The Age of Water Lilies (31 page)

Mrs. Godwin was reassuring. “Oh, yes, he certainly recovered well and he has never thought of himself as lame. But I tell you this so you will understand that this terrible event will fade away as the weeks and months pass. I expect we'll see Mick playing catch across the road this spring just as he always has. And racing off on his bike to ball practice. Right now you think that the world is a very frightening place and it can be, no doubt, but happy things will come to you. So please try to snuggle down under your covers and sleep.”

What Tessa remembered most in later years about Mick's accident and the kindness of the Godwins was how she learned that people were full of surprises. An elderly woman, previously only seen in her garden and occasionally shaking a rug out the back door, had taken care of men who were burned worse than Mick; her equally old husband had not only been a teacher but a soldier as well. In books, soldiers were young and handsome, and Mr. Godwin was ancient with almost no hair and brown spots on his hands and arms. But once he had been one of those young gallant men and then he had been hurt and that was what led him to Mrs. Godwin. And to the house next door to Tessa's family home in Fairfield. She decided to draw that house onto her map and made faint drawings of two people standing on the porch, holding hands.

TWENTY-NINE

1920

They were all extremely nervous, except Mary Morrison, who was of course Helen. She stood in the dressing room in her simple blue gown, a crown of airy wildflowers (fashioned by Frances Gibbs from silk and bits of ribbon and gauze) in her long hair, which was braided into a loose cord to fall over one shoulder.

“I should be nervous, but I'm not. I can't wait to take the stage! My parents say I have always been theatrical and perhaps they're right.” She twirled across the dressing room and her ribbons rose in the draft. “And I do have to say that it is not often one gets to portray a character of whom it has been said,
‘Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships. / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?'
That is courtesy of Theodore, who of course reads far more than I.”

“And does he mind that you are Helen?” asked Alice Ramsay.

“Oh, I can't say. Nor will he. He has reservations about the arts in general, I think, so no doubt dramatic presentations will possess a whiff of dubious utility in his world of getting and spending. But he'll be here tonight, with his parents, and with mine. I told him I wouldn't marry him if he didn't come.”

•  •  •

Ticket sales had been brisk. The
Colonist
ran an article about the women and their production that was slightly derisive but that at least alerted the city's citizenry to the opportunity to see the play. Their anonymous patron, known only to Ann, had paid for the rental of the theatre, and the women had collected enough money among themselves to produce a simple handbill that they distributed to likely venues. That, and the newspaper article, was their only sources of advertising. Word of mouth provided the rest.

Costumes had been kept simple—robes for the female roles and tunics of coarse burlap (potato sacks begged from a grocer) for Talthybius and Menelaus and the attendant soldiers. Helmets for the soldiers had been discussed and then voted against as silly. “Let us suggest rather than insist,” was the sentiment. Sara and Nancy had been asked what they thought they should wear, and after conferring, they suggested their cedar capes, which they would wear in cleansing ceremonials. It was agreed that the two of them would sit together, to one side of the stage. A few pillars, stored at the theatre for the various operas performed there, were brought on to the stage and strung with ivy to give the set a pagan look. One of them was artfully broken at the top, which added to the suggestion of destruction. The backdrop curtains had been painted by Flora with help from most of the cast at one point or another. The first featured Troy in ruins and the second, which would come down over the first during the final scenes of the play, was the same view but with an overcast sky and wisps of smoke rising from the ruins that were now on fire.

Programs had also been kept simple although Ann wrote an introductory paragraph for the play that made oblique reference to Troy's position opposite Gallipoli across the Dardanelles, to suggest how the characters in the play would have been held within the same landscape as the men in 1915–1916 as their drama unfolded.

“This is it, ladies,” Ann told her cast of women as they stood in the wings, listening to the sound of their audience settling in. “I am so proud of how hard you've all worked. I think we have something fine to show this city. What's more, I feel we are part of a larger movement. There are people in England who are waiting to know how our production is received. Are you excited?”

Of course they were. Frances Gibbs was trembling, and her robe kept sliding down her shoulders. Priscilla Foley spoke softly to her and hugged her. Caroline Leach closed her eyes and took deep breaths to calm herself. But if they were not ready now, not after the two months of rehearsal and days spent painting backdrops, designing and sewing costumes, organizing and distributing handbills, pleading with friends and family to buy tickets, then they would never be ready. Or this was how the practical Agnes Hunter expressed it to the group.

The voice of Poseidon, through Alice Ramsay (who had developed extraordinary projection since her first timid and tentative attempt), intoned to the audience an immortal and timeless observation:

The groves are empty and the sanctuaries

Run red with blood. Unburied Priam lies

By his own hearth, on God's high altar-stair,

And Phrygian gold goes forth and raiment rare

To the Argive ships; and weary soldiers roam

Waiting the wind that blows at last for home,

For wives and children, left long years away,

Beyond the seed's tenth fullness and decay,

To work this land's undoing
.

The audience settled themselves in. The theatre was cold; puffs of grey air could be seen as Poseidon spoke. It gave the stage a strange atmosphere, unworldly and severe.

As the two divine beings discussed their various dissatisfactions with the victorious Greeks and how they might be punished for their desecration of Athena's temple, the heat of the assembled audience gradually warmed the theatre. By the time Poseidon and Athena exited and the heap of rags on the stage rose to reveal itself to be a woman, there was no more grey breath to suggest anything other than a mortal woman waking to grief.

O ships, O crowding faces

Of ships, O hurrying beat

Of oars as of crawling feet,

How found ye our holy places?

