Shooting Butterflies (41 page)

‘Did Cherry never suspect about us? All this time, did she really have no idea?'

‘She says she didn't and I believe her. She's never been very good at hiding her feelings. My biggest mistake was to overestimate my importance to her. God, what a self-regarding fool I've been. I told myself that I was thinking of
them
. But I was thinking of myself just as much. I couldn't take feeling that bad about myself. If I left and she went to pieces then it would be
my
fault and I couldn't stand that. I needed to feel good about myself. Oh, I was a good guy, all right; I didn't run out on my alcoholic wife, I just cheated on her. And you, who I profess to love more than anything, I hurt you instead because it was the easier option. Because you were strong and never made a fuss. And the irony is that I was most probably wrong about Cherry anyway. She's as tough as anything. If I had left, maybe she would have been forced to pull herself together. You and I could have had so much more time if I hadn't been such a sanctimonious idiot.' He looked as if the pain of dying was nothing compared to the pain of that wasted time. She bent forward and took his hand. ‘Leave the obsessive pondering, the self-hatred and the what ifs to me; I do it so much better.
Your
job is not to die. Once you haven't, then we can plan our future. And don't think we're not alike you and I, because we are, more than you know.'

He squeezed her hand. ‘But I am going to die, and soon, Grace. We should not waste time pretending otherwise.'

‘That's giving up. It's not fair. You don't have a right to. You're to make a miracle recovery and live on to become a monument to the power of love. That's how it's meant to be.' She tugged at his hand so that he was forced to turn and look at her. She looked
back at him as if she was pleading for her own life. ‘That's how it should be.'

Cherry phoned once. Grace picked up the phone in the kitchen. ‘Jefferson, please,' Cherry said. Their conversation was brief.

‘She's moving to Florida. She's having some papers sent over for me to sign so that she can go ahead and sell the house.' He smiled ruefully. ‘When she wasn't blaming me for her problems, she blamed them. She had to be perfect. They never understood who she really was. Now she's moving down to live on their doorstep.' He looked at Grace. ‘I've been terribly stupid, haven't I?'

‘No. You've done what most of us do; given a lot of your best and a little of your worst. Don't beat yourself up over it. Humankind was not placed on earth to get it right, only to try. So what about the girls? When will you see them?'

‘I asked her that. She told me they didn't wish to see me. It seems that she has spared them no detail of their father's transgressions.'

‘And of his illness?'

‘That she didn't say.'

Grace kept bumping into Melissa, on the street, in the shops, on the beach. How were they? Was it her imagination, or had Jefferson lost weight? And wouldn't it be nice if the four of them got together real soon?

‘Everything is fine,' Grace said, speaking with the conviction of a robot. ‘We'd love to see you but right now … well, you know.' Melissa looked a little more hurt each time. Grace wished she could explain: ‘I'm not ready for everyone to know our unhappy ending.'

When Joy, the specialist nurse, came round on Monday morning, Grace stopped her on the way into the bedroom. ‘He's mad to refuse chemotherapy, isn't he? If he goes along with the treatments on offer, there's a chance that he'll make it, isn't there? I mean, look at him; I know he's thin, he always was quite thin but he doesn't look like someone dying.' Grace's eyes bored into Joy's, her shoulders tense, her voice eager. Then she relaxed a little, even managing a smile as she answered her own question. ‘No, of course he doesn't. You'll talk to him, won't you? Now, which
hospital do you suggest?' Grace drew breath and Joy put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Let's have a cup of coffee, shall we,' she said.

She sat Grace down at the kitchen table and explained matters, calmly and gently. She said there was a good chance that with chemotherapy his life would be prolonged by a few months but that that was the best they could hope for. Jefferson would have had all the options explained to him. If, as sometimes happened with this type of cancer, his lungs got congested he would be offered palliative radiotherapy on an outpatient basis. He would have received counselling. He had made his decision. Grace looked up at her with hollow eyes inky-ringed from lack of sleep. Joy leant across the table and put her hand over Grace's. ‘I know it's not what you want to hear, but really I don't disagree with him.'

