The Age of Water Lilies (2 page)

“A woman like that, well, it's no wonder she hasn't a husband,” sputtered George.

Flora refrained from commenting that he, in turn, did not have a wife.

She did not like to disagree with George. Or disappoint him. It took so little. Surely he hadn't always been like this? She remembered him as a patient and helpful brother when she was young. When he was away at school, she'd send him a little story within a letter, and he'd write back, full of praise, with gentle corrections of her spelling. On his holidays he'd teach her things, help her with projects, include her in outings with his tutors. Now it seemed he was determined that Flora should observe high standards of behaviour and dress. At the sign of a lapse, he would brood in silence until she had seen the error of her ways. Which might have been as slight as not wearing gloves to the hotel for tea. He did not like her to argue with him, although their own parents had had tremendous differences of opinion. The senior Oakdens had led separate lives to some extent, had separate bedrooms, dressing rooms; her father did his botanizing and her mother did needlework when she was not in a dark room with a cool cloth over her eyes. But Flora's father listened to her mother's ideas about everything, women's suffrage included; although he argued with her vigorously, it was without anger. Both parents came from families long planted in rural Wiltshire, each tracing a line back to the
Domesday Book
. Each was accustomed to people paying attention when he or she spoke. Neither had bothered much with Flora, apart from arranging her debut into society in 1909 and encouraging one or two desultory attempts at courtship by young men who were sniffing for fortune but who did not seem in the least interested in Flora herself.

There were times Flora wished for someone, a friend, in order to share a particularly potent moment. For instance, at a meeting, Mr. Footner, the man who built most of the houses at Walhachin, had argued heatedly in favour of women having the vote. Flora had been so surprised to hear men refuse to acknowledge that their wives, the women who bore and raised their children and ran their homes, might actually be able to make a wise decision about leadership. These were women who organized dances for the community, raised money, taught piano, and were generally as capable as could be imagined at every task before them. One man shouted, “What next? If they have the vote, there is no saying what they will ask for next!”

Although she lowered her eyes and said nothing, Flora thought the man deserved a swift retort of the kind she knew she ought to have had at the ready. But if she had difficulty expressing an opinion to George, surely it would be that much harder to reply to a stranger. Still, in her imagination, she was accumulating a list of responses. She was dreaming of a way to be the kind of woman she admired though she had not come up with a way to abandon her gloves just yet. She wished for someone to ask how a vote might be so dangerous a thing for a woman to have that it would incite men to anger and shouts.

Flora hurried towards her brother's voice, finding him with their two horses saddled and bridled. “I am taking Fred out to the flume,” he told her, “and I won't be back for dinner. Mary has put up a lunch for me, and I'll eat when I can.”

Mary was the woman who did for them, an Indian from Skeetchestn, the Deadman River village. She hummed as she went about her work, something George did not like but made no objection to, fearing that the woman might decide to leave their service. She really was an efficient worker, polishing the woodwork with lavender wax and keeping the windows clear as the sky. Her biscuits were light, she skimmed the milk and made lovely butter, and she was not averse to cleaning the chicken house. Most households that could afford help had Chinamen; the native women were not thought suitable for inside work. Mary was good, perhaps an exception, though they still might yet come to grief, Flora was told by one matron of the community who sniffed as though she expected to be proven right. Flora had answered airily, “If we come to grief, I am certain it will not be the fault of Mary.” The matron's face had turned livid. Flora found it easier somehow, standing up for Mary, who was so hard-working and reliable.

