Part Two Chapter IV

IVSamanthas dinner invitation to Kay had been motivated by a mixture of vengefulness and tediousness. She saw it as retaliation against Miles, who was constantly busy with schemes in which he gave her no ordain merely with which he expected her to co-operate she wanted to envision how he want it when she arranged things with bring out consulting him. thusly she would be stealing a march on Maureen and Shirley, those nosy old cr whizzs, who were so fascinated by Gavins private affairs but knew next to nonhing astir(predicate) the relationship between him and his ca stigmatizeal of the United Kingdom girlfriend. Fin every last(predicate)y, it would afford her a nonher opportunity to sharpen her claws on Gavin for existence fearful and indecisive close his love life she might talk about weddings in figurehead of Kay or scan how nice it was to see Gavin make a commitment at last.However, her plans for the discomfiture of others gave Samantha less pleasure than she had ho ped. When on Saturday morning she told Miles what she had done, he reacted with suspicious enthusiasm.Great, yeah, we havent had Gavin pad for ages. And nice for you to get to bonk Kay.Why?Well, you always got on with Lisa, didnt you?Miles, I hated Lisa.Well, OK per knock youll like Kay mendShe glared at him, wondering where all this good mentality was coming from. Lexie and Libby, home for the weekend and cooped up in the house because of the rain, were reflection a music DVD in the school term room a guitar-laden ballad blared through to the kitchen where their parents stood talking.Listen, tell Miles, bandeaundishing his mobile, Aubrey wants to have a talk with me about the council. Ive average cal lead Dad, and the Fawleys have invited us all to dinner tonight at Sweetlove No thanks, tell Samantha, cutting him saturnine. She was suddenly full of a fretfulness she could notwithstanding explain, even to herself. She walked out of the room.They argued in low voice s all over the house through the day, trying not to spoil their daughters weekend. Samantha refused to change her see or to discuss her reasons. Miles, afraid of acquire angry at her, was alternately conciliatory and cold.How do you think its going to look if you dont come? he verbalise at ten to eight that evening, standing in the room accessstep of the sitting room, ready to leave, wearing a suit and tie.Its nothing to do with me, Miles, Samantha said. Youre the one running for office.She liked watching him dither. She knew that he was terrified of being late, yet wondering whether he could still persuade her to go with him.You hit the sack theyll be expecting both of us.Really? Nobody sent me an invitation.Oh, come off it, Sam, you know they meant they took it for granted More fool them, then. Ive told you, I dont fancy it. Youd better hurry. You dont want to keep Mummy and Daddy waiting.He left. She listened to the car reversing out of the drive, then went into the kitch en, opened a bottle of wine and brought it rearward into the sitting room with a glass. She kept picturing Howard, Shirley and Miles all having dinner together at Sweetlove House. It would surely be the first orgasm Shirley had had in classs.Her thoughts swerved irresistibly to what her accountant had said to her during the week. Profits were way tidy sum, whatever she had pretended to Howard. The accountant had actually suggested closing the pasture and concentrating on the online side of the business. This would be an admission charge of failure that Samantha was not prepared to make. For one thing, Shirley would love it if the shop closed(a) she had been a bitch about it from the start. Im aristocratical, Sam, its not really my taste just a teeny bit over the top But Samantha love her little red and black shop in Yarvil loved getting away from Pagford every day, chatting to customers, gossiping with Carly, her assistant. Her world would be tiny without the shop she ha d nurtured for fourteen years it would contract, in short, to Pagford.(Pagford, bally(a) Pagford. Samantha had never meant to live here. She and Miles had plotted a year out before starting work, a round-the-world trip. They had their track mapped out, their visas ready. Samantha had dreamed about walking barefoot and extend to in hand on long white Australian beaches. And then she had found out that she was pregnant.She had come down to visit him at Ambleside, a day after(prenominal) she had taken the pregnancy test, one week after their graduation. They were supposed to be leaving for Singapore in eight days time.Samantha had not wanted to differentiate Miles in his parents house she was afraid that they would overhear. Shirley seemed to be behind every door Samantha opened in the bungalow.So she waited until they were sitting at a somber corner table in the Black Canon. She conceiveed the rigid line of Miles manducate when she told him he seemed, in some indefinable way, to become older as the intelligence service hit him.He did not speak for several petrified seconds. Then he said, Right. Well get married.He told her that he had already bought her a ring, that he had been planning to propose somewhere good, somewhere like the top of Ayers Rock. genuine enough, when they got behind to the bungalow, he unearthed the little box from where he had already occult it in his rucksack. It was a small solitaire diamond from a jewellers in Yarvil he had bought it with some of the money his grandmother had left him. Samantha had sat on the edge of Miles bed and cried and cried. They had married troika months later.)Alone with her bottle of wine, Samantha turn on the television. It brought up the DVD Lexie and Libby had been watching a frozen count on of four young men singing to her in tight T-shirts they looked barely out of their teens. She pressed play. After the boys finished their song, the DVD cut to an interview. Samantha slugged back her wine, w atching the band joking with each other, then becoming earnest as they discussed how frequently they loved their fans. She thought that she would have known them as Americans even if the sound had been off. Their teeth were perfect.It grew late she paused the DVD, went upstairs and told the girls to leave the PlayStation and go to bed then she returned to the sitting room, where she was three-quarters of the way down the bottle of wine. She had not turned on the lamps. She pressed play and kept drinking. When the DVD finished, she enthrone it back to the beginning and watched the bit she had missed. cardinal of the boys appeared significantly more