The Casual Vacancy

IV


Nobody was answering their telephone. Back in the Child Protection team’s room, Kay had been punching in numbers on and off for nearly two hours, leaving messages, asking everyone to call her back: the Weedons’ health visitor, their family doctor, the Cantermill Nursery and the Bellchapel Addiction Clinic. Terri Weedon’s file lay open on the desk in front of her, bulging and battered.

‘Using again, is she?’ said Alex, one of the women with whom Kay shared an office. ‘Bellchapel’ll kick her out for good this time. She claims she’s terrified Robbie’ll be taken off her, but she can’t keep off the smack.’

‘It’s the third time she’s been through Bellchapel,’ said Una.

On the basis of what she had seen that afternoon, Kay thought the time was right for a case review, to pull together those professionals who shared responsibility for individual fragments of Terri Weedon’s life. She continued to press redial between dealing with other work, while in the corner of the office their own telephone rang repeatedly and clicked immediately onto the answering machine. The Child Protection team’s room was cramped and cluttered, and it smelt of spoilt milk, because Alex and Una had a habit of emptying the dregs of their coffee cups into the pot of a depressed-looking yucca plant in the corner.

Mattie’s most recent notes were untidy and chaotic, peppered with crossings out, misdated and partial. Several key documents were missing from the file, including a letter sent by the addiction clinic a fortnight previously. It was quicker to ask Alex and Una for information.

‘Last case review woulda been …’ said Alex, frowning at the yucca plant, ‘over a year ago, I reckon.’

‘And they thought Robbie was OK to stay with her then, obviously,’ said Kay, the receiver pressed between ear and shoulder as she tried and failed to find the notes of the review in the bulging folder.

‘It wasn’t a case of him staying with her; it was whether he was going to go back to her or not. He was put out to a foster mother, because Terri was beaten up by a client and ended up in hospital. She got clean, got out, and was mad to get Robbie back. She went back on the Bellchapel programme, she was off the game and makin’ a proper effort. Her mother was saying she’d help. So she got him home and a few months later she’d started shooting up again.’

‘It’s not Terri’s mother who helps, though, is it?’ said Kay, whose head was starting to ache, as she tried to decipher Mattie’s big, untidy writing. ‘It’s her grandmother, the kids’ great-grandmother. So she must be knocking on, and Terri said something about her being ill, this morning. If Terri’s the only carer now …’

‘The daughter’s sixteen,’ said Una. ‘She mostly takes care of Robbie.’

‘Well, she’s not doing a great job,’ said Kay. ‘He was in a pretty bad state when I got there this morning.’

But she had seen far worse: welts and sores, gashes and burns, tar-black bruises; scabies and nits; babies lying on carpets covered in dog shit; kids crawling on broken bones; and once (she dreamed of it, still), a child who had been locked in a cupboard for five days by his psychotic stepfather. That one had made the national news. The most immediate danger to Robbie Weedon’s safety had been the pile of heavy boxes in his mother’s sitting room, which he had attempted to climb when he realized that it attracted Kay’s full attention. Kay had carefully restacked them into two lower piles before leaving. Terri had not liked her touching the boxes; nor had she liked Kay telling her that she ought to take off Robbie’s sodden nappy. Terri had been roused, in fact, to foul-mouthed, though still slightly hazy, fury, and had told Kay to f*ck off and stay away.

Kay’s mobile rang and she picked it up. It was Terri’s key drug worker.

‘I’ve been trying to get you for days,’ said the woman crossly. It took several minutes for Kay to explain that she was not Mattie, but this did not much reduce the woman’s antagonism.

‘Yeah, we’re still seeing her, but she tested positive last week. If she uses again, she’s out. We’ve got twenty people right now who could take her place on the programme and maybe get some benefit from it. This is the third time she’s been through.’

Kay did not say she knew that Terri had used that morning.

‘Have either of you got any paracetamol?’ Kay asked Alex and Una, once the drug worker had given her full details of Terri’s attendance and lack of progress at the clinic, and rung off.

