Shooting Butterflies (30 page)

‘And you,' he glanced at her bare left hand, ‘are you married, children?'

‘Divorced. No children.'

‘Did you not want any?'

‘Yes, I did.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Don't worry; you did your best.'

‘How do you mean, I did my best?'

‘Did I say that? What I meant to say was, it was
for
the best.'

‘Oh.'

‘How long are you over for?'

She stubbed her cigarette out and almost immediately reached for another. He raised an eyebrow but lit it for her and said, ‘I go back in two days' time.' There was a pause. ‘Are you busy tomorrow?'

She nodded. ‘A job. King's Road. Advertising. It could take most of the day.'

‘I've got a partners' dinner in the evening. So what are you shooting?'

‘The woman who is strong yet vulnerable, outgoing while possessing an aura of mystique, happy-go-lucky yet ambitious to get to the top, independent yet yearning for love, the woman who wears Whispers panty-liners.'

He laughed, but he asked, ‘You don't mind doing that crap?'

‘Not at all. And it's not crap, it's work. And the money it brings in is what gives me the freedom to do my own stuff.'

‘You're so yourself, Grace. You always were.'

He looked so beautiful and so serious that she said gently, not teasing, ‘But who else would I be?'

‘You know what I mean. Most people act out all these different roles. You don't. It's very relaxing.'

Smiling, she shook her head. ‘I used to, but I've come to think it's best to leave being someone else to others; they tend to be better at it.' She looked at him, her head tilted, a small smile on her lips. ‘When I first knew you, you cared so much; about your wild animals and your woods. You invested everything
you did with this intensity, as if you lived your life in bold letters.'

Jefferson tried not to look flattered, and failed. It was that open face of his. ‘I still care,' he said. ‘That's one thing I've learnt: you can make yourself interested in almost anything as long as you go in deep and with enthusiasm. I quite see now how someone can dedicate their entire life to the study of a particular kind of ant. There's no subject that doesn't stretch to accommodate your interest if you approach it the right way. Anyway, the law is fascinating. Maybe not the initial study but the practice and the principles.'

They both glanced at their watches. It was time to go and they rose from the table in perfect synchronicity. They shook hands as awkwardly as children, but as he turned she kept him back, just for a moment, raising herself on tiptoe and giving him a kiss on the cheek. ‘Goodbye then, Jefferson McGraw.'

That night she phoned Angelica. ‘What do you do when you have just come face to face with a romantic fantasy?'

‘Celebrate?'

‘And when it's unobtainable?'

‘Get drunk?'

‘You're not being helpful.'

‘All right then; live the rest of your life unfulfilled and yearning for what can never be, and knowing that your dream is real, out there, but always out of your reach.'

‘That's it. That's better.'

‘Or, assuming it's a guy, you could fuck him senseless and damn the consequences.'

‘That too is a tempting option.'

But alone, away from the phone, she stopped being flippant. What kind of freak was she still to be in love with a man who she had loved and lost when they were both no more than children?

He called her two months later. He was back in London.

(‘Dangerous,' Angelica said.

‘It's OK. We both know that nothing can happen.')

Liar, liar, pants on fire. Well, they might as well have been, the speed with which the two of them undressed. Quickly, quickly, no time for regrets. Illicit lovers live in mean time; time is their enemy. Come on down, every second counts. Don't answer the phone. Stay a little while longer; you've been gone for so long.

She could not possibly sleep. How could she when he was lying there beside her? He was a miracle. If a miracle occurred, did you turn over and go to sleep? She could not have enough of him. Proudly she listened to him inhale and exhale; look at him, he
breathes.
Every moment they were together was to be savoured. Precious, precious seconds. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…

But she did sleep eventually and when she woke it was seven o'clock and he was up and dressed already. He perched on the bed looking at her with a mixture of helplessness and determination, as if he had no choice but to cross the field of fire. ‘Last night changed things.'