Flora watched George ride away, mounted on Titan, his gelding, and leading the grey mare for Fred. She wished herself back asleep under the trees, a child again. Or else mounted on the mare, sleeves rolled up to help George with the work ahead. The flume required constant attention. It carried water for the orchards and fields from a creek on the north side of the river, something like twenty miles away, through a system of troughs and trestles made of wood milled in Savona. The weight of water constantly undermined the structure, so the boards warped from water and hot sun; George was not alone in thinking that far too much water was being wasted before it ever reached the trees. One of the labourers, a taciturn fellow called Fred Dunne, shared his frustration. Fred had been involved in the initial construction of the flume before George had arrived from England, but her brother was inclined to listen when Fred suggested ideas for improving the system. They would ride out along the miles of wooden troughs, checking for leaks, for debris, and might not come back to the community until well after dark. Upon his return, George would expect a bath to be ready, clean towels warming on the fender. These were things a servant would do at home at Watermeadows, but this small household ran only with the assistance of Mary, who would be long gone by the time George wanted his bath. So Flora watched the skyline for the sight of the horses and had the bathtub filling as her brother removed his boots and tossed his saddlebag to the floor of the kitchen.

After his bath, George appeared on the veranda, lighting the oil lamp on the table before him; he drank a small whisky while moths made soft noise around the lamp, a whirr of wings, a click as they touched the glass of the globe, a quiet hiss as they disintegrated in the heat. Flora sat with him while he spoke of the flume, pointing north towards the tracing of its structure on the hill. She wondered what the whisky tasted like but was refused a drink of her own.

“Whisky is a man's drink, Flora. Come now! I can't have my sister drink such a thing. But I will fix you a Pimm's Cup! How would that be?”

He went into the house, turning on the carbide light in the kitchen, and for a few minutes Flora heard the tinkling of spoons and glass. George returned with a tall glass smelling of cucumber. A Pimm's Cup was a drink she liked at a sporting event—the one time she was taken to Ascot she remembered that was the drink everyone savoured as they waited for the races to begin. The concoction never failed to impress, the dance of the fizzy lemon making it taste of the nursery. Her mother had scolded her for trying to fish out the slices of fruit, though it seemed wasteful to leave them.

After his second whisky, George became quite exercised by his day at the flume. “By God, Flora, it was a false economy to use second-rate lumber to build that thing. I don't know what they were thinking of. It will take some work to get it functioning reliably. And there must be some way to pump water up from the river. It's right below us, for Heaven's sake! Why on earth we must bring it from such a distance when a river runs through our community . . . Well, I am going to consult a man in Vancouver about pumps at the next opportunity.”

One of the other labourers, now working at the rail siding, actually knew something about irrigation since he'd been employed over at the Coldstream Ranch, but he had not been consulted during the planning of the settlement's system. George was determined to seek this man out as well and ask him to help.

Flora could smell soap as George waved his arm in the dim lamplight. She heard rustling in the field just beyond their house and hoped it wasn't a snake—sometimes you could hear their bodies in the dry grass, and the insistent harsh rattle when they were startled—or a coyote lurking for their hens or the one splendid Muscovy duck their neighbour kept and that waddled between the properties, aching for water.

“What will it mean for this year's crop, this trouble with the flume?” Flora asked. George said none was really expected, the Jonathans and Wagoners might produce something, but that the real harvests would be in two or three years' time when the Rome Beauties and Wealthys came to maturity. Some orchardists had interplanted potatoes between their trees, some onions, and when Flora first arrived the previous fall, she'd been shown enormous earth-covered potatoes and had seen the onions drying on the ground, their papery skins fragrant and golden, their green tops withered. They had very good flavour, she was told, and would travel down to Vancouver by train in bushel baskets. A drying shed was being built for tobacco too, which proved congenial to the soil and weather.

Flora had been eager to leave Watermeadows, the family home near Winsley, in Wiltshire. Not that she had been unhappy there, for how could unhappiness find a toehold in a life so utterly calm and pleasant? The estate was more than two hundred acres; an eighteenth-century house of mellow golden Bath stone stood on a slope above the river with gardens and pastures leading down to the water; a ha-ha separated the two so that it seemed that placid Jersey cows grazed in rhododendron groves, a student of Capability Brown having arranged this effect. Right down by the river were meadows that flooded each spring, giving the property its name, rich with water avens and ragged robin, flag irises providing cover for snipe and water rails. The land upon which the estate was built had been inhabited for many thousands of years; flints and arrowheads showed up frequently when a gardener turned the soil. A small spring in a secluded limestone escarpment was a place used over the centuries by those wanting to bathe in its warm restorative waters, not as hot as the spring at Turleigh but very pleasant all the same. Flora's father had spoken of creating a large warm pool around the spring, then introducing the
Victoria regia
water lily and perhaps some other tropical water lilies as well. But nothing had come of that plan and the area remained wild with ransomes and bluebells and red campion, a perfect place to come for picnics.