Kay took her painkillers with tepid tea, lacking the energy to get up and go to the water cooler in the corridor. The office was stuffy, the radiator cranked up high. As the daylight faded from the sky outside, the strip-lighting over her desk intensified: it turned her multitude of papers a bright yellow-white; buzzing black words marched in endless lines.

‘They’re going to close down Bellchapel Clinic, you watch,’ said Una, who was working at her PC with her back to Kay. ‘Got to make cuts. Council funds one of the drug workers. Pagford Parish owns the building. I heard they’re planning to tart it up and try and rent to a better-paying client. They’ve had it in for that clinic for years.’

Kay’s temple throbbed. The name of her new hometown made her feel sad. Without pausing to think, she did the thing that she had vowed not to do after he had failed to call the previous evening: she picked up her mobile and keyed in Gavin’s office number.

‘Edward Collins and Co,’ said a woman’s voice, after the third ring. They answered your calls immediately out in the private sector, when money might depend on it.

‘Could I speak to Gavin Hughes, please?’ said Kay, staring down at Terri’s file.

‘Who’s speaking, please?’

‘Kay Bawden,’ said Kay.

She did not look up; she did not want to catch either Alex’s or Una’s eyes. The pause seemed interminable.

(They had met in London at Gavin’s brother’s birthday party. Kay had not known anyone there, except for the friend who had dragged her along for support. Gavin had just split up with Lisa; he had been a little drunk, but had seemed decent, reliable and conventional, not at all the kind of man that Kay usually went for. He had poured out the story of his broken relationship, and then gone home with her to the flat in Hackney. He had been keen while the affair remained long-distance, visiting at weekends and telephoning her regularly; but when, by a miracle, she had got the job in Yarvil, for less money, and put her flat in Hackney on the market, he had seemed to take fright … )

‘His line’s still busy, would you like to hold?’

‘Yes, please,’ said Kay miserably.

(If she and Gavin did not work out … but they had to work out. She had moved for him, changed jobs for him, uprooted her daughter for him. He would never have let that happen, surely, unless his intentions were serious? He must have thought through the consequences if they split up: how awful and awkward it would be, running across each other constantly in a tiny town like Pagford?)

‘Putting you through,’ said the secretary, and Kay’s hopes soared.

‘Hi,’ said Gavin. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine,’ lied Kay, because Alex and Una were listening. ‘Are you having a good day?’

‘Busy,’ said Gavin. ‘You?’

‘Yes.’

She waited, the phoned pressed tightly against her ear, pretending that he was speaking to her, listening to the silence.

‘I wondered whether you wanted to meet up tonight,’ she asked finally, feeling sick.

‘Er … I don’t think I can,’ he said.

How can you not know? What have you got on?

‘I might have to do something … it’s Mary. Barry’s wife. She wants me to be a pall-bearer. So I might have to … I think I’ve got to find out what that involves and everything.’

Sometimes, if she simply remained quiet, and let the inadequacy of his excuses reverberate on the air, he became ashamed and backtracked.

‘I don’t suppose that’ll take all evening, though,’ he said. ‘We could meet up later, if you wanted.’

‘All right, then. Do you want to come over to mine, as it’s a school night?’

‘Er … yeah, OK.’

‘What time?’ she asked, wanting him to make one decision.

‘I dunno … nine-ish?’

After he had rung off, Kay kept the phone pressed tightly to her ear for a few moments, then said, for the benefit of Alex and Una, ‘I do, too. See you later, babe.’





V


As guidance teacher, Tessa’s hours varied more than her husband’s. She usually waited until the end of the school day to take their son home in her Nissan, leaving Colin (whom Tessa – although she knew what the rest of the world called him, including nearly all the parents who had caught the habit from their children – never addressed as Cubby) to follow them, an hour or two later, in his Toyota. Today, though, Colin met Tessa in the car park at twenty-past four, while the schoolchildren were still swarming out of the front gates into parental cars, or onto their free buses.

The sky was a cold iron-grey, like the underside of a shield. A sharp breeze lifted the hems of skirts and rattled the leaves on the immature trees; a spiteful, chill wind that sought out your weakest places, the nape of your neck and your knees, and which denied you the comfort of dreaming, of retreating a little from reality. Even after she had closed the car door on it, Tessa felt ruffled and put out, as she would have been by somebody crashing into her without apology.

