Case Histories

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘Sorry,’ Jackson said, ‘they found my donor card, it had you down as my next of kin. It was only a mild concussion, they shouldn’t have bothered.’

  ‘You were lying there most of the night, Jackson. You were lucky it was so warm, imagine if it had been winter.’ She said this accusingly rather than compassionately, as if it was his own fault that he’d been mugged. Actually, he really would like to see the other guy because he was pretty sure he’d done some damage back. Jackson had been lucky, his reactions had been fast and he had moved intuitively when he saw the figure coming at him, enough to deflect the blow so that it only gave him concussion rather than smashing his skull like an egg. And he’d got one back in, nothing as considered as a good right hook or a roundhouse kick, or any of the more refined moves he’d been taught at one time or another – instead it had been the automatic brute response of the hard man out on a drunken Saturday night and he had nutted the guy full in the face. He could still hear the nose squelching as his forehead connected with the soft tissue. It hadn’t done his concussion much good, of course, and he must have passed out at that point because the next thing he remembered was the milkman trying to rouse him some time before dawn.

  Josie drove him home. ‘They want someone to stay with me for twenty-four hours,’ he said apologetically to Josie, ‘in case I lapse back into unconsciousness.’

  ‘Well, you’ll just have to find someone else,’ she said as she pulled up at the top of the lane, not even driving down it. He realized he was still waiting for sympathy that wasn’t going to come. He climbed awkwardly out of the Volvo’s passenger seat. All the bones in his skull seemed to have been rearranged, like tectonic plates slipping and sliding against each other. Every movement reverberated around his skull. He felt seriously damaged.

  Josie rolled down the window so she could speak to him. For a second he thought she was going to lean out and give him a wifely kiss farewell or offer to stay and look after him but instead she said, ‘Perhaps it’s time you got another next of kin, Jackson.’

  When he got home Jackson propped Blue Mouse on the mantelpiece. He’d known that sooner or later he would start to capitalize the damn thing. He put Victor’s urn (he’d forgotten to return it to Amelia and Julia amidst all the hysteria) between Blue Mouse and the only ornament that adorned the mantelpiece – a cheap pottery wishing well that had ‘Wishing You Well from Scarborough’ written on the side. After the split the marital property had been divided up in a way that Josie considered fair – Jackson took his ‘crap’ (Josie’s term for his country CDs and the little souvenir wishing well) and Josie took everything else. Perhaps Blue Mouse would watch over him, seeing as there was no one else who would. Jackson swallowed two of the Co-codamol that the hospital had given him (although what he wanted was morphine) and lay down on the sofa and listened to Emmylou singing From Boulder to Birmingham, but there was too much pain going on for even Emmylou to heal.

  12

  Caroline

  CAROLINE GLANCED AT HER STEPCHILDREN IN THE BACK seat of the Discovery and thanked God they didn’t go to her school. They attended some small private place in the middle of nowhere where they did a lot of outdoor games and spoke French all day Wednesday. In principle, of course, there was nothing wrong with that and it would have been interesting to apply this regime to the curriculum of some of the inner-city schools she used to teach in. Only two years but it seemed like a lifetime ago. Yet another lifetime. How many times could you shed your skin? Hannah and James were making faces at her in the rear-view mirror so they were either unbelievably stupid and didn’t think she could see or they just didn’t care. Either way they were inbred. Rowena, Jonathan’s mother, talked all the time about ‘breeding’ because she had a stable of hunters (big, frightening brutes), but sometimes she seemed to be applying the concept to her own family, and Caroline wanted to point out to her that natural selection led to a vigorous species whereas ‘breeding’ resulted in congenital defects, in pale, blond children who spoke French on Wednesdays and whose blank Midwich cuckoo faces suggested latent idiocy. In Caroline’s professional opinion.

