Case Histories (3 page)
Great mathematical discoveries were made before the age of thirty, she now knew, courtesy of one of Victor’s colleagues. Rosemary herself was only thirty-two. She couldn’t believe how young that sounded and how old it felt.
She supposed Victor had married her because he thought she was domesticated—her mother’s loaded tea tables probably misled him, but Rosemary had never made so much as a plain scone when she lived at home, and since she was a nurse he probably presumed she would be a nurturing and caring person—and she might have presumed that herself in those days, but now she didn’t feel capable of nurturing a kitten, let alone four, soon to be five, children, to say nothing of a great mathematician.
Furthermore, she suspected the great work was a fake. She had seen the papers on his desk when she dusted in that hole, and his reckonings looked not dissimilar to her father’s intense calculations of racing form and betting odds. Victor didn’t strike her as a gambler. Her father had been a gambler, to her mother’s despair. She remembered going with him to Newmarket once when she was a child. He had lifted her onto his shoulders and they had stood by the winning post. She had been terrified by the noise as the horses thundered down the homestretch and the crowd at the stand side grew frenzied, as though the world might be about to end rather than a 30/ 1 outsider winning by a short head. Rosemary couldn’t imagine Victor anywhere as spirited as a racecourse, nor could she see him in the smoky commonalty of a betting shop.
Julia emerged from beneath the hydrangeas looking querulous with heat. How was Rosemary ever going to turn them back into English schoolchildren when the new term began? Their open-air life had transformed them into gypsies, their skin brown and scratched, their sun-scorched hair thick and tangled, and they seemed to be permanently filthy, no matter how many baths they took. A drowsy Olivia stood at the opening of the tent and Rosemary’s heart gave a little twitch. Olivia’s face was grubby and her bleached plaits were askew and looked as if they had dead flowers entwined in them. She was whispering a secret into Blue Mouse’s ear. Olivia was her only beautiful child. Julia, with her dark curls and snub nose, was pretty but her character wasn’t, Sylvia—poor Sylvia, what could you say? And Amelia was somehow . . . bland, but Olivia, Olivia was spun from light. It seemed impossible that she was Victor’s child, although, unfortunately, there was no doubting the fact. Olivia was the only one she loved, although God knows she tried her best with the others. Everything was from duty, nothing from love. Duty killed you in the end.
It was very wrong, it was as if the love she should have had for the others had been siphoned off and given to Olivia instead, so that she loved her youngest child with a ferocity that didn’t always seem natural. Sometimes she wanted to eat Olivia, to bite into a tender forearm or a soft calf muscle, even to devour her whole like a snake and take her back inside her where she would be safe. She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn’t even have the strength to feel guilty. Olivia caught sight of her and waved.
T
heir appetites were listless at teatime and they picked at the unseasonable lamb hot pot that Rosemary had spent too much time making. Victor emerged, blinking in the daylight like a cave dweller, and ate everything in front of him and then asked for more, and Rosemary wondered what he would look like when he was dead. She watched him eating, the fork traveling up and down to his lips with robotic rhythm, his huge hands, like paddles, wrapped around the cutlery. He had farmer’s hands, it was one of the things she had first noticed about him. A mathematician should have slender, elegant hands. She should have known from his hands. She felt sick and crampy. Maybe she would lose the baby. What a relief that would be.
Rosemary rose from the table abruptly and announced
bedtime.
Normally there would be protests but Julia’s breathing was labored and her eyes were red from too much sun and grass—she had all kinds of summer allergies—and Sylvia seemed to be in the grip of some form of sunstroke, she was sick and weepy and said her head hurt, although that didn’t stop her from being hysterical when Rosemary told her to go to bed early.
