The Underpainter

by Jane Urquhart

  INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR

  The Underpainter

  “Urquhart is one of Canada’s most accomplished and interesting writers.”

  — Edmonton Journal

  “Original and dazzling, radiant and quietly perceptive, Urquhart’s new novel delights the senses even as it astonishes the mind….”

  — London Free Press

  “A lyrical novel with a deep, unsentimental connection to ordinary life…. [Urquhart’s] language is vivid enough to take your breath away.”

  — Boston Globe

  “Urquhart explores the ability to love and the failure to love; the visual pictures and images of humanity beneath the surfaces on which art is created. The Underpainter is a savory read.”

  — Flare

  “Urquhart’s evocation of time and place shimmers with clarity….”

  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Urquhart has written a novel whose narrative power matches her delicate artistry with words … lodges in the mind and heart forever.”

  — Montreal Gazette

  “Richly textured prose, and an intricate, many layered structure.”

  — Sunday Times (U.K.)

  “A rich, multi-faceted story, skillfully told”

  — San Francisco Chronicle

  “The Underpainter has the force of an idea whose time has come….”

  — Globe and Mail

  “Her writing shimmers with lyric sensuality.”

  — Vancouver Sun

  “It is the sadness of stoic self-denial, of huge sacrifices made for questionable ends, of small and large renunciations, that haunts our collective past and rises so powerfully out of the pages of this novel.”

  — Toronto Star

  “Elegant and unpretentious … an absorbing, beautifully cadenced novel.”

  — Daily Telegraph (U.K.)

  “Urquhart writes forcefully; her imagery is vivid, and her evocation of time and place is accomplished and assured.”

  — Times Literary Supplement (U.K.)

  “Urquhart… is a skilled word-painter.”

  — Washington Post Book World

  “Brave, intelligent and vivid.”

  — Literary Review (U.K.)

  “The Underpainter is a sad, subtle work that continues [Urquhart’s] tradition as one of Canada’s finest contemporary authors.”

  — Winnipeg Free Press

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  International Acclaim For The Underpainter

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part 1: THE LAKE EFFECT

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part 2: NIGHT IN THE CHINA HALL

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Part 3: ONTARIO LAKE SCENERY

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Tony Urquhart,

  whose spirit is visible in art, in life

  For Amy Quinn,

  who discovered the letters, and knew

  For Ellen Seligman,

  with affection and gratitude

  “Although an even north light is preferable in the greater number of cases, direct bright sunlight is sometimes useful in examining blacks and other very dark colours.”

  — RALPH MAYER,

  The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques

  The woman is standing near the window in the downstairs front room of a log house on the north shore of Lake Superior.

  It is the winter of 1937.

  She is wearing a grey tweed skirt and a checked woollen bush jacket. Her dark-blonde hair is pulled back from her face and hangs in a thick braid almost to her waist. Despite the fact that she has kept her fires — both in the Quebec heater in this room and in the stove in the kitchen — burning all night, it is cold enough that she can see her breath. In her hand she holds an unopened envelope with the words “Canadian National Telegram” printed on it. Her head is bent and her shoulders are slightly stooped as she stares at this folded and glued piece of paper.

  To the left and to the right of the house in which she stands lies a series of similar homes built for the miners who arrived in this place in the 1860s. Since the penultimate closure of the silver mine in 1884, all but a few of these dwellings are abandoned in winter. In recent decades they have been used as summer residences only by certain adventurous families from the small twin cities of Port Arthur and Fort William, which are situated sixteen miles to the west but cannot be seen from here because a limb of the huge, human-shaped peninsula of rock, known as The Sleeping Giant, hides them from view.

  This unconscious granite figure is famous. In the summer, tourists driving the gorgeous north shore of Lake Superior stop their cars and stare across Thunder Bay at his reclining body. Passengers who have travelled on the Trans-Canada train can bring his physique to mind long after mountains and prairies have faded from memory. He is twenty miles long, this person made from northern landscape, and, in 1937, no roads as yet have scarred his skin. According to the Ojibway, who have inhabited this region for hundreds of years, he was turned to stone as punishment for revealing the secret location of silver to white men greedy enough to demand the information. He will lie forever obdurate, unyielding, stretched across the bay.

  The little settlement of Silver Islet Landing, where the woman lives, occupies a site on his anatomy sometimes referred to as “the toe of the giant.”

  During the brief summer season, bonfires bloom nightly on the small offshore islands she can see from her front windows. Swimmers dive from the dock near the large clapboard building that acts as a hotel and a store. Steamers, which provide the only transportation to the spot, ply back and forth from Port Arthur; the narrow track near the shore is filled with running children. Occasionally games and entertainments take place on the sand beach at the end of the lane. There is often laughter, and sometimes singing.