  After the wedding, Rowena moved into the dower house, a small house on the estate, which she always referred to as ‘my little cottage’ even though it had four bedrooms and two sitting rooms. She made a point of ‘not interfering’, which meant that she interfered all the time but behind Caroline’s back. She put on a good front though: at the wedding she had smiled benignly throughout like someone mainlining Valium and she had paid for the whole thing, the marquee, the string quartet, the silver-service lackeys, the cold salmon and roast venison, the vast vases of white lilies from which someone had unfortunately forgotten to remove the stamens so that the guests were continually showered with pollen. And no one mentioned that it was a register office wedding, or that it was a second marriage, even though the offspring of the first marriage were notable by their presence, running around like rats that had been transformed into children – dressed in white satin outfits that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the doomed court of Louis XVI.

  They had arrived on a plane from Buenos Aires a few days before the wedding and then never went back because Jemima – the first wife – had decided that they should have an English education and Jonathan concurred. And it really hadn’t bothered Caroline because (and, yes, she understood the irony) she was great with children, which was why she was so good at her job – and the two didn’t necessarily go hand in hand, she knew plenty of teachers who saw children as an annoying by-product of the profession rather than its raison d’être. She just hadn’t expected Hannah and James to be such little bastards.

  It was the au pair’s day off so Caroline had volunteered to pick them up from school. The au pair was a Spanish girl called Paola and Caroline tried to keep her spirits up with Rioja and sympathy because she seemed to be on the point of leaving all the time. And who could blame her, stuck in the middle of nowhere with a crap climate and two evil brats turning the screw on her all the time? They couldn’t even be bothered to pronounce her name properly – ‘Powla,’ she continually corrected them, making the vowels stretch exotically like a cat yawning, and yet they still insisted on ‘Porla’ in their posh, tight little voices. They had lived in a Spanish-speaking country for the last two years, for heaven’s sake, and yet they couldn’t even say ‘Buenos días’, or if they could they wouldn’t.

  Their small, insular school kept its children busy for longer hours than the village school. Caroline had finished work over an hour ago but Hannah and James had all sorts of extra-curricular activities tagged on to the end of their day: clarinet and cricket, piano, ‘voice’ (as if they didn’t have one), folk dancing (Jesus) and fencing – when they first mentioned the fencing she thought they meant building actual fences. She would have liked to drop them – preferably from a great height – into a class in Toxteth or Chapeltown and see what good their fencing did them then.

  They drove past the village school and she could hear James making snorting noises. She’d heard him refer to the village kids as ‘oiks’ and she’d almost slapped him. She suspected his slow male brain had confused ‘oik’ with ‘oink’, which was why he always snorted when he came within breathing distance of the lower orders. She wasn’t sure that she could refrain from violence towards him for much longer.

  It had been a coincidence that the headmistress of the school was due for retirement just after they returned from their honeymoon. It had been easy to get the post. Caroline’s credentials far outstripped anything that could be asked of her in a three-classroom village school and she felt completely at home there within days of returning from Jersey – which was where they had spent their one-week honeymoon, in the Atlantic, in a sea-view room overlooking St Ouen’s Bay, although they had viewed the sea very little as they spent most of their time in bed. ‘Oh, the Atlantic,’ Rowena said, on their return, ‘such a lovely hotel. What did you do all week?’ and Jonathan said, ‘Oh, you know, the zoo, the orchid place,
walked out to La Corbière, had afternoon tea in the Secret Garden,’ and Rowena had such a satisfied smile on her face at this mind-numbingly bourgeois itinerary that Caroline only just stopped herself from saying, ‘Actually, Rowena, all we did was fuck the living daylights out of each other.’

  ‘You’re going to work after your wedding then?’ Rowena had said to her in the airless atmosphere of their wedding marquee, and Caroline replied, ‘Yes,’ and didn’t feel a need to elaborate. The collar of Rowena’s cream raw-silk suit had been defiled by a smear of burnt-orange lily pollen which Caroline hoped Rowena’s dry cleaners would have great difficulty in removing.

  Everyone in the village talked about what a hard job it was being headmistress of the school but it couldn’t have been easier. The kids were sweet, nice country children – just one mild case of attention deficit, a couple of scabby kids, one wee shit and statistically there should be at least one abused kid in there but so far Caroline hadn’t identified him or her. They were nearly all up to speed on reading (a miracle), they knew old-fashioned playground games and their lives ran on an agricultural calendar so that harvest festival was a proper harvest festival and someone brought an honest-to-goodness, real-life lamb into show-and-tell in spring. There was even a maypole on the village green that the kids danced around, innocent of all phallic connotations. She loved the job and hoped that if she got divorced she’d be able to keep it because everything was so damned feudal around here that it was probably in the gift of the lord of the manor, who for all intents and purposes appeared to be Jonathan. Not that she was intending to get divorced but it was hard to believe that this would go on for ever, nothing else did so why should this? And you couldn’t stay one step ahead all the time. It didn’t matter how long you were lost, sooner or later you would be found.