Almost every night that summer the eldest three had asked if they could sleep outside in the tent, and every night Rosemary said no on the principle that it was bad enough they looked like gypsies without living like them, and it didn’t matter if gypsies lived in caravans—as Sylvia was at pains to point out—Rosemary was trying her best to retain good government in this family, against all the odds and without any help from a husband, for whom the quotidian demands of meals and housework and child care were meaningless and who had only married her in order to have someone who would look after him and it made her feel worse when Amelia said, “Are you alright, Mummy?” because Amelia was the most neglected of all of them. Which is why Rosemary sighed, took two paracetamol and a sleeping tablet—which was probably a lethal cocktail for the baby inside her—and said to her most forgotten child,
If you want you can sleep in the tent with Olivia tonight.
T
he dewy grass and canvas smell of the tent was a thrilling thing to wake up to—better certainly than Julia’s breath, which always seemed to grow sour in the night. Olivia’s own indefinable scent was just detectable. Amelia kept her eyes closed against the light. The sun already felt high in the sky and she waited for Olivia to wake and climb under the old eiderdown that was making do as a sleeping bag, but it was Rascal rather than Olivia who finally roused her by licking her face.
There was no sign of Olivia, only an empty shell of covers as if she’d been winkled out of them, and Amelia felt disappointed that Olivia had got up without waking her. She walked barefoot across the dew-wet grass, Rascal trotting at her heels, and tried the back door of the house, which turned out to be locked—apparently her mother hadn’t thought to give Amelia a key. What kind of a parent locks her own children out of their home?
It was quiet and felt very early but Amelia had no idea what time it was. She wondered if Olivia had got into the house somehow because there was no sign of her in the garden. She called her name and was startled by the tremor in her voice. She hadn’t realized she was worried until she heard it. She knocked on the back door for a long time but there was no answer, so she ran along the path at the side of the house—the little wicket gate was open, giving Amelia more cause for alarm—and into the street, shouting, “Olivia!” more forcefully now. Rascal, sensing entertainment, began to bark.
The street was empty apart from a man getting into his car. He gave Amelia a curious look. She was barefoot and dressed in Sylvia’s hand-me-down pajamas and supposed she did look odd but she hardly cared. She ran to the front door and rang the bell, keeping her finger on the buzzer until her father, of all people, yanked the door open. He had obviously been roused from sleep—his face looked as rumpled as his pajamas, his mad-professor hair sticking out at all angles from his head as he stared fiercely at her as if he had no idea who she was. When he recognized her as one of his own he was even more puzzled.
“Olivia,” she said, and this time her voice came out as a whisper.
I
n the afternoon, a bolt of lightning cracked the flat skies above Cambridge, signaling the end of the heat wave. By that time, the tent in the back garden had become the center of a circle that had grown wider and wider as the day progressed, pulling more and more people inside it—first the Lands themselves, roaming the streets, scrambling through undergrowth and hedges, yelling Olivia’s name until they were hoarse. By then the police had joined the search and neighbors were checking gardens and sheds and cellars. The circle rippled outward to include the police divers fishing the river and the complete strangers who volunteered to comb meadow and fen. Police helicopters flew low over outlying villages and countryside as far as the county borders, truck drivers were alerted to keep an eye out on the motorway, and the army was brought in to search the fens, but none of them—from Amelia screaming herself sick in the back garden to the Territorial Army recruits on their hands and knees in the rain on Midsummer Common—could find a single trace of Olivia, not a hair or a flake of skin, not a pink rabbit slipper nor a blue mouse.
CASE HISTORY NO. 2 1994
Just a Normal Day
T
heo had begun to try and walk more. He was now officially “morbidly obese,” according to his new, unsympathetic GP. Theo knew that the new, unsympathetic GP—a young woman with a very short haircut and a gym bag thrown carelessly in the corner of the doctor’s office—was using the term to try and frighten him. Theo hadn’t considered himself “morbidly obese” until now. He had thought of himself as cheerfully overweight, a rotund Santa Claus kind of figure, and he would have ignored the GP’s advice, but when he got home and told his daughter, Laura, about the conversation in the doctor’s office she had been horrified and had immediately drawn up a plan of exercise and diet for him, which was why he was now eating chaff with skim milk for breakfast and walking the two miles to his Parkside office every morning.
