So, her life had been moving forward according to this plan. She lived in a small flat, one bedroom, walls painted white, scented candles, everything kept simple (very like a secular anchorite in fact) and socialized minimally with the other staff. There were a couple of middle-aged divorcees that she sometimes went to the cinema with or with whom she shared a bottle of wine, some place where it was quiet enough to talk. The conversation generally bemoaned the lack of suitable men – ‘all the good ones married or gay’ – the usual stuff, and when they poked around in her own life she said, ‘One bad marriage is enough,’ in a way that suggested it had been too bad to talk about. She was taking a break from relationships, she said, only she didn’t say how long that break had been. Twenty-two years since she’d been with a man! The middle-aged divorcees would be astonished if they knew that. But then, celibacy was a part of being an anchorite, wasn’t it? Or was it anchoress? The Reverend Burton would know (‘Call me John, for God’s sake,’ he said, laughing.). Of course, she’d had sex with women in that time, so you couldn’t really call it celibacy.
He was a funny chap, John Burton. Sandy, gingery hair, quite small and fine-boned, nothing like Jonathan. He had a sweetness about him, a kind of essential goodness that was lovely. He had been an inner-city penitent too, but it had broken him in some way, and so now he was interred in the country like a convalescent. Jonathan wasn’t the kind of man who would ever have a breakdown. Jonathan had incredibly good manners (from his mother, from Ampleforth College, although the Weavers weren’t Catholics, far from it), which was one of the things that attracted her to him, but underneath he was flinty and indestructible, which was also what attracted her. (‘Adamantine’, that would be a very good word for him. From the Greek, but the origin somewhat obscure.)
Gillian, a friend from teacher-training college, had invited her to stay on her parents’ farm for the August bank-holiday weekend. They had paired up at college because they were older than most of the other students. They weren’t close friends – although Gillian thought they were closer than they actually were – but Gillian was easy company, funny, cynical yet un-challenging, so, after debating long and hard with herself (as she did about everything), Caroline finally accepted the invitation. A weekend in the country, she said to herself, what harm can there be in that? Really?
And it was lovely, absolutely lovely. Gillian’s parents were jolly types and Gillian’s mother wanted to feed them all the time, which was fine by both of them. Gillian’s mother told them how admirable it was that they were such independent ‘girls’ with careers and mortgages and choices when what she really meant was that Gillian – an only child – was well into her thirties now and wasn’t she ever going to produce a grandchild?
The guest bedroom was clean and comfortable and Caroline slept better than she had for years, probably because it was so peaceful. The only sounds were the sheep bleating and the cocks crowing, the never-ending birdsong, the acceptable noise of the occasional tractor. The air smelt sweet and it made her realize what a long time it was since she had breathed really good clean air. The vista from her bedroom window was of rolling green dales, seamed and braided with grey stone walls that ran on for ever, into infinity, and she thought it was the most beautiful view she’d ever had in her life (although she’d had some rotten views), so that she was in love with the landscape before she fell in love with Jonathan, who in some ways was just a kind of extension and embodiment of the countryside.
And it was hot, much hotter than she’d expected Yorkshire to be, not that she’d known what to expect of Yorkshire, not having been there before. (‘What, never visited God’s own county?’ Jonathan said in mock horror. ‘I’ve been hardly anywhere,’ she replied, truthfully.)
On the Saturday afternoon Gillian took Caroline to an agricultural fair, a small one, local to the dale, ‘not like the Great Yorkshire Show or anything – more of a fête’, Gillian explained. It was being held in a field a couple of miles away, on the outskirts of a village that Gillian told her she would love because it was ‘all picture-postcard quaint’ and Caroline smiled and said nothing because, yes, it was all beautiful and might be Yorkshire (which seemed to be more of a state of mind than a place) but it was still the country. But, of course, Gillian was right, the village was like a Platonic ideal of a village – a packhorse bridge, a beck, skirted with yellow flag irises, that threaded its way amongst the grey stone houses, the old red telephone box, the little postbox in the wall, the village green with its fat white sheep grazing unfettered. (‘Yorkshire sheep,’ Jonathan said, ‘they’re bigger,’ and months later she regurgitated this fact to a colleague at school who fell about with laughter so that she felt like an idiot. By then she had a ruby-and-diamond ring on her finger, a ring that had once belonged to Jonathan’s father’s mother. It wasn’t until afterwards that his own mother, Rowena, told her that she’d refused that ring and insisted on new diamonds instead – from Garrard – because she didn’t want a ‘hand-me-down’.)
