Case Histories (10 page)

A man hurried into the office and Deborah Arnold said, “There you are at last,” without looking up from the keyboard. “Sorry,” the man—Theo presumed this was Jackson Brodie—said to Theo, “I had to go to the dentist.” Deborah gave a bark of laughter as if this were a risible excuse. The man shook Theo’s hand and said, “Jackson, Jackson Brodie, please come in and have a seat,” and ushered him toward the inner office. As Jackson closed the door, Deborah’s sarcastic tones could be heard singing out, “Mr. Brodie will see you now.”

“I’m sorry,” Jackson said to Theo. “She’s delusional. She thinks she’s a woman.”

7

Caroline

T
he church was called St. Anne’s. Caroline had no idea who St. Anne was. She had been brought up without religion, had never even been to a proper church service, not one in a regular church anyway, not even for her wedding to Jonathan, which had taken place in a registry office because Jonathan’s first wife was alive and well, although, thankfully, living in Argentina with a horse breeder. The church was on a back road, small and very old with a squat Saxon tower and a graveyard that had closed its gates to business years ago and was now overgrown, in a picturesque way, with wildflowers and briar. She couldn’t identify any of the flowers and thought maybe she would get a book, order it online from Amazon, because of course they lived miles away from any bookshop.

The church was midway between their own small village and another even smaller one, so Caroline supposed that at some time in the medieval past the church had decided to economize and make the two villages share a priest. And of course in those days no one thought anything about walking long distances. Country children used to walk five miles to school in the morning and five miles home at night without complaining. Or perhaps they did complain but no one ever recorded their comments for posterity. That was how history worked, wasn’t it? If it wasn’t written down it never existed. You might leave behind jewelry and pottery, ornamental tombs, you might leave behind your own bones to be dug up at a later age, but none of those artifacts could express how you
felt.
The dead under her feet in St. Anne’s old graveyard were tongueless and dumb. She couldn’t imagine James and Hannah walking any distance to school. They seemed to have no idea what feet were for.

Caroline had driven past the church several times, but it had never struck her until now that she could actually go inside. She knew the vicar, of course, or at least, she had known him: he died last year and his replacement hadn’t arrived yet. The new incumbent wouldn’t have just the two churches to look after: there were four or five denuded parishes under his care nowadays (or perhaps it would be a woman?) because no one went to church anymore, not even Jonathan’s mother.

It had nothing to do with religion—Caroline was just sheltering from the rain. She’d taken the dogs for a walk, the church was about a mile from their own house (which was an estate, really), and the dogs had got into the graveyard and were now moving like Hoovers across the ground, their noses down, their tails up, their small dog brains consumed with the idea of uncharted territory and a thousand new scents. Caroline could only smell the one scent—the sour, melancholy smell of greenery.

The dogs had already urinated on several gravestones and Caroline hoped no one was spying on her. Watching, not spying. “God, you’re so paranoid, Caro,” Jonathan said. “That’s what comes from being a townie.” The dogs were Labradors and they belonged to Jonathan. That’s what he brought to the marriage, two dogs and two children. James and Hannah, Meg and Bruce. Meg and Bruce were the dogs. The dogs and the children behaved well for Jonathan, less well for Caroline, although the dogs were better than the children. When it had started to rain she tied the dogs up on the porch (it would be good if she could do that with the children). She hadn’t realized that “Caro” was a diminutive of Caroline until she met Jonathan. It sounded very Regency, like in all those old-fashioned historical novels she used to read when she was younger. Much younger. Of course, he came from the kind of background—county—where people were called “Caroline.” And Lucy, and Amanda and Jemima, so he should know.

She suspected there might be a special ecclesiastical word for “porch,” but if there was she didn’t know it, although she knew there were all kinds of particular terms for the bones of the church, its carcass and ribs, like medieval poetry—apse, chancel, nave, transept, clerestory, sacristy, misericord—although she wasn’t too sure what any of them meant, except for “misericord,” because it was one of those words that once you’d come across it you always remembered it.

The misericords in St. Anne’s were ancient, made of oak, not the oak of the church door, which was gray and bleached like old driftwood, as if it had been at sea for a long time, the misericords were the color of peat or wet tea leaves. If you looked at them closely you realized they were carved with weird, pagan creatures, more like hobgoblins than men, half hidden among trees and leaves—here acanthus and there what looked like a palm tree. This must be the “green man,” only there were lots of them on the ends of the pews—all different—so green
men
would have been more appropriate. She didn’t know they had green men in Yorkshire as well. As well as where she had lived before. In another life, one she could hardly remember sometimes. And at other times remember only too well.

