The Casual Vacancy

IV


‘Very sad,’ said Howard Mollison, rocking a little on his toes in front of his mantelpiece. ‘Very sad indeed.’

Maureen had just finished telling them all about Catherine Weedon’s death; she had heard everything from her friend Karen the receptionist that evening, including the complaint from Cath Weedon’s granddaughter. A look of delighted disapproval was crumpling her face; Samantha, who was in a very bad mood, thought she resembled a monkey nut. Miles was making conventional sounds of surprise and pity, but Shirley was staring up at the ceiling with a bland expression on her face; she hated it when Maureen held centre stage with news that she ought to have heard first.

‘My mother knew the family of old,’ Howard told Samantha, who already knew it. ‘Neighbours in Hope Street. Cath was decent enough in her way, you know. The house was always spotless, and she worked until she was into her sixties. Oh, yes, she was one of the world’s grafters, Cath Weedon, whatever the rest of the family became.’

Howard was enjoying giving credit where credit was due.

‘The husband lost his job when they closed the steelworks. Hard drinker. No, she didn’t always have it easy, Cath.’

Samantha was barely managing to look interested, but fortunately Maureen interrupted.

‘And the Gazette’s on to Dr Jawanda!’ she croaked. ‘Imagine how she must be feeling, now the paper’s got it! Family’s kicking up a stink – well, you can’t blame them, alone in that house for three days. D’you know her, Howard? Which one is Danielle Fowler?’

Shirley got up and stalked out of the room in her apron. Samantha slugged a little more wine, smiling.

‘Let’s think, let’s think,’ said Howard. He prided himself on knowing almost everyone in Pagford, but the later generations of Weedons belonged more to Yarvil. ‘Can’t be a daughter, she had four boys, Cath. Granddaughter, I expect.’

‘And she wants an inquiry,’ said Maureen. ‘Well, it was always going to come to this. It’s been on the cards. If anything, I’m surprised it’s taken this long. Dr Jawanda wouldn’t give the Hubbards’ son antibiotics and he ended up hospitalized for his asthma. Do you know, did she train in India, or—?’

Shirley, who was listening from the kitchen while she stirred the gravy, felt irritated, as she always did, by Maureen’s monopolization of the conversation; that, at least, was how Shirley put it to herself. Determined not to return to the room until Maureen had finished, Shirley turned into the study and checked to see whether anyone had sent in apologies for the next Parish Council meeting; as secretary, she was already putting together the agenda.

‘Howard – Miles – come and look at this!’

Shirley’s voice had lost its usual soft, flutey quality; it rang out shrilly.

Howard waddled out of the sitting room followed by Miles, who was still in the suit he had worn all day at work. Maureen’s droopy, bloodshot, heavily mascara-ed eyes were fixed on the empty doorway like a bloodhound’s; her hunger to know what Shirley had found or seen was almost palpable. Maureen’s fingers, a clutch of bulging knuckles covered in translucent leopard-spotted skin, slid the crucifix and wedding ring up and down the chain around her neck. The deep creases running from the corners of Maureen’s mouth to her chin always reminded Samantha of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Why are you always here? Samantha asked the older woman loudly, inside her own head. You couldn’t make me lonely enough to live in Howard and Shirley’s pocket.

Disgust rose in Samantha like vomit. She wanted to seize the over-warm cluttered room and mash it between her hands, until the royal china, and the gas fire, and the gilt-framed pictures of Miles broke into jagged pieces; then, with wizened and painted Maureen trapped and squalling inside the wreckage, she wanted to heave it, like a celestial shot-putter, away into the sunset. The crushed lounge and the doomed crone inside it, soared in her imagination through the heavens, plunging into the limitless ocean, leaving Samantha alone in the endless stillness of the universe.

She had had a terrible afternoon. There had been another frightening conversation with her accountant; she could not remember much of her drive home from Yarvil. She would have liked to offload on Miles, but after dumping his briefcase and pulling off his tie in the hall he had said, ‘You haven’t started dinner yet, have you?’

He sniffed the air ostentatiously, then answered himself.

‘No, you haven’t. Well, good, because Mum and Dad have invited us over.’ And before she could protest, he had added sharply, ‘It’s nothing to do with the council. It’s to discuss arrangements for Dad’s sixty-fifth.’

Anger was almost a relief; it eclipsed her anxiety, her fear. She had followed Miles out to the car, cradling her sense of ill-usage. When he asked, at last, on the corner of Evertree Crescent, ‘How was your day?’ she answered, ‘Absolutely bloody fantastic.’

‘Wonder what’s up?’ said Maureen, breaking the silence in the sitting room.

Samantha shrugged. It was typical of Shirley to have summoned her menfolk and left the women in limbo; Samantha was not going to give her mother-in-law the satisfaction of showing interest.

Howard’s elephantine footsteps made the floorboards under the hall carpet creak. Maureen’s mouth was slack with anticipation.

‘Well, well, well,’ boomed Howard, lumbering back into the room.

‘I was checking the council website for apologies,’ said Shirley, a little breathless in his wake. ‘For the next meeting—’

‘Someone’s posted accusations about Simon Price,’ Miles told Samantha, pressing past his parents, seizing the role of announcer.

‘What kind of accusations?’ asked Samantha.

‘Receiving stolen goods,’ said Howard, firmly reclaiming the spotlight, ‘and diddling his bosses at the printworks.’

