The Age of Water Lilies (26 page)

And Tessa remembered the beautiful plates, the goblets that held the party Freshie, all highly coloured and shining.

The family went for their annual August camping trip to St. Mary's Lake on Saltspring Island, the blue tent aired in the yard and then repacked into its canvas bag, the old black skillet cleaned and oiled in readiness to fry the fillets of bass that Tessa's father would catch on his early morning ventures onto the lake in the little wooden boat he had made himself. They spent a week camping, all of them sleeping in rows in the tent with their sleeping bags and the air mattresses that never held air for a whole night through. The dog came too and slept on an old towel just inside the tent beside the pink plastic pot that one could pee in at night if it was raining too hard to head to the outhouse.

Tessa loved Saltspring Island. There were old houses and fields of sheep and long wharves tilting out into the sea. Herons waded in the shallow bays. There were oysters, which her parents loved, but which she couldn't imagine actually eating. They looked like snot. Her brother Mick said this, and the three children all laughed until their parents told them to stop or risk not being allowed to swim that day. But then Teddy would snort and that would set them off again. She saw her father go quite red; her mother smiled at him and touched his shoulder.

They swam every day, almost all day. Sometimes they drove to ocean beaches and stopped at Mouat's Store for ice cream. The children were allowed to row across St. Mary's Lake to an abandoned homestead where they feasted on green apples from trees draped in Spanish moss. Many of the trees were broken by bears. You could tell because there were mounds of bear scat, black as tar but filled with apple pulp and seeds, at the foot of the trees. Branches were torn away, stripped of apples, and left to lie in the golden grass, little scales of lichen on them. The house was covered in weathered grey clapboards; its generous windows faced the lake. It was sad to peer in through broken windows and see remnants of the lives lived within: a cupboard with dishes on its spiderwebby shelves; a blue coffee pot still on the rusted old range; mattresses covered in blue and white ticking torn apart by mice or larger animals for the stuffing that lay on the floor. Tobacco tins full of nails and bolts. A bedstead once white but now corroded by rust, left in a field. It was as though a family had awoken one morning and decided to leave. Tessa wondered if they'd dreamed of the place for years afterwards, in all its magic. She tried to draw it; the place ended up looking shabby and old in her little sketchbook, so she burned the page in the campfire that evening. Some things were best stored in the imagination, where the rust and the weathered boards were beautiful and not derelict.

And leaving Saltspring that summer was sad too. There had been four rainy days during their week of camping, but on the last day, as with the day before, the sun rose hot and yellow. Fish were surfacing on the lake, the smell of the morning campfire was sweet with fir sap, and the pancakes were exactly the way Tessa liked them best—a little black around the edges but puffy inside with bubbles to catch the melted butter and syrup. They took down the tent, rolled up their sleeping bags, helped the dog into the back of the station wagon. Before they knew it, they were on the ferry out of Fulford Harbour, waving goodbye to the herons. It wasn't until they were back home that Tessa realized they all smelled of woodsmoke, their T-shirts and shorts permeated with it. She loved the smell and held her kangaroo shirt back from the laundry, tucking it into her closet so she could bury her face in it and remember the snap of the fire as they roasted marshmallows and wieners on sticks Mick had sharpened with his special Swiss Army knife.

“Will we ever go back?” she asked her mother as she helped with the laundry the day after their return.

“What a question! Of course we'll go back. We've always gone to St. Mary's Lake! Why do you ask?”

“I don't know. It felt so final, leaving this time.”

“Watch your fingers, Tessa. And please hand me my basket; you're closer to it than I am. I'm going to take this load up to hang out.”

She tried to think of a way to add Saltspring to her map, but there wasn't room. When she finished this one, maybe she would make another map. But somehow it felt that everything belonged on the same map. The cemetery, the old houses, the curve of Ross Bay, and even the lights of Port Angeles across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and now when she thought of it St. Mary's Lake and the homestead in its ruined orchard. She was sorry she had burned her sketch, but she hoped she could draw another from memory.

