Shooting Butterflies (37 page)

‘So Jeff,' Rob said, ‘have you ever come across a guy named Tim Hubbard? He's a veterinarian too, got a small-animal practice on 47th and 3rd. No? I suppose I thought all you guys kind of knew each other, like a vets' fraternity type-thing, getting together over
the issue of the Upper East Side's overfed pooches, that kind of thing.'

‘Speaking of which,' Melissa said, ‘is Pluto all right? He's been sounding kind of wheezy lately. I know he's always wheezy, but isn't he getting worse? Not that I'm in any way implying that you wouldn't be taking care of that dog, you being a professional … but we've known him for so long, that's all.' She turned an apologetic smile on Jefferson.

‘He's fine,' Jefferson said firmly. ‘I listened to his chest only this morning and he's good.'

Grace stifled a giggle, feeling guilty for playing games with nice Rob and Melissa and enjoying it all the same. ‘You did too, my darling,' she said, reaching across the table and stroking his cheek. ‘You even warmed the stethoscope first. He does that. They might have fur but they don't like a cold metal thing on their little chests any more than you or I would; that's what you say, isn't it, dear?'

He smiled back but he seemed a bit tense. ‘Are you all right?' Grace mouthed. It was exhausting at times, she thought, having all the sums of your happiness adding up to just one person.

‘I just love your accent, Grace,' Melissa said. ‘How long did you say you've been over here?'

Grace changed the subject. ‘Is it true that Clarissa James is marrying Alec FitzWilliam? I mean didn't he leave school just last summer?' Clarissa was a colleague of Rob's at the high school. She was a keen amateur photographer so she and Grace had gone for some walks together in the weeks before Jefferson's vacation. But once Jefferson had arrived Grace had not got around to seeing much of Clarissa. It was one of the things Grace found confusing about love. It was supposed to have the power to turn you into a better person – a more tender, universally caring one – and sometimes it did; yet often it made you plain selfish, forgetful of friends, of everyone and everything that did not belong to the tiny universe inhabited by two people in love.

As Grace had hoped, Melissa turned her attention to the budding scandal, away from the mystery of how two people could have been married for twenty years and still behave like lovers. ‘I hear his parents are just furious,' she said. ‘And is
she
going to see him
through college? She'll have to. They're threatening to cut him out of the trust fund and they're a very wealthy family.'

‘I'm encouraging them, the family that is, to leave the boy's share to the local rabbit sanctuary instead,' Jefferson said. ‘I mean, if they really are cutting him off, the money might as well go to a good cause.' Grace took the chance, when Rob got up to get some more wine and Melissa was fussing over the stove, to whisper to Jefferson, ‘Honey-pie, you're going too far.' He stroked a loose strand of hair from her forehead, smiling, teasing, loving. ‘C'mon, give me a chance here. I'm a small-pet vet. Some of my best friends are rabbits.'

Melissa and Rob were back in the dining room. ‘You know,' Melissa said, smiling, hand on her hips, her head tilted as she looked at them. ‘You two even look alike. Has anyone ever said that to you before? Same-colour hair, same-shape eyes, same square chin. You even have a dimple right there,' she pointed to the tip of Grace's chin, ‘although his is deeper. You look at them, Rob. Don't you think I'm right?'

Later on, over coffee – decaf because there was nothing else in the house – she asked, ‘Have you ever thought of combining your work? I was thinking how neat it would be if you took, like, those before and after shots of the little creatures.'

‘Like Tom with balls and Tom without them,' Jefferson said. ‘Remembrance of things past, that kind of thing.'

Grace looked hard at him. He was getting tired, that was obvious, although she could not see why when he had slept most of the afternoon. Maybe he was coming down with something. ‘It's not a bad idea,' she said. ‘But I'm not sure most owners would be too keen on having shots reminding them of such painful times.'

‘No, no, I was thinking of it like a portfolio thing. Like plastic surgeons have. To advertise your skills, you know the kind of thing. I mean, you two are so great together.'

