and breathe in the sense of who it is I am mourning. A place to contain his memory in a solid and formal way. A stone with his name on it to say finally that he is dead.”

“Then why not have one made? I think Robert Alexander might well be grateful too for such a thing. Mrs. Alexander too, if she would only put her pride aside.”

Flora sniffed and wiped her eyes with a handkerchief she took from the pocket of her skirt. “Do you think so, Ann?”

“I do.”

“All this unrestrained emotion: you must wonder at me sometimes. I watch the processions of people through the cemetery with their wreathes, their sorrow, watch them stand before a grave and focus the whole of their love and anguish on that small plot of earth with its precious content, and I wish for such a place. To think of him unburied, uncommemorated, oh, it's too much sometimes. But what a good idea. Thank you, Ann. And now will you finish that aria?”

“Well, you'll have to hear the whole thing because I can't just pick up where I left off. I love this piece.”

“I'd love to hear it from the beginning. Is there a reason why you are singing in the afternoon, and why this cantata in particular?”

Ann smiled. “Oh, I had a little time and I thought I'd rather sing than simply drink tea by the window and gaze dreamily out. And why this piece? There needs never be a reason to sing Bach! But this cantata was composed for Candlemas, which is today of course, February 2, the time of year when wolves and bears are waking from their dens. And the Mother of Jesus goes to be purified in the midst of it all.”

With that, she laughed at her uncharacteristic show of pedantry, took up her music, cleared her throat, took a deep breath, expanding her rib cage to hold the air necessary for the long controlled passages, to give platform for the rich high notes; she sang the beautiful phrases again, sung first in the eighteenth century to welcome light back to earth, the sacred cry of a woman cleansed after giving birth to a saviour, a blessing of ground and fields, of candles to serve as talisman against the passing of the long winter.

•  •  •

When Flora approached Robert Alexander with the possibility of a permanent memorial to Gus, he insisted on assuming the cost if she, Flora, would decide on what the stone would say.

“He knew this cemetery, you know. Walked in it any number of times as a boy. You must talk to your Mr. Stewart and order stone that you think most suitable. Choose the lettering, fine and strong as he was. And some words to fix him forever in time. I might be inclined to something from Homer, those lines at the conclusion of the
Iliad
—‘Such was their burial of Hector, breaker of horses. But I leave it to you.'”

“Those are very suitable words indeed, Robert. Truly beautiful. But if you really don't mind, I have something else, a few lines, also poetry, which I think Gus would have wanted too.”

And then there was never any question in her mind what those words should be. There would be his name. His dates. She kept in her box of special tokens a piece of paper, written in his hand in a tiny box canyon near the Deadman River, while hawks made lazy circles in a still sky, a code they would use so she would know he had gone to the battlefields of France.
Sed nos inmensum spatiis confecium aequor / et iam tempus equum fumantia solvere colla
. That would be his inscription.

Flora's father died in the fall of 1919. It seemed that he simply lost his will to live—the letters from her mother revealed that the doctors believed he had given up.
He sits in the wheeled chair with a blanket over his legs and looks out towards the river. Mrs. Sloan makes all manner of milk puddings and invalid foods but nothing tempts him,
her mother wrote in a letter that arrived just days before the envelope with the black border. He was to be buried in the Winsley churchyard. Mrs. Oakden would sell Watermeadows as soon as she could in order to move into a flat in London to be closer to her sister.

Is there anything you would like
? her mother wrote.
Papers, books, any of the photographs
?

Why don't you decide on a few personal papers and photographs,
Flora wrote back.
I'd like Grace to know something about my side of her family. Her grandfather Alexander tells her all about her Scottish ancestors and her father. She is enchanted to believe that a father she never knew, except in photographs, was once a boy in this very neighbourhood.
And Flora knew that no mention would ever be made of Grace, or the lost father. No curiosity shown towards a Scottish grandfather or the life that Flora now lived.

She wept for her father, but it was a mild grief, her sorrow at the real loss of her family and home having been wrung from her during the creation and completion of her panel of tiles. The man who had written to her such dispirited letters about selling his horses, letting the gardens go wild, having no interest in anything much any longer, was not the father she remembered from her girlhood, the proud though remote man who let her accompany him to breeders of water lilies or to Stourhead or the glass houses at Kew. She did not know that man in the wheeled chair looking out to the river, had no place in her memory for him.

A box arrived some months later. Among the photographs and a volume of her grandfather's sermons, a series of watercolours of birds done by an aunt, was a journal and a package of letters. Some of the letters, she could see, were in the hand of Henry, an ornate copperplate. The journal was bound in a marbled paper, quite beautifully, though it was soiled. When she opened it, Flora realized it had been with her older brother during his time in Gallipoli. There were notes on weather, birds, meals, descriptions of stomach troubles, and then a kind of code in which he seemed to talking about meetings away from the camp, the beauty of P., lines of verse about marble limbs. Then a direct cry,
I am nothing without you, my dearest Peter, and if we must die, let us die in one another's arms.

Peter? she wondered. Peter?

There was more, and it broke her heart to read it. Her brother had had a lover, a young man, someone he'd known for years, although it was clear there was a class separation. Family was mentioned, and how his own might feel about a relationship with this young man. Henry wondered how their special friendship might continue back in England; an entire entry mused about the future, as though it was just around the corner from the landing beach at Cape Helles. And then entries about the horrors of seeing men shot as they tried to move to the sand from the sea. Her brother had been terribly afraid, she read, afraid of so many things—blood, loud noise, the Turks coming over the dunes with their weapons, the sight of bodies turning black within a day in the fierce sun. Then joy: a brief unexpected rhapsody on the beauty of the Australian soldiers, tanned and muscular as they tried to wash themselves of dust and sweat at the end of a day. Fear again—of his encounters with Peter being discovered. And of one of them dying without the other nearby.

When she finished reading Henry's journal, she felt as though she'd been through a whirlwind. He had so clearly been in love with the young soldier in his company. They had sworn to be true to each other, he confessed to the pages of his journal, and there was a photograph tucked into its pages, a young man smiling, a forelock of unruly hair falling over his brow.
With all my love, Peter
, was written on the back. He looked familiar but for the moment Flora did not think about that.

Had her father read the journal? Of course he must have. Her father, for whom the term
manly
was a high compliment. Her father's heart was so proud that two of his sons had gone to serve their King and country, full in the bloom of English manhood. And her mother, who had never told Flora the least thing about her physical body, not the bleeding, not the expectation of breasts. And now there was this knowledge of Henry passed along to her, an uneasy legacy. Who was Peter, and had he survived the war?

And like a small sharp arrow, a sudden memory of the housekeeper, Mrs. Sloan, and her son Peter entered Flora's mind; the two of them lived in what had once been the dower cottage on the Watermeadows property. Mr. Sloan, who had also worked for them, had been killed by a falling tree. She looked at the photograph again. That forelock. That smile. She almost recalled—did she, or was it the anxiety of not knowing? Of wanting to put a face to a name, to give shape to the lover in her brother's heart?—that Henry and Peter had rambled the local woods together, in search of flints and remnants of the Roman road. They'd returned to Watermeadows with their eyes shining, full of ancient stockades and tracks worn deep into the valleys from the weight of quarried rock. They'd seemed so proud and electric somehow to the young Flora, their bodies alive with the landscape they'd explored. And now she realized they had been alive with the knowledge of each other.