This was quite untrue. Andrew and Paul both possessed cheap laptops; the PC sat in the corner of the tiny sitting room and neither boy touched it, preferring to do nothing that took them within the vicinity of their father. Ruth often spoke of her sons to Shirley as though they were much younger than they were: portable, tractable, easily amused. Perhaps she sought to make herself younger, to emphasize the age difference between herself and Shirley - which stood at nearly two decades - to make them even more like mother and daughter. Ruth's mother had died ten years previously; she missed having an older woman in her life, and Shirley's relationship with her own daughter was, she had hinted to Ruth, not all it could have been.

"Miles and I have always been very close. Patricia, though, she was always rather a difficult character. She's up in London now."

Ruth longed to probe, but a quality that she and Shirley shared and admired in each other was a genteel reticence; a pride in presenting an unruffled surface to the world. Ruth laid her piqued curiosity aside, therefore, though not without a private hope that she would find out, in due course, what made Patricia so difficult.

Shirley and Ruth's instant liking for each other had been rooted in their mutual recognition that the other was a woman like herself, a woman whose deepest pride lay in having captured and retained the affection of her husband. Like Freemasons, they shared a fundamental code, and were therefore secure in each other's company in a way that they were not with other women. Their complicity was still more enjoyable for being spiced by a sense of superiority, because each secretly pitied the other for her choice of husband. To Ruth, Howard was physically grotesque, and she was puzzled to understand how her friend, who retained a plump yet delicate prettiness, could ever have agreed to marry him. To Shirley, who could not remember ever setting eyes on Simon, who had never heard him mentioned in connection with the higher workings of Pagford, and who understood Ruth to lack even a rudimentary social life, Ruth's husband sounded a reclusive inadequate.

"So I saw Miles and Samantha bringing Barry in," Ruth said, launching into the main subject without preamble. She had much less conversational finesse than Shirley, finding it difficult to disguise her greed for Pagford gossip, of which she was deprived, stuck high on the hill above town, isolated by Simon's unsociability. "Did they actually see it happen?"

"Oh yes," said Shirley. "They were having dinner at the golf club. Sunday night, you know; the girls were back at school, and Sam prefers eating out, she's not much of a cook..."

Bit by bit, over their shared coffee breaks, Ruth had learned some of the inside story of Miles and Samantha's marriage. Shirley had told her how her son had been obliged to marry Samantha, because Samantha had fallen pregnant with Lexie.

"They've made the best of it," Shirley sighed, brightly brave. "Miles did the right thing; I wouldn't have had it any other way. The girls are lovely. It's a pity Miles didn't have a son; he would have been wonderful with a boy. But Sam didn't want a third."

Ruth treasured up every veiled criticism Shirley made of her daughter-in-law. She had taken an immediate dislike to Samantha years before, when she had accompanied four-year-old Andrew to the nursery class at St. Thomas's, and there met Samantha and her daughter Lexie. With her loud laugh, and her boundless cleavage, and a fine line in risque jokes for the schoolyard mothers, Samantha had struck Ruth as dangerously predatory. For years, Ruth had watched scornfully as Samantha stuck out her massive chest while talking to Vikram Jawanda at parents' evenings, and steered Simon around the edge of classrooms to avoid having to talk to her.

Shirley was still recounting the secondhand tale of Barry's final journey, giving all possible weight to Miles' quick thinking in calling the ambulance, to his support of Mary Fairbrother, to his insistence on remaining with her at the hospital until the Walls arrived. Ruth listened attentively, though with a slight impatience; Shirley was much more entertaining when she was enumerating the inadequacies of Samantha than when extolling the virtues of Miles. What was more, Ruth was bursting with something thrilling that she wished to tell Shirley.

"So there's an empty seat on the Parish Council," Ruth said, the moment that Shirley reached the point in the story where Miles and Samantha ceded the stage to Colin and Tessa Wall.

"We call it a casual vacancy," said Shirley kindly.

Ruth took a deep breath.

