Unnatural Order. Liz Porter

terms of his relationship with her. Now she could see him with others and he seemed to be both kind and easy-going.

      The day before Caroline was due to fly back, Karl insisted on showing her around Stuttgart. He carefully avoided mentioning future plans as he showed her galleries, bookshops and theatres. He didn’t need to. Everywhere they went Caroline tried to imagine herself as a local, and was shocked to find herself enjoying the game.

      Life with Karl would be comfortable, she thought, as they drank coffee at an outside table on the paved mall of the Konigstrasse. It would provide the intimacy and home life that, for years, she had envied from the outside looking in. But what about friends? What would she do without Anna? And Jane? All Karl’s neighbours appeared to be old. There would be nobody to nip downstairs and have a quick coffee with.

      Of course there would be Karl. But only Karl. Yet how long, as Karl had asked the night before, would she have Jane?

      He certainly had a knack for homing in on her vulnerabilities, and for plying her with enough wine to make her talk about them.

      The night before, over a beautifully cooked meal of veal with mushrooms, she had been in tears describing her street in London and how depressed she felt sometimes as she walked past her neighbours’ lit windows and saw vignette after vignette of family life. Bookshelves bulging with happy domestic clutter; a plump infant sitting in a highchair waving a spoon in the air while a six-year-old practised piano. Miseries and frustrations also lurked behind these tableaux vivants, but she couldn’t see them from the street. All she could feel was a sense of shared warmth – of meals cooked together or for one another. Of cups of tea in bed.

      ‘You could have all that here,’ Karl had said. She knew. But what else would she have?

      On the plane back to London, she finally opened her diary. But by then so much had happened she didn’t know where to start.

      August 7. Am I making a big mistake? she wrote in large letters on a new page.

      It had to be a mistake, she told herself, as the plane bumped down at Heathrow. And none of it would have happened if she hadn’t been so damned open with him.

      Why on earth had she ever told him that she envied Anna and the security of her life with Christopher? Or that the selfish, rotten part of her (or was that her entire personality?) would be devastated if Jane fell in love with someone because then she’d have no-one to stay home and watch Katharine Hepburn movies with. Or that there were really only two things she loved about her job: her colleagues and the unlimited access to private movie previews, and that what she wanted was to stay home and write fiction.

      She had made it so easy for Karl. She had said she wanted to settle down, and that she envied her married friends their loving partners. So there he was, offering her an opportunity to settle down and be constantly adored. He said she didn’t have to work if she didn’t want to.

      ‘Just stay home and write short stories, write novels, write kids’ books. Whatever makes you happy,’ he had said.

      The evening TV news had been on as they were talking. They had both looked up as an item came on about a woman arrested for the murder of her own small son. The woman, a slight figure with long unkempt blond hair and huge red-rimmed eyes, was being led away in handcuffs while a small crowd of onlookers jeered. The voice-over had been too fast for Caroline to catch all the facts, but there was plenty of editorial detail in the movement of the camera as it lingered on the woman’s tear-stained face and then panned across the vindictive expressions to be seen in the crowd around the police car.

      ‘First they arrested the husband, now they’ve let him go and they say she did it,’ Karl translated.

      ‘Couldn’t you write a story about her?’ he asked, when the segment was over.

      ‘Probably not,’ she had replied, suddenly irritated by the fact that she had to explain that English papers and magazines were far too parochial to care about a murder in another country unless there were some absolutely extraordinary circumstance – and, ideally, a British citizen involved.

      Non-journalists never had the slightest idea about the themes that made saleable magazine articles and Karl was no exception to the rule. He missed the terseness in her tone. He was too preoccupied with a small piece of paper on which he’d been doing a series of calculations.

      Not to bore her with details, he continued, but he had worked out exactly how much he had left from his salary after expenses. His conclusion was that he could definitely afford to support her while she wrote, although he wasn’t sure if he could manage to keep her in that beautiful Dior talcum powder that she always spilt on the floor after her bath.

      Had there been anything he hadn’t thought of, thought Caroline, absent-mindedly signalling the steward for another glass of wine. Why hadn’t she simply said, ‘It’s so lovely of you to ask, but it’s completely out of the question.’ How could she possibly have found herself saying that they could talk about it again if he came to England? And why had she been so agreeable when he said he couldn’t come because he had school on Saturday mornings, and no free weekend for two months? She had suggested that he just take a sickie but he looked at her as if she were recommending that he mug old ladies to get the money for his fare.

      How could she have let him pressure her into agreeing to come back to Gellingen for a weekend at the beginning of September, which was his birthday? Not just to celebrate but to talk again about his plan?

      Caroline closed the diary and leaned back in her seat. The young man in the seat next to her was reading a book called How to Own Your Own Life. She probably should have been reading that, not the German feminist magazine she had bought at the airport. Some of the language was a little too difficult for her, but she enjoyed contrasting the themes of articles in a serious women’s publication with those in London Woman. There was a polemic arguing that women boycott all male service providers: dentists, doctors, carpenters and plumbers; a piece on the role of Aboriginal women in the battle to stop alcohol ravaging Australia’s indigenous communities; and an article recommending the unionisation of cleaning women. Did they ever do anything just for laughs, these women? Presumably they joked and moaned about their partners and their sex lives at their weekly editorial conferences. But the only evidence of that was in an excellent comic strip. She flipped through once more, searching for a piece of fiction. In vain. Jesus Christ they were a serious bunch. She settled in to read the story about Aboriginal women.