The Underpainter (24 page)

I thought this was a mistake. I believed in distance, believed in stepping back from the canvas in order to see it better. I believed that no one should ever feel ambushed by the subject of a painting.

H
ere is something Augusta told me, that night in the China Hall, about the war.

There was always a fresh wind from the sea around Number One Canadian Hospital in Étaples, she said. A fresh wind from the sea, even in the fog, so that she couldn’t understand why the greyness persisted, why it didn’t just blow away. On clear days the dunes changed constantly under the moving sun. Once when she was sitting on the back steps of one of the wards she watched a red tide climb a distant sand hill — poppies coming into first flower under the touch of daylight. It was dawn, after a long night during which she had anesthetized five soldiers for amputations. Two had died. The poppies were like a stain on the hillside, she said, like blood.

Behind the hill there was a huge half-circle of sand with an acre of flat space at its foot that stubbornly held its shape despite the inconstancy of the surrounding dunes. The French
called it the amphitheatre and maintained it had been there since Roman times. Here the staff played baseball and soccer and held Dominion Day celebrations on July 1, performing skits and singing songs about a country Augusta could barely remember, the world of the hospital having become the only nation she felt any allegiance to. It was here, later in the war, that she would come to know Maggie.

Nothing was fixed or permanent in that geography, Augusta said. The wind moved in from the sea and changed the shape of the acres of dunes that surrounded the hospital and base camps. Soldiers departed for the trenches and returned, ruined, on long hospital trains that unloaded their freight into the wards. The men were treated. Some died, some were moved to England or Canada, depending on their wounds. Many were patched and sent back to the front. The medical staff too was often being posted to new locations: a manor house in England, a large hotel on an empty beach, something unimaginable in Italy or Greece. Encounters were brief; brutal or tender, gone like dreams in the morning. The King visited the hospital wards once and was forgotten the next day, another face in an ever-changing sea of male faces. Aviators dropped messages from planes for nurses who had left Étaples months before. “God and the Hun willing,” one of the letters read, “we’ll meet again someday.”

Augusta had been in the Number One Canadian Hospital longer than most, for a full year by the time she met Maggie. Before that there had been Salonica, then Kent, then Boulogne. She kept odd memories from each posting, memories that mostly concerned her own person, as if her body were the
provider of the only reliable information. She had combed lice from her hair in Salonica, had recovered from diphtheria in Boulogne, and it was here, in Étaples, that she had pierced her own arm with a needle in order to fight the fatigue. Only once, she whispered to herself, only once or twice, she said, recalling the flood of calm, of comfort, which followed the injection.

In late November of 1917, Augusta began to visit the buried amphitheatre in the dunes as often as she could manage it. There were few hours of daylight in that season and the rain was almost unceasing, but none of that mattered to her. Weather would not stop her, work sometimes did, though even when the casualties were pouring in from the front she was frequently able to steal a half-hour — sometimes in the middle of the night — to climb the sand hills behind the hospital and to settle herself down for a few moments beside the scrub pines that clung to the edge of the circular ridge. The amphitheatre was definitely there, she decided, sleeping under the sand. It would always be there; it had to be. She had no desire to unearth it, no desire for proof The shape it described in the sand that protected the territory of the arena below, her own conviction, provided more certitude than she had witnessed anywhere in recent times. Its constancy brought comfort to her.

Fred had been reported missing at Passchendaele. Even in death there was no certainty, though God knows Augusta had seen it close the faces of enough young people to believe in its finality. She would awaken in the nurses quarters each day and whisper over and over, “Fred is dead, no, Fred is not dead.”

She hadn’t seen her brother for three years. When she tried to remember the shape of his eyes, his hands, they became
confused with the hands and eyes of the thousands of men over whose beds she had bent under the billowing ceilings of tents or beside the cold wooden walls of huts. Early in the war, when she had been told that her brother Charlie had died of meningitis at the training camp on Salisbury Plain, she had dreamed of him each night for months and had awakened sobbing each morning. But she could not call up Fred’s face, hear his quiet laugh. Because her dreams now all took place in the wards, they were filled instead with grey blankets and soiled linen. Her mind seemed incapable of playing with other images. Fred was dead. Fred was not dead. The amphitheatre would be there, she decided, under the sand. Forever.

