The Underpainter (17 page)

When George materialized again, flowers in his hands, the bowler hat on his head made him look like a vaudevillian comic. The child ran from his voice. She had lost a shoe; the going was difficult. Her skirt was in tatters, her breath laboured, but she wanted to be rid of George, rid of him. His voice was a scalpel tearing her throat, knives in her ears.

The first injection of the morphia, as they called it then, brought the world back so brutally, with such violence, that she seemed to ricochet off it as if someone had thrown her at a wall. George sat by the bed, his arm outstretched so that his hand was on her shoulder. “Augusta,” he said, “look at me.” But the room was so full of stable colour — so full of static furniture — that his breathing, his moving flesh could not hold her attention. Then, in an instant, both he and the furniture were gone, and the head of the child in Augusta’s mind bobbed against the chest of a true, familiar, and benign rescuer. Maggie’s remembered gift. A needle full of balm. She was exhausted, overcome. The pain, however, was far away, a creature in another part of the forest.

The child had been without her bonnet, George had told Augusta, had been wearing a blue plaid cotton frock. People in Augusta’s life wore hats and dresses. Girls most often ran about bare-headed, boys sometimes wore caps. The girl had been not quite six years old.

Augusta told me that when she was six years old her primary passion, apart from the love of an orderly house, had been Sunday-school cards, those coloured lithographic depictions of
Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden, Daniel braving the lions, a procession of animals entering the ark, David facing Goliath, his sling ready. She had kept them hidden in a white cardboard box at the back of her closet, added one to the stack each Sunday afternoon when she and her family returned from church. Sometimes there were meaningful landscapes — a desert, a mountain, a garden. When all other activities were forbidden on the Sabbath, Augusta could enter these, walk around in them. Her eagerness to attend Sunday school was admired by her parents, even to some extent by her brothers, but, she admitted to me, it was really the coloured card given to each child for attendance and punctuality that she was after, rather than the hymns, the moral lectures.

Eventually, like the unmoving furniture of the hospital room in which she lay, the story of lost Jane Eyre took on a static visual quality for Augusta, its episodes reminding her of the Bible cards, or of the stories told by the stained-glass windows in her church.

Little Jane had been without her bonnet. I painted the forgotten or abandoned object as it must have loomed in Augusta’s mind; huge, an ominous flower dark against a pale-blue wall, two ribbons reaching up towards the nail from which it hung. Another picture was superimposed over this one. In it, the child stood with her back to a blueberry picnic, her face directed towards the dusky forest that held all her future lostness, anticipation visible in every muscle of her miniature body. This, I decided, was the moment when the small girl from the early nineteenth century and the woman in the hospital bed a hundred years later would have joined, would have taken a position from
which they would never waver. They were going to be lost, missing, irreclaimable.

Augusta said that when she was feverish, or when, at the beginning of a four-hour period, the morphia was fresh in her bloodstream, the pale-green hospital walls broke into her concentration concerning the child. But after a day or two of this, she learned that by changing her position in the bed and closing her eyes she could fight her way back to the story.

She believed that at night the little girl would take shelter beneath a rocky overhang. Heather would spill in all directions away from this place where she crouched. But there was no heather in the forest. The child hugged a pine tree, pressed her cheek into rough bark. A curtain of rain fell over her — how lost she was, how dispossessed — her blue plaid frock darkened and clung.

There was a photograph somewhere of this Canadian Jane Eyre as an older woman. George had seen it. She was a distant relative of his, by marriage, and he told Augusta he believed he had met her once when he was very young, at a funeral, he thought, or some other occasion when fruitcake was being passed around. She was an old woman. Had she read the novel? Augusta wondered aloud. George thought not, they were not a novel-reading kind of family, though, oddly, in the photograph Jane had been holding a book. The Bible, more than likely. The others with her — probably her sisters — were holding china cups and saucers, and there was a teapot and a cream jug on the table they were
gathered around. All of them would have been middle-aged women with names changed by marriage. The china appeared to be Limoges and George wondered what became of it. It was the china that made the picture remain in his memory.

