The Age of Water Lilies (30 page)

“Oh, Flora,” said Mary Styles, who had lost a son herself. “And did he leave a wife and house?”

“I can't draw that particular parallel, Mary, but Henry would have inherited my family's home in Wiltshire, I can say that, and everything within it. But his life was certainly half-finished. He should not have died.”

She wrung her hands together, violently. “Who knows what he would have done, would have been, in the fullness of time? He knew about birds and the old Roman ruins. He was loved. We hear numbers, so many numbers, in this poem, and in the newspapers, and in every speech about nobility and sacrifice but the numbers were lives, weren't they? Individual lives. My brother, oh, both my brothers. Your sons. Caroline's cousin, Agnes's brother, my dear Grace's father who was so splendid.”

And she began to weep into her cold hands. Mary Styles, seated beside her, gathered Flora into her arms and let her cry against her woollen shoulder.

There was silence for a minute or two, broken only by Flora's quiet sniffling.

Then Alice Ramsay said, in a very quiet voice, “For each of those men, there was a woman. More than one, likely. And as spoils, well, the women aren't exactly divided up among the victors, because surely that was related to position and accomplishment on the part of the men. But they must do as Andromache does, as Hecuba does: carry on in a world made meaningless without the loved one nearby.”

She looked around the circle of solemn faces. “As we've rehearsed this play, I've felt Hecuba's sorrow, her helplessness. I didn't expect to. I was lucky, I know, because my son returned pretty much intact, though his nightmares are something to behold, but a nephew was lost, every part of his body it seems, at Gallipoli, a boy I haven't seen since he was an infant when I cradled him in my arms before we left England. That we are reading these lines and offering the story of these lives—I think it's as important as a church service to honour the dead or another memorial service by a cold tombstone.”

“Luck?” Everyone looked to see who had shouted that word. “Luck?” It was Caroline Leach. “For you, maybe. For him, though? What will his life be, from what you've said? Will he ever sleep without dreaming of carnage again?”

“Don't speak of something you know nothing about,” retorted Agnes, her face livid.

And Alice, who could have been offended, crossed the room to sit by Caroline and to say something to her that resulted in the two of them embracing.

Ann judged that it was time to take up the scripts, so she asked women to turn to the lengthy section of the Chorus, beginning, “O Muse, be near me now, and make / A strange song for Ilion's sake . . .” She had some ideas for choreographing the Chorus as they chanted this, the strophe and the antistrophe, and she wanted the women to consider a very simple dance as they moved.

It had been decided they would not have music. Ann corresponded with groups in England who were also working on productions of the play, including an acquaintance who spoke to Sybil Thorndike—Miss Thorndike had performed in both
Hecuba
and
The Trojan Women
and had made the role of Hecuba in each play her own. She told the mutual acquaintance to relay to Ann that the twelve chords struck by eight trumpets that had opened the performance at the Alhambra in London had thrilled her to the very core. But that said, she agreed with Gilbert Murray that her preference was for a spoken chorus, not a singing one, and that however moving the use of Hebridean folk melodies or the simple notes of a psaltery, she wondered if the stark power of the language might somehow be undermined. This correspondence helped to confirm Ann's own inclination to simplicity.

But then Elizabeth Washburn brought the information that she had overheard two Indian women from Songhees—well, not the old Songhees any longer, not since the area at Mud Bay had been sold for cash ten years earlier and its residents moved over to Esquimalt Harbour—who were hanging out her family's laundry chanting a most strange and powerful song in the back garden where the clotheslines were. When she asked them about it, they told her it was a cleansing song, owned by their family, and that they were practising for a ceremonial to honour cousins who'd been killed in France and whose personal belongings had recently been returned to the family.

