The Casual Vacancy (22 page)

But Kay seemed to consider them more in the light of a down payment on a renegotiated contract.
You missed me. You needed me when you were upset. You’re sorry we didn’t go as a couple.
Well, let’s not make that mistake again.
There had been a certain complacency about the way she had treated him since; a briskness, a sense of renewed expectation.

He was making spaghetti Bolognese tonight; he had deliberately omitted to buy a pudding or to lay the table in advance; he was at pains to show her that he had not made much of an effort. Kay seemed oblivious, even determined to take this casual attitude as a compliment. She sat at his small kitchen table, talking to him over the pitter-patter of rain on the skylight, her eyes wandering over the fixtures and fittings. She had not often been here.

“I suppose Lisa chose this yellow, did she?”

She was doing it again: breaking taboos, as though they had recently passed to a deeper level of intimacy. Gavin preferred not to talk about Lisa if he could avoid it; surely she knew that by now? He shook oregano onto the mince in his frying pan and said, “No, this was all the previous owner. I haven’t got round to changing it yet.”

“Oh,” she said, sipping wine. “Well, it’s quite nice. A bit bland.”

This rankled with Gavin, as, in his opinion, the interior of the Smithy was superior in every way to that of ten Hope Street. He watched the pasta bubbling, keeping his back to her.

“Guess what?” she said. “I met Samantha Mollison this afternoon.”

Gavin wheeled around; how did Kay even know what Samantha Mollison looked like?

“Just outside the deli in the Square; I was on my way in to get this,” said Kay, clinking the wine bottle beside her with a flick of her nail. “She asked me whether I was
Gavin’s girlfriend
.”

Kay said it archly, but actually she had been heartened by Samantha’s choice of words, relieved to think that this was how Gavin described her to his friends.

“And what did you say?”

“I said — I said yes.”

Her expression was crestfallen. Gavin had not meant to ask the question quite so aggressively. He would have given a lot to prevent Kay and Samantha ever meeting.

“Anyway,” Kay proceeded with a slight edge to her voice, “She’s asked us for dinner next Friday. Week today.”

“Oh, bloody hell,” said Gavin crossly.

A lot of Kay’s cheerfulness deserted her.

“What’s the problem?”

“Nothing. It’s — nothing,” he said, prodding the bubbling spaghetti. “It’s just that I see enough of Miles during work hours, to be honest.”

It was what he had dreaded all along: that she would worm her way in and they would become Gavin-and-Kay, with a shared social circle, so that it would become progressively more difficult to excise her from his life. How had he let this happen? Why had he allowed her to move down here? Fury at himself mutated easily into anger with her. Why couldn’t she realize how little he wanted her, and take herself off without forcing him to do the dirty? He drained the spaghetti in the sink, swearing under his breath as he speckled himself with boiling water.

“You’d better call Miles and Samantha and tell them ‘no,’ then,” said Kay.

Her voice had hardened. As was Gavin’s deeply ingrained habit, he sought to deflect an imminent conflict and hoped that the future would look after itself.

“No, no,” he said, dabbing at his wet shirt with a tea towel. “We’ll go. It’s fine. We’ll go.”

But in his undisguised lack of enthusiasm, he sought to put down a marker to which he could refer, retrospectively.
You knew I didn’t want to go. No, I didn’t enjoy it. No, I don’t want it to happen again.

They ate for several minutes in silence. Gavin was afraid that there would be another row, and that Kay would force him to discuss underlying issues again. He cast around for something to say, and so started telling her about Mary Fairbrother and the life insurance company.

“They’re being real bastards,” he said. “He was heavily insured, but their lawyers are looking for a way not to pay out. They’re trying to make out he didn’t make a full disclosure.”

“In what way?”

“Well, an uncle died of an aneurysm, too. Mary swears Barry told the insurance agent that when he signed the policy, but it’s nowhere in the notes. Presumably the bloke didn’t realize it can be a genetic thing. I don’t know that Barry did, come to…”

Gavin’s voice broke. Horrified and embarrassed, he bowed his flushing face over his plate. There was a hard chunk of grief in his throat and he couldn’t shift it. Kay’s chair legs scraped on the floor; he hoped that she was off to the bathroom, but then felt her arms around his shoulders, drawing him to her. Without thinking, he put a single arm around her, too.

