In the kitchen, as she deposited a stack of plates in the sink, Mrs Shield tried to make things better by saying how everyone seemed to think Grace appearing on television very exciting. ‘And I sort of led that sweet young man to believe that you would do it. He’ll be terribly disappointed.’
‘Evie.’ Grace took her stepmother’s hands in hers. ‘Look, I hate to be awkward.’ Mrs Shield’s sandy eyebrows rose in a question. ‘All right, so that’s not strictly true, but this time it’s for a good reason. I know there seems to be a feeling that being on television is one step from entering the gates of heaven, and had I been working still and been asked to talk about my work then I might have leapt at the chance. But it’s not my world any more, and to the programme makers I’m just a warmed-up old scandal they think might add spice to their recipe. It’s the difference between appearing at the fair as the juggler or the bearded lady. You do understand?’
Mrs Shield gave Grace’s hand a little pat and made an effort to smile. ‘Yes. Yes, of course I do. I just think you’re a little particular. But that’s probably to your credit.’ And she added, so quietly Grace could hardly hear, ‘Some of us would be glad to be asked to appear at the fair in the first place.’
After dinner the talk turned to Noah’s book. ‘It’s about time someone did your grandfather that honour,’ Percy said. ‘This part of the world has an unfair reputation for being stuffy. My own boys keep going on about it. “It’s so dull, Dad. So middle class and boring.” Middle class, perhaps, but boring? People need to be reminded that it was these pleasant lands that produced a great artist like Arthur Blackstaff. They don’t make them like that any more, no they don’t. I credit him with firing in me my lifelong interest in the fine arts. Without him as an example I don’t believe I would ever have even thought of picking up my brushes.’
‘I didn’t know you painted, Percy,’ Noah said.
‘I’m strictly amateur, dear boy, just an amateur, but it’s given me great pleasure over the years. I know there is a view that would say why bother when your work is never going to amount to anything. But I believe there’s something to be said for endeavour. I don’t wish to be pompous, but I think I’m a better person because of my little hobby. Art ennobles the soul, even when the art in question is far from perfect, I truly believe that. And, as I see it, art should be uplifting, beautiful, and that’s what Arthur Blackstaff believed. I heard him speak once. I was a young man but I never forgot. “I deplore isms,” he said. “Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism… there is no ism in beauty.”’
‘Hear hear,’ poor Marjory said. ‘Some of the things they call art these days …’
Grace, fearing a conversation about unmade beds and piles of bricks, pretended not to hear. Instead she asked Percy, ‘But beauty in whose eyes? I admit it; I have problems with Arthur Blackstaff’s work. Oh it’s all there, every detail correct and present, every colour true. Everything is spelt out and speaks to me not one word.’ She turned to Noah. ‘I hope you don’t mind me being so blunt.’
‘Isn’t it a bit late asking that now?’ Elsa interjected mildly. Grace grinned at her.
‘Are you sure you are the best judge, dear?’ Poor Marjory’s voice came clipped from smiling lips. ‘Arthur was one of our greats.’
‘You can think what you like, Grace,’ Noah said, ‘but I don’t agree with you. How much of his work are you actually familiar with? Have you seen the Island canvas, for example?’
‘No.’
‘Well, you should.’
Marjory’s face, pink-powdered and rouged, took on the alert look that Grace knew meant she was about to say something unpleasant. ‘Wasn’t there some drama at the time of its unveiling?’ she asked, proving Grace right. ‘One of the old people told me. You know how the villagers like to gossip.’ Seemingly oblivious to the embarrassed hush around the table and the clenched set to Noah’s jaw, she went on, ‘I know he was no angel, there was the matter of his young women … but I don’t really see that as an excuse. I know my children are always saying that I was a saint to put up with Malcolm the way I did, but I never saw it that way. No, he had his little ways, but I knew my duty.’
‘Poor Marjory.’ Mrs Shield shook her head. ‘You are the bravest woman I know.’