"Simon," she said, excited at the mere telling of it, "is thinking of standing!"

Shirley smiled automatically, raised her eyebrows in polite surprise, and took a sip of tea to hide her face. Ruth was completely unaware that she had said anything to discompose her friend. She had assumed that Shirley would be delighted to think of their husbands sitting on the Parish Council together, and had a vague notion that Shirley might be helpful in bringing this about.

"He told me last night," Ruth went on, importantly. "He's been thinking about it for a while."

Certain other things that Simon had said, about the possibility of taking over bribes from Grays to keep them on as council contractors, Ruth had pushed out of her mind, as she pushed out all of Simon's little dodges, his petty criminalities.

"I had no idea Simon was interested in getting involved in local government," said Shirley, her tone light and pleasant.

"Oh yes," said Ruth, who had had no idea either, "he's very keen."

"Has he been talking to Dr. Jawanda?" asked Shirley, sipping her tea again. "Did she suggest standing to him?"

Ruth was thrown by this, and her genuine puzzlement showed.

"No, I...Simon hasn't been to the doctor in ages. I mean, he's very healthy."

Shirley smiled. If he was acting alone, without the support of the Jawanda faction, then the threat posed by Simon was surely negligible. She even pitied Ruth, who was in for a nasty surprise. She, Shirley, who knew everybody who counted in Pagford, would have been hard-pressed to recognize Ruth's husband if he came into the delicatessen: who on earth did poor Ruth think would vote for him? On the other hand, Shirley knew that there was one question that Howard and Aubrey would want her to ask as a matter of routine.

"Simon's always lived in Pagford, hasn't he?"

"No, he was born in the Fields," said Ruth.

"Ah," said Shirley.

She peeled back the foil lid of her yogurt, picked up her spoon and took a thoughtful mouthful. The fact that Simon was likely to have a pro-Fields bias was, whatever his electoral prospects, worth knowing.

"Will it be on the website, how you put your name forward?" Ruth asked, still hoping for a late gush of helpfulness and enthusiasm.

"Oh yes," said Shirley vaguely. "I expect so."

III.

Andrew, Fats and twenty-seven others spent the last period on Wednesday afternoon in what Fats called "spazmatics." This was the second-from-bottom maths set, taken by the department's most incompetent teacher: a blotchy-faced young woman fresh from teacher training, who was incapable of keeping good order, and who often seemed to be on the verge of tears. Fats, who had set himself on a course of determined underachievement over the previous year, had been demoted to spazmatics from the top set. Andrew, who had struggled with numbers all his life, lived in fear that he would be relegated to the very bottom set, along with Krystal Weedon and her cousin, Dane Tully.

Andrew and Fats sat at the back of the room together. Occasionally, when he had tired of entertaining the class or whipping it into further disruption, Fats would show Andrew how to do a sum. The level of noise was deafening. Miss Harvey shouted over the top of them all, begging for quiet. Worksheets were defaced by obscenities; people got up constantly to visit each other's desks, scraping their chair legs across the floor; small missiles flew across the room whenever Miss Harvey looked away. Sometimes Fats made excuses to walk up and down the room, imitating Cubby's bouncy up-and-down stiff-armed walk. Fats' humor was at its broadest here; in English, where he and Andrew were both in the top set, he did not bother to use Cubby for material.

Sukhvinder Jawanda was sitting directly in front of Andrew. Long ago, in primary school, Andrew, Fats and the other boys had pulled Sukhvinder's long, blue-black plait; it was the easiest thing to catch hold of when playing tag, and it had once presented an irresistible temptation when dangling, like now, down her back, hidden from the teacher. But Andrew no longer had any desire to tug it, nor to touch any part of Sukhvinder; she was one of the few girls over whom his eyes glided without the slightest interest. Since Fats had pointed it out, he had noticed the soft dark down on her upper lip. Sukhvinder's older sister, Jaswant, had a lithe curvy figure, a tiny waist and a face that, prior to the advent of Gaia, had seemed beautiful to Andrew, with its high cheekbones, smooth golden skin and almond-shaped liquid-brown eyes. Naturally, Jaswant had always been completely beyond his reach: two years older and the cleverest girl in the sixth form, with an aura of being aware, to the last hard-on, of her own attractions.

