The Age of Water Lilies (21 page)

“It's a nice name, Grace.”

“Well, I named her for another little girl, an Indian baby whose mother helped in our house in Walhachin. She died of a fever. When my daughter was born, it seemed a good idea to honour the memory of that child who spent a day with me once and whom I never forgot.”

“I think I'd better go home now, Miss Oakden. But thank you for the lemonade. And for showing me the frogs!”

“Goodbye, Tessa. Come and visit me again. I can't promise that the frogs will be here but I think they won't have gone far.”

TWENTY

1917

One of Victoria's leading architects, Tom Lamb, a former disciple of Francis Rattenbury, who regularly came to James McGregor's firm for tiles, saw Flora's water lilies. He admired the single tiles she had actually coloured and fired, which were given pride of place in the front window of the business; he wanted enough for a bathroom mural, his client having viewed the canvases of Monet's ponds and lilies on a trip to France before the war. He had been captivated by their qualities of light and reflection. Undeterred by the controversy surrounding the Impressionists as a group and Monet's work as perhaps the most significant example of the aesthetic, he had decided to bring something of it to the new home he was planning in Victoria's Rockland neighbourhood. He had bought a small Monet canvas, more an oil sketch, of water lilies and hoped to work the theme into his home.

“What do you think, Miss Oakden? Shall we tell Mr. Lamb yes? Of course we will not provide single tiles to be applied willy-nilly but an actual panel with an overall design. Your design.”

“I'd like to try, sir, if you think you can spare me from the regular work. This will take some plotting and working out. I can do some of the design sketches at home, of course, but I think I will need to spend time with Mr. Nagy figuring out the glazes and what is possible in terms of colour with the firings we will need to use for a bathroom tile.”

James McGregor smiled at Flora. “You underestimate your worth, my dear. The architect has seen your work and has asked for you specifically. I think it is safe to say that this will bring in more income to our firm and to you personally—we will talk bonuses at some point soon—than the regular work that I am happy to delay for a time. Please consider any time you spend on sketches to be part of your workday and leave me a record of your hours for payment. If you would like to come in a little later in the mornings, please do so, if you find it more congenial to sketch at home.”

“I'm grateful to you, Mr. McGregor. And very excited about this commission! I'll begin straight away, shall I?”

•  •  •

It was a challenge to think in terms of a piece larger than a single tile, a little daunting although she had been hoping for the opportunity to do something grand. She'd had this feeling before, anticipating a square of linen and a basket of silk or crewel yarn. Those results, while pleasing, had never been quite what she'd hoped for. A pillow cover, after all, with a blue lotus or a tangle of wildflowers, was not much to devote one's creative urges towards. But an entire ceramic panel! Flora completed many panels of sketches, contemplated them, then discarded each one in a frustrated moment. She went to the local library to look at reproductions of Monet's water lilies and fell in love with the dreamy washes of colour, the reflected images in water, the lovely arch of a bridge across the canvas. What a wonderful composition, she thought, the bridge framing the view below. She arranged the pages on the table top in the airy reading room of the Public Library on Yates Street, the smell of wood polish clean and bracing. This was the work of someone who had looked carefully at individual water lilies and then the effect they had massed and blooming profusely in still water, bright air. It was a new way of seeing, attempting to offer the impression of how the images were a process of emotional response to something beautiful, not just the things themselves. And how light filled each canvas! But they were conceived in a painter's mind, to be worked in paints, another thing altogether from the disciplines of clay and fire. With tile, she would have to think in terms of space and interruption, of trying to subordinate light to her own purposes.

Flora worked on a panel of one hundred and twenty tiles, ten wide, twelve in length, each the six inches by six inches standard pressed-clay biscuit, framed with a border of narrow edging tile. She planned the tiles to be tube-lined but saw an example in a journal of a British designer's unique slip-trail technique, using a finer applicator for the slip than the tube-lining tools she was accustomed to but still drawing with slip of a firm-enough consistency to serve as dams between the colour fields. She experimented until she was able to use it for the fine “drawing” she needed for her panel. The effect was more painterly, she thought. She consulted at length with her friend Mr. Nagy and his alchemical recipes for colour.