Beside her in the passenger seat, his knees absurdly high in the cramped confines of her car, Colin told Tessa what the computing teacher had come to his office to tell him, twenty minutes previously.

‘… not there. Didn’t turn up for the whole double period. Said he thought he’d better come straight and tell me. So that’ll be all over the staff room, tomorrow. Exactly what he wants,’ said Colin furiously, and Tessa knew that they were not talking about the computing teacher any more. ‘He’s just sticking two fingers up at me, as usual.’

Her husband was pale with exhaustion, with shadows beneath his reddened eyes, and his hands were twitching slightly on the handle of his briefcase. Fine hands, with big knuckles and long slender fingers, they were not altogether dissimilar from their son’s. Tessa had pointed this out to her husband and son recently; neither had evinced the smallest pleasure at the thought that there was some faint physical resemblance between them.

‘I don’t think he’s—’ began Tessa, but Colin was talking again.

‘—So, he’ll get detention like everyone else and I’ll damn well punish him at home too. We’ll see how he likes that, shall we? We’ll see whether that’s a laughing matter. We can start by grounding him for a week, we’ll see how funny that is.’

Biting back her response, Tessa scanned the sea of black-clad students, walking with heads down, shivering, drawing their thin coats close, their hair blown into their mouths. A chubby-cheeked and slightly bewildered-looking first year was looking all around for a lift that had not arrived. The crowd parted and there was Fats, loping along with Arf Price as usual, the wind blowing his hair off his gaunt face. Sometimes, at certain angles, in certain lights, it was easy to see what Fats would look like as an old man. For an instant, from the depths of her tiredness, he seemed a complete stranger, and Tessa thought how extraordinary it was that he was turning away to walk towards her car, and that she would have to go back out into that horrible hyper-real breeze to let him in. But when he reached them, and gave her his small grimace of a smile, he reconstituted himself immediately into the boy she loved in spite of it all, and she got out again, and stood stoically in the knife-sharp wind while he folded himself into the car with his father, who had not offered to move.

They pulled out of the car park, ahead of the free buses, and set off through Yarvil, past the ugly, broken-down houses of the Fields, towards the bypass that would speed them back to Pagford. Tessa watched Fats in the rear-view mirror. He was slumped in the back, gazing out of the window, as though his parents were two people who had picked him up hitchhiking, connected to him merely by chance and proximity.

Colin waited until they reached the bypass; then he asked, ‘Where were you when you should have been in computing this afternoon?’

Tessa glanced irresistibly into the mirror again. She saw her son yawn. Sometimes, even though she denied it endlessly to Colin, Tessa wondered whether Fats really was waging a dirty, personal war on his father with the whole school as audience. She knew things about her son she would not have known if she had not worked in guidance; students told her things, sometimes innocently, sometimes slyly.

Miss, do you mind Fats smoking? D’you let him do it at home?

She locked away this small repository of illicit booty, obtained unintentionally, and brought it to neither her husband’s nor her son’s attention, even though it dragged at her, weighed on her.

‘Went for a walk,’ Fats said calmly. ‘Thought I’d stretch the old legs.’

Colin twisted in his seat to look at Fats, straining against his seat belt as he shouted, his gestures further restricted and hampered by his overcoat and briefcase. When he lost control, Colin’s voice rose higher and higher, so that he was shouting almost in falsetto. Through it all, Fats sat in silence, an insolent half-smile curving his thin mouth, until his father was screaming insults at him, insults that were blunted by Colin’s innate dislike of swearing, his self-consciousness when he did it.

‘You cocky, self-centred little … little shit,’ he screamed, and Tessa, whose eyes were so full of tears that she could barely see the road, was sure that Fats would be duplicating Colin’s timid, falsetto swearing for the benefit of Andrew Price tomorrow morning.

Fats does a great imitation of Cubby’s walk, miss, have you seen it?

‘How dare you talk to me like that? How dare you skip classes?’

