The Age of Water Lilies

by Theresa Kishkan

  Robert Alexander

  He had not said anything directly unkind. It had been Gus’s stern mother. So Flora agreed to the tea for the next week. He arrived in a car, an immaculate Model T, and he was solicitous as he helped her to the passenger seat. He drove carefully along May to Cook and then to the city centre, where he parked his vehicle in front of the Garden Tea Room and held the door open for Flora to enter. On the drive he had only commented on the houses they passed, the progression of plants—she was surprised that winter was so mild here, even milder than Wiltshire where their pond occasionally froze to allow skating—his medical practice. But once inside, seated at a booth below walls trellised with lathe and swags of ivy trained through and among them, he made a formal apology for the way she had been treated at his home. Flora accepted without additional comment. He was a man who didn’t do this often, she deduced, didn’t admit he had been wrong. It would serve nothing to make things worse. She reminded herself that he was her lover’s father, the man responsible for much of who and what his son had become. She remembered Gus’s reflection about the malt whisky that his father enjoyed, as did his son, and she smiled.

  “Will you share the thought that makes you smile, Miss Oakden?”

  “Only if you will call me Flora. And it is only an observation that Gus once made about whisky, that the two of you shared a fondness for the Islay malts. It was the day when the child of the Indian woman who cleaned for us died. I was very upset. Gus offered me a drink from his flask. A day I remember because it was the first of my brother’s rules that I broke, and I was surprised at how little guilt I felt, particularly as the whisky had such a fine mellow flavour.”

  Robert Alexander chuckled delightedly. He was surpris- ingly easy to talk to. Over tea, cucumber sandwiches, slices of Battenburg cake (which he joked would soon have to be renamed, just as the Royal Family’s name, Saxe-Coburg, was rumoured to be in the process of being anglicized, both because of their association with the Hun: “Mountbatten? Is that change enough, do you think, Flora?”), he asked about her background, her family, the adventure in gentlemanly apple-growing undertaken by her brother. He was hungry for information about his son. Flora told him everything she knew, even the names of the horses, and then she realized how much she didn’t know: where the entire past five years had gone, for instance. She knew of his two years on ranches and farms, but before that there had only been hints: a mine in Colorado, some time at sea. His father was aware of a brief stint teaching at a one-roomed school in the northern part of the province. Talking about him made him seem closer. His father absorbed every word.

  On the way home, the doctor (“Please call me Robert. It does not seem appropriate to suggest myself yet as father-in-law, but one day we will talk about that.”) asked if he might take her to tea another time. Flora agreed. She liked him and felt at ease in his company. What was left unsaid was that Mrs. Alexander would not be part of the outing.

  • • •

  Flora thought she would set up maternity care in preparation for the birth of her child, and to that end, she visited St. Joseph’s Hospital by the convent of the Sisters of St. Ann. It was the Sisters themselves who operated the hospital. She had contacted them in the weeks after her arrival in Victoria because she felt she should follow up on their invitation to come to see them once she arrived. There had been a meeting with a Sister in a tidy room overlooking extensive gardens and orchards where she was given the impression she should arrange to stay in a home for unwed mothers to which they would be happy to refer her. Arrangements would be made for the Christian adoption of her child after its delivery. The Sister was kind but obviously taken aback when Flora replied that she had no intention of giving her baby up, that she and the baby’s father would be married as soon as the war was over, and that although irregular, she felt her situation did not present insurmountable difficulties. Clearly the Sister thought otherwise.

  At the suggestion of the Sister, Flora arranged for an appointment to see a doctor. He was very severe. It was his opinion that she had no choice but to take shelter in the home for unwed mothers, deliver herself of her child to the good work of the orphanage, and come to an agreement with God afterwards. She left in tears.

  Ann was a great consolation when Flora returned to Hollyhock Cottage. She made a simple meal of scrambled egg and toast and carried the tray in by the fire; she poured them each a glass of sherry.

