The Age of Water Lilies (24 page)

She thought about Henry, what she remembered of him. They had never been close. He had been born seven years before Flora and had been away at school for most of her childhood. Summers he had a tutor, sometimes the same one as George but often a special one to concentrate on Greek or Latin exclusively, whereas George's tutors needed to also help him with his maths and history, and remedial languages. Unlike George, he didn't try to amuse a younger sister; he occasionally ruffled her hair as he passed her on the terrace on his way to birdwatch or to walk the old Roman roads in search of antiquities. She thought at first her mother was being cruel in sending her Henry's journal but realized after thinking about it at length that her mother would have had no other way to share what she knew about her son. No language for what Henry was and whom he loved. Flora barely had a vocabulary for Henry, but in her own love affair, she had walked off the path and into a landscape where she had become her true self. In a box canyon, she had made love among the tracks of a rattlesnake. On the porch of a log cabin by a remote lake fringed with reeds, she had let her blanket fall to the floor and stood naked before a man who would give her Grace. What she had done and what had come of it needed new words; she had found them, taken them in, tried to take the sting away with love and hard work. Henry had paid a very high price for loving whom he loved, and she wanted to find a place for him and his Peter in her heart.

To settle that heart and to accommodate this new knowledge, she went for a walk to the cemetery, taking Grace with her. They crossed the road, and Grace slipped her hand from Flora's in order to take her own way into the quiet grounds.

“I like to go between the hedges,” she explained as she came out on the other side of the privet. “I like the smell. And it's the right way to come in.”

“Whatever do you mean by that, Grace?”

“I can't hear them talking when I go through the gate,” was the strange reply. And she would say no more.

They walked to Gus's stone and Flora tidied the area around it a little, brushing away leaf litter and needles from the exotic plantings of pine trees from various parts of the world that provided beautiful shade in summer and restful dark in winter. When the stone had first been laid into the ground, Flora had regularly removed any moss that began to accumulate between the letters and numbers of the inscription. But now she left it. She liked the way the plushy green softened the edges of the words—
Sed nos inmensum spatiis confecium aequor / et iam tempus equum fumantia solvere colla
. Their hard clarity smoothed, the way the pain of Gus's death had been eased somehow over the years as Flora was absorbed by the daily work of raising her child, making a living for them, running the house with Ann. She bent to the stone and ran her thumb along the soft edge of
equum,
remembering as she did so the lovely eyes of Agate, the flared nostrils of Flight. In the meantime, Grace wandered in the grass, her face dreamy. Flora watched her extend her hands, as though to touch something but there was nothing but air. She could hear Grace talking softly while the crows preened and muttered.

There was less work for Flora now that the war was over and men were reclaiming jobs they had left behind. Fewer men returned than had left in a wild patriotic rush; that was certain. The speculative balloon, so elevated and promising at the beginning of the war, had burst, and buildings stood empty all over Victoria. Architects were more conservative, and although the occasional commission for tiles still materialized, many weeks went by without a call from James McGregor to ask that Flora come in for a consultation.

•  •  •

One architect Flora met on a walk along the Ross Bay waterfront— “Miss Oakden, surely?” “Yes, and you are Mr. Restholme! How do you do, sir?” “I have wanted so much for a client to ask for tiles so that I could commission a group from you—your water lilies are famous, you know—but it seems that the war has left people uneasy about spending money on something of beauty” —told her he would actively promote her work but nothing came of it.

Flora had been permitted to keep the extra tiles she'd made for Tom Lamb's client as insurance against cracking or breaking. With Ann's blessing, she arranged to have someone come to the house to affix a panel of them onto the bathroom wall in the Memorial Crescent house. The effect was not as grand as the room in the beautiful Rockland house, but it gave both women great pleasure.

“Little would anyone know, passing this house on the street, that its bathroom contained such a work of art!” Ann exclaimed as they toasted the installation with measures of the Islay malt they had taken to drinking on special occasions.

