Night in the China Hall is one of my least satisfactory canvases. For it to have been successful I would have had to paint everything I’ve told you so far, everything Augusta told me, the teeming floral patterns of the china that engulfed us, and the dreadful artificial light raining down on a place in which night was never meant to be witnessed. I would have had to paint Vivian’s black mink coat flung over the counter like a wounded beast, Augusta’s locket, the cardboard sign that read CLOSED and that George had carefully placed among the cups and saucers displayed in the shop window. I would have had to paint the smoke from my cigarettes that gradually filled the place with a dirty fog, the tassel hanging from the end of the old green blind that George had forgotten to pull down over the glass in the door. I would have had to paint the dining room where we all consumed in silence the simple meal that Augusta hurriedly put together for us, George’s homemade wine that we drank with our food. I would have had to paint the look on George’s face as I walked into the shop with Vivian beside me, the bell that hung above the door and that rang too long and too loud in the silence. But, in the end, I painted Augusta talking to me in the shop in the early hours of the morning. Only this. Nothing else.

“Look who’s here,” I said. “What a surprise, n’est-ce pas?”

“What a surprise,” George echoed. He stood with a small tube of paint in one hand, the doorknob in the other, and a paintbrush clenched in his teeth. I could not interpret his expression.

“It’s Vivian,” I prompted. “Or I suppose I should say the famous Vi Desjardins.”

George said nothing, seemed frozen.

Then, after several awkward moments, Vivian raised one hand towards George’s face, removed the paintbrush from his mouth, and kissed him lightly on the lips. When he didn’t respond she took a step backwards and looked at him. “You haven’t changed,” she said. Silence. Vivian placed the brush in a vase on a nearby shelf, walked past George to the far end of the store, took off her coat, and dropped it on the counter. She stared at each of the three walls in turn. “This place hasn’t changed either,” she added.

A brief, vivid picture flashed in my mind, a picture of George leaning from the train window. She crushed it beneath her heel

I hoped that Vivian would behave decently towards George’s friend. I suspected she was capable of utterly ignoring the presence of another woman in the room.

George didn’t answer, began walking down the length of the shop towards Vivian, a peculiar smile on his face. “Oh, I’ve changed,” he said to her. “Everything about me has changed completely.”

Vivian tilted her head, looked at him quizzically, then announced brightly, “Not in my view, you haven’t.”

I looked at the man and woman who stood face to face at the far end of the China Hall. Quite suddenly I knew that in spite of the youthful George’s angry misery, a relationship of some kind had developed between them over the course of that winter preceding the war. I found the idea surprising and somewhat amusing. Just as I was smiling to myself about George’s romantic past, I heard Augusta call from somewhere in the rooms at the back of the store.

“George,” she was asking, “who’s in the shop with you?”

It wasn’t until after supper, until after I had brought out the bottle of scotch, that George stopped breezily articulating pleasantries. Augusta had excused herself in order to tidy the kitchen, and George had fallen into the kind of quietness that could be mistaken for contentment were it not for the way he stared at the tumbler on the table in front of him, suddenly drained the contents, then pushed it towards the bottle at my end of the table without raising his eyes. I refilled the glass and slid it into his hand. Still, he did not look at me, or at anything else for that matter. Vivian began to relate a long anecdote concerning the unpublished lyrics of a Cole Porter song. George coughed once in the middle of this, shoved his chair back with an abrasive, grating sound, and Vivian paused. But he did not get up from the table and so she continued, her voice rising in pitch. In the middle of a sentence that began with the words, “Then Cole said to me,” George said hoarsely, “That’s not what we care about Vivian, not what we want to know”

She appeared not to have heard what he said. “What was that, darling?” she asked, leaning her head in his direction.

“Darling,” he repeated, still looking at the table, his voice flat. “What kind of a word is ‘darling’?”

I could hear Augusta’s footsteps in the kitchen, then the sound of running water.

Vivian swallowed. “George,” she said, “I wanted to —”

But he interrupted her. “Where did you go … darling? Or perhaps we should ask you what you are doing here, what in hell made you come back here?”

