The Underpainter (34 page)

Cornwall, according to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, which I consulted after I was finished with the atlas, is a peninsula seventy-five miles long by forty-five miles wide. The climate is mild and by British standards quite sunny. In fact, its coast is often referred to as the English Riviera. Palm trees flourish there. None of this would have made much difference to Owen Pengelly, who spent most of his boyhood under the ocean in the hellish halls of the tin mines, learning in the darkness to love light.

In the beginning I had decided to work in Owen Pengelly’s room because of the view and for the light. Sara led me into her father’s room and watched as I looked out each of its three windows in turn. She removed the curtains. She removed the curtains and sunlight filled her father’s room.

Fifteen summers had passed. The last time I had seen her, Sara and I stood facing each other at opposite ends of Owen
Pengelly’s room, me leaning against the interior wall, she a dark figure framed by the south window. I had been walking back and forth over paint-spattered pine flooring. She had remained entirely still. As I approached the east window, the hotel at the Landing became larger. As I approached the west, the beach flung itself into my line of vision like a small white scythe. I did not want the details of these things, the hotel’s unpainted clapboard, the sand backed by dark pines, but they pressed themselves upon my attention as I spoke. I no longer wanted any details, the objects I had drawn so fastidiously: lamps and washstands, suspenders, boots and overalls, candleholding hat, her father’s stories, her mother’s death, the sharp sun in the sky above the lake, the grotesque gestures of north-shore pines. I no longer wanted sentences leading to narrative. Sara had taken me from the mine that we could still see bits of out the window all the way back to Cornish labyrinths under heaving oceans. I didn’t want sweating rock lit by lamplight, and I didn’t want exaggerated light raking the surfaces of objects locked in rooms.

I have neither the strength nor the shallowness …

I stopped pacing and leaned against the wall. “It has nothing to do with you, Sara. I’m not talking about character.”

“Fifteen years,” she said.

“Fifteen summers,” I corrected.

She stared hard at me then. The sunbursts in her eyes had been swallowed by her pupils. I was angered by the shame I felt under her scrutiny.

We were both silent.

“I’m sorry,” I finally said, though I wasn’t at all at the time. “I’m sorry, but this is an aesthetic not an emotional decision.”

Sara stood at the south window, blocking the view of the sun-drenched lake.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, with all of the coldness I had in me then. “I’ve painted you enough.”

I
left Davenport on the King’s Highway Number Two. I made a right turn at Highway 28. I drove north.

As I manoeuvred the Packard over icy highways, past frozen rivers, I concentrated on the wire I had sent, imagining its strange route across the ice of Thunder Bay to Silver Islet Landing — the place to which no roads led. I could see the telegraph office in Port Arthur, the yapping dogs of the mail sled, the arrival of the message, Sara opening the envelope, reading the words. Otherwise I focused on the weather. Sometimes the snow was so heavy I was completely disoriented. Had it not been for the white banks the plough had left on either side of the road I might have lost my way altogether, the way one loses the thread of a conversation late at night, or an idea that has come to one shortly after waking. I don’t remember where I slept at night, one northern town or another. Parry Sound or North Bay. Sudbury, perhaps. Wherever it was, I sent another telegram from there.

I checked into the Prince Arthur Hotel in Port Arthur on Wednesday evening, collapsed fully clothed onto the bed in a
room on the fifth floor, and slept for fourteen hours. The next morning I rose, opened the curtains, and was confronted by the piercing light of the sun on the snow-covered ice of Lake Superior. The cloudless sky. The blinding view. The huge man made of rock slumbered now on a smooth white sheet, not on the textured dark bed of glimmering water I remembered from my summer arrivals. A thin mist covered his body. Everything else was clear, precise, and painful to look at under that light that revealed, then blinded. Even when I turned my back to the bay the brilliance persisted, breaking through the large window and into the room. Nothing in my experience of the north shore had prepared me for this season’s lucidity. My age was written all over my face in a ruthless hotel mirror. I barely recognized my own hands.

After breakfast I walked on squeaking snow up and down Cumberland Street, in and out of stores until I came across a pair of binoculars in a junk shop. They were well worn, had belonged to a soldier of the Great War, and still housed in their leather case the original instructions for their use in that nightmare. But they were in perfect repair.

The shopkeeper told me that the temperature was thirty below zero. But the sun, the white blaze, was everywhere and so the chill seemed irrelevant. I wanted to believe in a new, clean light, wanted to believe that it would banish forever the dark rooms behind George’s China Hall. The examined past.

I returned to my room with the binoculars in a brown paper bag and began to wait.

Almost immediately I pulled the desk chair towards the window. I was determined to face that which was coming towards
me. My eyes watered constantly for the first hour, until finally I was able to look at the radiant bay without wincing or weeping, my face tightening under dried salt. I would gaze through the binoculars, bring the stone giant closer to me for four or five minutes, then let him recede again into the distance. I knew that when Sara appeared — I was certain she had received at least one of my telegrams and that she would appear — she would come into view from around the head of The Sleeping Giant.

Sometimes I read the Bible I had found in the desk drawer. I read the instructions in case of fire on the hotel door. I read the admonitions on the yellowed piece of paper in the binocular case. Every line seemed portentous, charged with meaning. “Try to avoid the reflection of enemy flares in the lenses.” “Proceed in an orderly fashion to the stairwell or the fire escape.” “How sweet are thy words unto my taste, yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth.” The rest of the time I looked out over Thunder Bay — either with the binoculars, or without.

