The Underpainter

by Jane Urquhart

  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 group
ings 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.

  Sometime during August of 1935, the last month of the last summer that I spent at Silver Islet, Sara told me what it was like to wait. She said there were two kinds of waiting: the waiting that consumes the mind and that which occurs somewhere below the surface of awareness. The latter is more bearable, but also more dangerous because it manifests itself in ways that are not at first definable as such. She then told me that over the period of the last winter she had finally realized that everything that she did or said — every activity — was either a variant of, or a substitute for, waiting and therefore had no relevance of its own.

  There were no telephones at Silver Islet — there still are none, as far as I know — and very erratic mail delivery. Telegrams were considered important enough to be pushed through, regardless of the weather, by boat in the summer or by dog team over the ice in the winter, but I always let Sara know the date of my arrival in June by dropping her a card early in the month. Over the course of the year I occasionally sent her a note to let her know I was fine, and now and then an announcement of one of my exhibitions. Winter was the time when I worked intensely in the studio on the large landscapes, figurative pieces, and interiors for which I had done oil, charcoal, and pencil sketches the previous summer. It was also a very social period. I went to parties and the art openings of friends. I performed duties attached to the various clubs and organizations to which I belonged. For me, winter was always a busy season, one I enjoyed immensely, especially as my reputation grew and my sales increased. Wealthy New Yorkers, it turned out, loved wilderness landscapes. They wanted rocks and water, twisted trees and muskeg on their smooth plastered walls. And some of them wanted Sara’s fair skin and dark-blonde hair; some of them wanted that as well.

  When I was in New York, Sara became a series of forms on a flat surface, her body a composition adapting to a rectangle, her skin and hair gradients of tone. She became my work, and then, when the work was finished, I lost sight of her completely, turned towards ambition. Very occasionally, even when we were together, it was like that — the bed a large white canvas and me manipulating the positive, the negative space, a finished, saleable picture dominant, fixed in my mind. But most often she would not allow it, would refuse to pose, or even to remain in the room if she sensed this other side of me surfacing. “There’s someone in you,” she once said, snatching her robe from a chair. “Someone I don’t want looking at me.”

  She intuited, you see, the entrepreneur.

  It had not been easy to get her to pose for me in the first place, this waitress, this miner’s daughter whose only experiences had taken place on the sparsely populated shore of a northern Great Lake. It wasn’t until after we’d been lovers for over a month that she agreed to do so, and even then she would ask me, before each session, if I were certain that I wanted to paint her. She couldn’t understand why I would be interested enough in her to want to put her in a picture. Her knowledge of men was necessarily limited, so, at first, she was physically quite shy. There had been a boy during her late teenage years, a boy she had been fond of, but he left the settlement to find work.

  “My father was sick by then,” she told me. “Otherwise I’d likely have gone with him. He said he’d come back, but … When your own father came and there was talk of the mine reopening, it crossed my mind that he might return then. You’ll think I’m crazy, it was years later. He was the only one, you see, and I never knew what became of him.” She smiled. “He was probably in some place like Timmins with a wife and four children.”

  As it turned out, there wouldn’t have been work anyway. My father’s speculations had been a complete bust.

  “But,” Sara said when I pointed this out to her, “your father brought you here.” She looked at me, her expression clear and frank. “The mine closed,” she said, “but you came back.”

  Sara visited me in the city once, tracing the route that I so often took when I was leaving her, stepping on board The Canadian in Port Arthur, waking in Union Station in Toronto, then changing trains, continuing on to New York. What was in her mind, I wonder now, on that journey, and what long agony of conscious and unconscious waiting caused her to make the decision to take it? Port Arthur would have been all she knew of cities; she had never bought a railway ticket. Did she feel terror or joy, or excitement? Was she able to sleep while the train rocked through the night? And did she come carrying a message, a message I refused to receive?

  She surprised me and I responded with my own crazy form of panic. I took her to a series of pointless parties and heartlessly ignored her, talked to everyone else in the room, especially women, while she sat tense in a corner, her spine straight, her hands folded in her lap, her forced smile gradually fading. When we were alone together in the studio, I made love to her over and over again, coldly, suggesting by my actions that I believed this was the reason she had come to me, that I was doing my duty. I didn’t want her there and she knew it; I made certain that she knew it. She had no place, no relevance at all, in this part of my life. She belonged in a light-filled room in the north, a room with a view of landscapes J could frame and sell, her body frozen into poses I could also frame and sell. Her presence in my city life, my winter life, was unacceptable. I let it be known that I thought being seen with her was vaguely scandalous, as if one of us had a partner who might object.

  She left quietly one cold, early winter morning, having groped for her clothes in the darkness while I pretended to sleep. I was angry at her decision to travel to see me and was glad at her departure. I didn’t communicate with her again for four months, then I sent a note to tell her the date of my arrival in the north.

  But, ultimately, it took much longer than four months to finally erase the pictures in my mind of Sara walking awkwardly beside me on city streets, struggling to keep up, or of her lying emotionally wounded on my rumpled bed while radiators banged and voices on the telephone announced invitations to more and more parties. Two decades later, after I withdrew to this house in the city of my birth, I completed five paintings entitled Night Journey from the North, The Surprise Appearance, Five Parties, The Used Bed, and Departure at Dawn, or Winter Morning. The series occupied me for the better part of two years.

  What I was able to accomplish during those four months of silence between Sara and me back in the late 1920s or early
1930s, however, was to reconstruct the woman I knew waited for me on the northern edge of the largest of lakes, to separate her completely from the woman who had, against my wishes, visited me in the city.

  But nothing successfully removed that episode from my mind. It bruised my memory in some way. I felt invaded by it. Sitting here, an old man, I can recall it graphically.

  Between the artist and the model, you see, there must always be a distance.

  By the third or fourth summer she had given me complete run of the house — total access. There were days when I wanted to work very early in the morning so that I could watch one of the downstairs rooms fill with quiet, liquid light. Often I remained in the kitchen during the dawn hours, but sometimes I would move into the front sitting room, which had an eastern window through which I could see the pink and yellow sky. I never painted the horizon, wanted only to capture the effect of it, the way it changed the appearance of the objects in the rooms. There is something pure, almost virginal, about rarely witnessed light; northern light that appears in what would be, in other seasons and latitudes, the middle of the night. Light that does not often waken sleepers. I felt covetous of it, wanted to share it only with my art.

  I would let myself in with the key she had given me and sit quietly in the kitchen or the front room until a particular object was touched by this light. At the time, I believed that an intimate knowledge of the interior of Sara’s house would enrich my paintings, not only with its spaces but also with the regions of her body, and so I would make pencil drawings of her handbag resting on a chair, or of her jacket hanging on a hook behind the door. This was a lesson in portraiture given to me by Robert Henri. In class he would often have us turn our backs on the posing model and tell us to draw instead her robe where she had left it on the floor beside the podium, the whole time keeping in mind what we had learned from our previous drawings of her. When I told Rockwell about this later, he remembered loathing such activities, and said that the discarded robe on the floor had no more resonance than a simple still life. “Never forget,” he told me, “that the French call still life nature morte. There has to be a reason for that.” But I was excited by the idea of keeping one picture fixed in my inner eye while allowing my outer eye to focus on something connected but physically separate. It seemed an exercise designed for me and my eidetic facility.