The Underpainter

by Jane Urquhart

  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:

  “The Yankees think they won the war, parlez vous.

  The Yankees think they won the war, parlez vous.

  The Yankees think they won the war,

  But we were there three years before.

  Inkey Dinkey, parlez vous.”

  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?”

  I had no answer for this.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “George and I were given leave to walk from the hospital down to the beach where you had your summer place, down to the lake.”

  “George visited you in the Davenport hospital. He told me something about carolling.”

  Augusta looked up abruptly from the figurines with which she was still toying. Her eyes were wide with surprise. “George had been in the hospital for eight months when I arrived.”

  “In the hospital? As a patient?”

  She nodded.

  I thought of my art-school days, how involved I had been with the bohemian life I had chosen, how I had assumed George was overseas during all that time. I had simply been too preoccupied to continue to write to him after the first year or so. “I never knew,” I said to Augusta. “He never told me.”

  “He was sent there after Passchendaele.”

  Augusta looked towards the dark, still-empty street. “Where Fred was lost; a battle with a beautiful name. But it wasn’t the battle, though I suppose those who invalided George thought it was. He told me that after the battle, in some village or other that had been left in ruins, he found a piece of porcelain: a figurative group. Children playing with birds near a tree. It was all smashed and he couldn’t find all of the pieces and he refused to leave until he did. When they tried to force him to leave, then …”

  I couldn’t understand it. There had been all this death and then this one broken piece of china.

  “He would hate it if he knew I was telling you this,” Augusta said. “But it was the end of the world for him, the smashed porcelain. He still had one of the children’s little white hands with him at the Davenport hospital. I wonder how he managed to keep it with him. It was only about this big.” Augusta raised her hand with thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. “I wonder where it is now, what ever became of it?” She twirled one figurine slowly on the counter. “That little hand was another of the first things that I saw, then George behind it, showing it to me. I didn’t remember him, of course, but he remembered me. Later I recalled that he was the Northumberland boy I had met in Étaples.”

  I reached for the bottle, secretly glancing at my watch as I did so.

  “He should have told me about her,” said Augusta. “He should have told me right away. We were that close.”

  “Perhaps it wasn’t important,” I said.

  Augusta kept twirling the shepherdess. “It was important,” she said.

  I had never even considered marriage, could not imagine domesticity, the contractual companion, household chores. I was dependent on being single, wanted to avoid the daily structure that a constant woman guaranteed. There was no real relevance to this past, this moment, that had so disturbed George. I was convinced of that. Too much had happened in the meantime for it to have really stuck. Painful at first to the boy he had been then, it could only have become, with time, a minor wound, a barely discernible scar. By now it could not possibly have damaged much more than his pride. I could not take it seriously. He was reacting to the surprise of Vivian’s sudden appearance, I decided. He would be over it in a week.

  “It was important,” Augusta repeated. “I saw his face.”

  George had been a pigeon dispatcher as part of his duties during the war. It had comforted him to hold the warm, smooth bellies of the birds in his hands, and it pleased him to watch them rise and carry something as beautifully constructed as a sentence above the turmoil of the battle. Language was never ordered, he claimed, in the front lines. Expression was limited to commands, curses, cries. So a sentence, regardless of its subject, a sentence being taken to its destination was, to his mind, a rare and wonderful event.

  At Passchendaele, however, the confusion was so desperate, the noise so deafening, that the birds would not fly, clung instead to the sleeves of his uniform or fluttered helplessly around the tank from which they were being released. It was then that George knew that language in all its forms was becoming irrelevant, that nothing in the mayhem around him could or should be documented.

  After the war, he often painted pigeons on china, and he encouraged children in the town to collect them as figurines. The birds were precious to George. There was a war memorial, he once told me, erected in honour of these feathered messengers, somewhere in Belgium. He himself had wanted to write a book entitled Birds in War, which would celebrate the role of the homing pigeon in the madness of the battles, but, as far as I knew, he had never started it.

