Case Histories

by Kate Atkinson

  When Victor proposed to her fourteen years ago Rosemary had no idea what the life of a college lecturer’s wife would entail, but she had imagined it would involve wearing what her mother called ‘day dresses’ and going to garden parties on the Backs and strolling elegantly across the plush green of the courts while people murmured, ‘That’s the famous Victor Land’s wife, he would be nothing without her, you know.’

  And, of course, the life of a lecturer’s wife had turned out to be nothing like she had imagined. There were no garden parties on the Backs, and there was certainly no elegant strolling across the college courts, where the grass was afforded the kind of veneration usually associated with religious artefacts. Not long after she was first married she had been invited to join Victor in the Master’s garden, where it soon grew apparent that Victor’s colleagues were of the opinion that he had married (horribly) beneath him (‘A nurse,’ someone whispered, in a way that made it seem like a profession only slightly more respectable than a streetwalker). But while one thing was true – Victor would be nothing without her – he was also nothing with her. At that very moment he was toiling in the cool dark of his study, the heavy chenille curtains closed against the summer, lost in his work, work which never came to fruition, never changed the world or made his name. He was not great in his field, merely good. This gave her a certain satisfaction.

  Great mathematical discoveries were made before the age of thirty, she now knew, courtesy of one of Victor’s colleagues. Rosemary herself was only thirty-two – she couldn’t believe how young that sounded and how old it felt.

  She supposed Victor had married her because he thought she was domesticated – her mother’s loaded tea tables probably misled him, for Rosemary had never made so much as a plain scone when she lived at home – and as she was a nurse he no doubt presumed she would be a nurturing and caring person – and she might have presumed that herself in those days but now she didn’t feel capable of nurturing a kitten, let alone four, soon to be five, children, to say nothing of a great mathematician.

  Furthermore, she suspected the great work was a fake. She had seen the papers on his desk when she dusted in that hole and his reckonings looked not dissimilar to her father’s intense calculations of racing form and betting odds. Victor didn’t strike her as a gambler. Her father had been a gambler, to her mother’s despair. She remembered going with him to Newmarket once when she was a child. He had lifted her on to his shoulders and they had stood by the winning post. She had been terrified by the noise as the horses thundered down the home straight and the crowd at the stand side grew frenzied, as though the world might be about to end rather than a 30/1 outsider winning by a short head. Rosemary couldn’t imagine Victor anywhere as spirited as a racecourse, nor could she see him in the smoky commonality of a betting shop.

  Julia emerged from beneath the hydrangeas looking querulous with heat. How was Rosemary ever going to turn them back into English schoolchildren when the new term began? Their open-air life had transformed them into gypsies, their skin brown and scratched, their sun-scorched hair thick and tangled, and they seemed to be permanently filthy, no matter how many baths they took. A drowsy Olivia stood at the opening of the tent and Rosemary’s heart gave a little twitch. Olivia’s face was grubby and her bleached plaits were askew and looked as if they had dead flowers entwined in them. She was whispering a secret into Blue Mouse’s ear. Olivia was her only beautiful child. Julia, with her dark curls and snub nose, was pretty but her character wasn’t, Sylvia – poor Sylvia, what could you say? And Amelia was somehow … bland, but Olivia, Olivia was spun from light. It seemed impossible that she was Victor’s child, although unfortunately there was no doubting the fact. Olivia was the only one she loved, although God knows she tried her best with the others. Everything was from duty, nothing from love. Duty killed you in the end.

  It was very wrong, it was as if the love she should have had for the others had been siphoned off and given to Olivia instead, so that she loved her youngest child with a ferocity that didn’t always seem natural. Sometimes she wanted to eat Olivia, to bite into a tender forearm or a soft calf muscle, even to devour her whole like a snake and take her back inside her where she would be safe. She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn’t even have the strength to feel guilty. Olivia caught sight of her and waved.