‘I don't know, Melissa,' Grace said. ‘We're both kind of possessive about our work. We like to keep things separate.'

It was not even half past ten when Grace got to her feet, pulling Jefferson up from the sofa with her. ‘No stamina,' she said. ‘But we've had a great time. You must come over to us soon.'

They walked the few steps home hand in hand, and the evening was warm but overcast and quite still.

Jefferson fell into bed like a traveller after a long journey and was asleep within moments. Grace lay awake listening to his soft breaths and Pluto's wheezing ones, and she wondered what was different because something surely was. Then she realised it was the ocean. It was quiet; the constant roar of the breakers had silenced to a sound too soft for her to hear. It was the absence of sound that had disturbed her.

Usually Grace watched Jefferson return to his wife and family with heavy-hearted acceptance that this was how it had to be. There were those first few hours of gut-wrenching pain to get through once the door had closed behind him and she felt as empty as if her insides had walked right out with him. And there was the constant nagging fear that something might happen while they were apart: an accident that she would know nothing of until it was too late, because she had no right to know, not even to know if he was dead or alive. But the pain and fear would ebb. She would remind herself that she was far from unhappy living on her own and that there were times when she could not imagine living with anyone, not even Jefferson. She would think sacrilegious thoughts, like maybe Cherry being sick was not the reason for Grace and him not being together all the time, but that secretly they both suspected that their love was the kind best protected from the everyday and that therefore this full-time love in a part-time relationship was all they dared take on. But eventually her emotions would settle like the sea at night. She would return to a contented equilibrium: in love, busy, achingly lonely at times, but doing all right until the next time they met up.

But this time it was different. This time as he turned round having closed his suitcase, he had a pleading look in his eyes. The last time she had seen a look like that was when Angelica took Michael to a birthday party. The little boy had stood with them in the doorway, surveying the large hall teeming with noise and movement, the pushing and shrieking and giggling of a mass of little boys and girls, and he had turned and looked up at his mother with an expression as if to say, ‘Don't make me do this.'
But he was a brave and proud little boy so after that look he had straightened his shoulders and joined the fray.

Jefferson, bag in hand, straightened his shoulders and walked out of the bedroom. She followed behind, her lips clamped shut on a small calm smile, her heart thumping. Grabbing hold of him, clinging to his arm and weeping, ‘Don't. Don't leave. Stay with me and give us a chance, please', was not an option.

Bollocks!
Grace, dreaming her past, heard the words as clearly as if Nell Gordon was in the room. Nell Gordon, that smug cultural regurgitator, that second-guesser of other people's lives, who flattered herself that she understood it all because she knew the ‘truth', when every sane person knew that there was no such thing, just a flock of perceptions, as similar and different, as ever present and elusive, as the birds in the sky.

Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks.
There she was again.
And you're telling me
I
distort the picture. That little scene of domestic bliss was one big lie, wasn't it?

Grace was tired but she still could not sleep. She was not averse to the idea that there was such a thing as telepathy and, if there was, maybe Nell Gordon was tossing and turning in
her
bed.

What kind of day were you having when you decided to deconstruct my life, eh? Bad, I wouldn't mind betting. A dearth of interesting material and you with a deadline and probably little Tristram's birthday party to organise and at least three launches to attend. Do you have a file marked Subjects For That Desperate Day, that day that comes in every journalist's life when there's inches and inches of empty columns to fill and nothing to fill it with? And I sympathise with you, I really do. You're not some tabloid hack. You're a serious writer on the arts pages of an important broadsheet; you can't just make up some natty little piece about the vicar and the golf-club secretary. But Nell, why me? I who, after the furore and the applause, after my own personal chariot ride between triumph and disaster, withdrew into what my father used to call a becoming silence? Why pick on me?