Samantha was pleased to find herself unmoved. She had only the haziest idea who Simon Price was.

‘They’ve posted under a pseudonym,’ Howard continued, ‘and it’s not a particularly tasteful pseudonym, either.’

‘Rude, you mean?’ Samantha asked. ‘Big-Fat-Cock or something?’

Howard’s laughter boomed through the room, Maureen gave an affected shriek of horror, but Miles scowled and Shirley looked furious.

‘Not quite that, Sammy, no,’ said Howard. ‘No, they’ve called themselves “The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother”.’

‘Oh,’ said Samantha, her grin evaporating. She did not like that. After all, she had been in the ambulance while they had forced needles and tubes into Barry’s collapsed body; she had watched him dying beneath the plastic mask; seen Mary clinging to his hand, heard her groans and sobs.

‘Oh, no, that’s not nice,’ said Maureen, relish in her bullfrog’s voice. ‘No, that’s nasty. Putting words into the mouths of the dead. Taking names in vain. That’s not right.’

‘No,’ agreed Howard. Almost absent-mindedly, he strolled across the room, picked up the wine bottle and returned to Samantha, topping up her empty glass. ‘But someone out there doesn’t care about good taste it seems, if they can put Simon Price out of the running.’

‘If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, Dad,’ said Miles, ‘wouldn’t they have gone for me rather than Price?’

‘How do you know they haven’t, Miles?’

‘Meaning?’ asked Miles swiftly.

‘Meaning,’ said Howard, the happy cynosure of all eyes, ‘that I got sent an anonymous letter about you a couple of weeks ago. Nothing specific. Just said you were unfit to fill Fairbrother’s shoes. I’d be very surprised if the letter didn’t come from the same source as the online post. The Fairbrother theme in both, you see?’

Samantha tilted her glass a little too enthusiastically, so that wine trickled down the sides of her chin, exactly where her own ventriloquist’s doll grooves would no doubt appear in time. She mopped her face with her sleeve.

‘Where is this letter?’ asked Miles, striving not to look rattled.

‘I shredded it. It was anonymous; it didn’t count.’

‘We didn’t want to upset you, dear,’ said Shirley, and she patted Miles’ arm.

‘Anyway, they can’t have anything on you,’ Howard reassured his son, ‘or they’d have dished the dirt, the same as they have on Price.’

‘Simon Price’s wife is a lovely girl,’ said Shirley with gentle regret. ‘I can’t believe Ruth knows anything about it, if her husband’s been on the fiddle. She’s a friend from the hospital,’ Shirley elaborated to Maureen. ‘An agency nurse.’

‘She wouldn’t be the first wife who hasn’t spotted what’s going on under her nose,’ retorted Maureen, trumping insider knowledge with worldly wisdom.

‘Absolutely brazen, using Barry Fairbrother’s name,’ said Shirley, pretending not to have heard Maureen. ‘Not a thought for his widow, his family. All that matters is their agenda; they’ll sacrifice anything to it.’

‘Shows you what we’re up against,’ said Howard. He scratched the overfold of his belly, thinking. ‘Strategically, it’s smart. I saw from the get-go that Price was going to split the pro-Fields vote. No flies on Bends-Your-Ear; she’s realized it too and she wants him out.’

‘But,’ said Samantha, ‘it mightn’t have anything to do with Parminder and that lot at all. It could be from someone we don’t know, someone who’s got a grudge against Simon Price.’

‘Oh, Sam,’ said Shirley, with a tinkling laugh, shaking her head. ‘It’s easy to see you’re new to politics.’

Oh, f*ck off, Shirley.

‘So why have they used Barry Fairbrother’s name, then?’ asked Miles, rounding on his wife.

‘Well, it’s on the website, isn’t it? It’s his vacant seat.’

‘And who’s going to trawl through the council website for that kind of information? No,’ he said gravely, ‘this is an insider.’

An insider … Libby had once told Samantha that there could be thousands of microscopic species inside one drop of pond water. They were all perfectly ridiculous, Samantha thought, sitting here in front of Shirley’s commemorative plates as if they were in the Cabinet Room in Downing Street, as though one bit of tittle-tattle on a Parish Council website constituted an organized campaign, as though any of it mattered.

Consciously and defiantly, Samantha withdrew her attention from the lot of them. She fixed her eyes on the window and the clear evening sky beyond, and she thought about Jake, the muscular boy in Libby’s favourite band. At lunchtime today, Samantha had gone out for sandwiches, and brought back a music magazine in which Jake and his bandmates were interviewed. There were lots of pictures.

‘It’s for Libby,’ Samantha had told the girl who helped her in the shop.

‘Wow, look at that. I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating toast,’ replied Carly, pointing at Jake, naked from the waist up, his head thrown back to reveal that thick strong neck. ‘Oh, but he’s only twenty-one, look. I’m not a cradle-snatcher.’

Carly was twenty-six. Samantha did not care to subtract Jake’s age from her own. She had eaten her sandwich and read the interview, and studied all the pictures. Jake with his hands on a bar above his head, biceps swelling under a black T-shirt; Jake with his white shirt open, abdominal muscles chiselled above the loose waistband of his jeans.

