The Underpainter (33 page)

I’ve come to believe there was something twinlike about George and Augusta, their shared war, their shared recovery, their knowledge of this for all the years after. Was Augusta defining herself in the face of partnering by clinging to memories of grey girls and hallucinations of lost children? Was she
laying claim to sorrow? Or was it simply that by walking out the door with Vivian, George had broken the partnership?

But what did I really know of them? Augusta, as I’ve said, was almost a stranger to me. Perhaps George was as well. He had thrust the painted cup in my face, in the face of the life I had chosen to live, the art I had chosen to make. How long had he held all of this, held me in contempt?

Now, as an old man, I ask myself: How long did I refuse to look at George, to learn him, to come to know him?

I was about to leave.

I placed my hand on the doorknob, which I noticed for the first time was porcelain and covered with small bunches of painted violets. This pointless decoration sickened me. Someone I couldn’t see was shovelling the snow from a nearby sidewalk; a harsh, scraping, rhythmic sound. Through the glass panel of the door I noted one lone figure heading for Victoria Hall. He crossed the street at an angle, his head bent into the wind, his hand on his hat. I wanted to be that figure, walking away from the scene that I believed was unfolding upstairs; George’s yell, the inevitable quarrel.
We were that close
, Augusta had said.
That intimate
. And intimacy, I had always suspected, was one long argument. Still, I drew my hand away from the porcelain knob, from the delicate flowers I so despised. I was going to wait it out, speak to George when he descended the stairs. It was Monday morning. No matter what, he would have to be in the shop. As I walked back towards the chair in which I had spent
the night, I heard the sound of breaking china. Despite her previous calm, I concluded, Augusta must have been enraged.

At 9:30, two delivery men arrived with a shipment of dinnerware. I thanked them, signed for the crates, watched them drive away. About fifteen minutes later a customer appeared and asked for George. I told her I was minding the shop, said she should return in an hour.

At 10:30, I called both their names from the hallway of the ground floor. I waited for five minutes for an answer. Then I climbed the stairs.

There are a number of formal things that one has to do after death enters a house. Someone has to be called: a policeman, a coroner, an undertaker. I am nothing if not efficient when it comes to formal things.

That night when Augusta told me she had sometimes used the drug, she had referred to it as “morphia” and I remember thinking that the word had a lovely, open, feminine sound to it. I thought about how George had said that he wished she had been involved in a less dangerous profession. Only after I had climbed the stairs did I understand that the danger in nursing lay, for Augusta, in the easy access it provided to the needle, the easy access it provided to the end of the story she had been telling me all night long.

But it was all hers, wasn’t it, this addiction, if that is what it was? A gift from the war.

I think. But then, as I’ve said so many times before, what did
I know, what do I know about George, about Augusta, about myself?

They looked like children who had been playing and who had been overtaken suddenly by sleep. George hadn’t even removed his coat, though his hat lay where he dropped it on the floor and there were a number of dark spots on the carpet where the snow he had tracked in from the street and up the stairs had melted and been absorbed. I thought of the Nordic sagas that Rockwell so loved. I remembered him telling me how Burnt Njal and his wife lay down in the midst of fire on a nuptial bed wreathed in smoke, glowing beams falling on them. The pain. I thought of those old ballads of partnered death where roses and briars entwine on freshly dug graves. On the bedside table were the needle and the small, now empty, bottle.

The rose. The briar.

There was no note; no testament to the sequence of events that had led this woman and this man to the brink. I still believe it possible that Augusta’s death may have been a mistake, one last injection beyond the limit. But there was no mistaking what had happened to George. And he had left a personal message for me: the shards of his china collection were strewn like petals all around the room.

This was my first inheritance.

I remembered how he had showed his few purchases to me before he left for the war, my trivialization of them, his defence. I remembered that, since then, whenever I had seen him, he had
assured me that I was still to be the beneficiary of the collection, including the newer pieces he had added. Now I understand that until that dreadful night he had clung to the belief that I might come to have some affection for the small, the delicate, the fragile. At the time, I remained staring stupidly at the mess on the floor, this reprimand spelled out in shards, which told me that George believed that I had never understood, that I was responsible, that the scene that greeted me in this boyhood room had been created by me as surely as if it were a painting I had completed with my own hand. It told me he was convinced that what had transpired was a deliberate act of cruelty on my part.

But it was much worse than that. It was an act of carelessness.

After the men had taken George and Augusta away, I returned to the China Hall, where I carefully unpacked the new shipment of dinnerware, making a display of a complete setting in the window as I had seen George do in the past. Then I tucked a broom under my arm and hauled the empty crate up the stairs. There I removed dustpan after dustpan of fragments from the floor. I washed the shelves where George had kept the collection and dusted the top of the dresser with a damp towel I had found in the bathroom. I shook a small braided rug out a window I had forced open and pulled the still-wrinkled coverlet tight across the bed. There were indentations in the pillows where their heads had rested and I couldn’t bear to touch them. “No, sir,”
the coroner had assured me, “you won’t be needed. Mr. Kearns has a brother in Brockville.”

The older brother whose education was paid for.

The room was beautifully clean when I had finished with it. Getting the crate into the Packard was difficult, but I managed somehow to wrestle it into the back seat. I slammed the rear door, opened the front, and climbed in behind the wheel.

