The Casual Vacancy

of wakefulness punctuated by snatches of restless sleep. At four in the morning, he had realized that his wife was awake too, and they had talked quietly for a while in the darkness. Even as they discussed what they had been forced to witness, each trying to drive out vague feelings of fright and shock, feathery little ripples of excitement had tickled Miles’ insides at the thought of delivering the news to his father. He had intended to wait until seven, but fear that somebody else might beat him to it had propelled him to the telephone early.
    ‘What’s happened?’ boomed Howard’s voice, with a slightly tinny edge; Miles had put him on speakerphone for Samantha’s benefit. Mahogany brown in her pale pink dressing gown, she had taken advantage of their early waking to apply another handful of Self-Sun to her fading natural tan. The kitchen was full of the mingled smells of instant coffee and synthetic coconut.
    ‘Fairbrother’s dead. Collapsed at the golf club last night. Sam and I were having dinner at the Birdie.’
    ‘Fairbrother’s
dead
?’ roared Howard.
    The inflection implied that he had been expecting some dramatic change in the status of Barry Fairbrother, but that even he had not anticipated actual death.
    ‘Collapsed in the car park,’ repeated Miles.
    ‘Good God,’ said Howard. ‘He wasn’t much past forty, was he? Good God.’
    Miles and Samantha listened to Howard breathing like a blown horse. He was always short of breath in the mornings.
    ‘What was it? Heart?’
    ‘Something in his brain, they think. We went with Mary to the hospital and—’
    But Howard was not paying attention. Miles and Samantha heard him speaking away from his mouthpiece.
    ‘Barry Fairbrother! Dead! It’s Miles!’
    ‘Sam and I went in the ambulance,’ Miles enunciated clearly. ‘With Mary and the body.’
    Samantha noticed how Miles’ second version emphasized what you might call the more commercial aspect of the story. Samantha did not blame him. Their reward for enduring the awful experience was the right to tell people about it. She did not think she would ever forget it: Mary wailing; Barry’s eyes still half open above the muzzle-like mask; she and Miles trying to read the paramedic’s expression; the cramped jolting; the dark windows; the terror.
    ‘Good God,’ said Howard for the third time, ignoring Shirley’s soft background questioning, his attention all Miles’. ‘He just dropped down dead in the car park?’
    ‘Yep,’ said Miles. ‘Moment I saw him it was pretty obvious there was nothing to be done.’
    It was his first lie, and he turned his eyes away from his wife as he told it. She remembered his big protective arm around Mary’s shaking shoulders:
He’ll be OK … he’ll be OK …
    But after all
, thought Samantha, giving Miles his due,
how were you supposed to know one way or the other, when they were strapping on masks and shoving in needles?
It had seemed as though they were trying to save Barry, and none of them had known for certain that it was no good until the young doctor had walked towards Mary at the hospital. Samantha could still see, with awful clarity, Mary’s naked, petrified face, and the expression of the bespectacled, sleek-haired young woman in the white coat: composed, yet a little wary … they showed that sort of thing on television dramas all the time, but when it actually happened …
    ‘Not at all,’ Miles was saying. ‘Gavin was only playing squash with him on Thursday.’
    ‘And he seemed all right then?’
    ‘Oh yeah. Thrashed Gavin.’
    ‘Good God. Just goes to show you, doesn’t it? Just goes to show. Hang on, Mum wants a word.’
    A clunk and a clatter, and Shirley’s soft voice came on the line.
    ‘What a dreadful shock, Miles,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’
    Samantha took a clumsy mouthful of coffee; it trickled from the corners of her mouth down the sides of her chin, and she mopped her face and chest with her sleeve. Miles had adopted the voice he often used when speaking to his mother: deeper than usual, a take-command nothing-fazes-me voice, punchy and no-nonsense. Sometimes, especially when drunk, Samantha would imitate Miles and Shirley’s conversations. ‘Not to worry, Mummy. Miles here. Your little soldier.’ ‘Darling, you are wonderful: so big and brave and clever.’ Once or twice, lately, Samantha had done this in front of other people, leaving Miles cross and defensive, though pretending to laugh. There had