The Underpainter (31 page)

“The light was muted,” she said, “fragile, as if the world were one large watercolour. Sometimes in the summer, between battles, we were given leave to go to Paris Plage for a swim and we would stay to watch the sunset. Then we would walk back over the dunes, which were rose-coloured and mauve. The clouds were sometimes yellow-coloured — like this.”

She held the pitcher out in front of her for a moment, then turned it over and read the bottom. “Sèvres,” she said. “George ought not to import it. It’s too costly. No one here will buy it.”

It was getting very late, was by now one o’clock in the morning. An uncomfortable silence followed the mention of
George’s name; it seemed we were both terribly aware of the time that had passed since his departure, though neither of us would say anything.

“I’m sorry,” I eventually muttered. “I’m sorry I brought her here. I didn’t know.”

“Neither did I.” Augusta laughed a little at this, then placed the Sèvres piece on the counter. “Though so much of everything,” she said, “is unexpected, isn’t it? Accidental — even if it’s hard to believe that. Still, it’s almost impossible to believe the opposite — that everything is planned. Overseas at the hospital so many of the men spoke of their wounds as if they were avoidable mistakes, talked about being ‘caught,’ as if the whole war were a natural phenomenon and if only you took proper care it wouldn’t harm you. A lot of them talked that way when they were dying … insisted that it was their fault, the result of some carelessness, some clumsiness on their part.” She paused. “But none of us wanted to acknowledge the random cruelty of the thing, did we? Otherwise …” She stopped speaking then and looked at me, remembering, I suppose, that I had experienced neither battles nor casualties.

I was becoming more and more conscious of the oddness of this situation, alone, as I was, past midnight, in an over-lit China Hall with this dark-haired, delicate-looking woman I barely knew. And she speaking of twenty years ago as if it were last week; her lover off with his recently rediscovered wife. I wondered about George, his anger, his insistence on delivering Vivian back to her world, a world he knew absolutely nothing about. I wanted him to come back, wanted him to
comfort this thin stranger who was pacing the boards of his store. I myself wanted to cross the lake, to return to my own country, my studio.

Augusta began to talk again. “Number One Canadian Hospital grew and grew,” she said, “all over the sand dunes. Battles and battles and battles. Huts and tents springing up like mushrooms. The graveyard doubling, then tripling in size.” She sat on the stepladder, looked at me and smiled. “I won the egg and spoon race,” she said, “and Maggie won the hundred-yard dash, on Easter day.”

I was mildly shocked to hear that they had played games in such a place and under such conditions, imagining, in my ignorance, that a kind of sobriety would have always been enforced in the face of repetitive tragedy. “Who was Maggie?” I asked.

“My friend, she was my best friend there.”

There were no passersby on the street at this hour, but if there had been, how strange this one lit window would have seemed to anyone looking in. Augusta, who had risen from the stepladder again, was walking back and forth. The china remained stupidly colourful in all the artificial light. Yet neither Augusta nor I would suggest that we move into the privacy of the house.

“Sometimes when things were really desperate, Maggie and I would serenade the patients. I suppose that’s what George remembered.” Augusta stood in the centre of the floor, folded her hands in front of her stomach, and sang, “There are rats, rats, as big as alley cats in the china dealer’s store.”

“Augusta,” I began, “he was young and —”

“You’d like a drink,” she cut me off. “I know you would and so would I. Wait here and I’ll fetch the scotch.”

I was exhausted. I wanted to leave the place. But failing that, she was right, I wanted a drink.

