“DO SOME PRELIMINARY SKETCHES and then get out your watercolours,” Lismer said. He had shed his tweed jacket and bow tie and wore a loose white shirt and soft wool pants. “Work as if you are preparing for studio paintings. Find the mixes you need and make colour notes right on the sketches.”
The women from the day classes settled down near each other on the bank, chatting as they sketched. The men looked about uneasily. Used to working over drafting tables, this was the first time many had sketched outdoors. They each found a solitary place and drew out their sketchbooks. Mary walked among them, occasionally taking their pencils from their hands to show them something on the page.
Arthur Lismer, his new camera in hand, spent the morning posing groups. Later he would give a photograph to Clare. In it, she and Jane, both dressed in white linen blouses and skirts, sat atop a huge boulder. Jane had tied a black scarf in a loose V around her neck, French style. Fred leaned against the boulder on one elbow, watching Clare laughing, her patch turned away from the camera.
What Clare would remember was the almost medicinal smell of poplar resin. The river, high from recent rains, rippling up the bank, pulling at strands of grass. Logs racing along in the current, out to the river mouth. Upriver, men with long pike poles pushing at the logs to keep them from jamming as they bounced past.
Clare drew the river where it fell over a band of rock midstream. Then she took out her watercolours and began mixing greens for the forest.
Come with me, Mary had said one day in the classroom, drawing the girls to the window. Look at green. Look! Not one green, dozens!
It was true. Clare had never noticed the bewildering number of greens: sap green, viridian, terre verte, phthalo green.
“Nothing will kill a landscape painting like using only green from a tube,” Mary had said.
Clare, rifling through the paints in the art school studios, always chose the blues first, the winter sea of Prussian, eggshell of Cerulean, Cobalt’s high summer sky, and French Ultramarine’s lapis. She’d spent hours in the studio mixing them all with her ochre and two yellows, Cadmium and Lemon, to see what kind of greens appeared.
She painted the layers of colour on the river, working from lightest to darkest. The most essential quality of watercolour is transparency. Clare recalled Winona’s words. She remembered other things from those long-ago lessons, how the mix of water and pigment was a matter of feel, how patient one had to be to let each layer dry.
After an hour, her eye tired from looking so hard at the bright planes of light shimmering under the water. She was stiff and the foot she had curled under her had fallen asleep. She got up and wandered down to the river.
She found Fred drawing. He’d been working on the riffle of waterfall, the water parting around smooth granite boulders. In the foreground he’d included a figure — Clare, her head bent, absorbed in her own drawing.
“I haven’t much experience with the figure,” Fred said apologetically.
Drawing her right side in profile, he had captured the shape of her brow and the set of her mouth perfectly. You would never know she wore an eye patch.
“It’s a good likeness,” Clare said.
“You don’t like it,” Fred said.
It made her feel nostalgic for that girl who was once whole. She preferred Jane’s portrait of her, without her eye patch.
“No, it’s very good,” she said. “You know how women are. We never like our own portraits.”
Jane appeared around the bend. The day had grown warm and she had taken off her black neck scarf. She waved it at them. “Come for a swim,” she called.
“I didn’t bring my bathing costume,” Clare said.
“There’s a private spot,” she said. “No one will see us.” She grabbed Clare’s hand.
JANE STRIPPED to her bloomers and blouse, dropping her skirt and stockings in a pile in the grass. The river was faster here, as it took the outside of the bend. Jane waded in, her bloomers ballooning out.
Clare hesitated, then pulled off her skirt and stepped in. The water, decanted from the cool forests and fields, was bracing. She stood rooted in place, watching Jane wade deeper and deeper until her blouse lifted up and her hair floated out around her face. Almost at once Jane was swept into the middle of the river. A yell. One of the loggers, running along the shore, pushing at a snarl of logs.
“Hey! You! Out of the river,” he yelled. The logs tumbled past Jane. She seemed to be swimming with them. One of the logs rolled and for a few seconds Jane disappeared underwater. She shouted, was yanked under again, came up gasping.
