The Underpainter (25 page)

As they walked over the dunes towards the hospital, Augusta told Maggie about the amphitheatre, how it had been there for centuries under the sand. The fog thickened again, but Augusta was able to orient herself by identifying certain groups of scrub pine that now and then erupted unexpectedly into her view. “How did you find your way out there?” she asked Maggie when they were on the path that led to the wards.

“I knew the direction and after a while I followed the sound of your voice.”

“I was saying things — out loud?”

“Enough for me to get near to where you were.”

They walked in silence for a few moments, their feet digging into the sand. “What did you hear me say?” Augusta eventually asked.

“You were saying something like ‘Fred is dead, Fred is not gone,’ then you said that thing about the birds.”

“The grey girl,” I said to Augusta, while snow blew through the metallic illumination created by the streetlights outside the China Hall.

“Yes,” she replied, “but I hadn’t thought of that yet.”

I was quite stunned by the audacity of what I had presumed, that and my sudden unquestioning belief in such a
phenomenon. I remembered my mother telling me about the Rochester Rappings, but I knew this was different from all that.

“Nothing was certain in that world.” Augusta stood now, placed her hands on the small of her back, stretching her spine. “Each reality was perpetually being exchanged for another reality. And it was the spring of 1918. Stationary hospitals nearer the front were being transformed day by day, becoming casualty clearing stations, then advanced dressing stations, then preparing to evacuate altogether — the shelling was that bad, beyond all description. We received thousands and thousands of casualties. There were no more shifts, everyone just worked until they collapsed, then rose to their feet three hours later and began again. Maggie and I became quite close, almost immediately; there was never time in the war for developing a friendship gradually. We pushed her bed down the length of our quarters until it was near mine. But we were so busy we were hardly ever in the nurses’ quarters at the same time and, when we were, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could keep us awake for very long. I was administering anesthetic by then — they had to train some of the more experienced nurses as anesthetists — there just wasn’t enough staff.

“Sometimes Maggie and I went to the amphitheatre rather than to bed, just to remove ourselves for an hour from all the frantic activity. We never had any idea what time it was. Sometimes it was dark, sometimes it wasn’t. In the dark while we sat on the dunes Maggie and I could see battle fire in the distance. I remember her face flickering in that strange orange light. It was in the middle of all this, when we had stolen half an hour
to go out to the amphitheatre, that she turned to me and said, ‘I am quite comfortable here, and you are too.’

“It was then that I recalled the little snow house and the grey girl and how she had said the same thing. I thought about how Maggie’s pale-blue uniform had appeared grey the morning that I met her in the fog. I didn’t question any of this. It seemed as valid to me as any other kind of reality. Besides, we understood each other, had become close friends. I thought the fact that I had hallucinated her, or imagined her, as a child spoke of a kind of predestiny. I didn’t tell her though. I wish now I had told her.”

“Did you ever tell George?”

“No, I never told George.”

After they had pushed their beds together at the far end of the nurses’ quarters, Augusta often heard the sound of Maggie’s pencil scribbling in the dark. Sometimes in the operating theatre while she was anesthetizing some poor broken boy, Augusta would see Maggie at the other side of the room where she was sterilizing instruments. Occasionally the blonde girl would stop for a few moments, pull the folded blue paper from her belt, and quickly jot down a few lines. No one else appeared to notice. Within a month of her arrival she was one of the most respected nurses in the hospital; her efficiency in the wake of the increasing chaos, a marvel to behold. The surgeons, even the matron, had nothing but praise for her.

But it was not this efficiency that caused Augusta to love Maggie Pierce. It was the way she refused to relinquish her own
personal obsession, the letters she insisted on writing to her dead lover, and the way she posted them, by casually dropping them into the River Canche or by releasing them, like pigeons, out on the dunes in a wind that would carry them either into the line of battle or out to sea.

Anesthetic was beautiful to Augusta. It was only during its administration that she felt completely satisfied by what she was doing. Men howling in agony could be brought under her hands to a state of rest, calm entering their features so completely that she was able to recognize in their serene expressions the children they had been. Some boys were so desperate for unconsciousness that they tore the mask from her hands. “Please, Sister,” they would gasp, shout, or whisper, “put me to sleep, put me to sleep.” And behind them, stretching down the hall, a long line of the groaning wounded. It was a wonderful moment, she maintained, when a body in the clutch of pain finally relaxed — a warm tide of balm moving over the table.

By the last week in March of that year, the level of casualties was so high and so persistent that the surgeons and nurses were practically delusional from lack of sleep. Often everyone around the table wept — when an operation was successful and a life had been saved, or when it was unsuccessful and the boy died. From the corner where she was sterilizing instruments Maggie often sang “The Maple Leaf Forever,” moving into the more obscure verses, with lines such as “Then swell the song both loud and long, till rocks and forests quiver.” All this to make Augusta
smile. Sometimes giddiness reigned at the most inappropriate times, when the surgeons found one of His Majesty’s buttons pushed by a bullet into a liver, or when after a successful four-hour operation to remove shrapnel from a brain, they discovered a deadly, malignant, and inoperable tumour just before they were about to close the skull. The boy died three days later, though whether from injuries or the tumour no one could really say. Sometimes when it was very quiet Augusta could hear Maggie scribbling in the corner, describing the previous operation and its results to her vanished lover.

