Returning to the house, Flora tried to calm herself, tried to determine what she needed to do next. She closed Ann’s bedroom door so that when her child awoke, she would think that Ann was sleeping. Then she made porridge for Grace’s breakfast. She telephoned Robert Alexander for advice.
“I will make some calls, Flora, and then if what we both believe has happened has truly come to pass, I think we will simply have to wait.”
Flora walked the beach for hours each day, watching the waves as though they might bring Ann to shore like a rich gift, a Venus in a wet camel-hair coat. Gulls cried out and the wind tossed them through the sky while skeins of geese passed overhead on their long journey south. And then, after four days, Ann’s body washed to shore in secluded Gonzales Bay, just south of Ross Bay, where it was found by a man collecting firewood from the beach. Her face had been partially eaten by seals, but she was still wearing her winter coat. In the generous pockets, confined with sturdy hat pins, were two large stones—the gypsum containing the ammonite and the chunk of smooth limestone with the little bones and scales.
“She would have wanted to sink,” Robert told Flora. “She was so emaciated that her body would have remained buoyant, and I don’t think she would have had the strength to swim out very far. She’d thought about this, it is clear. Were the stones meaningful to her?”
“She and her late husband collected them on their honeymoon at Blue Anchor, in Somerset. They were two of a quartet that she kept on the hearth. You will have seen them a hundred times, Robert.”
Saying that, Flora imagined Ann standing by the fireplace and choosing the stones. In her mind’s eye, she saw Ann holding each stone in her hand to determine its weight, selecting two, and then carrying them to the shore wrapped in her paisley scarf, cradled in her arms like a child. What would it have felt like to tuck them into her coat pockets and then walk purposefully into the tide? The Ann Flora was imagining was the fearless woman who had staged a play full of women lamenting the losses of war to a city perhaps not ready to be told such a tale. Flora imagined her smiling the ghost of her radiant smile as the water lapped at the hem of her coat, then her waist, and then pushing herself forward into the waves as the stones did the work of taking her down. A few gulls watched impassively from the breakwater.
“You are very quiet, Flora.”
She looked up, breaking her eerie reverie. “I cannot be angry that she ended her life this way, but I am worried that we might not be allowed to bury her in the usual way.”
“Because she took her own life, do you mean?” He took note of Flora’s nod of assent and thought for a moment. “I don’t think Ann was guilty of despair, which of course the Church considers a sin against God. She was certainly not mad. But she was clearly at the end of her life and this only hastened her death by days, or a week or two at the most. I think she simply tired of the pain and the sheer difficulty of staying alive and wanted an end on her own terms. I don’t believe this will present difficulty in arranging a burial, Flora. In the old days, yes, but not now. I may well be asked to sign something testifying to her mental state.”
“Robert, how did she have the strength to walk to the shore with the weight of those two stones? She could barely move from her bed to the chair by the window. I don’t understand it.”
“People often find reservoirs of strength they never knew they had, Flora. I have seen dying people possessed of extraordinary strength, as though everything depended upon this last moment of courage. And courage it surely was that helped Ann to rise from her bed, her deathbed, really, to make that last journey towards peace.”
“How will I tell Grace?”
But that did not prove to be difficult. When Flora sat with Grace and gently began to tell her that Ann had died, the child stroked her mother’s hands and said, “Don’t cry, Mummy. Ann has gone home. I heard her leave and she was singing.”
“Do you mean the other morning, Grace?”
“She has been leaving since we came home from Thomas’s ranch. I could hear her singing every day. She sang the whole story.”
• • •
Ann had bought a plot in Ross Bay Cemetery almost as soon as she’d known her cancer was not curable. It was near the sea, with little glimpses of water between the hedges, and away from the dense shade of the yews and pines. Open air, grass carpeted with English daisies for at least nine months of the year: Flora felt it was as perfect a resting place for her friend as might be found anywhere. She imagined Ann walking slowly around the various available plots of earth, wondering, and wished she’d been there to help, to take Ann’s arm, point out gulls, a clump of trilliums in the lea of the hedge.