It was so good to be held. If only their relationship could be distilled into simple, wordless gestures of comfort. Why had humans ever learned to talk?

He had dribbled snot onto the back of her top.

“Sorry,” he said thickly, wiping it away with his napkin.

He withdrew from her and blew his nose. She dragged her chair to sit beside him and put a hand on his arm. He liked her so much better when she was silent, and her face was soft and concerned, as it was now.

“I still can’t…he was a good bloke,” he said. “Barry. He was a good bloke.”

“Yes, everyone says that about him,” said Kay.

She had never been allowed to meet this famous Barry Fairbrother, but she was intrigued by the show of emotion from Gavin, and by the person who had caused it.

“Was he funny?” she asked, because she could imagine Gavin in thrall to a comedian, to a rowdy ringleader, propping up the bar.

“Yeah, I s’pose. Well, not particularly. Normal. He liked a laugh but he was just such a…such a
nice
bloke. He liked people, you know?”

She waited, but Gavin did not seem able to elucidate further on the niceness of Barry.

“And the kids…and Mary…poor Mary…God, you’ve got no idea.”

Kay continued to pat his arm gently, but her sympathy had chilled a little. No idea, she thought, what it was to be alone? No idea how hard it was to be left in sole charge of a family? Where was his pity for her, Kay?

“They were really happy,” said Gavin, in a cracked voice. “She’s in pieces.”

Wordlessly, Kay stroked his arm, reflecting that she had never been able to afford to go to pieces.

“I’m all right,” he said, wiping his nose on his napkin and picking up his fork. By the smallest of twitches, he indicated that she should remove her hand.

IV

Samantha’s dinner invitation to Kay had been motivated by a mixture of vengefulness and boredom. She saw it as retaliation against Miles, who was always busy with schemes in which he gave her no say but with which he expected her to cooperate; she wanted to see how he liked it when she arranged things without consulting him. Then she would be stealing a march on Maureen and Shirley, those nosy old crones, who were so fascinated by Gavin’s private affairs but knew next to nothing about the relationship between him and his London girlfriend. Finally, it would afford her another opportunity to sharpen her claws on Gavin for being pusillanimous and indecisive about his love life: she might talk about weddings in front of Kay or say how nice it was to see Gavin making a commitment at last.

However, her plans for the discomfiture of others gave Samantha less pleasure than she had hoped. When on Saturday morning she told Miles what she had done, he reacted with suspicious enthusiasm.

“Great, yeah, we haven’t had Gavin round for ages. And nice for you to get to know Kay.”

“Why?”

“Well, you always got on with Lisa, didn’t you?”

“Miles, I hated Lisa.”

“Well, OK…maybe you’ll like Kay better!”

She glared at him, wondering where all this good humor was coming from. Lexie and Libby, home for the weekend and cooped up in the house because of the rain, were watching a music DVD in the sitting room; a guitar-laden ballad blared through to the kitchen where their parents stood talking.

“Listen,” said Miles, brandishing his mobile, “Aubrey wants to have a talk with me about the council. I’ve just called Dad, and the Fawleys have invited us all to dinner tonight at Sweetlove —”

“No thanks,” said Samantha, cutting him off. She was suddenly full of a fury she could barely explain, even to herself. She walked out of the room.

They argued in low voices all over the house through the day, trying not to spoil their daughters’ weekend. Samantha refused to change her mind or to discuss her reasons. Miles, afraid of getting angry at her, was alternately conciliatory and cold.

“How do you think it’s going to look if you don’t come?” he said at ten to eight that evening, standing in the doorway of the sitting room, ready to leave, wearing a suit and tie.

“It’s nothing to do with me, Miles,” Samantha said. “You’re the one running for office.”

She liked watching him dither. She knew that he was terrified of being late, yet wondering whether he could still persuade her to go with him.

“You know they’ll be expecting both of us.”

“Really? Nobody sent me an invitation.”

“Oh, come off it, Sam, you know they meant — they took it for granted —”

“More fool them, then. I’ve told you, I don’t fancy it. You’d better hurry. You don’t want to keep Mummy and Daddy waiting.”