  “Why on earth should you need to use their hospital at all, Flora? Babies are born at home all the time. And you have a home, here, with me. We will find a doctor who will take you as your patient, not lecture you, but who will come here to do what is necessary. I think you must know I am looking forward to this child as much as you are. I will help in any way that I am able to.”

  “Oh, bless you, Ann. I have to say that I left that doctor thinking that I was truly a fallen woman and that I ought to give up my child to the mercy of . . . well, the orphanage, though I can barely say the word. Listening to you restores my faith in myself somewhat.”

  Ann smiled and threaded a slice of bread onto a toasting fork. “I love the smell of toasting bread! Have you seen the Protestant orphanage, by the way? A beautiful location, all hilly, surrounded by oak meadows, but the building itself . . . Oh, my Lord. Red brick, and a sense of chilly foreboding, like something out of Dickens. I’ve always imagined faces at the windows when I’ve passed it, and little screams for help, but I suppose that is my imagination at work!”

  When Robert Alexander arrived to take her for tea the next time, Flora found herself telling him about the consultations with both the nun and the doctor. He surprised her by offering to assist with the birth.

  “Like your friend Mrs. Ogilvie, I am inclined to think that most babies can be safely delivered at home. I have assisted hundreds into the world myself. And I would be honoured if you should require my help. No need to decide now but know that I am available. Of course you will keep your child, Flora, and one day it will be a story to tell your grandchildren. They will not believe that their grandmother had such a time of it in very proper Victoria!”

  FIFTEEN

  Mid-April 1915

  She did not know at first why she was awake. Still night. The dark windows unlit by any dawn. She was sleepy for a moment, then felt pain beginning in her abdomen, intense pain that lasted only a few seconds but that gripped her body fully while it lasted. She waited. A few minutes later, there was another. Less intense this time. Then another. She rose from her bed, put on her wrapper, and quietly went to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea.

  Ann entered the kitchen, asking, “Is everything all right, Flora?”

  “I think today will be the baby’s birthday,” replied Flora, turning to smile at Ann, then suddenly consumed by another pain.

  “Have you had the pains for long?”

  When she could speak again, Flora told her that she wasn’t certain, only that she had been brought out of sleep by them.

  “I will call the doctor now and see what he would like us to do.”

  She spoke into the phone, then turned to Flora. “He asks, has there been water?”

  “No, but the pains are coming a little more often . . .” and with that, she sat heavily in a chair and held her stomach with both hands as though to confine the pain and what might come after.

  Ann spoke into the phone again, then replaced the receiver on its small cradle.

  “He is on his way.”

  As she had been directed, Ann began heating water in a large kettle and taking extra towels and clean rags to Flora’s room. She padded the bed with old sheets. Then she chipped some ice off the block in the icebox and dampened a washing flannel with cool water to bathe Flora’s forehead, which was beaded with perspiration.

  • • •

  Three hours later, Flora was cradling a tiny howling daughter, wrapped in soft flannel, exhausted but exhilarated to have such tangible evidence that she had been loved by Gus. The baby was blue-eyed, with her mot
her’s fair hair. You could not say yet about the nose, which was as small as a nose could be. As soon as she had been handed the child, after the cord had been cut and the tiny body cleaned, she gave her the name that she had been holding secret until she knew the gender. George for a boy, Grace for a girl. The room was lit by morning sun; a pear tree bloomed outside the window like a welcoming committee.

  “May I?” asked Grace’s grandfather, reaching to take the bundle. “She is a fine baby, Flora. And look, all ten toes and fingers! You have done well, my dear.”

  “If only . . .” Flora started to say, then stopped herself. Robert Alexander would know, without her telling him, what she longed for in those precious moments following her daughter’s birth. He patted her hand awkwardly, the other arm hand firmly holding his granddaughter to his heart.

  There were times, holding the new Grace against her shoulder after a feeding, when Flora was reminded of the Grace she had known at Walhachin—her gurgle, her skin, the damp warmth she had left on Flora’s lap when the two of them had fallen asleep in the rocker. And only a few days later, that earlier Grace was dead.

