case review for a little boy on the at-risk register.’
‘Oh, right. Sorry. Maybe later?’
‘Yes,’ said Parminder. ‘Great. Goodbye.’
She scooped up the contents of her bag and hurried from the house, running back from the garden gate to check that she had closed the front door properly.
Every so often, as she drove, she realized that she had no recollection of travelling the last mile, and told herself fiercely to concentrate. But the malicious words of the anonymous post kept coming back to her. She already knew them by heart.
Parish Councillor Dr Parminder Jawanda, who pretends to be so keen on looking after the poor and needy of the area, has always had a secret motive. Until I died, she was in love with me, which she could barely hide whenever she laid eyes on me, and she would vote however I told her to, whenever there was a council meeting. Now that I am gone, she will be useless as a councillor, because she has lost her brain.
She had first seen it the previous morning, when she opened up the council website to check the minutes of the last meeting. The shock had been almost physical; her breathing had become very fast and shallow, as it had been during the most excruciating parts of childbirth, when she had tried to lift herself over the pain, to disengage from the agonizing present.
Everyone would know by now. There was nowhere to hide.
The oddest thoughts kept coming to her. For instance, what her grandmother would have said if she had known that Parminder had been accused of loving another woman’s husband, and a gora to boot, in a public forum. She could almost see bebe covering her face with a fold of her sari, shaking her head, rocking backwards and forwards as she had always done when a harsh blow had hit the family.
‘Some husbands,’ Vikram had said to her late last night, with a strange new twist to his sardonic smile, ‘might want to know whether it was true.’
‘Of course it isn’t true!’ Parminder had said, with her own shaking hand over her mouth. ‘How can you ask me that? Of course it isn’t! You knew him! He was my friend — just a friend!’
She was already passing the Bellchapel Addiction Clinic. How had she travelled so far, without realizing it? She was becoming a dangerous driver. She was not paying attention.
She remembered the evening that she and Vikram had gone to the restaurant, nearly twenty years ago, the night they had agreed to marry. She had told him about all the fuss the family had made when she had walked home with Stephen Hoyle, and he had agreed how silly it was. He had understood then. But he did not understand when it was Howard Mollison who accused her instead of her own hidebound relatives. Apparently he did not realise that goras could be narrow, and untruthful, and full of malice…
She had missed the turning. She must concentrate. She must pay attention.
‘Am I late?’ she called, as she hurried at last across the car park towards Kay Bawden. She had met the social worker once before, when she had come in for a renewal of her prescription for the pill.
‘Not at all,’ said Kay. ‘I thought I’d show you up to the office, because it’s a rabbit warren in here…’
Kay led her down a shabby, deserted institutional corridor into a meeting room. Three more women were already sitting there; they greeted Parminder with smiles.
‘This is Nina, who works with Robbie’s mother at Bellchapel,’ said Kay, sitting down with her back to the venetian-blinded windows. ‘And this is my supervisor Gillian, and this is Louise Harper, who oversees the Anchor Road Nursery. Dr Parminder Jawanda, Robbie’s GP,’ Kay added.
Parminder accepted coffee. The other four women began talking, without involving her.
(Parish Councillor Dr Parminder Jawanda, who pretends to be so keen on looking after the poor and needy of the area…
Who pretends to be so keen. You bastard, Howard Mollison. But he had always seen her as a hypocrite; Barry had said so.
‘He thinks that because I came from the Fields, I want Pagford overrun by Yarvillians. But you’re proper professional class, so he doesn’t think you’ve got any right to be on the side of the Fields. He thinks you’re a hypocrite or making trouble for fun.’)
‘…understand why the family’s registered with a GP in Pagford?’ said one of the three unfamiliar social workers, whose names Parminder had already forgotten.