Samantha drank Howard’s wine and stared out at the sky above the black privet hedge, which was a delicate shade of rose pink; the precise shade her nipples had been before they had been darkened and distended by pregnancy and breast-feeding. She imagined herself nineteen to Jake’s twenty-one, slender-waisted again, taut curves in the right places, and a strong flat stomach of her own, fitting comfortably into her white, size ten shorts. She vividly recalled how it felt to sit on a young man’s lap in those shorts, with the heat and roughness of sun-warmed denim under her bare thighs, and big hands around her lithe waist. She imagined Jake’s breath on her neck; she imagined turning to look into the blue eyes, close to the high cheekbones and that firm, carved mouth …

‘… at the church hall, and we’re getting it catered by Bucknoles,’ said Howard. ‘We’ve invited everyone: Aubrey and Julia – everyone. With luck it will be a double celebration, you on the council, me, another year young …’

Samantha felt tipsy and randy. When were they going to eat? She realized that Shirley had left the room, hopefully to put food on the table.

The telephone rang at Samantha’s elbow, and she jumped. Before any of them could move, Shirley had bustled back in. She had one hand in a flowery oven glove, and picked up the receiver with the other.

‘Double-two-five-nine?’ sang Shirley on a rising inflection. ‘Oh … hello, Ruth, dear!’

Howard, Miles and Maureen became rigidly attentive. Shirley turned to look at her husband with intensity, as if she were transmitting Ruth’s voice through her eyes into her husband’s mind.

‘Yes,’ fluted Shirley. ‘Yes …’

Samantha, sitting closest to the receiver, could hear the other woman’s voice but not make out the words.

‘Oh, really …?’

Maureen’s mouth was hanging open again; she was like an ancient baby bird, or perhaps a pterodactyl, hungering for regurgitated news.

‘Yes, dear, I see … oh, that shouldn’t be a problem … no, no, I’ll explain to Howard. No, no trouble at all.’

Shirley’s small hazel eyes had not wavered from Howard’s big, popping blue ones.

‘Ruth, dear,’ said Shirley, ‘Ruth, I don’t want to worry you, but have you been on the council website today? … Well … it’s not very nice, but I think you ought to know … somebody’s posted something nasty about Simon … well, I think you’d better read it for yourself, I wouldn’t want to … all right, dear. All right. See you Wednesday, I hope. Yes. Bye bye.’

Shirley replaced the receiver.

‘She didn’t know,’ Miles stated.

Shirley shook her head.

‘Why was she calling?’

‘Her son,’ Shirley told Howard. ‘Your new potboy. He’s got a peanut allergy.’

‘Very handy, in a delicatessen,’ said Howard.

‘She wanted to ask whether you could store a needleful of adrenalin in the fridge for him, just in case,’ said Shirley.

Maureen sniffed.

‘They’ve all got allergies these days, children.’

Shirley’s ungloved hand was still clutching the receiver. She was subconsciously hoping to feel tremors down the line from Hilltop House.





V


Ruth stood alone in her lamp-lit sitting room, continuing to grip the telephone she had just replaced in its cradle.

Hilltop House was small and compact. It was always easy to tell the location of each of the four Prices, because voices, footfalls and the sounds of doors opening and shutting carried so effectively in the old house. Ruth knew that her husband was still in the shower, because she could hear the hot water boiler under the stairs hissing and clanking. She had waited for Simon to turn on the water before telephoning Shirley, worried that he might think that even her request about the EpiPen was fraternizing with the enemy.

The family PC was set up in a corner of the sitting room, where Simon could keep an eye on it, and make sure nobody was running up large bills behind his back. Ruth relinquished her grip on the phone and hurried to the keyboard.

It seemed to take a very long time to bring up the Pagford Council website. Ruth pushed her reading glasses up her nose with a trembling hand as she scanned the various pages. At last she found the message board. Her husband’s name blazed out at her, in ghastly black and white: Simon Price Unfit to Stand for Council.

She double-clicked the title, brought up the full paragraph and read it. Everything around her seemed to reel and spin.

‘Oh God,’ she whispered.

The boiler had stopped clanking. Simon would be putting on the pyjamas he had warmed on the radiator. He had already drawn the sitting-room curtains, turned on the side lamps and lit the wood-burner, so that he could come down and stretch out on the sofa to watch the news.

Ruth knew that she would have to tell him. Not doing so, letting him find out for himself, was simply not an option; she would have been incapable of keeping it to herself. She felt terrified and guilty, though she did not know why.

She heard him jogging down the stairs and then he appeared at the door in his blue brushed-cotton pyjamas.

‘Si,’ she whispered.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said, immediately irritated. He knew that something had happened; that his luxurious programme of sofa, fire and news was about to be disarranged.

She pointed at the computer monitor, one hand pressed foolishly over her mouth, like a little girl. Her terror infected him. He strode to the PC and scowled down at the screen. He was not a quick reader. He read every word, every line, painstakingly, carefully.

When he had finished, he remained quite still, passing for review, in his mind, all the likely grasses. He thought of the gum-chewing forklift driver, whom he had left stranded in the Fields when they had picked up the new computer. He thought of Jim and Tommy, who did the cash-in-hand jobs on the sly with him. Someone from work must have talked. Rage and fear collided inside him and set off a combustive reaction.

He strode to the foot of the stairs and shouted, ‘You two! Get down here NOW!’

Ruth still had her hand over her mouth. He had a sadistic urge to slap her hand away, to tell her to f*cking pull herself together, it was he who was in the shit.

Andrew entered the room first with Paul behind him. Andrew saw the arms of Pagford Parish Council onscreen, and his mother with her hand over her mouth. Walking barefoot across the old carpet, he had the sensation that he was plummeting through the air in a broken lift.

