The Casual Vacancy (26 page)

“Oh,” she said, coming to a startled halt on the threshold. “I didn’t realize you were having —”

“Gavin and Kay just dropped in,” said Samantha a little wildly. “Come in, Mary, please…have a drink…”

“Mary, this is Kay,” said Miles. “Kay, this is Mary Fairbrother.”

“Oh,” said Kay, thrown; she had thought that it would only be the four of them. “Yes, hello.”

Gavin, who could tell that Mary had not meant to drop in on a dinner party and was on the point of walking straight back out again, patted the sofa beside him; Mary sat down with a weak smile. He was overjoyed to see her. Here was his buffer; even Samantha must realize that her particular brand of prurience would be inappropriate in front of a bereaved woman; plus, the constrictive symmetry of a foursome had been broken up.

“How are you?” he said quietly. “I was going to give you a ring, actually…there’ve been developments with the insurance…”

“Haven’t we got any nibbles, Sam?” asked Miles.

Samantha walked from the room, seething at Miles. The smell of scorched meat met her as she opened the kitchen door.

“Oh shit, shit, shit…”

She had completely forgotten the casserole, which had dried out. Desiccated chunks of meat and vegetables sat, forlorn survivors of the catastrophe, on the singed bottom of the pot. Samantha sloshed in wine and stock, chiseling the adhering bits off the pan with her spoon, stirring vigorously, sweating in the heat. Miles’ high-pitched laugh rang out from the sitting room. Samantha put on long-stemmed broccoli to steam, drained her glass of wine, ripped open a bag of tortilla chips and a tub of hummus, and upended them into bowls.

Mary and Gavin were still conversing quietly on the sofa when she returned to the sitting room, while Miles was showing Kay a framed aerial photograph of Pagford, and giving her a lesson in the town’s history. Samantha set down the bowls on the coffee table, poured herself another drink and settled into the armchair, making no effort to join either conversation. It was awfully uncomfortable to have Mary there; with her grief hanging so heavily around her she might as well have walked in trailing a shroud. Surely, though, she would leave before dinner.

Gavin was determined that Mary should stay. As they discussed the latest developments in their ongoing battle with the insurance company, he felt much more relaxed and in control than he usually did in Miles and Samantha’s presence. Nobody was chipping away at him, or patronizing him, and Miles was absolving him temporarily of all responsibility for Kay.

“…and just here, just out of sight,” Miles was saying, pointing to a spot two inches past the frame of the picture, “you’ve got Sweetlove House, the Fawley place. Big Queen Anne manor house, dormers, stone quoins…stunning, you should visit, it’s open to the public on Sundays in the summer. Important family locally, the Fawleys.”

“Stone quoins?” “Important family, locally?” God, you are an arse, Miles.

Samantha hoisted herself out of her armchair and returned to the kitchen. Though the casserole was watery, the burned flavor dominated. The broccoli was flaccid and tasteless; the mashed potato cool and dry. Past caring, she decanted it all into dishes and slammed it down on the circular dining-room table.

“Dinner’s ready!” she called at the sitting-room door.

“Oh, I must go,” said Mary, jumping up. “I didn’t mean —”

“No, no, no!” said Gavin, in a tone that Kay had never heard before: kindly and cajoling. “It’ll do you good to eat — kids’ll be all right for an hour.”

Miles added his support and Mary looked uncertainly towards Samantha, who was forced to add her voice to theirs, then dashed back through into the dining room to lay another setting.

She invited Mary to sit between Gavin and Miles, because placing her next to a woman seemed to emphasize her husband’s absence. Kay and Miles had moved on to discussing social work.

“I don’t envy you,” he said, serving Kay a large ladle full of casserole; Samantha could see black, scorched flecks in the sauce spreading across the white plate. “Bloody difficult job.”

“Well, we’re perennially under-resourced,” said Kay, “but it can be satisfying, especially when you can feel you’re making a difference.”

And she thought of the Weedons. Terri’s urine sample had tested negative at the clinic yesterday and Robbie had had a full week in nursery. The recollection cheered her, counterbalancing her slight irritation that Gavin’s attention was still focused entirely on Mary; that he was doing nothing to help ease her conversation with his friends.

“You’ve got a daughter, haven’t you, Kay?”

“That’s right: Gaia. She’s sixteen.”

“Same age as Lexie; we should get them together,” said Miles.