Colin screamed and raged, and Tessa had to blink the tears out of her eyes as she took the turning to Pagford and drove through the Square, past Mollison and Lowe, the war memorial and the Black Canon; she turned left at St Michael and All Saints into Church Row, and, at last, into the driveway of their house, by which time Colin had shouted himself into squeaky hoarseness and Tessa’s cheeks were glazed and salty. When they all got out, Fats, whose expression had not altered a whit during his father’s long diatribe, let himself in through the front door with his own key, and proceeded upstairs at a leisurely pace without looking back.

Colin threw his briefcase down in the dark hall and rounded on Tessa. The only illumination came from the stained-glass panel over the front door, which cast strange colours over his agitated, domed and balding head, half bloody, half ghostly blue.

‘D’you see?’ he cried, waving his long arms, ‘D’you see what I’m dealing with?’

‘Yes,’ she said, taking a handful of tissues from the box on the hall table and mopping her face, blowing her nose. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘Not a thought in his head for what we’re going through!’ said Colin, and he started to sob, big whooping dry sobs, like a child with croup. Tessa hurried forward and put her arms around Colin’s chest, a little above his waist, for, short and stout as she was, that was the highest bit she could reach. He stooped, clinging to her; she could feel his trembling, and the heaving of his rib cage under his coat.

After a few minutes, she gently disengaged herself, led him into the kitchen and made him a pot of tea.

‘I’m going to take a casserole up to Mary’s,’ said Tessa, after she had sat for a while, stroking his hand. ‘She’s got half the family there. We’ll get an early night, once I’m back.’

He nodded and sniffed, and she kissed him on the side of his head before heading out to the freezer. When she came back, carrying the heavy, icy dish, he was sitting at the table, cradling his mug in his big hands, his eyes closed.

Tessa set down the casserole, wrapped in a polythene bag, on the tiles beside the front door. She pulled on the lumpy green cardigan she often wore instead of a jacket, but did not put on her shoes. Instead, she tiptoed upstairs to the landing and then, taking less trouble to be quiet, up the second flight to the loft conversion.

A swift burst of rat-like activity greeted her approach to the door. She knocked, giving Fats time to hide whatever it was he had been looking at online, or, perhaps, the cigarettes he did not know she knew about.

‘Yeah?’

She pushed open the door. Her son was crouching stagily over his school bag.

‘Did you have to play truant today, of all days?’

Fats straightened up, long and stringy; he towered over his mother.

‘I was there. I came in late. Bennett didn’t notice. He’s useless.’

‘Stuart, please. Please.’

She wanted to shout at the kids at work, sometimes, too. She wanted to scream, You must accept the reality of other people. You think that reality is up for negotiation, that we think it’s whatever you say it is. You must accept that we are as real as you are; you must accept that you are not God.

‘Your father’s very upset, Stu. Because of Barry. Can’t you understand that?’

‘Yes,’ said Fats.

‘I mean, it’s like Arf dying would be to you.’

He did not respond, nor did his expression alter much, yet she sensed his disdain, his amusement.

‘I know you think you and Arf are very different orders of being to the likes of your father and Barry—’

‘No,’ said Fats, but only, she knew, in the hope of ending the conversation.

‘I’m going to take some food over to Mary’s house. I am begging you, Stuart, not to do anything else to upset your father while I’m gone. Please, Stu.’

‘Fine,’ he said, with half a laugh, half a shrug. She felt his attention swooping, swallow-like, back to his own concerns, even before she had closed the door.





VI


The spiteful wind blew away the low-hanging cloud of late afternoon and, at sunset, died out. Three houses along from the Walls’, Samantha Mollison sat facing her lamp-lit reflection in the dressing-table mirror, and found the silence and the stillness depressing.

It had been a disappointing couple of days. She had sold virtually nothing. The sales rep from Champêtre had turned out to be a jowly man with an abrasive manner and a hold-all full of ugly bras. Apparently he reserved his charm for the preliminaries, for in person he was all business, patronizing her, criticizing her stock, pushing for an order. She had been imagining somebody younger, taller and sexier; she had wanted to get him and his garish underwear out of her little shop as quickly as possible.

