Shooting Butterflies (20 page)

One day she overheard her father-in-law say to her husband, ‘For God's sake, it was a
foetus
. My mother lost three between your Uncle Douglas and me. But in those days people were expected to get on with it.'

Andrew replied, ‘I know, but the way she is right now I can't reason with her. If I try to suggest that she might be getting this a little out of proportion, she looks at me as if she wants to kill me.'

They stood talking in the hallway of Hillside House and Grace, next door in the sitting room with Kate, heard every word. Kate looked at her, her face turning pink then ashen. ‘It's OK,' Grace said to her. ‘It's OK.' Then she got up from her chair and left,
brushing past the two men in the hall. She stomped through the wet streets in her thin-soled shoes, the wind sweeping the tears across her face. Back home she went straight upstairs to the bedroom, but before she got to the bed her legs gave way and she ended up doubled over on the floor crying until her face ached and her eyes were so puffy there was just a slit for her to look through.

She thought that the time it took a man to come after his wife, once she had fled in distress, was indicative of the state of the marriage. In the early days when love was both raw and tender he would follow hard on her heels, all concerned looks and anxious hands yearning to comfort and wanting to know what was wrong. Time passed stretching sympathy thin. This was when he would amble along a good half hour or so after the upset – concerned of course, but mostly hoping that a quick hug and a kiss and a soothing word or two would get things back to normal, fast. Then came the day when his eyes would follow his wife way ahead of the rest of him. ‘What
now
?' he would ask himself. Finally, and unable to suppress his boredom, he would go off to get the whole business over with. ‘What have I done now?' he would ask. And without waiting for an answer he would continue, ‘Do you have to make such a big deal out of everything?' He would place his hand on her shoulder, gingerly, as if she had come hot from the oven. ‘Calm down … Stop being hysterical. You're getting shrill again.'

When Andrew did return home, coming upstairs with steps so reluctant it sounded as if his soles were made of Velcro, the worst of it was that she had ceased to care if he came back at all. He stood looking down at her and asked why on earth she had run off and what she was doing sitting in a heap on the floor. Grace raised her head and looked at him for a moment before answering. ‘The bed was too comfortable.'

‘There, my point exactly; you revel in your moods.' Then his expression softened and he put his hand out wanting to help her to her feet. She had to stop herself from snatching at it with her teeth. Instead she hugged her knees tight, refusing to budge.

Andrew kneeled at her side, impatient and concerned both at once. ‘What's the matter?'

‘I heard what your father said.'

‘Oh.'

‘And I heard you agree with him.'

‘Oh!' Andrew jumped up and started pacing the room. ‘I was humouring him. He's an old man, he's of another generation. You can't expect him to see things your way.'

‘No.' Grace got to her feet and picked up her dressing gown from the bed, searching the pockets for her cigarettes. ‘No, I suppose not.' She lit, one, blowing a perfect smoke ring. ‘My problem is that I thought there was this thing called
our
way. But there isn't, is there? And that's what frightens me.' Now she looked at him. Whatever it was he read in her eyes made him flinch and take a step back.

‘I do love you,' she said, her voice matter of fact as she stubbed out the cigarette, grinding it into the ashtray, then lighting another. Andrew winced; he hated her smoking. ‘At least I think I do. And I still quite like your parents. But I wonder about you all, more and more. I wonder what you see from your kindly perky Abbot eyes. I do know that whatever it is it's far away; it's not me or Kate or Leonora; it's not those of us up close. Perhaps I shouldn't blame you. Up close is not very comfortable, is it? I know your mother would rather I wasn't the sort of woman who keeps losing the grandchildren before they are even born. I know you wish I wasn't taking this so badly but that I would bounce back and stop being so tiresomely needy, so inconveniently and thoughtlessly sad. So go on, distance yourself elegantly, go off and be there for those once-removed. It's messy around me, I know.'