On my way out of Davenport I stopped at the telegraph office in order to wire Silver Islet. I knew what I was going to do. I was going to follow the old King’s Highway to Port Hope and make a right turn at Highway 28. Sara once told me that in winter there were no roads to Silver Islet, told me how she would sometimes ski across Thunder Bay to the small city of Port Arthur, often for something as simple as writing paper or to buy a book. I had no experience with skis, no experience with frozen lakes, but I could steer the Packard. I knew exactly what I was going to do. I was going to drive north.

T
wo and a half years before — the last time I had been in a room with her — Sara was no longer a young woman. Though in certain lights and from certain distances she could still be taken for one, mistaken for one because of her slimness and the fact that her hair showed no traces of grey. She wore her hair in a braid that hung down her back, or sometimes she wound it around her head as if it were a crown. Or a serpent. She wore it like that when she was swimming. Only very occasionally did she let it hang free, after she washed it and was letting it dry, or now and then when I asked her to.

She was, as I’ve said, no longer a young woman — maybe forty, or forty-five — but I can’t say for certain because she’d never told me her age and I’d never asked. We had regarded each other, Sara and I, from the opposite ends of a room I knew so well I could have drawn it, could still draw it, in my sleep. Have I mentioned her eyes? They were quite unusual, grey mostly, but with a yellow sunburst at the centre when the pupils were small.
The last time I stood in a room with her, the pupils were large, the eyes wide open, as if she wished to absorb the most minor details of the visual information surrounding her.

It had been her father’s room, and everything that was beyond the windows was, as she had pointed out early on, her father’s view. I had told her that it couldn’t possibly be the same view that her father had seen since the mine on the small offshore island, the island for which the settlement was named, was in a state of collapse. The superstructure had been slowly pried apart, year after year, by storms and the lake, ever since my father abandoned it in 1920. Sara believed that there was still silver there and she may have been right. But in the last year of its operation a half-dozen otherwise rational men from good American families had lost their fortunes to my father’s obsession, his certainty that something continued to glitter under the water. And then in the end, all my father’s money, all of the shareholders’ money, was washed away by the superior lake.

Sara had said that her father’s view had included more than Silver Islet Mine. It had included the lake, the landscape, the sky; especially the sky, which was precious to him because he had spent so much time underground. He had loved the surfaces of things, she said, rock, bark, water. He had loved light. In that way, she said, he was like me, for I was a landscape painter at the time and undoubtedly talked about colour and texture and light at great length, even though I don’t remember doing so. I do remember speaking to her about the working class, about strikes and unions, working conditions and social injustices. I thought I was interested in the working class, had
seen in Sara the embodiment of all that, and so I lectured her on the rights and privileges that, in my opinion, her father ought to have demanded from various bosses. Lectured her until one day she rose from her chair, walked across the floor, opened a cupboard door, and pulled out his last weekly two-pound supply of candles.

“These are what my father carried with him into the dark,” she said.

She was angry with me then, and she had every reason to be. The ignorance. The condescension.

The small log house where she lived was filled with lamps and lanterns. All of the miners’ houses had been, Sara told me, because the men so loved light. One of their great pleasures when emerging from the mine in the evening was to see the settlement lit like a locomotive along the shore. In the winter, of course, daylight would be lost to them, their shift being twelve hours long. One of Sara’s great pleasures as a child was to imagine the miners’ lanterns coming to life on the winter island, then moving slowly towards the log houses as the men made their way across the ice. The candles, she told me, had been stuck on the miners’ hats to help light the rock faces of the tunnels under the lake, tunnels which had been flooded ten years before her birth.

How sad to have been Owen Pengelly, to have been Sara’s light-loving father. At the age of seventeen he had walked away from the only map of the world he knew, a map comprising footpaths over fields, engine houses looming awkwardly on precipitous coastlines, the shafts and passageways and caverns
under the sea, and the wretched rows of grey houses. He had walked with three of his friends, away from the weeping mothers of the village of St. Just, eight miles to the port of Penzance and to a ship headed for Canada and another set of shafts and tunnels and caverns; this time under the greatest of lakes: Superior.

How is it that this ordinary boy, who became an ordinary man, this man I never met, occupies my thoughts when I can barely call up the features of my own father’s face? Of course, I never really knew my father, could only guess at what moved him to search for wealth, for social standing. Him and his money. Sara, on the other hand, learned her own father, stayed close to him until his last rattling breath. She wanted to be known by me as she had been known by him and so handed me her father’s story as if it were a gift. I have not yet used it in my work, though there is still time.

It was only very recently — just a few weeks ago — that I pulled the atlas from the shelf and looked at the claw-shaped land that Owen Pengelly sailed away from. I was examining Belgium, France — Étaples, Ypres, Calais — and all those other godforsaken places that I have kept so unfortunately close to me, when I noticed Cornwall at the bottom of Britain. It looked like the back paw of a beast, extended as if attempting to grasp something in its talons. Familiar names came into focus under my magnifier. St. Ives, St. Just, Lizard, Ludgvan, Botallack. Suddenly I recalled a pair of mining overalls hanging from a hook on the back of Owen Pengelly’s cupboard door, my drawings of them.

The last time Sara and I spoke we had been alone in her father’s room and she had said to me, “I have neither the strength nor the shallowness …”

She didn’t finish the sentence, didn’t tell what she had neither the strength nor the shallowness for. I remember once, long ago, reading a book by a classics scholar who had spent much of his life decoding fragments of Greek sentences. The tone of the book was one of frustration, of desire rarely satisfied. “Would that we had the subject of that verb!” the scholar exclaims in an uncharacteristically personal way about halfway though the book. There were nouns and a verb in that partial sentence of Sara’s, but over the years its fragmentary nature has been a source of discomfort for me.