She had bought a ‘with deepest sympathy’ card for Mary Fairbrother that lunchtime, but could not think what to write in it, because, after their nightmare journey to the hospital together, a simple signature did not seem enough. Their relationship had never been close. You bumped up against each other all the time in a place as small as Pagford, but she and Miles had not really known Barry and Mary. If anything, it might have been said that they were in opposing camps, what with Howard and Barry’s endless clashes about the Fields … not that she, Samantha, gave a damn one way or another. She held herself above the smallness of local politics.

Tired, out of sorts and bloated after a day of indiscriminate snacking, she wished that she and Miles were not going to dinner at her parents-in-law’s. Watching herself in the mirror, she put her hands flat against the sides of her face and pulled the skin gently back towards her ears. A younger Samantha emerged by millimetres. Turning her face slowly from side to side, she examined this taut mask. Better, much better. She wondered what it would cost; how much it would hurt; whether she would dare. She tried to imagine what her mother-in-law would say if she appeared with a firm new face. Shirley and Howard were, as Shirley frequently reminded them, helping to pay for their granddaughters’ education.

Miles entered the bedroom; Samantha released her skin and picked up her under-eye concealer, tilting her head back, as she always did when applying make-up: it pulled the slightly sagging skin at her jaw taut and minimized the pouches under her eyes. There were short, needle-deep lines at the edges of her lips. These could be filled, she had read, with a synthetic, injectable compound. She wondered how much difference that would make; it would surely be cheaper than a facelift, and perhaps Shirley would not notice. In the mirror over her shoulder, she saw Miles pulling off his tie and shirt, his big belly spilling over his work trousers.

‘Weren’t you meeting someone today? Some rep?’ he asked. Idly he scratched his hairy navel, staring into the wardrobe.

‘Yes, but it wasn’t any good,’ said Samantha. ‘Crappy stuff.’

Miles enjoyed what she did; he had grown up in a home where retail was the only business that mattered, and he had never lost the respect for commerce that Howard had instilled in him. Then there were all the opportunities for jokes, and for other less subtly disguised forms of self-congratulation that her line of trade afforded. Miles never seemed to tire of making the same old quips or the same sly allusions.

‘Bad fit?’ he enquired knowledgeably.

‘Bad design. Horrible colours.’

Samantha brushed and tied back her thick dry brown hair, watching Miles in the mirror as he changed into chinos and a polo shirt. She was on edge, feeling that she might snap or cry at the smallest provocation.

Evertree Crescent was only a few minutes away, but Church Row was steep, so they drove. Darkness was falling properly, and at the top of the road they passed a shadowy man with Barry Fairbrother’s silhouette and gait; it gave Samantha a shock and she glanced back at him, wondering who he could be. Miles’ car turned left at the top of the road, then, barely a minute later, right, into the half-moon of 1930s bungalows.

Howard and Shirley’s house, a low, wide-windowed building of red brick, boasted generous sweeps of green lawn at the front and back, which were mown into stripes during the summer by Miles. During the long years of their occupancy, Howard and Shirley had added carriage lamps, a white wrought-iron gate and terracotta pots full of geraniums on either side of the front door. They had also put up a sign beside the doorbell, a round, polished piece of wood on which was written, in old Gothic black lettering complete with quotation marks, ‘Ambleside’.

Samantha was sometimes cruelly witty at the expense of her parents-in-law’s house. Miles tolerated her jibes, accepting the implication that he and Samantha, with their stripped-back floors and doors, their rugs on bare boards, their framed art prints and their stylish, uncomfortable sofa, had the better taste; but in his secret soul he preferred the bungalow in which he had grown up. Nearly every surface was covered with something plushy and soft; there were no draughts and the reclining chairs were deliciously comfortable. After he mowed the lawn in the summer, Shirley would bring him a cool beer while he lay back in one of them, watching the cricket on the widescreen TV. Sometimes one of his daughters would come with him and sit beside him, eating ice cream with chocolate sauce especially made for her granddaughters by Shirley.

