for bed that night, he watched his silent wife’s reflection in the dressing-table mirror. For days, Samantha had been nothing but sarcastic if he mentioned the election. He could have done with some support, some comfort, this evening. He also felt randy. It had been a long time. Thinking back, he supposed that it had been the night before Barry Fairbrother dropped dead. She had been a little bit drunk. It often took a little bit of drink, these days.
‘How was work?’ he asked, watching her undo her bra in the mirror.
Samantha did not answer immediately. She rubbed the deep red grooves in the flesh beneath her arms left by the tight bra, then said, without looking at Miles, ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, actually.’
She hated having to say it. She had been trying to avoid doing so for several weeks.
‘Roy thinks I ought to close the shop. It’s not doing well.’
Exactly how badly the shop was doing would be a shock to Miles. It had been a shock to her, when her accountant had laid out the position in the baldest terms. She had both known and not known. It was strange how your brain could know what your heart refused to accept.
‘Oh,’ said Miles. ‘But you’d keep the website?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘We’d keep the website.’
‘Well, that’s good,’ said Miles encouragingly. He waited for almost a minute, out of respect for the death of her shop. Then he said, ‘I don’t suppose you saw the Gazette today?’
She reached over for the nightdress on her pillow and he had a satisfying glimpse of her breasts. Sex would definitely help relax him.
‘It’s a real shame, Sam,’ he said, crawling across the bed behind her, and waiting to put his arms around her as she wriggled into the nightdress. ‘About the shop. It was a great little place. And you’ve had it, what — ten years?’
‘Fourteen,’ said Samantha.
She knew what he wanted. She considered telling him to go and screw himself, and decamping to the spare room, but the trouble was that there would then be a row and an atmosphere, and what she wanted more than anything in the world was to be able to head off to London with Libby in two days’ time, wearing the T-shirts that she had bought them both, and to be within close proximity of Jake and his band mates for a whole evening. This excursion constituted the entire sum of Samantha’s current happiness. What was more, sex might assuage Miles’ continuing annoyance that she was missing Howard’s birthday party.
So she let him embrace and then kiss her. She closed her eyes, climbed on top of him, and imagined herself riding Jake on a deserted white beach, nineteen years old to his twenty-one. She came while imagining Miles watching them, furiously, through binoculars, from a distant pedalo.
X
At nine o’clock on the morning of the election for Barry’s seat, Parminder left the Old Vicarage and walked up Church Row to the Walls’ house. She rapped on the door and waited until, at last, Colin appeared.
There were shadows around his bloodshot eyes and beneath his cheekbones; his skin seemed to have thinned and his clothes grown too big. He had not yet returned to work. The news that Parminder had screamed confidential medical information about Howard in public had set back his tentative recovery; the more robust Colin of a few nights ago, who had sat on the leather pouffe and pretended to be confident of victory, might never have been.
‘Is everything all right?’ he asked, closing the door behind her, looking wary.
‘Yes, fine,’ she said. ‘I thought you might like to walk down the church hall with me, to vote.’
‘I — no,’ he said weakly. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I know how you feel, Colin,’ said Parminder, in a small tight voice. ‘But if you don’t vote, it means they’ve won. I’m not going to let them win. I’m going to go down there and vote for you, and I want you to come with me.’
Parminder was effectively suspended from work. The Mollisons had complained to every professional body for which they could find an address, and Dr Crawford had advised Parminder to take time off. To her great surprise, she felt strangely liberated.
But Colin was shaking his head. She thought she saw tears in his eyes.
‘I can’t, Minda.’
‘You can!’ she said. ‘You can, Colin! You’ve got to stand up to them! Think of Barry!’