“Divorced?” asked Samantha delicately.

“No,” said Kay. “We weren’t married. He was a university boyfriend and we split up not long after she was born.”

“Yeah, Miles and I had barely left university ourselves,” said Samantha.

Kay did not know whether Samantha meant to draw a distinction between herself, who had married the big smug father of her children, and Kay, who had been left…not that Samantha could know that Brendan had left her…

“Gaia’s taken a Saturday job with your father, actually,” Kay told Miles. “At the new café.”

Miles was delighted. He took enormous pleasure in the idea that he and Howard were so much part of the fabric of the place that everybody in Pagford was connected to them, whether as friend or client, customer or employee. Gavin, who was chewing and chewing on a bit of rubbery meat that was refusing to yield to his teeth, experienced a further lowering in the pit of his stomach. It was news to him that Gaia had taken a job with Miles’ father. Somehow he had forgotten that Kay possessed in Gaia another powerful device for anchoring herself to Pagford. When not in the immediate vicinity of her slamming doors, her vicious looks and caustic asides, Gavin tended to forget that Gaia had any independent existence at all; that she was not simply part of the uncomfortable backdrop of stale sheets, bad cooking and festering grudges against which his relationship with Kay staggered on.

“Does Gaia like Pagford?” Samantha asked.

“Well, it’s a bit quiet compared to Hackney,” said Kay, “but she’s settling in well.”

She took a large gulp of wine to wash out her mouth after disgorging the enormous lie. There had been yet another row before leaving tonight.

(“What’s the matter with you?” Kay had asked, while Gaia sat at the kitchen table, hunched over her laptop, wearing a dressing gown over her clothes. Four or five boxes of dialogue were open on the screen. Kay knew that Gaia was communicating online with the friends she had left behind in Hackney, friends she had had, in most cases, since she had been in primary school.

“Gaia?”

Refusal to answer was new and ominous. Kay was used to explosions of bile and rage against herself and, particularly, Gavin.

“Gaia, I’m talking to you.”

“I know, I can hear you.”

“Then kindly have the courtesy to answer me back.”

Black dialogue jerked upwards in the boxes on the screen, funny little icons, blinking and waggling.

“Gaia, please will you answer me?”

“What? What do you want?”

“I’m trying to ask about your day.”

“My day was shit. Yesterday was shit. Tomorrow will be shit as well.”

“When did you get home?”

“The same time I always get home.”

Sometimes, even after all these years, Gaia displayed resentment at having to let herself in, at Kay not being at home to meet her like a storybook mother.

“Do you want to tell me why your day was shit?”

“Because you dragged me to live in a shithole.”

Kay willed herself not to shout. Lately there had been screaming matches that she was sure the whole street had heard.

“You know that I’m going out with Gavin tonight?”

Gaia muttered something Kay did not catch.

“What?”

“I said, I didn’t think he liked taking you out.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

But Gaia did not answer; she simply typed a response into one of the scrolling conversations on the screen. Kay vacillated, both wanting to press her and afraid of what she might hear.

“We’ll be back around midnight, I expect.”

Gaia had not responded. Kay had gone to wait for Gavin in the hall.)

“Gaia’s made friends,” Kay told Miles, “with a girl who lives in this street; what’s her name — Narinder?”

“Sukhvinder,” said Miles and Samantha together.

“She’s a nice girl,” said Mary.

“Have you met her father?” Samantha asked Kay.

“No,” said Kay.

“He’s a heart surgeon,” said Samantha, who was on her fourth glass of wine. “Absolutely bloody gorgeous.”

“Oh,” said Kay.

“Like a Bollywood film star.”

None of them, Samantha reflected, had bothered to tell her that dinner was tasty, which would have been simple politeness, even though it was awful. If she wasn’t allowed to torment Gavin, she ought at least to be able to needle Miles.

“Vikram’s the only good thing about living in this godforsaken town, I can tell you,” said Samantha. “Sex on legs.”

“And his wife’s our local GP,” said Miles, “and a parish councillor. You’ll be employed by Yarvil District Council, Kay, are you?”

“That’s right,” said Kay. “But I spend most of my time in the Fields. They’re technically in Pagford Parish, aren’t they?”

Not the Fields,
thought Samantha.
Oh, don’t mention the bloody Fields.

