The Age of Water Lilies

by Theresa Kishkan

  Ann smiled. “A pleasure. You must take some time to make some sketches of possible designs. He will be impressed that you’ve come prepared. I will happily write you a character reference, you know that, and I expect Dr. Alexander would as well. Now, I’ve just received some new sheet music. I’ve always wanted to sing Gluck. Why don’t you have a cup of tea while I see what I can do with this aria?”

  Flora sipped her tea and listened to Ann as she began to find her way into the music. She played a note, found it in her voice, tried a little phrase, almost tentative in her articulation. It was Italian she sang: “‘Che faro senza Euridice?’” She stopped and pronounced Euridice three or four times to correct the stresses. Then, “‘Dove andro senza il mio ben . . . Oh, Dio! Rispondi!’” It was a glorious piece, thought Flora, and suited Ann’s voice beautifully.

  “Tell me what you’re singing, Ann,” asked Flora when the latter paused, pushing back a loose strand of hair from her forehead.

  “Well, the opera Orfeo is the story of Orpheus, you know, and his bride Euridice. See, I keep using the pronunciation I remember from school, but it’s different in Italian. I need to make a note on my score. There. She’s bitten by a snake, dies, and goes to the underworld. He follows her and is able to convince Hades and Persephone that he should have his wife back. He does this by singing so beautifully that they can’t resist. But the arrangement he makes is that she follow him back to life but he must not look back to see if she follows. She interprets his reluctance to look at her as an indication that his love for her has died. But eventually she does follow and he does look back.”

  “Oh, there are echoes of the Bible, Ann, and Lot’s wife turning to a pillar of salt!”

  “I would think this story predates the Bible by some many centuries as it comes to us from Greek mythology. Very old indeed. In the Greek version, she is lost to him forever. But in Gluck’s opera—I have the synopsis here!—it appears that the character of Love allows for a happy ending.”

  Flora was quiet. She kept a tiny flame of hope alive inside her own heart—that Gus’s death might have been a mistake, that he was even now wandering the fields of France, perhaps with loss of memory, and that he would be found and returned to her. That the body already found and buried, with her love’s own belongings in the tattered pockets, was someone else, some other woman’s beloved, or no one’s. This was beyond what was reasonable, she knew, but still it was there, the spark.

  And then: “What do the words mean, Ann?”

  Ann looked at the sheets and thought for minute or two. “I’m not truly fluent at Italian, you know, and I can’t begin to make a word-for-word translation because accommodations would be needed for meter and rhyme. But something like this: ‘Live without my dear Euridice? Live without my Euridice? How can I? Sorrowing, where can I go?’ And then some repetition of that, for the sake of the aria. Then he implores Heaven to tell him, as Euridice’s true love, where on the earth he can go without her. He will have to wander the earth without her. Oh, my dear Flora, I didn’t mean to make you weep. Please. I’m so sorry.”

  Flora wiped at her eyes with her handkerchief and smiled at Ann. “You will think I am crying because of Gus and of course that’s part of it. But I was remembering a sweet Chinese couple who worked in the orchards at Walhachin. The young bride, a delicate flower called May Lee, was bitten by a rattlesnake. She was taken to Kamloops to the hospital, but no one thought to include her husband, Song, in the vehicle. He watched her leave with the saddest face and then after she died—the drunken doctor in the community gave her a serum that was useless against rattlesnake venom. Mary, my Indian helper, who actually knew something about snakebite, was pushed aside with her potion of maple tea—well, after she died, he lived alone in a shack made of packing cases. Did I mention she was expecting a child? I remember touching her small abdomen and feeling the faint flutter of the baby before they took her away. Song would sit outside his shack at night and play a bamboo flute. It was the loneliest music I’ve ever heard.”

  There was the sound of Grace waking and Flora went to her, hearing Ann singing as she changed her child’s nappy and tickled the soft plump belly. She remembered May in front of the shack, chickens around her feet and that brief swelling under her cotton jacket, her baskets of vegetables so beautiful in the fierce sun. Somewhere she had a photograph and would look for it.

