The Age of Water Lilies (29 page)

“Oh, Tessa, you should be asleep by now. It's very late, sweetie. And a school night too!”

“I can't sleep, Mum. Will Mick die?”

Her mother hugged her close. “Absolutely not. But he is badly burned and will need to be in hospital for some time yet. We'll talk about it in the morning. ”

Lying in her bed, hearing the murmur of her parents' talk in the warm kitchen, Tessa tried to bring happy images into her head: the tiny frog in Miss Oakden's pool; the pleasure of Saturday afternoon at the library when the children would be set loose and told to meet back at the entrance in one hour; walking with her mother to Gonzales Bay along Hollywood Crescent with the anticipation of a swim in cool water followed by a Popsicle for the long walk home; finding the mysterious egg cases on the Moss Rocks. She tried to dream her way into the long golden grass on the other side of St. Mary's Lake, eating green apples in the sunlight. But the smell, she could not get the smell of burning leg and sulphur out of her nose. It filled her, made her want to throw up. She rushed to the bathroom just in time.

TWENTY-SEVEN

1920

Elizabeth Washburn had been a teacher in a public school in England before marrying and coming to Canada with her school-master husband. Ann asked her if she would act as the play's dramaturge, the person who would do some background research on the history and geography of
The Trojan Women
and then share her research with the cast.

“I think,” said Ann, “that it would help us immensely if we could all have more information on the background of the Trojan War, for example, so that we know exactly who these women are and what their circumstances were before they ended up being the spoils of the Greeks.”

Elizabeth was happy to find out what she could. She came to a rehearsal with a carton of materials to share with the other women. First she put a map of the Mediterranean Sea and surrounding lands on the wall and used her knitting needle as a pointer to indicate the locations—Greece, the various areas where the Greek princes and kings had come from.

“Here is Sparta,” she pointed. “Sparta, where Menelaus was king, and Mycenae, where Agamemnon ruled. Odysseus, to whom Hecuba was given, came from way over here . . .” (knitting needle tapping) “. . . a little island called Ithaka.”

“And Troy itself?” asked Flora. “Was it a real place?”

“Oh, yes,” replied Elizabeth. “In fact, archaeologists have uncovered many layers of cities upon the site where Ilium, the other name for Troy, stood, right here, in Turkey, just across the Dardanelles from the Gallipoli Peninsula where so many of our army perished in those middle years of the war.” Her pointer was tracing a line on the map from a little dot marked Troy to a long finger of land immediately above it.

At the sound of that place name, Flora caught her breath sharply and looked more closely. There it was. Near Troy. Gallipoli, where Henry had been killed and where he now lay in a cemetery called Twelve Tree Copse. He left no wife to mourn him, though two parents sat in an empty house for months with the loss of him hanging in the air like dust. And no child to take his name forward into the future, though he'd been loved by a young man with a forelock of dark hair and a sweet smile.

Others saw the terrible irony too. Caroline was first to comment on it. “For Heaven's sake, Elizabeth! The naval attempt on the Dardanelles—it was the same area!”

Elizabeth showed them Cape Helles and where the
anzacs
landed beyond Suvla. What had happened all those centuries ago had happened again in the recent past, and would happen again, in the future, near or far: was this the lesson that history was teaching? Flora hadn't paid enough attention to history. Walking the Roman roads, she had listened to poetry and collected a few flints, never realizing that both had been products of conflict. The elephant umbrella stand at Watermeadows was an invitation to high-minded discussions about the white man's burden and the treachery of the Boers; it had been easy to ignore as she went from dress fitting to dress fitting or else rode Seraphim down leafy lanes. Now she found herself listening and reading with a voracious hunger that surprised her. Ann's family in England sent copies of
The New Age
and Flora read them cover to cover. The writing on credit power and democracy was hard going, but Flora followed the lively arguments on art and women's suffrage with great interest. There was not a single opinion promulgated by the journal but rather many views, all eloquently and often provocatively presented.