  Their appetites were listless at teatime and they picked at the unseasonable lamb hotpot that Rosemary had spent too much time making. Victor emerged, blinking in the daylight like a cave dweller, and ate everything in front of him and then asked for more and Rosemary wondered what he would look like when he was dead. She watched him eating, the fork travelling up and down to his lips with robotic rhythm, his huge hands, like paddles, wrapped around the cutlery. He had farmer’s hands, it was one of the things she had first noticed about him. A mathematician should have slender, elegant hands. She should have known from his hands. She felt sick and crampy. Maybe she would lose the baby. What a relief that would be.

  Rosemary rose from the table abruptly and announced bedtime. Normally there would be protests but Julia’s breathing was laboured and her eyes were red from too much sun and grass – she had all kinds of summer allergies – and Sylvia seemed to be in the grip of some form of sunstroke, sick and weepy and she said her head hurt, although that didn’t stop her from being hysterical when Rosemary told her to go to bed early.

  Almost every night that summer the eldest three had asked if they could sleep outside in the tent and every night Rosemary said no, on the principle that it was bad enough they looked like gypsies without living like them and it didn’t matter if gypsies lived in caravans – as Sylvia was at pains to point out – Rosemary was trying her best to retain good government in this family, against all the odds and without any help from a husband for whom the quotidian demands of meals and housework and childcare were meaningless and who had only married her in order to have someone who would look after him, and it made her feel worse when Amelia said, ‘Are you all right, Mummy?’ because Amelia was the most neglected of all of them. Which is why Rosemary sighed, took two paracetamol and a sleeping tablet – which was probably a lethal cocktail for the baby inside her – and said to her most forgotten child, if you want you can sleep in the tent with Olivia tonight.

  The dewy grass and canvas smell of the tent was a thrilling thing to wake up to – better certainly than Julia’s breath, which always seemed to grow sour in the night. Olivia’s own indefinable scent was just detectable. Amelia kept her eyes closed against the light. The sun already felt high in the sky and she waited for Olivia to wake and climb under the old eiderdown that was making do as a sleeping bag, but it was Rascal rather than Olivia who finally roused her by licking her face.

  There was no sign of Olivia, only an empty shell of covers as if she’d been winkled out of them, and Amelia felt disappointed that Olivia had got up without waking her. She walked barefoot across the dew-wet grass, Rascal trotting at her heels, and tried the back door of the house which turned out to be locked – apparently her mother hadn’t thought to give Amelia a key. What kind of a parent locks their own children out of their home?

  It was quiet and felt very early but Amelia had no idea what time it was. She wondered if Olivia had got into the house somehow because there was no sign of her in the garden. She called her name and was startled by the tremor in her voice; she hadn’t realized she was worried until she heard it. She knocked on the back door for a long time but there was no answer so she ran along the path at the side of the house – the little wicket gate was open, giving Amelia more cause for alarm – and into the street, shouting ‘Olivia!’ more forcefully now. Rascal, sensing entertainment, began to bark.

  The street was empty apart from a man getting into his car. He gave Amelia a curious look. She was barefoot and dressed in Sylvia’s hand-me-down pyjamas and supposed she did look odd but she hardly cared. She ran to the front door and rang the bell, keeping her finger on the buzzer
until her father, of all people, yanked the door open. He had obviously been roused from sleep, his face looked as rumpled as his pyjamas, his mad-professor hair sticking out at all angles from his head as he stared fiercely at her as if he had no idea who she was. When he recognized her as one of his own he was even more puzzled.

  ‘Olivia,’ she said, and this time her voice came out as a whisper.

  * * *

  In the afternoon, a bolt of lightning cracked the flat skies above Cambridge, signalling the end of the heat wave. By that time, the tent in the back garden had become the centre of a circle that had grown wider and wider as the day progressed, pulling more and more people inside it – first the Lands themselves, roaming the streets, scrambling through undergrowth and hedges, yelling Olivia’s name until they were hoarse. By then the police had joined the search and neighbours were checking gardens and sheds and cellars. The circle rippled outwards to include the police divers fishing the river and the complete strangers who volunteered to comb meadow and fen. Police helicopters flew low over outlying villages and countryside as far as the county borders, truck drivers were alerted to keep an eye out on the motorway and the army was brought in to search the Fens, but none of them – from Amelia screaming herself sick in the back garden to the Territorial Army recruits on their hands and knees in the rain on Midsummer Common – could find a single trace of Olivia, not a hair or a flake of skin, not a pink rabbit slipper or a blue mouse.

