Shooting Butterflies

by Marika Cobbold

  ‘Men,’ Mrs Shield said to her. ‘You have to take them as they are or someone else will.’

  ‘Let them,’ Grace said.

  ‘You’re like a cat,’ Angelica said. ‘It’s your home you care about; the people can come and go.’

  Grace objected; she wasn’t overly fond of cats. Essentially it was a matter of trust; she did not trust them. ‘I care a great deal about people,’ she said. ‘I just don’t need to live with them. Look at that light.’ She gesticulated at the window. ‘Northern light; the best.’

  ‘You go on about that light,’ Angelica said, ‘but you’re hardly ever here in the daytime.’

  ‘But I know it’ll be back. That’s one thing you can trust in life; by morning the light will return.’

  ‘Is there some profound message hidden in that statement of the obvious?’ Angelica asked.

  ‘No.’ Grace shrugged. ‘But people are so worried about stating the obvious that in the end someone needs to, or the obvious will be obscured by the unusual.’

  Grace’s work was gaining attention but she never turned down a commission. To be able to live almost entirely off the work she loved (she supplemented her income with weekend work at Harrods’ photography department) was a luxury; she never forgot that. Her old flatmates, Angelica and Daisy, were both married. Daisy had moved away to Oxfordshire and disappeared beneath the weight of compost heaps, herbaceous borders and babies. Angelica, who had taken over the running of the Adam and Eve Gallery from her mother, had married Tom, a bond dealer. Tom was a big man, tall and broad, a rugby player with coarse black hair and the pink and white complexion of an old-fashioned schoolboy, the kind who played outdoors. He was loud and jovial. Grace thought that he had a mean set to his mouth. Tom told Angelica he liked career women and treated her work as a joke. He liked jokes. ‘When I first stepped out with Angelica she didn’t wash from one week to another. Ask me why, c’mon ask me why.’

  ‘Why didn’t Angelica wash, Tom?’

  ‘Because she was scared I’d call while she was in the bath.’

  Alone together in Angelica’s kitchen, Grace said to her, ‘You’re like a negative when you’re with him; white is black and black is white. Is that what it takes to be married?’ Angelica had soapsuds on her nose and looked as if she might cry. Grace dabbed the suds off Angelica’s face with a dry corner of the tea towel. ‘There.’ She smiled. ‘I’m sorry. If you love him it’s worth it, I suppose.’

  ‘I do love him,’ Angelica said. She looked straight at Grace. ‘And there are times when I hate myself for it.’

  To Grace, returning home used to be like walking into a pair of welcoming arms. Closing the front door was like pulling up a drawbridge: she was safe from the world, its questions and demands; no one could get at her. Alone in her flat there was no one nudging her for food or love or conversation. Her time was hers to do with what she pleased. There was no one to disappoint. No one to let her down but herself, no one needing what she could not give, or giving her what she did not want. For a long time, this suited Grace perfectly.

  But lately she had been feeling lonely, lonely and tired to the marrow. She was even questioning the nature of her work and, as she said to Angelica, once that happened she was on the slippery slope to asking what was the meaning of life, and that, as everyone knew, was the most dangerous question of all.

  ‘You haven’t really tried love,’ Angelica said.

  ‘Of course I have.’

  ‘You haven’t given anyone a chance because you’re still obsessed with that great teenage romance, which is sort of sweet but pretty pathetic too.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I haven’t given Jefferson a thought for years.’

  ‘How do you know I was thinking of him?’

  ‘Because, Rumpole, he was my only teenage romance.’

  Angelica contented herself with a knowing smile; so much more annoying than any words.

