Case Histories

On Saturday afternoon Gillian took Caroline to an agricultural fair, a small one, local to the dale, "not like the Great Yorkshire Show or anything – more of a fete," Gillian explained. It was being held in a field a couple miles away, on the outskirts of a village that Gillian told her she would love because it was "all picture-postcard quaint," and Caroline smiled and said nothing because, yes, it was all beautiful and might be Yorkshire (which seemed to be more of a state of mind than a place) but it was still the country. But, of course, Gillian was right, the village was like a Platonic ideal of a village – a packhorse bridge, a beck, skirted with yellow flag irises, that threaded its way among the gray stone houses, the old red telephone box, the little postbox in the wall, the village green with its fat white sheep grazing unfettered. (" Yorkshire sheep," Jonathan said. "They're bigger," and months later she regurgitated this fact to a colleague at school who fell about with laughter so that she felt like an idiot. By then she had a ruby-and-diamond ring on her finger, a ring that had once belonged to Jonathan's father's mother. It wasn't until afterward that his own mother, Rowena, told her that she'd refused that ring and insisted on new diamonds instead – from Garrards – because she didn't want a "hand-me-down.")

Caroline, needless to say, had never been to an agricultural fair in her life and was charmed by everything. Yes, that was what had happened to her. She had been charmed, bewitched, glamorized somehow – by the combed sheep and ruffled cows and the squeaky-clean pigs, by the marquees with their displays of prizewin-ning jams and sponge cakes, the crocheted shawls and knitted matinee jackets, the exhibitions of marrows and potatoes and leeks and roses, by the WI serving cream teas in a warm tent that smelled of grass, by the vicar – a big man with the rosy skin of a drinker – who opened the fair and told funny jokes (nothing like his successor, John Burton). There was an ice-cream van and a children's gymkhana and a small perfect antique merry-go-round. It was unreal. It was ridiculous. At any moment Caroline expected a steam train to pull up and the cast of bloody Heartbeat to alight on the platform. But instead it was Jonathan Weaver, who didn't alight but strode. "He got those thighs from show jumping," Gillian whispered. "Amateur, but he could have gone far, as they say." Oh no, now it was like a Jilly Cooper novel.

"Untitled aristocracy," Gillian said. "You know, ancient family, farmed-the-land-since-Domesday kind of thing, only they're dilettantes, not real farmers – she said bitterly."

"Why not?"

"They've always had other income, lots of it – London leases, land, the slave trade, wherever people get their money from, so they play at farming – a show herd of Red Devons, and their sheep are like something Marie Antoinette would have shepherded – and this is sheep country, let's not forget, where a sheep's a sheep, and all the farm cottages are modernized and central heated and they're rebuilding the original kitchen garden with National Trust money, no less."

Caroline didn't really understand this farmer's daughter's diatribe so she just said, "Right," and then Gillian laughed and said, "But, by Christ, I'd shag the daylights out of him any day."

She remembered standing in front of a display for best strawberry jam, the jars – topped with gingham mobcaps and labeled in a way that was reminiscent of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady - were garnered with rosettes and little "commended" cards and she was thinking that you should be able to taste the prizewinning jam, not just look at it, when suddenly he was standing beside her and introducing himself and then there was a kind of blackout here because the next thing she remembered was sitting up high in the passenger seat of his Range Rover, being driven to his house. He'd said something polite about "coming up to the house for some tea" but it must have been lust, pure and raw, and damned up for too long, which had impelled her – abandoning Gillian, who was furious with her (quite rightly) for going off in such a public manner with someone she'd only just met.