Shooting Butterflies (36 page)

William sulks and protests that then he shall have to walk the three miles from the station at Northbourne to his house, but Viola just laughs and tells him the exercise will do him good. ‘When you get home,' I tell him as we part, ‘could you please call my husband and tell him that I will not be returning until the morning.'

Viola pulls up outside the front door. I remain in my seat, gazing up at the house. I had never noticed before quite how meanly proportioned the windows are. I turn to her and whisper, ‘I can't go back.' She takes my hand and lifts it to her cheek. She kisses my upturned palm, then gently, and in turn, each finger. I pull free and grab her by the wrist. ‘It would have been kinder if you had never come for me.'

Tears fall down Viola's cheeks. I kiss each one away; I don't care who sees.

My children ask for a story.

Snow White lay alone in her coffin of glass, neither dead nor of the world. Men came from far and near to gaze at her perfect silent beauty. Her eyes were open but, although she could see the young men bending over her coffin, she could not feel the warmth of their breath. She saw the branches of the trees move above but she could not feel the breeze against her skin. She could see the birds but the sound of their singing was distorted by the glass and sounded like no song to Snow White.

Then one day a young prince came past in his motor car and when he saw the coffin of glass he stopped and stepped out to take a better look. And he saw how beautiful Snow White was and he loved her. He lifted the heavy glass lid and bent down and kissed her and as he kissed her the warmth returned to her cheeks and the breath came strong and calm from her lungs. He picked her up in his arms and lifted her out of the coffin of glass into the sunshine and the birdsong and the soft gentle breeze.

The children clap and cheer. I keep the true ending of the story to myself.

Gently, tears falling from his eyes and down upon the face of his beloved, the prince lowered her back into her glass coffin because they both knew that was where Snow White had to stay.

* * *

Arthur has finished his Island canvas. He says it will be his finest work to date, a rebuttal of the degenerate tendencies pervading the world of the day, a triumphant affirmation of Beauty as the true and noble goal of Art. During its creation, our third child had been conceived, born and buried, yet he has scarcely deviated a line from his initial sketch. The canvas will form the centrepiece of a grand new exhibition at the Argyll Gallery but first, that was the plan, there would be an unofficial unveiling at our home. The planned date for this has had to be postponed because of the mourning period. Arthur told me at the time that this was a great disappointment. I believe he looked to me for sympathy.

I, too, have been busy. During the day I look after my children, I garden and oversee the running of the house. I have had no need of Sir Charles's pills although I have been careful to remove them, each time, from my breakfast tray and to retire, as for a nap, when expected, mid-morning and before dinner. In the early morning, as soon as the sun has risen but before the household is awake, I creep up into the attic, to the small room at the back with the north-east-facing window, and I work.

The moment has come for the unveiling. Arthur strides ahead of the guests; he struts as proud as a sergeant major. He halts outside the morning room then pulls open the double doors.

Silence. Then noise breaks out across the room and flows down the hallway. Lady Glastonbury grabs her husband's arm and someone pushes a chair beneath her. I stand at the back, unnoticed. I feel nothing. Not triumph, not pity. Inside me there is a void. Into that void all feeling is drawn, soaked up, gone.

Crude. Offensive to good taste and refinement. Perverse. An affront to art. The work of a deficient.

The colours scream as they are dragged across the canvas. My painting speaks of friendship turned to love and love turned into hatred. There are pitter-patter mice with big velvet eyes and ears that are bigger still. There is a house with all the windows shut and a sea that melts into the horizon. On the beach, with the women, two young children play. I do not know to this day what offended them all most, that there was love or that there were children watching that love.

All of it, my world, my picture, propped up against the wall beneath my husband's great work.

Arthur faces his guests. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, something appears to have gone wrong.'

Nell Gordon:
The question many of Grace Shield's friends asked themselves was how she, an independent, free-spirited woman who had made her way in the competitive world of photography, could have meekly played the role of ‘other woman' during a six-year relationship.

