four when we went off on my stag weekend to Liverpool. First night there, we leave the campsite and go off to the pub, and there behind the bar is the landlord’s student daughter, a beautiful blonde, helping out on a Saturday night. Barry spent the whole night propping up the bar, chatting her up, getting her into trouble with her dad and pretending he didn’t know who the rowdy lot in the corner were.’
A weak laugh. Mary’s head was drooping; both hands were clutching those of the child on either side.
‘He told me that night, back in the tent, that he was going to marry her. I thought,
Gavin breathed carefully in and out, in and out, trying not to listen, and wondering what on earth his own brother would find to say about him under the same circumstances. He had not had Barry’s luck; his romantic life did not make a pretty story. He had never walked into a pub and found the perfect wife standing there, blonde, smiling and ready to serve him a pint. No,
But, all the same, he would ring her later, because he didn’t think he would be able to stand going back to his empty cottage after this. He would be honest, and tell her how horrible and stressful the funeral had been, and that he wished she had come with him. That would surely deflect any lingering umbrage about their row. He did not want to be alone tonight.
Two pews back, Colin Wall was sobbing, with small but audible gasps, into a large, wet handkerchief. Tessa’s hand rested on his thigh, exerting gentle pressure. She was thinking about Barry; about how she had relied upon him to help her with Colin; of the consolation of shared laughter; of Barry’s boundless generosity of spirit. She could see him clearly, short and ruddy, jiving with Parminder at their last party; imitating Howard Mollison’s strictures on the Fields; advising Colin tactfully, as only he could have done, to accept Fats’ behaviour as adolescent, rather than sociopathic.
Tessa was scared of what the loss of Barry Fairbrother would mean to the man beside her; scared of how they would manage to accommodate this huge ragged absence; scared that Colin had made a vow to the dead that he could not keep, and that he did not realize how little Mary, to whom he kept wanting to talk, liked him. And through all Tessa’s anxiety and sorrow was threaded the usual worry, like an itchy little worm: Fats, and how she was going to avert an explosion, how she would make him come with them to the burial, or how she might hide from Colin that he had not come – which might, after all, be easier.
‘We are going to finish today’s service with a song chosen by Barry’s daughters, Niamh and Siobhan, which meant a lot to them and their father,’ said the vicar. He managed, by his tone, to disassociate himself personally from what was about to happen.
The beat of the drum rang so loudly through hidden speakers that the congregation jumped. A loud American voice was saying ‘
Some people thought that it was a mistake: Howard and Shirley threw outraged glances at each other, but nobody pressed stop, or ran up the aisle apologizing. Then a powerful, sexy female voice started to sing:
The pall-bearers were carrying the wicker coffin back down the aisle, and Mary and the children were following.
The congregation filed slowly out of the church, trying not to walk in time to the beat of the song.
II
Andrew Price took the handlebars of his father’s racing bicycle and walked it carefully out of the garage, making sure that he did not scrape the car. Down the stone steps and through the metal gate he carried it; then, in the lane, he put his foot on one pedal, scooted a few yards and swung his other leg over the saddle. He soared left onto the vertiginously sloping hillside road and sped, without touching his brakes, down towards Pagford.
The hedgerows and sky blurred; he imagined himself in a velodrome as the wind whipped his clean hair and his stinging face, which he had just scrubbed clean. Level with the Fairbrothers’ wedge-shaped garden he applied the brakes, because some months previously he had taken this sharp turn too fast and fallen off, and had had to return home immediately with his jeans ripped open and grazes all down one side of his face…
He freewheeled, with only one hand on the bars, into Church Row, and enjoyed a second, though lesser, downhill burst of speed, slightly checked when he saw that they were loading a coffin onto a hearse outside the church, and that a dark-clothed crowd was spilling out between the heavy wooden doors. Andrew pedalled furiously around the corner and out of sight. He did not want to see Fats emerging from church with a distraught Cubby, wearing the cheap suit and tie that he had described with comical disgust during yesterday’s English lesson. It would have been like interrupting his friend having a crap.
As Andrew cycled slowly around the Square, he slicked his hair back off his face with one hand, wondering what the cold air had done to his purple-red acne and whether the anti-bacterial face wash had done anything to soothe the angry look of it. And he told himself the cover story: he had come from Fats’ house (which he might have done, there was no reason why not), which meant that Hope Street was as obvious a route down to the river as cutting through the first side street. Therefore there was no need for Gaia Bawden (if she happened to be looking out of the window of her house, and happened to see him, and happened to recognize him) to think that he had come this way because of her. Andrew did not anticipate having to explain to her his reason for cycling up her street, but he still held the fake story in his mind, because he believed it gave him an air of cool detachment.
He simply wanted to know which was her house. Twice already, at weekends, he had cycled along the short terraced street, every nerve in his body tingling, but he had been unable, as yet, to discover which house