Sukhvinder was the only person in the room who was making absolutely no noise. With her back hunched and her head bent low over her work, she appeared to be cocooned in concentration. She had pulled the left sleeve of her jumper down so that it completely covered her hand, enclosing the cuff to make a woolly fist. Her total stillness was almost ostentatious.

"The great hermaphrodite sits quiet and still," murmured Fats, his eyes fixed on the back of Sukhvinder's head. "Mustachioed, yet large-mammaried, scientists remain baffled by the contradictions of the hairy man-woman."

Andrew sniggered, yet he was not entirely at his ease. He would have enjoyed himself more if he knew that Sukhvinder could not hear what Fats was saying. The last time that he had been over at Fats' house, Fats had shown him the messages he was sending regularly to Sukhvinder's Facebook page. He had been scouring the Internet for information and pictures about hirsutism, and was sending a quotation or an image a day.

It was sort of funny, but it made Andrew uncomfortable. Strictly speaking, Sukhvinder was not asking for it: she seemed a very easy target. Andrew liked it best when Fats directed his savage tongue towards figures of authority, the pretentious or the self-satisfied.

"Separated from its bearded, bra-wearing herd," said Fats, "it sits, lost in thought, wondering whether it would suit a goatee."

Andrew laughed, then felt guilty, but Fats lost interest, and turned his attention to transforming every zero on his worksheet into a puckered anus. Andrew reverted to trying to guess where the decimal point should go, and contemplating the prospect of the school bus home, and Gaia. It was always much more difficult to find a seat where he might keep her in his eyeline on the school-to-home trip, because she was frequently boxed in before he got there, or too far away. Their shared amusement in Monday morning's assembly had led nowhere. She had not made eye contact with him on the bus either morning since, nor in any other way demonstrated that she knew he existed. In the four weeks of his infatuation, Andrew had never actually spoken to Gaia. He attempted to formulate opening lines while the din of spazmatics crashed around him. "That was funny, Monday, in assembly..."

"Sukhvinder, are you all right?"

Miss Harvey, who had bent down over Sukhvinder's work to mark it, was gawping into the girl's face. Andrew watched Sukhvinder nod and draw in her hands, obscuring her face, still hunched up over her work.

"Wallah!" stage-whispered Kevin Cooper, from two rows in front. "Wallah! Peanut!"

He was trying to draw their attention to what they already knew: that Sukhvinder, judging by the gentle quivering of her shoulders, was crying, and that Miss Harvey was making hopeless, harried attempts to find out what was wrong. The class, detecting a further lapse in their teacher's vigilance, raged louder than ever.

"Peanut! Wallah!"

Andrew could never decide whether Kevin Cooper irritated intentionally or accidentally, but he had an infallible knack for grating on people. The nickname "Peanut" was a very old one, which had clung to Andrew in primary school; he had always hated it. Fats had forced the name out of fashion by never using it; Fats had always been the final arbiter in such matters. Cooper was even getting Fats' name wrong: "Wallah" had enjoyed only a brief popularity, last year.

"Peanut! Wallah!"

"Fuck off, Cooper, you glans-headed moron," said Fats under his breath. Cooper was hanging over the back of his seat, staring at Sukhvinder, who had curled over, her face almost touching the desk, while Miss Harvey crouched beside her, her hands fluttering comically, forbidden to touch her, and unable to elicit any explanation for her distress. A few more people had noticed this unusual disturbance and were staring; but at the front of the room, several boys continued to rampage, oblivious to everything but their own amusement. One of them seized the wood-backed board rubber from Miss Harvey's vacated desk. He threw it.

