Shooting Butterflies

by Marika Cobbold

  ‘Perhaps distance is His problem – God’s, I mean,’ Jefferson said. ‘Perhaps that’s the answer to the age-old question of how He can allow such misery on earth. He means well, the very best, but from where He stands it all looks pretty good: there’s air to breathe (apparently it looks prettier from up there, the more polluted it is), we have the oceans and the lakes, the mountains and the streams, woods, plains… “Take a look at that,” He says to a visitor, pointing at the far-away earth. He is proud. Why shouldn’t He be? “You remember when I did the work?” He says to his friend. “I was flat out and so exhausted I had to rest all Sunday. But I knew I had done a great job. It’s a beautiful place; oh, is it beautiful. There’s everything anyone can need: air, water, food. The way I ordered nature, I’m telling you… genius. And look at them, I call them my children, see them milling about? How they have grown and multiplied. Actually, in that respect they have outdone all my expectations. I’m telling you, things must be going pretty well down there.”’ Jefferson stopped and shrugged, palms up to the heavens. ‘Could be as simple as that.’

  ‘So will you still love me from a distance?’ she asked, although she was sure his answer would be a resounding yes.

  Instead he shook his head and sighed. ‘I honestly don’t know. Earth might look better from afar; but me, I’m a close-up kind of guy. I might not have the soul to love from a distance.’ He took her in his arms, kissing her hair and the lids of her closed eyes, her cheeks and her lips. ‘Let’s not worry about that. It’s here and now that matters. But whatever happens this will never be just another affair.’

  Disappointed as she was with his answer, she could not help smiling. He was an intelligent man, a successful lawyer, yet he spoke his soap-opera lines with all sincerity and she loved him all the more for it, although she could not resist teasing. ‘This is bigger than both of us,’ she mumbled.

  He replied, unsuspecting as ever, ‘I know, darling, I know it is,’ and there was a catch in his voice that made her feel instantly ashamed of making fun.

  She shot a whole roll of black and white film just of him. At first, when she pointed the lens at him, he looked awkward, the way most people do, but soon he loosened up and enjoyed himself. ‘I always knew how to photograph you,’ she said. ‘Oh, I’m so good.’

  ‘Oh yes, oh yes, my darling, you are.’ Their eyes met and they burst out laughing. ‘But really,’ he said, ‘you have turned from gawky Grace to graceful Grace. When you work, you move with such delicate precision and you always know exactly where you are going.’ She blushed, pleased. It was her quiet embarrassment; being big and strong and often clumsy and answering to the name of Grace.

  They sat together on the sofa, talking, as lovers do, of everything, as long as it was to do with them. ‘I was such a fool back then,’ he said.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘And now I’m older and a wiser fool.’

  ‘See, apart from you having become a bloodsucking leech of a lawyer instead of a man who treats wild animals for free, you haven’t changed that much. You’re a romantic who cheats on your women. You’re a loyal friend. You’re vain about your good looks but you still won’t pay for a decent hair-cut. You’re capricious and you’re thoughtful. You’re always in a hurry unless you’re making love. You have the ego of a small-size town but you love the success of others and dislike talking about yourself, and, my darling, you still mouth clichés with the innocent wonder of someone who’s just woken up to this world.’ At that he laughed, his dark head thrown back, his throat exposed where it was soft and white. She slid her finger across, just below the Adam’s apple. ‘Cut or kiss,’ she said.

  He had a week. They made the most of the time between his meetings and her jobs by the simple trick of not sleeping more than an hour or two each night. Lying next to him in the early hours of the morning and able to touch him, just like that, as easily as if she was still dreaming, was a great and wholly unexpected happiness.

  The morning he was due to return to the States she wanted him to go as soon as possible. She perched on top of the dirty linen basket watching him shave. He was naked. He had been curiously shy at the start of the week, covering up as if she might find his nakedness offensive, but now he moved around as easily as if he were alone, or showing off.

