Shooting Butterflies (22 page)

Grace sighed. ‘So many people do. I come across them all the time. They stop me in the street and say, “Isn't she wonderful!” and “The world would be a better place if there were more people like her.”'

‘No one ever says that about me,' Kate said with grim satisfaction.

‘Me neither,' Grace said. They exchanged a smile.

‘Are you going to try for another baby?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because I've lost enough of them.'

‘And because you don't love Andrew any more.'

Grace stared at Kate. ‘Why do you say that?'

‘Because it's true. Don't deny it, don't smooth it over and pass by, don't you dare get like
them
.'

‘But, darling Kate, it's not true. I admit we're going though a difficult period right now, but that's to be expected.'

‘Why?'

Grace paused before answering. ‘Because all relationships do. I'm sure that, happy as they are, your parents' marriage has had its rocky periods.'

Kate shrugged. ‘Not really. They don't spend enough time together for that.'

‘But they're always together.'

‘They're in the same place at the same time. But you tell me, when did they last look at each other for long enough to have a row?'

Grace looked at the cross girl before her, the funny angry girl with her frizzy ginger hair and small bright eyes. Or at you, she thought. Or Leonora or Andrew.

‘Mum is like some priest, so busy doing greater good that she can't be held back by the narrow constraints of family. I can't complain. How could I? My mother is a saint, my father is a
character and I'm lovely and clever and a natural leader with friends beating down my door to spend time with me.' Kate looked like she was going to cry. Grace touched her hand under the table. ‘You don't know what to say, do you?' Kate said. ‘But you're all right. You're not stuck with us.'

Grace looked startled. ‘Yes, I am.'

‘Only if you want to be.'

Robina, her hair piled high and decorated with at least five pins and clips, was handing round plates of pheasant and burnt chipolatas. Pink-cheeked and smiling, she looked younger than her sixty-one years. As she always said, there was nothing she liked more than having a large group of friends and family gathered round her table.

‘Don't like,' Rory said, waving his spoon and fork in the air.

‘You do,' Robina said. ‘It's like chicken. Tweet-tweet bird; your favourite.'

‘Tweet-tweet bird?' said Rory, his eyes widening.

‘That's right, darling,' Robina cooed and she pointed to the sliver of meat on Rory's bunnikins plate. Rory looked at the meat and then up at his grandmother. His eyes were round with alarm. ‘Tweet-tweet bird,' he shrieked, waving his little arms as if he was warding off a swarm of bees. ‘Tweet-tweet.' Kate did her best to comfort him, whispering in his ear and stroking his sweaty blond locks. Robina told him briskly that tweet-tweet birdies liked nothing better than becoming food for hungry little boys. Rory, quite rightly, did not seem convinced.

‘Cheer up, old chap,' Andrew said from across the table.

‘Ghastly racket,' Timothy complained. ‘I always say there's no dealing with children until they can recite Greek verse.'

Kate gave Rory a hug with one hand while she lifted a fork with a small piece of meat to his wet pink lips. Rory in his agitation smacked Kate's wrist away so that the fork flipped from her hand and down on to the tablecloth which was white and embroidered and took hours to iron.

Glenda Shawcross looked aghast. Grace thought that maybe Rory was the only non-girl and the only child below the age of eleven that she had ever seen close-up. Rory was banging his spoon wildly on the table, leaving gravy smears all over the cloth.
Andrew's face had turned bright red when suddenly he leapt to his feet and strode across to where Rory sat in his all-natural-materials highchair, his baby mouth forming a perfect O of horror at what he had done. Andrew grabbed the boy by the arm and lifted him up in the air as if he weighed no more than a kitten. Before anyone knew it Rory had had his bottom smacked and found himself on the wrong side of a closed kitchen door. They could hear him howl. Grace looked at her husband and thought that maybe the babies, his and hers, had guessed what was in store and decided it was wisest to stay away.

Apart from Kate, who was telling her brother that he was a maniac, and Debbie, who was staring at Andrew with a look on her young face as if it was she who had been hit, everyone else carried on as if nothing had happened. Andrew had returned to the table red-faced and out of breath, smoothing out his white linen napkin and asking his father to pass the salt. Glenda Shawcross said something about the value of a firm hand early on and Timothy asked Neil if he had come across this absolutely fascinating little brainteaser; he had the diagram right there.