A sum of money had been settled on Flora once the sale of Watermeadows had been finalized, so she was not in financial difficulty, but she missed the work, the challenge of filling a space with an image that would both please and enlighten. Her life was full of Grace, but she waited for something else, a sense of purpose. When she returned to Hollyhock Cottage from a walk along the waterfront or among the graves, she'd hear Ann practising scales, and she yearned to enter into something deeply—she'd had a glimpse of what this must be like when she'd worked with Nagy to develop the colours for her tiles: the formulae, the chemical relationships. And yet at night when her child slept and she took something from her work basket to mend, she was content enough for the time being. She had begun to say a little prayer to herself as she darned stockings, a few lines from Isaiah: “‘And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.'”

TWENTY-THREE

1962

Summer arrived almost before Tessa knew it. School ended. The long two months stretched before her with promises of picnics, swimming in Gonzales Bay, go-cart races on the Eberts Street hill, endless games of hide-and-seek in the hours before bed. This was the summer she was allowed to go downtown on the bus to get her own library books once a week, her bus fare wrapped in a piece of tissue and tucked into her shorts pocket along with her library card.

Miss Oakden asked Tessa's mother whether the girl might be allowed to help with simple garden chores for a small allowance. Did Tessa want to do this? Oh, she was thrilled. To spend more time in that magical garden with the frogs and roses and then to have lemonade on the cool porch—the mornings she went to Miss Oakden's, she was always awake early with an excited feeling in her stomach. Miss Oakden was like the mysterious objects on her windowsill. She wanted to know more, wanted to be around her in order to learn how the woman fit into the neighbourhood. The world, even.

“I thought you could help me rake the grass, Tessa. I pushed the mower around very early because I couldn't sleep. Here is the basket I use to take clippings to the compost bin, which is there by the back fence.”

The raking took almost no time at all. After cleaning the bamboo tines of the last bits of sweet-smelling grass, Tessa wondered what she might do next.

“Would you mind going up on the stepladder to help train the new shoots of honeysuckle around the pergola? I feel a little too shaky to climb it these days, but I will hold it while you go up.”

Tessa didn't mind at all. With Miss Oakden's direction, she coaxed strands of honeysuckle in and around the lathe. The flowers were wonderfully scented, almost like cloves, the spice her mother put in apple pie. She had to avoid the bees with their heavy pollen sacs as they moved from blossom to blossom. And was delighted to find another of the small green frogs perched on a leaf like a tiny jewel. She was almost at eye level with it. Its throat pulsed, pale pink, and its tiny feet were splayed against the leaf like tiny hands, exactly the same brilliant green as the vine.

When they'd finished the chores, they had lemonade on the porch. Tessa wondered whether it would be all right to ask Miss Oakden questions about her daughter. There was a feeling in the house, Tessa couldn't have articulated what exactly it was, but she
felt
the presence of a girl when she went in to help the woman carry out a tray. There was no other way to say it. The silence after a footfall. The slight movement of curtains as though someone standing at a window had moved away. Almost the sound after laughter dies away.

“Did your daughter go to my school, Miss Oakden?”

“For several years, yes, she did, Tessa. She had classes in the Annex. And then her grandfather asked that he be allowed to pay for her to attend St. Ann's Academy—you know where that is, I believe, because one of the girls on your street is a student there?”

Tessa did know. Eva Den Boer, four doors down, went every morning on the bus in her tunic and knee socks, white shirt and tie. It took her outside the neighbourhood in more ways than one, and Tessa had never really known her very well at all, though they were the same age.

“Did your daughter have a grandmother too?” asked Tessa, thinking of her own, who lived in New Brunswick—the Victoria grandparents had died before she was even born—and who had come to spend a few weeks with her family after Tessa's grandfather died.

“Well, yes, she did, although her grandmother only came around to the idea of knowing her when Grace was an older girl, no longer even a teenager, really. Families have odd ideas about things, my dear, and Grace's grandmother was stubborn. But I believe she was glad to have changed her mind, even if it meant some regret for the years having passed without contact with Grace. As for my own parents, also her grandparents, they never knew Grace. My father died just after the Great War, the one in which Grace's father was killed, and my mother never enjoyed good health, never contemplated a trip to Canada. In those years, I could not have afforded to take my daughter to England, which was where my mother lived. And when I could have managed a trip for us, it was too late. I tried to give Grace some sense of my family home there, my childhood. It was all I could do, though it seemed so little at the time.”