  2

  Case History No. 2 1994

  Just a Normal Day

  THEO HAD BEGUN TO TRY TO WALK MORE. HE WAS NOW officially ‘morbidly obese’, according to his new, unsympathetic GP. Theo knew that the new, unsympathetic GP – a young woman with a very short haircut and a gym bag thrown carelessly in the corner of the surgery – was using the term to try to frighten him. Theo hadn’t considered himself ‘morbidly obese’ until now. He had thought of himself as cheerfully overweight, a rotund Santa Claus kind of figure, and he would have ignored the GP’s advice but when he got home and told his daughter, Laura, about the conversation in the doctor’s surgery she had been horrified and had immediately drawn up a plan of exercise and diet for him, which was why he was now eating chaff with skimmed milk for breakfast and walking the two miles to his Parkside office every morning. Theo’s wife, Valerie, had died from a post-operative blood clot in the brain at the absurd age of thirty-four, so long ago now it was sometimes hard to believe he had ever had a wife or a marriage. She had gone into hospital only to have her appendix removed. When he looked back on it now, he realized that he should probably have sued the hospital or the health authority for negligence, but he had been so caught up in the day-to-day care of their two daughters – Jennifer was seven and Laura only two when Valerie died – that he had hardly had time even to mourn his poor wife, let alone seek retribution. If it hadn’t been for the fact that both girls looked like her – more and more now they were older – he would have found it hard to conjure up anything but a vague memory of his wife.

  Marriage and motherhood had made Valerie more solemn than the student whom Theo had carefully courted. Theo wondered if those people who were destined to die young had some kind of premonition of the shortness of the hours and that gave their life an intensity, a seriousness like a shadow. Valerie and Theo had been fond of each other rather than passionate, and Theo didn’t know if the marriage would have lasted if she’d lived.

  Jennifer and Laura had never been troublesome girls and they’d made it easy for Theo to be a good parent. Jennifer was a medical student in London now. She was a sober, driven girl with not much time for frivolity and jokes but that didn’t mean she didn’t feel compassion, and Theo couldn’t imagine her sitting in a GP’s surgery one day telling some fat bloke she’d never met before that he was morbidly obese and he should get off his arse a bit more. That wasn’t really what the new GP had said to Theo, but she might as well have done.

  Like her sister, Laura was one of those organized, capable girls who achieved what they set out to do with the minimum of fuss, but, unlike Jennifer, Laura had a carefree character. That didn’t mean she wasn’t an achiever – she had all her scuba-diving certificates and planned to be a master diver by the time she was twenty. She was sitting her driving test next month and she was expected to get As in all her exams. She had a place waiting for her at Aberdeen to do marine biology.

  She had got a job for the summer working in a pub on King Street and Theo worried about her coming home at night, imagined some maniac knocking her off her bike on Christ’s Pieces and doing unthinkable things to her. He was hugely relieved that she had decided to go straight to university in October and not go backpacking across Thailand or South America or wherever, the way all her friends seemed to be doing. The world was a place freighted with danger. ‘You don’t worry about Jenny,’ Laura said, and it was a fact, he didn’t worry about Jennifer and he pretended (to himself, to Laura) it was because Jennifer’s life was invisible to him in London, but the truth was he simply didn’t love her as much as he loved Laura.

  Every time Laura left the house he worried about her, every time she leaped on her bike, put on her wetsuit, stepped on a train. He worried when she went out in a high wind that a piece of falling masonry might drop on her head, he worried that she would take a student flat with an unserviced water heater and die of carbon monoxide poisoning. He worried that her tetanus shots weren’t up to date, that she would walk through a public building that was pumping Legionnaire’s disease through the air conditioning, that she would go into hospital for a routine operation and never come out again, that she would be stung by a bee and die from anaphylactic shock (because she’d never been stung by a bee so how did he know she wasn’t allergic?). Of course he never said any of these things to Laura, they would have seemed ridiculous to her. Even if he expressed the mildest trepidation about something (‘Careful making that left turn, you’ve got a blind spot,’ or ‘Turn the light off at the switch before you change the bulb’), Laura would laugh at him, would say he was an old woman and couldn’t even change a light bulb without foreseeing a disastrous chain of events unfolding. But Theo knew that the journey that began with a tiny screw not being threaded properly ended with the cargo door blowing off in mid-air.