Because I had spent only the summer months at Silver Islet, and had taken the steamer there as soon as I could after stepping from the train, I had come to know this bay only superficially during my trips back and forth over the water. Sara had taken me to the top of the stone giant I could now see from the window. She had forced me to look over its edge, thirteen hundred feet down to dark water, but I had resented the effort and rejected the view, though I had allowed some of the surrounding rocks and trees to leak into a painting I completed a few months later. My father, I recalled, had been impressed by the cliffs, the heights, the legend of the native warrior turned to stone for revealing the secret location of silver to the invading Europeans.
Drawn in his more reflective moments to the romantic side of this particular brand of capitalism, he was charmed in the end by the conviction that some extraordinary power had prevented his success. And this belief protected him, at least in his own eyes, from the banality of a lost fortune, a pointless endeavour. It was the shape of The Sleeping Giant I wanted to fit into one of my paintings; neither its natural nor its supernatural history interested me. My father and I both had exploited this landscape — differently, its true — but we had exploited it nevertheless.

By late afternoon I had stared out into the bay for such a long time I was beginning to suffer from snow blindness. I had seen clouds shaped like peninsulas float across the sky, blue shadows move under these across the white plain of the frozen lake. I had seen light unfurl like sheets of delicate yellow paper behind the slumbering stone man. But nothing in me wanted to reach for a pencil, a brush, a tube of colour. My hands held only the binoculars, the distances and intimacies they were creating. The long white surface. The reclining granite figure.

At 5:30, I left the hotel for the streets, where I bought a quart of whisky. I ate in the hotel dining room with my back to the bay. I returned to my room. The white had vanished, was replaced by a deep shade of blue. A star appeared over the ribcage of the stone man, then another near his foot. And another. My face, the bed, the dresser were reflected in the window. I closed the curtains and poured myself a drink.

I ask myself: What has your life been? You have used everything around you. And for what? An arrangement of colours on a flat
surface. “At least I could have taken nourishment from this,” George had shouted, holding a teacup at the end of the arm he thrust towards my face. “At least I could have filled it again and again with warmth.”

Shards all around him and both of them gone.

With the white hope out the window shadowed by night and the curtains closed, scenes from the previous Sunday presented themselves like photographs in a grim family album, everything fixed and still, terrible and permanent — the whisky cranking open the part of my brain where these tableaux were printed. Augusta’s pale face, George’s hand on her dark sleeve, the sound of breaking china, the inexplicable carefulness with which I swept the room the following morning. Vivian’s head thrown back in laughter, the dull eyes of the fox she wore around her neck, her black mink flung over the counter. And now the woody taste of the same scotch I drank that night present on my tongue.

I’d heard of men who had locked themselves into hotel rooms, drinking quart after quart of whisky, and were found by the house detective days later having choked to death on their own vomit. Now it came to mind that there would have been windows in the rooms where these tragedies took place, and beyond the windows a view. What had these desperate men looked at before the event they were courting overtook them? I wondered if men had died drunk in this hotel, whether their last registered image was that of the stone man sleeping or whether they were on the other side, the city side, where the colourful mass of clapboard buildings climbed up the hill.
Brilliancy is moving towards colour, not towards white
.

I’d heard of men who shot themselves in hotel rooms. I poured myself another drink.

I awoke with the buzz in my head of a mild hangover. I washed, ordered breakfast, and ate without opening the curtains. Then I placed the chair in the correct position, reached for the binoculars, and took up my post. Again the dazzle, the watering eyes, the ice and sky and sun. No misty bedspread for the giant. No clouds at all.

She would come today.

There were three or four ice fishermen a hundred yards or so off the ends of the piers. One had miraculously built a hut early in the morning while I was still sleeping. The others were unsheltered. I tried to compare their patience to my own but knew I had failed when the chambermaid knocked and I was forced to stand in the dark hall while she moved a carpet sweeper back and forth across the room. I wanted her out of there. I wanted to be at the window, alone, when Sara rounded Thunder Cape. I wanted to see her sixteen miles away, then twelve, then eight…. She would come today and I would come to love her. My atonement would be in that love. Augusta, George, would be vindicated. Every broken piece of porcelain would be mended, the China Hall swept clean. I would see Sara’s eyes when I closed my own, not George’s, not Augusta’s.

“Feel the dignity of a child,” Robert H. had once said. “It is a dignity of innocence.” Sara was the only innocent person I
knew. There had never been, would never be, children in my life. She, her clarity and lightness, would be a kind of childhood, would allow the atmosphere of childhood, at least, to enter my rock heart. In that wild, uncultivated place she would be like a bush garden.

In the end, I was, of course, unable to see her from sixteen miles away. Not even the binoculars could accomplish that. She would have been ten miles from Port Arthur, I suppose, when she appeared in the centre of the circle the lens made — a black dot on that vast white sheet. She had to be far enough out on the bay to become visible. She had to be completely surrounded by white. Otherwise she simply disappeared against the landscape of The Sleeping Giant. Now she was like a fugitive cell that had broken loose from the stone architecture of his body. A grain of sand. I was relieved by my belief in her.

An hour later I could see her with the naked eye. “The naked eye,” I said aloud, testing the phrase. The eye unassisted, uncovered. But it made no difference; she was a tiny spot on the retina. It would still be hours until her arrival. How small and insignificant she looked. How unprotected, exposed.

I watched her inch towards me for the next hour. The wind had picked up and often she would vanish into white. But always she re-emerged unchanged; small and far away. I knew the limbs that crossed the ice so well I could have painted them blindfolded. I had seen, and recorded, the changes time had made
from year to year. No one, I was certain, had ever scrutinized Sara with such voracious intimacy or, I could admit now, with such coldness.