When Augusta was in the back rooms, I looked at the vase George had been painting before Vivian and I had so carelessly interrupted the work period he kept for himself at the end of each afternoon. I lifted the object from the turntable and rotated it in my hands. George had become much more skilful over the years, particularly when rendering trees. This forest scene, I couldn’t help but admit to myself, was beautifully composed, the foliage a sort of sweep of motion towards the right side of the oval that contained it, the clouds in the sky luminous and plentiful, yet not overstated. I thought of the day I had seen a younger, slimmer George packing away his brushes, one by one, just before he went to war, and I realized abruptly that he would have been already married at the time; married and then almost instantly abandoned. So this painting, these smooth forms, the brushes he handled with such care, would have been his only comfort, for I knew instinctively he had told no one of his humiliation. His secret marriage in the winter of 1914 would have been, to his parents and friends, simply a weekend away in the city. For Vivian, the whole catastrophe would have been merely an adventure. How many weeks would have passed before he permitted himself to accept the brutal truth that she would live the rest of her life without a backwards look? I remembered
how adamant he had been about not seeing her when he went overseas. There had been that anger then, that passion.

And now this fractional glance cast over her shoulder towards the past. And me, the stupid facilitator of the whole unfortunate reunion.

Augusta returned with the half-bottle of scotch. She took two Blue Willow teacups from a shelf on the opposite side of the room, brought them to the counter, poured a couple of inches in one of them, but left the other empty. Then she sat on the stepladder and looked down at her hands. I noticed that she wore no jewellery.

I heard a motor car in the distance and lifted my head to see yellow light entering into the otherwise empty street.

“He wont be back tonight,” Augusta said, observing the direction of my glance. “You can leave now if you like. He won’t be back.”

“He’ll be back soon,” I assured her. I glanced at my watch. “It won’t be long now.”

“He’s still in love with her.”

“Augusta,” I argued, “he could hardly wait to be rid of her. He was tremendously angry.”

“Nevertheless,” she said, “I saw his face. He won’t be back until morning.”

There was a listlessness about her I couldn’t interpret, a limpness that seemed to suggest she didn’t care much one way or the other.

“He’ll be back,” I said. “In the meantime, I want to stay. I want to explain.”

“What is there to explain?” Augusta was holding her empty cup, turning it around and around in her hands. “Everything seems perfectly clear,” she said. “Now” She placed the cup on the counter. “I knew he didn’t want marriage … or children, but I thought it was because of the war. That hideousness.” There was a vacancy in Augusta’s expression, but she was still smiling. “It is astonishing to me,” she said, “how a world — a complete social system — can be constructed and then dismantled, just like that.” She snapped her fingers in the space between us.

“Nothing has been dismantled,” I said, believing she was speaking about her liaison with George.

Augusta appeared not to be listening to me, but then she said, “That’s not what I mean. It’s those dunes, those huts, and all those men, all of us. The trains passing over the estuary on that bridge. Everything was assembled, then dismantled. Even the pain and the death, even that was constructed, or at least planned on paper. That place was the whole world once, and it’s all gone. Taken apart. If you went there now, there would be only a graveyard. Maggie and I knew everything about each other” She looked around the China Hall. “But she knows nothing about all this.”

“Your friend,” I said. “Are you in touch with her now?”

“She’s dead.” Augusta stood, walked behind the counter, opened the glass-fronted cabinet, and began to remove the china figurines that George kept there — certainly not Meissen or anything like that, but some of the things he felt ought to be protected, locked behind glass. She placed several of these pieces
one by one on the counter. A ballerina, a lady of the court, a top-hatted dandy, a shepherdess, and two china birds — pigeons. She was trembling slightly and I could see sweat glistening on the palms of her hands.

“Have a drink,” I said.

“She’s dead and I’m alive and that is the way it is. They bombed us, the patients too. They unravelled everything we had stitched together. I was out on the dunes at the time, but Maggie was in the nurses’ quarters. Only three of the nurses died. She was one of them.” Augusta glanced at me and smiled in that odd, distant way that I had noticed before. “The Americans had been in Europe for a year or so then. You had already arrived.”

“I never went to war.”

“I meant your country.”

To the tune of “Mademoiselle of Armetiers,” Augusta sang absently:

She told me that schoolchildren had chanted this taunt at recess while skipping rope, well into the early 1920s in Canada. I was reminded of Rockwell bellowing German lieder from the steps of his house overlooking Brigus Cove in Newfoundland, how he had been run off the island for that. And now this
woman twenty years later singing a variation of an old war song while small breakable figures stood lined up on a flat surface in front of her.