‘Hello, darling,’ said Shirley, when she opened the door. Her short, compact shape suggested a neat little pepper pot, in its sprigged apron. She stood on tiptoe for her tall son to kiss her, then said, ‘Hello, Sam,’ and turned away immediately. ‘Dinner’s nearly ready. Howard! Miles and Sam are here!’

The house smelt of furniture polish and good food. Howard emerged from the kitchen, a bottle of wine in one hand, a corkscrew in the other. In a practised move, Shirley backed smoothly into the dining room, enabling Howard, who took up almost the entire width of the hall, to pass, before she trotted into the kitchen.

‘Here they are, the good Samaritans,’ boomed Howard. ‘And how’s the brassière business, Sammy? Breasting the recession all right?’

‘Business is surprisingly bouncy, actually, Howard,’ said Samantha.

Howard roared with laughter, and Samantha was sure that he would have patted her on the bottom if he had not been holding the corkscrew and bottle. She tolerated all of her father-in-law’s little squeezes and slaps as the harmless exhibitionism of a man grown too fat and old to do anything more; in any case, it annoyed Shirley, which always pleased Samantha. Shirley never showed her displeasure openly; her smile did not flicker, nor did her tone of sweet reasonableness falter, but within a short time of any of Howard’s mild lewdnesses, she always tossed a dart, hidden in a feathery flourish, at her daughter-in-law. Mention of the girls’ escalating school fees, solicitous enquiries about Samantha’s diet, asking Miles whether he did not think Mary Fairbrother had an awfully pretty figure; Samantha endured it all, smiling, and punished Miles for it later.

‘Hello, Mo!’ said Miles, preceding Samantha into what Howard and Shirley called the lounge. ‘Didn’t know you were going to be here!’

‘Hello, handsome,’ said Maureen, in her deep, gravelly voice. ‘Give me a kiss.’

Howard’s business partner was sitting in a corner of the sofa, clutching a tiny glass of sherry. She was wearing a fuchsia pink dress with dark stockings and high patent-leather heels. Her jet-black hair was heavily lacquered into a bouffant, beneath which her face was pale and monkeyish, with a thick smear of shocking pink lipstick that puckered as Miles bent low to kiss her cheek.

‘Been talking business. Plans for the new café. Hello, Sam, sweetheart,’ Maureen added, patting the sofa beside her. ‘Oh, you are lovely and tanned, is that still from Ibiza? Come sit down by me. What a shock for you at the golf club. It must have been ghastly.’

‘Yes, it was,’ said Samantha.

And for the first time she found herself telling somebody the story of Barry’s death, while Miles hovered, looking for a chance to interrupt. Howard handed out large glasses of Pinot Grigio, paying close attention to Samantha’s account. Gradually, in the glow of Howard and Maureen’s interest, with the alcohol kindling a comforting fire inside her, the tension Samantha had carried with her for two days seemed to drain away and a fragile sense of well-being blossomed.

The room was warm and spotless. Shelving units on either side of the gas fire displayed an array of ornamental china, nearly all of it commemorating some royal landmark or anniversary of the reign of Elizabeth II. A small bookcase in the corner contained a mixture of royal biographies and the glossy cookbooks that had overrun the kitchen. Photographs adorned the shelves and walls: Miles and his younger sister Patricia beamed from a twin frame in matching school uniforms; Miles and Samantha’s two daughters, Lexie and Libby, were represented over and again from babyhood to teens. Samantha figured only once in the family gallery, though in one of the largest and most prominent pictures. It showed her and Miles’ wedding day sixteen years before. Miles was young and handsome, piercing blue eyes crinkled at the photographer, whereas Samantha’s eyes were closed in a half blink, her face was turned sideways, her chin was doubled by her smile at a different lens. The white satin of her dress strained across breasts already swollen with her early pregnancy, making her look huge.

One of Maureen’s thin claw-like hands was playing with the chain she always wore around her neck, on which hung a crucifix and her late husband’s wedding ring. When Samantha reached the point in her story where the doctor told Mary that there was nothing they could do, Maureen put her free hand on Samantha’s knee and squeezed.

‘Dishing up!’ called Shirley. Though she had not wanted to come, Samantha felt better than she had in two days. Maureen and Howard were treating her like a mixture of heroine and invalid, and both of them patted her gently on the back as she passed them on her way into the dining room.

