"I've been meaning to drop in," Mary said, "you were so kind - and I wanted to thank Miles -"

"No need," Samantha said awkwardly.

"Oh, but I'd like -"

"Oh, but then, please do -"

After Mary had walked away, Samantha had the awful feeling that she might have given the impression that that evening would be a perfect time for Mary to come round.

Once home, she dropped the bags in the hall and telephoned Miles at work to tell him what she had done, but he displayed an infuriating equanimity about the prospect of adding a newly widowed woman to their foursome.

"I can't see what the problem is, really," he said. "Nice for Mary to get out."

"But I didn't say we were having Gavin and Kay over -"

"Mary likes Gav," said Miles. "I wouldn't worry about it."

He was, Samantha thought, being deliberately obtuse, no doubt in retaliation for her refusal to go to Sweetlove House. After she had hung up, she wondered whether to call Mary to tell her not to come that evening, but she was afraid of sounding rude, and settled for hoping that Mary would find herself unequal to calling in after all.

Stalking into the sitting room, she put on Libby's boy band DVD at full volume so that she would be able to hear it in the kitchen, then carried the bags through and set to work preparing a casserole and her fall-back pudding, Mississippi mud pie. She would have liked to buy one of Mollison and Lowe's large gateaux, to save herself some work, but it would have got straight back to Shirley, who frequently intimated that Samantha was overreliant on frozen food and ready meals.

Samantha knew the boy band DVD so well by now that she was able to visualize the images matching the music blaring through to the kitchen. Several times that week, while Miles was upstairs in his home study or on the telephone to Howard, she had watched it again. When she heard the opening bars of the track where the muscular boy walked, with his shirt flapping open, along the beach, she went through to watch in her apron, absentmindedly sucking her chocolatey fingers.

She had planned on having a long shower while Miles laid the table, forgetting that he would be late home, because he had to drive into Yarvil to pick up the girls from St. Anne's. When Samantha realized why he had not returned, and that their daughters would be with him when he did, she had to fly around to organize the dining room herself, then find something to feed Lexie and Libby before the guests arrived. Miles found his wife in her work clothes at half past seven, sweaty, cross and inclined to blame him for what had been her own idea.

Fourteen-year-old Libby marched into the sitting room without greeting Samantha and removed the disc from the DVD player.

"Oh, good, I was wondering what I'd done with that," she said. "Why's the TV on? Have you been playing it?"

Sometimes, Samantha thought that her younger daughter had a look of Shirley about her.

"I was watching the news, Libby. I haven't got time to watch DVDs. Come through, your pizza's ready. We've got people coming round."

"Frozen pizza again?"

"Miles! I need to change. Can you mash the potatoes for me? Miles?"

But he had disappeared upstairs, so Samantha pounded the potatoes herself, while her daughters ate at the island in the middle of the kitchen. Libby had propped the DVD cover against her glass of Diet Pepsi, and was ogling it.

"Mikey's so lush," she said, with a carnal groan that took Samantha aback; but the muscular boy was called Jake. Samantha was glad they did not like the same one.

Loud and confident Lexie was jabbering about school; a machine-gun torrent of information about girls whom Samantha did not know, with whose antics and feuds and regroupings she could not keep up.

"All right, you two, I've got to change. Clear away when you're done, all right?"

She turned down the heat under the casserole and hurried upstairs. Miles was buttoning up his shirt in the bedroom, watching himself in the wardrobe mirror. The whole room smelled of soap and aftershave.

"Everything under control, hon?"

"Yes, thanks. So glad you've had time to shower," spat Samantha, pulling out her favorite long skirt and top, slamming the wardrobe door.

"You could have one now."

"They'll be here in ten minutes; I won't have time to dry my hair and put on makeup." She kicked off her shoes; one of them hit the radiator with a loud clang. "When you've finished preening, could you please go downstairs and sort out drinks?"

After Miles had left the room, she tried to untangle her thick hair and repair her makeup. She looked awful. Only when she had changed did she realize that she was wearing the wrong bra for her clinging top. After a frantic search, she remembered that the right one was drying in the utility room; she hurried out onto the landing but the doorbell rang. Swearing, she scuttled back to the bedroom. The boy band's music was blaring out of Libby's room.

Gavin and Kay had arrived on the dot of eight because Gavin was afraid of what Samantha might say if they turned up late; he could imagine her suggesting that they had lost track of time because they were shagging or that they must have had a row. She seemed to think that one of the perks of marriage was that it gave you rights of comment and intrusion over single people's love lives. She also thought that her crass, uninhibited way of talking, especially when drunk, constituted trenchant humor.

"Hello-ello-ello," said Miles, moving back to let Gavin and Kay inside. "Come in, come in. Welcome to Casa Mollison."

