The Casual Vacancy

girls glanced at her as they passed.
    ‘Tha’s Krystal Weedon’s mum,’ one of them said loudly.
    ‘The prozzie?’ the other replied at the top of her voice.
    Terri could not muster the strength to swear at them, because she was crying so hard. Snorting and giggling, the girls strode out of sight.
    ‘Whore!’ one of them called back from the end of the street.

III
    Gavin could have invited Mary into his office to discuss the most recent exchange of letters with the insurance company, but decided to visit her at home instead. He had kept the late afternoon free of appointments, on the off-chance that she might ask him to stay for something to eat; she was a fantastic cook.
    His instinctive shying away from her naked grief had been dissipated by regular contact. He had always liked Mary, but Barry had eclipsed her in company. Not that she ever appeared to dislike her supporting role; on the contrary, she had seemed delighted to beautify the background, happy laughing at Barry’s jokes, happy simply to be with him.
    Gavin doubted that Kay had ever been happy to play second fiddle in her life. Crashing the gears as he drove up Church Row, he thought that Kay would have been outraged by any suggestion that she modify her behaviour or suppress her opinions for the sake of her partner’s enjoyment, his happiness or his self-esteem.
    He did not think that he had ever been unhappier in a relationship than he was now. Even in the death throes of the affair with Lisa, there had been temporary truces, laughs, sudden poignant reminders of better times. The situation with Kay was like war. Sometimes he forgot that there was supposed to be any affection between them; did she even like him?
    They had had their worst ever argument by telephone on the morning after Miles and Samantha’s dinner party. Eventually, Kay had slammed down the receiver, cutting Gavin off. For a full twenty-four hours he had believed that their relationship was at an end, and although this was what he wanted he had experienced more fear than relief. In his fantasies, Kay simply disappeared back to London, but the reality was that she had tethered herself to Pagford with a job and a daughter at Winterdown. He faced the prospect of bumping into her wherever he went in the tiny town. Perhaps she was already poisoning the well of gossip against him; he imagined her repeating some of the things she had said to him on the telephone to Samantha, or to that nosy old woman in the delicatessen who gave him goose-flesh.
    I uprooted my daughter and left my job and moved house for you, and you treat me like a hooker you don’t have to pay.
    People would say that he had behaved badly. Perhaps he
had
behaved badly. There must have been a crucial point when he ought to have pulled back, but he had not seen it.
    Gavin spent the whole weekend brooding on how it would feel to be seen as the bad guy. He had never been in that position before. After Lisa had left him, everybody had been kind and sympathetic, especially the Fairbrothers. Guilt and dread dogged him until, on Sunday evening, he cracked and called Kay to apologize. Now he was back where he did not want to be, and he hated Kay for it.
    Parking his car in the Fairbrothers’ drive, as he had done so often when Barry was alive, he headed for the front door, noticing that somebody had mowed the lawn since he had last called. Mary answered his ring on the doorbell almost instantaneously.
    ‘Hi, how – Mary, what’s wrong?’
    Her whole face was wet, her eyes brimming with diamond-bright tears. She gulped once or twice, shook her head, and then, without quite knowing how it had happened, Gavin found himself holding her in his arms on the doorstep.
    ‘Mary? Has something happened?’
    He felt her nod. Acutely aware of their exposed position, of the open road behind him, Gavin manoeuvred her inside. She was smalland fragile in his arms; her fingers clutched at him, her face pressed into his coat. He relinquished his briefcase as gently as he could, but the sound of it hitting the floor made her withdraw from him, her breath short as she covered her mouth with her hands.
    ‘I’m sorry … I’m sorry … oh
God
, Gav …’
    ‘What’s happened?’
    His voice sounded different from usual: forceful, take command, more like the way Miles sometimes talked in a crisis at work.
    ‘Someone’s put … I don’t … someone’s put Barry’s …’
    She beckoned him into the home office, cluttered, shabby and