The Underpainter by Jane Urquhart Page B

interior of coloured lights, loud music, and paper scenery, as if he wished to be out in the meadows, or back in his cluttered China Hall, alone, with moonlight shining on the platters.
    Then Vivian would appear — her dark, upswept hair, her perfect, gleaming teeth. She would approach George, who would be forcing himself to study the opposite wall, and seize his arm, tugging him towards the centre of the floor. The dance that ensued was one of the oddest I have ever witnessed; the whole room turned to watch it. Vivian led George through the steps, positioning his limp arms, one on her shoulder, the other on her hip, and then moving her own right hand rhythmically from his back to the nape of his neck, lifting it now and then to caress his hair or lightly touch his lips and cheeks. She was like a light flickering near him, a brush painting his features. All the time they were dancing, she laughed, chattered. He remained stiff, impassive; moving, or being moved, from static pose to static pose. His expression was grim.
    I thought, at first, that he hated her.
    At the end of the dance she released him, a pet bird with whom she had tired of toying, and stepped from partner to partner, treating each with the same bright, yet oddly detached attention. I was amazed by her beauty — there was no one there like her — but I was even more astonished by the fact that she chose her own partners, often even paying for the dance tickets herself, while the other girls sulked shyly in corners waiting to be chosen.
    Vivian never waited for anything. She was always in perfect control.
    It wasn’t until the end of the summer that I managed to persuade George to talk about her. By then, however, I had gatheredinformation from some of the other young people my age I had come to know around town. Vivian was new in Davenport, I was told, had arrived the previous autumn with her mother, who was choir director at the Presbyterian Church. Vivian played the organ there and sang, had, in fact, made a name for herself all over the province as an amateur musician. But that wasn’t all; she and her mother rented themselves out as entertainment (The Lacey Girls), and it was rumoured that they had played the northern mining towns — the dance halls as well as concert halls. There was an air of scandal about them, softened somewhat by their connection with the church. The father, it was said, remained in Toronto, where he ran a boarding house. The mother apparently had great ambitions for her daughter, kept her home most evenings when they weren’t performing to practise scales. She was allowed to go out only on infrequent nights. I thought this explained Vivian’s desperate gaiety, her need to harness every partner in the room.
    George and I were painting in watercolour on a Sunday afternoon after a Saturday night during which Vivian’s appearance had reduced most of the young men in the room to a collection of servile suitors and had caused in George a melancholy anger so fierce it was palpable and so prolonged it was changing the shape of the whole afternoon.
    “What is it about that Vivian woman?” I asked, breaking a taboo I knew perfectly well was in place. She had chosen to dance with me once or twice during the previous evening. I was pretending that I wanted to know more about her, but I really wanted to know more about George.
    “What do you mean?” he snapped. “What about her?”
    “Why does she make you so angry?”
    “She doesn’t make me angry.” George banged his small tin paint box shut. “Why should she make me angry?”
    “That’s what I’m asking you.”
    George stood, picked up his chair, and tossed it in the back of the wagon. He walked around the vehicle and slouched beside the old horse, stroking the soft part of the animals nose for several minutes. Then he turned, walked past me, and collapsed into a sitting position on the ground near the edge of the hill. I could tell by the movement of his curved back that he