Shooting Butterflies (16 page)

When her grandmother took her away Grace was sorry to see her go, but she knew that soon another little Arabella, Fenella or Lucinda, or a James, Jonathan or Charles, would come to have her or his picture taken.

She had no more work on for that day. Since marrying Andrew she had cut down gradually in order to have time to do things like taking clothes to the drycleaner's and ironing shirts and shopping for groceries and cooking: all those wifely tasks Grace had confessed to Angelica she found strangely enjoyable. ‘It's all right,' Angelica had said. ‘You're not alone in this strange perversion; I quite like it too. Well, I used to, back when he was grateful.'

‘What do you think it is?' Grace asked. ‘I used to hate all that stuff.'

‘It's nature having its wily way; it's nesting, so they say.'

‘Nesting; that expression makes me cringe. Anyway, isn't one supposed to be pregnant for that?'

‘It's preparation. Some of us prepare for longer than others. I bet you sniff his shirts.'

Grace laughed. ‘I never. I did once stroke a pile of freshly ironed ones, but that's as kinky as I get.'

And there was all this family life to get used to. Today, as always on Sundays, they were having lunch with her parents-in-law. Before she left the house she saw to some of Andrew's ironing. She liked that expression:
saw to
. It sounded so breezy and competent. She picked a blue shirt from the basket and as she smoothed it across the ironing board she smiled at the thought of her conversation with Angelica. Blue was Andrew's favourite colour. She wondered if their child, when they had one, would be good in blue like its father or more suited to black like its mother. Then, as she folded the shirt, she remembered that, actually, Andrew was not really that fond of blue. It was Jefferson who liked blue of every shade. He had been just a little vain and aware that the colour brought out the deep cornflower of his eyes.

* * *

‘Some of the front gardens around here are amazing,' Grace said as they sat round the table at Hillside House. ‘Roses with heads the size of cabbages, phlox and peonies; has no one told them the best-kept Devon town award has gone already?'

‘You should take some pictures,' Robina said. ‘Send them to the local paper.' She had made a huge untidy pie and was serving it along with young carrots, new potatoes and home-baked wholemeal bread.

‘I don't shoot flowers much,' Grace explained.

Robina and her friend Janet stared at her. ‘But why?'

It was not a question to which Grace had given much thought. ‘They just don't stand still for long enough,' she said airily, holding her plate out for carrots.

Robina looked at her for a moment then her brow cleared. ‘Oh, one of your little jokes.' She turned to Janet. ‘Grace's people on her mother's side were Irish-American.' Robina was a woman who needed a reason for everything. Lately she had seemed very keen to find a reason for Grace who kept trying to tell her that looking for reasons in this world could send a person mad. In Grace's view, if God had wanted people to have reasons He would
not
have given them religion.

Baby Rory was staying the weekend while his parents had some ‘grown-up' time, Janet and Neil were there as usual on a Sunday and a young man called Stuart. ‘One of mother's waifs and strays,' Kate had said. Sixteen was a cruel age. Stuart Wright was a pupil at the nearby boarding school for disabled youngsters. Stuart's parents were both dead and his closest relatives, an uncle and aunt, lived in Yorkshire, so on hearing that the boy spent almost all his weekends at school, Robina had stepped in and ‘adopted' him.

Stuart had been blind from birth although he could sometimes distinguish very bright light. When Grace was little there were times when she had played at being blind, walking with her arms theatrically stretched out before her, fumbling and stumbling, comfortingly aware that all she needed to do for everything to be well again was to open her eyes. But the reality of a sightless life scared her like little else; to live in darkness and never know when someone might be watching you. When she fell in love with photography the fear of blindness became an obsession. If she went
blind, photography would have no meaning; and neither, Grace imagined, would life.

She wanted to know if Stuart formed pictures in his mind.

‘I have no visual references,' he said. ‘And I don't know if what I think of as a picture is what a sighted person thinks of as one. But I do build pictures in my mind – from touch; from the feel of the sun, rain and wind; from scents and atmosphere; I'm especially good at sensing tension.' A small smile spread across his lips. ‘Of course I do use other people's descriptions, but that comes last. It's my experiences I draw from, no one else's.'