“Was there a lost quality about the old woman?” Augusta had asked once, when the morphia had made her able to speak.

“Not in the photo,” George had replied. “She looked very solid, matronly.”

I painted the fields and then the dark edge where the fields stopped and the forest began. Even when Augusta was a child, each Ontario town and village was likely to be near a forest — a forest where it was possible for a child to get lost. In spring, before the leaves thickened, you could see trilliums glowing like stars deep in the woods. Boys often claimed to have spent long hours surrounded by trees. Girls would rarely bother with the forest.

What lured this child into the riot of disordered growth that the virgin forest must have been at that time? For most of her then-short life the trees would have been a black or green smear in the distance, an army that the men of the community were constantly pushing back. As the child drew nearer the woods, there might have been a dark and light pattern that attracted her. After all, inside a forest, as Sara showed me, light is more tangible, more distinct, a foreign element fighting for space. Perhaps Jane went into the forest to touch the light and found herself, ironically, surrounded by darkness. For Augusta,
dreaming, drugged, this would have been an attractive, disturbing possibility. She would try to sort through the contradictions in this as the pain worsened. Augusta, turning on her side and looking out over the Toronto chimneys from the hospital window, would have thought about this, about her own snow house near the cedar bush of her own childhood. Often as the afternoon progressed, the pain in her throat returned and she longed for the four o’clock needle.

Once, years later, I found myself painting the four o’clock needle onto a canvas, but I scraped it off before it was finished, wanting not even the suggestion of its shape.

The first forested night, the child had seen a tree cracked open by lightning, or so she had said when she was rescued, and she had known then that this one blasted pine was all hers. She had slept near it on damp ground. She claimed that a large black dog had come and curled up at her back, keeping her warm until dawn. Augusta knew this black dog was exhaustion, followed by sleep, warm and panting. In the morning the animal had fled. The girl climbed the broken tree and saw women in white fanning out through a distant part of the forest. Searching for her. She tried to call, but her voice was gone. She remembered no words and even an attempt to remember caused the knife in her throat to twist.

On her second night in the woods, the child had slept in the fork the lightning had made in the tree. The dog leapt up beside her, she would later insist, appearing just as night fell. It was
June and everything was in full leaf so she would have had no awe-inspiring view of stars and sky. She had eaten nothing for thirty-six hours. Her hands and face were swollen with insect bites. Earlier in the day she had dipped her hands into a pool of stagnant water and, when she pulled them out, her wrists had been braceletted by leeches.

These would have merely caused small Jane Eyre some curiosity, though she would have been frightened by the blood that appeared when she pulled them from her skin.

Augusta confessed to me that she hadn’t wanted to be a nurse, but it was preferable to being a teacher of unruly boys like her brothers, or a stenographer in a dull man’s office — seemingly her only other alternatives. She said this in the China Hall decades after the war and years after her reintroduction, in a drab Toronto hospital, to the morphia. If she hadn’t been a nurse, she would never have gone overseas. She would never have met George. She and Maggie would never have walked in their grey-blue uniforms across the sand dunes at Étaples. Maggie, her friend, had chosen the profession because of a love of healing, because of a belief that almost anything could be fixed. Each night in the Toronto hospital, Maggie walked into Augusta’s dreams. “This will fix it,” she would say, her voice soft, soothing, the needle sparkling at the end of her hand.

Augusta had tried to talk to George about all of this when he visited her late one afternoon. “That war,” she had said weakly. “If that war hadn’t happened, or if I’d decided to
become a stenographer, we would never have met and I would never have met Maggie. I keep dreaming about her all the time.” She was not aware that she was weeping.

George patted her hand sympathetically, but he appeared odd to her, almost like a dull businessman whose stenographer she might have been.

He looked at her with great fondness. “You are better today,” he said.