“I'll want the leaves to have really high gloss. I know that there's some range in the copper oxides. How can we predict just how green the glaze will be, and how bright?”

“Ahh, well, I will try to stabilize with tin. And there are the silicas. And a soda frit, we will try that.”

“What can we do to get a really milky white? Maybe with just a touch of yellow. Or cream really.”

And it would be feldspar, quartz, some whiting, talc. Or magnesium carbonate to make the finish silky.

She wanted richly coloured glazes, some of them heightened with gold lustre, particularly to detail the golden stigmas in the centres of the open blossoms, and a few of the lilies themselves, modelled on the native luteums.

Nagy made a number of small batches of glazing media, each carefully recorded—the amounts of cobalt and antimony, of copper oxide and cadmium, in concert with the kaolins and feldspars. Flora experimented with many small tiles that she painted with glaze, at varying concentrations of pigment to slip, and Nagy fired them and kept careful records of temperature, time, and condition of the kiln. The test tiles would come out and the two of them would examine them carefully, noting each tiny flaw—shivering, crawling, pitting, pinholing. Occasionally a tiny blister would form, or pocking. Nagy would mutter and make notes.

“Can we deepen this a little, Mr. Nagy?” she asked him when the dark blue was almost right but with a tendency to wash out at the borders of the tiles.

He nodded and went back to work, adjusting his formula, making the glaze more alkaline. The next attempt was perfect.

When she found not just the colour she wanted but also the depth—she wanted the water to hold light and reflect it, she wanted the lilies themselves to be saturated with their hues—then she kept those small practice tiles on her work table as an inspiration.

•  •  •

The trick was to get the pattern to flow naturally from one tile to the next, and in order to guard against the likelihood of at least one tile cracking as it was fired, she made three of each, painstakingly measuring and adjusting to ensure that each was the same. It might have been easier to stencil the tiles or hand-paint them rather than the trickier slip-trail method, but she wanted depth and a sense of a second dimension, the glazes pooling in their contained areas and echoing water or deep green leaf or the drenched crimson of
N. rubra
. The narrower framing tiles she worked with a lattice of brown-glazed bamboo, letting edges of it nudge into the main panels at intervals; this meant careful alignment of tiles with an allowance for their mortar, the ideal result being that the eye would not stop at the thin mortar line but see the whole panel as a framed tableau of highly glazed ceramic.

Everything she knew of water lilies went into the panel—their stately presence in the calm water, the delicate dragonflies stitching petal to leaf (the beautiful Persian blue for the body of the insect, a gauzy grey, highlighted with gold lustre, for the wings), a field in the distance green with summer. In the air, a haze of morning sunlight. She arranged a stand of bulrushes to one side of the panel, the leaves heavy with the weight of a yellow-headed blackbird and its nest, and the shadow of a fish under one polysepalum. When she was bent over her drawings and notes for glazes, when she was moving the implement containing the coloured slip across the surface of a tile, easing the line into a golden stamen, a shapely reed, a ripple in the surface of the still water, she was back in her childhood, walking the watermeadows with her father, observing the marshy pools, or else inspecting the tanks of overwintered hybrids, alert to the new growth of leaves, the emergence of a bud, rising from the water like the head of a small mammal, the stalk supple and hollow. And she was sitting on the porch of a rustic cabin, wrapped in a blanket, a mug of tea in her hands, watching the dragonflies at work on the surface of the lake, blackbirds trilling from the rushes. Her heart would fill as she worked, memory informing her sense of design, longing and loss enriching the colours, the juxtaposition of flowers and water, a dusting of pollen on the arch of a leaf in one corner.

Flora stood with the work crew in the newly plastered bathroom, deciding on the exact placement of her panel. The client, a pleasant man who had been more than delighted with the design and now with the tiles themselves—he had seen them arranged on a large work surface and had been full of praise for the execution of the design, the colours, the movement of lilies in the calm water—was also present. Earlier consultation with Tom Lamb, the architect, determined that the tiles were sufficiently light enough in weight that it was not necessary to apply them first to a thick support that would then be securely hung by means of screws. Instead the tiles were to be fixed directly to the wall with a highly adhesive mortar. The wall had been marked carefully with builder's chalk, a grid to indicate how the tiles would be fixed to the surface with mortar, each square on the marked grid corresponding with a tile, each numbered, and a paper plan to work from.