I saw that she was unconsciously separating the male and the female figures.

“How did you come to know him … George, I mean? How did you come to form this … partnership?”

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything.” Augusta reached for the bottle and poured another inch or so into my Blue Willow cup.

Hers remained empty.

There was nothing I could do but listen. George had not returned.

Augusta did not remember, would never remember, returning from overseas. It wasn’t until she had been back in Canada for a month or so that she was able to recall the war, Étaples, the broken men, the beautiful dunes she had described, her friend Maggie. She said it was as if she, who had been trained for it, had discovered a way to anesthetize herself, to put herself into a great darkness, a dreamless sleep. Her return to the world, she told me, was like a return from diethyl ether, but more gradual, more prolonged.

The first thing she became aware of was the colour green: flat, unobtrusive, all-pervasive. This brought with it, in time, memories: the shelf paper in her mother’s pantry, a pinafore she had worn as a child, and the soft pods of milkweed plants in the meadow. The green was a painted wall in the Ontario military
hospital in Davenport that had recently been adapted for the treatment of shell-shock victims.

Augusta was the only woman there. She was given a room of her own.

The night after the first bombing raid and Maggie’s death, everyone who could be moved slept in the scrub pine woods on the opposite side of the River Canche. Sometimes, even now, more than twenty years later, Augusta dreamed of moonlight and poplar trees, fire and noise, for the bombing had occurred again. On the third night of moonlight and bombs, poplars, sand, and fire, and surrounded by men who were howling in fear and anger, Augusta showed signs of neither fatigue nor fright. Instead, she spent the whole night quietly laughing, and talking to her brother Fred.

Fred was not there. He had been reported missing and presumed dead at Passchendaele.

“They didn’t know what to do with me,” she said. “Shell-shocked nursing sisters were a rarity. But I came from Northumberland County and they had opened the hospital by then. So I was brought here, to Davenport.” Augusta was silent for a moment, then she said, “There are none of us still there now, none of us left from the war. But the hospital remains. Those of us who didn’t recover were sent to asylums closer to our homes.” She smiled. “I suppose if I hadn’t recovered I’d still be there, at the neighbourhood funny farm. It is close, after all, to the place I used to call home.”

But she did recover, she assured me. Her first real perception, after the green, was of a series of shadows tumbling across her lap in a more or less irregular way. These dark shapes, she
carne to realize, were the shadows of pigeons. She had been taken by an orderly to one of the upper-storey screened porches on a warm day in early spring; a warm day, but one still cool enough that they had dressed her in a scarf and mittens and had placed a pale-blue blanket over her knees. She had seen the shadows on the blanket.

The pigeons were busily nesting in the eaves around the porch. Augusta had spoken the word “pigeon” aloud, and after that she had heard flies buzzing, drowsily coming to life after a winter sleep. She panicked then because she had no idea how long she had been gone. Her whole life might have passed — she felt the way she had imagined an old woman might feel — but when she removed one mitten she saw with relief that the skin on her hand was smooth, young.

The first few days of reawakening were really quite wonderful; the world was so fresh and new. “It was on parade,” she said, “and I was like an infant. A fir tree, a cloud reflected in the window across the street, a squirrel leaping from one branch to another — all of this delighted me. But, of course, this couldn’t last.”

She remembered that Fred was gone.

She remembered the war and her time at Étaples.

She remembered how Maggie died.

After she told me about Maggie’s death, I searched her face for signs of guilt. There was only grief there. While she wept I fumbled awkwardly around in my pockets for a handkerchief until I was thoroughly convinced I didn’t have one. Then Augusta said something I will never forget.

“What were any of us to do with the rest of our lives anyway? After all that. We were only in our early twenties and our lives were finished. And yet here we are, George and me, right in the middle of the aftermath. What makes it just continue and continue?”