Shooting Butterflies (19 page)

‘Sure.'

Outside, the sun was settling into comfortable late afternoon. The strong wind from the north had died to a soft breeze and she stopped for a moment to draw in the scent from the tobacco plants. In the upstairs window she could just glimpse the old lady,
straight-backed in her chair. As she walked back to Northbourne Gardens, she thought of the adoration the young newlywed Louisa had shown towards her husband. Godlike: was that the word she had used? Grace smiled to herself. It was the secret of a happy marriage, an adoring wife. No wonder Grace's marriage had ended almost before it had begun.

Nell Gordon:
Baby heartbreak ended the marriage idyll.

‘Oh, I would advise anyone to try marriage,' Grace said. ‘It usually starts so well.'

Angelica, seven months' pregnant was down for an advent weekend visit. Tom, her husband, was skiing.

Grace reached for a lollipop. ‘Guess what? I'm pregnant too, twelve weeks.' Angelica moved as close as she could with her big stomach and gave her friend a hug. She had tears in her eyes.

Grace hugged her back. She grinned and waved the lollipop in the air. ‘See how good I am, how responsible, how very virtuous. I don't smoke, I hardly drink and as for fornication I'm told it's positively beneficial.'

‘I'm glad
you're
happy,' Angelica said.

A week later Grace lost the baby. Andrew was disappointed but he coped better than she had expected.

Angelica drove down that weekend, barely able to fit behind the steering wheel. ‘I feel like an affront,' she said, embracing Grace, and Grace felt the tiny foot of her friend's baby against her own empty stomach.

Grace freed herself gently. ‘Don't be silly.'

Later, as they finished lunch in the kitchen, she asked, ‘Angelica, how does he cope so well?'

‘By being a bloke,' Angelica said.

‘I expect he feels it as much as I do but just doesn't know how to express it.'

‘That's no reason.
You're
not usually a master of emotional
displays yourself, but it's pretty easy to see that you're not feeling too good right now.'

Grace did not reply directly. Instead she said, ‘He's my rock.'

‘Stone wall, more like,' said Angelica.

Everyone agreed it was sad, of course it was, but that it was probably for the best: nature's way of telling her there was something wrong with the baby; that it was not meant to be. All Grace knew was that there was another empty space in the world where a child of hers should have grown and thrived, another should-have-been birthday that she alone would acknowledge. She fervently hoped there was such a thing as reincarnation and that her incomplete babies had been able to return to base to be told, with a smile and a slap on the back, ‘Better luck next time.'

Angelica asked her to be godmother to little Michael. At the springtime christening in London, Grace looked at Angelica standing by the font in her cream skirt and coat, the infant in her arms. You never know the measure of your decency, she thought, until your best friend has what you want most in the world. ‘I'm so glad for you,' she whispered inaudibly. She kept saying it over and over in her mind:
I'm so glad for you
.

Grace lost the next baby too, at sixteen weeks this time. She had been for a walk, and had sat down for a while beneath the weeping willow at the bottom of the garden. She watched the sun set behind the hill, telling the baby what a sunset looked like, and dawn too. ‘Aurora; if you're a girl I'd like to call you Aurora, but I probably won't in the end because I'll be afraid of seeming pretentious, and having people think you are the child of some second cousin of an earl or a half-forgotten pop star.'

It was such a mild evening for mid-October. The wind had been coming from the south for a while and everyone was talking about another Indian summer. The leaves on the trees had not yet changed colour, but there was such a dusty tired look about them you almost wished for them to turn, so they could fall to the ground and get some rest.

It was while she was sitting there, talking to the baby, that
the feelings of unease began. She brushed her worries away, staying where she was, enjoying the birds and the fresh air. Suddenly she went cold and her heart skipped a beat. She knew something terrible was happening. She clutched her stomach, begging, praying, as she got to her feet and made for the house.