  And it would be impossible to live here and not work. What would she do all day long? Jonathan made up things to do. He was always in and out of the farm office or striding around the hills, looking at fields and fences – although not doing fencing (of any kind) – but he had a manager to run the farm and everything would go on just as well if he never went into the office or looked at a fence. He went out a lot with his shotgun and killed things as if that was somehow an important part of running a farm, but in fact it was just because he loved shooting (or killing). He was a good shot and a good teacher, and Caroline discovered she had quite a talent as a markswoman. Not that she shot anything living, not like Jonathan – just targets and clay pigeons and tin cans off walls. She liked the guns, she liked the heft of them in her arms, she liked that moment of fine poise just before squeezing the trigger when you knew your aim would prove true. It was astonishing that you could wander around the countryside (even though it was countryside you owned) brandishing lethal weapons and no one stopped you.

  When he wasn’t pretending to run the estate or shooting something smaller and more helpless than himself, Jonathan went out on one or other of his mother’s hunters. Everyone was always saying to Caroline, ‘Do you ride?’ and couldn’t believe it when she said no. Rowena was a ‘wonderful horsewoman’ of course (as if she were a centaur) and Jemima had spent most of her marriage on horseback from the sound of it. People seemed to find it hard to believe that Jonathan would marry someone who didn’t know a forelock from a fetlock but actually he didn’t give two hoots whether or not she liked horses. That was one of the really good things about him – he was totally indifferent to anything she did, in fact he was pretty much indifferent to anything anyone did. There was a connection loose there, she was sure, an absence of social bonding; in another life he might have found himself branded a psychopath. Psychopaths were everywhere, they weren’t necessarily killing and raping and practising a trade as serial killers. Psychopathic tendencies, that’s what they’d said Caroline had, well, not Caroline, of course, the person that she used to be. Caroline considered it was a serious misdiagnosis. Now James, he was definitely a sociopath; that was what breeding did for you.

  Jemima, their mother, had visited last summer. She was a perfect little piece of English porcelain who clearly got on famously with Rowena, bonded over girths and martingales, and the Red Devons and the problem with the ‘upper meadow’ – Caroline didn’t even know they had an upper meadow, let alone a problem with it.

  ‘So you got divorced … why exactly?’ she asked Jonathan, holding him in a slippery, sweaty post-coital embrace while half a mile down the road Jemima was laying her delicate blond head on to the one-hundred-and-twenty pounds a pop Hungarian goose-down pillows in one of the three spare bedrooms of the dower house. ‘Oh God,’ Jonathan groaned, ‘Jem was so boring. You have no idea, Caro,’ and he laughed a dirty kind of laugh and rolled her over and took her from behind – say what you like, the man had stamina – and as she half suffocated in their own pillows (slightly less expensive, but only just) she wondered if Jemima ever took it up the arse and thought probably not, but you never knew with posh girls, they were capable of all kinds of depravity that was unsuspected by oiks.

  They had honeymooned in Jersey because, rather late in the day, Caroline realized that she didn’t have a passport. Jonathan didn’t care, he wasn’t terribly interested in anywhere that wasn’t North Yorkshire. She could have got a passport, she had a birth certificate – in the name of Caroline Edith Edwards. Caroline thought ‘Edith’ was probably the name of a grandmother, because it was an old-fashioned name for someone born in 1967. ‘Caroline Edwards’ was six years younger than Caroline, although, of course, she had never reached Caroline’s age. That Caroline was dead before she was five years old, ‘taken by an angel’ according to her gravestone although her death certificate claimed it was a more prosaic leukaemia that had carried her off. Caroline had visited the grave, in Swindon, and laid a little posy of flowers on it, just to say thank you to Caroline Edith Edwards for the gift of her identity, even though it was taken rather than given.