Caroline, needless to say, had never been to an agricultural fair in her life and was charmed by everything. Yes, that was what had happened to her: she had been charmed, bewitched, glamorized somehow – by the combed sheep and ruffled cows and the squeaky-clean pigs, by the marquees with their displays of prize-winning jams and sponge cakes, the crocheted shawls and knitted matinee jackets, the exhibitions of marrows and potatoes and leeks and roses, by the WI serving cream teas in a warm tent that smelt of grass, by the vicar – a big man with the rosy skin of a drinker – who opened the fair and told funny jokes (nothing like his successor, John Burton). There was an ice-cream van and a children’s gymkhana and a small, perfect, antique merry-go-round. It was unreal. It was ridiculous. At any moment Caroline expected a steam train to pull up and the cast of bloody Heartbeat to alight on the platform. But instead it was Jonathan Weaver, who didn’t alight, but strode. ‘He got those thighs from show jumping,’ Gillian whispered. ‘Amateur, but he could have gone far, as they say.’ Oh no, now it was like a Jilly Cooper novel.
‘Untitled aristocracy,’ Gillian said. ‘You know, ancient family, farmed the land since Domesday kind of thing – only they’re dilettantes, not real farmers,’ she added bitterly.
‘Why not?’
‘They’ve always had other income, lots of it – London leases, land, the slave trade, wherever people get their money from, so they play at farming – a show herd of Red Devons, and their sheep are like something Marie Antoinette would have shepherded – and this is sheep country, let’s not forget, where a sheep’s a sheep, and all the farm cottages are modernized and central-heated and they’re rebuilding the original kitchen garden with National Trust money, no less.’
Caroline didn’t really understand this farmer’s daughter’s diatribe so she just said, ‘Right,’ and then Gillian laughed and said, ‘But, by Christ, I’d shag the daylights out of him any day.’
She remembered standing in front of a display for ‘best strawberry jam’. The jars – topped with gingham mob caps and labelled in a way that was reminiscent of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady – had garnered rosettes and little ‘commended’ cards and she was thinking that you should be able to taste the prize-winning jam, not just look at it, when suddenly he was standing beside her and introducing himself and then there was a kind of blackout here because the next thing she remembered was sitting up high in the passenger seat of his Range Rover being driven to his house. He’d said something polite about ‘coming up to the house for some tea’ but it must have been lust, pure and raw, and damned up for too long, that had impelled her – so that she abandoned Gillian, who was furious with her (quite rightly) for going off in such a public manner with someone she’d only just met.
They drove on a long straight road that ran through parkland and it was only after five minutes or so that she realized he owned this road, and the parkland, and everything – he owned landscape, for God’s sake. And although it was lust that had got her this far she had genuinel
y thought that his invitation to tea would involve an elegant, light drawing room on the walls of which would hang paintings of horses and dogs. There would be large sofas upholstered in a pale-lemon damask silk and there would be a grand piano on which were displayed family photographs in heavy silver frames (this image was largely based on a childhood school visit to a stately home). She could see herself perched nervously on the edge of one of the lemon damask sofas while Jonathan’s mother presided over the tea tray – pretty, antique china – as she interrogated her politely about her ‘fascinating’ urban life.
