The Casual Vacancy (35 page)

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 favor. 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…”

This, Andrew thought, was how Ruth spoke to Simon on the rare occasions when she felt obliged to challenge him: subservient, apologetic, tentative. Why did his mother not demand that the woman take down the post at once? Why was she always so craven, so apologetic?
Why did she not leave his father?

He had always seen Ruth as separate, good and untainted. As a child, his parents had appeared to him as starkly black and white, the one bad and frightening, the other good and kind. Yet as he had grown older, he kept coming up hard in his mind against Ruth’s willing blindness, to her constant apologia for his father, to the unshakable allegiance to her false idol.

Andrew heard her put down the receiver, and he continued noisily down the stairs, meeting Ruth as she left the sitting room.

“Calling the website woman?”

“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 straightaway, 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!”

Andrew returned to his bedroom hungry, because he had been heading for the kitchen to take some food, and lay for a long while on his bed, wondering whether the post had been a terrible mistake, and also wondering how badly Simon would have to injure anyone in the family before his mother realized that he recognized no moral code whatsoever.

Meanwhile, in the study of her bungalow, a mile away from Hilltop House, Shirley Mollison was trying to remember how to delete a post from the message board. Posts were so infrequent that she usually left them there for up to three years. At last she dug out of a filing cabinet in the corner the simple guide to administering the site that she had made for herself when she started, and managed, after several fumbled attempts, to remove the accusations against Simon. She did it only because Ruth, whom she liked, had asked her to; she felt no personal responsibility in the matter.

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 fibers 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 fetes 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 epicenter 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 aging cherub, with a demonic brain seething beneath a deerstalker on tight gray 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?”