The Casual Vacancy Read Online Free Page A

to just below her shoulder blades; her nose was perfectly straight, narrow, foreshortened, emphasizing the provocative fullness of her pale mouth; her eyes were set wide apart, thick-lashed, of a heavily flecked greenish hazel, like a russet apple. Andrew had never seen her wear makeup, and no spot or blemish marred her skin. Her face was a synthesis of perfect symmetry and unusual proportion; he could have gazed at it for hours, trying to locate the source of its fascination. Only last week, he had returned home after a double lesson of biology in which, due to a divine random arrangement of tables and heads, he had been able to watch her almost constantly. Safe in his bedroom afterwards, he had written (following half an hour’s staring at the wall, which succeeded a bout of masturbation) “beauty is geometry.” He had torn the paper up immediately, and felt foolish every time he remembered it, but still, there was something in it. Her gorgeousness was a matter of minor adjustments to a pattern, so that a breathtaking harmony resulted.
    She would be here any minute, and if she sat beside square and sulky Sukhvinder, as she so often did, she would be close enough to smell the nicotine on him. He liked to see inanimate objects react to her body; liked to see the bus seat give a little as she dropped her weight into it, and that copper-gold mass of hair curve against the steel bar at the top.
    The bus driver slowed, and Andrew turned his face away from the door, pretending to be lost in contemplation; he would look around when she got on, as if he had only just realized that they had stopped; he would make eye contact, possibly nod. He waited to hear the doors open, but the soft throb of the engine was not interrupted by the familiar grind and thump.
    Andrew glanced around and saw nothing but short, shabby little Hope Street: two lines of small terraced houses. The bus driver was leaning over to make sure she was not coming. Andrew wanted to tell him to wait, because only the previous week she had burst from one of those little houses and come running up the pavement (it had been acceptable to watch, because everyone had been watching), and the sight of her running had been enough to occupy his thoughts for hours, but the driver hauled at the big wheel and the bus set off again. Andrew returned to his contemplation of the dirty window with an ache in his heart and in his balls.
    V
    The small terraces in Hope Street had once been laborers’ houses. Gavin Hughes was shaving slowly and with unnecessary care in the bathroom of number ten. He was so fair, and his beard so sparse, that the job really only needed to be done twice weekly; but the chilly, slightly grubby bathroom was the only place of sanctuary. If he dawdled in here until eight, he could plausibly say he needed to leave for work immediately. He dreaded having to talk to Kay.
    He had only managed to head off discussion the previous evening by initiating the most prolonged and inventive coupling they had enjoyed since the very earliest days of their relationship. Kay had responded immediately and with unnerving enthusiasm: flicking herself from position to position; drawing up her strong, stocky legs for him; contorting like the Slavic acrobat she so closely resembled, with her olive skin and very short dark hair. Too late, he had realized that she was taking this uncharacteristic act of assertion as a tacit confession of those things he was determined to avoid saying. She had kissed him greedily; he had found her wet intrusive kisses erotic when the affair began, now he found them vaguely repellent. He took a long time to climax, his horror at what he had started constantly threatening to deflate his erection. Even this worked against him: she seemed to take his unusual stamina as a display of virtuosity.
    When at last it was over, she had cuddled close to him in the darkness and stroked his hair for a while. Miserably he stared into the void, aware that after all