It happened almost like that. She heard the engine of the bus as it approached and she felt sick with fear that this could be it and that she would never see him again. It pulled in and stopped, the doors hissing open to let out a couple of passengers who were greeted by hugs and smiles from those waiting for them. She turned, and that was where it got to be different. There was no silver Dodge driving up the road towards the terminal, no sign of a tall anxious boy running towards her. So she stepped on to the bus.
Grace returned home to The Gables. Everything was as she had left it. Only Grace had changed. Mrs Shield had met her at Heathrow having come all the way in a taxi. She cried when she embraced Grace, wiping her eyes with a lace handkerchief, delicate in her big red-chapped gardener’s hands. Sad – happy: the words were opposite but we cried at both, which, Grace thought, was actually pretty odd.
‘I expect you’re longing for a nice cup of tea,’ Mrs Shield said. At that Grace too burst into tears.
Two weeks before she was due to start university Grace discovered that she was pregnant. She told no one. Who should she have told? Jefferson, so that she could ask him for money or, given the old-fashioned ways of his family, shame him into a shotgun wedding? Mrs Shield? Yes, she could tell Mrs Shield and the reward would be her stepmother’s clumsy yet determined support, but the price would be fifty-five per cent of Grace’s mind and soul and right then she couldn’t afford that. A helping hand from Mrs Shield made you feel like a glove puppet.
So Grace kept quiet, turning all the taps on in the bathroom when she was being sick and saying only that she had decided not to take up her place at Cambridge but was moving to London and getting a job instead. Mrs Shield was greatly upset. She had told everyone who was interested, and many who were not, that her stepdaughter was going to Cambridge. Grace tried to reason with her.
‘You must realise that I can’t go to university just because you’ve told your bridge group and your hairdresser and poor Marjory Reynolds.’ Mrs Shield looked as if she realised nothing of the sort.
Grace got the job in the Adam and Eve photography gallery through her friend Angelica Lane, whose mother owned it. Grace unlocked the doors in the morning and locked them at night. She dusted the pictures and sometimes, when there was no one else available, she hung some. She spent those days of early pregnancy surrounded by moments saved in time: Marilyn Monroe stepping out of a limousine, as radiant as if she’d swallowed a light bulb; a man reverently lifting out a book from the shelves of a blitzed library; Audrey Hepburn laughing on the set of Funny Face; James Cagney strumming a guitar. And always sunbeams shot through the roof of Grand Central Station.
In her spare time she pored for hours over her snaps of Jefferson and the two of them together; photographs that proved that for a while, at least, he had smiled as if there was nowhere in the world he would rather be than right there with Grace.
She went nowhere without her camera and she saved every spare pound to buy a better one. She learnt to develop her black and white films in a makeshift darkroom, really no more than a large cupboard, in the flat in Bayswater she shared with two old friends from school. Angelica was at secretarial college and Daisy worked in a casino, an added bonus as it made Mrs Shield feel that things could have been worse.
Grace had still not seen a doctor. She hadn’t put on much weight, but she kept being sick in the mornings and there were days when she was so tired that she would gladly have handed over her last ten pounds to anyone who would take her place in the world. She kept waiting to be overwhelmed by a sense of Jefferson; after all, the baby growing inside her was the mix of him and her. Instead she resented this tiny someone who, although they had never even met, was controlling her physical wellbeing, her ability to do her work, her moods, what she ate and drank: lots of dairy products and no alcohol and an apple once a day. She could not even smoke.
When she finally did see her GP he asked her if she wanted to keep the child. Grace looked as if she hadn’t known she had an option so he explained that very soon she would have to decide. On the Saturday she walked into Mothercare. She had almost convinced herself that an abortion would be the right way to proceed, but still she spent an hour wandering around, trance-like amongst the cots and prams and baby clothes, bottles and sterilising units, potties and nappies, singing mobiles and chimes. She found herself at the till, paying for a tiny white Babygro, and only then did she realise that she must have decided to have the baby after all.
