The Age of Water Lilies (33 page)

“Is it upsetting for you to think of us moving?” he asked.

She couldn't speak at first. She swallowed again and the hard lump moved a bit. “No. Yes. Well, you know. Exciting but sad. This is where we live. If we don't live here, I'm afraid I'll forget everything I know about it. Will we come back?”

“I can't answer that, sweetie. Maybe. Maybe not. We'll see how it goes. We might end liking Morden so much we'll never want to leave. We won't sell our house, though. Or at least not right away, not until we know how we feel about everything.”

It seemed her mother was always too busy. There were lists to make, movers to consult—they came with stacks of paper for wrapping things and big wooden boxes they called “tea chests,” and padded blankets to put around wooden furniture and other objects before fitting them into the back of the huge moving van. The family had Christmas in a house bereft of half its furniture, but the tree was lovely in the window as usual, decorated with lots of candy canes and tinsel and one string of lights (most of the ornaments had already been packed). Santa Claus came, bringing oranges for their stockings, and little whistles shaped like birds that you filled with water and that gurgled like red-winged blackbirds, a Chinese fan for Tessa, and the wrapped parcels under the tree held wonderful surprises: a camera for each child with two rolls of film; knapsacks with canteens and first-aid kits; heavy parkas and snowboots for the Morden winter they'd be driving into.

Although the basement was cold, Tessa worked daily on her map. She didn't want to forget anything, not a building or a tree or a particular gathering of birds. She drew a dead dogfish on the beach below the cemetery, a group of three children around it, one with a stick. The school at its five corners and the Annex perched on its rocks. She added the Guracks' house, with the shape of the grandmother beyond the big window.

THIRTY-ONE

Winter 1920–21

In later years, Flora would be grateful for the play, for the intense relationship with Ann as they rehearsed while folding sheets, doing dishes, or walking the quiet lanes through the cemetery. (Hecuba:
Death cannot be what Life is, Child; the cup / Of Death is empty, and Life hath always hope
. Andromache:
O Mother, having ears, hear thou this word / Fear-conquering, till thy heart as mine by stirred with joy
.)

How bitter it was for her to return from Jane and Allan's ranch to discover that Ann was suffering from an invasive cancer (“I had been feeling slow, even before the play, though it was easier to put any concerns aside during that time! And I had no appetite. Robert advised a consultation with my doctor. I'd not expected such bad news, I'm afraid, and was rather sharp when the doctor gave me my death sentence. ‘You will not see another summer,' he said, which was not a pleasant way to put things.”) and would be dead within three months. How could such a robust and vital woman die, with so many projects planned, so many years anticipated for seeing them through? It was almost too much for Flora, and for Grace too. The child had bloomed in Ann's care while Flora had found work with James McGregor. When Flora would return from work, weary from the long ride home, it was reassuring to walk into a warm home with a bathed child waiting in sweet-scented flannel to be kissed and cuddled and put to bed.

“Let's do what we can, Flora—put in some bulbs, walk by the sea, and I'll sing while I can. What about this? My cousin in England sent me sheet music for some Robert Burns songs. They are very sentimental, I'm afraid, but the melodies are pure gold. Do you know this one?”

She was rustling some music at the piano and then playing the opening bars of something Flora thought was familiar. It wasn't until Ann began to sing that Flora knew it was “Ae Fond Kiss,” a song she had first heard at a Scottish aunt's home when her family had gone up for the grouse season. But she had not heard it as Ann sang it, a melody of abiding sweetness, and lyrics to break the human heart. ‘Had we ne'er loved sae kindly, / Had we ne'er loved so blindly, / Never met, not never parted, / We had ne'er been broken hearted.'

Flora listened and thought of her own love, her “first and fairest,” the way her life had changed as a result. What would have happened if I'd answered otherwise when he asked if I minded when he kissed me? she wondered. And she could not imagine.