Andrew's complexion, ruddy and freckled from weekends spent outside, turned a deeper pink. ‘I had no idea you felt like this. You're so … so bitter. I don't believe I know you any more, Grace. Really, I don't think I can take this for much longer …'

She looked at him, at the pained expression in his eyes, at his jaw muscles working, and she realised he did not concern her much any more. He was too removed to make an impression.

Another month passed. Could Grace please, Robina asked her one day, wear something other than black? She had invited Grace over
for tea and a chat, pretending she needed help with choosing curtain materials but really just to get her to step outside the cottage.

‘What do you want me to do? Say “Hey, I just recently lost another baby so why don't I go and shop for some fuchsia?”'

‘Of course not, Grace,' Robina said in the voice she used when telling Rory that Rodney the pet rooster had gone to heaven. ‘All I'm
trying
to say is that you're not the first woman to have suffered a miscarriage.'

‘Three times, Robina.' Grace had not meant to say that. No one knew about the first one all those years ago. ‘And by the way,' she added, her voice conversational, ‘I take honey, not sugar, in my tea. I have done for the whole time that you've known me.'

Robina was staring, her mouth wide open enough to fit in a fist. ‘What do you mean
three times
?'

‘Nothing; it's nothing to do with you,' Grace said. ‘I'd better go. I've got things to do.' As she walked past on her way to the back door, Robina grabbed her by the arm. ‘Grace, please tell me, what's all this about three times?'

Grace looked into Robina's keen eyes and saw the concern. She felt bad suddenly. It could not be easy to have Grace as her daughter-in-law, Grace with her black moods and black clothes and lost babies. She opened her mouth about to speak, to say something, anything to show that she was sorry too and that she wanted to be friends. But Robina spoke first. ‘You should have told me. You both should. I assume Andrew does know?' She still had her hand on Grace's arm.

‘Not entirely,' Grace said.

‘What
do
you mean, not entirely?'

‘He knows about what concerns him.'

‘Are you telling me that you've been pregnant before … before Andrew? Did you not tell him about this?'

‘No. I didn't think it anyone's business but mine.'

‘How can you say that? Andrew is your husband. We're your family. We love you.'

Grace thought for a moment before saying, ‘No. No, I don't think you do. And I don't believe the fact that I have had other relationships would come as a complete surprise to Andrew. Then
again, in the happy-clappy warm and woolly world of the Abbot family maybe he did expect to marry a 29-year-old virgin.'

‘I know you're upset, so I'll pretend you didn't say any of that.'

‘Actually,' Grace looked at Robina steely-eyed, ‘I really would rather you didn't. I'd really rather you listened to what I'm saying and remembered, just for once.'

But Grace stopped being angry with Andrew. Instead she looked at him like someone waking from a long sleep to find all that was left of the dream was an indefinable sense of loss. She tried to remember how it was that he had come to be her husband.

Grace Shield has been up to see me again today. I enjoy her company. We tell each other things. ‘I don't usually talk to people about things I care about,' she says with a smile that is embarrassed and pleased both at once. ‘Maybe if you knew someone back when you were a child, you have that childish trust that they wish you well. Maybe when you've known someone when they were a child, you don't feel the need to dissemble because children use information as stories not weapons. Maybe that's it; us having known each other all those years ago.'

‘Or maybe you need to speak to someone and you know that I will probably have forgotten what you said as soon as you've said it.' Grace looks up at me with such a shocked expression that I start to laugh. ‘My mind works differently these days. I know that I sometimes make connections where none should be. I know I remember as if it were yesterday what happened half a century ago, while what happened yesterday is covered in mist. But it's quite normal, you know, when you're as old as I am.'

