The Casual Vacancy

bags through and set to work preparing a casserole and her fall-back pudding, Mississippi mud pie. She would have liked to buy one of Mollison and Lowe’s large gateaux, to save herself some work, but it would have got straight back to Shirley, who frequently intimated that Samantha was over-reliant on frozen food and ready meals.
    Samantha knew the boy band DVD so well by now that she was able to visualize the images matching the music blaring through to the kitchen. Several times that week, while Miles was upstairs in his home study or on the telephone to Howard, she had watched it again. When she heard the opening bars of the track where the muscular boy walked, with his shirt flapping open, along the beach, she went through to watch in her apron, absent-mindedly sucking her chocolatey fingers.
    She had planned on having a long shower while Miles laid the table, forgetting that he would be late home, because he had to drive into Yarvil to pick up the girls from St Anne’s. When Samantha realized why he had not returned, and that their daughters would be with him when he did, she had to fly around to organize the dining room herself, then find something to feed Lexie and Libby before the guests arrived. Miles found his wife in her work clothes at half-past seven, sweaty, cross and inclined to blame him for what had been her own idea.
    Fourteen-year-old Libby marched into the sitting room without greeting Samantha and removed the disc from the DVD player.
    ‘Oh, good, I was wondering what I’d done with that,’ she said. ‘Why’s the TV on? Have you been
playing
it?’
    Sometimes, Samantha thought that her younger daughter had a look of Shirley about her.
    ‘I was watching the news, Libby. I haven’t got time to watch DVDs. Come through, your pizza’s ready. We’ve got people coming round.’
    ‘Frozen pizza
again
?’
    ‘Miles! I need to change. Can you mash the potatoes for me? Miles?’
    But he had disappeared upstairs, so Samantha pounded the potatoes herself, while her daughters ate at the island in the middle of the kitchen. Libby had propped the DVD cover against her glass of Diet Pepsi, and was ogling it.
    ‘Mikey’s
so lush
,’ she said, with a carnal groan that took Samantha aback; but the muscular boy was called Jake. Samantha was glad they did not like the same one.
    Loud and confident Lexie was jabbering about school; a machine-gun torrent of information about girls whom Samantha did not know, with whose antics and feuds and regroupings she could not keep up.
    ‘All right, you two, I’ve got to change. Clear away when you’re done, all right?’
    She turned down the heat under the casserole and hurried upstairs. Miles was buttoning up his shirt in the bedroom, watching himself in the wardrobe mirror. The whole room smelt of soap and aftershave.
    ‘Everything under control, hon?’
    ‘Yes, thanks. So glad you’ve had time to shower,’ spat Samantha, pulling out her favourite long skirt and top, slamming the wardrobe door.
    ‘You could have one now.’
    ‘They’ll be here in ten minutes; I won’t have time to dry my hair and put on make-up.’ She kicked off her shoes; one of them hit the radiator with a loud clang. ‘When you’ve finished preening, could you please go downstairs and sort out drinks?’
    After Miles had left the room, she tried to untangle her thick hair and repair her make-up. She looked awful. Only when she had changed did she realize that she was wearing the wrong bra for her clinging top. After a frantic search, she remembered that the right one was drying in the utility room; she hurried out onto the landing but the doorbell rang. Swearing, she scuttled back to the bedroom. The boy band’s music was blaring out of Libby’s room.
    Gavin and Kay had arrived on the dot of eight because Gavin was afraid of what Samantha might say if they turned up late; he could imagine her suggesting that they had lost track of time because they were shagging or that they must have had a row. She seemed to think that one of the perks of marriage was that it gave you rights of comment and intrusion over single people’s love lives. She also thought that her crass, uninhibited way of talking, especially when drunk, constituted trenchant humour.
    ‘Hello-ello-ello,’ said Miles, moving back to let Gavin and Kay inside. ‘Come in, come in. Welcome to Casa Mollison.’
    He kissed Kay on both cheeks and relieved her of the chocolates she was holding.
    ‘For us? Thanks very