The Age of Water Lilies

by Theresa Kishkan

  “They’re so lovely. Did you find them here?”

  Ann was quiet for a few moments, holding the gypsum to her heart. “No, they come from your part of the world, actually. From Blue Anchor, near Watchet, on the Somerset coast. Phillip and I went there for our honeymoon—an aunt of his had a cottage that we borrowed—and we spent most of our days on the beaches and under the cliffs, amazed at the sheer number of fossils there. I remember our baggage being loaded onto the train when we went back to London and the porter saying, ‘Very heavy, Miss. Do ye have rocks in ’er or summat?’ They’ve accompanied me wherever I’ve gone.”

  Deciding to save carfare, Flora walked back to the Empress Hotel. Along May Street to Cook Street, then down Fort: Victoria was a pretty town, though Cook Street seemed very much in transition. Obviously there had been farms along the street. A few fenced pastures remained, and marshy areas with the remnants of skunk cabbage, their fleshy leaves broken by frost, bordered the road. But now newly built houses were everywhere, Tudor facades and stucco, new and clean on their mucky lots. Little tea rooms and shops materialized as Flora walked down Fort Street. Open spaces with surveying stakes showed that change was in the air.

  “Will she have you?” asked the woman in the tea room at the Empress Hotel, not unkindly, as she poured steaming tea into those delicate Spode cups the colour of eggshells. And Flora was able to tell her yes, realizing that the woman had known all along of her condition, her situation (her fingers bare of rings, the absence of a husband’s name), that Ann Ogilvie might not be the person to whom every young woman could be sent.

  • • •

  Waking a few days later, her first morning in the white-floored room, Flora was surprised to hear singing. She wondered if she was dreaming. She lay in her flowered bed hearing scales and arpeggios as someone, Ann Ogilvie almost certainly, warmed up her voice. Up and down the scale, to aye, and then to ah, and then to oh, and to ee, stopping and repeating. Then the voice began to sing a piece that Flora remembered from a concert at the Albert Hall on a trip to London during her coming-out: surely this was Handel? The recitativa “Frondi tenere” from Serses, boldly sung, and then the beautiful aria about a plane tree’s shade? “‘Ombra mai fu, di vegetabile . . .’” The voice was lovely, reaching the highest notes of the aria without any difficulty. Stopping. Ringing one piano note as though to remember pitch. “‘Caraed amabile!’” Flora wept in her bed, an eiderdown around her shoulders as she listened. The music contained within it memories sweet and far away from this pink cottage opposite the cemetery where she had a room—but for how long, and what would happen to her? The enormity of the future, with its unknowns: Flora felt lost in her bed, thinking of this. But then a few more bars, the same words: “‘Ombra mai fu, di vegetabile, soave pui . . .’” It was reassuring somehow to listen to such praise for trees in the midst of her anxiety.

  When she came out of her bedroom to use the toilet, Ann peeked out from the room at the other end of the hall.

  “Good morning, my dear. I hope I didn’t wake you? I always try to practise in the mornings because one never knows what the day will bring. How did you sleep? Were you warm enough? Later in the day, I will show you the linen cupboard where you will find extra blankets and things.”

  Flora laughed. “Warm enough? As though there could be any question with that mountain of eiderdown and blankets. It was perfect. Thank you. And so nice to wake to Handel! I’d forgotten that piece, but it was a good reminder of how grateful we should be to trees. In Walhachin one longed for leafy plane trees in summer. Or an avenue of pollarded limes. Apple trees take such a long time to come to maturity. Ours provided such a little shade. So to hear that aria, bringing to mind memories of, oh, I suppose completely English glades . . . Thank you so much, Ann. Not just for the singing but for, well, everything.”

  “It’s my pleasure, Flora. I will go back to my piano and my music now. You will find tea in the kitchen—it’s on the hob— and a place set for you in the dining room just beyond. Go through the French doors and you’ll see.”

