The Casual Vacancy

to Samantha, topping up her empty glass. ‘But someone out there doesn’t care about good taste it seems, if they can put Simon Price out of the running.’
    ‘If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, Dad,’ said Miles, ‘wouldn’t they have gone for me rather than Price?’
    ‘How do you know they haven’t, Miles?’
    ‘Meaning?’ asked Miles swiftly.
    ‘Meaning,’ said Howard, the happy cynosure of all eyes, ‘that I got sent an anonymous letter about you a couple of weeks ago. Nothing specific. Just said you were unfit to fill Fairbrother’s shoes. I’d be very surprised if the letter didn’t come from the same source as the online post. The Fairbrother theme in both, you see?’
    Samantha tilted her glass a little too enthusiastically, so that wine trickled down the sides of her chin, exactly where her own ventriloquist’s doll grooves would no doubt appear in time. She mopped her face with her sleeve.
    ‘Where is this letter?’ asked Miles, striving not to look rattled.
    ‘I shredded it. It was anonymous; it didn’t count.’
    ‘We didn’t want to upset you, dear,’ said Shirley, and she patted Miles’ arm.
    ‘Anyway, they can’t have anything on you,’ Howard reassured his son, ‘or they’d have dished the dirt, the same as they have on Price.’
    ‘Simon Price’s wife is a lovely girl,’ said Shirley with gentle regret. ‘I can’t believe Ruth knows anything about it, if her husband’s been on the fiddle. She’s a friend from the hospital,’ Shirley elaborated to Maureen. ‘An agency nurse.’
    ‘She wouldn’t be the first wife who hasn’t spotted what’s going on under her nose,’ retorted Maureen, trumping insider knowledge with worldly wisdom.
    ‘Absolutely brazen, using Barry Fairbrother’s name,’ said Shirley, pretending not to have heard Maureen. ‘Not a thought for his widow, his family. All that matters is their agenda; they’ll sacrifice anything to it.’
    ‘Shows you what we’re up against,’ said Howard. He scratched the overfold of his belly, thinking. ‘Strategically, it’s smart. I saw from the get-go that Price was going to split the pro-Fields vote. No flies on Bends-Your-Ear; she’s realized it too and she wants him out.’
    ‘But,’ said Samantha, ‘it mightn’t have anything to do with Parminder and that lot at all. It could be from someone we don’t know, someone who’s got a grudge against Simon Price.’
    ‘Oh, Sam,’ said Shirley, with a tinkling laugh, shaking her head. ‘It’s easy to see you’re new to politics.’
    Oh, fuck off, Shirley.
    ‘So why have they used Barry Fairbrother’s name, then?’ asked Miles, rounding on his wife.
    ‘Well, it’s on the website, isn’t it? It’s his vacant seat.’
    ‘And who’s going to trawl through the council website for that kind of information? No,’ he said gravely, ‘this is an insider.’
    An insider … Libby had once told Samantha that there could be thousands of microscopic species inside one drop of pond water. They were all perfectly ridiculous, Samantha thought, sitting here in front of Shirley’s commemorative plates as if they were in the Cabinet Room in Downing Street, as though one bit of tittle-tattle on a Parish Council website constituted an organized campaign, as though any of it mattered.
    Consciously and defiantly, Samantha withdrew her attention from the lot of them. She fixed her eyes on the window and the clear evening sky beyond, and she thought about Jake, the muscular boy in Libby’s favourite band. At lunchtime today, Samantha had gone out for sandwiches, and brought back a music magazine in which Jake and his bandmates were interviewed. There were lots of pictures.
    ‘It’s for Libby,’ Samantha had told the girl who helped her in the shop.
    ‘Wow, look at that. I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating toast,’ replied Carly, pointing at Jake, naked from the waist up, his head thrown back to reveal that thick strong neck. ‘Oh, but he’s only twenty-one, look. I’m not a cradle-snatcher.’
    Carly was twenty-six. Samantha did not care to subtract Jake’s age from her own. She had eaten her sandwich and read the interview, and studied all the pictures. Jake with his hands on a bar above his head, biceps swelling under a black T-shirt; Jake with his white shirt open, abdominal muscles chiselled above the loose waistband of his jeans.
    Samantha drank Howard’s wine and stared out at the sky above the black privet