The Casual Vacancy
long-stemmed broccoli to steam, drained her glass of wine, ripped open a bag of tortilla chips and a tub of hummus, and upended them into bowls.
Mary and Gavin were still conversing quietly on the sofa when she returned to the sitting room, while Miles was showing Kay a framed aerial photograph of Pagford, and giving her a lesson in the town’s history. Samantha set down the bowls on the coffee table, poured herself another drink and settled into the armchair, making no effort to join either conversation. It was awfully uncomfortable to have Mary there; with her grief hanging so heavily around her she might as well have walked in trailing a shroud. Surely, though, she would leave before dinner.
Gavin was determined that Mary should stay. As they discussed the latest developments in their ongoing battle with the insurance company, he felt much more relaxed and in control than he usuallydid in Miles and Samantha’s presence. Nobody was chipping away at him, or patronizing him, and Miles was absolving him temporarily of all responsibility for Kay.
‘… and just here, just out of sight,’ Miles was saying, pointing to a spot two inches past the frame of the picture, ‘you’ve got Sweetlove House, the Fawley place. Big Queen Anne manor house, dormers, stone quoins … stunning, you should visit, it’s open to the public on Sundays in the summer. Important family locally, the Fawleys.’
‘Stone quoins?’ ‘Important family, locally?’ God, you are an arse, Miles.
Samantha hoisted herself out of her armchair and returned to the kitchen. Though the casserole was watery, the burnt flavour dominated. The broccoli was flaccid and tasteless; the mashed potato cool and dry. Past caring, she decanted it all into dishes and slammed it down on the circular dining-room table.
‘Dinner’s ready!’ she called at the sitting-room door.
‘Oh, I must go,’ said Mary, jumping up. ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘No, no, no!’ said Gavin, in a tone that Kay had never heard before: kindly and cajoling. ‘It’ll do you good to eat – kids’ll be all right for an hour.’
Miles added his support and Mary looked uncertainly towards Samantha, who was forced to add her voice to theirs, then dashed back through into the dining room to lay another setting.
She invited Mary to sit between Gavin and Miles, because placing her next to a woman seemed to emphasize her husband’s absence. Kay and Miles had moved on to discussing social work.
‘I don’t envy you,’ he said, serving Kay a large ladle full of casserole; Samantha could see black, scorched flecks in the sauce spreading across the white plate. ‘Bloody difficult job.’
‘Well, we’re perennially under-resourced,’ said Kay, ‘but it can be satisfying, especially when you can feel you’re making a difference.’
And she thought of the Weedons. Terri’s urine sample had tested negative at the clinic yesterday and Robbie had had a full week in nursery. The recollection cheered her, counterbalancing her slight irritation that Gavin’s attention was still focused entirely on Mary; that he was doing nothing to help ease her conversation with his friends.
‘You’ve got a daughter, haven’t you, Kay?’
‘That’s right: Gaia. She’s sixteen.’
‘Same age as Lexie; we should get them together,’ said Miles.
‘Divorced?’ asked Samantha delicately.
‘No,’ said Kay. ‘We weren’t married. He was a university boyfriend and we split up not long after she was born.’
‘Yeah, Miles and I had barely left university ourselves,’ said Samantha.
Kay did not know whether Samantha meant to draw a distinction between herself, who had married the big smug father of her children, and Kay, who had been left … not that Samantha could know that Brendan had left her …
‘Gaia’s taken a Saturday job with your father, actually,’ Kay told Miles. ‘At the new café.’
Miles was delighted. He took enormous pleasure in the idea that he and Howard were so much part of the fabric of the place that everybody in Pagford was connected to them, whether as friend or client, customer or employee. Gavin, who was chewing and chewing on a bit of rubbery meat that was refusing to yield to his teeth, experienced a further lowering in the pit of his stomach. It was news to him that Gaia had taken a job with Miles’ father. Somehow he had forgotten that Kay possessed in Gaia another powerful device for anchoring herself to Pagford. When not in the immediate
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