The Underpainter (10 page)

From Dominion Day onwards, the ceiling of Davenport’s dance pavilion was tented with flags — the Union Jack, the Red Ensign — and the talk before, during, and between dances was always of war. A forty-mile excursion across a shared Great Lake had brought me so close to Europe and its conflicts that, at
times, even during my hours of withdrawal, it was difficult to remember that that particular continent and its adjacent imperial island were still thousands of miles away. George and his friends began to appear in uniform on Saturday nights, looking smug and mature after hours spent marching with their militia units. Words like Serbia and Belgium, places I barely recalled from grade-school geography, sprang easily to their lips. Girls with bright eyes, shining hair, and crisp new dresses were as restless as the young men they danced with, anxious for a declaration of open hostilities abroad, confident that their opinions were shared by the crowd.

Vivian was nowhere among the dancers. I had not seen her once since I’d returned.

When I asked about her, a shadow trembled briefly across George’s face, as if a swift bird had passed between him and the sun. Then his expression became absolutely neutral. “She’s gone,” he said. “She left for Europe with her mother. They sailed months ago.”

“Ah well,” I said, wanting to reinstate an air of complicity between us, “if you’re sent over you’ll be able to see her. Though I suppose if it comes to that, her mother will have brought her back by then.”

“There is no fear of me seeing her,” he said. “I don’t want to see her.”

“What about fate … destiny?” I was almost teasing, then saw his face darken, but not soon enough. I was drawn to the minor drama of the oblique relationship, was using words as if they were cheap, lacking in power.

It was a gorgeous day. George and I were walking on the
diagonal path that bisected Davenport’s lakeside park into two neat isosceles triangles. The lake was gleaming, a hundred bright sails on its surface. “I expect I’ll be killed in the war anyway,” George said. “I expect that is what will happen.” He spoke these words almost cheerfully, as if he did not wish to disturb the lightness of the day, the beauty of the morning.

Everything around us was in perfect bloom; everything had been raked and swept and cultivated by people devoted to horticultural societies and town fairs where glossy vegetables and sleek horses won blue ribbons. Nothing had yet disturbed this picture. No one had the slightest understanding of irony. There was no need for it. In the decades that approached the summer of 1914, honour and loyalty had yielded satisfactory rewards. If you fed and groomed the horse, hoed and watered the garden, in all likelihood at some time or other you would be presented with a prize. I refused to take seriously George’s statement about death. The only drama I could imagine for him would be romantic in nature, minor; interesting only in the vaguest of ways but, above all, well ordered.

“This war may never happen,” I said. “And if it does, it will end almost immediately. You’ll be back in no time.”

We were almost at the King Street end of the park when George stopped, turned towards me, and announced that he had made out his will, that I was to inherit his china collection.

The half-painted vases and urns that stood on the shelf behind his counter came instantly to mind. I laughed and thanked him. There was irony in my voice, but as I’ve said, this was a place where irony was not understood. Yet.

“You could finish painting the vases, I suppose,” he said,
“but it would be best if you saw the whole collection so that I could explain it to you.”

“You’re not going to leave me with everything in the store?” I said nervously. I envisioned an entire afternoon in the shop, George enthusing, pattern after pattern.

“The store is my father’s,” he reminded me.

All along King Street we walked in the shade of the large old sugar maples that have now all but vanished from towns and roadsides on both sides of the border.

“I’m talking about my own collection — you’ve never seen it — I keep it in my room.” George paused then, waiting for some comment from me, I imagine. When I remained silent, his voice softened, became almost apologetic. “I suppose,” he said, as tentatively as he might have had he been going to ask me to make a large sacrifice on his behalf, “I suppose you really should see it.”

We were heading in the direction of the China Hall. It was Sunday morning and all of the shop windows we passed were covered by dark-green shades. I believed that what George was suggesting had nothing to do with the possibility of death, that he merely wanted to show me his treasures, and I still think I was partly right about this. George would survive the war, though he would be gone for a long, long time. There was an eagerness about him that morning that was compelling. I knew I would have to view whatever it was he kept in his room.