She walked to this spot each day she could, through sandstorms, through thunderstorms, through snowstorms. By February of 1918, the weather was uncharacteristically bright and calm; the hospital itself, when she turned to look back at it, appearing in this clarity almost permanent, huts having by now replaced almost all of the original tents. It was as if, Augusta mused, a tribe of nomadic hunters and gatherers had progressed to a fixed agrarian society — except for the fact that nothing would grow on these dunes, and the population was constantly changing, and civilization still slept in its stone solidity beneath the surface, tens of feet down.

March was the time of the most disorienting fogs, fogs so thick they obliterated the views from the windows of the wards. But by then Augusta could have walked to the amphitheatre in her sleep, she had made the trek so often. She liked the indeterminate quality of these grey days, enjoyed the sound of trains she wasn’t able to see rattling on the bridge that crossed the
River Canche and the odd voice reaching her from the hospital below, or, by contrast, no noise at all except that of the wind from the sea, which should have blown away the fog.

It was in early March, in the midst of a particularly dense fog and after she had been sitting on the sloping sand for twenty minutes or so, that Augusta became aware of unfamiliar sounds — scratching, and a slight fluttering — somewhere quite near her at the amphitheatre. She straightened her spine and listened more carefully. Then she relaxed again.

“Birds,” she said. She told me she often spoke aloud when she was alone at the amphitheatre, liking the reassuring sound of her own voice when it was meant for no one but herself. “Birds,” she repeated. “Birds in the fog.”

The girls voice surprised her. “Hello,” it said. “Hello, are you there?”

Augusta did not reply right away. She was a little shocked by what she felt to be an invasion of an exclusive territory. Having never met anyone out on the dunes before, except at planned events, she wasn’t quite sure whether the voice was intended for her. “Here,” she eventually said. “I’m over here beside the pines”

“I can’t see you,” the voice said. “So keep speaking until I find you.”

A command. Augusta swallowed, then paused. “What shall I say?” she asked.

“Sing the ‘Marseillaise.’”

A hoot of laughter.

“‘The Maple Leaf Forever’ then.”

“No,” said Augusta. “I can’t bear that. No maple leaf is ever forever.”

“‘The thistle, shamrock, rose entwined … the maple leaf forever.’” The girl’s voice was strong and clear now.

“I can’t bear songs with dauntless heroes in them,” said Augusta. She thought for a moment. “‘In days of yore, from Britain’s shore, Wolfe the dauntless hero came,’” she sang, remembering how she and her twenty classmates had sung the patriotic Canadian song at the village school whenever there were pageants or Christmas plays. How many of these children were dead now, or wounded? “‘And planted firm Britannia’s flag on Canada’s fair domain,’” she continued, recalling the now suddenly old-fashioned colonial words. “What tosh!” she added, though she was speaking mostly to herself.

“
Britannia est magna insula,”
said the voice. An interval, then, “But it isn’t really, is it? Such a small place for so much trouble.”

“Trouble,” said Augusta bitterly. “Yes.”

“I can almost see you.” The girl emerged from the fog. “There, now I can see you.” She smiled. Radiantly.

The girl was thin, with extremely fair hair, and was, Augusta decided, quite beautiful in a fragile way. She had taken off her nursing veil, probably once she began to walk out on the dunes, and now, because of the wind, it looked like a large white bird fluttering at the end of her hand. She stood looking down at Augusta and wrapping the white cloth around and around her wrist like a bandage. Then, abruptly, she sat down on the sand. “I’m Maggie Pierce.”

Augusta was thinking, I know her. “Augusta Moffat,” she said. And then, “Have I seen you before?”

“Maybe, probably not. I’ve only been here for two days … transferred from Boulogne. But I saw you, from a distance. You
were on your way out here when I first arrived. I thought. Wherever she’s going… away from the hospital… it will be the perfect place to write my letters.” She placed her hand on some bright-blue notepaper folded and tucked inside her belt. “I like to write them outside.”

