After the financial disaster of my father’s attempt to reopen Silver Islet Mine, he lost interest in Canada altogether, sold the summer house in Davenport, and turned his attentions to the stock market and rebuilding his fortune. I, however, having discovered the gorgeous north shore of Lake Superior, returned each summer, lured by landscape and by Sara.

During the 1920s, on my way to Silver Islet, I would often stop for a few days in Toronto, and sometimes George would drive seventy-five miles west on the King’s Highway Number Two and meet me there. I would take him out for dinner at the Royal York Hotel on Front Street, and we would ask each other polite questions about the previous year while we ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and drank some of the worst wine I have tasted anywhere at any time. I remember that during these clipped, formal encounters George would sit with his back to the wall and his eye on the door — a habit learned from years of shopkeeping. I was aware that we both felt displaced and uncomfortable, and eventually I decided that I wanted Davenport, the China Hall, and the memory of the prewar summers to be part of our visits, so I would take the train from Toronto along the shore to the lakeside town and stay with my friend for two nights. I liked the atmosphere of the store, George in his apron, customers coming and going. Because we knew that interruption was always a possibility our conversations remained comfortably casual, never developing beyond what I considered to be an acceptable level of intimacy. In retrospect I see that the China Hall was home to me in a way that nowhere else had ever been. I knew which of the two stools behind the counter was mine, and where the scotch was hidden. I always slept exceptionally well in the dark formal bedroom that had once belonged to George’s mother and father.

It was in the China Hall, during one of my traditional two-day stopovers in Davenport, that George first brought up the subject of Augusta Moffat, a young nurse he had met at the Number One Canadian Hospital in Étaples and had rediscovered when he returned to Canada. We had been talking about his parents, who had been dead for some time now having succumbed to the 1917 influenza while George was in France. He said that when he was informed of their deaths he could barely process the information. Surrounded as he was by corpses and ghosts and a daily life that had all but obliterated his childhood, it seemed only natural to him that they should be gone.

“I suppose I never really mourned them,” he confessed. “I found the idea of them dying unmaimed, and in clean sheets, to be almost soothing.”

He noticed I was looking at him oddly.

“You don’t understand,” he continued. “Often when we thought about ordinary household objects — a pillow, or a sofa, or a bathtub — they would seem like the greatest of luxuries. That was at the beginning when some of us still spent our time talking about what we would most appreciate when we got back — those of us who still believed that we would get back. We’d say that we’d want warm fresh bread, a down-filled quilt — that sort of thing. But finally, anything at all beyond the basics of just staying alive seemed frivolous, almost intrusive. By the last year of the war some of the fellows didn’t even bother to unwrap parcels from home. We began to resent the fact that human beings had wasted their time inventing things such as automobiles and furniture with which to pamper themselves.” He laughed. “Even clean underwear annoyed us, the whole idea of laundry.”

I couldn’t imagine laundry being on the minds of soldiers, one way or the other, and said so.

“It wasn’t, of course,” George answered. “Unless we went to hospital in a condition that would allow us to notice. That was the only place that any of us saw even a trace of cloth that was clean. I remember one man, one of the walking wounded, totally refusing to get into a bed because it was so pristine. It was almost as if he were afraid of it. Finally they had to give him a shot of something to make him lie down.”

At this point, a man George knew walked into the store and was quite surprised when I insisted on waiting on him. He wanted some trinket for his mother’s birthday. Because in the past he had always given her teacups, we decided on a porcelain thimble. George stood by and watched the proceedings with some amusement. After I had got the money safely into the cash register and the man had departed with his tiny parcel, George picked up where he had left off.

“With me,” he said, “my most memorable moment in the hospital was when I first heard a woman’s voice singing. It wouldn’t have occurred to me that a nurse would do this. And then later, when I got back from the war, I found the singer herself, this nurse, Augusta Moffat. I was amazed that she was here in Davenport. I remembered her because she had sung to me, well, to all of us in the ward. Some of us even ended up singing with her.”

George had not been seriously injured, he told me — a flesh wound in the thigh — so spent only a few days at the hospital before returning to the front. “I remembered how she just started quite suddenly to sing. It seemed absolutely extraordinary, magical, at the time, though later she told me that nurses were expected to serenade the patients.

“And then when I returned, there she was. Up the hill. At the asylum.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder towards the south. “It began, you know, as a hospital for shell-shock victims.” George was painting a delicate tangle of wisteria on a vase as he said this, and his voice was oddly cheerful, following the lilt and curve of the vines.

