Vivian straightened her spine. “Look,” she said, “I came here in good faith, to make amends, to explain.”
“To explain,” George repeated, his voice cold, hard.
“What the hell is going on here?” I said. “What is this?”
“You wait twenty-four years,” George said, ignoring me, “to explain. I don’t believe that’s why you’re here, Vivian. I can’t believe that’s why you’re here. And you,” he said, turning suddenly to me. “Is this your idea of a joke?”
I had never heard George speak like this to anyone. “ What’s the joke?” I wanted to know. “I have no idea what is going on here.”
“I didn’t tell him,” Vivian sighed. “I half supposed he knew. It just didn’t come up.”
“Knew what?” I looked at each of them in turn and asked again. “Knew what? Will somebody please tell me what’s going on here?”
By now the look on George’s face was frightening. But I’d seen the expression before, I realized, during dances at the pavilion. In that look all those years ago there had dwelt the man that George would become; the angry man sitting at this dining-room table. “Settle down,” I said to him. “We just dropped by to say hello. Vivian wanted to see Davenport again.”
George drew back from Vivian. “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus Christ.” He put his elbows on the table and covered his face with his hands.
He is hiding something terrible, I thought, something he isn’t able to remove from the expression on his face. Vivian placed one white hand on the dark wool of his sleeve. “I just couldn’t, George,” she said softly. “It was one night and then Mother took me away. And she was right. We were just children … I was only seventeen and you weren’t that much older that winter. I find it touching now that you felt you had to marry me in order to go to bed with me.” She laughed. “I certainly haven’t run into anyone as chivalrous since.”
George raised his head from his hands and looked at her. “Chivalrous,” he repeated, almost as if he had never heard the word before. “We were married,” he hissed. “We got married.”
I could see there were tears in his eyes, anguish on his face, and felt embarrassed.
“For one night,” Vivian said, as if correcting him. Then, when he looked stricken, she repeated, “I just couldn’t, George. I was already becoming someone else. You caught me just on the edge of that.”
“I suppose you want a divorce,” he said. “I suppose that’s why you’ve come.”
Vivian removed her hand from his arm, tossed her hair back and laughed. “Not particularly,” she said. “Why bother?”
It was then that I saw Augusta standing, shadowed, in the doorway. She was holding a tray on which there were cups, saucers, a coffee pot, and four pieces of cake. Framed by the moulding on the doorjamb, she resembled one of the women in Sargent’s full-length, life-sized portraits. She was that frozen, that still. She looked at me, she looked at what she was carrying in her hands, and, for some inexplicable reason, she looked out the side window where not even the wall of the neighbouring building was visible in the dark. Then she turned and quietly carried the tray back into the kitchen.
George had not seen her at all. He had never taken his eyes from Vivian’s face.
Augusta made her second entrance into the room five minutes later, after an excruciating period of silence. This time the clatter of the cups on the tray was loud enough that both George and Vivian turned to stare at her. I couldn’t bear to look at her face.
George stood up. “Vivian has to catch a train,” he said, “in Toronto. I’m going to drive her there.”
“But,” I said, “I was going to drive her back to —”
“No,” said George, “you told me you were spending the night. You’ll have enough driving to do tomorrow. I’ll take her there … for old time’s sake. You stay with Augusta.”
I had imagined that he wanted to be rid of her, as quickly as possible. “But isn’t there a train from Davenport?” I asked. “Couldn’t I drive her to the station here?”
Vivian rose slowly to her feet. She looked preoccupied, distracted, almost middle-aged. Her lipstick had worn off at least half an hour ago and she had uncharacteristically forgotten to reapply it, a strand of her elaborate hairdo had fallen from the pins. “I want George to drive me,” she said. “I have to catch the train from Toronto at midnight.”
“There is nothing she can take from here,” said George, “to get there in time.”
“She could take me,” I said in exasperation. “I don’t see why you should have to —”
“Leave it alone, Austin,” George said ominously.
And then there was Augusta, standing, utterly silent, just a few feet inside the door to the dining room.
“I don’t know what this means,” I said to her. “I don’t know why he’s behaving like this.”
“Let them go,” she said quietly. “Just let them go.”
The four of us walked, one after another, through the curtain that separated the China Hall from the rest of the house. Vivian had left her coat and her train case on the counter; this one small piece of luggage suggesting that all along she suspected she would be leaving without me.
Every move that George was making, each gesture — from the way he shook his coat up over his shoulders to the rough manner in which he thumped the cash register to remove some cash for the trip — suggested anger, implacability. Just before he reached the door he stopped suddenly, removed a painted teacup from one of the shelves, and thrust it towards my face. “At least I could have taken some nourishment from this,” he said. I could see that his hand was still shaking. “At least I could have filled it again and again with warmth. Can you say the same thing about anything you’ve done?”
“Leave him alone, George,” said Augusta. “This has nothing to do with him.”
He swung around then and looked at her, almost with shock, as if he hadn’t even known that she was there, as if this was all happening years ago, before they had met. His face softened, but he did not touch her. “Oh, Augusta,” he said. “Augusta.”
She would not look at him.
To Vivian he said, “That woman … Augusta … is the woman I’ve come to love.”
No one said anything. This confession seemed ludicrous, trite, as sentimental as the worst piece of painted china in the room. I felt humiliated for him. At that moment not one of us believed him.
George opened the door and Vivian walked out into the snow.