I tell her about Georgie. About how my son died. The seeds of the tragedy were sown long before it happened, by his father and by me. One of the reasons that he settled in Canada was for the wilderness. He would go off for days on end and reappear, so his wife told me, with a new calm that would last a few months before the old restlessness took over and he disappeared once more. Even with a young wife and a new baby, he still felt the need to withdraw, to walk far beyond any human contact. He was found floating face down in a quiet bay of the great lake. It was assumed that the ice had broken beneath his feet. I had
to find out every detail of his last long walk, every detail of his dying. No one understood my seemingly unquenchable thirst for information, anything to do with my son's disappearance into the vast winter whiteness. At first even I didn't quite understand but eventually I knew: while I was busying myself finding answers to the questions, I was busying myself with my son; and while I was busy with my son it was not yet over and he was not quite gone.

So I look at Grace Shield with compassion. She thinks I hold the answers to all her questions but soon enough she will realise, as I had to, that the one answer she needs she knows already: the one you loved is gone and will not return. But for now I let her have her head, although it isn't easy. I tell her as much as I can bear to, although I have to take it slowly. It hurts, having grown tough skin over the wounds of the past, to tear them open again.

And downstairs Noah grunts and frets about his book. When he came to see me last night he told me a quote he had come across.
Writing is easy; all you do is sit down at your desk and open a vein
.

Remembering is a bit like that.

‘You mooch, child.' How does she do it, Lydia, my mother-in-law; how does she, tiny birdwoman, make me feel small when I tower over her? ‘Can't stand mooching. It's high time you took over some of the running of the household. Responsibility, tradition, duty. Arthur needs everything to be just so or he won't achieve the calm he needs, the peace to do his work. It's our task to make sure he gets that peace. I won't be around for ever.'

You don't really believe that? I know you are quite incapable of imagining the world without you, of truly, in your heart of hearts, believing that there will be a time when there is no you.
Women like Lydia Blackstaff are never truly gone. Their spirits live on in the anxious glance of a clumsy maid or the nervous laughter of a poor relation and in myriad rules designed to make life uncomfortable: no hot water in the mornings, jam with the bread for the children's tea only on Sundays, no log fires after the first day of the fourth month no matter what the fickle April weather turned up. That same mean spirit reigns in the fruit-cages in the garden where nettles stand guard around the raspberry canes so that you are
lucky to get half a punnet of berries before your hands start burning from the stings. Oh no, Lydia Blackstaff would never truly be gone from Northbourne House.

I am told to take over doing the flowers for the main rooms. ‘Find my trug and the secateurs, and you may take my gloves.' Here she glances down at my hands that I hold folded across my middle like a schoolchild, and adds, ‘No, I think you had better ask Jenkins for a pair of his.'

I don't know many of the plants by name, other than the obvious ones like dahlias and asters, but I know what will look pleasing and find more than enough for every main room of the house and a couple of the bedrooms too. I gather plenty of foliage. I'm especially taken with the shrub whose small leaves glow in the sun like old Madeira. I arrange those branches with the golden-orange asters and the deep-yellow and pink dahlias and some late-flowering dusky pink roses in a blue jug for the drawing room. The colours of a slow sunset, I think to myself, as I stand back admiring my handiwork.

‘No sense of colour.' Lydia leans on her son's arm and points an accusing finger at my arrangement. ‘And that jug, it's a kitchen jug, child. Have you no idea?'

But soon I find myself useful even by my mother-in-law's standards; I am expecting.

The baby appears, a bruised fruit prised from its shell, and I look down into his unfathomable eyes and swear I will not let him down.

Arthur glances at his son before kissing me tenderly on the forehead, saying I have made him the happiest, the proudest man in all the world. He does not stay long. There is a smell of blood around still and Arthur has an uncommonly sensitive stomach. But for months afterwards the villagers talked about how Mr Blackstaff had come running from the big house with no coat and only his sheepskin slippers on his feet, shouting out the news and standing everyone a drink at the Dog and Hound.

When he next comes to my room, two days later, he presents me with a prettily carved cameo pin before going over and inspecting his sleeping son. ‘Ugly little brutes, aren't they, babies?'

I barely glance at the brooch and ask him instead why he has not been in to see us both, his son and I, since the birth.

Arthur looks displeased. He was a man who expected more thanks for his efforts. ‘Don't you like your pin? It's very fine.'