  Now when Grace arrived home, she found herself restless and picky, seeing flaws, muttering about the lack of cupboards and the temperamental heaters, and that one large room did not spell airiness but emptiness. Nowadays she lifted her pale face from the pillow and asked for at least one good reason why she should bother to get up. Maybe it was the work that was finally getting to her. The problem was that the nature of her work was very much the nature of her. She went out with her camera looking for light and invariably returned with the dark side. She was not a gloomy person; it was just that black seemed to stand out more to her than any other colour. Mostly that was all right. Her work was good and true to what she saw: the cloud around the silver lining, the sadness of a smiling face, a world that held such beauty and smelt so bad. Like everyone else, she was dying to know the hows and whys, but even dead there was no guarantee that she might become better informed. So, in the absence of answers, she documented the view from her small corner, hoping at least to get a glimpse of the bigger picture. By now, though, she felt she could really do with a change of view.

  The night was still as Grace left her flat. The lone saxophonist on the sixth floor of the tower block at the back of her street was filling the air with longing; saxophones made her melancholy, always had. But hell, she thought, she should be happy. She had it all; the pretty flat in the run-down area, no one to love, no one to love her and autumn was coming; the season of mellow fruitfulness and slow death.

  She was on her way to a preview at a new gallery on Mount Street. She often went to previews but this one was different; this time Grace was one of the exhibitors, showing portraits she had originally taken to accompany a series of newspaper features: black and white pictures of actors and artists and authors, long exposure, no artificial light and the lens pointing straight into her subjects’ eyes.

  She walked down the road on her way to the tube in her one good suit, black with a hip-length jacket nipped in at the waist. Smart-looking girl from a run-down street. Smart-looking girl with smart-sounding job and a broken boiler and damp creeping up her sitting-room wall like a vine.

  Her work received attention. Four sold that night alone.

  ‘The picture,’ she said, striking an attitude before an admiring young journalist. ‘The picture, Steve, is the only thing that matters.’

  She stood, smoking her cigarettes, listening to praise, not bothering to hide her delight. By nine she was one of only a handful of people still at the gallery. Even Mrs Shield, up from the country, had left. There were trains to catch, dinner parties to go to, families to attend to, babysitters to be relieved. Grace, in her smart suit, took the tube home alone and walked the last few hundred yards down the road where dustbins cast their shadows in the lamplight and goodness knows who lurked in the deep wells beneath the basement steps.

  She reached the safety of her front door and stepped inside, switching on the light. She paused on the threshold.

  ‘I know you’re dying to hear all about my evening,’ she called into the empty flat, ‘so I’ll tell you; I was a huge success.’

  She was wearing a coat over her pyjamas and carrying the newspapers when she walked straight into him, about a block away from her flat. It was Sunday morning. She was sleepy. Without looking up, she told him to mind where he was going.

  ‘I know you,’ the man exclaimed. It sounded as if this was the best news he had heard all week. Brushing a strand of hair from her eyes, she looked up at him, a stranger as far as she was concerned. He looked to be in his early thirties and had the curly blond hair of a cherub and a grown man’s strong nose and chin. He was carrying a large cardboard box filled with marrows.

  ‘For me?’ she said, nodding at the box. ‘That’s just so sweet of you.’

  He looked as if he was about to hand it to her, then his brow cleared and he laughed. ‘They’re for my sister. She’s unaccountably fond of marrows. Mum grows them. But honestly we have met, at Tom and Angelica’s party last month. You’re Grace.’

  Grace made a great show of inspecting her arms and legs before saying, eyes wide, �
��My God, so I am.’

  His cheeks turned pink but he laughed, which was good of him, Grace thought. She added, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember. There were an awful lot of people at that party; about two years’ worth of return invitations, I think. Or maybe I was drunk.’

  ‘Oh no, not at all. No, it’s me; I have an instantly forgettable face.’ He was not particularly tall, but he had the kind of build that made you think he might be good at forcing open jammed drawers and moving furniture. He balanced the box in the crook of one arm and extended his right hand. ‘I’m Andrew Abbot.’

  She took his hand. She liked his gaze. It was steady. She had met too many men whose eyes darted round continuously when they talked, as if they were scared that life might sneak off and leave them behind while they weren’t looking.

  Around them the street was coming alive with Sunday walkers. The sun was appearing after a night of heavy rain and the city had that pristine feel to it as if overnight its soul had been washed clean. ‘Have you had breakfast?’ Andrew asked.