  ‘Why worry, Dad?’ was Laura’s constant amused reaction to his qualms. ‘Why not?’ was Theo’s unvoiced response. And after one too many early-morning vigils waiting for her to come home from work in the pub (although he always pretended to be asleep) Theo had suggested casually that they needed a temp in his office and why didn’t she come and help them out, and to his astonishment she’d thought about it for a minute and then said, ‘OK,’ and smiled her lovely smile (hours of patient, expensive orthodontic work when she was younger) and Theo thought, thank you, God, because although Theo didn’t believe in God he often talked to him.

  And for her very first day at work at Holroyd, Wyre and Stanton (Theo was the ‘Wyre’) Theo wasn’t going to be there, which upset him a lot more than it did Laura, of course. He was in court in Peterborough, a tedious dispute over a land boundary that should have gone to a local solicitor but the client was an old one of Theo’s who had moved recently. Laura was dressed in a black skirt and a white blouse and had tied her brown hair back and he thought how neat she looked, how pretty.

  ‘Walk to the station, promise, Dad?’ Laura said sternly as Theo got up from the table and Theo said, ‘If I must,’ but knew he wouldn’t make the train if he did and thought he could pretend to walk and then take a taxi. He finished his low-calorie, high-fibre cattle-feed cereal and drained his cup of black coffee, thinking about cream and sugar and a Danish pastry, one of the ones with apricot and custard that looked like a poached egg, and thought perhaps they might sell them at the station buffet. ‘Don’t forget your inhaler, Dad,’ Laura said to him and Theo patted his jacket pocket to prove he had it. The very thought of not having his Ventolin inhaler made Theo feel panic, although he didn’t know why: if he had an asthma
attack on any English street probably half the people on it would be able to whip out an inhaler and offer it to him.

  He said to Laura, ‘Cheryl will show you the ropes’ – Cheryl was his secretary – ‘I’ll be back in the office before lunch, maybe we can go out?’ and she said, ‘That would be nice, Dad.’ And then she saw him off at the front door, kissing him on the cheek, saying, ‘I love you, Dad,’ and he said, ‘Love you too, sweetheart,’ and at the street corner he’d looked back and she was still waving.

  Laura who had brown eyes and pale skin and who liked diet Pepsi and salt-and-vinegar crisps, who was as smart as a whip, who made scrambled eggs for him on Sunday mornings, Laura who was still a virgin (he knew because she had told him, to his embarrassment), which made him feel immensely relieved even though he knew she couldn’t stay one for ever, Laura who kept a tank of saltwater tropical fish in her bedroom, whose favourite colour was blue, whose favourite flower was the snowdrop, and who liked Radiohead and Nirvana and hated Mr Blobby and had seen Dirty Dancing ten times. Laura whom Theo loved with a strength that was like a cataclysm, a disaster.

  Theo and David Holroyd had set up in partnership not long after Theo’s marriage to Valerie. Jean Stanton joined them a couple of years later. All three of them had been at university together and they wanted a ‘go-ahead, socially responsible’ law practice, the kind that did more than its fair share of domestic and matrimonial and legal-aid work. Their good intentions had weakened over the years. Jean Stanton had discovered she liked litigation more than domestic violence and that her politics had changed from centre left to Conservative with a large ‘C’ and David Holroyd found that, as a fifth-generation East Anglian lawyer, conveyancing was his life blood and so it usually fell to Theo to ‘keep up the ethical end of it’, as David Holroyd put it. The practice had grown substantially; there were three junior partners now and two associates and they were bursting at the seams in the Parkside office but none of them could bear the idea of moving.