Marjory murmured a protest that sounded just like agreement. ‘No, no, well there have been times …’ She straightened her back and patted the side of her candy-floss hair. ‘Of course adultery is a mortal sin whatever the reason for it.’ She paused and glanced sideways at Grace. ‘But best not to go into that.’
‘Oh please don’t worry on my behalf,’ Grace said. ‘I have no shame.’
‘Why do you say things like that, Grace,’ Mrs Shield fussed, ‘when we all know it isn’t true?’
That’s when Percy stood up and said that he did not know about anyone else but he was ready for his beauty sleep.
Mrs Shield declared the party a success. ‘Although I wish you wouldn’t make those little jokes of yours. People who don’t know you as well as I do take you seriously. And Noah, what a delightful young man he’s turned into. Those wonderful eyes. I never knew his poor father but they say he’s the spitting image. It’s all very sad. Everybody dying.’
Grace put her arm round Mrs Shield and gave her a little hug, careful not to hurt her ribs. ‘Oh Evie, you haven’t been going around thinking we weren’t; dying, I mean?
Mrs Shield looked puzzled for a moment then her brow cleared. ‘You know what I mean, Grace. And dear Marjory; I noticed you two having a little chat by the door and I thought I’d leave you to it.’
Poor Marjory had lingered after the others had gone. ‘Now, I can’t deny that I was more than a little shocked to read about your … well … Evie never said a word. And him married all those years and three little girls too. But I want you to know that I believe you’ve suffered enough.’ It was all in her gentlest voice and as she finished speaking she placed her bird-like hand on Grace’s arm. ‘And don’t thank me. I care about you, my dear. As I always say, there’s no changing the past however much one might wish to. There can only be a determination to do better next time. Not of course that there would be a next time. I know you have learnt your lesson. You’re in my prayers, dear, every night. As the good Lord says, repent and you shall be forgiven.’
Grace looked at her, at the small triangular face and the clever close-set eyes. ‘You’re right, Marjory, you can’t change the past. Which is fine by me because the particular part of my life to which you are so delicately referring is the one I’d never change, not for anything.’
Marjory had fled into the night cloaked in indignation.
Grace lay in her narrow bed trying to get to sleep counting the ways by which she could murder poor Marjory: tripwire, fire, axe, poison, trap, hole, water, knife, push, stairs, crash, toadstool.
And you, Nell bloody Gordon, don’t think I’ve forgotten you. You’re like a great big bluebottle, buzz buzz buzz. Each time I think I’m shot of you, I find a little more dirt has spread. And I bet you’re not having problems sleeping. Why should you? After all, journalism is next to godliness.
Nell Gordon: Following her divorce, Shield ended up living back in London.
‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten …’ Grace was doing her exercises by the open window on a chilly spring morning when she saw him walk by on the street below. She stopped her sideways stretches and leant out of the window, calling his name. He didn’t turn so she wolf-whistled. Finn had taught her and she had not forgotten. But the sound was drowned by the wind and the noise of the traffic, and he walked on. Grace stood staring after the disappearing figure and then, although she knew it was too late, ran barefoot down the stairs of the building and out on to the street.
Back inside she laughed at herself, not very convincingly. All those years and Jefferson McGraw still appeared, a mirage reminding her of what she did not have.
‘It can’t have been him,’ she said to Angelica on the phone.
Grace paused. ‘No. No, of course I don’t. Well, that’s it, I do. Oh hell, Angelica, why am I still so hung up on this one episode in my past? He’s always there, nagging away at me in the background like an unanswered question. It’s the magic of love untried by reality; it never fails. Seeing him, really seeing him, would give me all the answer I need: yes, he’s just another man and I would have been no happier with him than with anyone else.’
‘I would probably still be hung up on Tom if he had dumped me instead of marrying me,’ Angelica said.
‘That was not helpful.’
* * *
Grace saw him three more times in the ensuing six months. She began to wonder if she had a problem. She went to see a therapist. The room was cheerful, sunshine yellow: yellow chairs, yellow sofa, yellow walls, yellow curtains, bowls and jugs of daffodils and yellow tulips. You could go mad in that room and still think you were having a good time.