In April, the number of wounded abated somewhat and, after long bouts of sleep, the fatigue began to lift. Maggie and Augusta were able to talk. Augusta told her friend all the things she told me, about her farm and her brothers, about her strict father and the snow house — leaving out the part about the grey girl — about her sampler, her Sunday-school cards. Very occasionally the girls shared a needle, but only when they were very tired and convinced that without it they would not have been able to carry out whatever task they had been called upon to complete. A different kind of exhaustion had them in its clutches now that they had slept off all the adrenalin brought about by the crisis. They walked on the dunes and visited the amphitheatre. Maggie continued to write the letters. Augusta continued to think about solid stone arches and benches, fluted columns and curved halls, stable and unchanging, tens of feet down. They promised each other they would be friends forever.

On a clear night in May, Augusta walked alone over the dunes to the amphitheatre. The moon was round and cold in the sky.
There had been a dance a few days before in the nurses’ quarters to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the Number One Canadian Hospital, and both she and Maggie had been able to ignore the irony of a celebration long enough to have a good time. They had spent hours dancing with patients; some on crutches, some in wheelchairs, others who were unable to hold their partners because they had no arms. The atmosphere everywhere since then had been light and warm, the weather echoing this. Maggie had written to her dead lover about the feeling of camaraderie that surrounded her, and had shown Augusta the letter. “I feel I belong here now,” she had written, “and that you belong there, wherever you are.” Then she had wept a little, but not for long. She had made a special friend among the wounded soldiers.

As Augusta walked alone under the clear night sky, her inner voice chanted, “Fred is dead. Fred is not dead,” but it had become more like a melody one couldn’t shake from one’s mind than a painful announcement.

She knew the night was beautiful, and was sorry that Maggie was not with her, had chosen sleep instead, having begun her shift at four the previous morning.

A train clattered over the bridge on the River Canche. Its fire box was open and for a few moments the dunes turned an unearthly shade of orange because of this light, reminding Augusta, strangely, of a painting in her grandmother’s house that showed the first Canadian Houses of Parliament the night they burned to the ground. Then the dunes turned silver again in the moonlight, and Augusta settled herself down near the buried and permanent stone of the amphitheatre. Below her, the
lights of the hospital complex were like the lights of a fashionable resort. Beneath the sand the memory of a constant, ordered world slept on.

She heard the planes before she knew what they were, assuming, until she saw most of the lights below her extinguish, that the noise was that of another hospital train arriving with wounded from the front. Then she heard the shrill song of the bombs. This disembodied noise seemed to go on for a long, long time, and reminded her of the whistle from the nearby canning factory where children were occasionally permitted to pull the cord that caused its high voice. Augusta had time to remember her brothers arguing over who would get first crack at it, time to wonder what on earth they had all been doing in the canning factory in the first place. Then she saw the only world she had come to understand shatter. At first she could not move, sat on the sand as if entranced. When the fires started they looked almost benign, tranquil, as if they had been lit on a beach for recreational purposes. The engines of the planes droned calmly into the distance.

Augusta worked that night in the miraculously undamaged operating theatre by the light of five candles, everyone having agreed that any more illumination would guarantee further attacks. Her shoes filled with sand as she ran towards the disaster. Every step had been a struggle, a treadmill nightmare, the dunes giving way under her feet. Her thighs still ached from the effort.

One by one the men were brought to the operating table, soldiers who had been torn apart in battle, sliced open just days ago by the surgeons, and who were now torn apart again. Among them were staff members from the hospital: orderlies, doctors, cooks, caretakers, ambulance drivers. Sometime during the night the moon moved into the window near where Augusta stood holding the black rubber mask over the face of a patient, making her hands look blue and cold. Just then the planes returned, and the bombing resumed, though this time the target was the base camps closer to town. Still, the force of this shook the hut and knocked over two of the candles, setting fire to a supply of bandages. Eight medical personnel rushed forward to extinguish the inconsequential blaze, as if by mastering this one problem they could somehow control the devastation around them.

It was far into the night when Maggie was brought into the room and lifted gently from a stretcher. Her beautiful fine hair was matted with blood, her legs and arms bent in ridiculous directions. One of her hands was missing. The surgeon began pacing up and down beside the table. “I don’t know where to start,” he was saying. “I don’t know where to start.”

Augusta heard herself shout, “Who is this? I want to know who this is?” And she was surprised by the sound of her own voice asking this question because she knew. She knew.

There was no sign of the girl’s left eye and her nose had been pushed sideways so that it lay against her cheek. Her faded blue-grey uniform was covered with blood.

“Re-tourniquet that arm!” the surgeon commanded.

“Don’t touch her!” Augusta heard herself yell.

“I’ll start with the head, then look for internal injuries,” said the surgeon. But the man did not move. He looked oddly at some kind of instrument in his hand. Candlelight quivered on the blade. “I haven’t operated on a woman since before the war,” he said to Augusta. And then, “My God, is she really alive?”