Shooting Butterflies (11 page)

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 with 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.'

‘Did I say diddums? Absolutely not. Anyway, if you really don't want to do it, just tell your aunt she'll have to find someone else.'

‘It's not so easy. Lillian had already told Arthur about her plans. He, the old show-off, got incredibly excited. He even went up to London and ordered a suit.' Noah smiled and shook his head. ‘He died before it was finished.'

‘Oh dear,' Mrs Shield said. ‘I do hope they didn't charge him.'

‘So it ended up being a bit of a deathbed promise.'

‘Now I'm here I would still like to say hello to your grandmother,' Grace said.

‘I'm sure she'd like to see you too, although, well she
is
very old. She'll probably remember you …'

‘That means you think she might not, and why should she? Some kid that hung around the place a quarter of a century ago.'

‘I should have come to the funeral, your grandfather's that is,' Mrs Shield said. ‘But I was still in Selbourne. I know it's not very far, but by the time I read the obituary it was too late. Of course if someone had thought to tell me. Your grandmother must be quite lost without him. She was never one to be out and about or get involved, was she? I always thought of them as a pair of birds, him all showy colourful plumage and her the little dull-feathered female at his side. Although she isn't little at all, is she?'

Noah took Grace upstairs to his grandmother's sitting room on the first floor. He went in on his own to warn her that she had a visitor. Louisa told him she would be glad to see Grace Shield again. Grace paused in the doorway, surprised by the stark simplicity of the room. The walls were white and there were no curtains, just white-painted wooden shutters. There were two upholstered armchairs in striped bleached-blue linen, a round table and some lamps, a bookcase filled with books and several framed photographs: snapshots, the kind you found on the mantelpieces of most family homes. She recognised Noah in several, and Arthur. There was a sturdy frowning girl who grew up to be a sturdy frowning woman; Noah's Aunt Lillian? And a young man who might have been Noah but for the clothes and a hair-cut that dated from an earlier time. Noah's father, Grace thought. Most surprisingly, for the wife of an artist, there was not a single painting on the walls.

Louisa sat in a high-backed wooden chair close to the artificial gas fire with all bars burning; like all old people she felt the cold as keenly as a bud. The light from the tall north-facing windows bored into every line and wrinkle, highlighting the spider veins that lay like a fine mesh across her face. But there was beauty too, if you bothered to look: in the shape of her eyes, and in the structure beneath the sagging skin. ‘Seeing Noah again, being back here in this house, I can almost smell my childhood,' Grace said.

Louisa smiled and bid her sit down as if their last meeting had been yesterday. ‘Noah tells me you have some questions. I don't know that I'll be much use. I have no idea why they built it; ugly old-fashioned-looking thing.'

‘What's that?'

‘The Dome, Grace.'

‘Oh, the Dome.' Grace sat down. ‘No, I can't say that I do either.'

‘So what else did you want to know?'

‘It's about this painting, I have been given a wonderful painting, and wondered if you knew the artist, A.L. Forbes.' There seemed to be no flash of recognition in Louisa's eyes and next thing she had turned her head, looking around, asking where her cup of coffee was. ‘I always have a cup of coffee and a biscuit at eleven.'

‘Noah said you probably wouldn't know, but I thought I'd ask anyway. You see, it's such a wonderful painting. I'll bring it down to show you next time I'm here.'

‘You say Noah didn't think I'd know this Forbes?'

‘He just said you didn't mix that much with your husband's artist friends.'

‘He is right. I never got on with them.'

From My Window I can see Grace Shield get into her car with her stepmother. I remember Grace, Noah's friend. She has grown up to be beautiful, but otherwise she has not changed much. She is still asking questions. It used to be about the ghost. Now she asks did Arthur, did I, know a painter called Forbes?

The dramas of our lives, Arthur's and mine, were played out in different times. Now my grandson wants to write a biography and he has asked me, most solicitously, how I feel about the prospect of our story being told. I said to him that he must do as he wishes. It doesn't do to stand in people's way when they wish to create something. And Grace Shield talks of her artist. She loves his work. When you get very old you tend to run out of tears, and pain comes to you muffled, bundled up against the years, but after Grace Shield left I cried.

Back at Mrs Shield's flat there was a bundled-up newspaper left on the doormat. Grace picked it up and handed it to Mrs Shield. A green Post-it note in the shape of a Christmas tree announced it had been left there by poor Marjory Reynolds. Another Post-it marked the page.

Inside, Grace helped Mrs Shield off with her lace-ups and handed her her Doctor Scholls. ‘I'll make us a cup of tea,' she said, disappearing into the kitchen as Mrs Shield settled down to read. ‘Oh dear,' Grace heard. ‘Goodness me, now that is unfortunate.'

Grace appeared and put the mugs down on the coffee table. ‘What did Marjory want you to read?' She looked over Mrs Shield's shoulder. ‘What the hell …' She snatched the paper.

There was a photograph accompanying this piece too. They had used the old trick of choosing one that cast their villain – Grace – quite literally in a bad light. Whereas in the picture alongside Nell Gordon's article Grace had looked simply wan, here she looked mean. Her pale face showed up flour-white and, unusually, she was wearing the kind of bright-red lipstick that suggested she had just had a sip of human blood. Her straight brows were knitted together in a frown and there were dark circles under her eyes.

Sandy Lodge-Archer was a tabloid columnist known for her brisk proud-to-be-British, great-to-be-northern, can't-stand-whingers, roll-up-your-sleeves, tighten-your-belt, ready-with-a-quip, spirit-of-the-blitz, Old Mother Brown views which she shared with the nation twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays. Lately she had been posing this question:
Is the New Woman turning into Yesterday's Man?
Grace had read one of the pieces and found the question at least worth debating, until this particular Monday. The entire column, apart from a couple of lines in the bottom right-hand corner dedicated to the wonders of a 95-year-old actress who still put on her make-up every day just to let the cat out, was about Grace. Grace by name, but not by nature. Ungrateful Grace. Disloyal Grace. Immoral Grace. Calamity Grace. Disgraceful Grace.

Sandy Lodge-Archer referred to Nell Gordon's piece as
a recent article in a Sunday broadsheet;
it doesn't do to give credit to a rival. And Sandy herself had got to work, digging up an old newspaper cutting from Grace's first ever exhibition where, aged twenty-five, she had spoken with all the humility and wisdom of youth and most definitely not knowing how her words would be stored and used against her when life was very much more serious. ‘The picture is the only thing that matters,' the young Grace had said. ‘My aim is to take perfect photographs of our imperfect world.' She had finished by paraphrasing Faulkner's words on writing. ‘Everything goes by the board: honour, pride, decency … to get the right shot. If I had to rob my own grandmother to get the work done I would. The picture is worth any amount of old ladies.'