The Underpainter (32 page)

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.

Slumped in the chair behind the counter, I dreamed I was trying to take a picture of my mother. I was watching the camera, which she had snatched from my hands, slowly tumble towards the rapids of the Genessee River when George shook my shoulder.

“Is Augusta still here?” he was asking. “Is she still here?”

“Of course,” I said. “She went upstairs, she went to bed” I put my hands on the counter and pulled myself out of the chair. “Where the hell have you been?”

He didn’t answer at first. His face was grey, his eyes bloodshot. “Why did that woman come here?” he asked. “What reason did she have for coming here?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She didn’t tell me.”

“I couldn’t want her,” he said. “I don’t even know who she is.” He was looking at the curtains at the end of the room, the curtains through which Augusta had passed. “I never knew who she was. God, the nights I spent inventing her, trying to work out what had happened.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “Now she’s gone for good.”

“Gone for good.” He looked at the two Blue Willow cups. Then suddenly his face changed, turned paper white. He staggered a bit and then steadied himself on the stepladder on which Augusta had been sitting. I saw he was beginning to tremble dangerously. “Augusta,” he whispered.

“What is it?” I asked. “What’s the matter?”

“She didn’t drink anything,” he said.

“No, I drank it all. What’s wrong?”

“Did she talk … did she talk about the war?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “Quite a lot. She talked quite a lot.”

“She never drinks, and she goes on and on about the war when …” Suddenly he swung away from me as if he sensed something menacing behind him. He looked around in an unfocused, almost desperate manner, then bolted from the room, through the curtains, and up the stairs.

I felt wretched. The dawn was weak and grey and it was still snowing. I wanted my studio, the pale geometric shapes I had been working with, their emptiness. The China Hall was crowded with colour, with subject matter. I found myself staring at a row of ridiculous tankards from England: square, arrogant faces whose smirking expressions infuriated me. The whole
breakable business infuriated me — all the flowered tableware destined to carry bad food and encourage idiotic conversation at dinner parties. I was on my way to the door when I heard George yell.

I had never heard a sound like it before. It was almost musical, almost like song.

One cry. That’s all. A held note. Crescendo. Diminuendo. Then silence.

I have often, since then, thought about Augusta’s claim to unhappiness, her insistence upon the exclusivity of its ownership. “My unhappiness,” she had asserted. “Mine!” The fierceness with which she identified the singularity of her emotions, her state, is something that has preoccupied and perplexed me for the remainder of my life, for there had been a sense of triumph in her declaration. Each of us wants something that is ours alone, I suppose, some idiosyncrasy of character, some carefully maintained victory or sorrow. Augusta had her dead friend, the war, her drift towards morphine. Certainly she could have allowed George his neophyte failed marriage, his passion, his anger concerning Vivian.