"Case Histories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Atkinson Kate)

Chapter 7. Caroline

The 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.

Gretting 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 cata-clysmal 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 divorcees 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 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 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.)

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 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.")

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 prizewin-ning 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 smelled 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 said 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 mobcaps and labeled in a way that was reminiscent of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady - were garnered with rosettes and little "commended" cards and she was thinking that you should be able to taste the prizewinning 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, which had impelled her – abandoning 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 that 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 genuinely 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 that would be 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 on 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.

"Good-bye, 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.