The Casual Vacancy полностью

(If she and Gavin did not work out… but they had to work out. She had moved for him, changed jobs for him, uprooted her daughter for him. He would never have let that happen, surely, unless his intentions were serious? He must have thought through the consequences if they split up: how awful and awkward it would be, running across each other constantly in a tiny town like Pagford?)

‘Putting you through,’ said the secretary, and Kay’s hopes soared.

‘Hi,’ said Gavin. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine,’ lied Kay, because Alex and Una were listening. ‘Are you having a good day?’

‘Busy,’ said Gavin. ‘You?’

‘Yes.’

She waited, the phoned pressed tightly against her ear, pretending that he was speaking to her, listening to the silence.

‘I wondered whether you wanted to meet up tonight,’ she asked finally, feeling sick.

‘Er… I don’t think I can,’ he said.

How can you not know? What have you got on?

‘I might have to do something… it’s Mary. Barry’s wife. She wants me to be a pall-bearer. So I might have to… I think I’ve got to find out what that involves and everything.’

Sometimes, if she simply remained quiet, and let the inadequacy of his excuses reverberate on the air, he became ashamed and backtracked.

‘I don’t suppose that’ll take all evening, though,’ he said. ‘We could meet up later, if you wanted.’

‘All right, then. Do you want to come over to mine, as it’s a school night?’

‘Er… yeah, OK.’

‘What time?’ she asked, wanting him to make one decision.

‘I dunno… nine-ish?’

After he had rung off, Kay kept the phone pressed tightly to her ear for a few moments, then said, for the benefit of Alex and Una, ‘I do, too. See you later, babe.’

As guidance teacher, Tessa’s hours varied more than her husband’s. She usually waited until the end of the school day to take their son home in her Nissan, leaving Colin (whom Tessa — although she knew what the rest of the world called him, including nearly all the parents who had caught the habit from their children — never addressed as Cubby) to follow them, an hour or two later, in his Toyota. Today, though, Colin met Tessa in the car park at twenty-past four, while the schoolchildren were still swarming out of the front gates into parental cars, or onto their free buses.

The sky was a cold iron-grey, like the underside of a shield. A sharp breeze lifted the hems of skirts and rattled the leaves on the immature trees; a spiteful, chill wind that sought out your weakest places, the nape of your neck and your knees, and which denied you the comfort of dreaming, of retreating a little from reality. Even after she had closed the car door on it, Tessa felt ruffled and put out, as she would have been by somebody crashing into her without apology.

Beside her in the passenger seat, his knees absurdly high in the cramped confines of her car, Colin told Tessa what the computing teacher had come to his office to tell him, twenty minutes previously.

‘…not there. Didn’t turn up for the whole double period. Said he thought he’d better come straight and tell me. So that’ll be all over the staff room, tomorrow. Exactly what he wants,’ said Colin furiously, and Tessa knew that they were not talking about the computing teacher any more. ‘He’s just sticking two fingers up at me, as usual.’

Her husband was pale with exhaustion, with shadows beneath his reddened eyes, and his hands were twitching slightly on the handle of his briefcase. Fine hands, with big knuckles and long slender fingers, they were not altogether dissimilar from their son’s. Tessa had pointed this out to her husband and son recently; neither had evinced the smallest pleasure at the thought that there was some faint physical resemblance between them.

‘I don’t think he’s—’ began Tessa, but Colin was talking again.

‘—So, he’ll get detention like everyone else and I’ll damn well punish him at home too. We’ll see how he likes that, shall we? We’ll see whether that’s a laughing matter. We can start by grounding him for a week, we’ll see how funny that is.’