The Age of Water Lilies (12 page)

Going back to the house with the stream still ringing in her ears, Tessa saw Miss Oakden's porch light shining through the dusk. Hers was one of the houses backing onto the park, though not close to the route Tessa thought the stream must follow on its way to Ross Bay. She had never been in that backyard, but even in the falling light she could see through the space between the boards that there was a small pool with some potted plants around it and something growing right in the pool itself, large shiny leaves spreading over the surface of the water. They caught the light from the kitchen window, where Tessa could see Miss Oakden washing dishes, looking up occasionally from the sink to gaze out at the gathering dusk. She looked sad. As she leaned against the fence, Tessa discovered there was a loose board. By working it a little on its nail, she found it could be moved aside like a shutter to make an opening wide enough for a skinny girl like herself to enter the yard. She would ask Miss Oakden first, but this special gate would eliminate the need to walk around the block if she were to visit her friend. It could be their secret. And she wanted to see the pool the next time she visited.

PART TWO

Memorial Crescent, Fairfield

ELEVEN

1962

Tessa begged a large sheet of chart paper from her teacher, Mrs. Barrett, and found an area in the basement at home where she could spread it out, held down at each corner by a brick. She was also allowed to bring home one of the blue-covered classroom atlases. She struggled to understand some of the explanations: contours, projections (there was that Mercator guy again); but some of it was really interesting. A map could show crops, populations, zones for climate and agriculture and mining. Some of this was helpful. Tessa laboured over scale until she understood that it was a way to show how the real distances between places or objects could be presented in a relative way by using a ratio. They had learned about ratio at school, so it was a matter of thinking about things above and below a line. If she kept that in mind, it was easier to imagine the distance between her street and the Cross of Sacrifice in inches instead of in yards or miles.

Tessa tried to think of the best way to begin her map, to include as much as she could. She wanted to trace the route of the buried streams, position her favourite graves at the cemetery, some of the trees she loved best (the Atlas cedar with its forty-seven trunks, of course, and some pines—one her father said was a red Japanese pine and another, from the Himalayan Mountains). She looked both places up in her borrowed atlas and realized how far the trees were from their native soil and air. She wanted to include her street, and May Street, and Memorial Crescent where Miss Oakden lived. Also the Moss Rocks, and Moss Street too because that was the way she usually walked to school, and Fairfield Road because her classroom in the Annex looked onto it. The old turreted house on the corner of May and Memorial. She knew there would have to be a legend; she would need to work out a scheme for this before she began to draw the map.

Among the books on the shelves in the dining room she found one with old maps. She particularly liked the maps drawn by Samuel de Champlain. He included little drawings of fish and mammals, mountains, trees, sailing ships in the oceans, and even crops. This was so much more interesting than the usual maps that divided Canada into provinces with broken lines, stars for the capital cities, and elevation shown by colour with a legend explaining how each five hundred feet above sea level shaded from green through orange to pink, with three shades of blue below sea level. She decided that de Champlain was a person to learn from when it came to making maps.

Tessa made a pad of old burlap potato sacks and lay on her stomach on the cold basement floor to plan her project. Even though she felt such urgency inside herself to begin, she chewed indecisively on the end of her pencil. Finally she decided to lightly sketch in certain areas on her map, to mark out the territory. There was no point in going beyond the cemetery, past where the Cross of Sacrifice was, that far corner near where Hollywood Crescent began its meandering to Gonzales Bay. Tessa's mother sometimes walked with the children to the Gonzales beach on hot summer days, but the streets and houses between Eberts and that beach were like a foreign country. Tessa knew no one living there; the children from those streets attended another school. This map was about her own street, her route to school, the monumental works, and the graves. And underneath it all, the buried streams. So she carefully made a line around a patch of white paper, taking up about a third of the entire area. This would be the cemetery. Fairfield Road would be the top boundary. But what about compass details? She would have to borrow her brother's Cub compass and take her bearings the next time she went over on her bike. It would be a kind of orienteering, wouldn't it?