‘Someone,’ said Simon, glaring at his sons, ‘has talked about things I’ve mentioned inside this house.’

Paul had brought his chemistry exercise book downstairs with him; he was holding it like a hymnal. Andrew kept his gaze fixed on his father, trying to project an expression of mingled confusion and curiosity.

‘Who’s told other people we’ve got a stolen computer?’ asked Simon.

‘I haven’t,’ said Andrew.

Paul stared at his father blankly, trying to process the question. Andrew willed his brother to speak. Why did he have to be so slow?

‘Well?’ Simon snarled at Paul.

‘I don’t think I—’

‘You don’t think? You don’t think you told anyone?’

‘No, I don’t think I told any—’

‘Oh, this is interesting,’ said Simon, pacing up and down in front of Paul. ‘This is interesting.’

With a slap he sent Paul’s exercise book flying out of his hands.

‘Try and think, dipshit,’ he growled. ‘Try and f*cking think. Did you tell anyone we’ve got a stolen computer?’

‘Not stolen,’ said Paul. ‘I never told anyone – I don’t think I told anyone we had a new one, even.’

‘I see,’ said Simon. ‘So the news got out by magic then, did it?’

He was pointing at the computer monitor.

‘Someone’s f*cking talked!’ he yelled, ‘because it’s on the f*cking internet! And I’ll be f*cking lucky not – to – lose – my – job!’

On each of the five last words he thumped Paul on the head with his fist. Paul cowered and ducked; black liquid trickled from his left nostril; he suffered nosebleeds several times a week.

‘And what about you?’ Simon roared at his wife, who was still frozen beside the computer, her eyes wide behind her glasses, her hand clamped like a yashmak over her mouth. ‘Have you been f*cking gossiping?’

Ruth ungagged herself.

‘No, Si,’ she whispered, ‘I mean, the only person I told we had a new computer was Shirley – and she’d never—’

You stupid woman, you stupid f*cking woman, what did you have to tell him that for?

‘You did what?’ asked Simon quietly.

‘I told Shirley,’ whimpered Ruth. ‘I didn’t say it was stolen, though, Si. I only said you were bringing it home—’

‘Well, that’s f*cking it then, isn’t it?’ roared Simon; his voice became a scream. ‘Her f*cking son’s standing for election, of course she wants to get the f*cking goods on me!’

‘But she’s the one who told me, Si, just now, she wouldn’t have—’

He ran at her and hit her in the face, exactly as he had wanted to when he had first seen her silly frightened expression; her glasses spun into the air and smashed against the bookcase; he hit her again and she crashed down onto the computer table she had bought so proudly with her first month’s wages from South West General.

Andrew had made himself a promise: he seemed to move in slow motion, and everything was cold and clammy and slightly unreal.

‘Don’t hit her,’ he said, forcing himself between his parents. ‘Don’t—’

His lip split against his front tooth, Simon’s knuckle behind it, and he fell backwards on top of his mother, who was draped over the keyboard; Simon threw another punch, which hit Andew’s arms as he protected his face; Andrew was trying to get off his slumped, struggling mother, and Simon was in a frenzy, pummelling both of them wherever he could reach—

‘Don’t you f*cking dare tell me what to do – don’t you dare, you cowardly little shit, you spotty streak of piss—’

Andrew dropped to his knees to get out of the way, and Simon kicked him in the ribs. Andrew heard Paul say pathetically, ‘Stop it!’ Simon’s foot swung for Andrew’s ribcage again, but Andrew dodged it; Simon’s toes collided with the brick fireplace and he was suddenly, absurdly, howling in pain.

Andrew scrambled out of the way; Simon was gripping the end of his foot, hopping on the spot and swearing in a high-pitched voice; Ruth had collapsed into the swivel chair, sobbing into her hands. Andrew got to his feet; he could taste his own blood.

‘Anyone could have talked about that computer,’ he panted, braced for further violence; he felt braver now that it had begun, now that the fight was really on; it was waiting that told on your nerves, watching Simon’s jaw begin to jut, and hearing the urge for violence building in his voice. ‘You told us a security guard got beaten up. Anyone could have talked. It’s not us—’

‘Don’t you – f*cking little shit – I’ve broken my f*cking toe!’ Simon gasped, falling backwards into an armchair, still nursing his foot. He seemed to expect sympathy.

Andrew imagined picking up a gun and shooting Simon in the face, watching his features blast apart, his brains spattering the room.

‘And Pauline’s got her f*cking period again!’ Simon yelled at Paul, who was trying to contain the blood dripping through his fingers from his nose. ‘Get off the carpet! Get off the f*cking carpet, you little pansy!’

Paul scuttled out of the room. Andrew pressed the hem of his T-shirt to his stinging mouth.

‘What about all the cash-in-hand jobs?’ Ruth sobbed, her cheek pink from his punch, tears dripping from her chin. Andrew hated to see her humiliated and pathetic like this; but he half hated her too for landing herself in it, when any idiot could have seen … ‘It says about the cash-in-hand jobs. Shirley doesn’t know about them, how could she? Someone at the printworks has put that on there. I told you, Si, I told you you shouldn’t do those jobs, they’ve always worried the living daylights out of—’

‘F*cking shut up, you whining cow, you didn’t mind spending the money!’ yelled Simon, his jaw jutting again; and Andrew wanted to roar at his mother to stay silent: she blabbed when any idiot could have told her she should keep quiet, and she kept quiet when she might have done good by speaking out; she never learned, she never saw any of it coming.