  She had made breakfast – toast and soft-boiled eggs – although she ate nothing herself, but just kept downing mugs of sweet milky tea. He ate his own egg and hers, but when he looked at her she saw he had tears in his eyes that he wiped away quickly with the back of his hand.

  Go, she thought; go so I can start grieving. The days ahead would be strewn with burning coal and lined with barbed wire and there was no other way than through; so, she reckoned, the sooner she could begin the sooner she would be out the other side.

  ‘I’ve got time for another cup of tea,’ he said.

  ‘No. No, you don’t.’ She got to her feet. ‘The traffic can be dreadful at this time of the morning.’

  He looked a little surprised. ‘But I’ll be going against the traffic. Anyway, the car won’t be here for another ten minutes at least.’

  ‘Better get going then,’ she said.

  ‘I’m screwing up your life again, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

  He looked at her. ‘Would you move to the States? You could work over there just as well as here.’

  Her heart skipped a beat as if it was already celebrating. But she shook her head. ‘No. This is my home. Everything you see I’ve built for myself. I took nothing from my husband in the divorce. And it’s not so easy to start again, even for a freelance. I’ve built up a reputation here, I have my contacts; people who know my work and trust me. And there’s Mrs Shield, and my friends. I might end up hating you, leaving it all behind to sit around in some cabin waiting, waiting for you.’

  ‘What’s with the cabin? It could be a real elegant condo or a cottage in the Hamptons.’

  ‘Wherever… waiting for you to turn up and dreading for you to leave? What kind of imbalance would that bring to our relationship? I would become someone else, some dependent, clinging, frustrated version of the woman you love. And,’ she put her arms round his neck and looked him deep in the eyes, ‘I still don’t entirely trust you. This time, if I’m going to have my heart broken I want it to be on my home ground.’

  ‘You can trust me,’ he said. ‘But I don’t blame you for not knowing that… yet.’

  She sat on the bed and cried at the sight of the crumpled sheets. She lay down and rested her head on the pillow that smelt faintly of him.

  She took a picture of the bedroom. It became the first of a whole series of shots where absence spoke strongest. A child alone outside the school gates, a woman alighting from a train on to a deserted railway platform, the same woman keeping to one side of a double bed.

  ‘Have you ever suffered from depression?’ Noah asked Grace. ‘And I’m not talking about feeling a bit down.’

  Grace looked at him, wondering where that question came from. ‘Depression is the absence of the Dumb-chip,’ she said. ‘And yes, yes, I have. It was deathly. I saw the world as an ugly place filled with darkness and malice and life as utterly pointless. Then the Dumb-chip kicked in and now I find the world miraculous and each and every life as something sacred, occasionally even my own. I don’t know how long it’ll be until sanity returns.’

  ‘That’s what I like to see; a positive outlook.’

  Grace lit a cigarette. ‘Don’t get me wrong; I prefer it when the Dumb-chip’s in. Without it you see clearly and that is unbearable.’

  ‘Call it illness or unbearable clarity of vision, but I wonder if Louisa suffered from depression way back. There are letters from Arthur to friends, entries in his diaries. Something was going on and it must have affected his work.’

  ‘Well, did it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know his work. Did it go through some kind of sea-change?’

>   Noah scratched his head as he paced the room. ‘No, not really. The Donald Argyll biography hints at some personal problems way back in the early 1930s. Of course Argyll’s book only goes up to the Second World War. I’ve been studying Arthur’s work from that period but I can’t say that I see any reflection of trouble there. Part of me, the professional part, the one who wants some money and a few decent reviews, wants to explore this further. But then there’s the good-grandson part. Talk about selling one’s granny.’

  ‘No.’ Grace shuddered. ‘Let’s not.’

  He stopped his pacing, reaching out and taking her hand, and he looked at her as tenderly as he had once, long ago, when she fell off her bicycle and ended up weeping inconsolably for the mother she had lost five years earlier. ‘Was it worth it, Grace?’

  She paused again before answering, ‘I still don’t know.’

