The Underpainter by Jane Urquhart

Author:Jane Urquhart [Urquhart, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-429-1
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 1997-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

We walked that day away from the lake, taking paths Sara had known since childhood, into the woods of The Sleeping Giant, the man mountain, the Sibley Peninsula. We followed swift-moving shining streams that Sara referred to, poetically, as the veins of the slumbering Gargantua. She had read more books than I had. Her father had loved poetry: there were, and probably still are, old editions of Byron and Shelley in the log house. And then there was the public library in Port Arthur. Requested volumes could be sent over by steamer in the summer, dog team in the winter.

“There is more than one way to visit the body of a man,” she said.

I thought the allusion was sexual, until she told me of the Ojibway legend that claimed that the whole twenty miles of the human-shaped peninsula was the warrior Nanibijou, whose body had been turned to stone after he revealed to the European acquisitors the location of the sacred silver.

She told me the names of the various trees, laying her hand flat against the bark as she spoke. She identified plants. She said that her Cornish father had taught her how to do this. Denied access to it for much of his life, because of his work in the mine, he had developed a passion for the surface of the earth and had taken his daughter walking far into the woods on Sundays, even when the snow was deep. Sara could not remember a time when she had not known how to walk through the woods on snow-shoes or how to glide over the frozen lake on skis.

The pines were straight and tall and thick. Sara wanted me to look up to admire their great height, but, captured by my own temperament, I barely raised my eyes. I preferred the visual to be a private experience.

I tramped along sullenly behind her. At one point she spun around and faced me on the path, real anger in her eyes. “Why don’t you ever say anything?” she demanded. “Tell me what you’re looking at, what you’re listening to.”

“It’s not in my nature to say anything,” I replied testily. A battalion of mosquitoes was circling my head. I wanted to be back inside the stillness of the room, shading the curve of her hip with my pencil.

“Is it in your nature to feel anything, I sometimes wonder?”

“What is this all about?” I asked. “Of course I can feel things. I get angry. I get hurt. I’m an artist, for Christ’s sake, I feel things all the time, and I’m beginning to feel angry now.”

“You feel things privately.”

“Yes, privately. What’s the matter with that? I’m not going to spend my life burdening other people with my emotions.”

“I am talking about feelings … not some fit of anger, some temper tantrum.”

“Anger is a feeling.”

“You know very well there’s a difference.”

Yes, I knew very well there was a difference. Sara was searching the map of my character for the place where my heart was

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