“Jane! Jane!” Clare ran to the shore, in her wet bloomers, following the logjam tumbling past where the students were working, the logger dashing along beside it.
On the river in front of the house, opposite where Lismer’s canoe was tied, the log jam seemed to stall. Jane’s head submerged over and over again as the logs rolled in the current. Fred leapt up, grabbed the pike pole from the logger, pushed the canoe into the river, and paddled hard.
Fred hauled the canoe to the shore upriver from the logjam and pushed the pike pole out to Jane, who couldn’t quite reach it. She swam hard against the current, trying over and over to reach the pole with her outstretched hand. Fred climbed out onto the logs and lay on his stomach jabbing at the log that had somehow snagged Jane by her blouse.
“Take off your blouse,” Fred called.
She was panicking, gulping air.
“Jane! Your blouse is caught.”
She went under, emerged again.
The other students, men and women, were all gathered on the shore now. Arthur Lismer stood with a horrified expression, as if he could already see all the repercussions of a tragedy. When Clare turned back, Jane’s white form flashed under the water. She had managed to free herself from her blouse. Her bloomers had been torn off in the rushing current. She grabbed the pike pole.
“Hold on tight!” Fred called as he pulled her in like a long white fish. The students were clustered on the shore watching, the girls with their arms entwined. The men stood uneasily, transfixed by Jane’s naked form, lying motionless on a flat granite boulder. Fred took off his shirt and draped it over her. After a few moments, she sat up coughing.
Mary had gone white. She glowered and shouted, “Up to the house! Lunch!” Shooting a dark look over her shoulder at Jane, she began herding the students towards Lismer’s cottage, where Esther Lismer was heading down the hill with a bundle of dry clothes.
Fred helped Jane into the canoe, settling her in the bow before he pushed it back into the current, steadied it, jumped into the stern, and ferried it back to the shore where Clare waited, still in her wet bloomers, with Esther’s clothes. Fred helped Jane out of the canoe and then turned his back, busying himself with the boat, while the women helped her dress.
“Oh dear, I’m sorry to ruin the fun.” Jane was shivering. “I hope the students all had their sketchbooks handy.” She sneezed. “It’s amazing the lengths one has to go to, to provide a nude model! Elsie’s mother will be storming into the board meeting again.” She started to laugh and soon she and Clare were caught in a fit of giggles.
After lunch Esther insisted Jane rest in the guest room. The other students wandered off back to the river or lay in the grass under the apple trees. Clare, who had recovered her skirt, sat on a wooden bench in the garden with Fred.
“Where did you learn to paddle a canoe?” Clare said.
“In Ontario. I really learned so that I could impress my girlfriend.”
“And did it work?” Clare said.
Fred laughed. “I almost drowned her. Our canoe capsized. Lena never set foot in a canoe again.”
“What happened to her?” Clare said gently.
Fred picked up a spruce cone lying in the grass. “She went back to Germany just before the war.” He pulled scales off the cone, letting them drop. “Her parents decided to return. They never really felt at home in Canada. And she went with them.” He tossed the cone b
ack into the grass.
“That must have been sad for you.”
“Yah.” He brushed the knees of his trousers. “But perhaps it was for the best. We weren’t very well suited to each other in the end. We were drawn together because we were from the same place in a new country. We’d always known each other.”
“Like Leo and me,” Clare said.
“But he was going to return.”
She saw the ship pulling away, its rails lined with soldiers. “They all were.” She’d never thought about whether she and Leo were suited to each other. When they were growing up, he’d always been the most interesting person she knew, the person whose company she preferred above all others, even in the years when he’d little time for her. She looked around at the clusters of laughing students, at Mary and Arthur Lismer standing on the porch, their heads bent towards each other. She’d changed since Leo left. Her world had grown wider than Grafton. If he hadn’t died, would he have been the same man? She had watched the men in the night class, the ones who had been invalided from the war, and she’d studied the face of Angus, the model they’d drawn in class. There was a shadow under their skin, strain in their eyes, as if part of them was otherwise occupied, like a child covering a lie, that effort of maintaining a façade of innocence.
