The Age of Water Lilies (19 page)

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.

How far away Flora felt too, but with no desire to return to the postwar Watermeadows. She felt she could not bear the close, dark rooms with her mother lying prone,
sal volatile
at hand and a damp cloth over her eyes. Or the empty stable. Or the ruined gardens, overgrown and untidy, a lame old man hobbling around with a wheelbarrow, unable to keep up. It was not a daughter they wanted, really, but someone devoted to Duty. And perhaps most of all, she could not bear a fence being constructed to replace the hedge where she had a secret gap that she used to move between orchard and meadow, each world utterly enchanted, the one with bees and birdsong, the other with foxes and hedgehogs, and the memory of her brother George returning from the swampy area near the river with her rocking horse over his back. There was no place there now for the woman she was and she wanted nothing to interfere with her precious storehouse of memories of the girl she had been. The war had taken too much that was valuable and she would not allow it to take this from her too. Though she conceded to herself that of course it had taken these things but she needn't have that confirmed with an actual visit to what she had stopped thinking of as home.

And was her father being forgetful or did he simply not acknowledge that Flora had a child who was in fact an Oakden? Not the offspring of one of the beloved sons of course but a child, a continuation of blood and name, a child in which to place hopes and to fill with stories of the past? Out of sight, out of mind, she supposed. And what did he think might happen to Grace if Flora returned to care for her mother? A child at solitary play in the long corridors, the tangled gardens, unacknowledged by a silent grandfather mourning the loss of his sons. No pony, no uncles to lift her into the air, no loving governess to shadow her every move.

In one of her pensive moods, when Grace was sleeping and Ann out on errands, she began to draw water lilies, not as they grew in the tanks and ponds at Watermeadows but as they might decorate tiles. She drew the beautiful Egyptian blue lotus cradled on the deep green leaves, she drew the sweet-smelling British alba, the bright sun-coloured water lilies from the lake where she had spent an idyllic few days with Gus in that autumn of 1913, their horses grazing in the knee-high grass while they made love on a mattress of fir boughs, the heady resins scenting their bodies. She included the sinuous stems and indicated glazes to make the leaves glisten, the flowers as close to their natural colours as possible—the pink of
N.'Ortgiesiano-rubra'
edged with deeper rose, as though dipped in the most intense pinky-red pigment in the paintbox, the tropical red of
N.'Devoniensis'
, named in honour of the Duke of Devonshire by his head gardener, Joseph Paxton, a talented hybridist as well as the man who helped to coax
Victoria regia
to bloom at Chatsworth in the first heat of excitement of its cultivation in Britain. These were stories Flora had grown up with, and she drew with yearning for a life lost and a time vanished.

James McGregor was pleased with the water lilies when Flora showed him final versions of her initial drawings. By now she knew just enough about the glazing formulas to suggest combinations that would result in the vivid, rich colours she had in mind. As background, she envisioned a blue, something deeper than the Ming Turquoise but not cobalt; she would work with Nagy to find the perfect hue. Cobalt lightened with copper oxide? Perhaps they would experiment with oils and salt to find a texture that would be pleasing. More tin oxide to give some of the lilies an opacity. She planned panels as well, for a bathroom wall, or as an exterior feature, perhaps to be placed within a brick facade. Well, she drew them but did not imagine she might actually ever develop the sketches to actual working plans.

We gave away your mare,
he'd written, and suddenly Flora wanted to know what had happened to Agate and Flight, Gus's horses at Walhachin. Wanted to know about the apple trees, the curtains she'd chosen for the sitting room of the house she had shared with her brother, the roses he was coaxing to grow, those delphiniums the colour of the sky. Perhaps when Grace was older, they might make a trip by train to see what was left of that life. In the meantime, she might write to Jane McIntyre again (she had tried some months earlier but had no reply) in her paradise in the Upper Hat Creek Valley, to see whether her old friend might want to renew their relationship.

Some evenings she sat with her work basket, the one she had bought in Lytton with its faint stain of berries on the interior, and thought about sewing. There was often mending, to be sure. Grace's clothing, her own stockings to be darned, her bodices to be repaired and trimmed, some with a little of the Honiton lace she had kept from the days when her mother still sent her parcels with notions and newspapers and Shetland hoods. What she wanted was something else, the pleasure of the needle passing through fine fabric, leading its trail of thread, silk or linen or crewel-wool, flowers forming in the wake—bud to bloom, wild bouquets of colour. She remembered sitting with Jane under the shade of a wide leafy tree, making handkerchief camisoles trimmed with pretty lace. They had talked of love and children; Jane had agreed that Gus was handsome and worthy. After Flora had returned to Walhachin, she had worn her camisole when she and Gus met in the orchard to make love under an apple tree heavy with green fruit. Later, she'd picked out grass seed from where it had entered the fibres of her garment when she'd been pressed into the ground with the weight of Gus upon her body.

Jane
, she wrote,
I know it might be difficult for you to know me now—I did write earlier this year but had no response but I am determined to try again. I would love to have a few lines from you. I have been remembering our day at your home, making the camisoles under the trees. I
hardly dare ask if there is a child yet, but of all women I know, you are the one who should have them to love and attend to in your paradise.

A letter came back. When Flora saw it on the hall table, arriving back after a long hard day at the pottery, she could hardly believe it: Jane's elegant script on a heavy cream envelope! She waited to open it. There was Grace to greet and Ann to sit with at the table for a half-hour's catching up on the details of the day—what Grace had eaten, how she had made an attempt to pronounce Rufous, how they had walked to Clover Point along the water and noticed a seal following their progress.

“I will just finish a few things in the kitchen, Flora, and Grace is happy with her dolly, so why don't you change your clothing and have a few minutes to read your letter?”

Flora sat in her window seat with its calm view of the garden and opened the envelope. A letter—and a photograph! Jane and her husband, a baby in Allan's proud arms, stood by the front door of their home, tendrils of clematis framing them. Both smiled broadly. Tears came to Flora's eyes as she held the evidence of her friend's new happiness. She unfolded the pages.

My dear Flora,
the letter began
, how wonderful to hear from you! I've thought of you so often and wondered if we might be in contact again. As for your earlier attempt, I can only say that I did not receive any letter or I'd have replied at once. I asked in Walhachin for news of you, but, as you can imagine, no one would speak of you, except Mary, who thought you were in Victoria. I must confess that I meant to try to find you, but as you can see from the photograph, I find my hands full these days! We were blessed with young Thomas ten months ago, I hardly believe it still, but he is robust and bonny, as his grandmother says. You will wonder why Allan is home and not overseas. It's his heart. He has a problem with it (scarlet fever as a boy), gets tired easily, and must be careful of what he does. He is of course glum that he can't be with the men in Europe, but people need meat too, and his work here is important. But, Flora, you've said so little about your life in Victoria! Please write and tell me more. Do you have a photograph of Grace?
And—oh, I hesitate to ask this—is there news of Gus? I know the 5th Battalion suffered terrible losses at Ypres, and after, but I think Gus was part of another regiment? Perhaps he had better luck.

There was more. Jane wrote of the weather, mutual acquaintances, changes in the towns below the Hat Creek Valley—Ashcroft and Walhachin and little Clinton to the north. And then:
Flora, this might seem delicate, but I want to say that I wish I had, well, counselled you a little more honestly during our last visit. If I had been less discreet, I might have told you that there are ways one can prevent a pregnancy if one is engaged in an intimate relationship as you so clearly were. You have paid a big price (I won't say too big) for something so natural and wonderful. But then your child must give you so much happiness too so perhaps I am speaking out of turn.