The Casual Vacancy полностью

The question of whether Stuart Wall had really known something about her husband and Maureen was less urgent now, because Howard was patently incapable of shaming her in that way again, and perhaps never would be, and nobody seemed to be gossiping. And if the silence she offered Howard, when she was unavoidably alone with him, was tinged with a sense of grievance on both sides, she was able to face the prospect of his protracted incapacitation and absence from the house with more equanimity than she might have thought possible three weeks previously.

The doorbell rang and Shirley hurried to open it. Maureen was there, hobbling on ill-advised high heels, garish in bright aquamarine.

‘Hello, dear, come in,’ said Shirley. ‘I’ll get my bag.’

‘They’re saying people got up a collection,’ said Maureen, brimful of gossip that Shirley had somehow missed, in her endless back and forward trips to the hospital. ‘Don’t ask me who. Anyway, I wouldn’t have thought the family would want it right by the river, would you?’

(The dirty and foul-mouthed little boy, of whose existence few had been aware, and of whom nobody but his mother and sister had been especially fond, had undergone such a transformation in Pagford’s collective mind by his drowning, that he was spoken of everywhere as a water baby, a cherub, a pure and gentle angel whom all would have embraced with love and compassion, if only they could have saved him.

But the needle and the flame had had no transformative effect upon Krystal’s reputation; on the contrary, they had fixed her permanently in the mind of Old Pagford as a soulless creature whose pursuit of what the elderly liked to call kicks had led to the death of an innocent child.)

Shirley was pulling on her coat.

‘You realize, I actually saw them that day?’ she said, her cheeks turning pink. ‘The boy bawling by one clump of bushes, and Krystal Weedon and Stuart Wall in another—’

‘Did you? And were they really…?’ asked Maureen avidly.

‘Oh yes,’ said Shirley. ‘Broad daylight. Open air. And the boy was right by the river when I saw him. A couple of steps and he’d have been in.’

Something in Maureen’s expression stung her.

‘I was hurrying,’ said Shirley with asperity, ‘because Howard had said he was feeling poorly and I was worried sick. I didn’t want to go out at all, but Miles and Samantha had sent Lexie over — I think, if you want my honest opinion, they’d had a row — and then Lexie wanted to visit the café — I was absolutely distracted, and all I could think was, I must get back to Howard… I didn’t actually realize what I’d seen until much later… and the dreadful thing,’ said Shirley, her colour higher than ever, and returning again to her favourite refrain, ‘is that if Krystal Weedon hadn’t let that child wander off while she was having her fun in the bushes, the ambulance would have reached Howard so much more quickly. Because, you know, with two of them coming… things got confu—’

‘That’s right,’ said Maureen, interrupting as they moved out towards the car, because she had heard all this before. ‘You know, I can’t think why they’re having the service here in Pagford…’

She longed to suggest that they drive past the church on the way to the hospital — she had a craving to see what the Weedon family looked like en masse, and to glimpse, perhaps, that degenerate junkie mother — but could think of no way to frame the request.

‘You know, there’s one comfort, Shirley,’ she said, as they set off for the bypass. ‘The Fields are as good as gone. That must be a comfort to Howard. Even if he can’t attend council for a while, he got that done.’

Andrew Price was speeding down the steep hill from Hilltop House, with the sun hot on his back and the wind in his hair. His week-old shiner had turned yellow and green, and looked, if possible, even worse than it had when he had turned up at school with his eye almost closed. Andrew had told the teachers who enquired that he had fallen off his bike.

It was now the Easter holidays, and Gaia had texted Andrew the previous evening to ask whether he would be going to Krystal’s funeral the next day. He had sent an immediate ‘yes’, and was now dressed, after much deliberation, in his cleanest jeans and a dark grey shirt, because he did not own a suit.

He was not very clear why Gaia was going to the funeral, unless it was to be with Sukhvinder Jawanda, to whom she seemed to cling more fondly than ever, now that she was moving back to London with her mother.

‘Mum says she should never have come to Pagford,’ Gaia had told Andrew and Sukhvinder happily, as the three of them sat on the low wall beside the newsagent’s at lunchtime. ‘She knows Gavin’s a total twat.’