Case Histories: (Jackson Brodie) by Kate Atkinson

Author:Kate Atkinson [Atkinson, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-07-12T04:00:00+00:00

12

Car­oline

CAR­OLINE GLANCED AT her stepchil­dren in the back seat 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 ap­ply this re­gime 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 rear-view 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 dower 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 re­gister 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’être. 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.

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