‘Any news on the little-grandchild front?' Robina who had been trying to change the subject for a while now turned to Grace.

‘Is that what babies are known as these days?' Kate said, rolling her eyes. ‘Grandchildren.'

‘Sharp as a tack, aren't you, my dear,' Robina said. ‘In fact it gets her into trouble sometimes. She's seen as very much a leader amongst her peers, you know.'

‘
Mother!
' Kate protested, but just then Leonora arrived, surprising them all.

‘I wasn't expecting you today, darling,' Robina said, calmly bringing out another plate. ‘Weren't you and Archie supposed to be going away for the weekend?'

‘Well, we changed our plans. Hi, Grace; hi, Stuart; hi, everyone.' Leonora, looking as if she had slept in her hippy chic, nodded towards Janet and Neil.

‘Take a look at this …' Timothy pushed a piece of paper towards Leonora. On it was a drawing he had been busy with during most of lunch, depicting four little men with tall pointed hats and some other men pointing guns. ‘Now,' Timothy said, expanding with the sheer excitement of the problem, ‘one of these little guys will be in a position to warn the others …'

‘Draw a rose for me,' Grace said, tearing a clean piece of paper from Timothy's notepad and putting it in front of Stuart. She found a Biro in her pocket and put it in his hand. ‘Here,' she plucked a stem from the bowl of dusky pink roses at the centre of the table and beheaded it, handing him the flower that was just a bud. ‘I'll float it in some water on a saucer when we're done,' she reassured Robina. ‘I won't waste it.'

Stuart sniffed the rose that had no scent. He touched each petal delicately with the tip of his middle right finger, then he stroked the outer ones. Next he put it down by the side of his plate and began to sketch.

Baby Rory, excited to see his mother, was bobbing up and down in his wooden seat that looked so uncomfortable compared with the new padded manmade ones, but Robina hated anything plastic and swore by natural materials. ‘Me, me, me.' He stretched out a podgy hand, wanting his own flower. Grace looked around and caught sight of a nodding daisy right outside the open back door. Excusing herself, she nipped out and picked it, then handed it to Rory who tried to eat it. Leonora took it away and gave him a rusk instead.

‘For future reference,' Grace said, ‘Feed Baby
rusks
, not daisies.'

‘Don't you worry, my dear,' Robina said. ‘Motherhood will come naturally. In fact, I always say that Baby brings his own sense with him. And Grace, Stuart is gravely visually impaired; I don't think he wants to play at drawing.'

Stuart's rose was a jagged mouth inside an outline like a pansy and set in a V-shaped cradle. Like all good abstracts, it had captured the essence. Grace was tempted to ask him to draw a portrait of Robina, but thought maybe that would be best kept to later. Instead she deheaded a second stem and handed it to Stuart, saying, ‘Tell me what you see now.'

Robina cleared her throat. Stuart explored the second rose. This one was open other than for a small tight bud at its centre. ‘Moist,' Stuart said, his index finger prodding at the closed centre of the flower. He smiled dreamily. ‘Flesh-pink.'

‘That's just a word,' Grace said. ‘What makes you think it's that colour?'

Stuart handed Grace the rose, taking her finger and tracing it along the same path as his had wandered a few moments earlier. Grace too began to smile. When she felt the tight bud at the centre of the rose she laughed. Then Stuart laughed too.

Robina, who was like Mrs Shield in the way she hated being left out of
anything
, wanted to know what was so funny. Timothy wanted to know if anyone had solved his puzzle.

‘Actually, all the little fuckers can get shot, for all I care,' Leonora said. She had been unusually quiet until then.

The others all began to talk and, knowing they weren't overheard, Kate spoke to Grace. ‘You know, it really bugs me the way Mum keeps saying I'm so smart and everyone loves me and I'm a leader. She knows it's not true. I'm really unpopular. I'm not in anyone's group. Some people are scared of me, that's all. But try telling her that.'

‘You're her daughter,' Grace said. ‘She's proud of you.'

‘She's
ashamed
of me, more like.'

‘Why would you think that? She never stops praising you to anyone who wants to listen.'