Shirley had turned down the dimmer switch, and lit long pink candles to match the wallpaper and the best napkins. The steam rising from their soup plates in the gloom made even Howard’s wide, florid face look otherworldly. Having drunk almost to the bottom of her big wine glass, Samantha thought how funny it would be if Howard announced that they were about to hold a séance, to ask Barry for his own account of the events at the golf club.

‘Well,’ said Howard, in a deep voice, ‘I think we ought to raise our glasses to Barry Fairbrother.’

Samantha tipped back her glass quickly, to stop Shirley seeing that she had already downed most of its contents.

‘It was almost certainly an aneurysm,’ announced Miles, the instant the glasses had landed back on the tablecloth. He had withheld this information even from Samantha, and he was glad, because she might have squandered it just now, while talking to Maureen and Howard. ‘Gavin phoned Mary to give the firm’s condolences and touch base about the will, and Mary confirmed it. Basically, an artery in his head swelled up and burst’ (he had looked up the term on the internet, once he had found out how to spell it, back in his office after speaking to Gavin). ‘Could have happened at any time. Some sort of inborn weakness.’

‘Ghastly,’ said Howard; but then he noticed that Samantha’s glass was empty, and heaved himself out of his chair to top it up. Shirley drank soup for a while with her eyebrows hovering near her hairline. Samantha slugged down more wine in defiance.

‘D’you know what?’ she said, her tongue slightly unwieldy, ‘I thought I saw him on the way here. In the dark. Barry.’

‘I expect it was one of his brothers,’ said Shirley dismissively. ‘They’re all alike.’

But Maureen croaked over Shirley, drowning her out.

‘I thought I saw Ken, the evening after he died. Clear as day, standing in the garden, looking up at me through the kitchen window. In the middle of his roses.’

Nobody responded; they had heard the story before. A minute passed, full of nothing but soft slurps, then Maureen spoke again with her raven’s caw.

‘Gavin’s quite friendly with the Fairbrothers, isn’t he, Miles? Doesn’t he play squash with Barry? Didn’t he, I should say.’

‘Yeah, Barry thrashed him once a week. Gavin must be a lousy player; Barry had ten years on him.’

Near identical expressions of complacent amusement touched the candlelit faces of the three women around the table. If nothing else, they had in common a slightly perverse interest in Miles’ stringy young business partner. In Maureen’s case, this was merely a manifestation of her inexhaustible appetite for all the gossip of Pagford, and the goings-on of a young bachelor were prime meat. Shirley took a particular pleasure in hearing all about Gavin’s inferiorities and insecurities, because these threw into delicious contrast the achievements and self-assertion of the twin gods of her life, Howard and Miles. But in the case of Samantha, Gavin’s passivity and caution awoke a feline cruelty; she had a powerful desire to see him slapped awake, pulled into line or otherwise mauled by a feminine surrogate. She bullied him a little in person whenever they met, taking pleasure in the conviction that he found her overwhelming, hard to handle.

‘So how are things going, these days,’ asked Maureen, ‘with his lady friend from London?’

‘She’s not in London any more, Mo. She’s moved into Hope Street,’ said Miles. ‘And if you ask me, he’s regretting he ever went near her. You know Gavin. Born with cold feet.’

Miles had been a few years above Gavin at school, and there was forever a trace of the sixth-form prefect in the way he spoke about his business partner.

‘Dark girl? Very short hair?’

‘That’s her,’ said Miles. ‘Social worker. Flat shoes.’

‘Then we’ve had her in the deli, haven’t we, How?’ said Maureen excitedly. ‘I wouldn’t have had her down as much of a cook, though, not by the look of her.’

Roast loin of pork followed the soup. With the connivance of Howard, Samantha was sliding gently towards contented drunkenness, but something in her was making forlorn protests, like a man swept out to sea. She attempted to drown it in more wine.

A pause rolled out across the table like a fresh tablecloth, pristine and expectant, and this time everybody seemed to know that it was for Howard to set out the new topic. He ate for a while, big mouthfuls washed down with wine, apparently oblivious to their eyes upon him. Finally, having cleared half his plate, he dabbed at his mouth with his napkin and spoke.