Nobody spoke for a minute. Ruth dabbed at her eyes with the back of her hand and sniffed intermittently. Simon clutched his toe, his jaw clenched, breathing loudly. Andrew licked the blood from his stinging lip, which he could feel swelling.

‘This’ll cost me my f*cking job,’ said Simon, staring wild-eyed around the room, as if there might be somebody there he had forgotten to hit. ‘They’re already talking about f*cking redundancies. This’ll be it. This’ll—’ He slapped the lamp off the end table, but it didn’t break, merely rolled on the floor. He picked it up, tugged the lead out of the wall socket, raised it over his head and threw it at Andrew, who dodged.

‘Who’s f*cking talked?’ Simon yelled, as the lamp base broke apart on the wall. ‘Someone’s f*cking talked!’

‘It’s some bastard at the printworks, isn’t it?’ Andrew shouted back; his lip was thick and throbbing; it felt like a tangerine segment. ‘D’you think we’d have – d’you think we don’t know how to keep our mouths shut by now?’

It was like trying to read a wild animal. He could see the muscles working in his father’s jaw, but he could tell that Simon was considering Andrew’s words.

‘When was that put on there?’ he roared at Ruth. ‘Look at it! What’s the date on it?’

Still sobbing, she peered at the screen, needing to approach the tip of her nose within two inches of it, now that her glasses were broken.

‘The fifteenth,’ she whispered.

‘Fifteenth … Sunday,’ said Simon. ‘Sunday, wasn’t it?’

Neither Andrew nor Ruth put him right. Andrew could not believe his luck; nor did he believe it would hold.

‘Sunday,’ said Simon, ‘so anyone could’ve – my f*cking toe,’ he yelled, as he pulled himself up and limped exaggeratedly towards Ruth. ‘Get out of my way!’

She hastened out of the chair and watched him read the paragraph through again. He kept snorting like an animal to clear his airways. Andrew thought that he might be able to garrotte his father as he sat there, if only there was a wire to hand.

‘Someone’s got all this from work,’ said Simon, as if he had just reached this conclusion, and had not heard his wife or son urging the hypothesis on him. He placed his hands on the keyboard and turned to Andrew. ‘How do I get rid of it?’

‘What?’

‘You do f*cking computing! How do I get this off here?’

‘You can’t get – you can’t,’ said Andrew. ‘You’d need to be the administrator.’

‘Make yourself the administrator, then,’ said Simon, jumping up and pointing Andrew into the swivel chair.

‘I can’t make myself the administrator,’ said Andrew. He was afraid that Simon was working himself up into a second bout of violence. ‘You need to input the right user name and passwords.’

‘You’re a real f*cking waste of space, aren’t you?’

Simon shoved Andrew in the middle of his sternum as he limped past, knocking him back into the mantelpiece.

‘Pass me the phone!’ Simon shouted at his wife, as he sat back down in the armchair.

Ruth took the telephone and carried it the few feet to Simon. He ripped it out of her hands and punched in a number.

Andrew and Ruth waited in silence as Simon called, first Jim, and then Tommy, the men with whom he had completed the after-hours jobs at the printworks. Simon’s fury, his suspicion of his own accomplices, was funnelled down the telephone in curt short sentences full of swearwords.

Paul had not returned. Perhaps he was still trying to staunch his bleeding nose, but more likely he was too scared. Andrew thought his brother unwise. It was safest to leave only after Simon had given you permission.

His calls completed, Simon held out the telephone to Ruth without speaking; she took it and hurried it back into its stand.

Simon sat thinking while his fractured toe pulsated, sweating in the heat of the wood-burner, awash with impotent fury. The beating to which he had subjected his wife and son was nothing, he did not give them a thought; a terrible thing had just happened to him, and naturally his rage had exploded on those nearest him; that was how life worked. In any case, Ruth, the silly bitch, had admitted to telling Shirley …

Simon was building his own chain of evidence, as he thought things must have happened. Some f*cker (and he suspected that gum-chewing forklift driver, whose expression, as Simon had sped away from him in the Fields, had been outraged) talking about him to the Mollisons (somehow, illogically, Ruth’s admission that she had mentioned the computer to Shirley made this seem more likely), and they (the Mollisons, the establishment, the smooth and the snide, guarding their access to power) had put up this message on their website (Shirley, the old cow, managed the site, which set the seal on the theory).

‘It’s your f*cking friend,’ Simon told his wet-faced, trembling-lipped wife. ‘It’s your f*cking Shirley. She’s done this. She’s got some dirt on me to get me off her son’s case. That’s who it is.’

‘But Si—’

Shut up, shut up, you silly cow, thought Andrew.

‘Still on her side, are you?’ roared Simon, making to stand again.

‘No!’ squealed Ruth, and he sank back into the chair, glad to keep the weight off his pounding foot.

The Harcourt-Walsh management would not be happy about those after-hours jobs, Simon thought. He wouldn’t put it past the bloody police to come nosing around the computer. A desire for urgent action filled him.

‘You,’ he said, pointing at Andrew. ‘Unplug that computer. All of it, the leads and everything. You’re coming with me.’





VI


Things denied, things untold, things hidden and disguised.