In Ann's last weeks, she was permitted to come home to Hollyhock Cottage with Robert Alexander's promise that he would be available at any time to come to ease her suffering with whatever means were available to him. (“My own doctor felt my place was in the ward with the nuns tightening my sheets and bringing me dreadful puddings. I do not have his blessing for this, but Robert was persuasive.”) Flora filled Ann's bedroom with late asters and roses and brought her cups of beef broth or plain soups. She'd walk around the block to the grocery store on Eberts Street and ask Mrs. Sturgeon for a block of special chocolate or a wedge of nougat to place on a tiny porcelain dish to accompany Ann's tea. She sat up many nights while Ann weakened, holding her friend's hand, reading poetry to her. The beautiful sonnets of William Shakespeare, the glorious odes of John Keats.

“I am leaving the house to you, Flora,” whispered Ann one night as Flora bathed her face during a particularly sleepless spell. “I made the arrangement when I first knew about the cancer. So you will always have a home. It has given me so much pleasure to have you here, to have had a child to love and share responsibility for, and to have watched you make a real life for yourself after losing your lover and your family. I have been so proud of you.”

“How could I have done any of it without you? Lie still and I will change your nightdress. Oh, smell this, Ann! This fresh one still has the smell of the outdoors in it. You taught me to love that. We have done a lot of laundry together.”

Mornings were best. Ann had lucid hours when she sat up in her chair and laughed. She was very thin, but there was still beauty in her long fingers, her spirit. She quietly gave up singing because she could no longer gather enough breath.

“Shall I play for you, Ann?” asked Grace.

“I'd love that, my dear.”

Ann had been teaching Grace piano before the summer, simple songs, which filled the house, never again to ring with Ann's voice practising arpeggios, scales, the full-blown beauty of a Bach cantata, or the sweet sadness of a Robert Burns poem. Though Grace said later, “I hear her every morning,” and would add no more to that.

The Trojan Women visited and brought food—cold hams, poached fish with parsley sauce, dishes of small minted potatoes, all designed to tempt Ann, who loved the sight of such pretty dishes but who couldn't eat much at all. And who finally couldn't see anyone but Flora, who knew to expect the sudden gasps, the odours, the grinding of teeth that made her suspect that Ann was dreaming of something terrible. Calls to Robert Alexander became more frequent. He would arrive with his medical bag containing the precious vials of morphine that allowed Ann to relax into a state of painless oblivion.

•  •  •

One morning Flora woke to silence. She had been so exhausted that she had slept deeply and wondered whether she had missed Ann's call in the night. Fearfully she pulled on her wrapper and ran to Ann's bedroom. The bed was empty. The bathroom? Empty. Rapidly Flora determined that Ann was not in the house and not in the garden—or not that she could see. Checking the bedroom again, Flora could see that Ann's shoes were not there and checking further, she discovered her coat was missing from the coat rack near the door.

I will not panic, she thought as she put on her clothes and drew on her warm coat for the day was drizzly and grey. She is so weak that even if she was able to get herself up and out, she could not have gone far. But thinking she would not panic, and stilling her racing heart, were two different things.

She went into the garden and searched carefully, thinking that perhaps Ann had wanted air in the night and a last look at the trees she and Phillip had planted more than two decades earlier. Perhaps she'd fallen and Flora, sleeping deeply, had not heard her call for help. Nothing. She tried to think as Ann might—a favourite neighbourhood location, a . . . well, what? Where?

Ann loved the ocean. She kept the windows open to hear the waves at Ross Bay crash to the shore during windstorms and she loved the iodine smell of the sea. Checking first to make sure that Grace was still asleep, Flora quickly ran the scant block from Hollyhock Cottage to the shore. The water was calm under the soft rain, swells coming in to the sand and rock regular and precise as a human pulse. And then she saw the scarf.

It was Ann's paisley cashmere scarf, a gift from her one sister still in Scotland. She always wore it with her winter coat, the one that was missing from the rack. It was draped over some rocks by a little sandy area. Flora's heart beat rapidly, fluttering in her chest so that she bent double to catch her breath, and her blood chilled as she saw the footprints in the sand, leading from the rocks to the water. They disappeared as the wet sand showed the progress of the tide's recession. Flora put her own foot into one of the prints—she and Ann had the same size feet—and sure enough, the fit was exact.