“All right,” I eventually said, sensing that one way or another I was going to have to endure this punishment. “Let’s see it.”

In the clarity of the low, raking light, each building we passed seemed polished, scrubbed, and utterly deserted. Nothing moved
except the odd cat and our own wavering reflections in the large glass fronts of the closed shops. George had spent the previous night at my beachside house so that we could get up at five on a Sunday morning to paint the sun rising behind the lighthouse. It had been, and still was, a morning of absolute calm, the lake a bowl of light under a pale-blue sky, the horizon erased. I had felt, on the beach, as if we were standing on the edge of the world with nothing but a gorgeous emptiness in front of us. “The water needs wind to define it,” George had said. There had been no wind.

Like almost everyone else in Davenport, George’s parents were at church. We let ourselves in by the back kitchen door, walked down the dim hall, past the quiet parlour, and climbed the stairs. This was my first visit to the rooms above the China Hall. The master bedroom, when I glanced at it, appeared formal — almost funereal. I thought of my own parents’ large, shadowed room, how my father had refused to sleep there after my mother died, her brush and comb and music box still displayed upon the dressing table. George’s room was almost spartan in contrast to his parents’. A uniform of the Davenport Heavy Battery hung from a clothes hook like an effigy on the wall.

“The collection,” he announced, gesturing towards a bookcase on the other side of the room.

There, behind hinged glass doors, was a scant assortment of china. Not much really — bread-and-butter plates painted with scenes from Izaak Walton’s
The Compleat Angler
, a couple of dessert dishes that George referred to as “Dickens ware,” a vase with a Canterbury pilgrim trudging along an empty track, and five brooches with orchids painted on them.

“These are the real treasures,” George said, picking up one of the brooches and handing it to me.

“How so?” I turned the piece of jewellery around and around in the palm of my hand.

“Dewsbury may be the greatest living artist.”

“Dewsbury,” I repeated stupidly.

“A painter for Royal Doulton’s Nile Street factory.” George gazed out his east-facing window as if he could see all the way to London. “I’ll buy his landscape vases when I have more money.”

I examined the miniature painting for a few more moments, mostly for the sake of politeness, then I returned it to the shelf. To my mind, there was nothing extraordinary about it.

“I know you’re not overly impressed,” George said, bending protectively towards the shelf and realigning the brooch with the others, “but if you took some time … if you were to look carefully. And, of course, the best is gone.”

Who, I wondered, would want to take it?

“Smashed,” he continued. “It couldn’t be helped.”

I imagined an accident in transit. Poor George, I thought, picturing him opening a package from England filled with small shards.

He straightened up and smiled. “So, you’ll look after this then, if I am killed?”

“Only if you die with your boots on,” I joked.

For one short instant, irony existed in prewar Davenport. George laughed. “With my boots on,” he said. “You can rely on that. And with my orphaned collection destined for a foster home, another shore.” He turned towards the door. Again there was this sense of undefinable eagerness about him. He wanted to
get back to the glorious day. As we scrambled down the stairs, he referred to the collection one last time. “It will be right here,” he said brightly. “Just drop by and pick it up.”

When war between Britain and Germany was declared in August, George’s battalion was ready for departure within days. Like everyone else in Davenport, I went to the railway station to see “the boys” off. I, though a boy myself, felt alien, excluded; my American nationality, my lack of uniform making me appear to be almost like another genus and species. The Davenport Heavy Battery was to go to Valcartier in Quebec for training and from there to Salisbury Plain in England. I had never seen the normally subdued population of the lakeside town in such a state of celebratory excitement. Their Dominion Day festivities had a certain joviality to them, but they were nothing like this ecstasy connected to the idea of participation in a distant war. Perhaps the young country yearned for engagement of one form or another, wanted to leap into the chorus and onto the world stage. How many wars ago this was. How little any of us knew about the chorus, or the stage.