“I’ll be back in four hours,” he said.
He was speaking to Augusta or to me or perhaps to both of us. Or maybe he was talking to himself. As it was, the sentence hung in the air — a message that hadn’t quite reached its destination. The bell on the door rang gaily, inappropriately, for a long, long time after they had gone.
“I’d better go too,” I said to Augusta. “I’m sorry about all this.”
“No,” she said, “don’t go yet. I’d like someone to talk to while I wait.”
I had no wish to discuss the events that had just passed; George’s response to Vivian, the revelation of their ephemeral childhood marriage. I had already concluded that it had been, at least for Vivian, a whim, driven by her need to assert herself in the face of her domineering mother. It probably had very little to do with George, despite his undeniable passion, had been instead a contest between mother and daughter, one which the mother, as is so often the case, won in the end. It all seemed tawdry to me somehow, in ways that a full-fledged adulterous affair might not have. No, I did not want to talk about it — not at all.
As if she sensed this, Augusta clarified her request. “Listen,” she said, “I just want to tell someone the story of my life.”
And so … Night in the China Hall
We did not go back into the rooms of the house, the rooms behind the China Hall. We might have felt that that would have been too confining, too intimate. We were strangers to each other, really, and so I suppose we had no business being alone t
ogether at all. I thought Augusta might have felt that way anyway, and so I sat in the captain’s chair that George kept behind the counter and she perched on the small stepladder he used when he wanted to reach items beyond his grasp on the shelves. For the first time, I thought about how there were no real doors to George’s house, how all exits and entrances were made through this rococo world of tableware, this hall of commerce. And then I thought about the terms “exit” and “entrance” and how suitable they were for the theatricality of the evening, a theatricality I was beginning to believe that Vivian had planned from the moment we entered the taxi to go to her hotel.
Augusta began her story by telling me about her childhood on the farm, about her irrepressible pack of brothers, her stern father and practical mother. I was surprised and impressed by her attention to detail, how she could name and describe the tree nearest each of the windows of her girlhood home and how each of the baby boys had looked when he was six months old. She told me about Decoration Day in the village graveyard, about her Sunday-school cards, and her brief months of outdoor play. The snow house. The grey girl. Often she laughed — at herself, her father, her brothers. Hours passed while she explained this world to me, its rituals and eccentricities. Hours passed as she took me on this tour of her girlhood, her young womanhood. Yet I knew that the journey she was taking me on would eventually reach its destination and that that destination was going to be the war — the war and her alliance with George.
“There was always a fresh wind from the sea,” she said when it became evident that she was ready to reveal this part of her story.
Always a fresh wind in this place in France called Étaples. Thousands of Allied soldiers were billeted at one time or another in camps there. And thousands more were freighted in on hospital trains; these two cargoes passing each other on the tracks that led to and from the front. As it turned out, George had been one of the many with minor wounds who had spent only a day or so in the hospital before being sent back into action.
“George told me that you got to know him there,” I said.
“Only a little, not much,” she said. “Only enough to discover that we were from the same county. But I was a farm girl and he came from Davenport. I remembered him because of the China Hall, this China Hall. My grandmother’s good dishes had come from there — from here. Blue birds with pink ribbons in their beaks were painted on them, and as a child I would have loved that. The thought of those dishes there in Étaples made me briefly homesick, but just briefly. There was no time for homesickness or anything else. So many of them were dying right before our eyes, and there was nothing we could do.”
She told me then about her uniform. She still had one, she said, hanging in a closet somewhere, probably at the farm. It comprised a grey-blue worsted skirt, with a cotton blouse of the same colour. The latter garment had the word “Canada” embroidered on the shoulder. There had been a white apron, starched white cuffs, and a white veil. It sounded nunlike to me, and would have seemed slightly absurd in the chaos of a room filled with men who were ripped to pieces. Calm female donors kneeling at the edges of sixteenth-century altarpieces — altarpieces featuring horrifying last judgements — came to mind, but of course I didn’t mention this to her.
Augusta walked around the China Hall now as she talked. Everything about her was small and neat, her hands and shoulders, for instance. And then there were her eyes, large and dark in her pale, heart-shaped face. Sometimes she picked up a piece of Spode or Limoges for no apparent reason, took it on a tour of the room, then placed it carefully back on the shelf in the spot from which it came. True to her word, she didn’t make any reference to Vivian, didn’t mention her at all. It was at first as if Vivian had never made an entrance into the building, as if I had come to Davenport as I usually did, alone.
She spoke for some time about Étaples, describing its physical setting so vividly that now, years later, I can still picture it despite the fact that I’ve never been there and have no wish to conjure up the place.
I had been concerned with the granite shore of Lake Superior, had painted it for such a long time I became fascinated by the idea of the gentle approaches to water she described: estuaries, tidal flats, the soft curve of the dunes folding down to the sea. While Augusta talked about this landscape, she moved her hands and arms as if she were spellbound simply by the act of remembering it. She said that scrub pine grew there, and that in late spring quite suddenly the dunes would be covered by a profusion of wildflowers; poppies mostly and some blue-and-yellow flowers I’ve forgotten the name of.
“You have no idea what the light was like,” she said. “It was like nothing else I’ve ever seen”
When she spoke about the light, she was carrying a small porcelain pitcher in her hands, a pale-yellow vessel with gold-leaf bands on the handle and base.
“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 stepladde
r 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.
The Underpainter Page 23