The muddy River Orr gushed over the wreckage of the stolen computer, thrown from the old stone bridge at midnight. Simon limped to work on his fractured toe and told everyone that he had slipped on the garden path. Ruth pressed ice to her bruises and concealed them inexpertly with an old tube of foundation; Andrew’s lip scabbed over, like Dane Tully’s, and Paul had another nosebleed on the bus and had to go straight to the nurse on arrival at school.

Shirley Mollison, who had been shopping in Yarvil, did not answer Ruth’s repeated telephone calls until late afternoon, by which time Ruth’s sons had arrived home from school. Andrew listened to the one-sided conversation from the stairs outside the sitting room. He knew that Ruth was trying to take care of the problem before Simon came home, because Simon was more than capable of seizing the receiver from her and shouting and swearing at her friend.

‘… just silly lies,’ she was saying brightly, ‘but we’d be very grateful if you could remove it, Shirley.’

He scowled and the cut on his fat lip threatened to burst open again. He hated hearing his mother asking the woman for a favour. In that moment he was irrationally annoyed that the post had not been taken down already; then he remembered that he had written it, that he had caused everything: his mother’s battered face, his own cut lip and the atmosphere of dread that pervaded the house at the prospect of Simon’s return.

‘I do understand you’ve got a lot of things on …’ Ruth was saying cravenly, ‘but you can see how this might do Simon damage, if people believe …’

‘Yes.’ Ruth sounded tired. ‘She’s going to take those things about Dad off the site so, hopefully, that’ll be the end of it.’

Andrew knew his mother to be intelligent, and much handier around the house than his ham-fisted father. She was capable of earning her own living.

‘Why didn’t she take the post down straight away, if you’re friends?’ he asked, following her into the kitchen. For the first time in his life, his pity for Ruth was mingled with a feeling of frustration that amounted to anger.

‘She’s been busy,’ snapped Ruth.

One of her eyes was bloodshot from Simon’s punch.

‘Did you tell her she could be in trouble for leaving defamatory stuff on there, if she moderates the boards? We did that stuff in comput—’

‘I’ve told you, she’s taking it down, Andrew,’ said Ruth angrily.

She was not frightened of showing temper to her sons. Was it because they did not hit her, or for some other reason? Andrew knew that her face must ache as badly as his own.

‘So who d’you reckon wrote that stuff about Dad?’ he asked her recklessly.

She turned a face of fury upon him.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but whoever they are, it was a despicable, cowardly thing to do. Everyone’s got something they’d like to hide. How would it be if Dad put some of the things he knows about other people on the internet? But he wouldn’t do it.’

‘That’d be against his moral code, would it?’ said Andrew.

‘You don’t know your father as well as you think you do!’ shouted Ruth with tears in her eyes. ‘Get out – go and do your homework – I don’t care – just get out!’

Yet the deletion of the post could not remove it from the consciousness of those who were passionately interested in the forthcoming contest for Barry’s seat. Parminder Jawanda had copied the message about Simon Price onto her computer, and kept opening it, subjecting each sentence to the scrutiny of a forensic scientist examining fibres on a corpse, searching for traces of Howard Mollison’s literary DNA. He would have done all he could to disguise his distinctive phraseology, but she was sure that she recognized his pomposity in ‘Mr Price is certainly no stranger to keeping down costs’, and in ‘the benefit of his many useful contacts’.

‘Minda, you don’t know Simon Price,’ said Tessa Wall. She and Colin were having supper with the Jawandas in the Old Vicarage kitchen, and Parminder had started on the subject of the post almost the moment they had crossed the threshold. ‘He’s a very unpleasant man and he could have upset any number of people. I honestly don’t think it’s Howard Mollison. I can’t see him doing anything so obvious.’

‘Don’t kid yourself, Tessa,’ said Parminder. ‘Howard will do anything to make sure Miles is elected. You watch. He’ll go for Colin next.’

Tessa saw Colin’s knuckles whiten on his fork handle, and wished that Parminder would think before she spoke. She, of anyone, knew what Colin was like; she prescribed his Prozac.

Vikram was sitting at the end of the table in silence. His beautiful face fell naturally into a slightly sardonic smile. Tessa had always been intimidated by the surgeon, as she was by all very good-looking men. Although Parminder was one of Tessa’s best friends, she barely knew Vikram, who worked long hours and involved himself much less in Pagford matters than his wife.

‘I told you about the agenda, didn’t I?’ Parminder rattled on. ‘For the next meeting? He’s proposing a motion on the Fields, for us to pass to the Yarvil committee doing the boundary review, and a resolution on forcing the drug clinic out of their building. He’s trying to rush it all through, while Barry’s seat’s empty.’

She kept leaving the table to fetch things, opening more cupboard doors than was necessary, distracted and unfocused. Twice she forgot why she had got up, and sat down again, empty-handed. Vikram watched her, everywhere she moved, from beneath his thick eyelashes.

‘I rang Howard last night,’ Parminder said, ‘and I told him we ought to wait until we’re back up to the full complement of councillors before we vote on such big issues. He laughed; he says we can’t wait. Yarvil wants to hear our views, he said, with the boundary review coming up. What he’s really scared of is that Colin’s going to win Barry’s seat, because it won’t be so easy to foist it all on us then. I’ve emailed everyone I think will vote with us, to see if they can’t put pressure on him to delay the votes, for one meeting …

‘“The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother”,’ Parminder added breathlessly. ‘The bastard. He’s not using Barry’s death to beat him. Not if I can help it.’