It is often assumed that people like Grace – people who are not
obviously
cheerful, people who appear to have a slightly darker view of the world than others – are not, as a rule, hopeful. But that is wrong. Grace was one of the most hopeful people she knew; she just kept it to herself. Not to do so would make her even more vulnerable when the worst happened, when the blow fell and she stood there, fool that she was, smiling up at the descending fist, her own hand outstretched as if she had expected a handshake. So when she lay in the hospital, waiting for her scan, having been told that the procedure would probably show that the pregnancy was terminated, she nodded and said she understood. But in her mind was quite a different story; secretly she hoped that the scan would show up a tiny being, still miraculously there, alive, growing. ‘Would you believe it?' the technician would say, straightening up, beaming. ‘There's a heartbeat.'

By the time Andrew arrived it was all over. Her doctor had just told her, very gently, ‘I'm afraid it's as we thought, you've lost the baby.' Grace kept her eyes very wide as she said, ‘It's what we knew all along.'

Back home, afterwards, she had spent a lot of time wandering back and forth beneath the weeping willow as if she was looking for something.

Andrew changed.
He
said that it was Grace who had changed, although that was all right, considering what she had been through.

‘What
we
have been through, surely,' she corrected him.

He who was so kind, helpfulness itself, always there, a shoulder to cry on, a friend to so many, a man to be counted on to give of himself and of his time and effort, he was curiously absent in those weeks after the second baby was lost. He stayed late at school. He went to see his old friend Ed, who had just lost his job and had no one else to talk to. He spent almost every weekend rehearsing
the junior drama club's Christmas production. ‘Those girls have worked their little guts out to get this play right; surely you're not suggesting I let them down now?'

‘Too right I am. I don't give a flying fuck about the girls' end-of-term play or any other of their beastly little activities.'

He looked at her, incredulous. ‘I shall forget you said that.' He stalked off. Even his steps sounded offended.

Grace ran after him, arms flailing, shrieking, unable to contain her pain and rage. ‘Don't forget it.
I
need you, Andrew. I, me, Grace, your wife.
I
hurt and
I
need you! Why can't you be with me?'

Andrew went to stay a weekend with Leonora and Archie in London. Their marriage was in difficulty. Mainly, it appeared now, because they weren't actually married. Grace had only just found this out. ‘Tell them from me,' Grace had yelled after the departing Andrew, ‘that if it's broke, don't bloody mend it.'

Before he left for London, Andrew had told Grace that she had a very odd, narrow view of the world. There were other people to consider, did she not see that? Grace seemed to be concerned only with her own problems, whereas he took a broader view and she would just have to learn to respect that.

Angelica was down for the second weekend in a row, not saying much about the lost baby but being Grace's friend, silent or chatty, smiling or serious, whatever was needed, leaving her own baby with Tom's mother on the pretext that ‘the old trout demands her pound of baby flesh and you know how carsick he gets'. Grace had not protested. Seeing her little godson, she thought she might either resent him or run away with him clasped to her bosom, and neither was a good idea.

‘So what if you are selfish and possessive right now?' Angelica said. ‘You've had a shitty time. You're allowed. But it's typical men; always there when you don't want them, never there when you need them. A problem once removed is so much easier to deal with than one that's right up close, one that is there, with you when you wake in the morning and when you go to sleep at night. People once-removed are so much more grateful and when you've finished being good to them you can leave them where you found them and go back home.
You, Grace,
are
home; you're not grateful and there's nowhere else to put you.'

Grace looked at Angelica and gave a little laugh without a trace of joy in it. ‘You're saying everything I've tried not to think.'

Angelica leant across the table and took her hand. ‘What are friends for?'

‘I thought he was a safe harbour. Silly old me. Every sailor knows that when a storm brews you set sail for open waters.'

‘How is work? We could do with something new at the gallery. Mother thought she'd found the Georgia O'Keeffe of photography but, as I told her, the point about someone like O'Keeffe is that she's unique.'

‘I don't know, Angelica; for the first time I can remember, work just doesn't seem that relevant.'

‘I've had moments like that; when I first met Tom, when I was pregnant and for the first months after Michael was born. Maybe it's a woman thing, it's as if a fog descends, of contentment or despair, hiding everything else from view. But the fog does clear, Grace, I assure you, and then you need your work.' Angelica gently stroked Grace's hand. ‘I'm not saying that work will make up for what you've lost, but it is the one thing that will give you a fighting chance of getting your life back.'

