The Casual Vacancy (51 page)

“No, she didn’t want to come,” said Patricia. She was drinking champagne, but from her expression, it might have been vinegar. “The invitation said
Pat and guest are invited…
huge bloody row. One up to Mum.”

“Oh, Pat, come on,” said Miles, smiling.

“Oh, Pat, fucking come on what, Miles?”

A furious delight took hold of Samantha: a pretext to attack.

“That’s a bloody rude way to invite your sister’s partner and you know it, Miles. Your mother could do with some lessons in manners, if you ask me.”

He was fatter, surely, than he had been a year ago. She could see his neck bulging over the collar of his shirt. His breath went sour quickly. He had a little trick of bouncing on his toes that he had caught from his father. She experienced a surge of physical disgust and walked away to the end of the trestle table, where Andrew and Sukhvinder were busy filling and handing out glasses.

“Have you got any gin?” Samantha asked. “Give me a big one.”

She barely recognized Andrew. He poured her a measure, trying not to look at her breasts, boundlessly exposed in the T-shirt, but it was like trying not to squint in direct sunlight.

“Do you know them?” Samantha asked, after downing half a glass of gin and tonic.

A blush had risen before Andrew could marshal his thoughts. To his horror, she gave a reckless cackle, and said, “The band. I’m talking about the band.”

“Yeah, I — yeah, I’ve heard of them. I don’t…not my kind of thing.”

“Is that right?” she said, throwing back the rest of her drink. “I’ll have another one of those, please.”

She realized who he was: the mousy boy from the delicatessen. His uniform made him look older. Maybe a couple of weeks of lugging pallets up and down the cellar steps had built some muscle.

“Oh, look,” said Samantha, spotting a figure heading away from her into the growing crowd, “There’s Gavin. The second-most boring man in Pagford. After my husband, obviously.”

She strode off, pleased with herself, holding her new drink; the gin had hit her where she most needed it, anesthetizing and stimulating at the same time, and as she walked she thought:
he liked my tits; let’s see what he thinks of my arse.

Gavin saw Samantha coming and tried to deflect her by joining somebody else’s conversation, anybody’s; the nearest person was Howard and he insinuated himself hastily into the group around his host.

“I took a risk,” Howard was saying to three other men; he was waving a cigar, and a little ash had dribbled down the front of his velvet jacket. “I took a risk and I put in the graft. Simple as that. No magic formula. Nobody handed me — oh, here’s Sammy. Who are those young men, Samantha?”

While four elderly men stared at the pop group stretched across her breasts, Samantha turned to Gavin.

“Hi,” she said, leaning in and forcing him to kiss her. “Kay not here?”

“No,” said Gavin shortly.

“Talking about business, Sammy,” said Howard happily, and Samantha thought of her shop, failed and finished. “I was a self-starter,” he informed the group, reprising what was clearly an established theme. “That’s all there is to it. That’s all you need. I was a self-starter.”

Massive and globular, he was like a miniature velvety sun, radiating satisfaction and contentment. His tones were already rounded and mellowed by the brandy in his hand. “I was ready to take a risk — could’ve lost everything.”

“Well, your mum could have lost everything,” Samantha corrected him. “Didn’t Hilda mortgage her house to put up half the deposit on the shop?”

She saw the tiny flicker in Howard’s eyes, but his smile remained constant.

“All credit to my mother, then,” he said, “for working and scrimping and saving, and giving her son a start. I multiply what I was given, and I give back to the family — pay for your girls to go to St. Anne’s — what goes round, comes round, eh, Sammy?”

She expected this from Shirley, but not from Howard. Both of them drained their glasses, and Samantha watched Gavin drift away without trying to stop him.

Gavin was wondering whether it would be possible to slip out unnoticed. He was nervous, and the noise was making it worse. A horrible idea had taken possession of him since meeting Gaia at the door. What if Kay had told her daughter everything? What if the girl knew that he was in love with Mary Fairbrother, and told other people? It was the sort of thing that a vengeful sixteen-year-old might do.

The very last thing he wanted was for Pagford to know that he was in love with Mary before he had a chance to tell her himself. He had imagined doing it months and months hence, perhaps a year down the line…letting the first anniversary of Barry’s death slip by…and, in the meantime, nurturing the tiny shoots of trust and reliance that were already there, so that the reality of her feelings stole gradually upon her, as they had upon him…

“You haven’t got a drink, Gav!” said Miles. “That situation must be remedied!”

