Parminder’s Birmingham accent was still strong after sixteen years in Pagford. A deep vertical groove between her eyebrows gave her a perennially intense look, sometimes of crossness, sometimes of concentration.
‘He died,’ said Maureen, gazing hungrily into the scowling face. ‘Last night. Howard’s just been telling me.’
Parminder remained quite still, with her hand in her purse. Then her eyes slid sideways to Howard.
‘Collapsed and died in the golf club car park,’ Howard said. ‘Miles was there, saw it happen.’
More seconds passed.
‘Is this a joke?’ demanded Parminder, her voice hard and high-pitched.
‘Of course it’s not a joke,’ said Maureen, savouring her own outrage. ‘Who’d make a joke like that?’
Parminder set down the oil with a bang on the glass-topped counter and walked out of the shop.
‘Well!’ said Maureen, in an ecstasy of disapproval. ‘“Is this a joke?” Charming!’
‘Shock,’ said Howard wisely, watching Parminder hurrying back across the Square, her trench coat flapping behind her. ‘She’ll be as upset as the widow, that one. Mind you, it’ll be interesting,’ he added, scratching idly at the overfold of his belly, which was often itchy, ‘to see what she…’
He left the sentence unfinished, but it did not matter: Maureen knew exactly what he meant. Both, as they watched Councillor Jawanda disappear around a corner, were contemplating the casual vacancy: and they saw it, not as an empty space but as a magician’s pocket, full of possibilities.
VIII
The Old Vicarage was the last and grandest of the Victorian houses in Church Row. It stood at the very bottom, in a big corner garden, facing St Michael and All Saints across the road.
Parminder, who had run the last few yards down the street, fumbled with the stiff lock on the front door and let herself inside. She would not believe it until she heard it from somebody else, anybody else; but the telephone was already ringing ominously in the kitchen.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Vikram.’
Parminder’s husband was a cardiac surgeon. He worked at the South West General Hospital in Yarvil and he never usually called from work. Parminder gripped the receiver so tightly that her fingers hurt.
‘I only heard by accident. It sounds like an aneurysm. I’ve asked Huw Jeffries to move the PM up the list. Better for Mary to know what it was. They could be doing him now.’
‘Right,’ whispered Parminder.
‘Tessa Wall was there,’ he told her. ‘Call Tessa.’
‘Yes,’ said Parminder. ‘All right.’
But when she had hung up, she sank down into one of the kitchen chairs and stared out of the window into the back garden without seeing it, her fingers pressed to her mouth.
Everything had shattered. The fact that it was all still there – the walls and the chairs and the children’s pictures on the walls – meant nothing. Every atom of it had been blasted apart and reconstituted in an instant, and its appearance of permanence and solidity was laughable; it would dissolve at a touch, for everything was suddenly tissue-thin and friable.
She had no control over her thoughts; they had broken apart too, and random fragments of memory surfaced and spun out of sight again: dancing with Barry at the Walls’ New Year’s party, and the silly conversation they had had walking back from the last meeting of the Parish Council.
‘You’ve got a cow-faced house,’ she had told him.
‘
She couldn’t settle. Through the hall, then back into the kitchen, where she seized the telephone and called Tessa Wall, who did not pick up. She must be at work. Parminder returned, trembling, to the kitchen chair.
Her grief was so big and wild it terrified her, like an evil beast that had erupted from under the floorboards. Barry, little, bearded Barry, her friend, her ally.
It was exactly the way her father had died. She had been fifteen, and they had come back from town to find him lying face-down on the lawn with the mower beside him, the sun hot on the back of his head. Parminder hated sudden death. The long wasting away that so many people feared was a comforting prospect to her; time to arrange and organize, time to say goodbye…
Her hands were still pressed tightly over her mouth. She stared at the grave, sweet visage of Guru Nanak pinned to the cork board.
(Vikram did not like the picture.
‘What’s that doing there?’
‘I like it,’ she had said defiantly.)
Barry, dead.
She tamped down the awful urge to cry with a fierceness that her mother had always deplored, especially in the wake of her father’s death, when her other daughters, and the aunts and cousins, were all wailing and beating their breasts. ‘And you were his favourite too!’ But Parminder kept her unwept tears locked tightly inside where they seemed to undergo an alchemical transformation, returning to the outer world as lava slides of rage, disgorged periodically at her children and the receptionists at work.
She could still see Howard and Maureen behind the counter, the one immense, the other scrawny, and in her mind’s eye they were looking down at her from a height as they told her that her friend was dead. With an almost welcome gush of fury and hatred she thought,
She jumped up again, strode back into the sitting room and took down, from the top shelf, one volume of the
IX
The room set aside for the guidance department at Winterdown Comprehensive opened off the school library. It had no windows and was lit by a single strip light.
Tessa Wall, head of guidance and wife of the deputy headmaster, entered the room at half-past ten, numb with fatigue and carrying a cup of strong instant coffee that she had brought up from the staff room. She was a short stout woman with a plain wide face, who cut her own greying hair – the blunt fringe was often a little lop- sided – wore clothes of a homespun, crafty variety, and liked jewellery of beads and wood. Today’s long skirt might have been made of hessian, and she had teamed it with a thick lumpy cardigan in pea-green. Tessa hardly ever looked at herself in full-length mirrors, and boycotted shops where this was unavoidable.
She had attempted to soften the guidance room’s resemblance to a cell by pinning up a Nepalese hanging she had owned since her student days: a rainbow sheet with a bright yellow sun and moon that emitted stylised, wavy rays. The rest of the bare painted surfaces were covered with a variety of posters that either gave helpful tips on boosting self-esteem or telephone numbers to call for anonymous help on a variety of health and emotional issues. The headmistress had made a slightly sarcastic remark about these the last time she had visited the guidance room.
‘And if all else fails, they call ChildLine, I see,’ she had said, pointing to the most prominent poster.
Tessa sank into her chair with a low groan, took off her wristwatch, which pinched, and placed it on the desk beside various printed sheets and notes. She doubted that progress along the prearranged lines would be possible today; she doubted even whether Krystal Weedon would turn up. Krystal frequently walked out of school