The wailing of the little boy turned into sobs. Grace looked around her at them, but apart from Kate, who slouched sullen in her seat, they were just eating and chatting. The sobs became hysterical. Grace put her napkin on the table, placed her knife and fork neatly together like a pair of ladylike legs on her plate, and got to her feet. She returned a few moments later with Rory clasped to her neck, as he slowly ran out of sobs. He stayed that way, clamped to Grace, while she ate the rest of the meal.

‘I don't think it was your place to interfere,' Andrew said as they left the table. Grace was still holding Rory but now the child eased his grip round her neck, pulling away enough to turn his head. The look in his big damp baby eyes as he stared at his uncle made Grace feel sick. Well done, Andrew, she thought. Well done, you complete, you utter bastard, because now this two year old knows how to hate.

‘What are you looking at me like that for … darling?' Andrew added the last word to lessen the impact of what looked perilously like a public argument. ‘Someone has to discipline that boy.'

‘I think it's
his
looks you should worry about,' Grace said.

‘And how is the collection going?' Robina asked Glenda. She turned to Grace to explain. ‘Glenda and I have initiated what we provisionally call the Right to Play. It's just a little idea I had. We are collecting unwanted toys and redistributing them to those poor little mites who have nothing. So many children are completely over-indulged with toys these days when everyone knows that a saucepan and a wooden spoon is just as much fun …'

‘I know I'd prefer a Fisher-Price cookery set with inbuilt fried eggs and beans any day,' Grace said.

‘You're not a child,' Robina said. ‘Anyway, my little idea, which Glenda has been kind enough to agree to sponsor through the school, is to have pupils bring in what they themselves see as surplus toys and books and for us to send them to children who truly need them.'

No one could argue with that, not even Grace, but she did her best. ‘Give them an old saucepan and a wooden spoon,' she said.

Robina ignored her and Andrew shot her a furious glance, twitching his head towards Glenda Shawcross in a meaningful fashion.

‘I have a whole box of old Barbie stuff,' Kate said.

‘Good for you.' Robina beamed at her daughter. ‘I never approved of you having the dreadful things in the first place, but you made such a fuss I gave in and children do seem to love them.'

Coffee was served in the sitting room in front of the fireplace. There was a fire lit in spite of the mild weather. It was one of Robina's little sayings:
The family's heart is by the hearth
. Grace said she would make herself a cup of tea. She carried Rory back into the kitchen with her, his little legs circling her hip, his damp hot face buried in her shoulder. She stood by the kettle, waiting for it to boil, humming to the baby, rocking gently from foot to foot. Now and then there was a small snuffling sound from Rory and then, as he grew heavier, she realised he had fallen asleep. She freed his legs and cradled him in her arms, gazing down at his face, so calm, so innocent and peaceful, as if nothing bad had happened. Suddenly there was a clattering of heels on the stairs and Leonora burst into the kitchen. She looked right at Grace and her sleeping son but did not stop. Instead she
made for the sitting room. Grace, still with Rory in her arms, followed.

‘Look at me,' Leonora yelled. ‘She told me, no she suggested, that I stay away.' She pointed at Robina. ‘We don't want anyone to get a look right up close, do we?'

Rory started to cry again, wanting his mother, but Grace whispered in his ear and held on to him.

‘I think you should see, get a good look.' She turned and they all saw how her cheek was bruised and swollen, the black eye and the cut lip. Robina got to her feet, as did Andrew, but they kept their distance. Leonora put her arms out for Rory and Grace handed him to her. Looking round her, Leonora said, in a quiet voice now she was holding Rory, ‘I told you he was a bastard, the Honourable bloody Archie Watchfield. I told you, but you didn't listen. Too busy, were you, Mum, being all things to all bloody men and women and fuck-all use to us.'

Timothy had been busy showing Glenda Shawcross his recently acquired edition of A.A. Milne's
When We Were Six
in Latin, now he dropped the book. To Grace it seemed to take ages to fall, like a leaf on a slow wind rather than a whole book. He too stood up and made to go to his daughter but Robina got there first, taking Leonora by the arm and ushering her and Rory out of the room. It was like a magician's trick, Grace thought, it happened so fast. Now you see them, now you don't; amazing! She stared at the door. There was silence.

