The Casual Vacancy

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 aspectof her Pagford life: school fêtes 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 epicentre 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,’