  Flora sent a letter off to Gus almost immediately. You would love her fingers, she told him. So small and perfect, and the soles of her feet, which have never touched the earth. Your father says she has your nose, but it is truly so little that I don’t know how he can say that. But she is clearly a comfort to him. I don’t know if he doted on you but he surely dotes on his granddaughter, stopping in so regularly that we have given him a key in the event we are busy with laundry—there is so much, I never would have dreamed such a tiny infant could need so many nappies, so many nightdresses. As a family we are perhaps unorthodox—a widow, an unmarried mother, a father so far away it might almost be another world, and a grandfather who has somehow accepted not only the child but also the household in which she lives. And cries! Oh Gus, her cry would break your heart.

  The rabbit-skin booties were a delight to lace onto Grace’s tiny feet, the fur soft against soles that had never touched the earth, never left a print in soil or snow. No item of clothing pleased Flora as well, though Ann had knitted sweaters of wool light as swan’s down and Flora herself had smocked nightdresses sewn from flannel sprigged with nosegays of primroses and clover. When Flora put the booties on Grace’s feet, she remembered the Indian woman’s smile and the touch of those hands on her stomach like a blessing. Did she cast a spell upon me? wondered Flora. Because, riding the train down to the coast, she had woken from her brief sleep with the utter conviction that there was no shame in carrying the child of a man she loved with her whole heart, knowing that she would make her own way and not seek shelter with those who might want to take her child from her. The booties were proof of that moment.

  • • •

  Early June 1915

  “Robert Alexander has telephoned, Flora,” said Ann, coming out to the garden where Grace slept in her pram under a tree while Flora wrote letters at the table. A letter to her mother, a letter to Jane—she wrote but did not expect them to answer. “He is coming over. He sounded very serious. I hope there’s not bad news. I will stay out here with Grace so you can see him in the sitting room. I put the kettle on and the teapot is warm.”

  He was at the door within ten minutes. Flora knew it was something awful when she saw him through the glass. He came in and hung his hat and his walking stick on the coat rack.

  “There is no easy way to tell you this, Flora,” Robert began, taking Flora’s hands in his own. “No easy way. A letter has come from the Front, from Gus’s commanding officer. Gus was killed in action at Festubert on May 24. That is near Artois, I gather, a terrible battle, coming quite soon after Ypres.” His voice broke for a second, then he recovered himself. “The letter speaks of his bravery. As yet there is no body.”

  “Could it be a mistake?” asked Flora, knowing that it couldn’t. She felt a shiver running down her spine, a sensation her mother always referred to as “someone walking over a grave.”

  “I do not believe it to be a mistake. I sent a wire to someone I know in Ottawa, an aide to the Minister of Militia and Defence, Sam Hughes, and he replied within the day to say that indeed there were casualties as the 5th and 7th Battalions took significant ground at Festubert and that my son’s name was among those confirmed dead. Perhaps you should have a little brandy, my dear.”

  Flora sat down and felt a glass being pressed into her cold hands. She was urged to drink. A fire surged down her throat and into her stomach, making her eyes water, but it was warm; after a second mouthful, she did feel less faint. Her hands were still cold. She began to weep, quietly at first, but then great sobs wracked her body. The doctor handed her his handkerchief and she held it to her eyes, pressing them as though to obviate sight completely. As though to obviate her life itself.

  After a time—it might have been a few minutes, it might have been an hour—she remembered her guest. She composed herself. Wiping her eyes, smoothing her hair, she turned to him.

  “I am so sorry, Robert. For you and Mrs. Alexander, who have not seen him in so long, as much as for myself, and for Grace, who will never know him.”