Then Glenda Shawcross asked, ‘Did her husband do that to her?'

‘Actually, they're not married,' Andrew said.

Grace lay awake, too tired to sleep. She listened to the ticking of the clock. She could have sworn that ticking got louder as the hours passed. She wanted the night to be over but she dreaded the morning.

Much later she heard the front door open and close and Andrew's steps on the stairs. She turned on to her stomach and buried her face in the pillow, pretending to be fast asleep. He tiptoed into the room pretending to believe her, undressing in the dark, edging into the bed, keeping to his side.

On the third Monday of June Grace woke up and did not wish herself dead. Instead of struggling to keep the curtain of night shut against the break of dawn she opened it wide and said, ‘Good morning, all.' At breakfast she ate her toast and had some more. Later, on her way to get the papers, a stranger smiled at her and she smiled back. She had thought of herself as a felled tree, drying up inside the rough bark, then, when she had all but given up, a small green shoot burst forth and reached towards the sunshine. Surprise!

She studied the work she had been doing in the past year and tried to figure out why the photographs were dead. She spoke to Andrew about it not because she thought he would care but because he was there. ‘Look,' she pointed at the pictures in the album from her summer in New Hampshire, ‘I took those, way back. I knew nothing about photography and yet those shots have more life to them than anything I've been doing lately.'

‘Who's the bloke?' Andrew pointed at Jefferson McGraw.

‘Oh, just an old boyfriend.'

Andrew took the album from her and leafed through the pages, pausing now and then to study a particular photograph. ‘You never looked at me that way,' he said, closing it and chucking it down on the table.

‘What's that supposed to mean?'

Andrew looked at her, his eyes opaque. ‘I'm just saying that, if you had, maybe we wouldn't have the problems we have now.'

‘I won't even dignify that with a response,' Grace said. Because I have none, she thought. ‘Anyway, I was talking about my work.'

‘You usually are.'

‘And you don't talk about yours?'

‘I'm not obsessed.'

‘You knew what photography meant to me when we met. How important my work was to me. You didn't mind then. I cut the work
down; I did all the wifely stuff. And see what that got me? No, be true to yourself. It's high time I was.'

Andrew sat down. He looked at his hands and then he looked at her and her anger evaporated. That small sad smile of his, that little-boy-lost look, never failed to touch her, to make her want to go up to him and make everything better. But she stayed where she was as he said, ‘I didn't mind because I expected you to change and to love me more than any work. But it was the babies we didn't have you really loved.'

‘That's not true.'

‘Isn't it?'

‘You're a grown man; you should understand about other loves and not see them as competition.'

‘Maybe I should.' He shrugged.

Grace placed an ad in the local paper offering her services as a portrait photographer and she spoke to the editor asking him to consider her for work. Within three weeks she had photographed two brides-to-be, one actual bride and four small children, two of them twins. Then the editor called up to say that the nearby zoo at Crichton Manor was threatened with closure and a group of local councillors and animal-welfare people were meeting on site. Would she cover it? The staff photographer had gastroenteritis. A colleague of Andrew's was coming for supper with his wife that evening. Grace looked at the shopping list – four red peppers, anchovies, garlic, four duck breasts, strawberries, cream, ice-cream – then she went to the phone and called the school leaving a message for Andrew.
Got a job on. Please get Chicken Kiev from M&S plus two cheeses.

‘Be sure to get the lions,' the editor had said.

The zoo was not threatened with closure because of any lack of care for the animals but because accidents kept befalling its staff. Two years earlier, one had been kicked to death by an ostrich and only the other day a black bear known to be friendly and loving had gone for its keeper who only just escaped serious injury. The keeper, Ben Hawkins, was there today pleading the case for the zoo to be
kept open. The animals were not only happy and well cared for, but practically tame as well. To demonstrate he asked the visitors to accompany him and the owner, Lord Crichton, to meet Sonia the black bear for themselves. The group stayed at a distance while Ben Hawkins went inside Sonia's enclosure. Grace moved up to get a shot of the chairman of the council and the other visitors. She was backing up towards the enclosure, the camera to her eye. It looked to be a great shot. Whatever was going on in that enclosure it kept the visitors riveted. They stared, they mouthed, what
were
they mouthing? She pressed the shutter and let out a cry of pain.