“I’m better now. It was hell earlier.” Augusta recalled the vividness of her fantasy concerning the lost girl, the wet branches of the forest.

“I’ll have to be in the shop tomorrow,” George said, “but I’ll be back on the early train next Saturday. By then —”

“By then I may be dead.”

“You’re not going to die, Augusta.”

“I’m a nurse,” she snapped. “I know who is dying and who isn’t.”

“You’re not dying. You’ve had a rough go of it, but you’re not dying.”

I remember how my contemporaries hated the narrative in visual art. It was, according to them, the primrose path towards either genre painting or illustration and should be avoided, utterly. No fresco cycle, no nineteenth-century history painting could convince them otherwise. They scoffed at Giotto, Géricault, David, Goya, Ingres. The knowledge that I spent months painting the tale of the lost Jane Eyre would have greatly perplexed them.
What would they have made then of the two or three weeks when I attempted to submerge its details, its form?

After George left the room that day, as evening approached and the drug was beginning to wear off, the static pictures returned to Augusta. The child with flies covering her face. The child with a necklace of leeches causing the pain in her throat. Then, after the evening injection, images broke into narrative. It was the third day and the little girl had suddenly become pure, clear. Her muddy blue frock was gone and replaced by a bluish-grey garment. Her skin began to resemble a beautiful white fog. The white women were fanning out, away from her. They appeared to be emerging from her own body, their skirts and white aprons rippling in the breeze. The child stood in the groin of the charred tree as if she were fireweed, as if she had grown there. In the distance were the whistles, the ringing bells of the search party, but closer, more intimate — more familiar now — was the bird song and the rustling of small animals in the trees.

Augusta became completely convinced that Maggie was the night nurse, convinced that Maggie took the needle from her own arm with great tenderness to share it with her best friend. Long dark trains filled with the wounded were on the way, she said. Without the drug they would not have the strength for the agonizing work of the next few days. They wouldn’t have the strength or the courage to fix things, to make them better. Augusta and this girl — this best friend who stood by her bed, this lost child — they all wore the same blue-grey garments. They
all entered the same forests, shared the comfort of the needle, understood each other.

In the underpainting, there were three lost grey children dissolving into the organic matter surrounding them. They were all clothed alike, though the greyness of their skirts varied at times from manganese violet to graphite. Three separate children — but as I worked on the subsequent layers of the picture, they began to cancel one another out.

Lying on her back Augusta would feel the morphia enter her bloodstream. She would close her eyes, spread her fingers fanlike on the starched sheet. The room would close down and the forest would open up all around her. Maggie would summon the white women to lure the seekers into another part of the woods so that there would never be a miraculous recovery.

Small Jane Eyre, you understand, could have followed any creek, any stream in the vicinity towards Lake Ontario, towards Davenport and safety. But some lost girls never attempt to return. The dark dog of sleep comes to lie beside them and they embrace him, keep him close to their hearts. Then, if any other kind of rescuer appears, the loyal animal bites the stranger’s outstretched hand.

A
ll day long I’ve been thinking about Sara’s empty house, thinking about it as she undoubtedly knew that I would. I thought about it while I worked on the collection — I added a Staffordshire sheep today — I thought about it while I worked on the current painting, which is to be called
Sleeping in the Park
. I do not really dwell on the fact of the log structure’s emptiness. Instead, I find I can’t keep from visualizing the
countenance
of its emptiness.

This morning I was awakened by the sound of the garbage truck, the squealing of its brakes as it stopped to take away my meagre leavings: a few orange peels, an empty wine bottle, some bread crusts. Mrs. Boyle nags me constantly about the amount I eat; eats like a horse herself if I am to judge by her size. She is forever trying to push more groceries into my already overstocked shelves and more food into my uninterested stomach. But what is the point of nourishment when of necessity it creates so much clutter? My questionable works of art, and the
collection, both in their varying stages of completion, are disturbing enough when I face them each morning. Do I need the added complication of packages on shelves?