Grace opened the back door and Pluto waddled out, wheezing, bug-eyed, weak old bladder fit to burst. She followed him, barefoot on the morning-damp lawn, still in her dressing gown. She leant over the gate, feeling the spiky wood against her chest. She was watching the road. There he was, turning the corner by the fire station. He was too far off for her to distinguish any features, but it was his walk, loose-limbed and easy, that gave him away. She raised her hand in a wave and, with Pluto puffing at her heels, walked back into the kitchen and put the bagels in the oven and the kettle on the stove. She left the door open with the bug-screen shut tight. It was going to be another hot day. She glanced at her reflection in the small mirror above the fridge. Her hair was damp from the shower, her cheeks were pink and laughter lines fanned out from the corners of her eyes. I'm just so smiley these days, she thought. I hardly recognise myself.

‘Honey, I'm home.' He said that each day as he returned from the shop with the papers and every time she laughed, not because it was especially funny but because he looked so pleased with his little joke.

She went to kiss him but tripped up on Pluto who was intent on getting there first. ‘Breakfast's nearly ready.'

As usual he commented on near enough everything in the paper and as usual she listened to only half of what he said. What took up most of his interest this morning was a proposed housing development on land that was known to be a toxic dump in an old whaling town some fifty miles down towards the mainland side.

‘So, the big guys say, do you folks want a roof over your heads or not?'

‘You're a lawyer,' Grace said. ‘Help. Offer your services to these people.'

He looked up at her and smiled. ‘Oh, so you were listening. Well, maybe I shall.'

Was he getting old already? But he was only just forty. Yet there were times, like right now, when Grace looked at him expecting that hum of energy when his whole body radiated enthusiasm, and got instead a glimpse of weariness. She leant across the table and put her hand on his. ‘Are you feeling all right?'

He straightened in the high-backed wooden chair and grinned at her. ‘Of course I'm all right. I'm always all right. I shouldn't have had that second whiskey last night, that's all.'

‘You go read your paper on the porch.' She planted a kiss on the top of his head, drawing in the warm scent of his hair. ‘Smells nice.'

‘It's that new shampoo I bought. It's French. It says on the bottle they've used real vanilla essence.' He bent down and scratched Pluto behind the ear before getting up from the table with the paper in one hand, his half-finished mug of coffee in the other.

She grinned at him. ‘What?' he said, self-conscious all of a sudden. ‘What?'

‘Nothing,' she said, but she smiled at the way he had of telling you the exact contents of his shampoo, the details of a meal he'd had out, or the exact ratio of wool to cashmere in his new sports jacket. It was as if by sharing each small thread of his life he tied the two of them closer together.

In a while she would bring him a fresh mug of coffee. She liked spoiling him in little ways like that. She liked thinking of him dozing in the rocker while she pottered round the kitchen, her heart filled with love, her brain gingham-wrapped. She put away the milk and the carton of juice and wondered at the way American appliances were so huge, so 1950s-bulky, compared to the ones at home. And those top-loading washing machines where you could watch the water pouring in. It was all about confidence, she thought, confidence in unlimited space and unending resources.

* * *

They always went for a walk after breakfast and then again last thing before bed at night. She liked the sound of that, saying it to an imagined listener:
we always
…

On the way to the beach they walked down Main Street, Jefferson holding her hand as he hurried along, his blue gaze fixed at some point far ahead. Grace pulled at his arm. She liked to take her time. She liked looking through lace curtains and half-open blinds and the shutters of the shabby-grand old houses.

Every day, as she put on her trainers ready for their walk, she felt that same current of excitement. Jefferson said she had got it all wrong; it was Pluto who should be wagging his tail and rushing to the door. But she knew what it was all about. It was going somewhere together openly, no sneaking around, no looking over the shoulder. It was about the way the most mundane experience became heightened to something noteworthy just because he was there. Ordinary days became gilt-edged.

They walked along the beach and the sun played with the many colours of the sands that flowed grain by grain towards the ocean. Above their heads busy terns flew back and forth between their nests and the sea, the returning birds carrying their silvery catch crosswise in their bills.