I had walked by the asylum several times on my way to and from the station. It was a large white-stucco building, each floor of which was fronted by screened porches so that it resembled a huge rabbit hutch. Sometimes, beyond the screens, I had seen dark shadows pacing. Behind a high wrought-iron fence was a lawn that always remained a sad yellow colour, whether the season was dry or damp, and on it one or two thin cedar trees swayed in the breeze. No, I hadn’t liked what I had seen of the asylum.

“So your friend was nursing there,” I said, encouraging George to tell me more. This was the first time since Vivian that I’d heard him mention a woman.

He spun the turntable on which the vase sat, then brought it to a stop with a gentle touch of his right hand. “She wasn’t nursing there,” he said, without looking at me. “She was a patient for a month or so. Some of them are still there, you know, from the war, though now it caters more to the secular insane.”

“But what on earth was she — what was a woman doing there?”

The look that George gave me seemed to suggest that this might have been the most foolish question he had ever been called upon to answer. “She was suffering from shell shock,” he said.

George continued to speak as he carefully removed the vase from the turntable, returned it to the shelf, and began to clean his brushes in a small sink he had installed behind the counter for this purpose. “A group of us went in at Christmastime, carolling, just after the end of the war. She seemed to respond to the music, though it was hard to tell for certain, and it was then that I remembered her from the ward in Étaples. Some time later she told me that she had sung in the Mendelssohn Choir when she was in training at the Toronto General Hospital, before she went overseas.” He paused. “I was as surprised then as you are now to find a woman there.”

“I had no idea that women suffered from shell shock.”

“Just her.” George leaned against his stool, folded his arms, and smiled at me. “Just her and a hundred damaged men. The ones who couldn’t cope. With the war. In their condition … well. She wouldn’t have been bothered by them anyway. They knew she had been a nurse, that she had been overseas, and they would have respected that. And the odd thing was, she wasn’t beautiful then. It was her awakening, her … recovery that made her beautiful. After that she just shone.”

“Well, I’m glad she recovered.”

“Oh,” said George, “so am I.”

Years later Augusta would tell me about the Davenport hospital, about coming to know George. She would tell me about the war. I imagine she was a very good nurse; George, in fact, told me that she was, but said he wished she were involved in a less hazardous occupation. I thought he was referring to the war, hazardous enough for her as I eventually discovered, but it was another danger altogether that he had been referring to.

Augusta later told me she had been a patient only twice: once in the Davenport Hospital for Shell Shock Victims — a period in her life she barely remembered — and once, a few years later, when persistent throat infections necessitated a tonsillectomy.

I have said that I have never successfully used the stories Augusta told me in a painting, and I did not lie. But there was something about her description of this simple children’s operation, performed in peacetime in the safety of a Toronto hospital, and the strangeness of the dreams it triggered that made me want to explore the narrative. And so, at the beginning of last year, I completed a major canvas entitled The Lost Jane Eyre, and it is now hanging in my gallery in New York City. The critics assumed that the subject of the underpainting dealt with the heroine of the famous book, and much scholarly nonsense was written about the search for and subsequent elimination of the feminine in my own psyche. Some of them even suggested that the painting was a statement about the repression, the eradication, of all that is feminine in society, and about everything that has been lost as a result of this. The truth is that I spent nearly six months painting a series of images that related to what Augusta had told me about the aftermath of her surgery, carefully building up texture with layer after layer of thick paint, then adding glazes of increasingly paler hues. Sometimes I painted images directly on top of other images in order to create an hallucinatory effect. In the end, it took many more glazes than anticipated to obscure the subject because the colours I used in the underpainting had been so extraordinarily vivid.

But the results were not totally successful, despite the positive critical reception of the picture and the price attached to it. Augusta’s character — what I was to know of it — would not permit obviation. All this is true. But my own character will not permit me to stop trying, and beyond this is the fact that the subject of her fantasies and nightmares, during her illness, fascinated me. It fascinated the visual bandit in me.

