Dr. Alexander stood on the step, tidy as ever, his hair brushed (hat in hand), tie neatly arranged, small wire-framed spectacles magnifying the blue of his eyes (Gus’s eyes). He held a package.
“Flora, this has arrived. I’ve read it only long enough to know that it belongs with you, though I should like to be able to borrow it occasionally. Will you let me hold Grace while you look at it?”
Flora took him around to the back garden, to chairs arranged by the little pool, and handed her child to its grandfather. She looked at the cover of the book he had given her and then at him.
“I was of two minds. It will upset you, I know, but you will want to know its contents as well. It is Gus’s journal, you see, sent by the lieutenant in charge of his platoon. At first they had no idea it was his, then one of his mates read it during a leave and knew at once.”
It was a green cloth-covered book, stamped with Canadian Pocket Diary on the cover. Inside was his name, his regiment, and a note: If found, return to Dr. Robert Alexander, St. Charles Street, Victoria, British Columbia. Flora’s hands trembled as she held it.
“I will look at it a little later, I think. Shall I bring tea to the garden? It is too lovely a day to be inside—and Grace’s pram is just around the corner. If you hold her, I will bring it here. Oh, Ann, how lovely—I was just going to bring out a tray.”
Ann appeared through the trellised gateway with a japanned tray holding a pot of tea and cups, a little dish of lemon slices, and a plate of thin ginger biscuits. She put it on the wicker table and exchanged a few words with Dr. Alexander, who was cradling the drowsy infant in his arms. Flora went through the motions of pouring tea, offering lemon, biscuits, with the chilling knowledge that Gus’s journal was waiting for her.
“There is a packet of letters apparently that will come later on. Mostly from you, I would think, though his mother and sister also wrote. And some other items of a personal nature. Clothing, I think, and . . .”
His voice broke and he stopped, took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes.
“Excuse me, my dear. And a penknife, with his initials. I know the one because I gave it to him myself, for his twelfth birthday. It had been my father’s, who was called Alastair, and it seemed particularly fortuitous that Gus had the same initials. Lovely bone handle and a blade that held an edge.”
“It must have been the knife he used to . . . oh, this will sound peculiar but it was so appropriate to the place and the moment. Please don’t think of your son, of me, as cruel or macabre, but Gus cut the lower part of the jaw off a deer skeleton that we found in a place we liked to ride to, a box canyon near Walhachin. It had been scoured by weather and insects and was quite clean. Lovely really, like ivory. He said it would be an anchor he would take with him to the war, something to keep him mindful of home. Anyway, he used a pretty knife to do that particular thing. You should know how careful he was with the knife. He kept it very clean and oiled; it was always in his pocket. It obviously meant a great deal to him.”
Robert Alexander looked both startled and relieved. “How odd you should mention this, Flora. There is something else, too, you see. That very thing, in fact. His lieutenant said it gave them a bit of start to find it in Gus’s haversack—apparently some men take rather, hmmm, unorthodox souvenirs and that was what gave them pause. But it was then determined to be the jawbone of an animal—a deer, thought some of the hunters in the platoon. The lieutenant wondered whether it might be better not to send it at all but to dispose of it at his end. But it rather sounds as though it was important to my son.”
His anchor, thought Flora, taken from that beautiful ruined vessel, the opened body of the deer. Aloud, she said, “Yes, it was important. Almost sacred, if you don’t mind me saying that. I would like to have it if at all possible.”
“I will say that we would like it sent back then.”
• • •
She could not bring herself to open the journal. She’d read the letters he’d sent to her over and over again, in part because he wrote in a voice he had intended for her, things he wished her to know, to share with her, as they had shared thoughts and secrets in the box canyon—oh, less than a year ago! It would be different with a journal though. A voice not intended to be heard, speaking the secret language of the heart. And so the journal was a privacy she was not willing to intrude upon. Not yet.
• • •
Robert brought the package containing the jawbone of the deer. Holding it in her hand, Flora remembered how they had found the skeleton in their favourite place. At first she had been repelled by it—a young woman brought up in a garden designed by a student of Capability Brown had no precedent for the bones of an animal dragged to a place by a predator—but Gus had shown her the beauty of it, how it resembled the frame of a small boat, ribbed and bleached. And she had run her fingers along the jaw once he had removed it from the skull, remarking how the bone felt like ivory. “And what’s ivory,” her lover asked, “but an animal part? Tusks, Flora, and teeth. I’ve known sailors to use it as for scrimshaw, carving beautiful pictures into it that they filled with ink. And of course there are cameos. Piano keys, my sweet! They’re ivory! No need to be squeamish about something so beautiful and so practical.” Grateful to have it restored to her (so little, too little), she gave the jawbone pride of place on her dresser, alongside her silver brush and mirror set, and the little woollen strawberry where she kept the pins for her hat.
