J. Rowling - The Casual Vacancy

‘In what way?’

‘Well, an uncle died of an aneurysm, too. Mary swears Barry told the insurance agent that when he signed the policy, but it’s nowhere in the notes. Presumably the bloke didn’t realize it can be a genetic thing. I don’t know that Barry did, come to…’

Gavin’s voice broke. Horrified and embarrassed, he bowed his flushing face over his plate. There was a hard chunk of grief in his throat and he couldn’t shift it. Kay’s chair legs scraped on the floor; he hoped that she was off to the bathroom, but then felt her arms around his shoulders, drawing him to her. Without thinking, he put a single arm around her, too.

It was so good to be held. If only their relationship could be distilled into simple, wordless gestures of comfort. Why had humans ever learned to talk?

He had dribbled snot onto the back of her top.

‘Sorry,’ he said thickly, wiping it away with his napkin.

He withdrew from her and blew his nose. She dragged her chair to sit beside him and put a hand on his arm. He liked her so much better when she was silent, and her face was soft and concerned, as it was now.

‘I still can’t… he was a good bloke,’ he said. ‘Barry. He was a good bloke.’

‘Yes, everyone says that about him,’ said Kay.

She had never been allowed to meet this famous Barry Fairbrother, but she was intrigued by the show of emotion from Gavin, and by the person who had caused it.

‘Was he funny?’ she asked, because she could imagine Gavin in thrall to a comedian, to a rowdy ringleader, propping up the bar.

‘Yeah, I s’pose. Well, not particularly. Normal. He liked a laugh… but he was just such a… such a nice bloke. He liked people, you know?’

She waited, but Gavin did not seem able to elucidate further on the niceness of Barry.

‘And the kids… and Mary… poor Mary… God, you’ve got no idea.’

Kay continued to pat his arm gently, but her sympathy had chilled a little. No idea, she thought, what it was to be alone? No idea how hard it was to be left in sole charge of a family? Where was his pity for her, Kay?

‘They were really happy,’ said Gavin, in a cracked voice. ‘She’s in pieces.’

Wordlessly, Kay stroked his arm, reflecting that she had never been able to afford to go to pieces.

‘I’m all right,’ he said, wiping his nose on his napkin and picking up his fork. By the smallest of twitches, he indicated that she should remove her hand.

Samantha’s dinner invitation to Kay had been motivated by a mixture of vengefulness and boredom. She saw it as retaliation against Miles, who was always busy with schemes in which he gave her no say but with which he expected her to co-operate; she wanted to see how he liked it when she arranged things without consulting him. Then she would be stealing a march on Maureen and Shirley, those nosy old crones, who were so fascinated by Gavin’s private affairs but knew next to nothing about the relationship between him and his London girlfriend. Finally, it would afford her another opportunity to sharpen her claws on Gavin for being pusillanimous and indecisive about his love life: she might talk about weddings in front of Kay or say how nice it was to see Gavin making a commitment at last.

However, her plans for the discomfiture of others gave Samantha less pleasure than she had hoped. When on Saturday morning she told Miles what she had done, he reacted with suspicious enthusiasm.

‘Great, yeah, we haven’t had Gavin round for ages. And nice for you to get to know Kay.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, you always got on with Lisa, didn’t you?’

‘Miles, I hated Lisa.’

‘Well, OK… maybe you’ll like Kay better!’

She glared at him, wondering where all this good humour was coming from. Lexie and Libby, home for the weekend and cooped up in the house because of the rain, were watching a music DVD in the sitting room; a guitar-laden ballad blared through to the kitchen where their parents stood talking.

‘Listen,’ said Miles, brandishing his mobile, ‘Aubrey wants to have a talk with me about the council. I’ve just called Dad, and the Fawleys have invited us all to dinner tonight at Sweetlove—’

‘No thanks,’ said Samantha, cutting him off. She was suddenly full of a fury she could barely explain, even to herself. She walked out of the room.

They argued in low voices all over the house through the day, trying not to spoil their daughters’ weekend. Samantha refused to change her mind or to discuss her reasons. Miles, afraid of getting angry at her, was alternately conciliatory and cold.

‘How do you think it’s going to look if you don’t come?’ he said at ten to eight that evening, standing in the doorway of the sitting room, ready to leave, wearing a suit and tie.

‘It’s nothing to do with me, Miles,’ Samantha said. ‘You’re the one running for office.’

She liked watching him dither. She knew that he was terrified of being late, yet wondering whether he could still persuade her to go with him.

‘You know they’ll be expecting both of us.’

‘Really? Nobody sent me an invitation.’

‘Oh, come off it, Sam, you know they meant – they took it for granted—’

‘More fool them, then. I’ve told you, I don’t fancy it. You’d better hurry. You don’t want to keep Mummy and Daddy waiting.’

He left. She listened to the car reversing out of the drive, then went into the kitchen, opened a bottle of wine and brought it back into the sitting room with a glass. She kept picturing Howard, Shirley and Miles all having dinner together at Sweetlove House. It would surely be the first orgasm Shirley had had in years.

Her thoughts swerved irresistibly to what her accountant had said to her during the week. Profits were way down, whatever she had pretended to Howard. The accountant had actually suggested closing the shop and concentrating on the online side of the business. This would be an admission of failure that Samantha was not prepared to make. For one thing, Shirley would love it if the shop closed; she had been a bitch about it from the start. I’m sorry, Sam, it’s not really my taste… just a teeny bit over the top… But Samantha loved her little red and black shop in Yarvil; loved getting away from Pagford every day, chatting to customers, gossiping with Carly, her assistant. Her world would be tiny without the shop she had nurtured for fourteen years; it would contract, in short, to Pagford.

(Pagford, bloody Pagford. Samantha had never meant to live here. She and Miles had planned a year out before starting work, a round-the-world trip. They had their itinerary mapped out, their visas ready. Samantha had dreamed about walking barefoot and hand in hand on long white Australian beaches. And then she had found out that she was pregnant.

She had come down to visit him at ‘Ambleside’, a day after she had taken the pregnancy test, one week after their graduation. They were supposed to be leaving for Singapore in eight days’ time.

Samantha had not wanted to tell Miles in his parents’ house; she was afraid that they would overhear. Shirley seemed to be behind every door Samantha opened in the bungalow.

So she waited until they were sitting at a dark corner table in the Black Canon. She remembered the rigid line of Miles’ jaw when she told him; he seemed, in some indefinable way, to become older as the news hit him.

He did not speak for several petrified seconds. Then he said, ‘Right. We’ll get married.’

He told her that he had already bought her a ring, that he had been planning to propose somewhere good, somewhere like the top of Ayers Rock. Sure enough, when they got back to the bungalow, he unearthed the little box from where he had already hidden it in his rucksack. It was a small solitaire diamond from a jeweller’s in Yarvil; he had bought it with some of the money his grandmother had left him. Samantha had sat on the edge of Miles’ bed and cried and cried. They had married three months later.)