‘He should want those few extra months. Believe me, we've not been spoilt with time. No, I'll talk to him. I'll make him change his mind.'

Joy looked at her and the pity in her eyes frightened Grace more than any words.

‘I'm not going into hospital,' Jefferson said. ‘What would be the point? Another few months of life spent away from you. No, not unless you feel you can't cope with me here.' He slipped in the last sentence in that kind of careless way Grace knew meant he was terrified of her answer. So she put her arms round him and told him that she was there for him for as long as it took, that she would cope, that for him she could cope with anything.

He was wearing a polo shirt the exact blue of his eyes and the breeze from the great saltmarshes blew across his face and smoothed his strained features. They were walking slowly, making frequent stops for him to rest and catch his breath. ‘It should be easy, catching it,' he said, trying to smile as he leant against the upturned hull of an abandoned rowing boat. ‘Seeing the damn thing never seems to get further than halfway down my throat these days.' Grace had been about to take a picture of him but she changed her mind and put the camera back in the deep pocket of her old tweed jacket. She had got greedy for pictures of him; they would have to see her through a lifetime without him. In the late nights and early mornings when he
slept, she worked in the small darkroom poring over the negatives, choosing which shots to print. Once the printing was done she spent hours studying every feature, every expression the way she could not with the real man. He got edgy if she was always close. He didn't like what he called her ‘anxious looks'. But at night alone in the darkroom she studied his face and smiled when he smiled and hurt when she recognised a twist of discomfort at the corners of his mouth.

‘It's all right taking pictures,' he said now.

‘I know. The light wasn't right, that's all,' she lied. They resumed their walk.

He said, ‘Don't go queasy on me, Grace.'

She looked sideways at him. ‘What do you mean, queasy?'

‘The day you stop taking my picture is the day I know I'm just a care package.'

‘I just want lots of pictures of you to …'

‘To remember me by; I know. But you like to work too and don't tell me the slow dying of a man does not make an interesting subject.'

Grace started opening her mouth to protest, closed it again, shook her head and smiled, placing her hand gently on his shoulder. ‘No, no, I wouldn't tell you that.'

He grinned back. ‘And there is the being-remembered factor and the having future generations poring over the pictures and saying, “So that was Jefferson McGraw dying so gracefully, with such style and such panache.”' Then he started to cry. He cried and she hugged him and this time her eyes were dry.

The nights in the darkroom got harder as she saw the changes in his face that she had been too busy, too shy, too scared, to notice during the day; the pain etched around his eyes and mouth and the growing weariness of his gaze. ‘You see him every moment of the day,' Joy said. ‘You won't notice every little change. And that's no bad thing.'

‘I see it in the pictures,' Grace told her.

He got up for lunch. They even had some white wine with their shrimps and French-style bread. The sun was streaming through the open door and windows, bathing the kitchen in a warm bright light, the kind that fooled you into thinking life was good.

But by the afternoon he was fretting about his children. He had called Cherry's parents but they refused to say where their daughter and grandchildren could be found. ‘Haven't you hurt them enough?' his mother-in-law said.

‘But the girls, I need to see them.'

‘You should have thought about that before you cheated on their mother.'

‘I did think about them, and Cherry; that's why I didn't leave.'

‘So now they should be grateful?' Grace could hear her laugh, sharp and theatrical, although she was a couple of feet away from the phone. Like mother, like daughter, she thought.

Jefferson contacted his colleagues at his old law firm, asking them to find out what could be done. ‘Grace, I might never see my daughters again.'

He called his parents-in-law once more. ‘I'm real sorry, Jefferson, but I've told you: Cherry and the girls don't want to hear from you right now. I know you're sick, and I'm sorry.'

‘What about the girls? Haven't they got a right to see their father before he dies?'