He led his partner firmly to the drinks table and poured him a beer, talking all the while, and, like Howard, giving off an almost visible glow of happiness and pride.

“You heard I won the seat?”

Gavin had not, but he did not feel equal to feigning surprise.

“Yeah. Congratulations.”

“How’s Mary?” asked Miles expansively; he was a friend to the whole town tonight, because it had elected him. “She doing OK?”

“Yeah, I think —”

“I heard she might be going to Liverpool. Might be for the best.”

“What?” said Gavin sharply.

“Maureen was saying this morning; apparently, Mary’s sister’s trying to persuade Mary to go home with the kids. She’s still got a lot of family in Liver —”

“This is her home.”

“I think it was Barry who liked Pagford. I’m not sure Mary will want to stay without him.”

Gaia was watching Gavin through a chink in the kitchen door. She was clutching a paper cup containing several fingers of the vodka that Andrew had stolen for her.

“He’s such a bastard,” she said. “We’d still be in Hackney if he hadn’t led Mum on. She’s so bloody stupid. I could have told her he wasn’t that interested. He never took her out. He couldn’t wait to leave after they’d shagged.”

Andrew, who was piling additional sandwiches on an almost empty platter behind her, could hardly believe that she was using words like shagged. The chimeric Gaia who filled his fantasies was a sexually inventive and adventurous virgin. He did not know what the real Gaia had done, or not done, with Marco de Luca. Her judgment on her mother made it sound as if she knew how men behaved after sex, if they
were
interested…

“Drink something,” she told Andrew as he approached the door with the platter, and she held up her own polystyrene cup to his lips, and he drank some of her vodka. Giggling a little, she backed away to let him out and called after him: “Make Sooks come in here and get some!”

The hall was crowded and noisy. Andrew put the pile of fresh sandwiches on the table, but interest in the food seemed to have waned; Sukhvinder was struggling to keep up with demand at the drinks table, and many people had started pouring their own.

“Gaia wants you in the kitchen,” Andrew told Sukhvinder, and he took over from her. There was no point acting like a bartender; instead, he filled as many glasses as he could find, and left them on the table for people to help themselves.

“Hi, Peanut!” said Lexie Mollison. “Can I have some champagne?”

They had been at St. Thomas’s together, but he had not seen her for a long time. Her accent had changed since she had been at St. Anne’s. He hated being called Peanut.

“It’s there in front of you,” he said, pointing.

“Lexie, you’re not drinking,” snapped Samantha, appearing out of the crowd. “Absolutely not.”

“Grandad said —”

“I don’t care.”

“Everyone else —”

“I said no!”

Lexie stomped away. Andrew, glad to see her go, smiled at Samantha, and was surprised when she beamed at him.

“Do you talk back to your parents?”

“Yeah,” he said, and she laughed. Her breasts really were enormous.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” boomed a voice through the microphone, and everyone stopped talking to listen to Howard. “Wanted to say a few words…most of you probably know by now that my son Miles has just been elected to the Parish Council!”

There was a smattering of applause and Miles raised his drink high above his head to acknowledge it. Andrew was startled to hear Samantha say quite clearly under her breath, “Hoo-fucking-ray.”

Nobody was coming for drinks now. Andrew slipped back into the kitchen. Gaia and Sukhvinder were alone in there, drinking and laughing, and when they saw Andrew they both shouted,
“Andy!”

He laughed too.

“Are you both pissed?”

“Yes,” said Gaia, and “No,” said Sukhvinder. “
She
is, though.”

“I don’t care,” said Gaia. “Mollison can sack me if he wants. No point saving up for a ticket to Hackney anymore.”

“He won’t sack you,” said Andrew, helping himself to some of the vodka. “You’re his favorite.”

“Yeah,” said Gaia. “Creepy old bastard.”

And the three of them laughed again.

Through the glass doors, amplified by the microphone, came Maureen’s croaky voice.

“Come on, then, Howard! Come on — a duet for your birthday! Go on — ladies and gentlemen — Howard’s favorite song!”