  Flora settled into the household with ease. Ann had routines THAT were not to be disturbed. Her singing, for instance. She had trained as a singer in London, before her marriage, and had enjoyed a brief but happy career as a recitalist. And she continued to perform in Victoria when possible. She practised every morning. And she insisted on fresh sheets every week; Mondays were always laundry days. She welcomed Flora’s help with this and was not surprised that Flora had never actually washed a sheet—“Why on earth would you have? I’d never done laundry myself until Phillip died and suddenly there was so little money, not enough for servants. But I rather like to wash bed linens, in part because they are so lovely hanging out in the garden like clean ghosts and the scent of them when they are ironed and returned to the beds! Heaven!”—and showed her how to use a mangle to wring out the water after the final rinse. The two of them did this together, their dresses wrapped in coarse aprons. They hung the sheets from the line, clothespins between their lips, each of them taking an end and pegging it in a kind of domestic dance, arms raised and faces uplifted.

  Every morning Flora checked the mailbox to see if a letter had arrived. There was one, posted in early February, and her heart turned as she opened the envelope. He was writing from Avonmouth, waiting to be transported across the Channel to the Bay of Biscay, and then the Loire. For some reason, she kept hearing “The Raggle Taggle Gypsies” as she read his brief letter, the refrain playing in her head like a lament: “And the other sang, Bonny Bonny Biscay Oh!” She would have to look on a map to see where he was now. Somewhere over there.

  Letter Five: Sweetest Flora, the letter began. Where I am now, when you read this, is anyone’s guess. We are preparing for the Continent and I think that ultimately means France, or Belgium. We are told almost nothing. Thus far I have been camped in a muddy field at Lark Hill as I mentioned. Never was a place less happily named. It seemed that every man but myself came down with a particularly nasty bug and the problem of keeping warm and dry was the thing on everyone’s lips. It is difficult to remember sometimes why I was so ready to come here. It was to end by Christmas, that was what everyone said. By now you will have met my parents . . .

  Flora broke off reading here with a pang of guilt. She had not met them. She had written to them and received no reply. This caused her considerable uncertainty. Should she write again? Should she simply appear at their door? And she had put them out of her mind in her effort to fit into Ann’s home. The two women spent a portion of each day sewing a layette for the baby; in that homely work Flora found a kind of peace. She had not wanted to interrupt it.

  She continued reading. “. . . and I wonder what you make of them, them of you. I cannot believe that they would not love you at first sight, as I did. Or at least my father. About the matter of which you wrote to me. I can only say I will return to you as soon as I am able. Know that I think of you often and remember our time in the Back Valley as something approaching Eden.”

  There was more. Descriptions of weather, a leave he had taken in London with a group from his battalion, little observations about the English countryside that pulled at Flora’s heartstrings because he was so close to Watermeadows. Gus had teamed up with a fellow who had been studying archaeology at the University of Toronto and who was happy to have company on rambles around Wiltshire in search of ancient sites. Gus’s observations brought specific memories to mind for Flora because one of her brother George’s tutors had taken the two of them on as many outings as their father would permit. Stonehenge, the smaller and less-frequented Avebury, an avenue of stones leading to the Sanctuary nearby, and the long barrow at West Kennet. And Gus had also managed to get away for long walks. With much of the camp waterlogged, it was possible to simply absent onself from the training that was so often cancelled due to weather conditions and illness on the part of the officers as well as soldiers; anywhere else, he said, there would have been serious disciplinary action but no on
e noticed. He described seeing the white horses cut into hillsides, particularly the impressive one at Westbury on the perimeter of the Plain where the troops were situated. More than a few afternoons were spent in a pub on Endless Street in Salisbury. Gus had entered the cathedral in Salisbury too, and was moved to tears at the sight of the tombs of knights who had fought in the Crusades in thrall to the early kings. It was their feet, Flora, that touched my heart. Seeing the effigies with those feet that had walked on soil so far from their homes. I don’t know why but I thought of my childhood home then with some great longing.

  Then Gus expressed impatience at the delays in getting the War Office to decide that the Canadians were ready to proceed to France. All a kind of snobbery, he wrote in Letter Six. We are not quite gentlemen to them. This is what it boils down to. But I think losses are higher than what anyone expected so I think it’s safe to say that the colonials might well be needed sooner rather than later. And Lord knows at times I think anything would be better than the mud of Lark Hill.

