He saw Mary’s kitchen, and her sweet face.
‘I have to beg to see you,’ Kay said, ‘and when you come round here you couldn’t make it clearer that you don’t want to come.’
She wanted him to say ‘that’s not true’. The last point at which a denial might have counted slunk past. They were sliding, at increasing speed, towards that crisis which Gavin both urgently desired and dreaded.
‘Tell me what you want,’ she said wearily. ‘Just tell me.’
Both could feel the relationship crumbling to pieces beneath the weight of everything that Gavin refused to say. It was with a sense of putting them both out of their misery that he reached for words that he had not intended to speak aloud, perhaps ever, but which, in some way, seemed to excuse both of them.
‘I didn’t want this to happen,’ Gavin said earnestly. ‘I didn’t mean it to. Kay, I’m really sorry, but I think I’m in love with Mary Fairbrother.’
He saw from her expression that she had not been prepared for this.
‘Mary Fairbrother?’ she repeated.
‘I think,’ he said (and there was a bittersweet pleasure in talking about it, even though he knew he was wounding her; he had not been able to say it to anyone else), ‘it’s been there for a long time. I never acknowledged – I mean, when Barry was alive I’d never have—’
‘I thought he was your best friend,’ whispered Kay.
‘He was.’
‘He’s only been dead a few weeks!’
Gavin did not like hearing that.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m trying to be honest with you. I’m trying to be fair.’
‘You’re trying to be
He had always imagined it ending in a blaze of fury, but she simply watched him putting on his coat with tears in her eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and walked out of her house for the last time.
On the pavement, he experienced a rush of elation, and hurried to his car. He would be able to tell Mary about the insurance company tonight, after all.
Part Five
Privilege
7.32 A person who has made a defamatory statement may claim privilege for it if he can show that he made it without malice and in pursuit of a public duty.
I
Terri Weedon was used to people leaving her. The first and greatest departure had been her mother’s, who had never said goodbye, but had simply walked out one day with a suitcase while Terri was at school.
There had been lots of social workers and care workers after she ran away at fourteen, and some of them had been nice enough, but they all left at the end of the working day. Every fresh departure added a fine new layer to the crust building over her core.
She had had friends in care, but at sixteen they were all on their own, and life had scattered them. She met Ritchie Adams, and she bore him two children. Tiny little pink things, pure and beautiful like nothing in the whole world: and they had come out of her, and for shining hours in the hospital, twice, it had been like her own rebirth.
And then they took the children from her, and she never saw them again, either.
Banger had left her. Nana Cath had left her. Nearly everybody went, hardly anyone stayed. She ought to be used to it by now.
When Mattie, her regular social worker, reappeared, Terri demanded, ‘Where’s the other one?’
‘Kay? She was only covering for me while I was ill,’ said Mattie. ‘So, where’s Liam? No… I mean Robbie, don’t I?’
Terri did not like Mattie. For one thing, she did not have kids, and how could people who didn’t have kids tell you how to raise them, how could they understand? She had not liked Kay, exactly, either… except that Kay gave you a funny feeling, the same feeling that Nana Cath had once given Terri, before she had called her a whore and told her she never wanted to see her again… you felt, with Kay – even though she carried folders, like the rest of them, even though she had instituted the case review – you felt that she wanted things to go right for you, and not only for the forms. You really did feel that. But she was gone,
On Friday afternoon, Mattie told Terri that Bellchapel would almost certainly close.
‘It’s political,’ she said briskly. ‘They want to save money, but methadone treatment’s unpopular with the District Council. Plus, Pagford wants them out of the building. It was all in the local paper, maybe you saw it?’
Sometimes she spoke to Terri like that, veering into a kind of after-all-we’re-in-this-together small-talk that jarred, because it sat alongside enquiries as to whether Terri was remembering to feed her son. But this time it was what she said, rather than how she said it, that upset Terri.
‘They’re closin’ it?’ she repeated.
‘It looks that way,’ said Mattie breezily, ‘but it won’t make any difference to you. Well, obviously…’
Three times Terri had embarked upon the programme at Bellchapel. The dusty interior of the converted church with its partition walls and its flyers, the bathroom with its neon-blue light (so you could not find veins and shoot up in there), had become familiar and almost friendly. Lately, she had begun to sense in the workers there a change in the way they spoke to her. They had all expected her to fail again, in the beginning, but they had started talking to her the way Kay had talked: as if they knew a real person lived inside her pockmarked, burned body.
‘…obviously, it
‘I smacked a nurse at Cantermill,’ said Terri, almost absent-mindedly.
After Mattie had left, Terri sat for a long time in her filthy chair in the sitting room, gnawing at her nails until they bled.
The moment Krystal came home, bringing Robbie back from nursery, she told her that they were closing Bellchapel.
‘They ain’t decided yet,’ said Krystal with authority.
‘The fuck do you know?’ demanded Terri. ‘They’re closin’ it, and now they say I’ve gotta go to fuckin’ Pagford to that bitch that killed Nana Cath. Well, I fuckin’ ain’t.’
‘You gotta,’ said Krystal.
Krystal had been like this for days; bossing her mother, acting as though she, Krystal, was the grown- up.
‘I ain’ gotta do fuckin’ anythin’,’ said Terri furiously. ‘Cheeky little bitch,’ she added, for good measure.
‘If you start fuckin’ usin’ again,’ said Krystal, scarlet in the face, ‘they’ll take Robbie away.’
He was still holding Krystal’s hand, and burst into tears.