“Did she want to know about it?” Tessa asked, knowing how she pestered her mother constantly for stories of a childhood in New Brunswick, during which she would watch her mother for any little glimmer of the child she had been. It was a very strange business to try to imagine one's parents as children, yet there were moments when those children could be found. In photographs sometimes. Or in the tone of a laugh, or at the beach when a mother might plunge into the waves like a girl, or a father helping to build a go-cart and then taking it from the top of the rise down the road, shouting with excitement like any kid.

“Yes, I think she did. I used maps so I could show her where we lived in relation to places like Stonehenge, for example, and Bath—she loved reading Jane Austen when she was a teenager. And I have some photographs of my family home, which was called Watermeadows. Grace liked the horses and the views of the river.”

“I'm making a map, Miss Oakden.”

“You are? What an interesting idea, Tessa. I see you in the cemetery fairly often, with your notebook, so am I correct in thinking that is part of your map?”

“Oh, yes. The entire neighbourhood. What I'm trying to do is make it all to scale with the important places and things on it. I'm using a legend. Did you know about the buried streams? Well, you do, because we talked about them a little, ages ago. But my dad found out where they come from, and I'm trying to get them right. People think they are storm drains, but they're not. My dad told me that Indians used them as trails in the old days.”

Miss Oakden was taken aback for a moment. This child was full of surprises! She gathered her thoughts and then said, “Grace's father knew about those streams, but they weren't buried then. His father told me he used to ramble all over what is now this neighbourhood, but it used to be quite wild. There were marshes and swamps, the Chinese had their market gardens where Cook Street is now—the shops and the newer buildings towards Beacon Hill Park—and there were farms and orchards all around this area. And yes, many streams for a boy to explore. The Indian people used Ross Bay for bird hunting and they had camas digging areas all over. That was a root they collected and ate. Beautiful blue flowers, like the sky. The streams would have been like roads, I suspect.”

“There weren't roads?” Tessa could not imagine the area without May Street, Fairfield Road, and even the narrow lanes in the cemetery.

“Oh, no, my dear. This would have been dense bush. Much of it was when I came here to live in 1914! Lots of the wild spirea and thimbleberry, ferns, the hawthorns with their shaggy bark and sweet blossoms. And the streams running, all of them, to Ross Bay or Foul Bay or Rock Bay, or over to the Inner Harbour. I think it wasn't until much later that they were filled in or directed through culverts to the sea. For instance, in this area, no one would want to think of a cemetery with water running through it, I suppose.”

“That's what my dad said too. Miss Oakden, there's a loose board on your back fence. I discovered it when I was listening for the stream in Bushby Park. If you don't mind, I can use it as a gateway when I come here. I can just fit through it. Shall I show you where?”

“No need to show me, Tessa. You may consider it your own private entrance to my garden.” And saying that, the woman had a faint and distant memory of a gap in a hedge, a small girl finding her way through it as her brother called her to come.

Later, working on her map, Tessa tried to draw in a boy in the upper waters of East Creek, at the very top of the map. She used her pencil as lightly as she could.

•  •  •

One day, after leaving Miss Oakden's house—she had watered that day and had been given secateurs (“Though I think of them as pruning hooks, from Isaiah, another broken promise of the Lord's.”) to take the finished roses off their canes: “Find a leaf node, my dear, here, just like this, and cut a little above it, at an angle. That will encourage the plant to flower again”— Tessa made her way to the beach to spend a little time looking out to sea. She found this compelling. Sometimes there were ships in the distance and always there were gulls to watch wheeling and turning in the heat. They'd glide low over the water and rise with a little silver fish, pursued by others as they flew to shore to eat. She was sitting on a warm log when she saw the skeleton wedged in behind the pile of logs nearest the breakwater. It was stretched out on its back, chest open, head turned to one side, arms by its side and short legs hanging down. She counted the fingers. Yes, there were five. It must be one of the bodies her father said had washed down from the cemetery in that storm his own father had told him about. It was too small to be an adult. It must be one of the children who died of the diseases before there was vaccine.