The rubber soared right across the room and crashed into the clock on the back wall, which plummeted to the ground and shattered: shards of plastic and metal innards flew everywhere, and several girls, including Miss Harvey, shrieked in shock.

The door of the classroom flew open and bounced, with a bang, off the wall. The class fell quiet. Cubby was standing there, flushed and furious.

"What is going on in this room? What is all this noise?"

Miss Harvey shot up like a jack-in-a-box beside Sukhvinder's desk, looking guilty and frightened.

"Miss Harvey! Your class is making an almighty racket. What's going on?"

Miss Harvey seemed struck dumb. Kevin Cooper hung over the back of his chair, grinning, looking from Miss Harvey to Cubby to Fats and back again.

Fats spoke.

"Well, to be perfectly frank, Father, we've been running rings around this poor woman."

Laughter exploded. Miss Harvey's neck was disfigured by a rising maroon rash. Fats balanced himself nonchalantly on the rear legs of his chair, his face perfectly straight, looking at Cubby with challenging detachment.

"That's enough," said Cubby. "If I hear any more noise like that from this class, I'll put the whole lot of you in detention. Do you understand? All of you."

He shut the door on their laughter.

"You heard the deputy headmaster!" cried Miss Harvey, scurrying to the front of the room. "Be quiet! I want quiet! You - Andrew - and you, Stuart - you can clear up that mess! Pick up all those bits of clock!"

They set up a routine cry of injustice at this, supported shrilly by a couple of the girls. The actual perpetrators of the destruction, of whom everybody knew Miss Harvey was afraid, sat smirking at their desks. As there were only five minutes remaining until the end of the school day, Andrew and Fats set about stringing out the clearing up until they would be able to abandon it unfinished. While Fats garnered further laughs by bouncing hither and thither, stiff-armed, doing the Cubby walk, Sukhvinder wiped her eyes surreptitiously with her wool-covered hand and sank back into obscurity.

When the bell rang, Miss Harvey made no attempt to control or contain the thunderous clamor or rush for the door. Andrew and Fats kicked various bits of clock under the cupboards at the back of the room, and swung their schoolbags over their shoulders again.

"Wallah! Wallah!" called Kevin Cooper, hurrying to catch up with Andrew and Fats as they headed down the corridor. "Do you call Cubby 'Father' at home? Seriously? Do you?"

He thought he had something on Fats; he thought he had got him.

"You're a dickhead, Cooper," said Fats wearily, and Andrew laughed.

IV.

"Dr. Jawanda's running about fifteen minutes late," the receptionist told Tessa.

"Oh, that's fine," said Tessa. "I'm in no hurry."

It was early evening, and the waiting-room windows made patches of clear royal blue against the walls. There were only two other people there: a misshapen, wheezing old woman wearing carpet slippers, and a young mother who was reading a magazine while her toddler rummaged in the toy box in the corner. Tessa took a battered old Heat magazine from the table in the middle, sat down and flicked through the pages, looking at the pictures. The delay gave her more time to think about what she was going to say to Parminder.

They had spoken, briefly, on the telephone this morning. Tessa had been full of contrition that she had not called at once to let Parminder know about Barry. Parminder had said it was fine, for Tessa not to be silly, that she was not upset at all; but Tessa, with her lengthy experience of the thin-skinned and fragile, could tell that Parminder, beneath her prickly carapace, was wounded. She had tried to explain that she had been utterly exhausted the last couple of days, and that she had had to deal with Mary, Colin, Fats, Krystal Weedon; that she had felt overwhelmed, lost and incapable of thinking of more than the immediate problems that had been thrown at her. But Parminder had cut her off in the middle of her rambling excuses and said calmly that she would see her later at the surgery.

Dr. Crawford emerged, white-haired and bearlike, from his room, gave Tessa a cheery wave, and said, "Maisie Lawford?" The young mother had some difficulty in persuading her daughter to abandon the old toy telephone on wheels that the latter had found in the toy box. While being pulled gently by the hand after Dr. Crawford, the little girl gazed longingly over her shoulder at the telephone, whose secrets she would never now discover.