Before Angelica left, Grace asked her to bring Michael down next time. ‘I have to get used to it. It can't go on for ever, this hiding of offspring as if they were illegal substances.'

Yet friends continued to be wary. When Grace was around they changed their conversations about first words, breast versus bottle and the rising cost of magicians for other, child-free topics. They stopped weighing up the advantages of the village school over the private kindergarten – learning to mix with
everyone
– and the advantages of the private kindergarten over the village school – not
having
to mix with everyone. Instead they spoke of teething, of overflowing nappy buckets and the exorbitant cost of toddler shoes. They did not want to flaunt their riches so instead they dressed down their lives for her benefit. They meant well.

Andrew carried on, Grace complained to Robina, as if the main
criterion for deserving his support was not to be his wife. Robina told Grace not to be too hard on him. ‘You can't expect him to feel this the way you do,' she said. ‘Men don't.' Grace was too weary to argue the toss on behalf of the entire species. ‘I'd settle for pretend,' she said. ‘But he whistles little ditties and avoids my eye. He's busy-busy. He's tired. He's
slippery
, Robina. He ducks and dives. Of all people, I thought he would be different.'

‘Men don't feel the need to talk about things. He can't change what happened. He can't get your baby back so he feels useless and that's what makes him withdraw; it's not unusual.'

‘I know, I know; men are from Mars and on Mars they
do
stuff and when they can't they go off whistling. But women know that talking is
not
the antichrist of doing. Talking to me about what happened, letting me talk to him, might bring
me
back, at least. And I'm beginning to fear that I won't get back on my own.'

‘There'll be other babies,' Robina said. ‘I promise.' Robina had a problem accepting that sometimes life did not behave according to her rules.

‘I know you've talked to Mum,' Andrew said. ‘And you're wrong if you think I'm not upset. But it happens. It happens a lot. Lucinda Baker had at least five of these early miscarriages before Chloe was born.'

When she told him how much she needed him he looked pained. When she got upset he said he had always thought of her as so strong and brave. He had a way of showing his disappointment that involved his whole body; his eyebrows rose above the question in his eyes, his shoulders hunched just enough for you to notice and his arms grew stiff, refusing to extend into a hug.

Mrs Shield came to stay. For two weeks Grace was fussed over and commiserated with. ‘I understand,' Mrs Shield said. ‘I lost a baby too, at six months.'

Grace had stared at her. ‘You were pregnant? You never told me.'

‘You were only little. I had not long married your father and I worried that you and Finn might feel even more insecure than you already did, poor little mites. I kept putting off telling you and
neither of you noticed anything different.' She smiled and shook her head. ‘You probably just thought I was getting fat. And after I lost it; well, there seemed no point in upsetting you.'

‘Evie.' Grace put her hand out. ‘Exactly how horrible was I?'

Mrs Shield laughed. ‘Oh Grace, you weren't horrible. A little challenging, perhaps, but never horrible.'

‘I hate it when you are different from how I decided you are,' Grace told her. ‘It's too confusing when one's parents start being people in their own right.'

Mrs Shield burst into tears. It was the first time Grace had ever referred to her as her parent.

There seemed to be a tariff of grief allowed, made up according to weeks of gestation. Twelve weeks allowed you fourteen days or so of dignified sorrow and a further fourteen of ‘not being quite yourself'. After that you were supposed to pull yourself together and get on with life. Another loss so soon after the first, and at sixteen weeks, allowed you to scream at your husband and his family in an uncontrolled manner and to burst into tears for no reason. (‘Hormones still all over the place.') After a few days of that a longer period of withdrawal from activities, even family events, was allowed, if not encouraged. But grieve too hard and too long and they would start to whisper of hysteria and ghoulishness and lack of a sense of proportion and remind you of the value of knowing how lucky you are, really, to have a loving husband and family, friends eager to help, enough money and a nice home.