She looked at Fred, at his downcast eyes, their red-gold lashes, his serious mouth. “What happened to her?” she said.
“She married an officer. The last I heard, he’d died and she and her sister were going to Berlin to work in a factory. There’ve been many hardships in — her country,” he said reluctantly.
“What kind?” Clare said.
He looked up at clouds, racing in the spring wind. “Everything goes to the front: medicine, fuel, boot leather, clothing, food. People are eating the food they would give to the animals. Many are getting sick and dying. Everybody’s weak.”
“You must be glad you stayed,” Clare said.
His white shirt was still damp, his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. She saw again the fine golden hairs on his forearms and the backs of his hands. But now she also saw the strength in them, the muscles rippling under the olive skin. She noticed things like that since she began drawing.
“If I hadn’t stayed I wouldn’t have met you,” Fred said.
Clare looked up at him. The sun broke from the clouds and the lines around his eyes deepened. Was he squinting into the light or smiling?
“And I wouldn’t have been able to save you. Twice,” he laughed.
She smiled. “And today you saved my friend.”
He took her hands in his and held them for a moment. When she didn’t pull away, he brought them to his lips. Then he lowered them back into her lap and looked searchingly into her face. He leaned towards her, one hand in the small of her back. His kiss tasted of river water.
39
LEO WAS UP TO HIS KNEES in mud, the snow falling thick. He had his gun trained on the German soldier’s back but his arm was shaking. He steadied it with his other hand. Snow was filling his ears, his mouth, his lungs. Marty looked at him pleadingly. The soldier turned around and Leo pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. It was one of his childhood toy rifles. The soldier turned back and shot Marty, who fell onto the ground, snow falling into his open eyes. Leo woke crying out, his sheet wound around him. Natalie was there, talking to him quietly, untangling his sheet. Sobbing, he could not shed the sight of Marty lying on the ground, staring at him accusingly as the snow turned red.
Natalie’s dark head, the slightly acrid smell of her sweat, her warm breath. She lifted the sheet and crawled in beside him, pressing her thin body against his back. She wrapped her arms around him and held him tight until the shaking ebbed away and his body relaxed into sleep.
When he woke in the hours before first light she was still there, lying on her back, one hand bent above her head. A strand of hair fell over her face. He lifted it and moved it gently away. She woke and looked at him without moving. He kissed her and she pulled him to her.
Later he would understand the need that fed their hunger. But, there, in that narrow bed under the crucifix, he entered her without words, without thought. Afterwards, he fell into a long, dreamless sleep.
The old man did not comment on Natalie’s disappearance each night but neither did he give up his bed for them.
Each morning Leo rose, put on Armand’s clothes, and stepped out into the yard. Summer rode in on air smelling of warm earth and the green skin of new foliage.
In the barn, the cow lowed an impatient greeting. Leo would feed her, stroke her ears, and run his hand over her belly. She was heavily pregnant by Hugo’s bull. There would be no milk until the calf was born.
In the house, Natalie served him and Lucien black chicory coffee. At these times she gave no hint of the intimacy of their nights. She continued to treat him as a guest. But Leo could feel the heat of her glance when Lucien was turned away. In stolen moments, in the barn or behind the house, she let him take her in his arms, kiss her, and bury his face into her neck, which smelled of the pleasant rancid odour of the soap she made in a cast iron pot on the stovetop.