‘Now, don't you go exaggerating like that, Jefferson. The girls are fine and we just don't see the need to drag them through all this … unpleasantness.'

‘That's what she called it,' Jefferson said to Grace, ‘an “unpleasantness”. All I can say is that it's becoming one of my greatest regrets that I won't be there to see my mother-in-law come to meet
her
“unpleasantness”.'

‘You should call the police or social services or something. You have a right to see your daughters, you know that; you're a lawyer. And they have a right to see you. How will they feel if they are made to stay down there and never …'

Jefferson finished the sentence for her. ‘Never see me again. Quite.'

‘They wouldn't let me see my mother after she died. It was the worst thing they could have done because it made it so much more difficult to let go. No, I'd call the bloody FBI if I were you. In fact, I'd have Cherry stuck in chains and thrown into prison without access to vodka
or
that bloody pink lipstick.'

* * *

‘What the hell are you doing, barging in like that?'

‘I just thought you might need a hand.'

‘Get out! For Christ's sake, do you have to follow me even into
here
?'

When he came out of the bathroom she saw he had been crying. ‘I'm sorry; I thought you were having a bath,' she said.

‘No, I'm sorry for yelling at you.' He wouldn't look her in the eyes as he passed her. ‘I'm meant to be your lover.'

‘You
are
.'

His jaw was working and his cheeks were fever-pink. ‘Then your idea of a lover is pretty different from mine.'

‘I want to know about this exhibition you're meant to be working on. Have you got anywhere?' He had come down to the kitchen. She was cleaning the windows. She had cleaned them the day before too, and the day before that.

She put the cloth down. ‘You know I haven't. I just haven't
seen
anything. Nothing really fires me; hardly surprising.'

‘You'll just have to try harder.'

‘Somehow that damn exhibition just doesn't seem very important right now.'

He slapped his hand down on the kitchen table. ‘That's just dumb. It's real important. Look at me. Have you thought how it makes me feel, thinking I'm messing up your career as well as having you run around like some damn nurse picking up after me, wiping my arse …'

‘You're not messing up my career and I haven't wiped your arse.'

‘The time will come …'

‘And then it'll be a privilege.'

‘Not for me, it won't. Look, Gracie, I'm the one dying here. That's enough of a burden. Don't make it heavier by adding guilt.'

‘I've
been
out, you know that. I've taken some shots: the usual, laughing kids, newborn bunnies.'

‘You should travel.'

‘Don't be silly.'

‘OK, so you don't want to leave just at the moment. That's fair
enough, I accept that. But I'm right about one thing; you can't press a pause button on your life while you wait for me to die.'

Grace couldn't take any more of that kind of talk so she got to her feet and tramped out of the door, slamming the bug-screen behind her. She did not go far, staying in the garden, breathing deep, looking up into the sky that seemed weighed down by the mass of working birds, holding her hands over her ears to shut out the noise of all that
life
, hating God.

Then she thought, what am I doing wasting time that I could spend with him? And she went back inside. He sat where she had left him, staring at the wall, his food untouched. When he heard her come in he turned and smiled at her. How could he still smile like that, like a child smiling at the future because they had not seen enough to fear it? She went up and wrapped her arms round him, but not too tight; his whole body was tender these days.

‘What's the title of the exhibition again?' he asked.

She kissed the short soft hair on the top of his head. ‘You don't give up.'

‘No.'

She sighed and went to sit down opposite him. ‘Would you believe,
A Celebration of Life
?'

He laughed. It was a big, genuinely amused laugh. ‘
A Celebration of Life
. OK. Let me think about it. Actually, I'll do the thinking in bed.'

They went upstairs together and she stayed with him. She had brought the rocker up from the porch and placed it by the bedroom window. She sat there often, reading, or trying to, or just watching him.

‘Honey, I've thought.' He used a silly voice and was looking at her with the old perky look in his eyes. ‘Use
me
.'