‘Did you know,' Jefferson said, ‘that the tern can cry out and still not drop its catch? It makes it such a superior bird, don't you think? Such a clever pretty bird,' and he raised himself on his toes, his right arm in the air as if he was trying to stroke one of those graceful curved wings.

Being in love brings out the mother in a woman and the boy in a man, Grace thought, as she pulled out a tube of sun cream and smothered it across his burnt forehead and the bright-red bridge of his nose. Jefferson, shifting restlessly from foot to foot, had been in the middle of drawing their initials in the sand with a stick he had stolen from Pluto, and as Grace patted the last of the cream into his cheeks he returned to his work, finishing off with X for a kiss.

They took a detour through the town on their way back, nodding hello to at least seven people. They stopped at the
bookshop. That shop surprised them every time, the way the aisles stretched back impossibly until it seemed the place defied the laws of nature, with the inside being larger than the exterior. Pluto was welcome and off his lead he just curled up right by the cookery section, as if he knew that was of interest to him. Jefferson and Grace, too, had their routines: he picking out book after book, checking the covers, the writing on the back, the author photograph; Grace choosing one book and reading it until he was through browsing. This way she already knew the first twenty pages or so of pretty well every one of the great American classics. So far she had enjoyed four enough to buy them and read them all the way through to the end. At the checkout they chatted to Mary who owned the store and worked there every day including Saturdays. She smiled as she looked at them. ‘You know,' she said, ‘it is truly uplifting to see a couple like y'all. You're just so nice to each other, so loving in everything you do and say. I tell you, I get enough couples in here bickering and glowering, needling and snatching. But seeing you two gives me hope.'

Maybe, Grace thought, they had no right to, but they walked out of that shop feeling pleased with themselves all the same, like a couple who had made it through the rough and the smooth and emerged not just together but wanting to be that way. Although they had no right, that was how it felt, and that was how they looked to the outside world. And what, Grace thought, was life but a series of perceptions?

Usually ten minutes was the most Jefferson would ever nap, but that day after lunch he just slept on and Grace did not have the heart to wake him. They played music in the afternoons and left it on to sweep them off to sleep. Today it was Verdi:
La Traviata
. It usually was. ‘I listen to them all,' Jefferson had said some time back, with that slightly self-important air he had when he was trying to impress her. ‘Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, but I keep returning to Verdi; Verdi and Mozart …' Grace had given him a look. ‘Oh all right then, and Dolly.'

Violetta, in her aria, was begging her lover's father to remember her kindly when she'd gone. Grace listened as she looked at
Jefferson sleeping, and she thought that life did not get much better than right there. She picked up the camera. She looked through the lens then went across to the window and opened the curtains a fraction. She gazed at him through the lens. He was lying on his back, one leg pulled up at an angle, both arms up above his head. His face was smooth in sleep but although the room was cool his hair was damp with sweat. He often woke up damp with sweat these days. He said he was dreaming. The way he looked tired even after a long night's sleep and the way he had been sweating, she thought his dreams must be the most exhausting part of each 24-hour day. ‘Did you run?' she had asked him the other morning, holding him tight. He nodded. ‘Were you frightened?'

‘Not really. I just knew I had to keep on going.'

‘What did you think would happen if you didn't run?'

He had looked at her with a child's all-knowing, all-questioning eyes. ‘That I'd stop. That's what scares me; having to stop.' But for now he was sleeping soundly and, if he was dreaming, these were peaceful dreams.

The afternoon was turning into evening and their neighbours, Rob and Melissa Walker, were expecting them for dinner at that strangely early time that Americans like to eat. Grace had to wake him.

Rob taught English and history at the local high school. Melissa was, as she put it herself, ‘a full-time mom'. They were good people, gentle and bright, but Grace wished Melissa would not always look at her so pityingly when it came to the subject of children. This evening, though, she asked if Grace would consider photographing the two Walker babies. Melissa wanted proper portraits, she said. ‘I'll pay you the going rate, of course.' Grace told her there was no need for that. ‘It will be fun,' she said. ‘I don't usually do babies. However sweet-looking, they are too unformed, their features are suggestions still. But your two do have good faces.'