As she struggled back from the black pool of the anesthetic after the operation, Augusta maintained that she had begun to have dreams — delusions perhaps — about a real little girl called Jane Eyre who had been lost for a few days in the woods near Davenport during the first decade of the nineteenth century. The name, of course, is famous now, but at the time of the actual incident, twenty years still had to pass before the Victorian novelist would lift her pen to write the celebrated book. But in Augusta’s post-operative, drugged mind, the small child George had told her about — the story was a Davenport legend — and the young woman in the novel she had read fused, became one lost female spirit. Voices called the name “Jane” in Augusta’s brain while she dreamed about a weeping little girl floundering across a barren moorland setting or, sometimes, through the thick virgin forests that had existed at the back of Davenport in the early 1800s. It seemed as if the child were trying to elude her rescuers. She had Augusta’s face, her will. She wanted the heath, the woods, the isolation, and her seekers were like hounds. She had no voice, it had been ripped from her throat. The followers, Augusta knew, would force the child to commit the act of speech, and then there would be the pain of crying out. George was among the searchers, beating the brush with a stick. “Augusta!” he called. “Jane!” Nothing in the child, or in Augusta, wanted to answer. Her voice had been torn out.

Later during that same night, Augusta believed she was back in the Number One Canadian Hospital in Étaples; that it was the spring of 1918 and that broken soldiers were calling out in agony from the surrounding beds. The guilt in her was so terrible that she could not rise from her own bed to administer to them. She wondered if it was her friend Maggie’s shift and if she would be able to cope all alone. Then the calling voices were, again, those of the search party, the vigilantes, the brush beaters, and Augusta was again a child being trailed, the branches of the forest tearing at her clothes and hair.

The next morning the delirium abated and the territory of Augusta’s bed once more had become starched white sheets. Beside her lay a kidney-shaped basin into which she vomited stale blood.

George made the trip in from Davenport and appeared with flowers, but she could not speak to him. He held her hand and bathed her forehead with a damp cloth.

Augusta’s nursing colleagues came in now and then to visit. One of them brought a stuffed toy because, as she said, Augusta had had the children’s operation.

Augusta smiled, but she couldn’t shake the memory of the lost little girl weeping, her voice gone, and the world demanding she return. The sun cascading through the window, the white teeth in her friends’ smiles, hurt her throat. She remembered that George had kissed her neck and she believed, as she slipped into sleep, that by doing so he had increased the pain there.

By the third day her temperature was 103° and the aching in her throat was like the voice she had lost, apart from her and howling. The infection had reached her ears and the pain rang there. She was assaulted by inner sound. Doctor Truscott wavered at the end of the bed, flipping through her chart, his face rippling with displeasure. The child in Augusta’s mind crashed through the undergrowth, her hands covering her ears, which were ringing with the noise of the world searching for her.

When George materialized again, flowers in his hands, the bowler hat on his head made him look like a vaudevillian comic. The child ran from his voice. She had lost a shoe; the going was difficult. Her skirt was in tatters, her breath laboured, but she wanted to be rid of George, rid of him. His voice was a scalpel tearing her throat, knives in her ears.

The first injection of the morphia, as they called it then, brought the world back so brutally, with such violence, that she seemed to ricochet off it as if someone had thrown her at a wall. George sat by the bed, his arm outstretched so that his hand was on her shoulder. “Augusta,” he said, “look at me.” But the room was so full of stable colour — so full of static furniture — that his breathing, his moving flesh could not hold her attention. Then, in an instant, both he and the furniture were gone, and the head of the child in Augusta’s mind bobbed against the chest of a true, familiar, and benign rescuer. Maggie’s remembered gift. A needle full of balm. She was exhausted, overcome. The pain, however, was far away, a creature in another part of the forest.

The child had been without her bonnet, George had told Augusta, had been wearing a blue plaid cotton frock. People in Augusta’s life wore hats and dresses. Girls most often ran about bare-headed, boys sometimes wore caps. The girl had been not quite six years old.

Augusta told me that when she was six years old her primary passion, apart from the love of an orderly house, had been Sunday-school cards, those coloured lithographic depictions of Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden, Daniel braving the lions, a procession of animals entering the ark, David facing Goliath, his sling ready. She had kept them hidden in a white cardboard box at the back of her closet, added one to the stack each Sunday afternoon when she and her family returned from church. Sometimes there were meaningful landscapes — a desert, a mountain, a garden. When all other activities were forbidden on the Sabbath, Augusta could enter these, walk around in them. Her eagerness to attend Sunday school was admired by her parents, even to some extent by her brothers, but, she admitted to me, it was really the coloured card given to each child for attendance and punctuality that she was after, rather than the hymns, the moral lectures.