  By mid-September, stillness and quiet are reinstated, the summer population having returned to the schools and industries of daily life. One old government official, who is responsible for the maintenance of two lighthouses and for the sporadic winter postal deliveries, remains in his house near the dock. And the woman remains in her cabin a little farther down the shore. By the time the world begins to frost, and then to freeze, even the memory of the summer activity seems unreal, as if it had been a mere performance and she a witness — not even a member of the audience but a stranger in the wings.

  When these houses were built, almost eighty years before, the need for shelter was so pressing that the mining company was forced to use unseasoned timber, which had warped in odd directions over the course of the first year. On frigid January mornings, the miners, their wives and children, had awakened to the sight of miniature snowdrifts on the floor and ragged open spaces between the logs. The gaps were swiftly filled with anything that came to hand — socks, knitted hats, treasured table linen from the Old Country. Eventually the houses gave up the struggle, settled, and became stable. Only then were the upstairs walls plaste
red and whitewashed. On the ground storey the logs remained — and still remain — exposed in the parlour and the kitchen.

  Once when the woman was driving a nail between the timbers to hang a picture that I had given her — a picture of herself in her summer garden — a chunk of caulking gave way and an embroidered handkerchief, edged in lace, fell like a message out of the wall.

  She is standing near the window beside a rough log wall. The unopened telegram in her hand appears to have already darkened with time, darkened in comparison to the white snow around her house, the brightness of sun that enters the room.

  She pushes a tendril of hair behind her ear, a strand that has escaped the braid. This strand contains some threads of grey. She stares at the envelope, then lifts her head to watch the departure of the mail sled, its driver and team of noisy dogs, to watch it glide over the snow-covered ice and disappear behind Burnt Island. For several minutes she wants to refuse the message she has not yet read. The world around her is quiet and fixed, frozen and beautiful. She does not want the scene disturbed. Even the tracks of the sled irritate her; they have scarred the white surface, they have soiled the day.

  The woman’s winters are long and bright and silent. Just before nightfall the landscape blossoms into various shades of blue. Few events interrupt the tranquillity; a storm, maybe, or the delivery of supplies, or her own infrequent journeys over ice, around Thunder Cape, into Port Arthur. She has come to rely on the predictability of the season, its lengthiness, its cold. She doubts she would be able to understand a life without it.

  She crosses the room and lifts the lid of the Quebec heater, which she holds at the end of the lever for some time as if not quite certain why she has taken this action. For a moment it looks as if she will toss the telegram, unread, into the fire. But this is not what she wants. When she replaces the lid, there is the sound of cast iron striking cast iron, a sound so familiar to her she barely hears it.

  Sitting on the chair nearest the stove’s heat, she carefully opens the envelope. It falls to her lap. She reads the contents.

  Almost immediately she decides to leave. In her father’s long-ago abandoned room upstairs, she takes his ancient mining clothes from the closet, shakes the dust from the overalls, and removes her jacket and skirt. She covers her feet in several layers of socks and steps into his boots, his overalls, then puts on his large down-filled parka. This is the costume she occasionally wears when she is outdoors in winter, though she knows it to be somewhat ridiculous on the body of a woman entering middle age. Outside her door she reaches for the skis leaning against the outer log wall, places them side by side on the paper-dry snow, tightens the leather straps over her father’s boots, and sets out.

  Just before she passes, like the mail sled an hour ago, between the mainland and Burnt Island, she turns to look back at the shore, back at the house she is leaving behind her. There is no differentiation, in this season, between water and land. A delicate wisp of smoke is escaping from her chimney, though she has added no wood at all to her fire this morning.

  It is six and a half miles to Thunder Cape, a large spearhead of land rising thirteen hundred feet and clearly visible across the frozen bay. She will spend the night with the couple that keeps the lighthouse there. Tomorrow she will ski sixteen miles across Thunder Bay to the modest lakehead city of Port Arthur.

  All of this is a very long time ago now, forty years at least. A very long time ago and purely hypothetical on my part. I did not see her leave her house, ski towards Thunder Cape, turn to watch the thin trail of smoke emerge from her chimney. I did not see her shake the dust off of her father’s underground clothes or strap the skis to his large boots.

  The telegram she carries in her pocket, or has left behind on the kitchen table, or has thrown into the trash, the telegram I never saw but know for certain she received and read, has told her that I, Austin Fraser, am waiting in Port Arthur, in a fifth-floor hotel room, hours of distance away.

  1

  THE LAKE EFFECT

  Each afternoon now, when I have finished with my work, memory beckons me into the street, insists that I walk with her in the snow. These are the things she wants to see: the cloud of my own warm breath obscuring my face, my uncertain steps, the small round wounds my steel-pointed cane makes as it impales the dangerous ice. She wants me moving slowly, feebly, around and around the one residential city block that has become my shrunken world. She wants to see me circling in the cold, going nowhere.