  Grace said she hadn’t. Andrew nodded towards the café across the street. ‘Would you like some?’

  ‘I shall have to keep my coat on.’

  ‘I’m sure they’ve got heating.’

  She flashed open the coat. ‘Pyjamas!’

  As they sat down at a table at the back, he asked, ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Tea, please. With honey. And milk.’

  ‘Toast?’

  ‘Please, and two poached eggs, bacon and tomatoes.’

  Andrew Abbot taught Latin and Greek at a private girls’ school in Devon. Apart from three years at Durham University and two years living and working in London, he was, he said, a Devon lad born and bred. ‘I like being near my family,’ he said. He paused, looking at her with a half amused, half embarrassed expression, and she put a cigarette to her lips to hide her smile. ‘I suppose that makes me some kind of freak.’ He picked up the packet of matches left on the table and lit her cigarette. She could see from the way he flinched when the smoke billowed across his face that he disliked the habit of smoking so she appreciated the courtesy all the more.

  ‘A freak; not at all,’ she said. ‘No, it makes you refreshing. If we’re honest, most of us probably wish we had a family we would want to live close to.’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s hopelessly uncool.’ Grace did not point out that wearing tweed jackets and corduroy trousers, and being a Classics master at a private girls’ school probably disqualified him from serious cool anyway.

  ‘What about you? Do you have family nearby?’ he asked her.

  ‘Mrs Shield, that’s my stepmother, lives in Surrey. I have an aunt and uncle in the States. All grandparents are dead. Parents are dead too, although, so the vicar assured me, they’re ever present.’ She leant closer. ‘Between you and me, I think they’re overdoing the low profile.’ She straightened up and gulped down some tea. ‘I have a brother in Australia; he tried to get further away but realised he was swimming in circles.’

  He smiled and shook his head. ‘You’re pretty flip about it.’

  She looked up at him from under dark lashes. ‘I could cry if you prefer.’

  ‘No, I don’t prefer, not at all.’ She was flattered by the way he seemed to see only her, not even turning for a look when a waiter dropped a tray full of glasses. ‘Are you close to your stepmother?’

  ‘I take her for granted so I suppose that means yes.’

  Andrew looked concerned. He had only known her … Grace looked at her watch … thirty-five minutes and already he worried about her.

  ‘It’s all right. I’m a big girl now. And it’s not all bad being on your own. It makes you less scared.’

  ‘I would have thought it made you more scared.’

  ‘Oh no. The worst thing is losing someone you love and I don’t have that worry any more; I’ve lost them already. Apart from Mrs Shield.’

  ‘So what happens if you marry and have children?’

  She laughed. ‘Good question.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Oh, I expect I shall have to start worrying all over again. Maybe I can’t stand the thought.’

  It was half-term and Andrew was staying with his sister and her husband and baby in Earl’s Court. Before they parted Andrew asked Grace if he could see her again.

  They met up three times that week. Wherever they went they seemed to get involved in conversations with perfect strangers, little joking exchanges or conspiratorial smiles. It was to do with attention, she thought. When Andrew looked at you or spoke to you his full attention was on you and no one and nothing else. It was hard not to respond to all that warmth and interest beamed in your direction. When it was removed from you, you felt bereft as if the music had stopped suddenly or the television had gone fuzzy during your favourite programme. Grace thought Andrew might be addictive.

  The last day of his stay she showed him her work, nervous like a mother introducing her darling children to a prospective step-father, but proud too and so very anxious for everyone to get on. ‘Here they are,’ she said with a mock modest gesture at the wall. ‘I hang my own work. Some consider that bad form but, as I see it, if I don’t want my pictures on the walls why should anyone else?’

  He liked what she did. He said, ‘Wow! I’m impressed,’ and, ‘This is really beautiful.’ He paused for a long time before the tatty old man sitting on a park bench in the pale winter sun with a smile on his crumbling face as if he had seen an angel.