SIXTEEN
Late July 1915
Ann was away to consult with someone who wanted her to sing at a function. This offered Flora an unexpected privacy, a sense of space, which she felt she must use somehow. Grace was sleeping; the only sound in the quiet house was the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall and the hiss and snap of the fire in the grate, built to stave off unseasonable damp. Flora took out the green diary Robert Alexander had delivered to her months earlier and put it on the low table in the sitting room. She had not felt brave enough to look at Gus’s journal before, but now in Ann’s absence, she wanted to touch the pages that he had touched. The empty house, her sleeping child, gave her courage.
“What will you tell me?” she asked the book. And then she opened it.
It was in part a journal, in part a sketchbook. She turned the pages slowly to look at the sketches first: a train carriage filled with men; two men played cards, another strummed a banjo. The date told her it was the journey to Valcartier when the men were filled with the optimism that they would be home within a month or two. By Christmas for certain. And then there were sketches, some incomplete, of ships—this must be the trip overseas, Flora thought, those hammocks the only privacy a man would have. Oh, and Stonehenge! She recognized a number of scenes from the sketches done while the battalion was encamped on Salisbury Plain. The long barrow at Kennet. The cathedral in Salisbury City. A little sketch to the side of quite a detailed one of the cathedral showed a tomb, with an effigy. A note in tiny handwriting below it: William de Longespee, half-brother to King John, adviser on the Magna Carta, captured in France, returned to England, died in 1226, given everlasting life in stone.
Flora stopped turning the pages. She had been in that very place, in Salisbury Cathedral, and had looked upon that very tomb, with George’s tutor. George had wanted to know about every tomb, every knight of old, in every churchyard or cathedral they visited. She couldn’t remember much about William de Longespee but did vividly recall that a very old man, not a priest or anyone like that, had shown them the interior of the cathedral. When they paused by that particular tomb, with the sleeping stone man on top (“Waiting for the Resurrection, he is.”), they were told that a hundred years earlier the tomb had been opened. William de Longespee was only bones, but the perfectly preserved corpse of a rat had been curled up in his skull. It had seemed a horrifying story to tell a young boy and his even younger sister, but the old man had said, “Worms, rats, it don’t matter to the dead now, does it? Even as they wait for their moment with God.
” The tutor had walked his charges briskly away.
And now here was the tomb, with the knight asleep upon its plinth of stone. Something the two of them had seen at different times but as though together. Particles of the air in that high cathedral might have entered each of them, been exhaled, then waited for the other’s arrival. Their feet on those ancient stones. Their eyes gazing up to the workings of the clock. I was there waiting for you, my love, thought Flora as she looked at the sketch. All those years ago I was waiting for you though I never knew your name.
And here was France, shown in detailed sketches of villages, long avenues of poplars stretching to the horizon, a tiny bird drawn lovingly as it perched on a fence post. A few quick portraits of other men, his fellow soldiers, she imagined, one of them cleaning a rifle, another sleeping—brief but clear glimpses of those men. She imagined Gus leaning against a tree and observing them, detached, but interested.
This has been home. It was a drawing of a cave dug into the side of what must be a trench. Sandbags composed the walls. The roof was branches shored up by boards. A pile of blankets was held off the floor (which looked like there were puddles on it) by duckboards. And on that pile of blankets, a man slept with his head cradled in his arms. Gus’s note said how bad the little hovel smelled—sweat, the latrine bucket, fumes of cordite. And how rats would scuttle back and forth along the trench, in search of food. They like best human flesh, wrote Gus, and grow fat and sleek on this diet. We keep an eye on our comrades while they sleep, he added, because the rats have no fear. He had seen them eating eyes and the liver of a corpse. The horned beetles were not so bad, but he hated the sight of slugs climbing the sandbags and sides of the trenches, leaving their thin scribble of silver. And the frogs—here was a sketch of a frog sitting on a boot sticking out the water like a bulrush. He wrote that frogs at least were companionable, their throats working as they observed the world.
And here was a field bereft of crops, of trees, barbed wire between the viewer and the view. Oh, Flora’s throat caught—surely that was a body on the hatching of earth? More than one. And that—a horse with its side opened to the sky? In Gus’s tidy hand, a note: this was a field, beyond it an orchard. These were men with lives forsaken for this. This horse should have been ploughing, these men holding women in their arms. I should be holding Flora now and not crouched by this carnage, waiting for an order to creep out to pull the bodies back so they might be identified and buried.
Little crosses in a muddy ditch. Burned trees. A team of horses struggling to pull a wagon holding a gun battery and a stack of shrapnel shells. Gus’s note said that the six horses simply could not drag the wagon through the quagmire, there should have been ten at least, and of course they were easy targets for German shells. He would never forget the screams of the struck animals as they sank into the mud. Nor of his comrades wounded and waiting for medical help. A donkey bringing rations along a trench, its face calm and oddly wise. A man carrying another man past shell holes and collapsed fences.
• • •
She had not noticed the book falling to the floor. How was it that such horrors happened—were still happening—to fine Canadian men, to French men, to English boys like those she had known in her village, and that the world was unaware? How could anyone have prepared those young men for the sight of rats eating their comrades? Or for the sight of shells blowing horses to pieces? She had grown up near the home of General Henry Shrapnel, whose invention of exploding shells had been instrumental in winning the Battle of Waterloo; she had seen the stone piers of the gateway leading to the general’s residence near Bradford-on-Avon with shells embedded in each pier, had ridden by on her own mild mare, never imagining that shrapnel might be put to such purposes. Yet why had she not imagined? The linkage from bomb to rats eating a young man’s liver had been hidden in the language of duty and obligation.
