The Age of Water Lilies (35 page)

“We went to a play at the Royal Theatre, Miss Oakden. It was
Peter Pan
, with a little light that moved around for Tinkerbell. Do you think it's changed much? From when you did your play there?”

“Oh, I don't think so, Tessa. I've been to concerts in recent years and it is much the same as it was. When we performed our play, we thought there would be more to follow. We thought we might actually change the world. But then our Hecuba died, the woman who owned this house, and we couldn't seem to organize ourselves without her. Life took up so much time that everything else had to be put aside. And then it was too late to do anything else but work in the garden and attend one funeral after another as people I loved died. Several of the women in the play, Mr. McGregor who helped me to find a way to make a living, Grace's grandparents, Jane, of course.”

“Who was Hecuba?” It was an interesting name to say.

“She was the mother of the Trojan prince, Hector. Oh, it's too complicated to tell you now, my dear, but she was a very brave woman and there was a play written about her. And she said so many things that we felt, as women who had watched men we loved go off to the Great War and not return, many of them, or return to us broken and hurt.”

The woman took out a small green notebook and held it to her chest. Then she returned it to the box.

“That is not to share, I'm afraid.” With her hand still on the notebook, Miss Oakden was again the young woman who bore the imprint of her lover's body upon her own and carried him in effigy into the future. Unthinkable now, in this room, with her arthritic hands and white hair, where a child sipped her tea and waited.

So she smiled and said, “But what about this? A drawing my daughter did that caught the eye of Emily Carr herself, who gave Grace a few art lessons as a result. And that led to Grace leaving for Paris, where she teaches art and English and paints and writes home far too seldom.”

She handed a sketch to Tessa, who looked at it and knew immediately what and where it was. It was one corner of the cemetery, where the trees grew low over the graves. It was a place where she had sat herself many times, grateful for the cave the trees made, and for the daisies that grew so profusely each spring, enough to crown a girl daily with a wreath of plaited blossoms. And it was a place where she most often heard the murmuring sounds of the dead, a sound that might be confused with birds but that a child knew came from under the earth with its tangle of secrets, even hidden water moving among the graves. She had heard ghosts in that very place, talking quietly, and she had not been afraid. She made a little mental note to herself to draw it on her map. She would put that girl into it too, the girl she sometimes felt in this house, waiting behind a door for Tessa to discover or reflected in the pool of water lilies on the bathroom wall. She'd thought that her map was finished, but maybe she would think of things to add to it for some time yet. Maybe you wouldn't know everything that was truly important until later.

“Did you ever go to Paris, Miss Oakden?” Tessa knew from her atlas where Paris was. She had looked it up the first time she learned that Grace had gone there to live. The very sound of the name filled her with longing.

“Oh, yes, I did. It's a beautiful city, full of narrow streets and flowering chestnut trees—I was there one May, Tessa, and loved it. Grace lives in a little apartment on the Rue pot de fer, and it was lovely to shop in the markets on the street nearby and visit the museums and churches. I meant to go back but didn't and now it's really too late. I'm not able to travel comfortably any longer and now simply wait for my Grace's letters.”

It was getting late. Whatever light the winter sun had held was fading fast. Miss Oakden spoke then, but it was as though to herself. “Some days I look out and I see this entire area as it was then, when this was Lovers Lane, when I had some hope of Gus, who was my sweetheart, returning from the war to hold me and our Grace in his arms. It's as though the apartment building over there had never been built, just the original Ross Bay cluster of houses from the original Hudson's Bay Company plan. I can see right down to the sea, hear the waves tumbling over themselves in their hurry to reach the shore so that they might slide back again into deep water. The trees in the cemetery—oh, they're young and supple, as I was, able to dream and reach for the sky, not the knotted tangle over the lanes, letting in almost no light at all to reach the ground and the poor sleeping dead. And my hands, knotted with arthritis, no longer able to sew as nimbly as I was once able to.”

And then, remembering her guest, she spoke directly to her: “It was a golden age, Tessa, a time of birth and new beginnings, even as the sorrow of being cast out by my family enveloped me at times.”

Tessa interrupted. “Did they do that, Miss Oakden? Did your parents and your brother cast you out?” It was a biblical image, thought the girl, or maybe from a fairy tale, where a wicked stepmother sends the beautiful young woman away from her loving father to live in the woods or in this case a low cottage by a cemetery. In the fairy tales, a prince came to rescue the young woman, but somehow she did not think a prince ever came for Miss Oakden. Not after her sweetheart died so far away and before the baby Grace was born. There were frogs in the garden and a girl might dream of their kiss but not, Tessa thought, an elderly woman.

“There were two brothers, Tessa, both killed overseas. I've told you something about George, who knew about Grace and wouldn't have liked it, but not about Henry, who never knew but who might have been forgiving. My parents would never acknowledge my daughter and would have been ashamed to have me return to them with a child. But this city was young, we all thought the war would be over within weeks, and of course no one ever dreamed of that next terrible war with its death camps and atom bombs dropped on Japan.”