Threading the narrows through,

Our from the gulfs of the Greek,

Out of the clear dark blue,

With hate ye came and with joy,

And the noise of your music flew,

Clarion and pipe did shriek,

As the coiled cords ye threw,

Held in the heart of Troy.

The audience sat riveted as Ann recited the ancient words of Euripides, words giving voice to Hecuba, alone outside the walls of her ruined city, the curtain of broken pillars and the background of fallen walls behind her. Ann's training as a singer allowed her to offer each phrase as a discrete dramatic unit, with power and clarity, and she delivered Hecuba's speech to the far ends of the theatre easily and immediately. Those in the farthest seats heard her as though they were sitting in the front row.

Who am I that I sit

Here at a Greek king's door,

Yea, in the dust of it?

Slowly the other women of Troy gathered around her on the stage, wondering at their fates.

How have they cast me?
asked one Trojan woman, played by a shy dark-haired person called Celia Munro who had barely said a word all through rehearsals apart from her lines and who now stood with complete confidence, asking with a strong voice,
How have they cast me? and to whom / A handmaid?

As the Chorus turned to begin their second strophe, Hecuba's mournful lament rang out:

And I the aged, where go I,

A winter-frozen bee, a slave

Death-shaped, as the stones that lie

Hewn on a dead man's grave . . . 

Those in the audience shivered as they heard these words. And Flora, listening in the wings, remembered how those lines had given her a window into the play as she and Ann had read the script in their own warm sitting room. She took deep breaths as she stood waiting for her own entrance, while Cassandra uttered her mad speeches containing within them the tragedy of that war's terrible violations—her own body, the temple of Athena, the unburied bodies of fallen men—and her bloody prophecies.

But part I must let be,

And speak not. Not the axe that craveth me,

And more than me; not the dark wanderings

Of mother-murder that my bridal brings,

And all the House of Atreus down, down, down . . . 

It was going remarkably well, Flora thought, still in the wings. She was anticipating the great choric moment, between the strophe,
O Muse, be near me now, and make / A strange song for Ilion's sake
 . . . and antistrophe,
O, and swift were all in Troy that day, / And girt them to the portal-way . . . 
It described arrival of the large wooden horse; the Indian women were to accompany the chanted verses, the slow and dignified rattles making an eerie rhythm for their voices to enter, to portent the warriors and all that fell with Troy.

The audience craned their necks to see where the sound was coming from. The Indian women were just within sight, seated on cedar mats they'd brought with them, wrapped in cedar capes. The sound they produced was as elemental as wind in coastal forests. When the passage ended, the single maiden from the Chorus sadly calling,
Weep, weep for Ilion
, Sara and Nancy began their own chant, a song to honour the dead of their own families, to cleanse their possessions of sorrow, to quiet their souls and give them rest. It was so moving that Flora had to remind herself that her own entrance was imminent.

The stage went briefly dark. The light cutout of a chariot was quickly moved into place and Flora positioned herself in front of it, cradling Astyanax on her lap.
Forth to the Greek I go
, she intoned,
Driven as a beast is driven
.

(In her arms she carried a large cloth doll. The idea of using Grace had been considered and abandoned, not simply because she was a girl and Astyanax a male child, but because Flora thought it might trouble her daughter to be put in the role of an infant whose fate was to be cast from the stone walls of a ruined city.)

I and my babe are driven among the droves

Of plundered cattle. Oh, when fortune moves

So swift, the high heart like a slave beats low.

So sang Andromache, who was Flora. Then Hecuba answered, who was Ann:

‘Tis fearful to be helpless. Men but now

Have taken Cassandra, and I strove in vain
.

And then the exchange, whereby Andromache tells her mother-in-law that another daughter, Polyxena, has been slaughtered on the tomb of Achilleus (and Andromache given to his son, Neoptolemus). Then Andromache rues the lot of women given to victors, forced to share the beds of the men who have killed their husbands.

O shame, shame!

What woman's lips can so forswear her dead,

And give strange kisses in another's bed?

Why, not a dumb beast, not a colt will run

In the yoke untroubled, when her mate is gone . . . 

And worse, if worse could be imagined, to come, for Astyanax, condemned to die as a future prince of Troy.

Go, die, my best beloved
, wept Andromache,
my cherished son
:

In fierce men's hands, leaving me here alone.

Thy father was too valiant; that is why

They slay thee! Other children, like to die,

Might have been spared for that. But on thy head

His good is turned to evil.

In the beautiful poetry of Euripides lay all the grief and sorrow of the ages, the slaughter of innocents, the loss of husbands, of fathers, of lovers; victors distributing the spoils as prizes, burning the sacred sites, forbidding the simple rituals of honour and remembrance.

When the moment arrived when Menelaus first sees Helen, the ostensible reason for the conflict between the Achaians and the allies of Troy, the audience let out a collective hiss. Hecuba's urgent plea to Menelaus to let Helen speak but also to allow her, Hecuba, to answer gave Helen her moment to absolve herself of responsibility. It was, after all, Hecuba who gave birth to Paris, and Priam who exposed him to the elements as an infant that he might die and not fulfill the portent of his mother's dream that he would bring destruction to the city of his birth; and Paris's judgment, that Aphrodite might be given the golden apple of discord in return for her gift to him of the loveliest woman on earth. No, she was bedazzled, she insisted, and not herself:
My wrong done / Hath its own pardon
.

Enough of that
, snapped Hecuba—

It was by force my son

Took you, thou sayest, and striving . . .  Yet not one

In Sparta knew? No cry, no sudden prayer

Rang from thy rooms that night . . . Castor was there