  At first Ann made little polite noises about what was happening overseas. And then she began to talk more stridently about the war. Flora had never heard someone so angry about the conflict. In Walhachin, men drilled for years as though in anticipation. When the call came, they were ready to leave within a day or two at most, the actual tangible work they had committed themselves to for so many years quickly put aside for the more abstract considerations of duty, their lovely laden trees abandoned to Chinese labourers and women, to men too old or disabled to wear a uniform. That did strike Flora as sad. But this anger, from a woman who had direct experience with a war, her bitterness and her contempt for the leaders: Flora was shocked at first but then grew to see what Ann meant as she listened to the older woman’s opinions.

  “On February 1, Flora, it was the fourteenth anniversary of my husband’s death at the Paardeberg Drift battle. There is no grave for me to visit, no monument in the cemetery across the road.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that, Ann. Of course you would want a place in which to focus your grief and then your sense of honouring your husband.”

  Ann continued, as though she hadn’t heard Flora’s words: “There are these photographs of course to remind me of who he was and what I’ve lost. And what other women lost, other families. Phillip had elderly parents, a sister. Some of the men were fathers. All of them were sons. That is my immediate loss.”

  She turned the edges of her sleeves back, smoothing the fabric with her long fingers. She took a deep breath and continued. “But also there is the larger thing, for me in any case, of what we lost as a society, by allowing Kitchener to order the burning of houses, the enforced gathering of women and children into those camps where there was such terrible hunger and illness. So many died, Flora, and I believe that England has that blood on its hands to this day. It’s utterly immoral. No amount of high-minded rhetoric will persuade me otherwise.”

  This was not something Flora knew anything about. An uncle of hers had gone to South Africa with the Duke of Edinburgh’s Regiment and fought at Mosilikatse Nek; he’d returned with various souvenirs—a spear, the leg of an elephant made into an umbrella stand—and a medal, for Distinguished Conduct. Nothing had been said about camps.

  “And as for a monument,” said Ann, “I would give anything for my husband himself to be in my bed at night, to take me in his arms and dance me to dinner. Or bring me nosegays of sweet violets from a street vendor as he did during the year of our courtship. I can still feel the warmth of Phillip’s hands as he pinned the little bouquet to my bodice. Oh, Lord, I pray that one day men stop this way of settling differences.”

  She wept as she finished, tears running down her cheeks as she peeled potatoes for their dinner. It was Flora’s turn to comfort her; the two of them stood in the kitchen while the rain echoed Ann’s tears on the windows, water coursing down the clarity of glass.

  When the letter arrived, only a few lines—a greeting, a comment about the weather, and then, Sed nos immensum spatiis confecium aequor / et iam tempus equum fumantia solvere colla—it caught Flora completely by surprise. His name, preceded by love. She kept tracing her finger over his signature as if to keep him safe.

  She wrote the difficult letter to her parents, giving them some information of her condition, her new home, details of Victoria that she hoped would soften the blow a little. She described the gardens, so English in their plantings and order, and the shops where one could buy tartans and Irish linen or order china to replace broken pieces. A telegram came in response with a brief message: Extremely disappointed. Stop. George has failed us. Stop. Henry has enlisted. Stop. Father.

  She summoned her courage and wrote another letter to the Alexanders, telling them that now she had grown to learn the streets and neighbourhoods, she realized they were only a short distance away.

  FOURTEEN

  January–February 1915

  “They have invited me to tea. Tomorrow,” Flora told Ann. “But I am afraid I will be turned from the door.” She laughed nervously. “Mrs. Alexander sounded polite but stern. Yes, Gus had written to tell them I would be coming to Victoria, and my reason for leaving Walhachin. Yes, they received my letter. Yes, they would agree to have me visit. Then directions. A time. That was all.” She took a deep breath. “I think I will walk if this sunshine holds. I must say after two winters in Walhachin, I did not expect British Columbia to have such mild weather. Look, Ann! There are snowdrops in your garden!”