But all right, it had been a game that first summer they spent together on the Cape. She and Jefferson had wanted to act out what might have been if, that other, long-ago summer, he had chosen Grace. They had wanted to let their love, poor sinner that it was, out of the shadows and hold it up to the light. They had wanted to have people walk by and say, ‘There go Grace and
Jefferson,' as if such a couple really had a right to be. So they had pretended to their neighbours. So they had lied. They had played house, watering the plants on the porch of the little cottage at the edge of town, just steps from the beach and the roar of the ocean. They had given Pluto his morning bowl of warm milk and wheat as if that was how they had always looked after their dog. So what? They never lied to themselves or each other; all they had done was dip their toes in a dream.

That time – four weeks in a borrowed house on the Cape – was the longest they had together in their six years.

A year earlier Jefferson had left his Manhattan law firm to take up a post teaching law at Redfield College, New Hampshire. Cherry had been going through an especially bad patch and he thought that moving back to small-town New England might help her. And for a while the drinking stopped. Jefferson drove her to AA meetings in another town, near enough to reach in half an hour, far enough away from the tittle-tattle tongues of neighbours. But come February she was a regular instead at that town's only karaoke bar. The call came one evening from a man named Dwight, who asked for her to be collected as she was hogging the mike again, and there had been complaints.

He phoned Grace in London. ‘What am I doing?' he groaned. ‘What am I doing with my life?' This was her moment; the moment when he was weak and she could make him come to her and stay. ‘Grace, Grace, are you there? Can you hear me? I was saying …'

‘I'm still here. And Jefferson, my darling, you're being good. You are staying because your wife is sick and would get sicker still if you weren't there. You're staying because if you left, your children would not just lose you, they would most probably lose her too. Now just don't ask me my opinion too often because it's possible that I shall not always be this good myself.'

‘I don't know that either of you are
exactly
good,' Angelica had said. ‘I mean, you are committing adultery.'

Grace, who had been sitting at her kitchen table resting her forehead in her hands, looked up at her with tired eyes. ‘I know, Angelica, I do know that. But how good do you want me to be?'

‘No, how good do
you
want to be?'

‘Don't ask silly questions. Like most people, I want to be good but I also want my own way.'

So when a friend of hers, an American photographer called Dylan Lennox, had suggested a house swap, Grace had called Jefferson up to say she had the chance to spend the summer not more than two hours' drive away. She had been working all year so she had money to fall back on and there were at least two famous writers, both known as reclusive, living on the Cape whose portraits were always sought after. ‘I think by now they're bored with being out of the limelight and dying to have someone hunt them out.'

The plan had been for Grace to spend the summer in the house on the Cape and for Jefferson to visit when he could: the odd weekend and the annual week he ‘walked the trail with a couple of the guys'. Then came their stroke of luck: Cherry had announced her intention of taking the girls to visit her parents in Florida. She was tired of the rain, she said, and the way people kept sneaking looks at her when they thought she couldn't see. Jefferson was happy. The girls would be fine with their grandparents to help care for them. They were excited about going away, especially as they had been promised a trip to Disneyland. Jefferson made up some story about extending his walking tour while he had the chance, saying, because he thought it would please Cherry who watched
Oprah
a lot, that he felt some quiet time communing with nature might help him find his spirit. Cherry always said he did not have one, and if he did, it was buried so deep it might as well not be there. To Grace, Jefferson said that was unfair; his spirit just ran and hid when Cherry was around.

Cherry certainly did not suggest that he come with them. Without him she was her parents' princess once more, free from any adult responsibilities. ‘You're always watching me, as if you're just waiting for me to do something wrong. I sometimes think that's what makes bad things happen; you watching and expecting the worst.' Then she went off on her holiday.

That's how Grace and Jefferson got their time together in the cottage on the Cape.

Viola has been sent away. Arthur tells me, stone-eyed, that I am entirely to blame for her banishment. I weep and beg him to at least tell me where she has gone but he refuses. ‘You should have thought, perhaps, about the consequences for your friend before you decided to flaunt your perversion to the world.'