And had she been prescient, on stage at the end of the performance, when she had spontaneously sung Dido’s lament, “When I am laid in earth,” with its haunting final refrain: “Remember me, Remember me; but ah! Forget my fate . . . ?”
The burial ceremony was simple, as had been directed by Ann in her last weeks. Her friends gathered by the grave after the church service (though one or two were censorious enough to absent themselves) and heard the familiar “ashes to ashes, dust to dust;” they sang the Twenty-third Psalm together before returning to Hollyhock Cottage for sherry and a slice of Ann’s good fruitcake. “She was always prepared for visitors,” commented Flora, cutting cake that had been baked while Flora and Grace were in the Upper Hat Creek Valley, when Ann must have only just learned of her illness. Baked and wrapped in brandy-soaked cloth to wait for this very day. Flora poured out little thimbles of sweet golden sherry from the glass decanter that had belonged to Ann’s mother. After the guests left, Flora and Robert shared a dram of the fine malt whisky that Ann had loved, and sent her soul on its way to reunion with her beloved Phillip. The two remaining stones from Blue Anchor looked lonely on the hearth, but Flora had insisted that the other two remain with Ann in death; her choice of them as final companions determined this decision. When Ann’s body had been prepared for her burial, Flora had wrapped the stones in the paisley scarf and placed them at her feet.
Soon afterwards, Flora spent an afternoon with Mr. Stewart at the monumental works. “Me again, I’m afraid, Mr. Stewart, looking again for a perfect piece of stone.”
“I am sorry for your loss, Miss Oakden. But I believe Mrs. Ogilvie would love this red granite from Aberdeen.”
“I have five lines of verse and of course the other details. Perhaps you could read the verse and recommend a style of lettering.”
He read the text carefully, the lines from the final aria of Bach’s Cantata 199:
I lay myself on these wounds
As though upon a true rock;
They shall be my resting place.
Upon them will I soar in faith
And therefore contented and happily sing.
“Strong and beautiful words, Miss Oakden. I think nothing would suit them better than a Roman face. Let me show this one, similar to that used on the Trajan column. See how handsome it is! The serifs are bold and give the face a timeless quality.”
After the stone was completed and placed, Flora lifted clumps of bluebells from Ann’s garden and planted them around the granite, along with a few snowdrops, already showing their green.
Leaving Pennies that cold December day on the train, I could never have dreamed what lay in wait for me in Victoria, a city I had never even seen, thought Flora. How much of it would have been possible without Ann? And what happens now with the rest of my life?
Without Ann, the world felt less sheltered, less loving. Flora had to learn her own company, the absence of Ann’s capable hands on laundry day, the shape of a room with only one cup on its table, one coat on its rack. On a cashmere blanket Ann had kept on the settee, Flora could smell her lavender water for a time and then it was gone.
There were mornings when Flora lay in her bed, remembering the view from her bedroom at Walhachin. She recalled hills, covered with grasses that smelled so sweet after rain—wild rye, bunchgrass, needlegrass, ricegra
ss. Each had its own bract, awn, panicle which caught the small rain or scattered pollen, a fine gold powder on the arms and legs. This was what it was like to know a place, a person, in all its intimacy, and then to lose its specificity. And she recalled the rasp of grasshoppers as they jumped from stem to stem, the vault of blue sky; she remembered the texture of the dust, caught in wind and dry with seeds, particles of sand. She had not come with the expectation of love and yet she had found someone who held her breasts in his hands and entered her body so completely that it made her wish that the world would stop with the two of them in its own private embrace. Ann did not replace that love but she had helped to occupy its absence. A small precious part of the absence. Flora had not expected to love the miles of grassland, the flinty smell of the river, and yet she could bring these to mind, across the miles and years, with no effort at all as she lay under her linen sheet, listening for Grace.
THIRTY-TWO
1962
Miss Oakden invited Tessa to come for a tea party, just the two of them. She had set the table with china, white napkins with embroidered letters (two As and an F), there was fruitcake (which Tessa didn’t really like but ate anyway) and little sandwiches with the crusts removed. There was lots of tea poured from a silver pot.