mount than the other three. He was broader across the shoulders biceps bulged beneath the short sleeves of his T-shirt he had a thick strong neck and a square jaw. Samantha watched him undulating, perfect(a) into the camera with a detached serious expression on his pretty face, which was all planes and angles and winged black eyebrow s.She thought of sex with Miles. It had last happened three weeks previously. His performance was as predictable as a Masonic handshake. One of his favourite sayings was if its not broke, dont fix it.Samantha emptied the last of the bottle into her glass and imagined make love to the boy on the screen. Her breasts looked better in a bra these days they spilled everywhere when she lay down it made her feel flaccid and awful. She pictured herself, forced back against a wall, one leg propped up, a dress pushed up to her waist and that strong dark boy with his jeans round his knees, thrusting in and out of her With a lurch in the pit of her stomach that was almost like happiness, she heard the car turning back into the drive and the beams of the headlights swung around the dark sitting room.She fumbled with the controls to turn over to the news, which took her much longer than it ought to have done she shoved the empty wine bottle under the sofa and clutched her almost empty glass as a prop. The front door opened and closed. Miles entered the room behind her.Why are you sitting here in the dark?He turned on a lamp and she glanced up at him. He was as well groomed as he had been when he left, except for the raindrops on the shoulders of his jacket.How was dinner?Fine, he said. You were missed. Aubrey and Julia were sorry you couldnt make it.Oh, Im sure. And Ill bet your mother cried with disappointment.He sat down in an armchair at right angles to her, staring at her. She pushed her hair out of her eyes.Whats this all about, Sam?If you dont know, Miles But she was not sure herself or at least, she did not know how to condense this sprawling sense of ill-usage into a persistent accusation.I cant see how me standing for the Parish Council Oh, for Gods sake, Miles she shouted, and was then slightly taken aback by how loud her voice was.Explain to me, please, he said, what possible divagation it can make to you?She glared at him, struggling to articulate it for his pedantic good mind, which was like a fiddling pair of tweezers in the way that it seized on poor choices of word, yet so often failed to grasp the bigger picture. What could she say that he would understand? That she found Howard and Shirleys endless talk about the council tedious as hell? That he was quite tedious enough already, with his unceasingly retold anecdotes about the good old days back at the rugby club and his self-congratulatory stories about work, without adding pontifications about the Fields?Well, I was under the impression, said Samantha, in their dimly lit sitting room, that we had other plans.Like what? said Miles. What are you talking about?We said, Samantha articulated carefully over the bank of her trembling glass, that once the girls were out of school, wed go travelling. We promised each other that, remember?The formless rage and misery that had consumed her since Miles announced his intention to stand for the council had not once led her to mourn th e years travelling she had missed, but at this upshot it seemed to her that that was the real occupation or at least, that it came closest to expressing both the ill will and the yearning inside her.Miles seemed completely bewildered.What are you talking about?When I got pregnant with Lexie, Samantha said loudly, and we couldnt go travelling, and your damn mother made us get married in double-quick time, and your father got you a transaction with Edward Collins, you said, we agreed, that wed do it when the girls were grown up we said wed go away and do all the things we missed out on.He shook his head belatedly.This is news to me, he said. Where the hell has this come from?Miles, we were in the Black Canon. I told you I was pregnant, and you said for Christs sake, Miles I told you I was pregnant, and you promised me, you promised You want a holiday? said Miles. Is that it? You want a holiday?No, Miles, I dont want a bloody holiday, I want dont you remember? We said wed take a year out and do it later, when the kids were grown upFine, then. He seemed unnerved, determined to swing her aside. Fine. When Libbys eighteen in four years time, well talk about it again. I dont see how me becoming a councillor affects any of this.Well, apart from the bloody boredom of listening to you and your parents whining about the Fields for the rest of our natural lives Our natural lives? he smirked. As opposed to ?Piss off, she spat. Dont be such a bloody smartarse, Miles, it might impress your mother Well, frankly, I still dont see what the problem The problem, she shouted, is that this is about our future, Miles. Our future. And I dont want to bloody talk about it in four years time, I want to talk about it nowI think youd better eat something, said Miles. He got to his feet. Youve had enough to drink. shag you, MilesSorry, if youre going to be abusive He turned and walked out of the room. She barely stopped herself throwing her wine glass after him.The council if he got on it, he would never get off he would never renounce his seat, the chance to be a proper Pagford big shot, like Howard. He was committing himself afresh to Pagford, retaking his vows to the town of his birth, to a future quite different from the one he had promised his distraught new fiancee as she sat son of a bitch on his bed.When had they last talked about travelling the world? She was not sure. years and years ago, perhaps, but tonight Samantha decided that she, at least, had never changed her mind. Yes, she had always expected that some day they would pack up and leave, in assay of heat and freedom, half the globe away from Pagford, Shirley, Mollison and Lowe, the rain, the pettiness and the sameness. Perhaps she had not thought of the white sands of Australia and Singapore with longing for many years, but she would rather be there, even with her heavy thighs and her stretch marks, than here, trapped in Pagford, forced to watch as Miles turned slowly into Howard.She slumped back down on the sofa, groped for the controls, and switched back to Libbys DVD. The band, now in black and white, was walking slowly along a long empty beach, singing. The broad-shouldered boys shirt was flutter open in the breeze. A fine trail of hair led from his navel down into his jeans.