TWENTY-FIVE

February 1920

It had all come about so smoothly. School teachers, reading circles, gatherings of watercolour painters: word had gone out that women were required for a staged reading of a Greek play. And on the appointed day, the doorbell at Hollyhock Cottage kept ringing as one by one the women found a place to sit by the fire after leaving their wraps and hats on the hall stand. Chairs had been moved from the dining room and bedrooms to accommodate the numbers. Flora had allowed Grace to postpone her nap a little while in order to see the women arriving, each with a bag or satchel, faces red with the bitter wind blowing off Ross Bay.

“What a lovely child! Which lady does she belong to?” A woman reached down, little foxes dangling from her neck, to stroke Grace's cheek.

Flora and Ann looked at each other and laughed. Both spoke at once: “Oh, she is Flora's daughter!” “She belongs to both of us, of course!”

It was the year following the peace talks in Paris. A treaty had been forged and signed. The newspapers had been full of the Fourteen Points, the hope for an organization that would somehow prevent another war from taking place. In Paris, in homes around the world, people endlessly consulted maps as those nations wanting sovereignty spoke out in a chorus of emancipation. The world looked upon a beaten Germany, bowed under payments and blame, expecting shame and contrition. Men still arrived home from overseas, horribly disfigured by gas burns and shells. Hospitals had special wards for those who had not regained their mental functions after the horrors of the Somme, of Passchendaele.

The session of the council of the League of Nations had met in Paris earlier in January. Newspaper headlines predicted a future of peace. Such an optimistic view did not convince Ann Ogilvie, who remembered her own husband's death at Paardeberg Drift in 1900, the death of her housemate's lover at Festubert fifteen years later, and, by extension, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men in conditions that were now understood to be beyond appalling. For Ann, there must be pressure and demonstrations on the part of those who wished passionately for peace to remind the politicians, now in Paris but eventually to return to their own countries, how important it was to the people themselves.

Ann's correspondence with friends and family in England had alerted her to the efforts of her brother's former professor of Greek at Glasgow, Gilbert Murray, to support the League of Nations, an organization that would help the broken nations of Europe to negotiate their differences. Mr. Murray's celebrated translation of
The Trojan Women
was being performed in various locations—Cowley Road cinema in Oxford in concert with the conference in that city to acknowledge the peace talks in Paris; a matinee performance at the Alhambra Theatre in London to raise funds for the League of Nations Union, chaired by Gilbert Murray. Ann's sister-in-law in London had attended the latter performance and said that Sybil Thorndike's Hecuba was astonishing. When the crowds called “Author, Author!” at the conclusion of the play, Mr. Murray rose from his seat and said, “The author is not here, he has been dead many centuries, but I am sure he will be gratified by your reception of his great tragedy.”

The women in the warm sitting room sat expectantly as Ann rustled through the papers she had in her hands.

“Ah, here's my folder. I have been collecting some reviews of this play, which I hope we will offer as a staged reading to the citizens of Victoria. I want to begin by reading you some comments on
The Trojan Women
—that is the play I mean for us to read. I should have begun with that!—so you will understand that we are not alone in this activity, that other people, women and men who believe that there must be alternatives to the butchery and barbarism we are only too familiar with, are attempting to do what I hope we can do and that is to draw attention to the plight of the women and children in war.”

There was some uneasy shuffling between two women in Ann's sitting room. Both of them had lost sons in France. Ann knew this and waited for them to speak. One of the women—they were sisters—asked, “Mrs. Ogilvie, are you saying that the Germans should have been left to take over Europe and then perhaps the world?”

“It is not my intention to offend anyone here,” Ann replied gently. “Let me say that quite clearly. And I think I am fully with our Mr. Murray in that I don't believe the world should tolerate such aggression at any cost, Mrs. Styles. But I do think that there must be ways of settling our differences that don't involve the slaughter of millions. Mr. Murray's League of Nations Union is one way that civilians can support diplomacy. I am hopeful that we, too, can help, even at this distance.”