Tessa thought she saw Vikram’s lips twitch. Old Pagford, led by Howard Mollison, generally forgave Vikram the crimes that it could not forget in his wife: brownness, cleverness and affluence (all of which, to Shirley Mollison’s nostrils, had the whiff of a gloat). It was, Tessa thought, grossly unfair: Parminder worked hard at every aspect of her Pagford life: school fêtes and sponsored bakes, the local surgery and the Parish Council, and her reward was implacable dislike from the Pagford old guard; Vikram, who rarely joined or participated in anything, was fawned upon, flattered and spoken of with proprietary approval.

‘Mollison’s a megalomaniac,’ Parminder said, pushing food nervously around her plate. ‘A bully and a megalomaniac.’

Vikram laid down his knife and fork and sat back in his chair.

‘So why,’ he asked, ‘is he happy being chair of the Parish Council? Why hasn’t he tried to get on the District Council?’

‘Because he thinks that Pagford is the epicentre of the universe,’ snapped Parminder. ‘You don’t understand: he wouldn’t swap being chair of Pagford Parish Council for being Prime Minister. Anyway, he doesn’t need to be on the council in Yarvil; he’s already got Aubrey Fawley there, pushing through the big agenda. All revved up for the boundary review. They’re working together.’

Parminder felt Barry’s absence like a ghost at the table. He would have explained it all to Vikram and made him laugh in the process; Barry had been a superb mimic of Howard’s speech patterns, of his rolling, waddling walk, of his sudden gastrointestinal interruptions.

‘I keep telling her, she’s letting herself get too stressed,’ Vikram told Tessa, who was appalled to find herself blushing slightly, with his dark eyes upon her. ‘You know about this stupid complaint – the old woman with emphysema?’

‘Yes, Tessa knows. Everyone knows. Do we have to discuss it at the dinner table?’ snapped Parminder, and she jumped to her feet and began clearing the plates.

Tessa tried to help, but Parminder told her crossly to stay where she was. Vikram gave Tessa a small smile of solidarity that made her stomach flutter. She could not help remembering, as Parminder clattered around the table, that Vikram and Parminder had had an arranged marriage.

(‘It’s only an introduction through the family,’ Parminder had told her, in the early days of their friendship, defensive and annoyed at something she had seen in Tessa’s face. ‘Nobody makes you marry, you know.’

But she had spoken, at other times, of the immense pressure from her mother to take a husband.

‘All Sikh parents want their kids married. It’s an obsession,’ Parminder said bitterly.)

Colin saw his plate snatched away without regret. The nausea churning in his stomach was even worse than when he and Tessa had arrived. He might have been encased in a thick glass bubble, so separate did he feel from his three dining companions. It was a sensation with which he was only too familiar, that of walking in a giant sphere of worry, enclosed by it, watching his own terrors roll by, obscuring the outside world.

Tessa was no help: she was being deliberately cool and unsympathetic about his campaign for Barry’s seat. The whole point of this supper was so that Colin could consult Parminder on the little leaflets he had produced, advertising his candidacy. Tessa was refusing to get involved, blocking discussion of the fear that was slowly engulfing him. She was refusing him an outlet.

Trying to emulate her coolness, pretending that he was not, after all, caving under self-imposed pressure, he had not told her about the telephone call from the Yarvil and District Gazette that he had received at school that day. The journalist on the end of the line had wanted to talk about Krystal Weedon.

Had he touched her?

Colin had told the woman that the school could not possibly discuss a pupil and that Krystal must be approached through her parents.

‘I’ve already talked to Krystal,’ said the voice on the end of the line. ‘I only wanted to get your—’

But he had put the receiver down, and terror had blotted out everything.

Why did they want to talk about Krystal? Why had they called him? Had he done something? Had he touched her? Had she complained?

The psychologist had taught him not to try and confirm or disprove the content of such thoughts. He was supposed to acknowledge their existence, then carry on as normal, but it was like trying not to scratch the worst itch you had ever known. The public unveiling of Simon Price’s dirty secrets on the council website had stunned him: the terror of exposure, which had dominated so much of Colin’s life, now wore a face, its features those of an ageing cherub, with a demonic brain seething beneath a deerstalker on tight grey curls, behind bulging inquisitive eyes. He kept remembering Barry’s tales of the delicatessen owner’s formidable strategic brain, and of the intricate web of alliances that bound the sixteen members of Pagford Parish Council.

Colin had often imagined how he would find out that the game was up: a guarded article in the paper; faces turned away from him when he entered Mollison and Lowe’s; the headmistress calling him into her office for a quiet word. He had visualized his downfall a thousand times: his shame exposed and hung around his neck like a leper’s bell, so that no concealment would be possible, ever again. He would be sacked. He might end up in prison.

‘Colin,’ Tessa prompted quietly; Vikram was offering him wine.

She knew what was going on inside that big domed forehead; not the specifics, but the theme of his anxiety had been constant for years. She knew that Colin could not help it; it was the way he was made. Many years before, she had read, and recognized as true, the words of W. B. Yeats: ‘A pity beyond all telling is hid at the heart of love.’ She had smiled over the poem, and stroked the page, because she had known both that she loved Colin, and that compassion formed a huge part of her love.