The bathroom was bright, high windows on two sides letting in natural light from the south and east; there were also electrical fixtures that had been specially made for the room—a central bronze flush-mounted cluster of water lily leaves with three open globes of bloom in creamy glass as well as two wall sconces, also bronze, the leaves curving upward, and two sunlit flowers glowing with their light.

“I don't think the men need our overseeing them, Miss Oakden. I have taken the liberty of arranging coffee in our bare conservatory if you will do me the honour of joining me.”

“How lovely, Mr. Graham. I would rather return here from time to time than watch the whole process. I confess it makes me nervous.” She didn't tell him about the replacement tiles should anything happen during the installation of these.

When they had finished their coffee, they returned to the bathroom, where almost all the tiles were now affixed to the wall. If Flora nearly closed her eyes and squinted, she could imagine them with the thin line of grout between each tile and the overall effect of the water lilies in the light-filled room. She was very pleased. As was the client. She returned in two days, after the mortar had set, to watch the careful application of the grout, and then several days later to see the finished panel, the tiles cleaned of the excess grout and glowing in their colours. It was even more beautiful than she had imagined it might be. The border worked perfectly, the knotted joints of bamboo entering the field of water at intervals, in a naturalistic way, the water lilies floating in their cobalt and emerald pools, light both contained and reflected in the glazes. The dragonfly on its leaf as though startled by the viewer, the blackbird among the rushes poised and alert. In the far distance, the fields of a lost childhood glimmered and shone.

This time the client had celebratory champagne so that a toast could be drunk to Flora, the work crew, and Tom Lamb, the architect, who had been so prescient as to recommend the work of a tile painter unknown to most of Victoria.

“I think we must also drink to Mr. Nagy, who was uncommonly patient with my constant demands for more blue, or less green, or might we begin again because I really am not quite happy with the pink.”

“Hear, hear.”

TWENTY-ONE

1962

On Saturday mornings, Tessa's father gave a weekly allowance of a dime to each of his children. With permission, they walked over to Miss Leeming's store on the corner of May Street and Moss Street. “Stay together,” their mother insisted. Along May Street, past the Moss Rocks with its forts and hideouts and the old peoples' home that was good for spying on, along past the modern houses clinging to the hill, and then across Moss Street to enter the store. Once inside, there was the dilemma: how to spend a precious dime and make it last the longest? For a nickel, you could get an ice cream cone, delicious in warm weather but gone so quickly! Miss Leeming always had a good selection of penny candy in her glass showcase and was patient with a child making the difficult decisions. Jawbreakers were the best value: five of them could be had for a penny. And if you could resist the temptation to bite into one and waited for it to dissolve in your mouth, it would last for ages until finally a small seed was revealed at its heart. Licorice whips that you could use as shoelaces (pinching off a tiny bit to eat); marshmallow bananas, sugary strawberries, mint leaves, jujubes, sour balls, red hots, even realistic packages of candy cigarettes with flaming tips of red sparkling sugar. The trick was to get the most candy of the kind you liked best—Tessa thought the mint leaves a waste because the flavour was nasty, nothing like the green taste of wild mint in her mouth as she lay on her stomach in damp grass—and then to take the small paper bag out to the sidewalk to compare its contents with the others.

But the others, her brothers and several neighbourhood kids who'd walked with them to Miss Leeming's store, had disappeared by the time Tessa had made her choice and so she had to walk home alone along May Street. At the house where the Hungarians lived, a house that opened directly onto the sidewalk without the buffer of a front lawn, only a brief step between door and street, she walked very quickly by, hoping the curtains wouldn't part, a hand wouldn't wave from the end of a worn sleeve. The sons of that household played with her brothers and they were okay, but the women were scary. There wasn't a father, just a mother, and a grandmother who couldn't really speak English. At a birthday party to which Tessa and her brothers had been invited, they'd sat around an oval table in a kitchen smelling of cabbage and strange spices.