Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

Caroline glanced at her stepchildren in the backseat of the Discovery and thanked God they didn't go to her school. They attended some small private place in the middle of nowhere where they did a lot of outdoor games and spoke French all day Wednesday. In principle, of course, there was nothing wrong with that and it would have been interesting to have applied it to the curriculum of some of the inner-city schools she used to teach in. Only two years but it seemed like a lifetime ago. Yet another lifetime. How many times could you shed your skin? Hannah and James were making faces at her in the rearview mirror, so they were either unbelievably stupid and didn't think she could see or they just didn't care. Either way they were inbred. Rowena, Jonathan's mother, talked all the time about "breeding" because she had a stable of hunters (big, frightening brutes), but sometimes she seemed to be applying the concept to her own family, and Caroline wanted to point out to her that natural selection led to a vigorous species whereas "breeding" resulted in congenital defects, in pale, blond children who spoke French on Wednesdays and whose blank Midwich Cuckoo faces suggested latent idiocy. In Caroline's professional opinion.

After the wedding, Rowena moved into the "dowager house," a small house on the estate, which she always referred to as "my little cottage" even though it had four bedrooms and two sitting rooms. She made a point of "not interfering," which meant that she interfered all the time but behind Caroline's back. She put on a good front though. At the wedding she had smiled benignly throughout like someone mainlining Valium and she had paid for the whole thing, the marquee, the string quartet, the silver-service lackeys, the cold salmon and roast venison, the vast vases of white lilies from which someone had unfortunately forgotten to remove the stamens so that the guests were continually showered with pollen. And no one mentioned that it was a registry-office wedding, or that it was a second marriage, even though the offspring of the first marriage were notable by their presence, running around like rats that had been transformed into children – dressed in white satin outfits that wouldn't have looked out of place in the doomed court of Louis XVI.

They had arrived on a plane from Buenos Aires a few days before the wedding and then never went back because "Jemima" – the first wife – had decided that they should have an English education and Jonathan concurred. And it really hadn't bothered Caroline because (and, yes, she understood the irony) she was great with children, which was why she was so good at her job. And the two didn't necessarily go hand in hand – she knew plenty of teachers who saw children as an annoying by-product of the profession rather than its raison d'etre. She just hadn't expected Hannah and James to be such little bastards.

It was the au pair's day off so Caroline had volunteered to pick them up from school. The au pair was a Spanish girl called Paola, and Caroline tried to keep her spirits up with Rioja and sympathy because she seemed to be on the point of leaving all the time, and who could blame her? She was stuck in the middle of nowhere with a crap climate and two evil brats turning the screw on her all the time. They couldn't even be bothered to pronounce her name properly – "Powla," she continually corrected them, making the vowels stretch exotically like a cat yawning, and yet they still insisted on "Porla" in their posh, tight little voices. They had lived in a Spanish-speaking country for the last two years, for heaven's sake, and yet they couldn't even say, "Buenos dias," or if they could they wouldn't.

Their small insular school kept its children busy for longer hours than the village school. Caroline had finished work more than an hour ago but Hannah and James had all sorts of extracurricular activities tagged onto the end of their day – clarinet and cricket, piano, "voice" (as if they didn't have one), folk dancing (Jesus), and fencing – when they first mentioned the fencing she thought they meant building actual fences. She would have liked to drop them – preferably from a great height – into a class in Toxteth or Chapeltown and see what good their fencing did them then.

They drove past the village school and she could hear James making snorting noises. She'd heard him refer to the village kids as "oiks" and she'd almost slapped him. She suspected his slow male brain had confused "oik" with "oink," which was why he always snorted when he came within breathing distance of the lower orders. She wasn't sure that she could refrain from violence toward him for much longer.

It had been a coincidence that the headmistress of the school was due for retirement just after they returned from their honeymoon. It had been easy to get the post. Caroline's credentials far outstripped anything that could be asked of her in a three-classroom village school, and she felt completely at home there within days of returning from Jersey – which was where they had spent their one-week honeymoon, in The Atlantic, in a sea-view room overlooking St. Ouen's Bay, although they had viewed the sea very little as they spent most of their time in bed. "Oh, The Atlantic," Rowena said, on their return. "Such a lovely hotel. What did you do all week?" and Jonathan said, "Oh, you know, the zoo, the orchid place, walked out to la Corbiere, had afternoon tea in the Secret Garden," and Rowena had such a satisfied smile on her face at this mind-numbingly bourgeois itinerary that Caroline only just stopped herself from saying, "Actually, Rowena, all we did was fuck the living daylights out of each other."

"You're going to work after your wedding then?" Rowena had said to her in the airless atmosphere of their wedding marquee, and Caroline replied, "Yes," and didn't feel a need to elaborate. The collar of Rowena's cream raw-silk suit had been defiled by a smear of burnt-orange lily pollen that Caroline hoped Rowena's dry cleaners would have great difficulty in removing.

Everyone in the village talked about what a hard job it was being headmistress of the school but it couldn't have been easier. The kids were sweet, nice country children, just one mild case of attention deficit, a couple of scabby kids, one wee shit, and statistically there should be at least one abused kid in there, but so far Caroline hadn't identified him or her. They were nearly all up to speed on reading (a miracle), they knew old-fashioned playground games, and their lives ran on an agricultural calendar so that harvest festival was a proper harvest festival and someone brought an honest-to-goodness, real-life lamb into show-and-tell in spring. There was even a maypole on the village green that the kids danced around, innocent of all phallic connotations. She loved the job and hoped that if she got divorced she'd be able to keep it because everything was so damned feudal around here that it was probably in the gift of the lord of the manor, who for all intents and purposes appeared to be Jonathan. Not that she was intending to get divorced, but it was hard to believe that this would go on forever. Nothing else did, so why should this? And you couldn't stay one step ahead all the time. It didn't matter how long you were lost. Sooner or later you would be found.

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.