“Robert,” she asked when next she saw him, “what did you make of Gus’s journal? You read it and seem calm and able to function. Yet I hardly know what to do.”
“To do, Flora?”
“How can we go on living as we do, knowing what is happening to our men overseas?”
The doctor was thoughtful but emphatic.“It is war, Flora. Not a picnic or a holiday. Our men are there to serve their King. They know their duty.”
“But . . .”
“I think you must try to think of the larger good, my dear. That if men like Gus had not gone, the Germans would have been free to take over whatever little nation caught their fancy. Of course it is terrible to think of the damage done. I don’t think there is any other way however. I am not a believer in appease- ment. It has never worked. I wonder if it might have been easier in past times when there were not telephones and telegraphs to transmit news so quickly. A runner bringing news from a battle- field seems to me almost more bearable. We at home are bombarded with daily news of the losses and I think it might detract from the high and noble work that our men are performing.”
“I cannot agree with you, Robert. There is nothing high and noble about what these sketches depict. It is sorrowful and shameful to me. But not noble.”
“Then we must agree to disagree, my dear Flora. You have every right to interpret the war in your own way. I think our ages and perhaps our genders mean that we see with different eyes. But let it not blind us to those shared things we also hold dear—your beautiful child, the memory of my son, our hope at least that this war might conclude sooner rather than later and that it might bring the promise of peace. To the small nations as well as the powerful ones.”
In the days that followed, Flora struggled to keep the horror of what she had seen in Gus’s notebook at bay. In the cozy home she shared with Ann, the trenches of France and Belgium seemed so far away. And yet. And yet.
When she talked to Ann about Gus’s sketches, her friend was not surprised.
“I’ve told you, Flora, about the conditions of the camps in the Transvaal, where women and children were herded by the British so that they would not provide food and solace to the enemy. In other words, their husbands and the fathers of those children. How so many of them died of starvation and disease. Scratch the patriotic rhetoric and this is what is hidden underneath. And our young men joined up so quickly and so willingly to fight the Kaiser.”
“Would they have gone, Ann, if they had known that such things were waiting to happen?”
“Some would say, Flora, that it has always been thus. But I think that we can and must hope for human beings to find other ways to settle border disputes and acts of aggression. How can we call ourselves civilized otherwise?”
• • •
Some nights Flora lay in the white sheets and imagined herself back into the cabin in the Back Valley, her bare body against fir boughs wrapped in homespun, crushed in the arms of a man who now was dead in France’s soil. What a distance he had gone from her and how ironic that she had moved into the landscape of his childhood while he had moved far beyond it into a country unknown to her. For a time they had occupied a box canyon, protected by walls of stone and the smell of wild grasses in the dry air. Like William de Longespee, Gus would soon be bones, and then dust. But that good knight had come back from France where he had gone in service to his king and had been buried in the church of his own parish. And Gus, in a place far from his home. When she remembered the shape of his body upon hers, pressed into her flesh, it was though she carried the effigy of him, privately, unseen by any but her.
SEVENTEEN
October 1915
“Have you thought about what you might do?” Ann asked in response to Flora’s comment that her allowance had been severely reduced. A letter had come from England, her parents complaining of frozen assets, certain funds unavailable, her trust fund from her grandfather included. What was not said loomed large between the lines.
“I have. As you know, I tried the hospital, which seemed the most likely place for a gentlewoman trained in needlework and little else—I was willing to
clean, work in the laundry, make dressings—but am deemed a fallen woman, it would appear.”
Flora laughed as she remembered the nun’s grim face, tight lips explaining that an unmarried mother might not be the best choice to mop floors for those suffering illness or convalescing after childbirth themselves.
“I was walking Grace around the block this morning and stopped to talk to nice Mr. Stewart at the monumental works. I told him I didn’t expect to find the mayor working stone with a chisel! But he said he likes to keep his hand in at the business. I admired the piece of pink granite he was cutting and then he asked out of the blue if I painted. Not really, I said, although I have developed patterns for needlepoint and have had some training in design, however sporadic. I sketch, I told him, and have tried my hand at colour washes over India ink. It turns out an acquaintance of his is very short-staffed and needs someone to paint fireplace tiles. I know just what he means. You have plain tiles round your fireplace, Ann, but you must have seen the beautiful ones designed by, oh, William Morris for one. Another William—de Morgan—, Charles Vosey, and another Charles, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Flowers, emblems, even frescoes. Do you know what I mean?”
“Indeed. The house up the road, the big one with the turrets, has a beautiful fireplace in the main sitting room with iris and daffodils on its tilework. Where is this place, Flora?”
“Quite some distance, I’m afraid. Out Douglas Street, but on the streetcar line so it would not be too difficult to get there, though certainly something of a journey. I am to see the man tomorrow, if you are able to watch Grace for me.”
The Age of Water Lilies Page 13