She loved that word, “misericord,” because it sounded so wretched and yet it wasn’t. It meant tenderhearted, from the Latin for heart, “
cor,”
from which you also get “core” and “cordial” but not “cardiac,” which came via the Latin from the Greek for heart—“
kardia”
(although they must surely be related at some ancient, ur-level). They had done neither Latin nor Greek at Caroline’s school, but later, after she had left school, when she had had a lot of time on her hands, she had patiently worked her way through primers and elementary Classics textbooks so that she could at least understand the etymology of words, to follow them back down their limbs and trunks until she reached their roots. Her own name contained
“cor”
if you moved the letters around. Caro. Cora. Cor. Like the crows, like the crows that feed on the dead. If you knelt on the hard floor, which in this church meant you couldn’t avoid kneeling on the cold stone slab of someone’s tomb (but they were probably glad of the company), and looked one of the green men in the eye, you could see the primordial gleam of madness in there and the —

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” Caroline said. “I think so.” The man offered his hand because her knees were stiff from kneeling on the floor, on the dead. The man’s hand was soft and rather cold for someone who was patently alive.

“My name’s John Burton,” he said (cordially).

“You’re very young,” Caroline said. “Or is that a sign I’m getting old—when vicars and policemen begin to look young?” and the vicar (John Burton) laughed and said, “My mother always says it’s when bishops start looking young that you have to worry,” and Caroline wondered what it was like to inhabit so easily a world where your mother made jokes about bishops, where people were called Caro.

“You’ll be the new vicar then,” Caroline said. He was wearing his cassock (was that what it was called?) so it was hardly a wild guess, and he looked down at his vestments and gave a rueful grin and said, “You’ve got me bang to rights, guv,” only he sounded faintly ludicrous because he said the words in his rather effete, upper-crust voice. Jonathan had retained (or acquired) a rough limestone edge to his voice that made him seem no-nonsense and forceful. “Very Heathcliffe,” her friend Gillian had said sarcastically, because, of course, he was moneyed and (very) expensively educated and his mother spoke like the Queen.

“I know who you are too,” John Burton said, and Caroline said, “Do you?” and thought, “Are we flirting? Surely not,” and John Burton—the Reverend John Burton—said, “Yes, of course I do. You’re the head teacher at the primary school,” and Caroline thought, “Damn,” because she really preferred it when no one knew who she was. No one at all.

G
etting married again hadn’t been part of the plan. The plan had been to bury herself in a town somewhere and do good works, like an eighteenth-century Quaker or some Victorian gentlewoman driven by philanthropy. She’d even thought about going abroad—India or Africa—like a missionary, working on a literacy project with women or outcastes, because being an outcast was something she understood.

She came north, expecting it to be gritty and industrial, but she knew that it was the novels she had read that had formed this picture in her head, and, of course, instead of being like
North and South
or
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,
it was gritty and
post
industrial and so much more difficult than she’d imagined. She’d spent her probationary year in Liverpool, then she did another couple years in Oldham and finally settled in Manchester. She was a “superteacher,” although they didn’t call it that, trained to be the savior of socially excluded kids, fast-tracking through inner-city Gehennas so that one day she was destined to be head of some imploding school that she would have to try and rescue from disaster, like the captain of a sinking ship. And that was fine and good because she was atoning, but instead of joining a convent, an order of penitents (an idea she’d been tempted by), she’d become a teacher, which was probably more useful than shutting yourself away, praying every four hours, night and day, although, of course, you couldn’t be sure—it might be that cloistered women praying night and day was the only thing that was preventing some cataclysmal disaster—a meteor or global nuclear meltdown.

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 divorcées that she sometimes went to the cinema with or with whom she shared a bottle of wine, someplace 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 divorcées 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 laughed). 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.)

G
illian, 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 unchallenging, 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, really 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 smelled sweet and it made her realize what a long time it had been since she had breathed really good clean air. The vista from her bedroom window was of rolling green dales, seamed and braided with gray stone walls that ran on forever, 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 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 fete,” Gillian explained. It was being held in a field a couple 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 among the gray 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 afterward that his own mother, Rowena, told her that she’d refused that ring and insisted on new diamonds instead—from Garrards—because she didn’t want a “hand-me-down.”)