Theo’s wife, Valerie, had died from a postoperative blood clot in the brain at the absurd age of thirty-four, so long ago now it was sometimes hard to believe he had ever had a wife or a marriage. She had only gone into the hospital to have her appendix removed, and, when he looked back on it now, he realized that he should probably have sued the hospital or the health authority for negligence, but he had been so caught up in the day-to-day care of their two daughters—Jennifer was seven and Laura was only two when Valerie died—that he had hardly had time even to mourn his poor wife, let alone seek retribution. If it hadn’t been for the fact that both girls looked like her—more and more now that they were older—he would have found it hard to conjure up anything but a vague memory of his wife.
Marriage and motherhood had made Valerie more solemn than the student whom Theo had carefully courted. Theo wondered if those people who were destined to die young had some kind of premonition of the shortness of the hours and that gave their life an intensity, a seriousness like a shadow. Valerie and Theo had been fond of each other, rather than passionate, and Theo didn’t know if the marriage would have lasted if she’d lived.
Jennifer and Laura had never been troublesome girls, and they’d made it easy for Theo to be a good parent. Jennifer was a medical student in London now. She was a sober, driven girl with not much time for frivolity and jokes, but that didn’t mean she didn’t feel compassion, and Theo couldn’t imagine her sitting in a GP’s office one day telling some fat bloke she’d never met before that he was morbidly obese and he should get off his arse a bit more. That wasn’t really what the new GP had said to Theo, but she might as well have.
Like her sister, Laura was one of those organized, capable girls who achieved what she set out to do with the minimum of fuss, but, unlike Jennifer, Laura had a carefree character. That didn’t mean she wasn’t an achiever—she had all her scuba-diving certificates and planned to be a master diver by the time she was twenty. She was taking her driving test next month and she was expected to get As in all her exams. She had a place waiting for her at Aberdeen to study marine biology.
She had got a job for the summer working in a pub on King Street and Theo worried about her coming home at night, imagined some maniac knocking her off her bike on Christ’s Pieces and doing unthinkable things to her. He was hugely relieved that she had decided to go straight to university in October and not go backpacking across Thailand or South America or wherever, the way all her friends seemed to be doing. The world was a place freighted with danger. “You don’t worry about Jenny,” Laura said, and it was a fact. He didn’t worry about Jennifer, and he pretended (to himself, to Laura) it was because Jennifer’s life was invisible to him in London, but the truth was that he simply didn’t love her as much as he loved Laura.
Every time Laura left the house he worried about her, every time she leaped on her bike, put on her wet suit, stepped on a train. He worried when she went out in a high wind that a piece of falling masonry might drop on her head, he worried that she would take a student flat with an unserviced water heater and die of carbon-monoxide poisoning. He worried that her tetanus shots weren’t up to date, that she would walk through a public building that was pumping Legionnaires’ disease through the air-conditioning, that she would go to the hospital for a routine operation and never come out again, that she would be stung by a bee and die from anaphylactic shock (because she’d never been stung by a bee, so how did he know she wasn’t allergic). Of course he never said any of these things to Laura—they would have seemed ridiculous to her. Even if he expressed the mildest trepidation about something (“Careful making that left turn, you’ve got a blind spot” or “Turn the light off at the switch before you change the bulb”), Laura would laugh at him, would have said he was an old woman and couldn’t even change a lightbulb without foreseeing a disastrous chain of events unfolding. But Theo knew that the journey that began with a tiny screw not being threaded properly ended with the cargo door blowing off in midair.
