The Casual Vacancy

remotely inclined to ease her passage into Pagford social life.
    ‘I must say, the Fields are pretty rough,’ she said, reverting to the subject with which Miles seemed most comfortable, and still ignorant that it was in any way inauspicious within Mary’s vicinity. ‘I’ve worked in the inner cities; I didn’t expect to see that kind of deprivation in a rural area, but it’s not all that different from London. Less of an ethnic mix, of course.’
    ‘Oh, yes, we’ve got our share of addicts and wasters,’ said Miles. ‘I think that’s about all I can manage, Sam,’ he added, pushing his plate away from him with a sizeable amount of food still on it.
    Samantha started to clear the table; Mary got up to help.
    ‘No, no, it’s fine, Mary, you relax,’ Samantha said. To Kay’s annoyance, Gavin jumped up too, chivalrously insisting on Mary’s sitting back down, but Mary insisted too.
    ‘That was lovely, Sam,’ said Mary, in the kitchen, as they scraped most of the food into the bin.
    ‘No, it wasn’t, it was horrible,’ said Samantha, who was only appreciating how drunk she was now that she was on her feet. ‘What do you think of Kay?’
    ‘I don’t know. She’s not what I expected,’ said Mary.
    ‘She’s exactly what I expected,’ said Samantha, taking out plates for pudding. ‘She’s another Lisa, if you ask me.’
    ‘Oh, no, don’t say that,’ said Mary. ‘He deserves someone nice this time.’
    This was a most novel point of view to Samantha, who was of the opinion that Gavin’s wetness merited constant punishment.
    They returned to the dining room to find an animated conversation in progress between Kay and Miles, while Gavin sat in silence.
    ‘… offload responsibility for them, which seems to me to be a pretty self-centred and self-satisfied—’
    ‘Well, I think it’s interesting that you use the word “responsibility”,’ said Miles, ‘because I think that goes to the very heart of the problem, doesn’t it? The question is, where exactly do we draw the line?’
    ‘Beyond the Fields, apparently.’ Kay laughed, with condescension. ‘You want to draw a line neatly between the home-owning middle classes and the lower—’
    ‘Pagford’s full of working-class people, Kay; the difference is, most of them
work.
D’you know what proportion of the Fields lives off benefits? Responsibility, you say: what happened to personal responsibility? We’ve had them through the local school for years: kids who haven’t got a single worker in the family; the concept of earning a living is completely foreign to them; generations of non-workers, and we’re expected to subsidize them—’
    ‘So your solution is to shunt off the problem onto Yarvil,’ said Kay, ‘not to engage with any of the underlying—’
    ‘Mississippi mud pie?’ called Samantha.
    Gavin and Mary took slices with thanks; Kay, to Samantha’s fury, simply held out her plate as though Samantha were a waitress, her attention all on Miles.
    ‘… the addiction clinic, which is absolutely crucial, and which certain people are apparently lobbying to close—’
    ‘Oh, well, if you’re talking about Bellchapel,’ said Miles, shaking his head and smirking, ‘I hope you’ve mugged up on what the success rates are, Kay. Pathetic, frankly, absolutely pathetic. I’ve seen the figures, I was going through them this morning, and I won’t lie to you, the sooner they close—’
    ‘And the figures you’re talking about are …?’
    ‘Success rates, Kay, exactly what I said: the number of people who have actually stopped using drugs, gone clean—’
    ‘I’m sorry, but that’s a very naive point of view; if you’re going to judge success purely—’
    ‘But how on earth else are we supposed to judge an addiction clinic’s success?’ demanded Miles, incredulous. ‘As far as I can tell, all they do at Bellchapel is dole out methadone, which half of their clients use alongside heroin anyway.’
    ‘The whole problem of addiction is immensely complicated,’ said Kay, ‘and it’s naive and simplistic to put the problem purely in terms of users and non …’
    But Miles was shaking his head, smiling; Kay, who had beenenjoying her verbal duel with this self-satisfied lawyer, was suddenly angry.
    ‘Well, I can give you a very concrete example of what Bellchapel’s doing: one family I’m working with – mother, teenage daughter and small son – if the mother wasn’t on methadone, she’d be on the