I had visited the China Hall the day before George left and had watched with genuine sadness as he packed away the few vases he had been painting and the small turntable on which he worked. His father would have to mind both shops, he told me, until he returned. I was having trouble imagining George in foreign landscapes, was only comfortable with the idea of him in the shop, or in the pavilion, or the Northumberland Hills. Despite my lack of respect for it, I knew that the china painting
defined George somehow. He was the lake, it was the wind. I was sorry to see him have to part with it.

He placed his carefully cleaned brushes in a rectangular wooden box and stood looking down at them, absorbed, before closing the lid and fastening the brass clasp. In those few seconds, it was as if I weren’t there at all, as if I had not opened the clanging door and was not leaning on the counter that he stood behind.

I was filled with the alertness, the energy of youth then. In spite of the bouts of solitude prescribed for me by my teacher, reflective thought did not come easily to me, and yet, standing there, watching my friend take leave of the tools he loved, I knew that I was witnessing an act of great intimacy. I was confused, embarrassed, and surprisingly moved by it.

Before I left the shop that day I bought a souvenir ink pot, painted by George. It had a view of Davenport’s Victoria Hall on the front of it and the pavilion on the back. He had completed a number of items of this nature over the period of the previous winter — salt and pepper shakers, cream pitchers, sugar bowls — and they had sold so rapidly to the Americans who were in town for the summer that the ink pot was the last of the batch. At first he didn’t want me to have it, it being “purely commercial” and, according to him, not a good example of his work. And then, when I insisted on having it, he didn’t want me to pay for it. He accepted the money finally when I told him I wanted it as a gift for my father. I was lying, of course; I never intended to give anything to my father.

I have kept the little ink pot with me all these years. It has
moved with me from desk to desk to desk, and I am dipping my pen into it, even now, as I write.

The boys were leaning from the coach window when I arrived at the station. The surrounding air was filled with laughter; any tears I saw were tears of joy glistening on radiant faces. There were, I remember, two bands playing opposing tunes at either end of the platform and a blur of white hands shaking small flags against an overcast sky. A few years later, when I was passing through Union Station in Toronto, I would see British Bull Dogs with Red Cross collection boxes strapped to their bodies and tired-looking, grief-stunned girls who, not knowing I was American, or perhaps not caring, would approach me with an accusatory white feather in their hands. But now there was only a rhapsodic fantasy concerning the Motherland; a migrant’s battle hymn.

Davenport’s Canadian National Railway station was at the northern limit of the town. Across the tracks, in the fields that stretched out towards the Northumberland Hills, there were small groupings of calm beige cattle and stooks of yellow barley. Directly in front of this pastoral scene, right on the edge of the tracks, were gathered three or four decrepit houses of an advanced age, which suggested that there might have been a village there before the larger town grew out to meet it. In the second storey of one of the homes, at the front of an odd-shaped dormer, was a tall Gothic window. Behind its dirty glass, a woman stood holding back a sheer curtain with one hand. I
have no idea how old this woman was, being far enough away that she appeared to be nothing but a shadow. I could not tell if she was beautiful or plain, happy or sad. But the way she slowly turned first her face and then her whole body away from the scene, as if in indifference or disgust, the way the tattered curtain fell back into place, filled me with something approaching dread. I have never forgotten her.

I pushed my way towards the train, was finally close enough to George to be able to shout good luck and goodbye.

“Remember, if anything should happen, take care of my collection,” he yelled. “Especially my treasured brooches.”

“I’ll do my best not to lose another to accident.”

“No accident,” he called over the hiss of the train. “She crushed it under her heel.”

When the steam from the locomotive cleared, I could see George’s beloved Northumberland Hills in the distance. He was gone before I was able to ask who had smashed the brooch.

I left the station and walked down Division Street towards the lake, my father’s house, and my exercises in reclusiveness. A state of solitude was not going to be difficult to achieve. There were no women in Davenport who interested me, and, as for company of my own sex, I was the only young man left in town.