“Why worry, Dad?” was Laura’s constant amused reaction to his qualms. “Why not?” was Theo’s unvoiced response. And after one too many early morning vigils waiting for her to come home from work in the pub (although he always pretended to be asleep), Theo had suggested casually that they needed a temp in his office and why didn’t she come and help them out and to his astonishment she’d thought about it for a minute and then said, “Okay,” and smiled her lovely smile (hours of patient, expensive orthodontic work when she was younger), and Theo thought, “Thank you, God,” because although Theo didn’t believe in God he often talked to him.
And for her very first day at work at Holroyd, Wyre, and Stanton (Theo was the “Wyre”), Theo wasn’t going to be there, which upset him a lot more than it did Laura, of course. He was in court in Peterborough, a tedious dispute over a land boundary that should have gone to a local solicitor but the client was an old one of Theo’s who had moved recently. Laura was dressed in a black skirt and a white blouse and had tied her brown hair back and he thought how neat she looked, how pretty.
“Walk to the station, promise, Dad?” Laura said sternly as Theo got up from the table, and Theo said, “If I must,” but knew he wouldn’t make the train if he did and thought he could pretend to walk and then take a taxi. He finished his low-calorie, high-fiber cattle-feed cereal and drained his cup of black coffee, thinking about cream and sugar and a Danish pastry, one of the ones with apricot and custard that looked like a poached egg, and thought perhaps they might sell them at the station buffet. “Don’t forget your inhaler, Dad,” Laura said to him, and Theo patted his jacket pocket to prove he had it. The very thought of not having his Ventolin inhaler made Theo feel panic, although he didn’t know why. If he had an asthma attack on any English street probably half the people on it would be able to whip out an inhaler and offer it to him.
He said to Laura, “Cheryl will show you the ropes”—Cheryl was his secretary—“I’ll be back in the office before lunch, maybe we can go out?” and she said, “That would be nice, Dad.” And then she saw him off at the front door, kissing him on the cheek, saying, “I love you, Dad,” and he said, “Love you too, sweetheart,” and at the street corner he’d looked back and she was still waving.
Laura, who had brown eyes and pale skin and who liked Diet Pepsi and salt and vinegar crisps, who was as smart as a whip, who made scrambled eggs for him on Sunday mornings, Laura, who was still a virgin (he knew because she told him, to his embarrassment), which made him feel immensely relieved even though he knew she couldn’t stay one forever, Laura, who kept a tank of saltwater tropical fish in her bedroom, whose favorite color was blue, whose favorite flower was the snowdrop, and who liked Radiohead and Nirvana and hated Mr. Blobby and had seen
Dirty Dancing
ten times. Laura, whom Theo loved with a strength that was like a cataclysm, a disaster.
T
heo and David Holroyd had set up in partnership not long after Theo’s marriage to Valerie. Jean Stanton joined them a couple years later. All three of them had been at university together and they wanted a “go-ahead, socially responsible” law practice, the kind that did more than its fair share of domestic and matrimonial and legal-aid work. Their good intentions had weakened over the years. Jean Stanton had discovered she liked litigation more than domestic violence and that her politics had changed from center left to Conservative with a large “C,” and David Holroyd found that, as a fifth-generation East Anglian lawyer, conveyancing was his lifeblood, and so it usually fell to Theo to “keep up the ethical end of it,” as David Holroyd put it. The practice had grown substantially, there were three junior partners now and two associates and they were bursting at the seams in the Parkside office, but none of them could bear the idea of moving.
The building had been a dwelling-house originally, five floors in all, from damp kitchen cellar to servants’ cold attics, the rooms piled together rather haphazardly but nonetheless a decent residence for a well-to-do family. After the war it had been broken up into businesses and flats and now only fragmented and ghostly traces of the interior remained—a decorative plasterwork border of swags and urns above the desk where Cheryl worked and the egg-and-dart frieze beneath the cornice in the hall.