TWELVE

December 1914

The train was late. Flora stood on the platform at Pennies with her valise and trunk beside her. She tucked her scarf in a little more snugly; the December wind was cold, coming off the bench above the river and carrying sand in it. Flora's cheeks stung—from wind, and sand, and tears. She had never felt so uncertain about anything in her life.

She hadn't heard from Gus for a month. A letter had arrived from England in late October, from Salisbury. She was surprised to learn how close he was to her family home at Watermeadows. She thought about asking her parents to have him come to stay but then realized how many questions that would cause and how few could be answered. Best to wait, perhaps, and take him there herself, a ring upon her left hand.

Letter Three: We are in the shadow of the great Stonehenge
, he wrote.
But the gods who guard those stones have done nothing about the weather. It was lovely when we first arrived but has rained ever since. And I've never seen anything like the rain here. Our tents leak, there is talk of huts but nothing has come of it yet, and the horses, well, I feel for them most of all. Mud fever, dreadful problems with their feet . . . It is hard to train in mud. And Flora, you've never seen mud like this. It sucks your boots off! And yet we are told we are not disciplined enough and require serious drilling to make real soldiers of us. Ha.

She wrote back to tell him of the unborn child she carried within her body, and a reassuring letter had come back very quickly to say she should not worry, he would do what he could, and if she needed to leave the community, she should think of his family home as a place of refuge. He would write to tell them to expect a letter from her, or some sort of contact, and he trusted they would write to her. He was now at a camp called Lark Hill and he said it was utterly bereft of larks. Instead, the tents and a few huts the men lived in were surrounded by mud. There was a lot of illness, which he had, until then, avoided, though many men had already died. They had yet to cross the English Channel. The King had inspected their regiment. Training went well. The weather was terrible and the food barely edible.

But then no other word. Each day she'd go to the post office. There were letters from her parents, a catalogue or two, invoices for fertilizers and agricultural equipment, but no letter from Gus. And she had begun to receive looks from women in the townsite, pointed looks at her expanding waistline (it was no longer possible to flatten her stomach with binding under her skirts). Invitations to join the other women for whist or knitting bees—socks were particularly needed among the troops and the women prided themselves on the quality and abundance of their socks—ceased.

And then she had been cut from inclusion in any social event, shunned in the post office as though she were invisible. A comment had been made, in a mocking voice, as she walked away from a fruitless quest for a letter—“Well, if we come to grief, I am certain it will not be the fault of Mary”—and she learned how spite could be carried in a heart like a wasp in a hidden place, ready to sting when least expected. There was no one Flora could turn to with her secret, which was not a secret any longer, but which had a story, a history, and she hoped a future. Jane McIntyre might have listened and comforted, but Jane and Allan were on an extended trip to San Francisco, in part to provide Jane with a chance to recover her health. And Flora could not present such awkward, ill-timed proof of her ability to both conceive and carry a child to her friend, weakened by another miscarriage.

Flight and Agate stood by the fence, waiting for their master, their coats ungroomed and their wise eyes patient.
But now, a huge space we have travelled / and time has come to uncollar our steaming horses
. The lines had begun to make a queer kind of sense, these horses bare of any tack, their saddles forgotten, standing by the fence listening for their master, the distance between Lark Hill and Walhachin and the far fields of France unfathomable.

Just when Flora had become so desperate that she was sleepless with anxiety, Mary made a suggestion.

“The Sisters might help, Missus. Where my brothers and I went to school, in Kamloops, at Le Roux Point. We write sometimes. They might help.”

Flora was moved that Mary was thinking of her situation. “Thank you, Mary. It's so close though, Kamloops. I wonder if I might not be better off going farther away from here. I can't bear being shunned, and so many of the people living here are in Kamloops regularly.”

“The Sisters have another place too. In Victoria. I have a letter with both addresses. Will I give it to you? I believe Gus Alexander's family is in Victoria.”