He kissed Kay on both cheeks and relieved her of the chocolates she was holding.

"For us? Thanks very much. Lovely to meet you properly at last. Gav's been keeping you under wraps for far too long."

Miles shook the wine out of Gavin's hand, then clapped him on the back, which Gavin resented.

"Come on through, Sam'll be down in a mo. What'll you have to drink?"

Kay would ordinarily have found Miles rather smooth and over-familiar, but she was determined to suspend judgment. Couples had to mix with each other's circles, and manage to get along in them. This evening represented significant progress in her quest to infiltrate the layers of his life to which Gavin had never admitted her, and she wanted to show him that she was at home in the Mollisons' big, smug house, that there was no need to exclude her anymore. So she smiled at Miles, asked for a red wine, and admired the spacious room with its stripped pine floorboards, its over-cushioned sofa and its framed prints.

"Been here for, ooh, getting on for fourteen years," said Miles, busy with the corkscrew. "You're down in Hope Street, aren't you? Nice little houses, some great fixer-upper opportunities down there."

Samantha appeared, smiling without warmth. Kay, who had previously seen her only in an overcoat, noted the tightness of her orange top, beneath which every detail of her lacy bra was clearly visible. Her face was even darker than her leathery chest; her eye makeup was thick and unflattering and her jangling gold earrings and high-heeled golden mules were, in Kay's opinion, tarty. Samantha struck her as the kind of woman who would have raucous girls' nights out, and find stripograms hilarious, and flirt drunkenly with everyone else's partner at parties.

"Hi there," said Samantha. She kissed Gavin and smiled at Kay. "Great, you've got drinks. I'll have the same as Kay, Miles."

She turned away to sit down, having already taken stock of the other woman's appearance: Kay was small-breasted and heavy-hipped, and had certainly chosen her black trousers to minimize the size of her bottom. She would have done better, in Samantha's opinion, to wear heels, given the shortness of her legs. Her face was attractive enough, with even-toned olive skin, large dark eyes and a generous mouth; but the closely cropped boy's hair and the resolutely flat shoes were undoubtedly pointers to certain sacrosanct Beliefs. Gavin had done it again: he had gone and picked another humorless, domineering woman who would make his life a misery.

"So!" said Samantha brightly, raising her glass. "Gavin-and-Kay!"

She saw, with satisfaction, Gavin's hangdog wince of a smile; but before she could make him squirm more or weasel private information out of them both to dangle over Shirley's and Maureen's heads, the doorbell rang again.

Mary appeared fragile and angular, especially beside Miles, who ushered her into the room. Her T-shirt hung from protruding collarbones.

"Oh," she said, coming to a startled halt on the threshold. "I didn't realize you were having -"

"Gavin and Kay just dropped in," said Samantha a little wildly. "Come in, Mary, please...have a drink..."

"Mary, this is Kay," said Miles. "Kay, this is Mary Fairbrother."

"Oh," said Kay, thrown; she had thought that it would only be the four of them. "Yes, hello."

Gavin, who could tell that Mary had not meant to drop in on a dinner party and was on the point of walking straight back out again, patted the sofa beside him; Mary sat down with a weak smile. He was overjoyed to see her. Here was his buffer; even Samantha must realize that her particular brand of prurience would be inappropriate in front of a bereaved woman; plus, the constrictive symmetry of a foursome had been broken up.

"How are you?" he said quietly. "I was going to give you a ring, actually...there've been developments with the insurance..."

"Haven't we got any nibbles, Sam?" asked Miles.

Samantha walked from the room, seething at Miles. The smell of scorched meat met her as she opened the kitchen door.

"Oh shit, shit, shit..."

She had completely forgotten the casserole, which had dried out. Desiccated chunks of meat and vegetables sat, forlorn survivors of the catastrophe, on the singed bottom of the pot. Samantha sloshed in wine and stock, chiseling the adhering bits off the pan with her spoon, stirring vigorously, sweating in the heat. Miles' high-pitched laugh rang out from the sitting room. Samantha put on long-stemmed broccoli to steam, drained her glass of wine, ripped open a bag of tortilla chips and a tub of hummus, and upended them into bowls.

Mary and Gavin were still conversing quietly on the sofa when she returned to the sitting room, while Miles was showing Kay a framed aerial photograph of Pagford, and giving her a lesson in the town's history. Samantha set down the bowls on the coffee table, poured herself another drink and settled into the armchair, making no effort to join either conversation. It was awfully uncomfortable to have Mary there; with her grief hanging so heavily around her she might as well have walked in trailing a shroud. Surely, though, she would leave before dinner.

Gavin was determined that Mary should stay. As they discussed the latest developments in their ongoing battle with the insurance company, he felt much more relaxed and in control than he usually did in Miles and Samantha's presence. Nobody was chipping away at him, or patronizing him, and Miles was absolving him temporarily of all responsibility for Kay.