When the door closed on them, Tessa realized that she was smiling fatuously, and hastily rearranged her own features. She was going to become one of those awful old ladies who cooed indiscriminately over small children and frightened them. She would have loved a chubby little blond daughter to go with her skinny, dark boy. How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing was a constant bereavement.

Parminder's door opened; Tessa looked up.

"Mrs. Weedon," said Parminder. Her eyes met Tessa's, and she gave a smile that was no smile at all, but a mere tightening of the mouth. The little old lady in carpet slippers got up with difficulty and hobbled away around the partition wall after Parminder. Tessa heard Parminder's surgery door snap shut.

She read the captions to a series of photographs showing a footballer's wife in all the different outfits she had worn over the previous five days. Studying the young woman's long thin legs, Tessa wondered how different her life would have been if she had had legs like that. She could not help but suspect that it would have been almost entirely different. Tessa's legs were thick, shapeless and short; she would have hidden them perpetually in boots, only it was difficult to find many that would zip up over her calves. She remembered telling a sturdy little girl in guidance that looks did not matter, that personality was much more important. What rubbish we tell children, thought Tessa, turning the page of her magazine.

An out-of-sight door opened with a bang. Somebody was shouting in a cracked voice.

"You're makin' me bloody worse. This in't right. I've come to you for help. It's your job - it's your -"

Tessa and the receptionist locked eyes, then turned towards the sound of the shouting. Tessa heard Parminder's voice, its Brummie accent still discernible after all these years in Pagford.

"Mrs. Weedon, you're still smoking, which affects the dose I have to prescribe you. If you'd give up your cigarettes - smokers metabolize Theophylline more quickly, so the cigarettes are not only worsening your emphysema, but actually affecting the ability of the drug to -"

"Don' you shout at me! I've 'ad enough of you! I'll report you! You've gave me the wrong fuckin' pills! I wanna see someone else! I wanna see Dr. Crawford!"

The old lady appeared around the wall, wobbling, wheezing, her face scarlet.

"She'll be the death of me, that Paki cow! Don' you go near 'er!" she shouted at Tessa. "She'll fuckin' kill yer with her drugs, the Paki bitch!"

She tottered toward the exit, spindle-shanked, unsteady on her slippered feet, her breath rattling, swearing as loudly as her beleaguered lungs would permit. The door swung shut behind her. The receptionist exchanged another look with Tessa. They heard Parminder's surgery door close again.

It was five minutes before Parminder reappeared. The receptionist stared ostentatiously at her screen.

"Mrs. Wall," said Parminder, with another tight non-smile.

"What was that about?" Tessa asked, when she had taken a seat at the end of Parminder's desk.

"Mrs. Weedon's new pills are upsetting her stomach," said Parminder calmly. "So we're doing your bloods today, aren't we?"

"Yes," said Tessa, both intimidated and hurt by Parminder's cold professional demeanor. "How are you doing, Minda?"

"Me?" said Parminder. "I'm fine. Why?"

"Well...Barry...I know what he meant to you and what you meant to him."

Tears welled in Parminder's eyes and she tried to blink them away, but too late; Tessa had seen them.

"Minda," she said, laying her plump hand on Parminder's thin one, but Parminder whipped it away as if Tessa had stung her; then, betrayed by her own reflex, she began to cry in earnest, unable to hide in the tiny room, though she had turned her back as nearly as she could in her swivel chair.

"I felt sick when I realized I hadn't phoned you," Tessa said, over Parminder's furious attempts to quell her own sobs. "I wanted to curl up and die. I meant to call," she lied, "but we hadn't slept, we spent almost the whole night at the hospital, then we had to go straight out to work. Colin broke down at assembly when he announced it, then he caused a bloody awful scene with Krystal Weedon in front of everyone. And then Stuart decided to play truant. And Mary's falling apart...but I'm so sorry, Minda, I should've called."