  “Yes, and before you know it, there will be daffodils too. Don’t worry about tomorrow. What do you say we walk down to the water?”

  The door was opened by a grey-haired woman in a severe dark blue dress. A man was behind her, tall, with the blue eyes Flora knew from his son. She was taken to a sitting room where a fire burned.

  “I cannot tell you we are happy about this,” the woman began, but her husband cut in gently.

  “Perhaps you could pour Miss Oakden a cup of tea, my dear, and let her get her bearings.”

  Flora sat in a deep leather armchair and was handed a cup of tea, the pattern the same Royal Worcester that her parents used for afternoon tea. She thought she would not mention this. Both of Gus’s parents watched her as she drank her tea, taking in her good clothing, her features, the unmistakable fact of her pregnancy. She waited for them to say something, then put her teacup down.

  “I know I must present something of a shock to you. I am a shock to myself. I was living one kind of life and now find that I must learn to live another kind entirely. But I must assure you that your son and I loved each other, love each other still. When he returns home—Oh, I hope it will be soon!—we intend to marry. This is not to say that I planned to have a child, not like this, but I cannot say I am altogether unhappy with it either.”

  Dr. Alexander spoke first. “We have not seen our son, our only son, in five years, and then only briefly after an absence of three years. It is a source of regret to me that hard words were spoken on my part, and he took my anger seriously and disappeared. We had no idea he was working in Walhachin. The last I heard was a rumour of his presence in a gambling establishment in San Francisco. So to receive a letter from a training camp in England with the information that there was a young lady in the picture who might contact us, a young lady expecting his child . . . You can surely see that it came as a surprise. You come as a surprise, Miss Oakden, and it will take time to adjust.”

  “I wonder what your own parents make of this,” Mrs. Alexander broke in crisply. “Have they disowned you? It would surprise me if they haven’t. I am the mother of two daughters and would not hesitate to call them to account if such a thing occurred in our family. Which it wouldn’t.”

  Flora wanted to rise from her chair immediately, find her coat, and leave. She did not know what she expected, but it was not this woman’s chilly assessment. Instead, she thought for a moment, then answered. “My parents are puzzled, of course, and I suspect rather relieved that I am so many thousands of
miles away. They blame my brother, with whom I lived in Walhachin, for not keeping a closer eye on me. They won’t acknowledge that I am an adult woman who must take responsibility for her own actions. And I expect they hope the whole thing will be taken care of somehow and never spoken of again.”

  Mrs. Alexander sniffed, as though in complete agreement with the long-suffering Oakdens, while Dr. Alexander looked thoughtful.

  Flora continued: “Although I may wish that Gus and I married before he left, I have no doubt of his love for me and I know he will return to me and our child. As for such a thing occurring in your family, I can only assure you that your son did have an involvement in the making of this child. He will do the right thing. I am certain of that. But if you haven’t seen him for five years, perhaps you have no idea of the man he became in his absence from you. In truth, it is eight years since you have known him. And now I have taken enough of your time. I will say goodbye.”

  She struggled to her feet and moved as calmly as she could towards the anteroom where her coat was hanging. She let herself out quickly and walked down the hill, her cheeks hot at the memory of the words spoken in her lover’s home.

  Back at Hollyhock Cottage, Flora gave Ann only the briefest of accounts of the meeting. Then she excused herself and went to her room to rest. She had walked back to Memorial Crescent at such a pace, fuelled by both anger and hurt, that she had worn herself out. She fell asleep with a knot in her heart that weighted her body to the bed like a stone.

  A gentle knock upon the bedroom door. “Flora, a note has come for you from that awful man. Shall I bring it in to you?”

  Ann handed Flora an envelope of heavy cream linen stock, her name on it, her address, in a strong black script. “By Hand” was written across the bottom. She opened it.

  My dear Miss Oakden,

  You are perfectly correct. We’ve no idea of the man our son has become. Will you tell me about him? I should like that very much. I apologize for our treatment of you in our home earlier today. My wife is too bewildered and unhappy to think clearly or lovingly about this, but I would like to see you again to try to make amends for our incivility. May I come by at your convenience to take you out to tea? Sincerely yours,