There was more discussion about this, animated and spirited, though most women agreed with Ann. She had been developing a reputation in Victoria for her outspoken views on war and the emancipation of women, so those responding to her call for players were aware of her opinions. Women would not have come to her door had they not at least known what to expect. And she was a listener; that was something everyone agreed on. She would carefully listen to what people had to say and she showed every sign of considering their point of view. She was the first to say that she had not formed her views on war and suffrage until the Boer War ended and she was left without a husband and without an income—although she had enjoyed both before that war began.

Ann read them extracts from the reviews she'd accumulated, ones that mentioned
The Trojan Women's
tragic dramatic centre—the distribution of the women of Troy to the victorious Greek princes and kings—and drew parallels between the recent war and the old story of victors and their spoils. The women were silent when she finished.

After a moment or two, she said, “I have copies here of the script for the play and wonder if we might think about roles. Essentially these are the parts: the play opens with Poseidon and Pallas Athena. These are important characters, a god and goddess respectively, but they make a fairly brief appearance so the parts might interest someone who would like to play another part as well.”

A woman murmured softly that for herself at least, playing a goddess would be enough to last a lifetime. Those around her chuckled in agreement.

Ann smiled too, then ran her finger down the cast list. “So perhaps two of you who might want to be part of the Chorus can also consider those roles? Then we'll have a Hecuba. She's queen of Troy and widow of Priam, mother of Hector and Paris, both who've been killed, and of Cassandra who also appears in the play. Cassandra is . . . well, she is a prophetess. A bit mad, but I believe that's understandable when one thinks of what she has gone through. Yes, Agnes?”

A middle-aged woman had raised her hand. “Will those in the Chorus sing, Ann? Is that the intention?”

“Ah, well, that's something to decide. The usual thing is for them to chant, but I've read of productions where they do in fact sing. It is Mr. Murray's belief, however, that the actual words are the important aspect of the Chorus and that music detracts from their power. Or can, at least, though that is not inevitable. Some performances have used melodies that are very simple and, I suppose one could say almost primitive. But I don't think we have the resources to investigate such possibilities at the moment. However, the Chorus is important and powerful. We will want strong voices for it, whether it be sung or recited. Does that answer your question?”

Agnes Hunter nodded. She smoothed her skirt, a dark blue gabardine, and touched her hair thoughtfully. It was her brother who'd gone to France and come home shell-shocked, a sad presence in the family home as he rocked and rocked in a chair by a window in a dark room and ducked with a shriek when the lights came on.

Ann continued, “So, Hecuba, then, and her daughter, and her daughter-in-law, who is the widow of the Trojan hero Hector. That's Andromache. I hope I'm pronouncing these names correctly. She has an important part too, because she must endure the murder of her young son Astyanax. And Helen, she's here too—the reason for the war in the first place. Her husband, Menelaus, who must decide whether to take her back (she left him for Paris) or have her killed. There's also a Greek herald, Talthybius, and some other soldiers and attendants. You remember that in Shakespeare's day, female parts were always performed by men? Well, we will do one better and have women performing the male and the female parts!”

Amid the laughter and commentary, one woman said that during the war years all the women she knew were accustomed to being both mother and father, housewife and handyman, so this would not be a hardship at all.

“How many in the Chorus, Ann?” asked Flora, looking up from her copy of the script.

“Well, that depends. It's a representative body, I gather—women who've lost their husbands, been captured, and are about to be assigned to Greeks as war spoils. I don't think numbers are as important as quality, if that doesn't sound simple-minded. I mean, it will depend on how many of us will want to try that role, but we don't need too many, I wouldn't think. I've been reading about the function of the Chorus and will have some ideas to share with you once we've decided our roles.”

A woman who had said nothing all this time but sat, wrapped in a dark shawl with a cloche pulled down over her eyes, suddenly said, “If no one objects, I would like the part of Cassandra.”