Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

He sat down at the computer and went online to the Stationery Store and ordered storage boxes, pretty ones that had flowers printed on them, and thought he would box up everything and label it properly and then perhaps he would ask Jackson to give him a hand putting them up in the loft. Then he went to Tesco.com and ordered groceries, but he didn't go to "My Favorites" because he knew his favorites were killers – frozen cheesecakes and ice cream, Danish pastries and full-fat yogurts, and instead he started a new list of skim milk and oatmeal, vegetables and fruit and wholemeal bread and large bottles of Evian and thought it looked like a miserable shopping list. It wasn't that Theo was feeling better or more cheerful or that he could see a positive future for himself, it was just that he kept thinking about the way he had clung onto life when it was being taken away from him, how he had fought to stay alive on Christ's Pieces. Laura hadn't been given the chance to fight but he had and maybe that meant something, although exactly what, he wasn't sure.

He was about to go to the online checkout when he thought twice about it and went into the pet-food section instead and ordered six cans of "premium dog food." Just in case. He paid and signed out and turned the computer off.

Then he waited.

She hadn't told anyone yet. She was four months' gone but she wasn't showing. Good abdominal muscles. She'd had a scan and everything was "normal" – she wasn't carrying twins or an alien. The midwife was a tight-lipped, superior cow and Caroline had considered lying when it came to the "Any previous pregnancies" question but she would be easily found out so she just said, "Yes, twenty-five years ago, the baby was adopted" (which was true). She could see the midwife doing the maths in her head, twenty-five years ago "Caroline Edith Edwards" would have been twelve. The midwife raised an eyebrow and Caroline felt like saying, "Fuck off, bitch," but she didn't because that would have been Michelle speaking, not Caroline Edith Edwards.

Caroline would have liked to talk about the increased risks of having a baby at forty-three, but she could hardly say, "Actually I'm six years older than you think," could she? And anyway, this baby felt anchored in, it felt whole and healthy, it felt like it had intentions.

She tried to imagine announcing to Hannah and James that they were going to have a baby sister (or brother, but she was sure it was a girl), she could imagine their expressions of disgust and jealousy then the sly little conspiratorial smiles as they planned the horrors they could perpetrate on it. Caroline put a protective hand on her stomach and felt the cold jelly that the midwife cow hadn't bothered to wipe off. And Jonathan – how could she tell Jonathan? Darling, guess what, you're going to be a daddy again," and he would puff up with pride at having his seed proved good, because it wouldn't be a baby, a person, it would be another thing, like the new John Deere, or Hannah's bay gelding, a dressage pony that was much too big for her, so with any luck she'd fall off and break her neck. (She really mustn't think things like that, it might be bad for the baby.) Dressage, that was Rowena's new plan for Hannah, "Never too early to start learning control," she'd said over a "luncheon" that she'd invited Caroline to in "my cosy little cottage," i.e., not the bloody great house you've taken away from me. Dressage. It was so English, so anal. Jemima, needless to say, was an expert.

"'You don't mind me asking you this, dear, do you?" Rowena said, leaning closer to her over the remains of a poached salmon that someone else must have cooked because Rowena could barely find the bread knife. "But, how shall I put this…" Her pale blue eyes were distant, almost visionary, and Caroline thought, I can't stand this. "Am I knocked up?" she intervened helpfully, and Rowena gave a little twitch of unease at Caroline's vernacular. "No, I'm not." Caroline was very, very good at lying.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes." And she watched Rowena struggle to suppress a smile of relief as she said, "Shall we take coffee in the garden?"

It was the first time she'd been to a service at St. Anne's, the first time she'd heard him preach a sermon. He looked less like himself in his starched white Sunday surplice and she wondered who made it so white and starched, was it some "lady" he paid? He didn't mention God very much, which Caroline was grateful for, and he rambled a bit, but the general tenor of the piece was that people should all be nicer to one another and Caroline thought, Fair enough, and the ten people in the congregation, including Caroline, all nodded genially at this message and when the service ended everyone shook hands, which struck Caroline as quite Quakerly. She had gone to religious services all the time when she was in prison, just because they provided a break in the routine and the chaplains were always particularly pleasant to her, which was probably because of what she'd done. The worse the crime, the more the chaplains tended to like you if you turned up in the chapel. One lost lamb and all that.

He stood at the door and shook everyone's hands again as they left and he had a kind word for everyone, of course. She made sure she was the last person to leave the church and half expected him to invite her for a cup of coffee, or even lunch, but he didn't, he just said, "It's nice to see you here, Caroline," as if she were a new convert, and she felt absurdly disappointed but she smiled and said something inconsequential before wandering off round the churchyard, hoping that maybe he would follow, but he went back inside St. Anne's.

She'd never been in love with anyone since Keith and that had just been some crazy teenage thing that, in the normal way of things, should have petered out into an indifferent divorce. It felt good to be in love again, she felt it gave her back some of the personality she'd lost. She loved the bug, of course. Tanya. But that was a different kind of love, an elemental kind. She hadn't loved her then, not in a way she understood anyway, it was something she'd learned since, in the intervening years of absence. And even though it had come to her too late it still helped to fill all those missing years. Retroactive love. It wouldn't feel like that for Tanya of course. She didn't know about all the love her mother had for her, not unless Shirley told her ("Your Mummy loved you so much, but she just couldn't be with you"). She had made Shirley promise to treat her as if she were dead and to look after the bug. She'd loved Shirley in that elemental way too or she wouldn't have done what she did. A fresh start. That's what she'd said to Shirley, "Take Tanya away, give her a fresh start, be the mother to her that I can't be." Although obviously not as articulate as that because of the circumstances –

"'I thought you had a very lovely home to go to." He looked amused. He'd removed his surplice and put on his old gray cardigan again. It was very womanish garb, a cardigan over what was basically, let's face it, a dress, and she couldn't help but idly wonder what he would look like underneath those black skirts, but was pleasantly surprised to realize that, although she would have quite liked to drop onto her knees on the grass and suck him off right then and there in the graveyard, what she really wanted to do was to look after him, do something good for him, make scrambled eggs and toast and tea, rub his back, read out loud to him from an English classic. She was definitely insane. "I'm pregnant," she said.

"Oh, congratulations. That's wonderful." He scanned her features for clues. "Isn't it?"

"Yes." She laughed. "It is wonderful. Please don't tell anyone yet."

"Oh gosh, of course not."