The Underpainter by Jane Urquhart

walking.
    Quite early on, perhaps immediately, I could see that, though I was a few years his junior, George found me intriguing. And I, of course, was attracted to his interest, having never before been so admired. He had the amateur’s fascination for the arts, and a strong belief, which I did not dispel and probably encouraged, that he was in the presence of a genuine practitioner. I scoffed at the designs on incoming shipments of tableware, lectured him shamelessly about real art while he smiled good-naturedly on the other side of the counter. Only once, I remember, did he interrupt me. He had been reaching for something high up on a shelf, his back to me so I couldn’t see his face. “It’s the only thing I can do,” he said, “in this place.”
    On Sundays we borrowed the old horse and delivery wagon from George’s father and made our way slowly into the hills that arced on the northern horizon and that one could see from the centre of town. Once we arrived in a spot where there was shade for the horse and a view for us, George would remove two oldwooden chairs from the vehicle, settle himself into one of them, and begin to draw wildflowers and pastoral scenes while I paced back and forth along the lane searching, unsuccessfully, for signs of chasms and falling water. I was uncomfortable with the docile atmosphere of summer pastures so sometimes I drew George, or the horse and wagon. I spent much of the time commenting on George’s drawings, which were proficient if somewhat sentimental for my taste. I was pleased and inflated by what I considered to be my ability to instruct him and with his readiness to accept my instruction.
    But, try as I might, I could never turn him from his china painting. He always brought along a cardboard folio in which to press certain plants and flowers that interested him and that he would use as references for his designs. This was a practice I sneered at as much for its girlishness as for its unsuitability to the making of what I believed, then, to be “real art.”
    I told him this, told him no one would get away with such nonsense at art school, then asked him bluntly why he didn’t go to art school if he was so interested in drawing.
    “I can’t imagine that,” he said. “A school for nothing but art”
    “Don’t they have them here then?” I asked. “Are there none at all in Canada?”
    “None for me,” George said. I thought he was being protective, evasive in his answer. It had simply never entered my mind that a family, dependent for its income on a grocery store and china shop, might not have sufficient money to send a son to the city to play with paints and crayons. Only one son’s educationcould be paid for in his family. His older brother, I later learned, had gone to law school.
    “Besides,” he continued, “I like china. I like the business. It gives me time to think and something to look at while I’m thinking. I can read in the shop. I can order things from England and France.” He squinted at the poplar tree he had been drawing. “It’s really not so bad.”
    I glanced at his perfect face — a face more fine-featured, more youthful-looking even than my own — his blond hair and moustache, his fine skin. I tried to imagine a life filled with saucers and teapots, account books and cash drawers, and was utterly unable to do so.
    But I could imagine what George would be thinking about in the yellow light of early afternoon, the slow, quiet hour in the shop, what he would be thinking about while he unpacked shipments from England and France and set up his fragile displays. It was already halfway through the first summer. Yes, I would have known what he was thinking about because he had already taken me to the pavilion. I had already seen the way he responded to Vivian.
    About twenty years ago, before I began my current series of paintings and while I was still living in New York, I worked on ten small abstract paintings called
Objects in a China