“I’ll miss you, my dear. I hope you’ll write to me occasionally. I have a little gift for you.”
She handed Tessa a small parcel wrapped in soft blue tissue. When the girl opened it, she discovered a cushion cover depicting a water lily leaf, immediately recognizable, even the sheen of a few water droplets, and on it was perched a little frog, its green colour slightly darker than the leaf. And there was an inscription too, on the other side, stitched in the most beautiful small letters: For my young friend, Tessa, with much affection, Flora Oakden, Hollyhock Cottage, 1962.
“I never knew your name was Flora,” Tessa said as she gave the woman a hug. She ran her fingers over the stitching, the satiny feel of the leaf and frog, the rougher texture of the fabric itself. It was the first grown-up present she’d ever received.
“Sometimes I feel like Flora is someone else, a young woman I knew long ago, and just where she has gone, I’m not certain. She is the one who came to this house about this time of year nearly fifty years ago and who never really left, though her intention was temporary shelter. The house belonged to someone who became my dearest friend. My daughter was born here. Our lives were contained here. Mine still is, I suppose, though increasingly I yearn for my childhood home or for the bungalow at Walhachin.”
“Our house will be empty in a few days. I’m scared of forgetting it. I’ve never lived anywhere else. I finished my map and I’m taking it with me. I just hope I’ve put everything important on it.”
The old woman smiled. “What a sensible idea, your map. And you must trust your heart to remember as well. I don’t think we ever forget the things that are really important to us. I used to occasionally buy linen for my needlework, which had patterns faintly printed on in a blue ink. It came with pre-cut yarns. Kits, I suppose they were. If I didn’t manage to work with that fabric right away, the pattern faded a little too much for my eyes to see it so I’d draw my own design and then stitch in my own silks and wools. But then I’d see the older pattern emerging. It was sad in a way, as though the original ink wanted to be remembered. But oh, what am I saying? Such silly observations from an old woman, Tessa.”
“You told me once you’d show me some of your photographs, Miss Oakden. Of that home in the desert, those horses.” Tessa was remembering the table with its arrangement of photographs, like Patience, or Solitaire, on the day she’d first seen the tree frogs in the garden.
“Yes, I’d like to show you some of that. Perhaps you could take the cups and plates to the kitchen, my dear, while I hunt out the box.”
She went away and returned after a short time with a tin box, carefully setting it on the dining-room table, now cleared of its party. She opened the box and stood silent for a moment, her fingers sorting among the bound bundles of letters, some with blue ribbon, some with faded pink, and loose photographs, some newspaper clippings.
“This was our home in Walhachin,” she said softly. “There was the loveliest screened porch, or balcony as I thought of it, where I slept on hot summer evenings. You could hear coyotes yipping sometimes, and once I heard wolves. Here is the little garden my brother made. See his pool? That was where my white water lily grew. And these were rose bushes he brought from England. Gloire de Dijon was this one. And this was an ancient moss. I remember a brilliant pink rambler too, though I can’t see it in this photograph.”
It looked sparse, not like the lush garden behind Hollyhock Cottage. But then there was a photograph of an orchard, the trees in neat rows, laden with blossom.
“These were our trees, our Rome Beauties and Wealthys and some Jonathans as well. They were just starting to produce well when the men went away to war. And we had potatoes and onions too. Some farmers grew tobacco. We didn’t bother. This was Miss Flowerdew’s hotel where we had parties and teas. And look, here is the Marquis of Anglesey’s swimming pool. I swam there occasionally, but mostly I paddled in the river myself. Oh, it was marvellous! Clean and cold, and in late summer you’d see these muscular fish, steelhead they called them, moving past on their way to the spawning beds up the Deadman River Valley. And later in the fall, the red sockeye salmon. Such a long way they travelled, from the ocean and the Fraser River, into the Thompson River and eventually to Shuswap Lake. Sometimes I felt a little like them, having travelled so far myself.”