She fretted about the price of things, about how her friends would react to sharing the flat with an infant, about childcare and how to compensate the baby for having no father. She asked how she could be everything to this stranger when she meant not very much even to herself.
But some days were spent happily dreaming. Would her child have bright-blue eyes like his father or green ones like Grace? And what would be his talents and interests?
‘What are you doing sitting there grinning to yourself?’ Angelica asked one evening.
‘I didn’t know I was,’ Grace said.
‘You were. You were looking into the distance with a dreamy smug smile on your face.’
Grace gave her friend an affectionate look. She had known Angelica since they were both fifteen. She was lucky to have a friend like that who she could depend on. When they were younger Angelica had been a left-wing radical who left her washing with her father’s housekeeper, she was a rebel who abhorred the use of the F-word. Now she was a young woman who wanted a career and knew it was her right to have a child, who did not believe in men but was forever on the lookout for the one true love. In a changing world Angelica’s perpetual state of contradiction was a comfort.
‘I’m pregnant,’ Grace finally told her.
‘You’re pregnant. How? No, don’t answer that. Who?’
‘Him.’
‘Oh, him. That little prick in America. Does he know?’
‘No.’
‘It is his baby too. Don’t you think he has a right?’
‘No,’ Grace said. ‘He left me.’
‘Be fair, he didn’t know you were pregnant.’
‘Did he ask?’
She lost the baby. She got up in the night to have a pee and found blood pouring out of her instead. Angelica drove her to the hospital. Grace was told that she was no longer pregnant. The baby that had grown inside her without as much as a by your leave had left with the same quiet determination. Once again someone had come into Grace’s life, made themselves matter, and left. The doctors told her that a miscarriage at this stage was fairly common and often for the best as it could mean the baby had been malformed or sick. Grace could not help thinking that those early weeks of not being made welcome might have had something to do with it.
In her mind she called the baby Gabriel. Gabriel Jefferson McGraw. Such a big name for a baby small enough to rest in the palm of a hand.
For years afterwards Grace searched the faces of children the age hers would have been, if he had been born, not just dislodged.
And you complain that I make your life out to be miserable. Grace, lying in the narrow camp-bed in Mrs Shield’s spare room with the seconds ticking by on the old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock, could hear that journalist, Nell Gordon, like some busybody imaginary friend.
This is an interior monologue, Grace said. That means I speak and you don’t, so bugger off out of my head. She turned on her stomach and put the pillow across the back of her head, folding the sides down like flaps over her ears. At last she slept.
But sometime in the early hours of the morning she sat up with a start, not sure what it was that had woken her. Her head felt heavy and the room was stuffy. She got out of bed and, pulling back the curtains, opened the window wider, breathing in the night air. She slept well through the constant noise of a London night, but the countryside was different, its thick silence suddenly pierced by branches hammering on your window, an owl hooting, a fox crying out like a child in pain. And if you slept through that there was always
the cockerel who, contrary to popular opinion, has no idea of time but just likes to pass the lonely hours crowing. Grace had not spent more than four consecutive nights in the country for twenty years. ‘Don’t you miss it?’ Mrs Shield was always asking her. ‘No,’ was Grace’s answer.
Grace was about to go back to bed when she spotted a pale figure moving out from the moon-shadow cast by tall oaks. Sleepy still, Grace lit a cigarette and leant against the window looking out. Somewhere a dog barked and the figure turned round and vanished back into the darkness, leaving Grace with an impression of silver moonshine rippling down a slender back. Grace stubbed out the cigarette, having waited in vain for the figure to return.
‘Could be Edna,’ Mrs Shield said the next morning when Grace told her. ‘And I don’t mind telling you that I didn’t sleep a wink myself, not one wink.’
‘I’m sorry. How are your ribs?’