  • • •

  It was a beautiful fall morning when Flora set out for Douglas Street and the manufacturer of fireplace tiles. The chestnut trees were losing their leaves, their conkers strewn along the road. She found the place easily, a brick and tile manufacturing works, after a streetcar ride of almost an hour and presented her letter of introduction from Alex Stewart. James McGregor read it quickly, gave her sketches an appraising look, and took her to a workroom where the materials for tile painting were collected on two long tables. A system of kilns was located in a yard at the back of the building. Stacks of bricks waited on pallets for removal to work sites; smoke rose from one of the big-bellied kilns to indicate firing in process.

  “Let me show you some samples, Miss Oakden. Here are some that are created by a method we call tube-lining.”

  He handed her a tile, a lovely full rose in deep pink on a green ground, to examine. “You see the line of colour here? It’s applied with a special tool, like those women use to decorate cakes and such, I’m told.”

  Flora peered closely at the tile, holding it to the light. “Now, here,” he continued, “feel the edge of this with your thumb, you’ll notice that it’s raised? Well, glaze is pooled into the surface areas behind the dams formed by those lines. Very labour- intensive and expensive, but some architects insist upon them. Sam Maclure is very happy with our tiles and plans some rooms around them. We can do them a little more reasonably than the alternative, which is to order them from England. And now of course shipping will be restricted for some time due to the war.”

  Taking up another tile, just as beautiful, James McGregor asked her whether she could see a difference. And she could, immediately.

  “The surface is less textured,” she told him. “I can see that it’s more like a painting, with a very highly glazed surface. None of the ridges that I can feel with the others under the glaze. I’m guessing that these require less intensive work?”

  He looked at her approvingly. “You’ve a good eye, Miss Oakden.” He looked at her sketches again, noting the details and the way the shapes filled the fields. He looked up. “I don’t mind telling you that I am more comfortable with men in my workshop, but the war has taken many of my best glazers and artisans. We have never had a woman. This place would normally be a hive of activity. Shall we give this a try, you working here? I have some orders for specific designs, but in time I will welcome suggestions from you too. I can tell that you have some sense of filling a space. Have you painted much?”

  “No,” she answered, “not very much. But I’ve done a lot of needlework and could never find patterns that I liked so I began to design my own. I’ve sketched of course and studied colour theory on my own. For a time I had ceramics lessons from an artist in our village in England. I know a little about glazes and kilns, though I have to admit not a great deal. I would very much like to try this.”

  Terms were settled: Flora would begin the next week. As she walked home to Memorial Crescent after being let off the streetcar on Fairfield Road, she felt a kind of optimism she hadn’t experienced for months. Gone was the terror that would wake her in the nights sometimes, a child first active within her and then sleeping in the bassinette beside her, that the world would turn its head from her in disgust. Some did, to be sure. She was accustomed to a certain kind of sniff when she entered a shop, a sweep of a skirt as a matron removed herself as quickly as possible from Flora’s proximity. As though what I have is contagious, thought Flora. And what do I have but love, and now grief? And a lovely daughter to remind me of both. And surely grief has spread among the families of those who have los
t their lives in the war like a terrible plague. You would think people might be more forgiving, having lost so much themselves.

  It was true that Grace was lovely. At six months she was plump and healthy, eager to smile and be tickled. It was a pleasure for Flora to take the child into her arms and bury her face in the soft neck smelling of talc. It was a lot of work to have a child. There were nappies to launder and feedings to prepare, long nights when a new tooth emerging caused Grace to cry fretfully in her cot so that Flora would take her up and walk her within the room or out in the garden if the weather permitted so that Ann’s rest would not be disturbed. She wondered what she would do without Ann’s help, though, for the other woman seemed as infatuated with Grace as was Flora. She would take the baby out for long walks in the pram to give Flora a break and was constantly sewing a little bonnet or pinafore or knitting a jumper. Some mornings, Flora would wake and realize that Ann had come in quietly to remove Grace so that Flora could have a longer sleep. Lying in her bed, she would hear Ann singing to the child in the kitchen, her beautiful voice producing children’s rhymes and lullabies to Grace’s delighted chuckle.