“It was so unexpected and moving to hear these two women, usually so quiet when they come to do our laundry and heavy cleaning, singing in my back garden. It was such a dignified sound and yet otherworldly, because of course they sang in their own language and not in ours. For some reason it reminded me of what the Chorus does, though I can't explain why exactly. And so I wondered then how it might work for us. They told me they usually sing with a rattle made of sheep horn—wild big-horned sheep, that is. And that the song is generally performed with dancers who wear masks. I gather, though, that the dancers are young men so that perhaps is not appropriate for us. In any case, it was the rhythm, its evocative sound, and the fact that it was used to heal, or cleanse, that caught my ear.”

She looked to Ann and then to the other women. What might they think of such an idea? On the edge of the Empire, where allegiances were to England and the King, most people thought of Indians, if they thought of them at all, as colourful but savage. One might hire them to clean, wondered one member of the Chorus, but was it really on to have them mix with this group of women?

“One hears of disease and squalor,” said Mary Morrison, wrinkling her pretty nose. “My fiancé's family has a summer home on the peninsula where the Indians cure their fish. It reeks! Some of them won't even speak English. The children never wear shoes!”

“And yet there is that artist, Miss Carr, who travels up the coast and paints their houses and boats and the mysterious totem poles,” Frances Gibbs remembered. “Very powerful paintings.”

Priscilla Foley was inclined to dismiss the idea. “Whatever do Indians have to do with this play written by a Greek?”

Ann thought for a moment and replied, “Well, one might also ask, What does a play written by a Greek two thousand years ago have to do with some women in Victoria in the twentieth century? Or what did Hebridean music have to do with the play performed in London? Or . . . ?” She left the idea open.

Flora, wanting to help Ann make her point, suggested inviting the Indian women to come to a rehearsal if Elizabeth thought they'd agree. Would the others agree that this would be a good idea? She was remembering Mary at Walhachin, who cleaned Flora's house with polish and whose biscuits were light as any. Whose cabin on the Deadman River was swept and smelled of sage.

Most did, and the ones who didn't were willing to give the Indian women a chance. And so it was decided that they would be invited to attend the next rehearsal in four days' time.

“This is Nancy Cooper and this is Sara Richard.” Elizabeth introduced her two companions to the assembled cast of
The Trojan Women
. The two Indian women smiled shyly. Both were attired in cotton dresses with woollen shawls wrapped around them for warmth. They wore bandanas of brightly flowered calico over their heads. Each carried a basket.

Ann explained to them that the women would like to hear the song they had been singing in Elizabeth's back garden. They reached into their baskets and took out objects that proved to be the anticipated rattles. Nancy's was shaped like a duck, carved of wood and polished, whose long tail functioned as a handle. Sara's was a curly horn, a sheep horn, and had tassels of wool hanging from it.

“How fascinating,” commented Ann, her eyes shining. “May we hear them?”

And the gathering of women was treated to the song that had so entranced Elizabeth. She had been right to call it otherworldly. The rattles were used along with the voice, but neither sounded as one would expect it to. One could hear wind in the rattle, could hear tides washing up on a stony shore, rain falling. And the voices of the women were low, centred in the throat and chest. It was as though the earth itself was telling what was lost, not with words but with the essence of sound articulating grief in all its registers.

The room was completely still when Nancy and Sara stopped singing. The song had spun a web of sorrow, an elemental dirge for what needed mourning.

Priscilla was the first to speak. “Let me take back my petty reservations about what might be appropriate and what might not be. To my mind, this is exactly what we should have in our play, if Nancy and Sara are willing to join us.”

Ann thanked the two women and offered them a cup of tea. It was clear to her from the faces in the room that others felt as Priscilla did.

“Would you be willing to play your song for our performance?” she asked the two women as they drank their tea. They nodded.

“Our cousins,” began Nancy, “they joined the fight for the King, same as the white men. They were lost to their wives. Instead of them coming home, ready to fish and gather clams, or to do farm work or pick hops, only a box with their extra shirts and papers came back. There was a pipe. A little bit of French money, which won't help their families at all. We can share our song if it will help. It's owned by our family and we have permission.”