  When they finally arrived back at the house it was almost half-past five and Hannah and James immediately started demanding something to eat. Paola was sitting at the kitchen table, looking morose, but when she saw them she got up and started rooting through the freezer for mini-pizzas and Caroline had to tell her to sit down and do nothing because it was her day off. It wasn’t as if there was anywhere for her to go. Sometimes she went out for a walk but she was from Barcelona and had no affinity with damp, green countryside. Sometimes Caroline gave her a lift to the bus stop on her way into school, and she spent the day moping around Richmond or Harrogate, but getting back again was a problem. More often than not she just stayed in her room. A couple of times Caroline had given her money to go down to London for the weekend because she seemed to know hundreds of Spanish people down there. Caroline was terrified that she wouldn’t come back; Paola was the closest thing she had to a friend, someone who was more of an outsider than she was. Gillian was long gone, doing VSO in Sri Lanka, and Caroline wished now that she had done that.

  Rowena didn’t see the point of having an au pair and constantly found ways of antagonizing Paola. ‘The children are out of the house all day,’ she argued with Caroline. ‘It’s not as if you have a baby.’ There was an invisible question buried in this statement. Was she planning on having a baby? Rowena didn’t want the bloodline of the Weavers diluted with Caroline’s suspect DNA. (‘What did your father do exactly, dear?’ Caroline Edith Edwards’s father was a butcher but that would have been too much for Rowena to bear so she said something vague about accountancy.) They didn’t need a baby, they had an heir and Hannah would do as the spare. They were a complete family – two adults, two children, four corners of a square, solid, like the keep of a castle. No room for any more, no room for a baby the size of a flea, currently being incubated inside Caroline’s belly. Jonathan would be cock-a-hoop probably. How many times would she make the same mistake in her life? The idea was that you were allowed to make one big mistake and then rectify it and not make it again. And, anyway, whether you rectified it or not what
did it matter because it would follow you for ever, wherever you went, whatever you did, there was always a corner somewhere that you would turn and there you would see that little bug lying on the floor, the little bug that had cried itself into the oblivion of sleep. The little bug in its new OshKosh dungarees.

  John Burton’s hair was thinning, the faint outline of a monk’s tonsure forming on top of his head. Caroline’s heart went out to him when she noticed his little bald patch. She was continually amazed at the absurdities of passion. He was kneeling in front of the altar doing something that she supposed was religious but when she drew closer she realized that he was sweeping the floor with a dustpan and brush. He gave an embarrassed laugh when he caught sight of her and said, ‘The lady who cleans the church is on holiday.’

  ‘Where?’ She loved the way he said ‘the lady’ rather than ‘the woman’.

  ‘Majorca.’

  ‘Do you pay her?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, looking shocked.

  ‘I thought churches were full of women doing things for the love of it, arranging flowers and polishing brasses and all that stuff.’

  ‘I think that’s the past you’re thinking about,’ he said. ‘Or a television programme.’

  Caroline sat in the front pew and said, ‘I could do with a cigarette.’ He sat down next to her, the brush and dustpan still in his hand, and said, ‘I didn’t know you smoked?’ and she said, ‘I don’t. Not really.’ He was wearing vicarish trousers, black and nondescript and rather cheap, a white T-shirt and an old grey cardigan that she wanted to stroke as if it was an animal. Even when he was in mufti he looked like a vicar. She couldn’t imagine him in jeans or a suit. She didn’t think he had any idea of how she felt about him. If she told him she would spoil his innocence. Of course she didn’t know him, not at all really. But what difference did it make? Maybe he wasn’t the right person for her (obviously not, in fact) and let’s not forget that she was married (but so what, really?) but surely there wasn’t just one person in the whole world who was meant for you? If there was then the odds against you ever bumping up against them would be overwhelming, and knowing Caroline’s luck even if she did bump up against them she probably wouldn’t realize who they were. And what if the person who was destined for you was a shanty-dweller in Mexico City or a political prisoner in Burma or one of the millions of people she was unlikely ever to have a relationship with? Like a prematurely balding Anglican vicar in a rural parish in North Yorkshire.