  * * *

  Louisa was in the garden seated on the wooden bench beneath the copper beech. She turned her head as Grace approached. Her face, a construction of bones draped in ill-fitting skin, lit up with a smile of such sweetness that Grace reached for the camera she no longer carried. ‘Autumn’s coming.’ Louisa patted the seat. ‘Sit down and have a chat. I adore my grandson but I do find it difficult to have a proper conversation with him. Do you have that problem? Maybe it’s men.’

  Grace put her hand to her mouth, disguising her laughter as a cough. ‘Yes, I think it probably is.’

  ‘The gardens are lovely, don’t you think? I shall miss them. Of course Arthur did not approve of my taste. He thought all the colour vulgar and he disliked what he saw as the lack of order, but I put my foot down. “I’m in charge of the gardens,” I told him.’ She chuckled, then added, ‘of course we haven’t been able to keep them up the way they should be for a long time now.’

  ‘These colours,’ Grace made a sweeping gesture towards the herbaceous borders, ‘these colours that Arthur didn’t like are the colours of my painting.’

  ‘I never was very good at what you call the nitty-gritty of gardening. And once something was in the soil I liked to leave it there. I liked seeing what’s going to happen next to the shape of a flower or a shrub, or the colours of the leaves. The gardener always wanted to move and replant, to bring some in and put some out, but I told him to let things be, to let them find their own way; to grow or die. Arthur always said I was the most passive woman he’d ever met. He was right, of course. I just never felt the urge to change things. I’m happy to watch what’s there.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ Grace said. ‘When I worked as a photographer I did pose pictures, obviously; portraiture especially is all about posing, about composing the picture. But what I liked best, what really interested me, was to catch the fleeting moment.’

  ‘Lillian was born about this time of year,’ Louisa said. ‘Lillian. Now there’s a happy creature. Strange but happy. I miss her. She’s in Tanzania, you know.’

  ‘I know. You told me.’

  Louisa

  Old Lydia Hobbles into the nursery on Jane Dale’s arm. She bends so low over the crib I fear she might topple and crush my baby. The sing-song talk she addresses to her granddaughter makes me giggle, although I’m still exhausted, floaty with the pain and exhilaration of birth – imagine, Lydia Blackstaff cooing like a dove. They don’t stay long. Outside the sun is shining but the heavy curtains are drawn across my windows. In the twilight I see the door open slowly, inch by inch, letting in the light from the landing. It’s Georgie. He looks so big now I’ve held a newborn baby again, my golden boy with his sturdy little limbs and his thick flaxen hair; but not too big to cry. I can see that he’s been crying; his eyes are puffy and pink-rimmed. Nanny told me that he had been frightened – ‘very worried’ he had said in his solemn way. Jane had told him that once there was a new baby in the house, the old one – in this case Georgie – would have to grow up quick smart because there was only room for one baby even when the house was as big as this one. After that Georgie had had nightmares, awful dreams where the baby grew larger and larger until it took up all the space that should have been Georgie’s, and finally he was squeezed out altogether, alone outside. ‘And I looked in through the window,’ he had wept to Nanny, ‘and all I could see was a big fat baby cheek. I couldn’t see you or Mama anywhere.’

  I hold my arms out to my little boy. ‘You come here.’ He rushes to me and I hug him close and feel his hot damp cheek against mine. I stroke his curls and whisper in his ear that everything is fine and no one could ever take his place.

  ‘Where is he?’ Georgie wants to know.

  ‘Who, Georgie?’ Then I realise and I smile at him. ‘You mean the baby? Well, the baby is a she. Look over there, in the crib.’

  Georgie looks and then gives vent to one of those sudden bursts of hilarity that annoy his father almost as much as his sudden bursts of tears. ‘But she’s so little!’ he shouts, bouncing up and down on the bed until being dragged off by Nanny. ‘She’s not big at all.’ He jumps up and down on the floor in his excitement.

