The Age of Water Lilies

by Theresa Kishkan

  “Oh, whatever is it? Have you had bad news of some sort? Did someone shun you on the street? You know how I feel about that—you must simply smile and lift your chin a little higher. But what, what?” She held Flora by the elbows and looked seriously into her eyes.

  Flora gently removed Ann’s hands. She wrung her own hands in consternation. “It’s just . . . ah, I realized on the way home that what I have done is set into tile my childhood, of all things. Its passing. My loss of it. My father’s water lilies. My old life. I have buried myself in the making of this work and now it’s over and my father has given up on his love for his flowers. He has given up on any hope he had for the future. And my future . . . well, I haven’t given up on it, but it won’t be what I so dreamed of all those months ago, years now, when I lay with Gus in our little box canyon and thought he would come home to me. To us, although I didn’t know then that there would be Grace. All these lilies floating in their pools of water . . . I’ve put them down the only way I could, and now it’s over. Oh, dear, am I making any sense at all?”

  She wept as she took off her coat and hung it on its hook and put her pocketbook down on the table in the hall. Then she went into the sitting room and stood by the window, looking out at the trees of the cemetery, their boughs dark in the falling light.

  “I don’t think I will ever see Watermeadows again. Nor my parents. My brothers are dead. My love is dead. And there are only momentary glimpses of Gus in Grace’s face. There’s nowhere to go to mourn him.”

  “Well, there is your heart, of course. You have the notebooks, the letters. I think that with time you will realize that we make our memorials out of such things. They keep the person intact in ways that I doubt any stone cross or obelisk could.”

  “I know that, Ann, I do. But so many have died over the past few years. Too many. I am resigned, I suppose, to never being able to visit the graves of my brothers. But I feel so lonely sometimes, as though there will never be anyone who knew me as a child or a young girl to tell me little stories of that time. I feel so far from my roots and so far from being the woman who was loved by Gus and who expected to have a life with him. And then I feel ungrateful for thinking this because you have been so kind to me, and to Grace.”

  Ann ran her fingers along the keyboard, finding a consoling chord. “But I do understand what you’re saying, I think. And it is still early days. It would be unusual for you to have put all this behind you, though I think you are doing admirably. The tile work, your new-found success as a designer—the architects will beat a path to your door now, mark my words—the obvious health and happiness of Grace . . .”

  Flora refused to take solace. In a very small voice, she said, “I think I would be grateful for even a stone in one of the leafy places across the road. Maybe one of the little areas where I always imagine I can hear water. A place to sit and breathe in the sense of who it is I am mourning. A place to contain his memory in a solid and formal way. A stone with his name on it to say finally that he is dead.”

  “Then why not have one made? I think Robert Alexander might well be grateful too for such a thing. Mrs. Alexander too, if she would only put her pride aside.”

  Flora sniffed and wiped her eyes with a handkerchief she took from the pocket of her skirt. “Do you think so, Ann?”

  “I do.”

  “All this unrestrained emotion: you must wonder at me sometimes. I watch the processions of people through the cemetery with their wreathes, their sorrow, watch them stand before a grave and focus the whole of their love and anguish on that small plot of earth with its precious content, and I wish for such a place. To think of him unburied, uncommemorated, oh, it’s too much sometimes. But what a good idea. Thank you, Ann. And now will you finish that aria?”

  “Well, you’ll have to hear the whole thing because I can’t just pick up where I left off. I love this piece.”

  “I’d love to hear it from the beginning. Is there a reason why you are singing in the afternoon, and why this cantata in particular?”

  Ann smiled. “Oh, I had a little time and I thought I’d rather sing than simply drink tea by the window and gaze dreamily out. And why this piece? There needs never be a reason to sing Bach! But this cantata was composed for Candlemas, which is today of course, February 2, the time of year when wolves and bears are waking from their dens. And the Mother of Jesus goes to be purified in the midst of it all.”

  With that, she laughed at her uncharacteristic show of pedantry, took up her music, cleared her throat, took a deep breath, expanding her rib cage to hold the air necessary for the long controlled passages, to give platform for the rich high notes; she sang the beautiful phrases again, sung first in the eighteenth century to welcome light back to earth, the sacred cry of a woman cleansed after giving birth to a saviour, a blessing of ground and fields, of candles to serve as talisman against the passing of the long winter.

  • • •

  When Flora approached Robert Alexander with the possibility of a permanent memorial to Gus, he insisted on assuming the cost if she, Flora, would decide on what the stone would say.

  “He knew this cemetery, you know. Walked in it any number of times as a boy. You must talk to your Mr. Stewart and order stone that you think most suitable. Choose the lettering, fine and strong as he was. And some words to fix him forever in time. I might be inclined to something from Homer, those lines at the conclusion of the Iliad—‘Such was their burial of Hector, breaker of horses. But I leave it to you.’”

  “Those are very suitable words indeed, Robert. Truly beautiful. But if you really don’t mind, I have something else, a few lines, also poetry, which I think Gus would have wanted too.”