He left. She listened to the car reversing out of the drive, then went into the kitchen, opened a bottle of wine and brought it back into the sitting room with a glass. She kept picturing Howard, Shirley and Miles all having dinner together at Sweetlove House. It would surely be the first orgasm Shirley had had in years.

Her thoughts swerved irresistibly to what her accountant had said to her during the week. Profits were way down, whatever she had pretended to Howard. The accountant had actually suggested closing the shop and concentrating on the online side of the business. This would be an admission of failure that Samantha was not prepared to make. For one thing, Shirley would love it if the shop closed; she had been a bitch about it from the start.
I’m sorry, Sam, it’s not really my taste…just a teeny bit over the top…
But Samantha loved her little red and black shop in Yarvil; loved getting away from Pagford every day, chatting to customers, gossiping with Carly, her assistant. Her world would be tiny without the shop she had nurtured for fourteen years; it would contract, in short, to Pagford.

(Pagford, bloody Pagford. Samantha had never meant to live here. She and Miles had planned a year out before starting work, a round-the-world trip. They had their itinerary mapped out, their visas ready. Samantha had dreamed about walking barefoot and hand in hand on long white Australian beaches. And then she had found out that she was pregnant.

She had come down to visit him at “Ambleside,” a day after she had taken the pregnancy test, one week after their graduation. They were supposed to be leaving for Singapore in eight days’ time.

Samantha had not wanted to tell Miles in his parents’ house; she was afraid that they would overhear. Shirley seemed to be behind every door Samantha opened in the bungalow.

So she waited until they were sitting at a dark corner table in the Black Canon. She remembered the rigid line of Miles’ jaw when she told him; he seemed, in some indefinable way, to become older as the news hit him.

He did not speak for several petrified seconds. Then he said, “Right. We’ll get married.”

He told her that he had already bought her a ring, that he had been planning to propose somewhere good, somewhere like the top of Ayers Rock. Sure enough, when they got back to the bungalow, he unearthed the little box from where he had already hidden it in his rucksack. It was a small solitaire diamond from a jeweler’s in Yarvil; he had bought it with some of the money his grandmother had left him. Samantha had sat on the edge of Miles’ bed and cried and cried. They had married three months later.)

Alone with her bottle of wine, Samantha turned on the television. It brought up the DVD Lexie and Libby had been watching: a frozen image of four young men singing to her in tight T-shirts; they looked barely out of their teens. She pressed play. After the boys finished their song, the DVD cut to an interview. Samantha slugged back her wine, watching the band joking with each other, then becoming earnest as they discussed how much they loved their fans. She thought that she would have known them as Americans even if the sound had been off. Their teeth were perfect.

It grew late; she paused the DVD, went upstairs and told the girls to leave the PlayStation and go to bed; then she returned to the sitting room, where she was three-quarters of the way down the bottle of wine. She had not turned on the lamps. She pressed play and kept drinking. When the DVD finished, she put it back to the beginning and watched the bit she had missed.

One of the boys appeared significantly more mature than the other three. He was broader across the shoulders; biceps bulged beneath the short sleeves of his T-shirt; he had a thick strong neck and a square jaw. Samantha watched him undulating, staring into the camera with a detached serious expression on his handsome face, which was all planes and angles and winged black eyebrows.

She thought of sex with Miles. It had last happened three weeks previously. His performance was as predictable as a Masonic handshake. One of his favorite sayings was “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.”

Samantha emptied the last of the bottle into her glass and imagined making love to the boy on the screen. Her breasts looked better in a bra these days; they spilled everywhere when she lay down; it made her feel flabby and awful. She pictured herself, forced back against a wall, one leg propped up, a dress pushed up to her waist and that strong dark boy with his jeans round his knees, thrusting in and out of her…

With a lurch in the pit of her stomach that was almost like happiness, she heard the car turning back into the drive and the beams of the headlights swung around the dark sitting room.

She fumbled with the controls to turn over to the news, which took her much longer than it ought to have done; she shoved the empty wine bottle under the sofa and clutched her almost empty glass as a prop. The front door opened and closed. Miles entered the room behind her.