‘Not good. I’m in considerable pain.’ Mrs Shield did look pale. As Grace searched for the painkillers, she raised her hand, grimacing. ‘I’ve taken them already. They don’t help, not one bit. Anyway, Edna’s hair is dark – and short. I keep telling her that very dark colour is all wrong for an ageing face, much too harsh, but she won’t listen; oh no, she goes and gets all huffy instead.’
‘Maybe it was Noah’s ghost?’
‘And combined with such a deep shade of red lipstick she’s beginning to look like Baby Jane. The older you get the less makeup you should be wearing, that’s what everyone says. Although in your case, Grace, I think you could do with some more. You look awfully pale.’
‘I am awfully pale. I always have been, remember? That’s why all my childhood you used to run after me and feel my forehead saying, “Are you running a temperature, Grace, you look awfully pale.” Anyway, I do wear make-up; I’m just subtle about it.’
‘Well, there comes a time in a woman’s life when subtlety isn’t the answer.’
‘You’re contradicting yourself.’
‘Am I, dear? I don’t think so. I would love another cup.’
‘Have you seen him, Noah? What is he like these days?’
‘We saw each other in the churchyard the other day. He looks just the same to me. Then you all do. He was putting flowers on his grandfather’s grave and I was visiting your father. Of course he didn’t recognise me, not at first. But when he did he asked after you. Anyway, you’ll see for yourself. I’ve arranged for us to go over there today so that you can ask about your artist. Some people seem to have nothing better to do than lie in bed all day; he was really quite offhand when I called earlier on.’
Grace glanced at her watch. ‘It’s only eight o’clock now. Anyway, you should rest, shouldn’t you, not run around the village.’
‘I’m perfectly all right if we take it slowly, dear. And you have the car anyway. As long as I don’t have to bend or lift.’
‘I still think it was Noah’s ghost I saw.’
‘Of course you don’t.’
Grace got to her feet. ‘You’re right; I don’t.’
* * *
But for his eyes, an amber colour not easily forgotten, Noah Blackstaff looked nothing like Grace remembered. Had he been a photograph, she thought, she would have suspected him to have been a composite. There was Pete the Poet’s sensitive delicate face on Steve the Strongman’s body. The effect was far from unattractive, just a little unusual. They made as if to embrace and ended up shaking hands. Grace thought, I don’t know if you are married, if you have children. I don’t know what you do for a living, how you decorate your home, yet I’ve hugged you when you cried. I know that shellfish makes you puke and once, when we were scared, we shared a bed. She said, ‘You’ve grown.’
He looked sideways at her and grinned. ‘Come into the kitchen.’
‘I’m sorry about your grandfather.’
‘Thank you.’ There was the kind of embarrassing pause that occurs between two people who know they should have a lot to talk about but actually have nothing to say. Then Noah thought of something. ‘I hear Finn lives in Australia.’
‘Yes, yes, he does. Married, two kids. Sadly, we hardly ever get to see each other.’
‘It’s not as if Australia is that far away,’ Mrs Shield said from her chair. The sun shone in through the window, warming her face. She sighed happily and closed her eyes.
‘I read about you in the paper; well done.’
Grace frowned. ‘What do you mean, well done? Or is public humiliation, and being described as a pathetic loser, quite a coup where you come from?’
He looked at her in a measured thoughtful way, as if he was inspecting her for faults. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, that was not what I meant. I was congratulating you on winning the Unibank. It’s an important award. I never knew you’d won it.’
As it happened Noah was a journalist: politics, mostly television. ‘I can see you being very popular with female viewers,’ said Grace.
‘That’s a pretty sexist comment, don’t you think?’
‘I’m sure it was just Grace’s clumsy way of paying you a compliment,’ Mrs Shield said. ‘She hasn’t really changed very much since you were children.’
Noah looked at Grace. ‘Oh, she’s changed, all right.’
Grace remembered that she was there to ask a favour. ‘Then again, some of my best friends are journalists.’