  And then there was never any question in her mind what those words should be. There would be his name. His dates. She kept in her box of special tokens a piece of paper, written in his hand in a tiny box canyon near the Deadman River, while hawks made lazy circles in a still sky, a code they would use so she would know he had gone to the battlefields of France. Sed nos inmensum spatiis confecium aequor / et iam tempus equum fumantia solvere colla. That would be his inscription.

  Flora’s father died in the fall of 1919. It seemed that he simply lost his will to live—the letters from her mother revealed that the doctors believed he had given up. He sits in the wheeled chair with a blanket over his legs and looks out towards the river. Mrs. Sloan makes all manner of milk puddings and invalid foods but nothing tempts him, her mother wrote in a letter that arrived just days before the envelope with the black border. He was to be buried in the Winsley churchyard. Mrs. Oakden would sell Watermeadows as soon as she could in order to move into a flat in London to be closer to her sister.

  Is there anything you would like? her mother wrote. Papers, books, any of the photographs?

  Why don’t you decide on a few personal papers and photographs, Flora wrote back. I’d like Grace to know something about my side of her family. Her grandfather Alexander tells her all about her Scottish ancestors and her father. She is enchanted to believe that a father she never knew, except in photographs, was once a boy in this very neighbourhood. And Flora knew that no mention would ever be made of Grace, or the lost father. No curiosity shown towards a Scottish grandfather or the life that Flora now lived.

  She wept for her father, but it was a mild grief, her sorrow at the real loss of her family and home having been wrung from her during the creation and completion of her panel of tiles. The man who had written to her such dispirited letters about selling his horses, letting the gardens go wild, having no interest in anything much any longer, was not the father she remembered from her girlhood, the proud though remote man who let her accompany him to breeders of water lilies or to Stourhead or the glass houses at Kew. She did not know that man in the wheeled chair looking out to the river, had no place in her memory for him.

  A box arrived some months later. Among the photographs and a volume of her grandfather’s sermons, a series of watercolours of birds done by an aun
t, was a journal and a package of letters. Some of the letters, she could see, were in the hand of Henry, an ornate copperplate. The journal was bound in a marbled paper, quite beautifully, though it was soiled. When she opened it, Flora realized it had been with her older brother during his time in Gallipoli. There were notes on weather, birds, meals, descriptions of stomach troubles, and then a kind of code in which he seemed to talking about meetings away from the camp, the beauty of P., lines of verse about marble limbs. Then a direct cry, I am nothing without you, my dearest Peter, and if we must die, let us die in one another’s arms.

  Peter? she wondered. Peter?

  There was more, and it broke her heart to read it. Her brother had had a lover, a young man, someone he’d known for years, although it was clear there was a class separation. Family was mentioned, and how his own might feel about a relationship with this young man. Henry wondered how their special friendship might continue back in England; an entire entry mused about the future, as though it was just around the corner from the landing beach at Cape Helles. And then entries about the horrors of seeing men shot as they tried to move to the sand from the sea. Her brother had been terribly afraid, she read, afraid of so many things—blood, loud noise, the Turks coming over the dunes with their weapons, the sight of bodies turning black within a day in the fierce sun. Then joy: a brief unexpected rhapsody on the beauty of the Australian soldiers, tanned and muscular as they tried to wash themselves of dust and sweat at the end of a day. Fear again—of his encounters with Peter being discovered. And of one of them dying without the other nearby.

  When she finished reading Henry’s journal, she felt as though she’d been through a whirlwind. He had so clearly been in love with the young soldier in his company. They had sworn to be true to each other, he confessed to the pages of his journal, and there was a photograph tucked into its pages, a young man smiling, a forelock of unruly hair falling over his brow. With all my love, Peter, was written on the back. He looked familiar but for the moment Flora did not think about that.

  Had her father read the journal? Of course he must have. Her father, for whom the term manly was a high compliment. Her father’s heart was so proud that two of his sons had gone to serve their King and country, full in the bloom of English manhood. And her mother, who had never told Flora the least thing about her physical body, not the bleeding, not the expectation of breasts. And now there was this knowledge of Henry passed along to her, an uneasy legacy. Who was Peter, and had he survived the war?

  And like a small sharp arrow, a sudden memory of the housekeeper, Mrs. Sloan, and her son Peter entered Flora’s mind; the two of them lived in what had once been the dower cottage on the Watermeadows property. Mr. Sloan, who had also worked for them, had been killed by a falling tree. She looked at the photograph again. That forelock. That smile. She almost recalled—did she, or was it the anxiety of not knowing? Of wanting to put a face to a name, to give shape to the lover in her brother’s heart?—that Henry and Peter had rambled the local woods together, in search of flints and remnants of the Roman road. They’d returned to Watermeadows with their eyes shining, full of ancient stockades and tracks worn deep into the valleys from the weight of quarried rock. They’d seemed so proud and electric somehow to the young Flora, their bodies alive with the landscape they’d explored. And now she realized they had been alive with the knowledge of each other.

  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.