Elizabeth asked them to wait for a few minutes and she would take them back in her car. And then she worked out some details with Ann regarding rehearsal times and when they would need the Indian women to be present.

•  •  •

The new dimension to the production gave the women a sense of urgency, a sense that they must make this whole effort meaningful not just to themselves but to the larger community. There had been talk in Victoria about the silliness that some women would go to in order to draw attention to themselves. It was felt that women on the stage were akin to dance-hall entertainment. Or worse. Frivolous, and not a little unseemly.

Agnes Hunter observed tartly that it had also been thought frivolous for women to be given the vote, though men had been happy enough to be nursed by them in field hospitals overseas. And those men who returned were happy enough to find that households had been kept running, businesses kept in good shape, factories kept producing, and who deserved thanks in large part for it?

“What is that terrible remark that Dr. Johnson once made?” asked Agnes. “Something to the effect that he was fond of ladies, he liked their beauty and delicacy, but he liked best their silence. I think that is not an uncommon sentiment among many men, even the ones we love. It is most distressing in the ones we love, perhaps. But this is an opportunity for us to speak not just with our words—or Euripides' words, to be precise—but also with the action we are taking by working so hard on this play.”

“Well said, Agnes.” Caroline Leach peered up from her sewing—she was working on Cassandra's robe—to give Agnes one of her infrequent but glorious smiles.

TWENTY-EIGHT

1962

Mick did not die. He had operations to patch his burned skin with skin from other parts of his body. His teacher visited him at the hospital so that he would not get behind in his school work. Tessa and Teddy were allowed to visit after a week. They brought a bag of their best Halloween candy and three Superman comics. And Mick was happy to get these things although he seemed like a quieter boy than the one who had been their brother before Halloween.

Some evenings the Godwins came so that Tessa's parents could go to the hospital together. The children would have their instructions—any homework had be done before they could watch one show on television; bedtime at eight would be observed although they could read quietly in their beds if they couldn't sleep. Mr. Godwin had been a headmaster at a school just outside Victoria and he was very helpful if there was a question about arithmetic or phonics.

On one of these occasions, when Tessa was crying in her bed—she did this most nights because the terrible events of Halloween would not go away, no matter how hard she tried to think of other things— Mrs. Godwin came quietly into her room.

“It's the smell,” Tessa gasped through her tears. “It was so awful and I keep smelling it.”

“I know just what you mean, my dear.”

“You do?”

Mrs. Godwin stroked Tessa's hair with her old wrinkled hands. “I was a nurse, you see, during the Great War—you will know it as World War One, but for me it was a baptism on every front—and I was sent to a hospital near Étables in France. So many of the patients had been burned, either by gas that blistered their faces and ruined their lungs or in explosions. That smell, oh, of burned flesh and gunpowder and worse, if you can imagine worse, stayed with me for a very long time. But it will go, you'll see. Mick was very lucky not to have been blinded or to have lost his fingers or a foot. He will be himself again, I do believe this, and you will gradually forget that smell.”

“Did the patients die, the ones in France?”

“Many of them did, yes. But others got well and were sent back to battle or else home. That is where I met my husband. He was injured at Vimy Ridge, the third battle of Arras in 1917, and brought to us. Luckily he was not burned but suffered shrapnel wounds, some pieces lodged in his knee, which is why he limps a little . . .”

“He took the stairs two at a time when he came to help Mick,” Tessa remembered. And she also remembered her father walking her to school one day, she must have been in grade one, and passing the street called Vimy that met Moss Street just a few blocks before the school. He spoke then of that war and its battles, but mostly she had been thinking of the day ahead, whether her pencils were sharp enough. And yet it had something to do with the Godwins, with this moment, although she could not have known it at the time. Some days it seemed that everything was connected, that little trails led from one moment to the next, across the years as though across a map. Mrs. Godwin as a young woman nursing a man who was not yet her husband. A place called Vimy. The Cross of Sacrifice in memory of those who were killed in that war. And the other one too.