And she took to visiting the library regularly to seek out books that attempted to come to terms with what had happened during the 1914–1918 conflict. A book called
The New Elizabethans
offered short memoirs of various poets, scholars, and athletes who had died on the battlefields of Europe. There were pictorial histories of Mons and the Somme, which broke Flora's heart over and over again. And a long strange essay caught her attention:
Aristodemocracy
by Sir Charles Waldstein looked at the ethics of conflict, taking the reader on an archaeological tour of history from Moses to Christ to Plato and the modern autocrats.

“Ann, I am reading this, well, it is called a ‘sketch,' but it is rather more than that, by Hillaire Belloc. It was clearly written near the beginning of the war and he's talking about the nature of aggression, German of course, and Prussian, Austro-Hungarian . . .”

“Ah, portray them as demons and the rest will be taken care of?”

“Something like that, I suppose. What is shocking to me is how ready we were—and I count myself among those! At least in 1914—to believe this. Most still are. Belloc was a man my parents greatly admired, I believe. But listen to this: ‘Germany must, in fulfilment of a duty to herself, obtain colonial possessions at the expense of France, obtain both colonial possessions and sea-power at the expense of England, and put an end, by campaigns perhaps defensive, but at any rate vigorous, to the menace of Slav barbarism upon the East. She was potentially, by her strength and her culture, the mistress of the modern world, the chief influence in it, and the rightful determinant of its destinies. She must by war pass from a potential position of this kind to an actual position of domination.'”

Flora paused and tried to find a way to articulate her thoughts. “He is characterizing the German position as this. But surely the other nations might say the same of themselves? Mistress of the modern world—surely that is England's goal? And what of the Belgian colonies in Africa? The Dutch?”

Ann was quiet for a moment. “It is always sobering to read this sort of thing, Flora. It determines me all the more to find a route that is mindful of the similarities of nations rather than the differences. My grandmother was a Quaker. Her notion of loving kindness towards aggressors rather than punishment, which seemed so naive when I was a girl, has much to commend it now, I think.”

“Yet there is this other kind of pacifism too, Ann, which I read about in
The New Age
and other places. One that suggests that force is occasionally necessary as a defensive measure but never in an offensive context. What do you think of that?”

It surprised Ann a little to hear Flora asking such questions. She remembered the young woman who had come to Hollyhock Cottage and who had been taken aback when Ann spoke of the war as unnecessary, the machinations of its leaders vile. But she approved of Flora's attempts to understand the dimensions of pacifism. “Oh, I think that might be Gilbert Murray's own position. That peace-loving nations might band together in a collectively secure way against violators of peace. And maybe this is where the League of Nations will take us. We can hope, can't we?”

•  •  •

Ann clutched her copy of the
Iliad
to her chest and crossed her ankles. The women were sitting in a circle. They took time before their rehearsals to hear what Ann had to say about their progress, or to listen to tidbits from Elizabeth about the play, or simply to catch up on their lives. It was cold in the hall and all of them wore layers of woollen clothing topped by shawls. A few knitted while they sat. Ann opened the book.

“This is the
Iliad
, ladies, the poem that details one period in the ten-year duration of the Trojan War, part of the tenth and final year, to be precise. I would say that it really encapsulates the war as a whole. And its awful concluding event, the death of the Trojan prince, Hector, who is of course a child of Hecuba, sets a whole other cycle of events into motion—Odysseus heads home and the
Iliad's
companion poem, the
Odyssey
, follows him on that journey. Another hero, Aeneas, heads off and ends up founding Rome. Now, let me see . . .”

Ann found the place she wanted in the book. “This translation is by Samuel Butler. It's prose, really. Not poetry. But it does have a kind of music, I think. So there's the appeal to the Muses, which is usual in epic poetry, and then the narrator says, ‘I will tell the leaders of the ships and all the fleet together.'”