‘Call me a silly deluded thing,' Grace said, ‘but I already thought spending the night making passionate love and mumbling over and over that you love each other kind of did.'

He rolled his eyes. ‘And you're just the same sweet soppy creature that I remember. I know I state the obvious but someone has to. So what do we do now?'

She smiled dopily, too happy, too close to the night before to worry.

‘I really think I love you, Grace,' he said. But he did not look happy about it.

She pulled him gently down towards her. ‘I really think I love you.'

‘That makes it pretty serious.'

She nodded.

‘I can't leave Cherry.'

‘I didn't ask you to.'

‘No, you don't understand. This is not some cheating-husband bullshit. I really can't. She's not well. She… she's got a problem.'

I could have told you that fifteen years ago, Grace thought, but she didn't say it.

‘She never really took to New York, to our life there. And why should she? We don't have that much in common.' He looked away as he said, ‘She got pregnant that summer. The summer you were over.'

Well,
snap
!

‘I had been dating her for two years. Then she told me it was over and she went away. I was pretty cut up for a while although if I was honest with myself I knew we weren't that good together. I had some fixation on her.' He smiled wryly. ‘Boys are like that. I met you and you were everything she was not. I really liked you, but you scared me too. I know I talked a brave talk back then but I was a seriously square kid. You were so different from my mother, Cherry, most of the women I knew. That's what was so good, and that was what drove me back to her, to what was familiar, unthreatening. Once I was back with her I knew pretty soon that I'd made a mistake but by then it was too late. By the way, she thinks I'm a pretentious little prick, and she's probably right. But she really doesn't have a lot of interests. She's not a stupid woman. But she has her views and beliefs and she's not prepared to move outside, not ever. And I've been busy working, being the husband I thought she wanted rather than the one she actually needed. I didn't pay enough attention to her, to what she really wanted.' The look on Grace's face made him laugh. ‘Don't look so surprised. We guys can work these things out as well as the next woman when pointed in the right direction; in our case two years of couple therapy and a spell in a drying-out clinic for her. A while ago she got drunk at lunchtime and wrapped the car round a lamp-post on her way to fetch the girls from school. I can't stop thinking, what if they had been in that car with her? She spent six weeks in hospital. They sent her away with stronger painkillers and more sleeping tablets. We've got a housekeeper now. Cherry's
been back to the clinic but she's drinking again. It's a miserable sordid story and I'm greatly to blame. I've thought of leaving but, apart from feeling partly responsible for her problems, there are the girls to consider. If their mother was OK and we shared custody, I reckon they'd get over it, cope like most kids do. But she is not all right. I'm scared that if I did go, she'd lose it altogether and what would that do to the girls? I couldn't leave them with her, so I'd take them and they'd probably end up having visits with their mom in an institution – not a good scenario.'

As she listened, Grace had tried to picture life in the Upper West Side apartment. All she saw were gothic images of a puffy prematurely aged Cherry reeling round the perfectly decorated rooms with a vodka bottle in her hand, her bubblegum-pink lipstick smeared across her lips and chin. Did she feel sorry for her? Not yet she didn't. She could not forget the way Cherry had sailed back into Jefferson's life, reclaiming him as carelessly as she had discarded him a couple of months before and with even less regard for the girl who had picked up the pieces while she was away. To this day she wondered if Cherry would ever have bothered if it hadn't been for her seeing someone else making such a good thing from what she had thrown out. Jefferson was gazing at her as if she held the answer to the unanswerable. She took his hand and kissed it then held it to her cheek, looking up at him. ‘You said it yourself. You have no option but to stay.'

He was examining her cameras, turning them over in his hands, holding each one up to his eyes, peering through the lens. ‘Actually,' he said, handing them back to her, ‘I'm a hopeless photographer.'

‘That's all right; I'm sure I'm a pretty useless lawyer.' She grinned at him. ‘Then again, as the man said when asked if he played the violin, “I don't know, I haven't tried.”' She placed the Hasselblad in its box and held on to the Leica.

