Jackson Brodie 01: Case Histories (1987) by Kate Atkinson

Author:Kate Atkinson
Format: epub
Published: 1987-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

Twelve

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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