  That night in the China Hall, Augusta told me that her first conversation with George in the Davenport hospital had involved homing pigeons; the same pigeons whose shadows she had seen on the blue blanket. Each day George came to the sun porch to watch the birds return to the eaves where they lived and to listen to the creatures speak to one another. Their song was full of pleasure, he informed Augusta, because they had come home, to domesticity, to familiarity. He who had fed them in cages, who had stroked their feathers and tied announcements and requests to their bodies, had never until his time in the hospital witnessed the moment of arrival. He said that in the sounds they made there was a pure expression of devotion and reunion. “They mate,” he told this woman who sat with the blue blanket over her lap, “for life”

  Augusta rose from the stepladder and placed the figurines and china birds back in the cupboard. Then she closed the door and turned the small brass key that always remained in the lock. “I don’t know why I took them out,” she said. “I don’t know what I wanted them for.”

  “For a while,” I told her, “I thought that Passchendaele was two words. ‘Passion’ and ‘dale.’”

  It was almost four o’clock in the morning, but it was winter and dawn was a long, long way off.

  “Did you know,” Augusta asked, “that there was a small girl who lived in Davenport in the 1820s whose name was Jane Eyre?”

  She spoke then about her tonsillectomy, about how she had hallucinated the girl’s story.

  “It was my first taste of the anesthetic that I had used so often on others. It might have caused a kind of madness in me. And me, a trained anesthetist.”

  It was not, however, her first taste of morphine.

  She confessed that she and her friend Maggie had “borrowed” the drug occasionally when they felt that otherwise they might collapse because of the fatigue. Some of the surgeons, she said, had used it as well, but no one ever spoke of this.

  I looked at Augusta now and saw that she was very pale.

  “Why don’t you lie down, go to bed?” I said. “I’ll wait for George.”

  I had at last given up the charade that he would, at any minute, appear at the door.

  “All this waiting,” Augusta said. “I feel as though I’ve always been waiting for something, but I’ve never known exactly what it was. Maybe it was tonight I was waiting for all along.”

  I could think of nothing to say to her.

  Augusta stood up and smoothed out the wrinkles on her dark skirt. “You should sleep too,” she said.

  “I’ll wait up for George.”

  She shrugged and turned towards the curtained door at the end of the shop. Then,
without looking at me, she asked, “What’s it like to be famous?”

  “It’s like nothing,” I said, knowing this to be an evasive answer.

  “Nothing,” she repeated without turning around. She stood absolutely still for a moment. Then suddenly she was beside me, her hand on my arm. She looked at me as if she were filled with curiosity, and I thought she might, at this late hour, begin to inquire into the facts of my own life. But, instead, she had one last thing to tell me.

  “When we were still patients and given leave to walk on the beach, do you know what George would say to me? He would say that there was no place in such a beautiful world for unhappiness such as ours.” She paused, ran her hands over the top of her head as if tidying her hair, then closed both fists. She lowered her arms until they were stiff and straight at her side, tilted her head back slightly as if she were about to take an oath. The tendons in her neck were taut, exposed. “But it was my unhappiness,” she declared passionately, “mine that there was no place for. In the end, I saw that our grief was self-contained, separate. Look at these unruined towns, these tree-lined streets, that lake out there with perfect flakes of snow falling on dark waves. There is no place at all for unhappiness such as mine in a world as beautiful as this. I belong with mud, stained bandages, moaning soldiers. I thought that George and I … that we shared the permanent misery of that war. But he is perfectly at home here. In the end, we each held our own unhappiness, as distant, as far away from the other as possible.”

  I didn’t understand, didn’t know what she was saying. “Augusta…” I began.

  But she had already disappeared. At the far end of the China Hall, a place of entrances and exits, the curtains fell easily back into place after Augusta had passed through them.

  I have almost always slept alone. A few nights here and there, yes, but even then the presence of another body often caused me to sleep fitfully and rise early. I have almost never, since early childhood, been awakened by another person. That morning I was awakened by George.