In reality, Jonathan’s mother was still at the fair, graciously presenting rosettes to the pony club, and neither Jonathan nor Caroline got anywhere near the drawing room (which would turn out to be nothing like she’d imagined it) because they went round the back of the house, where he took her into some kind of scullery, and they were hardly in the door before he pulled her pants down around her ankles and made her bend over the old wooden draining board while he shoved himself roughly inside her and as she hung on to the (handy) taps of the Belfast sink she thought, sweet Jesus Christ, now this is what you call fucking, and now look at her – driving a Land Rover Discovery and buying clothes from Country Casuals in Harrogate and sitting opposite him at the breakfast table (mahogany, Chippendale) with his two brattish children. Could someone please tell her how the hell that had happened?
‘Well,’ John Burton said, ‘I suppose I should be going.’ They had been sitting in a pew, side by side, quite companionably, but not speaking to each other. That was the thing about a church, you could be quiet and no one questioned why. The rain had almost stopped, although you could still smell it – green and summery – through the open door. ‘The rain’s easing off,’ he said, and Caroline said, ‘Yes, I think it is.’ He stood up and escorted her outside. The dogs had been asleep and now made a great performance of welcoming Caroline’s reappearance although she knew they couldn’t care less really.
‘Goodbye, then,’ John Burton said and shook her hand again. She felt a little flutter, something long dormant coming back to life. He climbed on his bike and cycled off, turning once to wave, an action that made him wobble ridiculously. She stood and watched him moving away from her, ignoring the overexcited dogs. She was in love. Just like that. How totally, utterly insane.
8
Jackson
VICTOR’S LAST RITES TOOK MINIMALISM TO A NEW LEVEL of austerity. Jackson, Julia and Amelia were the only people present, unless you counted victor himself, quietly decomposing in a cheap veneered-oak coffin that remained starkly unadorned by any farewell flowers. Jackson had expected, if nothing else, a sense of occasion. He had imagined that victor’s funeral would take place in the chapel of St John’s, his old college, where he would be lauded by his ex-colleagues in a tedious High Anglican service punctuated by hymns sung badly to the accompaniment of a pained-sounding organ.
Amelia and Julia were sitting in the front pew of the crematorium chapel. Jackson had managed to resist their invitation to sit between them, in the place of victor’s non-existent son. Jackson leaned forward and whispered to Julia, ‘Why is there no one else here?’ Nominally, he was there in a professional role: he wanted to know who would turn up at Victor’s funeral and he supposed in the event nobody was as interesting as somebody.
‘No one is here because we didn’t tell anyone,’ Amelia said as if it was the most reasonable thing in the world.
Amelia was not dressed in black for her father’s funeral, not a hint of it, quite the opposite in fact as she was sporting ribbed woollen tights in a bright scarlet that was quite alarming. Jackson wondered if there was a symbolic significance to this – probably some ancient Cambridge custom that dictated a bluestocking replaced her legwear with red on the death of her father. There seemed to be ancient Cambridge customs for most things (sorry, Oxford). Why would anyone wear woollen tights in the middle of summer? The crematorium chapel was chilled by the air conditioning but outside it was hot. Julia was as bad, rejecting the black of bereavement and muffling herself from head to toe in a vintage coat in grass-green velvet (were they cold-blooded, like reptiles?). Her mad hair looked as if it had been groomed by a troupe of circus dogs. Jackson in his black funeral suit and severe black tie was the only one who appeared to be mourning Victor.
Amelia’s brazen legs reminded him of the legs of a bird he’d seen recently in a National Geographic in his dentist’s waiting room.
Julia twisted round to face Jackson. ‘I always think on these occasions,’ she said, ‘well, not so much these occasions –’ she indicated the coffin in an offhand way – ‘as, you know, family stuff, birthdays, Christmas, that Olivia might turn up.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Amelia said.