The teenagers gazed at each other in tantalized horror. Gaia tripped forward, giggling, and pushed the door open.

The first few bars of “The Green, Green Grass of Home” blared out, and then, in Howard’s bass and Maureen’s gravelly alto:

The old home town looks the same,

As I step down from the train…

Gavin was the only one who heard the giggles and snorts, but when he turned around all he saw were the double doors to the kitchen, swinging a little on their hinges.

Miles had left to chat with Aubrey and Julia Fawley, who had arrived late, wreathed in polite smiles. Gavin was in the grip of a familiar mixture of dread and anxiety. His brief sunlit haze of freedom and happiness had been overcast by the twin threats of Gaia blabbing what he had said to her mother, and of Mary leaving Pagford forever. What was he going to do?

Down the lane I walk, with my sweet Mary,

Hair of gold and lips like cherries…

“Kay not here?”

Samantha had arrived, leaning against the table beside him, smirking.

“You already asked me that,” said Gavin. “No.”

“Everything OK with you two?”

“Is that really any of your business?”

It slipped out of him before he could stop it; he was sick of her constant probing and jeering. For once, it was just the two of them; Miles was still busy with the Fawleys.

She overacted being taken aback. Her eyes were bloodshot and her speech was deliberate; for the first time, Gavin felt more dislike than intimidation.

“I’m sorry. I was only —”

“Asking. Yeah,” he said, as Howard and Maureen swayed, arm in arm.

“I’d like to see you settled down. You and Kay seemed good together.”

“Yeah, well, I like my freedom,” said Gavin. “I don’t know many happily married couples.”

Samantha had drunk too much to feel the full force of the dig, but she had the impression that one had been made.

“Marriages are always a mystery to outsiders,” she said carefully. “Nobody can ever really know except the two people involved. So you shouldn’t judge, Gavin.”

“Thanks for the insight,” he said, and irritated past endurance he set down his empty beer can and headed toward the cloakroom.

Samantha watched him leave, sure that she had had the best of the encounter, and turned her attention to her mother-in-law, whom she could see through a gap in the crowd, watching Howard and Maureen sing. Samantha relished Shirley’s anger, which was expressed in the tightest, coldest smile she had worn all evening. Howard and Maureen had performed together many a time over the years; Howard loved to sing, and Maureen had once performed backing vocals for a local skiffle band. When the song finished, Shirley clapped her hands together once; she might have been summoning a flunky, and Samantha laughed out loud and moved along to the bar end of the table, which she was disappointed to find unmanned by the boy in the bow tie.

Andrew, Gaia and Sukhvinder were still convulsed in the kitchen. They laughed because of Howard and Maureen’s duet, and because they had finished two-thirds of the vodka, but mostly they laughed because they laughed, feeding off each other until they could barely stand.

The little window over the sink, propped ajar so that the kitchen did not become too steamy, rattled and clattered, and Fats’ head appeared through it.

“Evening,” he said. Evidently he had climbed onto something outside, because, with a noise of scraping and a heavy object falling over, more and more of him emerged through the window until he landed heavily on the draining board, knocking several glasses to the ground, where they shattered.

Sukhvinder walked straight out of the kitchen. Andrew knew immediately that he did not want Fats there. Only Gaia seemed unperturbed. Still giggling, she said, “There’s a door, you know.”

“No shit?” said Fats. “Where’s the drink?”

“This is ours,” said Gaia, cradling the vodka in her arms. “Andy nicked it. You’ll have to get your own.”

“Not a problem,” said Fats coolly, and he walked through the doors into the hall.

“Need the loo…” mumbled Gaia, and she stowed the vodka bottle back under the sink, and left the kitchen too.

Andrew followed. Sukhvinder had returned to the bar area, Gaia was disappearing into the bathroom, and Fats was leaning against the trestle table with a beer in one hand and a sandwich in the other.

“Didn’t think you’d want to come to this,” said Andrew.

“I was invited, mate,” said Fats. “It was on the invitation. Whole Wall family.”

“Does Cubby know you’re here?”

“Dunno,” said Fats. “He’s in hiding. Didn’t get ol’ Barry’s seat after all. The whole social fabric’ll collapse now Cubby’s not holding it together. Fucking hell, that’s horrible,” he added, spitting out a mouthful of sandwich. “Wanna fag?”