‘In fact,’ Noah said, ‘one could say that you are one yourself. You have done photo-journalism.’
‘I stopped,’ Grace said.
‘She still has the most awful chip on her shoulder,’ Mrs Shield said. ‘I can’t understand why. She comes from a loving family.’
Grace smiled stiffly. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Noah, but I’ve brought my own Greek chorus.’
‘You know, Mrs Shield,’ Noah said pleasantly as he switched the kettle on, ‘you’re right: Grace hasn’t changed. She’s just as rude. Coffee, Mrs Shield? Grace?’
‘Tea would be lovely, thank you so very much,’ Grace said.
For such a big man Noah was surprisingly light on his feet as he moved round the kitchen filling the kettle, decanting milk, outing cups on saucers.
‘A mug will be fine,’ Grace said.
‘I’m afraid we don’t have any.’
‘And what about you, Noah?’ Mrs Shield said. ‘Are you married?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I suppose it’s all right for a man. You have time on your side. Grace of course had to go and waste herself on the one man who wouldn’t marry her, and I don’t mean her husband. No, I’m talking about that American: Patterson. And here she is, in her forties and no family.’
‘Thank you, Evie,’ Grace said. She turned to Noah. ‘When it comes to information, Evie is a communist, private ownership being strictly against the rules.’
Mrs Shield ignored her. ‘Six years; that’s a long time in a woman’s life if she wants a family.’
‘You just wait until we get home,’ Grace said to Mrs Shield, who laughed delightedly. ‘He died,’ Grace told Noah. ‘I always think that gives him an excuse.’
‘And that was not the reason, as well you know.’ Mrs Shield turned her attention back to Noah. ‘So tell me, why did you never marry?’
‘I’m like Grace, I’m afraid; I lose people.’
Mrs Shield assumed the alert look of a dog who knows its dinner is on the way, but if Noah was about to expand on the subject Grace stopped him. ‘It’s wonderful to see you again after so long and all that, but, as Evie probably explained, I wanted to ask you something. Just the other day a painting came into my possession. I fell in love with it. If I know anything, and as it happens I do, it’s a serious work of art, yet I’ve never heard of the artist. I’ve checked my reference books and looked him up on the Internet but nothing – oh, apart from a man in Milwaukee who carves animals out of bone. I was going to take the picture round the shops in Chelsea – it was bought there apparently – but then Evie had her accident.’
For several minutes the conversation dealt w
ith Mrs Shield’s fall and the painful night she had passed, then Grace managed to get the subject back to her painting. ‘I thought you might know something, especially if you’re doing all this research on your grandfather. It’s dated Northbourne House, 1932 and I absolutely recognise the gardens and bits of the house; give or take the sea and a beech tree, it’s unmistakable. It’s odd that he’s painted in the sea but then it’s not that representative a picture. But why is there no information about the artist? He can’t have done just one painting and nothing else, before or after.’
‘Maybe your grandmother knew him.’ Mrs Shield made them both turn round to look at her.
Noah raked his fair hair with his fingers, making it stand up in a cockscomb and said, ‘She might but the problem with Granny is that she wasn’t very aware. Of course I’m fond of her, but if ever there was a person with her sights firmly set on the household minutiae of life, it is she. I can’t remember her ever showing much interest in Grandfather’s work.’
The biography had been Noah’s Aunt Lillian’s idea. She had been talking to the son of Donald Argyll, Arthur’s old agent, about a retrospective exhibition. The book had grown from there. Lillian’s next good idea was to contact her nephew in Canada. As a journalist and fond grandson, Noah was much the best person for the job. ‘People seem to assume that because you write for a living you can toss something off just like that. I’ve had to take two months off work to do all the research. She of course decided that she was needed back at the mission and off she waltzes back to Tanzania leaving it all to me.’
‘Diddums,’ Grace teased.
‘And you want me to help you find out about your artist.’
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