‘Why, why do I still think of this man, Jefferson? I mean, it was almost fifteen years ago. I was a child, we both were. It was a holiday thing. I’ve had several relationships since and I’ve been married. What’s wrong with me?’
‘There are no rules governing emotions. There doesn’t have to be a reason. Not one to do with sense and logic, anyway. Still, I agree that we have to consider the possibility of you having developed an obsession. Has it occurred to you that this reconnecting with a long-lost love, a teenage romance, is a way for you to cope with the feelings of failure associated with the breakdown of your marriage? In your own view, are you an obsessive character?’
Grace thought about it. How did she live her life? She worked for up to fourteen hours a day, six days a week, seven sometimes, taking pictures, developing, learning new techniques, reading, teaching, because she loved to and because her work was her particular God-given talent and not to be squandered. It was her sincere belief that to squander a God-given talent was a deadly sin. Grace told the therapist that. The therapist said Grace’s approach to work might count as obsessional but then again it might not. ‘People are very keen on absolutes,’ he had added a little apologetically, ‘but we live in a fluid world.’
‘Document, document, document,’ Grace said. ‘That’s how I deal with that.’
‘That’s OK if it works for you. What’s important is not so much what happens to you in your life, as how you react to what happens. You might feel out of control in a chaotic and ever-changing universe, but you’re not actually, because you and only you control how you receive what comes to you.’
That yellow room, the calm voice, the reassuring words; Grace felt better already. But she was impatient for some answers. ‘But is it normal to still be hung up on this man or have I developed some kind of obsession?’
‘That’s for you to work out.’
‘That’s not really an answer.’
‘I’m not here to give you answers; I’m here to help you find your own.’
Grace nodded. ‘And what about seeing him everywhere?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I keep seeing him. Although it’s not him, of course. At least I don’t think it is. I have run after him, whoever, a couple of times but I’ve lost him each time.’
‘You used the word lost.’
‘Yes …’
‘It’s an interesting choice.’
‘Not really. I just did: lose him. Anyway, I know it can happen to anyone that you think you see someone from the past, but it happens to me all the time. I don’t even know what he looks like these days. Last time I saw him, I mean actually saw him as opposed to imagining that I had, he was nineteen; a child, for heaven’s sake. He’ll be thirty-four now. That’s how stupid this whole thing is. No,’ Grace prepared to go as she could see from the clock on the yellow wall that her hour was up, ‘no, it’s an obsession all right and I’ll treat it as such.’
She supposed that’s what the therapist meant when he talked about helping you to find your own answers.
But she saw him again; this time he was in the park, crouched down patting a dog. She just shrugged and told herself to get on with the day.
‘So you see, I’m cured,’ she said to Angelica who was over for Sunday brunch. ‘I just walked on by.’ They had agreed not to spend the whole morning discussing work.
‘You look tired,’ Angelica said as Grace handed her a cup of tea with an extra spoonful of honey.
‘That’s the all-time least encouraging remark,’ Grace said. ‘People joke about that one in sitcoms.’
‘When did you last watch a sitcom?’
‘Friday. I do watch television, you know.’
‘But mostly you work. I’m all for it, in a way. The more you earn the greater my percentage, but I don’t want you burning out.’
‘I won’t. People spending their whole career going from war zone to war zone, they burn out.’
‘There are enough people chasing the big stories, the earth-shattering events. The quiet lives of quiet people need their chronicler too.’
Grace liked that answer. It got her off the hook. Right now she was working on her contribution to an exhibition of portraits of twentieth-century London women.
‘They’ve asked me to caption my pictures,’ Grace said. ‘I don’t know if I want that.’ She usually preferred her photographs to speak for themselves, but there was a time and place for text. Angelica was good at titles. Grace could come up with a whole series of pictures and have no idea what to call them, but Angelica usually found something spot on, so spot on that Grace sometimes asked for the captions to be left out. ‘But I only put down what you said you meant by a certain shot,’ was what Angelica usually said when they had such a discussion. And Grace would explain, ‘I know that’s how I said that I saw it, but that doesn’t mean everyone else has to see it the same way. A photograph should be like life itself, open to interpretation, viewed through a living mind. Otherwise it’s just another lifeless thing.