Returning to the house, Flora tried to calm herself, tried to determine what she needed to do next. She closed Ann's bedroom door so that when her child awoke, she would think that Ann was sleeping. Then she made porridge for Grace's breakfast. She telephoned Robert Alexander for advice.

“I will make some calls, Flora, and then if what we both believe has happened has truly come to pass, I think we will simply have to wait.”

Flora walked the beach for hours each day, watching the waves as though they might bring Ann to shore like a rich gift, a Venus in a wet camel-hair coat. Gulls cried out and the wind tossed them through the sky while skeins of geese passed overhead on their long journey south. And then, after four days, Ann's body washed to shore in secluded Gonzales Bay, just south of Ross Bay, where it was found by a man collecting firewood from the beach. Her face had been partially eaten by seals, but she was still wearing her winter coat. In the generous pockets, confined with sturdy hat pins, were two large stones—the gypsum containing the ammonite and the chunk of smooth limestone with the little bones and scales.

“She would have wanted to sink,” Robert told Flora. “She was so emaciated that her body would have remained buoyant, and I don't think she would have had the strength to swim out very far. She'd thought about this, it is clear. Were the stones meaningful to her?”

“She and her late husband collected them on their honeymoon at Blue Anchor, in Somerset. They were two of a quartet that she kept on the hearth. You will have seen them a hundred times, Robert.”

Saying that, Flora imagined Ann standing by the fireplace and choosing the stones. In her mind's eye, she saw Ann holding each stone in her hand to determine its weight, selecting two, and then carrying them to the shore wrapped in her paisley scarf, cradled in her arms like a child. What would it have felt like to tuck them into her coat pockets and then walk purposefully into the tide? The Ann Flora was imagining was the fearless woman who had staged a play full of women lamenting the losses of war to a city perhaps not ready to be told such a tale. Flora imagined her smiling the ghost of her radiant smile as the water lapped at the hem of her coat, then her waist, and then pushing herself forward into the waves as the stones did the work of taking her down. A few gulls watched impassively from the breakwater.

“You are very quiet, Flora.”

She looked up, breaking her eerie reverie. “I cannot be angry that she ended her life this way, but I am worried that we might not be allowed to bury her in the usual way.”

“Because she took her own life, do you mean?” He took note of Flora's nod of assent and thought for a moment. “I don't think Ann was guilty of despair, which of course the Church considers a sin against God. She was certainly not mad. But she was clearly at the end of her life and this only hastened her death by days, or a week or two at the most. I think she simply tired of the pain and the sheer difficulty of staying alive and wanted an end on her own terms. I don't believe this will present difficulty in arranging a burial, Flora. In the old days, yes, but not now. I may well be asked to sign something testifying to her mental state.”

“Robert, how did she have the strength to walk to the shore with the weight of those two stones? She could barely move from her bed to the chair by the window. I don't understand it.”

“People often find reservoirs of strength they never knew they had, Flora. I have seen dying people possessed of extraordinary strength, as though everything depended upon this last moment of courage. And courage it surely was that helped Ann to rise from her bed, her deathbed, really, to make that last journey towards peace.”

“How will I tell Grace?”

But that did not prove to be difficult. When Flora sat with Grace and gently began to tell her that Ann had died, the child stroked her mother's hands and said, “Don't cry, Mummy. Ann has gone home. I heard her leave and she was singing.”

“Do you mean the other morning, Grace?”

“She has been leaving since we came home from Thomas's ranch. I could hear her singing every day. She sang the whole story.”

•  •  •

Ann had bought a plot in Ross Bay Cemetery almost as soon as she'd known her cancer was not curable. It was near the sea, with little glimpses of water between the hedges, and away from the dense shade of the yews and pines. Open air, grass carpeted with English daisies for at least nine months of the year: Flora felt it was as perfect a resting place for her friend as might be found anywhere. She imagined Ann walking slowly around the various available plots of earth, wondering, and wished she'd been there to help, to take Ann's arm, point out gulls, a clump of trilliums in the lea of the hedge.