When the weather grew hot, he carried water from the well to make sure the new wheat did not wither. Once it was taller, it would be able to withstand the summer heat. He had begun to prepare the next field for hay, picking rocks, stopping to examine them, before dropping them in his pail. They were mixed gravels, the indiscriminate tailings of glaciers, sediments of feldspar and quartz, granite and basalt. He added the largest rocks to the stone wall running beside the field. The smaller rocks he dumped over it. When he was alone, working in this way, he thought of home. Clare and his father must believe he was dead. And for that he was sorry. Clare had said in her last letter, so long ago now, that she had injured her eye in the explosion. He wondered how it had recovered. The life they had planned together was the life of another man. He was someone else now. He could not imagine how the two men could become one again. He didn’t try. For now the only life he could bear to live was Armand’s.
40
CLARE SET UP HER EASEL on the harbour. A tug pulled a skein of logs through the narrows. A supply ship was coming into one of the piers, dead slow. Men ran up and down the dock, ready to take the ship’s great hawsers. The spring wind caught at tails of black smoke from the three tall stacks and swirled it up into the city. When Clare used to visit the city as a child, the big ships in the harbour were exotic. They smelled of industry, of travel. Now they smelled of war.
The class had begun to use oil paints and were to do a landscape, alla prima. Clare began with small studies in her sketchbook. She still struggled with space, what to place where, what to take out. Each study seemed filled with possibility, each one doomed to failure. It was important to choose the right composition before setting it on the canvas in oil.
Clare stood staring at her sketches, the clumsy limit of her skills flooding her with sudden fatigue. Mary stepped close. “You’re still trying to fit too much in, Clare.” Mary looked at the harbour and down again at Clare’s sketch. “Here, if you want to emphasize the sky,” she pointed to Clare’s drawing of heaped clouds and their reflections among the boats of the harbour, “then drop your horizon low, don’t draw attention to the water and the boats. Build your composition in the sky, balancing the mass of clouds against the empty space behind. Create form with changes in the colours of shadows and light. The sky is not blue but a passage from pale, almost green at the horizon, to warm cobalt in the dome of sky. You have to take control of a painting.” She stepped away, then hesitated and looked back at Clare. “It’s not important to know how a painting will turn out when you’re standing in front of a blank canvas. Each step will tell you what the next step could or should be. Make a thoughtful start, but you can’t anticipate the choices each new step will offer.” She smiled wryly. “Like life.”
By the time the class was packed up, clouds had boiled up from the horizon, swallowing the sun. The wind picked up, scudd
ing the harbour with stiff whitecaps.
Clare scraped her palette, wiping her palette knife clean on newsprint. She wrapped her brushes in a cotton cloth and packed them in her field box. Then she folded up her easel and tucked it under her arm.
Jane grabbed Clare’s free hand with hers, still smeared with blue paint. “We just have to stop by Uphams. It’s reopened and their summer dresses are in the window.” She began yanking Clare off down the street.
“Straight back to the studios, girls!” Mary shouted after them.
“I must have that one!” Jane pointed to a black-and-white striped dress, with red bows at the waist and collar. “Let’s go in and see how much it is.” A woman, holding the hand of a small girl in a blue sailor coat with gold buttons, bustled past the clutter of easels and paint boxes with a cluck of her tongue.
“Let’s get back to the studio,” Clare said, pulling Jane away from the window where she was leaving blue fingerprints. “And come back later after we’ve cleaned up.”
They climbed the hill to skirt the citadel, hurrying as the wind blew colder. There at the top of Prince Street was the figure of Fred Baker, looking through a pair of binoculars.
“Let’s take the shortcut.” Jane, who hadn’t noticed him, turned down Market Street. Clare let her lead her away, without calling up to him.
THE NEXT DAY rain drove the class back inside.
The model arrived after lunch, looking in no hurry, though she was late. She changed into the simple shift required of the female models, and took her place in the centre of the room. She planted her feet a little distance apart and dropped her arms to her side, palms turned outwards, her head to one side. She was a thin young woman, no more than twenty. She looked badly in need of sleep.
Jane had already filled her paper before the model had arrived, with winged figures, half bird, half human, flying from steeples. She leaned towards Clare. “Stop by my house on the way home today. My mother wants to talk to you.” She smiled broadly, mysteriously.
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