“My dad took us to see the salmon at Goldstream Park. It was sad, but then we went back a few months later and you could see some of the tiny ones there, the new little salmon—they were still attached to their egg sacs—and so it was as though they hadn’t really died at all. And we saw a bear quite far down-stream, and my dad said how good it was for them to have fish to eat before they went to hibernate for winter.”
“He’s wise, your father. That’s a very good way to look at it. And here, Tessa—you asked about the horses. Here is my brother’s mare, Vespa. I rode her quite often. My brother took this photograph of me heading out to make some sketches. Can you imagine trying to ride in such a cumbersome outfit? I wonder what ever happened to that hat? And here’s another one of the two horses I’ve already shown you, Agate and Flight.”
Tessa drank it in. The old woman who was Miss Oakden sharing the life of a girl called Flora, a girl who swam in a river and rode horses over hills that went on forever in the photographs, undulating and fading until they disappeared off the edge of the paper. Such interesting details—a valley named for dead men, the apples, swimming with fish!
“This is a young Chinese woman who died of a rattlesnake bite. I took her photograph one day when I went to buy vegetables from her, not long before the tragedy. It was so sad. Her husband watched her leave in a car with a doctor who didn’t know what he was doing and didn’t save her.” She hummed a little of the aria Ann sang all those years ago as she looked at the photograph. “‘Che faro senza Euridice? How could I live without my Euridice?’” And yet Song had lived without May, she had lived without Gus, and the world kept turning on its axis as though nothing had ever happened.
Then Miss Oakden was handing her a tiny pair of booties, made of rabbit fur, the soles worn almost transparent. Tessa cradled them in her palms, imagining the feel of them on her own feet.
“These were given me by an Indian woman in Lytton. I bought this basket from her” —and there was the basket, faded but durable—” and found them tucked into it later on the train. I used this larger basket for years for my mending. And my Grace wore these little shoes as a baby. I loved how they looked, poking out from her pretty smocked nightdresses. She took her first steps in these.”
“My old friend Jane McIntyre sent me this,” the woman said, indicating a little package of material dated 1928. “She’d been to the opening of a hotel in Kamloops, Tessa, and wanted to share
the experience with me. There’d been a banquet and then dancing on the roof, in a garden created there. Look at these photographs in the paper! Doesn’t it look like a wonderful affair?”
The paper was dry and crisp, the photographs grainy and hazy, but when she got used to the blurriness of the images, Tessa could make out the dancers and the band. And yes, the roof garden looked splendid with its railings and wicker furniture, and the Japanese lanterns hung from the eaves like balloons. It was so airy and dreamy, thought Tessa, like something happening so long ago, in a library book or on television.
“Jane died not long after that, still quite a young woman. She died having a child and the child didn’t survive either, though her first baby, the first to survive, that is, Thomas, was robust and bonny when I last saw him in the summer of 1921. Here, somewhere, yes, here, I have a photograph of Jane and her little family. She sent this to me once we’d found each other again after a few years of silence.”
“Did they visit you here?”
“Yes, they did, Tessa. They came down from their ranch in the Upper Hat Creek Valley to see a play I helped to organize, all the way to Victoria to see it. They sent me roses to my dressing room in the Royal Theatre. Here is one that I dried.”
In a thin envelope, a little cluster of red petals, fragile as paper. A drawing of a man’s face, not finished. A theatre program, some photographs of women in costumes, very stern-faced, on a stage.
“Was that valley near where you lived on the desert?”
“Well, not too far away. You got to it by a beautiful road that ran along the Oregon Jack Creek. It climbed quite high and couldn’t be used in winter. Oh, the wildflowers were so lush. It was like the Garden of Eden, that road and the valley it led to . . . I spent a few days there with Jane before I ever moved to Victoria. We sat under the trees and sewed. How unexciting that sounds, I expect, but it is one of my happiest memories. And I took Grace there too, the summer after our play. She loved it. She learned to ride a pony called Chatters. Here, here is a photograph of her and Thomas on their ponies helping Allan with the cattle.”
The Age of Water Lilies Page 26