Some days, Flora stood in the middle of the house at Walhachin, in the hall as the rooms radiated around her, clean and polished, and remembered the house as she'd first seen it, new, smelling of freshly sawn wood. George had arrived first but had done little to make a home. That had been left for Flora: she opened the tea chests of china and linen and curtains and hung chintz from the dowelling over each window, filled needle- worked covers with goose-feather cushions, arranged pretty jugs on windowsills and the mantelpiece, some of them with dried grasses and the vivid yellow plant she was told was rabbitbrush. She hoped her arrangements would pass muster, that the linens would smell as sweet as those from the cupboards at Watermeadows, that her table settings would be proof that she had learned her lessons well and that the fish service could be reliably found next to the cutlery for meat and salad, that the small bone-handled fruit knives were gleaming and ready for the apples that she served with cheese at the end of their meal. Coffee from the tall silver pot with the monogram and the eagle on the lid, segments of ivory alternating with sections of ebony on the graceful handle, a little creamer to match. And silver tongs to grip each lump of sugar, a pretty long-tined fork to skewer the thin slices of lemon when indeed lemons could be found.

Some days she regretted that the house had been filled with what she had imagined they were leaving behind. She remembered the rooms as she'd first known them, airy and bright, the plaster freshly painted, and the floors bare of any covering, just the bees' wax protecting the wood. There were possibilities in the long shapes of sunlight on the floorboards, in the smell of fir and window-screening. She'd had a momentary sense of herself as newly born, anticipating a future unlike any she might have expected, in a house without any history at all.

Happiness and purpose: Flora puzzled over the accommodation of these in her daily life. As much as she loved her mother, she did not want to pass most of her days at rest in a dark room. She did not want to sit in a chair by a window consulting with a servant about the day's meals. She did not look forward to having her hair dressed for a cotillion or being fitted for a dress she would wear once or twice and then forget. Coming to Canada with George had seemed such an adventure, and it certainly was, though not necessarily in the ways Flora had expected. She supposed that George was under pressure to succeed and that made him seem stern and proper, no longer the boy who jumped into the river below Watermeadows without a stitch of clothing. He had never taken notice of his sister's more casual habits until the two of them were living alone at Walhachin. She valued his company and wanted to keep the household harmonious. But sometimes, walking alone up Brassey Creek, she would let her hair down and tuck up her skirts to feel the sun on her legs. And on those walks, she certainly did not wear gloves.

•  •  •

Flora sat in a wicker chair on the veranda and looked out towards the river. She could see far into the distance, the brilliant sunlight rippling up from the road like water. Grasshoppers rubbed their legs together, a steady monotonous clicking. Someone was coming. Little clouds of dust rose from the road as Mary, it was Mary, rode towards the house on her quiet mare. The horse was carrying something else too; as Mary approached, Flora could see it was a child, a baby of about a year, fastened into a carrying frame of wood. Mary put her horse into the small paddock adjacent to the house where a cottonwood provided shade.

“My baby isn't too well, and I thought I'd better bring her with me. She'll sleep mostly.” Mary placed the sleeping child, still in its carrier, on the floor of the veranda, under the cooling blades of the fan.

Flora poured her a glass of lemonade, chips of ice clinking as they fell into the tumbler. George wouldn't like it, Flora thought—a servant bringing a child to her place of employment. But she was interested to see this woman with her child. Mary was already tying on an apron, her hands filled with rags to begin to clean. Flora could not have imagined a child sleeping on the floor of Watermeadows while one of the housemaids swept the carpets or dusted the furniture.