Eventually, like the unmoving furniture of the hospital room in which she lay, the story of lost Jane Eyre took on a static visual quality for Augusta, its episodes reminding her of the Bible cards, or of the stories told by the stained-glass windows in her church.

Little Jane had been without her bonnet. I painted the forgotten or abandoned object as it must have loomed in Augusta’s mind; huge, an ominous flower dark against a pale-blue wall, two ribbons reaching up towards the nail from which it hung. Another picture was superimposed over this one. In it, the child stood with her back to a blueberry picnic, her face directed towards the dusky forest that held all her future lostness, anticipation visible in every muscle of her miniature body. This, I decided, was the moment when the small girl from the early nineteenth century and the woman in the hospital bed a hundred years later would have joined, would have taken a position from which they would never waver. They were going to be lost, missing, irreclaimable.

Augusta said that when she was feverish, or when, at the beginning of a four-hour period, the morphia was fresh in her bloodstream, the pale-green hospital walls broke into her concentration concerning the child. But after a day or two of this, she learned that by changing her position in the bed and closing her eyes she could fight her way back to the story.

She believed that at night the little girl would take shelter beneath a rocky overhang. Heather would spill in all directions away from this place where she crouched. But there was no heather in the forest. The child hugged a pine tree, pressed her cheek into rough bark. A curtain of rain fell over her — how lost she was, how dispossessed — her blue plaid frock darkened and clung.

There was a photograph somewhere of this Canadian Jane Eyre as an older woman. George had seen it. She was a distant relative of his, by marriage, and he told Augusta he believed he had met her once when he was very young, at a funeral, he thought, or some other occasion when fruitcake was being passed around. She was an old woman. Had she read the novel? Augusta wondered aloud. George thought not, they were not a novel-reading kind of family, though, oddly, in the photograph Jane had been holding a book. The Bible, more than likely. The others with her — probably her sisters — were holding china cups and saucers, and there was a teapot and a cream jug on the table they were gathered around. All of them would have been middle-aged women with names changed by marriage. The china appeared to be Limoges and George wondered what became of it. It was the china that made the picture remain in his memory.

“Was there a lost quality about the old woman?” Augusta had asked once, when the morphia had made her able to speak.

“Not in the photo,” George had replied. “She looked very solid, matronly.”

I painted the fields and then the dark edge where the fields stopped and the forest began. Even when Augusta was a child, each Ontario town and village was likely to be near a forest — a forest where it was possible for a child to get lost. In spring, before the leaves thickened, you could see trilliums glowing like stars deep in the woods. Boys often claimed to have spent long hours surrounded by trees. Girls would rarely bother with the forest.

What lured this child into the riot of disordered growth that the virgin forest must have been at that time? For most of her then-short life the trees would have been a black or green smear in the distance, an army that the men of the community were constantly pushing back. As the child drew nearer the woods, there might have been a dark and light pattern that attracted her. After all, inside a forest, as Sara showed me, light is more tangible, more distinct, a foreign element fighting for space. Perhaps Jane went into the forest to touch the light and found herself, ironically, surrounded by darkness. For Augusta, dreaming, drugged, this would have been an attractive, disturbing possibility. She would try to sort through the contradictions in this as the pain worsened. Augusta, turning on her side and looking out over the Toronto chimneys from the hospital window, would have thought about this, about her own snow house near the cedar bush of her own childhood. Often as the afternoon progressed, the pain in her throat returned and she longed for the four o’clock needle.

Once, years later, I found myself painting the four o’clock needle onto a canvas, but I scraped it off before it was finished, wanting not even the suggestion of its shape.

The first forested night, the child had seen a tree cracked open by lightning, or so she had said when she was rescued, and she had known then that this one blasted pine was all hers. She had slept near it on damp ground. She claimed that a large black dog had come and curled up at her back, keeping her warm until dawn. Augusta knew this black dog was exhaustion, followed by sleep, warm and panting. In the morning the animal had fled. The girl climbed the broken tree and saw women in white fanning out through a distant part of the forest. Searching for her. She tried to call, but her voice was gone. She remembered no words and even an attempt to remember caused the knife in her throat to twist.

On her second night in the woods, the child had slept in the fork the lightning had made in the tree. The dog leapt up beside her, she would later insist, appearing just as night fell. It was June and everything was in full leaf so she would have had no awe-inspiring view of stars and sky. She had eaten nothing for thirty-six hours. Her hands and face were swollen with insect bites. Earlier in the day she had dipped her hands into a pool of stagnant water and, when she pulled them out, her wrists had been braceletted by leeches.

