Case Histories

She loved that word, "misericord," because it sounded so wretched and yet it wasn't. It meant tenderhearted, from the Latin for heart, "cor," from which you also get "core" and "cordial" but not "cardiac," which came via the Latin from the Greek for heart – "kardia" (although they must surely be related at some ancient, ur-level). They had done neither Latin nor Greek at Caroline's school, but later, after she had left school, when she had had a lot of time on her hands, she had patiently worked her way through primers and elementary Classics textbooks so that she could at least understand the etymology of words, to follow them back down their limbs and trunks until she reached their roots. Her own name contained "cor" if you moved the letters around. Caro. Cora. Cor. Like the crows, like the crows that feed on the dead. If you knelt on the hard floor, which in this church meant you couldn't avoid kneeling on the cold stone slab of someone's tomb "but they were probably glad of the company), and looked one of the green men in the eye, you could see the primordial gleam of madness in there and the -

"Are you all right?"

"Yes," Caroline said. "I think so." The man offered his hand because her knees were stiff from kneeling on the floor, on the dead. The man's hand was soft and rather cold for someone who was patently alive.

"My name's John Burton," he said (cordially).

"You're very young," Caroline said. "Or is that a sign I'm getting old – when vicars and policemen begin to look young?" and the vicar (John Burton) laughed and said, "My mother always says it's when bishops start looking young that you have to worry," and Caroline wondered what it was like to inhabit so easily a world where your mother made jokes about bishops, where people were called Caro.

"You'll be the new vicar then," Caroline said. He was wearing his cassock (was that what it was called?) so it was hardly a wild guess, and he looked down at his vestments and gave a rueful grin and said, "You've got me bang to rights, guv," only he sounded faintly ludicrous because he said the words in his rather effete, upper-crust voice. Jonathan had retained (or acquired) a rough limestone edge to his voice that made him seem no-nonsense and forceful. "Very Heathcliffe," her friend Gillian had said sarcastically, because, of course, he was moneyed and (very) expensively educated and his mother spoke like the Queen.

"I know who you are too," John Burton said, and Caroline said, "Do you?" and thought, "Are we flirting? Surely not," and John Burton – the Reverend John Burton – said, "Yes, of course I do. You're the head teacher at the primary school," and Caroline thought, "Damn," because she really preferred it when no one knew who she was. No one at all.

Gretting married again hadn't been part of the plan. The plan had been to bury herself in a town somewhere and do good works, like an eighteenth-century Quaker or some Victorian gentlewoman driven by philanthropy. She'd even thought about going abroad – India or Africa – like a missionary, working on a literacy project with women or outcastes, because being an outcast was something she understood.

She came north, expecting it to be gritty and industrial, but she knew that it was the novels she had read that had formed this picture in her head, and, of course, instead of being like North and South or Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, it was gritty and post-industrial and so much more difficult than she'd imagined. She'd spent her probationary year in Liverpool, then she did another couple years in Oldham and finally settled in Manchester. She was a "superteacher," although they didn't call it that, trained to be the savior of socially excluded kids, fast-tracking through inner-city Gehennas so that one day she was destined to be head of some imploding school that she would have to try and rescue from disaster, like the captain of a sinking ship. And that was fine and good because she was atoning, but instead of joining a convent, an order of penitents (an idea she'd been tempted by), she'd become a teacher, which was probably more useful than shutting yourself away, praying every four hours, night and day, although, of course, you couldn't be sure – it might be that cloistered women praying night and day was the only thing that was preventing some cata-clysmal disaster – a meteor or global nuclear meltdown.