‘I know.’ They both lapsed into sadness but then Julia rallied herself and said, ‘You look very handsome in a suit, Mr Brodie.’ Amelia gave Julia a disparaging look. Julia’s eyes were watering and she sounded choked up but she declared it was hay fever rather than grief ‘in case you get the wrong idea’. Julia offered her Beconase spray to Jackson, which he politely declined. Jackson had never had an allergy in his life (except to people, perhaps), and considered his constitution to be robustly northern. He’d watched a documentary recently on the Discovery channel that showed how northerners still had hardy Viking DNA and southerners had something else, something softer, Saxon or French.
‘The décor in here is so dreary,’ Julia whispered loudly and Amelia tutted as if she was at the theatre and Julia was an annoying stranger. ‘What?’ Julia said to her crossly. ‘He’s not going to leap out of his coffin and object, is he?’ A brief spasm of horror gripped Amelia’s features at this idea but at least the notion of a resurrected Victor shut them both up, even if only momentarily. Even a tedious Anglican service would have been preferable to the squabbling Land sisters.
On his way to Victor’s funeral, Jackson had paid a visit to the old offices of Holroyd, Wyre and Stanton, now a beauty parlour called Bliss. ‘Beauty Therapists’, that’s how they styled themselves, which made Jackson think of psychiatry rather than facials and manicures. Healing people with beauty. How would you do that? Music? Poetry? Landscape? Sex? What did he turn to when he needed healing? From Boulder to Birmingham, Emmylou Harris. His daughter’s face. That was corny, but it was true.
There was a room in Theo’s house. Theo had invited him to his house to show him the room. Jackson could not have lived with a room like that in his house. An upstairs bedroom that looked like a police incident room – photographs and maps pinned to the wall, flowcharts and whiteboards, timetables of events. Two metal filing cabinets bursting with files, boxes on the floor containing yet more files. Anything that could possibly have been relevant to his daughter’s death was in that room. And a good number of those things Theo shouldn’t have been in possession of – the scene-of-crime photographs, for example, not tacked up on the wall (for which small mercy Jackson gave thanks) but which Theo produced from the filing cabinet. Ghastly pictures of his daughter’s body which Theo handled with a kind of professional detachment as if they were holiday snaps that might interest Jackson. Jackson knew it wasn’t like that, that time had somehow inured Theo to every horror, but he was shocked nonetheless. ‘I’ve got a few contacts,’ Theo said, without expounding. He’d been a lawyer and lawyers, in Jackson’s experience, always had contacts.
Theo had spent the last ten years of his life doing nothing but investigate his daughter’s death. Was that the right thing to do or was it the crazy thing to do? The room was like something a psychopath might have kept, not any psychopath Jackson had ever come across, of course, but the psychopaths who inhabited crime novels and television programmes. Jackson thought they should make more television drama about car crime committed by fourteen-year-old boys high on glue and cider and boredom. It would be a lot more realistic, just not very interesting.
Looking at Victor’s coffin made Jackson wonder about Laura Wyre’s funeral. Hundreds of people
had attended, according to the press reports. Theo had hardly any memory of it, even though he had all the press clippings. When Jackson asked Theo about his daughter’s funeral his eyes had flickered from side to side as if his brain was disassociating from the memory. Weren’t there stages of bereavement you were supposed to go through – shock, denial, guilt, anger, depression – and then acceptance, when you were supposed to come out the other end and be OK, move on? Jackson had received grief counselling once. His school had arranged for someone to come in, from ‘the West Yorkshire Adolescent Psychiatric Unit’, an overblown title to place on the hunched shoulders of the short, red-haired psychologist whose breath smelt of raw onions and who consulted with Jackson in the makeshift cupboard that passed for a sickroom at his school. The red-haired, bearded psychologist told Jackson that he had to move on, to get on with his own life, but Jackson was twelve years old and had nowhere left to move on from and nowhere obvious to go.
Jackson wondered how many times people had suggested to Theo that he had to get on with his life. Theo Wyre was stuck somewhere near the beginning of the bereavement process, at a place he’d made all his own, where if he fought hard enough he might be able to bring his daughter back. It wasn’t going to happen. Jackson knew that the dead never came back. Ever.
Case Histories Page 11