She stopped talking for a minute and wiped her eyes with a hanky pulled from her sleeve. It was edged with the prettiest lace. She smiled at Tessa, who was listening to every word.

“When I think of those years, Tessa, that time, I think of it as an age of water lilies. I painted them so often onto tiles, some of them in grand houses, and some in much more modest ones, like this house and I stitched them onto linen. Well, you can see for yourself on the little cover I made for you! I thought I might reclaim my childhood at Watermeadows by doing so, I suppose, and perhaps my poor brother's small hope of water lilies at Walhachin as well. Now there is only the one plant in my garden pool, just enough for nostalgia to wrap me in its spell at times. Like now, I expect. And do you think, child, that your mother might want you home?”

Tessa supposed she might. She began to cry. “But I'm afraid, Miss Oakden, that I won't see you again.” The woman held her and smoothed her hair.

“Go now, Tessa. Take your parcel with you. Treasure your map. And write to me? I should like that very much.”

Tessa went out the back door and found the gap in the fence that let her small body through into the park where she paused to listen for the buried stream. Another few months, another year, and she would be too big to fit through the gap. She'd have to walk the long way around to Memorial Crescent and enter through the gate like anyone else.

THIRTY-THREE

Early 1963

And end now with a girl on her stomach in a basement, quietly finishing a map. It is the world contained within twelve square blocks, a cemetery at its heart, stones and obelisks telling their news of the living and the dead. Waves meet the shore on a stretch of ocean facing south. A school receives its neighbourhood of children, some of them riding bikes and some of them climbing up and over the rocky hill where clumps of shooting stars grow in an elegant seclusion, where lizards are born in a miracle of adaptation in the ferny clefts. A map of houses and days, of secrets and details noticed by a child fiercely in love with the pattern trees make with their shadows in sunlight, of the softening touch of moss on an inscription set in motion in a box canyon where lovers lay in dry grass and dreamed of a future now collapsed by violence. Off the edges of the map, the world settles its story and what can anyone do but remember the route water takes through the decades on its singular journey to the sea.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

I am indebted to my family for their support over the years. I wish to particularly thank my daughter, Angelica Pass, for translating the passages of Latin that occur in this novel and my son Forrest Pass for help with historical details (though of course any errors are mine). My husband, John Pass, and my son Brendan Pass have both provided love and encouragement for which I'm very grateful.

Penny Connell offered some good advice about the conventions of theatrical production. Patricia Anderson was extremely helpful at a difficult time in the manuscript's evolution. Other friends and scholars were generous with time and information. Ruth Linka and Emily Shorthouse at Brindle & Glass have been enthusiastic and responsive. Lynne Van Luven was an excellent editor, perceptive and challenging. I thank them all.

Readers interested in the community of Walhachin might enjoy Joan Weir's
Walhachin: Catastrophe or Camelot
as much as I did. A few real people make cameo appearances and I hope their ghosts will forgive me. I wish I'd known, at age fifteen, that Bertram Chase Footner, the elderly man who used to come out from his house in Saanich to tell me that my horse was a fine animal, was in fact the man who designed and built many of the Walhachin houses. There's so much I wish I'd asked him.

At a fundraiser for the Sunshine Coast Arts Council, Sechelt businessman Tom Lamb bid generously for the opportunity to have a minor character named for him in this novel. I thought I'd make him an architect. Later, reading Donald Luxton's indispensible
Building the West
, I was delighted to discover that there was in fact an architect called Thomas Lamb working in Victoria for a brief period in the 1920s. Any resemblance between the two is serendipitous.

The staff of the Sechelt Public Library was unfailingly efficient in obtaining books, microfiche, and other materials. The Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council provided assistance during the writing of this book for which I am grateful.

Theresa Kishkan is an accomplished author of eleven books of poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals such as
Geist
,
BC Bookworld
,
Brick
,
The Canadian Forum
,
Fiddlehead
,
The Malahat Review
, and
Quill and Quire
. Her collection of essays
Phantom Limb
was nominated for the 2007 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and her novel
A Man in a Distant Field
was shortlisted for the 2008 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Born in Victoria,
BC
, Theresa has lived on both coasts of Canada as well as in Greece, Ireland, and England. A mother of three children, she now makes her home on the Sechelt Peninsula with her husband, John Pass.

Copyright © 2009 by Theresa Kishkan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, audio recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher or a photocopying licence from Access Copyright, Toronto, Canada.

Originally published by Brindle & Glass Publishing Co. Ltd. in 2009 in softcover
ISBN 978-1-897142-42-4

This electronic edition was released in 2011
ePub ISBN 978-1-926972-19-0

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

Edited by Lynne Van Luven
Proofread by Heather Sangster, Strong Finish
Cover image by Doug Hohenstein
Author photo by Keith Shaw

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Brindle & Glass acknowledges the financial support for its publishing program from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, Canada Council for the Arts, and the province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.