Even in the lamplight I could see that his expression was bleak, his face white. The tumbler was shaking in his hand, the ice clinking slightly as if he were drinking on a train. I began to feel uneasy, remembered the day in the shop, George’s violent trembling, the lavender paint dripping onto the floor. What was this mood that he had so carefully concealed, hoarding it for three hours, until Augusta was out of the room? It was only in the face of his strangeness that I realized how artificial his previous politeness had been.

Vivian began to recoil from him, but he clutched her upper arm, drew her closer.

“Tell me all about it… darling,” he said.

She shook him off, smoothed the silk of her sleeve, sat back in her chair, and smiled brightly, first at me, then at him. “It was Mother,” she said lightly. “What else can I tell you? She just wouldn’t have it. We left the morning after I told her. She just packed up two suitcases and got us on a train for New York. You must have known this. From there we sailed to Britain. You know what she was like. She wouldn’t even consider it.”

George remained silent.

“She wouldn’t let me write or wire. I just couldn’t. I was never out of her sight.”

George said nothing.

“You can’t seriously believe that it wasn’t for the best?” Vivian looked at George with genuine astonishment.

“Best for who?” George angled his upper body towards her. “Best for who, Vivian, darling? Best for me? I don’t think so. Best for the boy I was then? I doubt it.” A pause, then he added the word “darling.”

“But it was all forgotten so quickly. I had my career … and then there was the war.” Vivian was no longer smiling. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “You would have gone to war, George, regardless.”

“Yes, I would have gone to war, regardless,” he said. He was staring directly at her, his face implacable. “And with any luck I would have been killed … is that it?”

Vivian straightened her spine. “Look,” she said, “I came here in good faith, to make amends, to explain.”

“To explain,” George repeated, his voice cold, hard.

“What the hell is going on here?” I said. “What is this?”

“You wait twenty-four years,” George said, ignoring me, “to explain. I don’t believe that’s why you’re here, Vivian. I can’t believe that’s why you’re here. And you,” he said, turning suddenly to me. “Is this your idea of a joke?”

I had never heard George speak like this to anyone. “ What’s the joke?” I wanted to know. “I have no idea what is going on here.”

“I didn’t tell him,” Vivian sighed. “I half supposed he knew. It just didn’t come up.”

“Knew what?” I looked at each of them in turn and asked again. “Knew what? Will somebody please tell me what’s going on here?”

By now the look on George’s face was frightening. But I’d seen the expression before, I realized, during dances at the pavilion. In that look all those years ago there had dwelt the man that George would become; the angry man sitting at this dining-room table. “Settle down,” I said to him. “We just dropped by to say hello. Vivian wanted to see Davenport again.”

George drew back from Vivian. “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus Christ.” He put his elbows on the table and covered his face with his hands.

He is hiding something terrible, I thought, something he isn’t able to remove from the expression on his face. Vivian placed one white hand on the dark wool of his sleeve. “I just couldn’t, George,” she said softly. “It was one night and then Mother took me away. And she was right. We were just children … I was only seventeen and you weren’t that much older that winter. I find it touching now that you felt you had to marry me in order to go to bed with me.” She laughed. “I certainly haven’t run into anyone as chivalrous since.”

George raised his head from his hands and looked at her. “Chivalrous,” he repeated, almost as if he had never heard the word before. “We were married,” he hissed. “We got married.”

I could see there were tears in his eyes, anguish on his face, and felt embarrassed.

“For one night,” Vivian said, as if correcting him. Then, when he looked stricken, she repeated, “I just couldn’t, George. I was already becoming someone else. You caught me just on the edge of that.”

“I suppose you want a divorce,” he said. “I suppose that’s why you’ve come.”

Vivian removed her hand from his arm, tossed her hair back and laughed. “Not particularly,” she said. “Why bother?”