She read to them, her rich voice giving them the names of the places, Hyria, Aulis, the fair city of Mykalessos, where the poet itemized the haunts of doves, the pastures, the fortresses, the vineyards, the young men filling the fifty ships of the Boeotians. Then the chieftains of the Phocaeans, with their forty ships, and Ajax—not the great Ajax son of Telemon but a little man, with a breastplate of linen—and his forty ships. More magnificent men with fifty ships and then the great Ajax of Salamis with his twelve ships. Agamemnon himself, ‘all glorious in his armour of gleaming bronze, foremost among the heroes,' with a hundred ships, and his brother, Menelaus, with sixty ships, going ‘to avenge the toil and sorrow he had suffered for the sake of Helen.' And on it went . . . Yes, Caroline?”

“It's those ships, Ann. The naval fleets of the Gallipoli campaign, the British and the French. Remember their names? The Lord Nelson, the Charlemagne, even the Agamemnon!” Her face was alive with this knowledge and the others watched her, uncertain how to respond. Her intensity rubbed some women the wrong way. A couple of them were irritated and wanted to listen to Ann; one dreamy member of the Chorus was forming a map in her own mind, one punctuated by abandoned kit bags and graves, and wanted to keep that intact while Ann read the ancient story.

Elizabeth, who had taught nervy young women, moved to sit by Caroline and linked her arm through the other's, saying softly, “Extraordinary, isn't it, how there are such echoes in these histories? Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.”

Mary Morrison, who had never heard of the
Iliad
and was enthralled with Ann's reading, particularly as it mentioned her own character Helen, said, quite sharply, “Hush and let her continue.”

Priscilla Foley clicked her tongue and reminded Mary that she was the youngest there. It was her opinion that entirely too much attention was paid to the girl's beauty. Let her have a houseful of children and she'd learn quickly enough that flowers faded with no one to remember their brief season.

For a few minutes, the air was tense in the Women's Christian Temperance Union Hall. Ann waited for quiet and then continued: “‘All the soldiers and farmers, the young men, the fierce men with long hair flowing behind them, leaving their groves and vineyards, their women and children, their elderly parents, their flocks of well-bred sheep, but taking their horses, their armour, their spears and their chariots.'”

Just as Ann finished reading, Agnes Hunter broke in. “No different this time around,” she spat, suddenly angry. “My brother went off with his hunting rifle, which of course was of no use whatsoever. Once he got to Quebec, they were all given those horrid Ross rifles, which we know now were hopeless once things got hot. They'd jam. How many wounded or dead because they couldn't get their own rifles to fire? My poor brother went off on the train, a boy who'd never even travelled past Vancouver, and then by boat to England, then to France and the battlefield of the Somme. Now he's a shadow and I doubt he'll ever be well again.”

Elizabeth Washburn spoke next. “What I heard in that, Ann, was how those young men left settled lives, farms, orchards, families, to rally behind a man whose wife had gone off with another man. Willingly or unwillingly—does it matter? All that manpower, all those lives lost, because one man's pride was injured and he needed to take revenge. My son didn't know where Germany was, never mind Bosnia, yet he was off to enlist before the ink on the newspaper headline on August 5, 1914, was dry. He was killed at Ypres, him and too many thousands of others.”

Ann looked thoughtful and then replied, “Yes, all the young men. The best. The strongest. All of them fired up to follow their kings and their chieftains. And whole worlds left behind to function without them. Each household an empire . . . That little portrait of Protesilaos with his flowery meadows and sheep, dead before he even arrived on Trojan soil, killed while leaping from his ship.”

With difficulty, she found her place in the
Iliad
again. “‘He had left a wife behind him in Phylake to tear her cheeks in sorrow, and his house was half-finished . . . ' I think that passage is so poignant.” Ann sighed and took a deep breath. “But so many echoes in that too—of our men and the Australians and New Zealanders being mowed down by Turkish gunfire as they tried to come ashore at Gallipoli.”

“He might have been my brother.” Flora hadn't realized she'd spoken aloud until she looked up to see that every eye was upon her. She tucked her hands into her sleeves—it was really very cold in the hall—and said again, “He might have been my brother, that man. I've recently been sent my brother's journals from home. He was killed at Gallipoli. He was frightened most of the time, I think, and was only thirty years old.”