Flora grasped at the small hope that the nuns might take her in, give her some tasks to pay for her keep. The money her parents sent, the clothing allowance, would surely cease when they learned of her condition, though a small trust from her grandfather would continue, she thought. A letter was sent to the nuns, and they replied that she should come and they would see what might be done. There was a home in Victoria for women who found themselves in Flora's position and inquiries would be made on her behalf. Something about this did not sit right with Flora, but she put it out of mind, reasoning that now she had a plan, a destination, and she would work out the details. Mary agreed to forward letters and of course Flora would let Gus know as soon as she had a new mailing address.

•  •  •

The train finally appeared on the rails to the east of Pennies. Flora checked her pocketbook again to make sure of her small amount of money and the letter with the directions to the convent. She had as well the address for Gus's parents' home written on a card. Dr. and Mrs. Robert Alexander, St. Charles Street, Victoria. She had been expecting a letter from them in response to the letter she had written to tell them she was coming to Victoria, but nothing had arrived. She would contact them, she thought, once she was settled into some kind of home.

She was lucky to have a seat to herself, on the left side of the train, where she sat pressing her face to the glass to watch the progress of the river down below. Everything looked so cold—the rock slopes, the grey hills, singular pines, the turbulent river. Flora nestled farther into her coat, moved her fingers in their gloves to increase circulation. She had a flask of sweet tea and a packet of sandwiches, made for her by Mary.

At Lytton the train stopped to take on more passengers. Flora had never been in the small town before. When the conductor suggested that those on the train might want to stretch their legs—the train would be stopped for an hour—she adjusted her scarf securely around her neck, pulled her cloche low over her hair, and disembarked to see what might be seen.

An Indian woman was sitting on the train platform, surrounded by baskets. Flora stopped to look at them. The woman was bundled in layers of sweaters over a woollen skirt, a kerchief wrapped around her head and tied at the back, gypsy-style. She smiled up at Flora.

“Your baskets are beautiful,” Flora commented. “Did you make them all?”

“Yes,” the woman replied, vigorously nodding. “All mine.”

Flora knelt, with some difficulty, to handle a spruce-root basket with an intricate rim. It had leather straps so it could be worn on the back, and it was worked with a detailed design of some darker fibre. Holding the basket up to her face, Flora inhaled its odours of tree and dried bark and a dark winy smell.

“For berries,” the woman explained.

That explained the straps, the faint stains on the interior. The basket was beautifully made, the woven work tight and smooth. Flora knew she had to have it and reached into her reticule for her money. She had no idea what to offer but simply held coins in her hand and let the woman choose. What she took did not seem enough. The woman's hands were gnarled and leathery and cold—when she reached into Flora's palm to take the money, her fingers were icy. On impulse Flora removed her gloves and placed them in the woman's hands, saying, “I'd like you to have something of mine too.” The woman smiled and took a small grass basket from her collection, imbricated with chevrons of a deep red reed. She tucked it into the larger berry basket, and the two women nodded at each other with satisfaction. The Indian woman then placed her hands on Flora's stomach like a blessing, nodding and smiling with such approval that a warmth began to spread through Flora's body.

Flora walked the main street of Lytton where four thin dogs watched her from the step of the gracious hotel. A hospital, a store, a new-looking Catholic church (St. Ann's, was this a portent? wondered Flora), some tidy houses. There was a place she could stand and watch the two rivers converge, the clear Thompson meeting the murky Fraser—a man walking by with a small boy held firmly by the hand told her which river was which—and then the combined waters gathering force for their long run down to the sea. Flora had grown to love the Thompson River during her residence at Walhachin, its sinuous muscular rope winding down below the house, its scent in all weathers. There was a place where the children of the settlement bathed in summer; a breakwater of large boulders had been constructed to create a deep quiet pool. Flora bathed there too at dusk on summer evenings when the silver flies made a screen she would pass through before lowering her body into the flinty water. Once, she had seen a strange creature coming down from the rocky shore to the pool; when she'd watched it for a while, she decided it must be a toad. Though a toad did not entirely make sense for the desert landscape. Asking someone later had produced the information that it had probably been a spadefooted toad and that it was not uncommon to see them after sunset when they left their cool underground holes—they dug these themselves with their curiously shaped feet—to drink in the safety of the dark.