‘The way you touch those guys, the way you look at them, it's like you're in love.'

She did not reply. Instead she said, ‘The Leica is good for sneaking up on people. No mirrors shunting up and down. And at
the moment of exposure you see the entire motif. The Hasselblad is for
The Moment
. The Leica is for the moment.' She signed the different emphases in the air with her finger.

He liked her fashion shoots against the backdrop of a polluted urban wasteland, pictures she had done years before. ‘The message is excruciatingly obvious; I was a lot younger. But they're good shots.'

‘You don't want to be too subtle,' he said. ‘People don't get it if you are.' He told her that he still wished he could take those complacent citizens from their lit-up, centrally heated, air-conditioned homes with their three-car garages and show them the desert they were helping to create. ‘Myself, I'm just the most eco-friendly guy you could hope to meet. I turn the tap off
while
I brush my teeth. I bicycle. I recycle. I eat organic so I expect I shit organic too. I drink coffee from humanely picked coffee beans. I spend a set amount of hours each week giving free advice to environmental organisations. Do I make a difference? Like hell I do. Do I carry on in spite of that? Sure I do.'

‘Of course. It's the fun of being human; you just carry right on although you know damn well it makes no difference.' She was still preoccupied with distance. She showed him some more fashion shots taken in the Seychelles. It had been early morning on Bird Island, a place easily confused with paradise.

‘For man there are no predators. The sea is a liquid-blue embrace, the wind wraps around you like a soft shield against the heat. The sky is alive with birds: humble-looking sooty terns, the rare tropic bird with its quill tail, and the white fairy tern, a perfect beauty across a night sky. Those white birds lay their eggs in the branches of the trees. The baby birds hatch precariously, and they stay there on that same branch waiting for their parents to feed them. From far away it looks as if the branches are covered in white candy floss. Up a bit closer, you think it must be singing fruit. Get closer still and you see it's baby birds, from tiny to almost fully grown. The adult birds can only feed their young on the wing. It's when you're at touching distance and happen to shift your gaze downwards that you realise that, for every ten fluffy baby birds decorating the tree, there is at least one who has slipped and fallen to the lowest branches or even to the ground beneath. Once
that low down they can't be fed. But they don't know, so they just sit there, stock still, patiently waiting for the food that never comes. The ones on the ground seem to be of a darker colour. Get right down, look closely, and you see that that darkness is the ants eating them alive. “Just look at that,” one of the models said, standing on the terrace of the restaurant, pointing at the trees. “Isn't that just the cutest sight?” Well it was, from where she was standing. So it beats me how people always talk about having to see the wood for the trees; that way how can you learn to treasure each and every single plant for its unique contribution to the wood? If you see only the wood, you'll never miss a tree when it is felled. It's more comfortable at a distance, of course it is. In fact it's a godlike state.'

‘Perhaps distance is His problem – God's, I mean,' Jefferson said. ‘Perhaps that's the answer to the age-old question of how He can allow such misery on earth. He means well, the very best, but from where He stands it all looks pretty good: there's air to breathe (apparently it looks prettier from up there, the more polluted it is), we have the oceans and the lakes, the mountains and the streams, woods, plains… “Take a look at that,” He says to a visitor, pointing at the far-away earth. He is proud. Why shouldn't He be? “You remember when I did the work?” He says to his friend. “I was flat out and so exhausted I had to rest all Sunday. But I knew I had done a great job. It's a beautiful place; oh, is it beautiful. There's everything anyone can need: air, water, food. The way I ordered nature, I'm telling you… genius. And look at them, I call them my children, see them milling about? How they have grown and multiplied. Actually, in that respect they have outdone all my expectations. I'm telling you, things must be going pretty well down there.”' Jefferson stopped and shrugged, palms up to the heavens. ‘Could be as simple as that.'

‘So will you still love me from a distance?' she asked, although she was sure his answer would be a resounding yes.