  Grace had something of Gus in her, apart from blood. It was his eyes, their blue distances, the way they held a face in them and made that person feel the only beloved on earth. Both the child’s grandfather and Flora noted them.

  • • •

  Ann was willing to provide child care so that Flora could take up employment at James McGregor’s workshop. She insisted it would give her pleasure. The days would be long ones, Flora needing to leave at 7 am in order to make streetcar connections to allow her to arrive at the workplace on time. Ann would practise her singing during Grace’s naps. The extra income from Flora’s job would pay for a girl to help with the heavy cleaning. But Flora asked, and was granted, a work schedule that would give her Mondays free so she could continue do the household laundry with Ann. She had grown to like the act of hanging out the sheets in the garden. In all the years of her girlhood, it had not occurred to her to wonder at the process by which the clean linen was brought to her bedroom and fitted onto her bed. Or how her petticoats were carefully washed and starched, or the tiny pin tucking on her bodices and shirtwaists pressed. The first one she ironed in Ann’s kitchen she had to dampen and press at least four times before she got it right.

  Flora found the work at the pottery physically demanding but so interesting that she would use her time on the streetcar home to sketch possible designs for tiles. At first she had been asked to apply colour to tiles already designed—a beautiful set of linked roses, in deep pinks and reds, with leaves glazed in dark green. These were moulded tiles, the glazes applied with brushes. The standard glazes were kept in large tubs with numbers to indicate their formula. She asked to watch the preparation of the glazes, a long process that was fascinating in itself. Feldspar, flint, soda, potash, lime, oxide of lead—these were fired to white heat, then the liquid glass was suddenly chilled in water. It would harden into pieces that were ground in rubber-lined cylinders, with water, to make a thick liquid called “slop.” The various colours were obtained by adding staining materials to the slop, the metallic oxides used—copper, iron, manganese, cobalt, uranium—giving particularly deep and beautiful hues. She was told that the purpose of the glazes was not just aesthetic, although the beauty of a glazed tile could not be denied, but served to seal the pores of the biscuit so that it was impervious to dirt and could easily be cleaned. The hygienic factor was important. Different types of clay required different glazes. Some would crackle at too high a heat while others would form bubbles. Some formed crystals, but these were considered desirable for certain pieces.

  Flora asked lots of questions. The chemistry interested her, the way two discrete elements combined to create a third unique and unexpected effect. How heat brought out beauty. The elderly man, a Hungarian called Nagy, who did most of the mixing, taciturn for the most part as he moved around his building, scooping powders and consulting his notebooks with formulas worked out like something from an alchemist’s workshop, was pleased by her questions.

  There were meetings with James McGregor and architects from around the city to discuss particular tiles for particular applications—the usual fireplace surrounds, bathrooms, foyers. After a few months of employment, Flora was encouraged to attend these meetings; she had demonstrated unusual skill in both the glazing of the tiles and their design. After a walk through the oak groves of Beacon Hill, she tried her hand at replicating the blue camas she had seen there, huge drifts of it, and those tiles proved very attractive, so much so that McGregor asked if she would try to design a range of tiles using wildflowers as a motif. When spring arrived, he assigned a man to drive her to places where he thought she might see the flowers he had in mind—the vivid orange Columbia lilies, the delicate nodding fawn lilies, the tall wands of magenta fireweed. She worked hard at these designs, often sitting at the table for hours at Hollyhock Cottage once Grace had been put to bed. So much depended upon the space. Increasingly she realized that long stems and leaves that could be made to flow in a slightly geometric way worked best. She spent hours studying the designs of the Scot Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who brought a very clean style to his work.

  One architect tiled an entire foyer with Flora’s camas. When she went to look at the results, she was thrilled to see that the effect was a little like coming upon a massed planting of the blue flowers—a room filled with light and the airy flowers with their slender green leaves. She remembered the glass house she had been taken to as a child, with tanks of white and blue water lilies, the wicker chairs covered in a chintz with a pattern of water lilies, and thought there was something of the same feeling in this sky-coloured room.