These would have merely caused small Jane Eyre some curiosity, though she would have been frightened by the blood that appeared when she pulled them from her skin.

Augusta confessed to me that she hadn’t wanted to be a nurse, but it was preferable to being a teacher of unruly boys like her brothers, or a stenographer in a dull man’s office — seemingly her only other alternatives. She said this in the China Hall decades after the war and years after her reintroduction, in a drab Toronto hospital, to the morphia. If she hadn’t been a nurse, she would never have gone overseas. She would never have met George. She and Maggie would never have walked in their grey-blue uniforms across the sand dunes at Étaples. Maggie, her friend, had chosen the profession because of a love of healing, because of a belief that almost anything could be fixed. Each night in the Toronto hospital, Maggie walked into Augusta’s dreams. “This will fix it,” she would say, her voice soft, soothing, the needle sparkling at the end of her hand.

Augusta had tried to talk to George about all of this when he visited her late one afternoon. “That war,” she had said weakly. “If that war hadn’t happened, or if I’d decided to become a stenographer, we would never have met and I would never have met Maggie. I keep dreaming about her all the time.” She was not aware that she was weeping.

George patted her hand sympathetically, but he appeared odd to her, almost like a dull businessman whose stenographer she might have been.

He looked at her with great fondness. “You are better today,” he said.

“I’m better now. It was hell earlier.” Augusta recalled the vividness of her fantasy concerning the lost girl, the wet branches of the forest.

“I’ll have to be in the shop tomorrow,” George said, “but I’ll be back on the early train next Saturday. By then —”

“By then I may be dead.”

“You’re not going to die, Augusta.”

“I’m a nurse,” she snapped. “I know who is dying and who isn’t.”

“You’re not dying. You’ve had a rough go of it, but you’re not dying.”

I remember how my contemporaries hated the narrative in visual art. It was, according to them, the primrose path towards either genre painting or illustration and should be avoided, utterly. No fresco cycle, no nineteenth-century history painting could convince them otherwise. They scoffed at Giotto, Géricault, David, Goya, Ingres. The knowledge that I spent months painting the tale of the lost Jane Eyre would have greatly perplexed them. What would they have made then of the two or three weeks when I attempted to submerge its details, its form?

After George left the room that day, as evening approached and the drug was beginning to wear off, the static pictures returned to Augusta. The child with flies covering her face. The child with a necklace of leeches causing the pain in her throat. Then, after the evening injection, images broke into narrative. It was the third day and the little girl had suddenly become pure, clear. Her muddy blue frock was gone and replaced by a bluish-grey garment. Her skin began to resemble a beautiful white fog. The white women were fanning out, away from her. They appeared to be emerging from her own body, their skirts and white aprons rippling in the breeze. The child stood in the groin of the charred tree as if she were fireweed, as if she had grown there. In the distance were the whistles, the ringing bells of the search party, but closer, more intimate — more familiar now — was the bird song and the rustling of small animals in the trees.

Augusta became completely convinced that Maggie was the night nurse, convinced that Maggie took the needle from her own arm with great tenderness to share it with her best friend. Long dark trains filled with the wounded were on the way, she said. Without the drug they would not have the strength for the agonizing work of the next few days. They wouldn’t have the strength or the courage to fix things, to make them better. Augusta and this girl — this best friend who stood by her bed, this lost child — they all wore the same blue-grey garments. They all entered the same forests, shared the comfort of the needle, understood each other.

In the underpainting, there were three lost grey children dissolving into the organic matter surrounding them. They were all clothed alike, though the greyness of their skirts varied at times from manganese violet to graphite. Three separate children — but as I worked on the subsequent layers of the picture, they began to cancel one another out.

Lying on her back Augusta would feel the morphia enter her bloodstream. She would close her eyes, spread her fingers fanlike on the starched sheet. The room would close down and the forest would open up all around her. Maggie would summon the white women to lure the seekers into another part of the woods so that there would never be a miraculous recovery.

Small Jane Eyre, you understand, could have followed any creek, any stream in the vicinity towards Lake Ontario, towards Davenport and safety. But some lost girls never attempt to return. The dark dog of sleep comes to lie beside them and they embrace him, keep him close to their hearts. Then, if any other kind of rescuer appears, the loyal animal bites the stranger’s outstretched hand.