“Ah,” said Miles, with a meaningful smile. “Yes, well, the Fields do belong to Pagford,
technically.
Technically, they do. Painful subject, Kay.”

“Really? Why?” asked Kay, hoping to make conversation general, because Gavin was still talking in an undertone to the widow.

“Well, you see — this is back in the fifties.” Miles seemed to be embarking on a well-rehearsed speech. “Yarvil wanted to expand the Cantermill Estate, and instead of building out to the west, where the bypass is now —”

“Gavin? Mary? More wine?” Samantha called over Miles.

“— they were a little bit duplicitous; land was bought without it being very clear what they wanted it for, and then they went and expanded the estate over the border into Pagford Parish.”

“Why aren’t you mentioning Old Aubrey Fawley, Miles?” asked Samantha. She had, at last, reached that delicious point of intoxication where her tongue became wicked and she became disengaged from fear of consequences, eager to provoke and to irritate, seeking nothing but her own amusement. “The truth is that Old Aubrey Fawley, who used to own all those lovely stone quoits, or whatever Miles was telling you about, did a deal behind everyone’s backs —”

“That’s not fair, Sam,” said Miles, but she talked over him again.

“— he flogged off the land where the Fields are built, pocketed, I don’t know, must have been a quarter of a mil or so —”

“Don’t talk rubbish, Sam, back in the fifties?”

“— but then, once he realized everyone was pissed off with him, he pretended he hadn’t known it would cause trouble. Upper-class twit. And a drunk,” added Samantha.

“
Simply
not true, I’m afraid,” Miles said firmly. “To fully understand the problem, Kay, you need to appreciate a bit of local history.”

Samantha, holding her chin in her hand, pretended to slide her elbow off the table in boredom. Though she could not like Samantha, Kay laughed, and Gavin and Mary broke off their quiet conversation.

“We’re talking about the Fields,” said Kay, in a tone intended to remind Gavin that she was there; that he ought to be giving her moral support.

Miles, Samantha and Gavin realized simultaneously that the Fields was a most tactless subject to raise in front of Mary, when they had been such a bone of contention between Barry and Howard.

“Apparently they’re a bit of a sore subject locally,” said Kay, wanting to force Gavin to express a view, to rope him in.

“Mmm,” he replied, and turning back to Mary, he said, “So how’s Declan’s football coming on?”

Kay experienced a powerful stab of fury: Mary might be recently bereaved, but Gavin’s solicitousness seemed unnecessarily pointed. She had imagined this evening quite differently: a foursome in which Gavin would have to acknowledge that they really were a couple; yet nobody looking on would imagine that they enjoyed a closer relationship than acquaintanceship. Also, the food was horrible. Kay put her knife and fork together with three-quarters of her helping untouched — an act that was not lost on Samantha — and addressed Miles again.

“Did you grow up in Pagford?”

“Afraid so,” said Miles, smiling complacently. “Born in the old Kelland Hospital along the road. They closed it in the eighties.”

“And you?” Kay asked Samantha, who cut across her.

“God, no. I’m here by accident.”

“Sorry, I don’t know what you do, Samantha?” asked Kay.

“I’ve got my own busi —”

“She sells outsize bras,” said Miles.

Samantha got up abruptly and went to fetch another bottle of wine. When she returned to the table, Miles was telling Kay the humorous anecdote, doubtless intended to illustrate how everyone knew everyone in Pagford, of how he had been pulled over in the car one night by a policeman who turned out to be a friend he had known since primary school. The blow-by-blow reenactment of the banter between himself and Steve Edwards was tediously familiar to Samantha. As she moved around the table replenishing all the glasses, she watched Kay’s austere expression; evidently, Kay did not find drink-driving a laughing matter.

“…so Steve’s holding out the Breathalyzer, and I’m about to blow in it, and out of nowhere we both start cracking up. His partner’s got no idea what the hell’s going on; he’s like this” — Miles mimed a man turning his head from side to side in astonishment — “and Steve’s bent double, pissing himself, because all we can think of is the last time he was holding something steady for me to blow into, which was nigh on twenty years ago, and —”

“It was a blow-up doll,” said Samantha, unsmiling, dropping back into her seat beside Miles. “Miles and Steve put it in their friend Ian’s parents’ beds, during Ian’s eighteenth-birthday party. Anyway, in the end Miles was fined a grand and got three points on his license, because it was the second time he’d been caught over the limit. So that was hysterically funny.”