  EIGHTEEN

  1917

  A year passed. Flora’s parents had resumed some contact with her. George had been killed at the Battle of the Somme, and her older brother, Henry, who’d been a captain in the Royal Wiltshire Regiment, had also been killed, in Gallipoli.

  Both brothers. She hardly knew what to think. George, with whom she’d shared a home, and whose fussiness irritated her but who was kind, generous, and protective. She recalled him sitting on the veranda at Walhachin, in lamplight, drinking his small measure of whisky while moths dipped and found the light, the shadows of their wings huge on the shingles. His smell—shaving soap and wool and cotton. The sight of him coming home across the grassy plateau on his tall gelding Titan, tired but never slouching in the saddle. He was so proper, was George, but as hard-working a man as she’d ever known. She wrote to her parents, sending her memories of George as a consolation, as if anything could be.

  She knew that her father in particular would be devastated by the loss of Henry even more than George. Watermeadows had been meant for Henry, the oldest son. He had been her father’s joy, an ardent walker who was interested in prehistoric sites and who made maps and kept a life list of birds. A letter from her mother told Flora that her father had given up on his water lilies and that the gardens were becoming overgrown and neglected because it was simply too difficult to find labourers.

  So many didn’t return, Flora, her mother wrote, and the ones that did don’t want to do this kind of work any longer, it seems. We have had a terrible time finding staff for the household. The young women all left to work in factories and the like once there was a call for workers to replace the men who’d joined up. Now the village girls all go off to be typewriters or nurses. I have no maid of my own any longer and have had to cut my hair because I simply could not find someone to pin it up for me. In any case, we can no longer afford to pay anyone what they require. We have Mrs. Sloan still of course, but she can’t do everything—she has nowhere to go, no one to go to, her son was killed at Gallipoli too, I don’t know if you’d heard? This is why she stays with us, though she lives in our house now, the dower cottage roof beyond repair. A kind of loyalty I suppose. And old Tom Higgins is too crippled with arthritis to maintain even the kitchen garden.
I think he stays because of the cottage. Where else would he live? We’ve had to close the entire western wing of the house. I don’t expect we will ever entertain the way we once did in any case so have no need for all those bedrooms. I have been terribly indisposed by the headaches all autumn and am of no use to anyone.

  They did not ask about Grace. It hurt Flora to write her own letters back, with news of her daughter and her work at the pottery, and to have no response to this information at all. But she kept up the frail contact to maintain a connection with what increasingly seemed to be a dream, a world where she had been part of a large household, a cherished girl, with brothers who cared for her and once brought her rocking horse home across the fields. She grieved for that girl as much as she grieved her brothers’ deaths.

  Her father wrote sad letters in which he did not mention his water lilies. He had taken to rowing on the Kennet Avon Canal near home and mentioned swans and their fierce faces. He said his investments had failed. He talked of selling some of the meadows, the ones farthest from the river, to someone who wanted to grow oats. (“He has assured us he will fence the area carefully, and will not tolerate the Hunt using our hedges as jumps into his fields. He thought this might placate me and certainly I pretended it did—we need the money, I hate to say . . .”) His once careful handwriting had become untidy, the pages occasionally blotched with ink, as though a tear had fallen into a sentence and dissolved the words.

  I’ve sold my hunters. I have no heart for riding to hounds, chasing down foxes. We gave your mare away, he wrote, to a little girl in Winsley. Although Seraphim is somewhat long in the tooth, the girl was delighted. I’ve seen her riding on the Bath road and was reminded of you, Flora. How far away you seem. How far away you are. I walk the property these days with the vision of my sons in my mind’s eye, before all this dreadful business with the Germans began. To think that there will not be an Oakden to continue on at Watermeadows causes me anguish. Perhaps one day you will return. Someone will have to care for your mother. I took her to Marienbad for two months just before the war broke out and sat at a table drinking a very nasty mineral water while she went through treatments, but we returned home in the same condition as when we set out for the Continent. I feel incapable of being her husband. What a thing to tell my daughter. And yet there is no one else.