Case Histories - Страница 33

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 were 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 to be 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 practicing a trade as serial killers. Psychopathic tendencies, that's what they said Caroline had. Well not Caroline, of course, the person that she used to be. Caroline considered it a serious misdiagnosis. Now, James, he was definitely a sociopath, that's 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 postcoital embrace while half a mile down the road Jemima was laying her delicate blond head onto the one-hundred-and-twenty-pounds-a-pop Hungarian goose-down pillows in one of the three spare bedrooms of the dowager 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. She was dead by the time she was five years old, "taken by an angel," according to her gravestone, although her death certificate claimed it was a more prosaic leukemia 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 minipizzas and Caroline had to tell her to sit down and do nothing because it was her day off. It wasn't as it 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 forever. 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 ton-sure 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 dust-pan and brush. He gave an embarrassed laugh when he caught sight ofher 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 program."

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 gray cardigan that she wanted to stroke as if it were 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 about 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 your ever bumping up against him would be overwhelming, and knowing Caroline's luck even if she did bump up against him she probably wouldn't realize who he was. 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 million people she was unlikely ever to have a relationship with? Like a prematurely balding Anglican vicar in a rural parish in North Yorkshire.

She felt suddenly tearful. "My au pair's going to leave me," she said. Oh, how pathetic must that sound to him. On a scale of world peace and third-world poverty, how did an unhappy Spanish au pair rate? But he was kind, as she knew he would be, and he said, "I'm sorry," as if he really were, and then they sat in silence and stared at the altar and listened to the summer rain drumming on the ancient stone slates.

Chapter 13. Amelia

Julia hauled a scuttle full of coal into the sitting room, escorted by a limping Sammy. "I can't believe Victor never put in central heating," she gasped, dropping the scuttle to the floor so that coal dust and tiny pieces of coal, like polished, unworked jet, spilled on the carpet. Amelia frowned at her and said, "I've just cleaned in here," and Julia said, "That's what will be written on your gravestone," and Amelia said, "Oh, really, by you?" and Julia said, "God, I'm gagging for it, aren't you?" and Amelia said, "Apropos of what exactly?"