  They talked for a time. Flora listened to her lover’s father remember his son’s childhood not a mile from where they sat, how he loved to take a lunch in his knapsack and walk for hours in any direction with his compass and his notebook (Flora remembered his note-taking on their own adventure in the Back Valley where skies had been described, birds accounted for, guesses made at geological formations), coming back late in the day with eyes shining and clothing covered in dust and grass seed. It was different then, much of the land still held by the hbc and not subdivided, though there were farms here and there. The hillsides were brush-covered and threaded with small creeks. She wept again to think of the young Gus wandering among the Garry oaks with his eyes skyward, taking in the blue distances.

  When he took his leave, Dr. Alexander embraced Flora for a long moment.

  “I am most grateful to you for letting me take you to tea that day. And for the gift of Grace.”

  She watched him pull away from the house in his dark car. And then she walked slowly to the garden to tell Ann the news. And to take solace from the sweet damp smell of Grace’s neck, to tighten the little laces on the rabbit-fur boots to keep her child’s feet warm.

  In her bed that night, Flora could not sleep. She relived every moment she’d spent with Gus, from the ride to Mary’s cabin on the Deadman River when she’d almost swooned like a Victorian maiden at the sight of his forearms and their soft hairs to the few stolen nights in a cabin by a lake, reed-fringed and loud with blackbirds. There were thrilling encounters among the dry grass in the orchards where her body had fused with his by the ardour he knew how to awaken in her. The hidden canyon where they had picnicked by a little creek and reclined on a saddle blanket while hawks made lazy circles in the air. On one of those occasions, Grace had been conceived.

  Subsequent days were difficult beyond imagining. So much of the pain of the past year was endured with the hope that Gus would return, they would be married and make a home together.

  “How will I bear it, not just for today, but for the days that will follow?” she wept to Ann one evening after dinner.

  “You must, Flora. For Grace and for yourself. And it will become, oh, not easier, but something that doesn’t stab at your heart every minute as I know it must now. Try to walk. There is something about the seafront, the wind, the sound of waves: it somehow cleanses the thinking. You will want to think your way through this as well as feel your way. Not that you could help the latter, but it will be good to try to think what it means as well. I will make sure Grace is safe. Just walk, whenever you feel you can’t do anything else. Between the spray of the tide and your tears, who is to know if you cry?”

  • • •

  Flora walked. In all weathers—and early summer always brought its fair share of wind and rain as well as clear sunny days—she would walk the waterf
ront, make her way through the lanes in the cemetery, climb the pretty streets to the high places where she could see the Olympic Peninsula on a cloudless day or else dense banks of fog on an unsettled one. It was as though she was looking for Gus, for his presence in the city of his youth. Looking for herself as she might have been, had she known him then. She would come upon lovers walking on the windy breakfront, the woman leaning into the man, and her heart would constrict. Or an old woman putting flowers into an urn on a grave in the cemetery, proof that grief had its own long lifespan.

  She climbed the stony hill locally called Moss Rocks and sat with her back against a warm outcropping, looking far out to sea. Shooting stars and bleeding hearts grew in clumps as lovely as any garden, and she was surprised to find both pink and creamy late erythroniums still blooming as well. And nodding onion, long-spurred violets, a tall blue flower which Ann told her was camas, and the sweet-scented Nootka rose. Once, as she sat among the rocks, she had watched two tiny lizards mating in a dry cleft and found herself weeping at the beauty of it, the long dignity of their effort.

  For a time, she avoided newspapers. She did not want the raw numbers of losses, the small triumph of a victory in the Ypres salient. She wanted to keep the one thing she knew about the war clear in her mind so she could examine it from every angle.

  Sometimes on her walks, Flora entered Beacon Hill Park and stood on the highest point where the wind blew almost always. The early summer plantings were blooming. Ducks were on the ponds with their young behind them in untidy processions. Beautiful Garry oaks stood in groupings on mossy rises; willows overhung the water. Flora discovered one pond with several water lily plants holding the chalices of their yellow flowers above the water. If she got close enough, she could see the stigmas like small umbrellas and the flies at work underneath. It was an unexpected moment to remind her of Watermeadows and she returned with Grace in her pram to have the solace of familiar flowers and ducks.