  Lillian should have been the boy in the family: that’s what Arthur says every time he sees her. There is nothing of her pale moonstruck mother or brother about her, none of our reproachful presence. For a while Arthur seems content. He picks up his son and throws him high in the air, catching him with strong sure hands. He makes me laugh with silly jokes and stories of his days as a young man sharing a loft with his poor artist friends and hiding the generous allowance from his mother so as not to be different from any of the others. He tickles the baby’s plump little stomach. He lights up our days, making us feel warm and strong, and full of hope. But soon he has to move on, leaving us alone out there in the cold.

  I engross myself in caring for my children. I try to make friends with Jane Dale, and I wait, wait for him to notice me again. But, like fruit left untasted in the bowl, I grow bruised and then plain bad. Arthur says my bad humour goes before me like a foul smell.

  ‘You complain that I avoid you. Of course I avoid you. Why should I risk my good humour and my peace of mind on a sour, bitter woman? You become my sweet funny Louisa again and I will want to be with you more, don’t you see?’

  Why was I never enough? What was it about me that the people who were meant to love me had such problems doing so? What was it about me that those people who said they loved me behaved as if they did not? I stand for hours staring at my reflection. I do not realise it at the time but Jane is watching me through a crack in the door.

  What she sees she describes later, in detail, to both Arthur and Lydia; she claimed they ought to know so that they could help. I know what she said.

  ‘There she was, stark naked, with all that hair falling down her back …’ Lydia interrupts to say how she is always saying I should have it cut, my long hair, my inelegant outmoded hair.

  ‘Mother!’ That’s Arthur speaking. ‘Jane is trying to tell us something.’

  ‘She was like an animal; no, a crazy woman, screaming, cursing.’

  ‘It’s the quiet ones you have to watch.’

  ‘Mother, will you let Jane finish.’

  ‘“What’s the matter with you all?” That’s what she kept screaming over and over again, even though there was no one in the room …’

  ‘Well, thank God for small mercies. Just imagine what the servants would have made of it. It would be all over the village.’

  ‘Mother!’

  ‘It was as if there were people there that only she could see. It was eerie. “What’s wrong with you all?” She said it over and over again but there was no one there. I closed the door and left her, in front of the glass, stark naked, weeping like a baby.’

  Arthur comes to see me. He tells me what he has heard. He is hurt, he says. He feels that I’m being most unfair. Do I not realise that he needs peace right now with the exhibition coming up? ‘Really, Louisa, does it always have to be about you? Now, I know things aren’t as we had hoped between us, but you’re my wife. We shall both have to
make the best of things. I’m not an insensitive man, as you know. In fact, I sometimes think that I am too sensitive for my own good. I understand the burden you carry from your unfortunate early life. The ghosts of your parents haunt you still. Suicide is indeed the greatest betrayal. That’s why, however distressed I myself might get at times, I would never contemplate such an action. So you need not worry on that score, I can assure you.’

  I look at him, wondering if his words are calculated, if he knows the distress they cause. ‘Arthur,’ I say, ‘until now I had never thought it the slightest possibility that you, of all people, should wish to take your own life.’ I look down at my quiet hands folded in my lap and then I face him again with a smile. ‘But thank you, my dear, for your assurance.’

  Georgie has turned into a whiny boy, Arthur says, always clinging to his mother and glaring at the world through those ambercoloured eyes. He runs to me or Nanny whenever his father takes the trouble to pay him attention. I get cross with Arthur for complaining about our son and I tell him that people are not possessions that can be toyed with for a while and then put back in the cupboard until the next time you feel like having a game. For someone who never tires of pointing out the faults and weaknesses in others, Arthur takes these remarks of mine very much to heart. He protests. Next his eyes are full of hurt like Georgie’s when he got smacked once for running out on to the road. Finally he storms from the room.

  My little daughter … she is a strange one, of that there is no argument. Nanny shakes her head in wonderment. ‘It’s not natural, a child that young who doesn’t cry. Look at her screwing up her little face and glaring at us.’