‘Look at this one,’ she said now, wiping the toast crumbs from her fingers and pushing the proof for the exhibition catalogue over to Angelica’s side of the table. She pointed at a picture from the 1930s of a woman standing, surrounded by her four children, on the striped lawn in front of their solid suburban home. ‘Maybe she was perfectly happy,’ Grace said. ‘But all I think is, thank God I’m living now. If now had been then, I’d still be with the Abbots, being slowly suffocated by heartless do-gooders whilst outside, life happened without me. Women like this one had the same big world outside their windows as we do, but they couldn’t get out there. Think about it; think about the wasted lives of women, generation after generation. They weren’t heard, they weren’t seen. God knows what passions and talents they might have harboured that were never given vent and space to grow. We all know that, but looking at some of those faces for the first time I actually feel inside me what it must have been like. Look at her; look at that blank expression, those lips set tight as if they were holding back a scream. I look at her hand resting on one daughter’s neck, and I feel she wants to squeeze. She’s thinking if I have to brush that hair into a perfect little parting with a tiny bow like the two princesses wear one more time, I shall go mad. If I have to listen, one more time, to my husband saying yes, I did have a good day at the office, thank you dear, I shall claw his eyes out. If I have to listen to one more Ovalteenie, or read one more article about how to make my home a perfect haven for my tired family, I shall slit my throat.’
‘I don’t see that at all,’ Angelica said. ‘I’m thinking what a nice-looking family. I envy that woman. Look at her, the adored centre of a happy family. No pressure to go out and fight in the workplace every bloody day. No commuting on filthy underground trains. She’s got a husband and she knows he’ll stay put or he’ll probably lose his chance of promotion at work, not to mention his Rotary membership. There would be lots of o
ther women living the same kind of life so she wouldn’t be isolated. She’d have had a cleaner and maybe even a cook. In the afternoons, if she wasn’t having tea with a friend, she might do some gentle shopping, no lugging heavy groceries obviously, but a new hat or some gloves.’
‘So should that picture be captioned or not?’ Grace wanted to know. ‘Because my caption would read: Woman in gilded cage on the verge of breakdown. And most likely that’s what people would then see. Yours would say something like Mrs Charles Phillips and her happy brood in front of their comfortable Wimbledon home. In both cases we would be steering the viewer in our particular direction. With some pictures and in some circumstances, that has its place. But then it ceases to be a partnership and the picture has no life beyond that one view.’
‘So I’ll tell the gallery you won’t caption your pictures. Now can we go to Harvey Nichols?’
Grace enjoyed shopping with Angelica who tended to buy what Grace secretly hankered after – the soft pink things, the velvet stuff, the nipped-in-at-the-waist and lace-trimmed items; everything that turned Angelica into a golden goddess of Boho chic but made Grace look like a Grenadier Guard in a frilly shower cap. ‘Simple lines in grey or navy,’ Mrs Shield always said as Grace grew up. ‘Nothing fussy or pink.’ She was right. Grace had substituted black for navy but otherwise she had stuck to her stepmother’s advice. If you opened her wardrobe you would find three pairs of black straight-legged trousers and two black jackets: one linen, one in a wool and cashmere mix. There was a knee-length black leather pencil skirt, one white cotton shirt, two black T-shirts, four white ones, a black poloneck jumper, two black V-necks, both cashmere, and one red cotton sweater for the days when she wanted to make out that she did not always wear black and white. She compensated for the lack of variety in colour by indulging her love for soft fabrics. She wore her cashmere jumpers as armour. Cashmere spoke. It said, Don’t fuck with me. Her underwear was pretty routine. If it spoke, Grace supposed it said, All right, so fuck with me then but don’t expect me ever to wear a thong.
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