The drawing room, oval ended and neoclassic in its restraint, with a view of Parker’s Piece from the windows, was now the boardroom for Holroyd, Wyre, and Stanton, and in winter there was always a real coal fire burning in the grate of the marble fireplace because David Holroyd was an old-fashioned sort. Theo had stood in the boardroom many times, sharing a glass of wine with his partners and associates, all of them full of the provincial bonhomie of successful professionals. And, of course, Jennifer and Laura had been in and out of that place all the time, ever since they were little, but it was still odd to think of her in there today, filing and fetching and carrying, and he knew how polite and willing she would be and felt proud because everyone in the office would be saying to one another, “Laura’s a lovely girl, isn’t she?” the way that people always did.
S
heep on the line. The ticket inspector did not elucidate whether it was a flock or a few stragglers. Enough of them anyway for everyone on the train to Cambridge to feel the bump and judder. The train had been stopped for ten minutes before the conductor made his way through the four carriages and informed them about the sheep, quashing speculation about cows, horses, and suicidal humans. After half an hour the train was still stationary, so Theo supposed it must be a flock rather than some solitary stray. He wanted to get back to Cambridge and take Laura out for lunch but it was “in the lap of the gods,” as the conductor put it. Theo wondered why it was the lap of the gods and not the hands of the gods.
It was stifling in the train, and someone, the guard presumably, opened the doors and people began to clamber out. Theo was sure it was against railway bylaws, but there was a narrow verge and an embankment at the side of the train so it seemed quite safe, there was no way another train could plow into them in the way that theirs had into the sheep. Theo alighted cautiously, and with difficulty, pleased with himself for being so adventurous. He was curious to see what sheep looked like after a close encounter with a train. Walking along the track, he soon discovered the answer to his question—bits of sheep, like joints of meat with wool attached, had been flung about everywhere, as if they’d been torn apart in a bloody massacre by a pack of wolves. Theo was surprised how strong his stomach was for this carnage, but then he had always regarded lawyers as being rather like policemen and nurses in their ability to rise above the mess and tragedy of everyday life and deal with it in a disinterested way. Theo had a strange sense of triumph. He had traveled on a train that had almost been derailed but no harm had come. The odds surely dictated that his chances (and therefore the chances of those close to him) of being in another train accident had lessened.
The driver was standing next to his engine, looking baffled, and Theo asked him if he was “okay,” and he said, by way of answer, “I saw just the one and I thought, Well, I probably don’t need to brake for that, and then”—he made a dramatic gesture with his arms as if trying to reenact a flock of disintegrating sheep—“and then the world went white.”
Theo was so taken by this image that it occupied his mind for the rest of the journey, which recommenced once they had transferred to another train. He imagined describing the scene to Laura, imagined her reaction—horrified and yet darkly amused. When he finally got off the train he took a cab halfway but then got out and walked. It would make him even later but Laura would be pleased.
T
heo rested for a minute on the pavement before tackling the steep stairs up to the first-floor office of Holroyd, Wyre, and Stanton. The GP was right, Laura was right, he had to lose some weight. The front door was propped open with a cast-iron doorstop. Every time Theo entered the building he admired this door to the office, it was painted a glossy dark green, and the handsome brass furniture—letter box, keyhole, lion-headed door knocker—were the original fittings. The brass plaque on the door, polished every morning by the office cleaner, announced,
HOLROYD
,
WYRE
,
AND STANTON—SOLICITORS AND ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW.
Theo took a deep breath and set off up the stairs.
The inner door that led into the reception area was also—unusually—open, and as soon as Theo walked in it was obvious that something was terribly wrong. Jean Stanton’s secretary was cowering on the floor, a trail of vomit on her clothes. The receptionist, Moira, was on the phone, dictating the address of the firm with a kind of hysterical patience. She had blood in her hair and on her face and Theo thought she was injured but when he went toward her to help her she waved him away with her hand and he thought she was dismissing him until he realized she was trying to send him in the direction of the boardroom.
Afterward, again and again, Theo pieced together the events that preceded this moment.