‘If she really was proud of me she'd see me as I am: a frizzy-haired dumpy girl of reasonable intelligence, not some beauty with a brain the size of a melon and a lorryful of charisma.'

Grace stared at her. Then she laughed. ‘You're funny, and clever enough for anyone. So, maybe your hair is not at its best right now …' They both burst out laughing.

Kate grew serious again. ‘But it's true. I'm right, aren't I? Making someone out to be better than they are is not love; it's not being proud, it's being selfish. They're saying, both Mum and Dad, in their different ways, that the way I am is not good enough so they have to embroider the facts to make me more to their taste.'

‘I've never looked at parental boasting in that light before,' Grace said. ‘And I'm still not sure you're right. Have you tried talking to them?'

‘Father only likes abstract problems; anything personal and he bolts to his study. And Mother. You try telling her that her world isn't perfect.'

‘I take it she gets upset?'

‘You could say that. She takes it as a personal insult.'

Grace nodded. ‘Mankind loves to be deceived. I remember when Mrs Shield told me that Father Christmas didn't exist, I hit her.'

‘Stuart's very nice,' Grace said to Robina over the washing-up a little later when the others had gone for a walk.

‘He's a dear boy,' Robina handed her a tureen to dry, ‘not a performing seal.'

‘Of course he isn't,' Grace exclaimed. ‘Whoever said he was?'

‘I'm not the one who made the poor boy draw silly pictures, at the lunch table.'

‘They weren't silly pictures, they were fascinating,' Grace protested, sounding even to herself like a ten year old who had been caught drawing willies in her exercise book. ‘I was interested in him. How can that be wrong?'

‘He might like to talk about other things than his handicap, have you thought about that? He might just like to be treated like everybody else.'

‘I did treat him like everybody else, that's the point,' Grace said. ‘I asked him about himself. I didn't talk about a handicap. I asked him how the world appeared to
him
.'

‘You're splitting hairs,' Robina said. ‘The tin goes under there.' She pointed to the drawer by the side of the huge gas stove. ‘Now, what were you and Kate so busy talking about?'

‘Oh, this and that.'

‘And …' Soft voice, steely eyes; Grace could see why Kate did not want to confront her mother. Saints were notorious toughies.

Grace leant against the sink, tea towel thrown over her shoulder, her eyes locked into Robina's. ‘She feels that you and Timothy need to make her into something better than what she actually is because who she is isn't good enough.'

Robina looked at her, measuring. ‘Nonsense,' she said finally. ‘I'll talk to her. I won't have such negativity in the house.'

As they walked back home to their cottage by the harbour, Andrew put his arm around her. ‘I'm so proud of you,' he said. ‘Look how well Kate relates to you. She has been really difficult lately and there she was opening up to you. Everyone really responds to you.'

Love may not be blind, Grace thought, but it sure is shortsighted. Yet she could not help but be pleased that he was so pleased with her. She had learnt, over the weeks and months of her marriage, that having someone think her so good, so pretty and so clever made her a little more of all those things. They had
happened gradually, those little changes. Andrew believed that Grace was kind-hearted – he told her so over and over again – so she began to perform little kindnesses even when it went right against her instincts to do so just because she could not bear to see the light of adoration dim in his eyes. Andrew believed her to be forgiving, thoughtful and magnanimous. She sent a birthday card to a one-time friend who had called Grace's contribution to a book on the human form ‘depraved' in a review. He said she was a country girl at heart and that she had a way with animals. She was certainly brought up in the country, though her heart was paved with asphalt. Yet when Timothy's dogs put their snouts up against her crotch she did not give them a surreptitious shove in the stomach with her knee, but smiled and patted their curly heads. And she would glance up and see the warm approval in her husband's eyes, the proud look that said,
See, see how she is loved by every living thing, see how sweet, how special she is
.

Grace remembered long ago standing in the doorway of Mrs McGraw's kitchen, an unwelcome presence yearning to be part of the kitchen-cosy and to have Jefferson's mother smile at her the way she was smiling at Cherry, the wanted one, the one who belonged. She looked up at Andrew and mouthed a silent thank you.