‘Yes, it will be interesting to see what happens on council now.’ He was forced to pause to suppress a powerful burp; for a moment he looked as if he might be sick. He thumped his chest. ‘Pardon me. Yes. It’ll be very interesting indeed. With Fairbrother gone’ – business-like, Howard reverted to the form of the name he habitually used – ‘I can’t see his article for the paper coming off. Unless Bends-Your-Ear takes it on, obviously,’ he added.

Howard had dubbed Parminder Jawanda ‘Bends-Your-Ear Bhutto’ after her first attendance as a parish councillor. It was a popular joke among the anti-Fielders.

‘The look on her face,’ said Maureen, addressing Shirley. ‘The look on her face, when we told her. Well … I always thought … you know …’

Samantha pricked up her ears, but Maureen’s insinuation was surely laughable. Parminder was married to the most gorgeous man in Pagford: Vikram, tall and well made, with an aquiline nose, eyes fringed with thick black lashes, and a lazy, knowing smile. For years, Samantha had tossed back her hair and laughed more often than necessary whenever she paused in the street to pass the time of day with Vikram, who had the same kind of body Miles had had before he had given up rugby and become soft and paunchy.

Samantha had heard somewhere, not long after they had become her neighbours, that Vikram and Parminder had had an arranged marriage. She had found this idea unspeakably erotic. Imagine being ordered to marry Vikram, having to do it; she had wrought a little fantasy in which she was veiled and shown into a room, a virgin condemned to her fate … Imagine looking up, and knowing you were getting that … Not to mention the additional frisson of his job: that much responsibility would have given a much uglier man sex appeal …

(Vikram had performed Howard’s quadruple bypass, seven years previously. In consequence, Vikram could not enter Mollison and Lowe without being subjected to a barrage of jocular banter.

‘To the head of the queue, please, Mr Jawanda! Move aside, please, ladies – no, Mr Jawanda, I insist – this man saved my life, patched up the old ticker – what will it be, Mr Jawanda, sir?’

Howard always insisted that Vikram take free samples and a little extra of everything he bought. In consequence, Samantha suspected, of these antics, Vikram almost never entered the delicatessen any more.)

She had lost the thread of the conversation, but it did not matter. The others were still droning on about something that Barry Fairbrother had written to the local paper.

‘… was going to have to talk to him about it,’ boomed Howard. ‘It was a very underhand way of doing things. Well, well, that’s water under the bridge now.

‘What we should be thinking about is who’s going to replace Fairbrother. We shouldn’t underestimate Bends-Your-Ear, however upset she might be. That would be a great mistake. She’s probably trying to rustle up somebody already, so we ought to be thinking about a decent replacement ourselves. Sooner rather than later. Simple matter of good governance.’

‘What will that mean, exactly?’ Miles asked. ‘An election?’

‘Possibly,’ said Howard, with a judicious air, ‘but I doubt it. It’s only a casual vacancy. If there isn’t enough interest in an election – though, as I say, we must not underestimate Bends-Your-Ear – but if she can’t raise nine people to propose a public vote, it’ll be a simple question of co-opting a new councillor. In that case, we’d need nine members’ votes to get the co-option ratified. Nine’s the quorum. Three years of Fairbrother’s term of office left to run. Worth it. Could swing the whole thing, putting one of our side in, instead of Fairbrother.’

Howard drummed his thick fingers against the bowl of his wine glass, looking at his son across the table. Both Shirley and Maureen were watching Miles too, and Miles, Samantha thought, was looking back at his father like a big fat Labrador, quivering in expectation of a treat.

A beat later than she would have done if she had been sober, Samantha realized what this was all about, and why a strangely celebratory air hung over the table. Her intoxication had been liberating, but all of a sudden it was restrictive, for she was not sure that her tongue would be wholly biddable after more than a bottle of wine and a long stretch of silence. She therefore thought the words, rather than speaking them aloud.

You’d better bloody well tell them you’ll need to discuss it with me first, Miles.