  Even though there is nothing in me that wants to court the past, it fills my mind, enters my painting. The tock tock of my cane striking ice is like the noise that beads make as they click together on a string. It is the sound of memory at work, creating a necklace of narrative.

  There is nothing in passion, really, except the sense that one should open one’s self to it. In many ways it can be as cold as anything else. Years ago in Silver Islet I would leave the painting I was working on in the upstairs room of Sara’s house, leave it facing the window, hoping that overnight some of the Great Lake Superior might move into it, or some of Sara’s dreams, though she slept in the back room and her window faced the rock, the cliff. Perhaps something of what remained of the offshore mine might make itself felt on the canvas. At the time, I was travelling in my experience along a cusp of acceptance. Being not yet known to myself or others, I continued to be interested in the figure and in landscape. I had been fascinated, you see, by the actuality of the north; its rocks and trees and water. Interested in Sara, the woman who lived there. It was during what would be my final summer at Silver Islet Landing that a stylistic change caught my mind, pulling me from realism towards the concept of formal ambiguity. This freed me, or so I thought, because, unlike a figure or a landscape, a concept can be carried anywhere. So I gathered up the embryo of this idea, along with my clothes and brushes and canvases, and took it with me first to New York and then some years later I took it here, to this vast modern house in Rochester, the city of my birth.

  I never saw Sara again after that — except from a very great distance — which may explain why part of me still feels it is possible that she might want to insinuate herself back into my life, my painting. But what an addled old man I am to let such foolishness enter my thoughts. The woman who comes to mind is wearing that short-sleeved house dress with the buttons down the front and the pockets over the hips. Even in the dead of winter I see her with her legs bare and her dark-blonde hair hanging in a thick braid down her back. And — even more impossible — she is only thirty-five years old, whereas Sara would have been in her seventies. And hairstyles, clothing, fashion have changed so completely.

  I myself have not for a long time been prey to the whims of fashion, although admittedly it had some influence over me in the past. Political fashion, aesthetic fashion, spiritual fashion, even, I suspect, emotional fashion; that sense that one should let whatever comes along seize the heart.

  The fashionable modernist architect who built the cavernous house in which I live, for instance, believed that absolutely nothing should be added to indoor spaces, nothing at all except light. He wanted everything else kept out: furniture, colour, paintings, fabrics — and even his beloved light was allowed entrance only after it had passed through glass. How he would have hated my shelves of painted china, insisting that all this clutter interfered with the “idea” of his work. He was a great advocate of ideas. I live in the most eastern of his long, spare, prairie-style houses. It suits me very well.

  I received the news from Canada last week. Special delivery. The mailman must have knocked — there is no buzzer — he must have knocked, received no answer, slipped the letter through the slot. I am very hard of hearing now, and have few visitors, so I am not attentive to the possibility of arrivals at my door. Who knows how long the cream-coloured envelope had been on the floor of my vestibule before my housekeeper, the ever-present, irrepressible Mrs. Boyle, emerged from the basement laundry room and picked it up? She had handed me the ordinary mail earli
er in the day and I had dealt with it as I usually do by consigning most of it to the trash after setting aside the bills, which I always send on to the accountant. She flung the envelope in question down on the desk that occupies one corner of my studio. “Special delivery,” she said.

  I crossed the room. I unfolded the letter, which told me of Sara’s death and the astonishing news that she had left the house to me.

  This small log house would have been Sara’s only possession. It seemed impossible that anybody else, even me — no, particularly me — could take ownership. I wanted nothing to do with it.

  Mrs. Boyle had been hovering nearby, pretending to dust but anxious no doubt for information I had no intention of giving her. “You’ve gone all ghastly,” she said. “What on earth is the matter?” I assured her that I had certainly not “gone all ghastly,” that I had simply been surprised by a legal letter concerning some property near Port Arthur, a small city on the north shore of the Great Lake Superior.

  “I have absolutely nothing at all to do with it now,” I said. “I haven’t been anywhere near the place for over forty years.”

  I rose from the desk, left the studio, and walked through the house to the vestibule. From the closet there I removed my hat, coat, scarf, and cane. Then I sat down on the bench near the door and struggled with my galoshes — I am eighty-three years old, and bending in any direction has become a problem.

  As I unbolted the heavy front door, I heard Mrs. Boyle shouting at me from the kitchen. Something about cold and wind. I pretended not to hear her and stepped outside.

  The first time I saw Sara she was holding a large broom, sweeping, her body twisting around the object as if she were dancing with it. Later I drew the broom with great care, great precision, right down to the last bristle. I drew even the inconsequential rose on the label that was wrapped around the base of the handle. Sara’s back was to me — I hadn’t yet seen her face — and the curve of her spine was visible through her cotton uniform. She was sweeping the verandah of the hotel that had once housed businessmen and speculators from American cities, but that now catered to tourists who wanted the view from Lake Superior’s north shore. She worked, in season, at the hotel and lived year-round in the small log house that her father had left her.