It was then that I saw Augusta standing, shadowed, in the doorway. She was holding a tray on which there were cups, saucers, a coffee pot, and four pieces of cake. Framed by the moulding on the doorjamb, she resembled one of the women in Sargent’s full-length, life-sized portraits. She was that frozen, that still. She looked at me, she looked at what she was carrying in her hands, and, for some inexplicable reason, she looked out the side window where not even the wall of the neighbouring building was visible in the dark. Then she turned and quietly carried the tray back into the kitchen.

George had not seen her at all. He had never taken his eyes from Vivian’s face.

Augusta made her second entrance into the room five minutes later, after an excruciating period of silence. This time the clatter of the cups on the tray was loud enough that both George and Vivian turned to stare at her. I couldn’t bear to look at her face.

George stood up. “Vivian has to catch a train,” he said, “in Toronto. I’m going to drive her there.”

“But,” I said, “I was going to drive her back to —”

“No,” said George, “you told me you were spending the night. You’ll have enough driving to do tomorrow. I’ll take her there … for old time’s sake. You stay with Augusta.”

I had imagined that he wanted to be rid of her, as quickly as possible. “But isn’t there a train from Davenport?” I asked. “Couldn’t I drive her to the station here?”

Vivian rose slowly to her feet. She looked preoccupied, distracted, almost middle-aged. Her lipstick had worn off at least half an hour ago and she had uncharacteristically forgotten to reapply it, a strand of her elaborate hairdo had fallen from the pins. “I want George to drive me,” she said. “I have to catch the train from Toronto at midnight.”

“There is nothing she can take from here,” said George, “to get there in time.”

“She could take me,” I said in exasperation. “I don’t see why you should have to —”

“Leave it alone, Austin,” George said ominously.

And then there was Augusta, standing, utterly silent, just a few feet inside the door to the dining room.

“I don’t know what this means,” I said to her. “I don’t know why he’s behaving like this.”

“Let them go,” she said quietly. “Just let them go.”

The four of us walked, one after another, through the curtain that separated the China Hall from the rest of the house. Vivian had left her coat and her train case on the counter; this one small piece of luggage suggesting that all along she suspected she would be leaving without me.

Every move that George was making, each gesture — from the way he shook his coat up over his shoulders to the rough manner in which he thumped the cash register to remove some cash for the trip — suggested anger, implacability. Just before he reached the door he stopped suddenly, removed a painted teacup from one of the shelves, and thrust it towards my face. “At least I could have taken some nourishment from this,” he said. I could see that his hand was still shaking. “At least I could have filled it again and again with warmth. Can you say the same thing about anything you’ve done?”

“Leave him alone, George,” said Augusta. “This has nothing to do with him.”

He swung around then and looked at her, almost with shock, as if he hadn’t even known that she was there, as if this was all happening years ago, before they had met. His face softened, but he did not touch her. “Oh, Augusta,” he said. “Augusta.”

She would not look at him.

To Vivian he said, “That woman … Augusta … is the woman I’ve come to love.”

No one said anything. This confession seemed ludicrous, trite, as sentimental as the worst piece of painted china in the room. I felt humiliated for him. At that moment not one of us believed him.

George opened the door and Vivian walked out into the snow.

“I’ll be back in four hours,” he said.

He was speaking to Augusta or to me or perhaps to both of us. Or maybe he was talking to himself. As it was, the sentence hung in the air — a message that hadn’t quite reached its destination. The bell on the door rang gaily, inappropriately, for a long, long time after they had gone.

“I’d better go too,” I said to Augusta. “I’m sorry about all this.”

“No,” she said, “don’t go yet. I’d like someone to talk to while I wait.”

I had no wish to discuss the events that had just passed; George’s response to Vivian, the revelation of their ephemeral childhood marriage. I had already concluded that it had been, at least for Vivian, a whim, driven by her need to assert herself in the face of her domineering mother. It probably had very little to do with George, despite his undeniable passion, had been instead a contest between mother and daughter, one which the mother, as is so often the case, won in the end. It all seemed tawdry to me somehow, in ways that a full-fledged adulterous affair might not have. No, I did not want to talk about it — not at all.

As if she sensed this, Augusta clarified her request. “Listen,” she said, “I just want to tell someone the story of my life.”

And so … Night in the China Hall