Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

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 prizewinning 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.