  ‘Show me everything,’ Andrew said, looking deep into her eyes. ‘I want to know everything about you.’ But he averted his gaze from the prostitute, with her skinny knobbly-kneed child legs beneath the scratched leather mini, and her dead eyes, black-rimmed like a card of condolence, in a child’s round face. He felt better when he could turn to the picture next to it, the one of children as he knew children to be, laughing, crying, tugging, jostling in the queue to Santa’s grotto.

  ‘So, he doesn’t quite get some of my work,’ Grace told Angelica as they were trawling through the charity shops for cashmere and old crocodile handbags. ‘I can’t blame him, actually.’ She paused from rifling through a box of knitwear. ‘Truth is, I don’t much like it myself sometimes.’

  ‘So what? No one likes what they do all the time. You’d be weird if you did. Or deluded.’

  ‘No, I don’t mean it like that. I mean I know it’s good work, those pictures he doesn’t like, but it’s work that hurts. I know one has to be true to one’s vision, but I can’t help wishing sometimes that mine would be a little more Bacardi on the Beach and less Hell is a Place Near You. I point my lens at the Andrex puppy and end up with a shot of the vivisection lab. It’s not what I want. I want the puppies alive and happy and dragging rolls of pink loo paper for half a mile the way they should be doing, while Doris Day sings that somewhere in this fucking world there’s a fine day.’

  ‘I don’t think she said fuck.’

  Grace said, ‘Not so we’d hear it.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I think that’s what I love about Andrew. Andrew is light. Andrew is normal. Andrew is wholesome. He is where I want to be.’

  ‘I’m allowed to get drunk; it’s my thirtieth birthday …’

  ‘Twenty-nine, darling, you’re twenty-nine today.’

  ‘ … next year. I was going to say; it’s my thirtieth birthday next year. I’m allowed to get drunk on the birthday before my thirtieth birthday.’

  Andrew pulled her close and whispered, ‘You, my darling Grace, are allowed to do whatever you like. But, having said that, we are getting some funny looks. Maybe we should be thinking about getting you home.’ He looked around the restaurant, empty but for one other couple and the waiters gazing at their watches and clattering tomorrow’s china. Grace smiled delightedly at the pair of him. She managed to get to her feet unaided, one lit cigarette between her fingers, another clamped between her lips. Andrew took the lit one and stubbed it out in the ashtray that was whisked away within seconds. ‘You’re thoughtful,�
�� Grace slurred. ‘I like that. You don’t want to keep those poor waiters waiting and I don’t care because I’m a horrid selfish person who thinks only of herself and reckons they’ve charged ridiculous amounts for second-rate food while looking down their noses at their customers and therefore they should be punished by being kept waiting for as long as possible. You see,’ she walked unsteadily to the door, ‘I’m horrid and you’re nice; that’s why we get on so well.’ She turned in the doorway and looked at him hard, managing to focus for several seconds by opening her eyes very wide and keeping them that way. ‘One could say that we complete each other.’

  Grace remembered being sick in the basin and Andrew stroking her hair away and rubbing her back with his free hand. She remembered him running a bath and helping her undress, and that she was not shy but busy concentrating on keeping her balance as he knelt in front of her peeling off her tights. She watched him from the bath as he folded her clothes in a neat little pile with her tights rolled up on top, and finally helped her out of the bath and wrapped her in a large pink fluffy towel she did not even remember she owned.

  Next thing she knew she was woken by a little man inside her head pounding her brain with an anvil. She had trouble fitting her tongue inside her mouth and she would have paid every pound in her wallet for a glass of water. But as she lifted her head from the pillow, groaning with pain, Andrew appeared in the doorway with a tray. On it was a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, a tub of live yoghurt and a vase with a single yellow rose. Grace tried to smile but gave up. It was her tongue again, getting in the way. She stretched out her hand for the glass of juice and drank it up, every last drop. Able finally both to speak and smile, although weakly, she said, ‘“Drink up, darling, every last drop,” – that’s what my mother used to say. Or at least that’s what my father told me my mother used to say.’

  Andrew perched on the side of the bed, having placed the tray on the bedside table. ‘That’s a mother kind of statement. Mine always said that too; in fact, given half a chance, she still does.’