Sometimes, though, her patience wore thin. Sometimes she wanted a little concern and reassurance too. Colin had erupted into a predictable panic when she had told him that she had received a firm diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes, but once she had convinced him that she was not in imminent danger of dying, she had been taken aback by how quickly he dropped the subject, how completely he reimmersed himself in his election plans.

(That morning, at breakfast, she had tested her blood sugar with the glucometer for the first time, then taken out the prefilled needle and inserted it into her own belly. It had hurt much more than when deft Parminder did it.

Fats had seized his cereal bowl and swung round in his chair away from her, sloshing milk over the table, the sleeve of his school shirt and onto the kitchen floor. Colin had let out an inchoate shout of annoyance as Fats spat his mouthful of cornflakes back into his bowl, and demanded of his mother, ‘Have you got to do that at the bloody table?’

‘Don’t be so damn rude and disgusting!’ shouted Colin. ‘Sit up properly! Wipe up that mess! How dare you speak to your mother like that? Apologize!’

Tessa withdrew the needle too fast; she had made herself bleed.

‘I’m sorry that you shooting up at breakfast makes me want to puke, Tess,’ said Fats from under the table, where he was wiping the floor with a bit of kitchen roll.

‘Your mother isn’t “shooting up”, she’s got a medical condition!’ shouted Colin. ‘And don’t call her “Tess”!’

‘I know you don’t like needles, Stu,’ said Tessa, but her eyes were stinging; she had hurt herself, and felt shaken and angry with both of them, feelings that were still with her this evening.)

Tessa wondered why Parminder did not appreciate Vikram’s concern. Colin never noticed when she was stressed. Perhaps, Tessa thought angrily, there’s something in this arranged marriage business … my mother certainly wouldn’t have chosen Colin for me …

Parminder was shoving bowls of cut fruit across the table for pudding. Tessa wondered a little resentfully what she would have offered a guest who was not diabetic, and comforted herself with the thought of a bar of chocolate lying at home in the fridge.

Parminder, who had talked five times as much as anybody else all through supper, had started ranting about her daughter, Sukhvinder. She had already told Tessa on the telephone about the girl’s betrayal; she went through it all again at the table.

‘Waitressing with Howard Mollison. I don’t, I really don’t know what she’s thinking. But Vikram—’

‘They don’t think, Minda,’ Colin proclaimed, breaking his long silence. ‘That’s teenagers. They don’t care. They’re all the same.’

‘Colin, what rubbish,’ snapped Tessa. ‘They aren’t all the same at all. We’d be delighted if Stu went and got himself a Saturday job – not that there’s the remotest chance of that.’

‘—but Vikram doesn’t mind,’ Parminder pressed on, ignoring the interruption. ‘He can’t see anything wrong with it, can you?’

Vikram answered easily: ‘It’s work experience. She probably won’t make university; there’s no shame in it. It’s not for everyone. I can see Jolly married early, quite happy.’

‘Waitressing …’

‘Well, they can’t all be academic, can they?’

‘No, she certainly isn’t academic,’ said Parminder, who was almost quivering with anger and tension. ‘Her marks are absolutely atrocious – no aspiration, no ambition – waitressing – “let’s face it, I’m not going to get into uni” – no, you certainly won’t, with that attitude – with Howard Mollison … oh, he must have absolutely loved it – my daughter going cap in hand for a job. What was she thinking – what was she thinking?’

‘You wouldn’t like it if Stu took a job with someone like Mollison,’ Colin told Tessa.

‘I wouldn’t care,’ said Tessa. ‘I’d be thrilled he was showing any kind of work ethic. As far as I can tell, all he seems to care about is computer games and—’

But Colin did not know that Stuart smoked; she broke off, and Colin said, ‘Actually, this would be exactly the kind of thing Stuart would do. Insinuate himself with somebody he knew we didn’t like, to get at us. He’d love that.’

‘For goodness sake, Colin, Sukhvinder isn’t trying to get at Minda,’ said Tessa.

‘So you think I’m being unreasonable?’ Parminder shot at Tessa.

‘No, no,’ said Tessa, appalled at how quickly they had been sucked into the family row. ‘I’m just saying, there aren’t many places for kids to work in Pagford, are there?’

‘And why does she need to work at all?’ said Parminder, raising her hands in a gesture of furious exasperation. ‘Don’t we give her enough money?’

‘Money you earn yourself is always different, you know that,’ said Tessa.

Tessa’s chair faced a wall that was covered in photographs of the Jawanda children. She had sat here often, and had counted how many appearances each child made: Jaswant, eighteen; Rajpal, nineteen; and Sukhvinder, nine. There was only one photograph on the wall celebrating Sukhvinder’s individual achievements: the picture of the Winterdown rowing team on the day that they had beaten St Anne’s. Barry had given all the parents an enlarged copy of this picture, in which Sukhvinder and Krystal Weedon were in the middle of the line of eight, with their arms around each other’s shoulders, beaming and jumping up and down so that they were both slightly blurred.

Barry, she thought, would have helped Parminder see things the right way. He had been a bridge between mother and daughter, both of whom had adored him.

Not for the first time, Tessa wondered how much difference it made that she had not given birth to her son. Did she find it easier to accept him as a separate individual than if he had been made from her flesh and blood? Her glucose-heavy, tainted blood …

Fats had recently stopped calling her ‘Mum’. She had to pretend not to care, because it made Colin so angry; but every time Fats said ‘Tessa’ it was like a needle jab to her heart.

The four of them finished their cold fruit in silence.