What Augusta had presumed to be birds was merely the sound of a girl attempting to write a letter, outside, in a strong wind.

“I haven’t finished this one,” the girl said, touching the paper again with her long white fingers. “It’s hard to find the time to finish them. Sometimes I write in the dark after lights out. Have you ever tried to write without looking? You’d be surprised; the writing is as neat and as straight as ever.”

At that moment it occurred to Augusta that she hadn’t written a proper letter in years. Nothing except postcards to her mother with a series of similar messages: I am fine. We are working hard. It is cold and rainy. “Who are you writing to?” she asked.

“To Peter,” the girl said. “A very exasperating boy. I’m mostly very angry with him. Sometimes I’m writing to tell him why. Other times I tell him what has happened to me during the day. I’ve already described this place to him … the river and the sea and the dunes. He would be interested in the river. He used to like to go fishing, but he would never let me go along. That made me angry too.”

Augusta remembered that Fred had liked to fish. All her brothers had, but Fred liked it especially because of the quiet. She tried to picture him, entering the kitchen with three or four brook trout. She could see the fish, the kitchen, but she couldn’t
see Fred’s face. The fog had lifted a little, giving her a better view of Maggie, though she still seemed exaggeratedly soft and pale. Augusta was a bit embarrassed that she had asked her new companion such a personal question.

“I never know where he is posted,” Maggie continued, “and he refuses to tell me.” She touched the blue paper at her waist again, as if to assure herself that it had not blown away, then wrapped the veil, which had unfurled in the wind, once more around her wrist. “I keep asking him where he is and he won’t tell me. He never was much of a talker, but this is ridiculous.”

“But he can’t tell you where his company is,” Augusta said. “It would be censored anyway, even if he did tell you.”

Maggie looked directly out into the fog. “We’ve known each other since we were children,” she said, determination in her voice. “I’ll keep writing until he tells me. Sometimes I stay up all night writing.”

Augusta sighed. “You should get your sleep instead. God knows there is little enough time for it.”

Maggie slowly unwrapped her veil from her arm, lifted it to her face, and burst into tears. “I’m quite mad,” she said, her voice choked with sobs. “I can’t seem to stop writing to him, even though I’m not sure he ever really liked me. Since we were children I was certain I was going to marry him.”

Augusta touched Maggie’s shoulder, tears coming into her own eyes. This pain was such an ordinary pain, she was suddenly filled with nostalgia. In peacetime two young women might have been having this conversation and one of them might be crying. Here in the fog, this girl with her white hair, her white apron and veil, her pale-blue uniform greyed by mist, looked almost like a
photographic negative, as if she were already a memory. “At least you write to each other,” Augusta said sympathetically. “That’s something.”

“But he doesn’t answer … not since the Somme. I don’t think I know where he is. He hasn’t answered for two years.” Maggie had stopped crying now and was attempting to pin her veil back into place. She removed her cap from the bib of her apron. “He is impossible, you see.” She turned and smiled at Augusta. “I like it that you come out here,” she said. “I think we are going to be friends. I saw you walking out over the dunes all alone and I thought, That one will be my friend.”

Augusta’s hand was on the girl’s back, between her shoulder blades. She did not remove it. “Maggie,” she said, closing her eyes, “are you saying that Peter was at the Somme?” The Allied casualties there had been unlike anything experienced so far in the history of warfare. “Maggie,” she repeated, shaking the girl’s shoulder gently when she didn’t respond. “Was he wounded?”

“No,” Maggie said, looking at her cap, which she was turning around and around in her hands. “No, not that, I won’t let that happen.”

“Did something happen to him at the Somme?”

A silence, followed by, “I’m quite mad, you know.”

Fred was killed at Passchendaele, thought Augusta. Fred was not killed at Passchendaele. What is madness?

Maggie stood and Augusta looked up at her, so grey and ephemeral in the fog. Maggie crossed her arms. “I know I am off kilter, but there is nothing you can say to make me stop writing the letters. I came out here to meet you but also
because I like to write the letters outside if I can, either that or in the dark.”

“We should be getting back,” said Augusta. “Matron here is fierce.”