"...and just here, just out of sight," Miles was saying, pointing to a spot two inches past the frame of the picture, "you've got Sweetlove House, the Fawley place. Big Queen Anne manor house, dormers, stone quoins...stunning, you should visit, it's open to the public on Sundays in the summer. Important family locally, the Fawleys."

"Stone quoins?" "Important family, locally?" God, you are an arse, Miles.

Samantha hoisted herself out of her armchair and returned to the kitchen. Though the casserole was watery, the burned flavor dominated. The broccoli was flaccid and tasteless; the mashed potato cool and dry. Past caring, she decanted it all into dishes and slammed it down on the circular dining-room table.

"Dinner's ready!" she called at the sitting-room door.

"Oh, I must go," said Mary, jumping up. "I didn't mean -"

"No, no, no!" said Gavin, in a tone that Kay had never heard before: kindly and cajoling. "It'll do you good to eat - kids'll be all right for an hour."

Miles added his support and Mary looked uncertainly towards Samantha, who was forced to add her voice to theirs, then dashed back through into the dining room to lay another setting.

She invited Mary to sit between Gavin and Miles, because placing her next to a woman seemed to emphasize her husband's absence. Kay and Miles had moved on to discussing social work.

"I don't envy you," he said, serving Kay a large ladle full of casserole; Samantha could see black, scorched flecks in the sauce spreading across the white plate. "Bloody difficult job."

"Well, we're perennially under-resourced," said Kay, "but it can be satisfying, especially when you can feel you're making a difference."

And she thought of the Weedons. Terri's urine sample had tested negative at the clinic yesterday and Robbie had had a full week in nursery. The recollection cheered her, counterbalancing her slight irritation that Gavin's attention was still focused entirely on Mary; that he was doing nothing to help ease her conversation with his friends.

"You've got a daughter, haven't you, Kay?"

"That's right: Gaia. She's sixteen."

"Same age as Lexie; we should get them together," said Miles.

"Divorced?" asked Samantha delicately.

"No," said Kay. "We weren't married. He was a university boyfriend and we split up not long after she was born."

"Yeah, Miles and I had barely left university ourselves," said Samantha.

Kay did not know whether Samantha meant to draw a distinction between herself, who had married the big smug father of her children, and Kay, who had been left...not that Samantha could know that Brendan had left her...

"Gaia's taken a Saturday job with your father, actually," Kay told Miles. "At the new cafe."

Miles was delighted. He took enormous pleasure in the idea that he and Howard were so much part of the fabric of the place that everybody in Pagford was connected to them, whether as friend or client, customer or employee. Gavin, who was chewing and chewing on a bit of rubbery meat that was refusing to yield to his teeth, experienced a further lowering in the pit of his stomach. It was news to him that Gaia had taken a job with Miles' father. Somehow he had forgotten that Kay possessed in Gaia another powerful device for anchoring herself to Pagford. When not in the immediate vicinity of her slamming doors, her vicious looks and caustic asides, Gavin tended to forget that Gaia had any independent existence at all; that she was not simply part of the uncomfortable backdrop of stale sheets, bad cooking and festering grudges against which his relationship with Kay staggered on.

"Does Gaia like Pagford?" Samantha asked.

"Well, it's a bit quiet compared to Hackney," said Kay, "but she's settling in well."

She took a large gulp of wine to wash out her mouth after disgorging the enormous lie. There had been yet another row before leaving tonight.

("What's the matter with you?" Kay had asked, while Gaia sat at the kitchen table, hunched over her laptop, wearing a dressing gown over her clothes. Four or five boxes of dialogue were open on the screen. Kay knew that Gaia was communicating online with the friends she had left behind in Hackney, friends she had had, in most cases, since she had been in primary school.

"Gaia?"

Refusal to answer was new and ominous. Kay was used to explosions of bile and rage against herself and, particularly, Gavin.

"Gaia, I'm talking to you."

"I know, I can hear you."

"Then kindly have the courtesy to answer me back."

Black dialogue jerked upwards in the boxes on the screen, funny little icons, blinking and waggling.

"Gaia, please will you answer me?"

"What? What do you want?"

"I'm trying to ask about your day."

"My day was shit. Yesterday was shit. Tomorrow will be shit as well."

"When did you get home?"

"The same time I always get home."

Sometimes, even after all these years, Gaia displayed resentment at having to let herself in, at Kay not being at home to meet her like a storybook mother.

"Do you want to tell me why your day was shit?"

"Because you dragged me to live in a shithole."

Kay willed herself not to shout. Lately there had been screaming matches that she was sure the whole street had heard.

"You know that I'm going out with Gavin tonight?"

Gaia muttered something Kay did not catch.

"What?"

"I said, I didn't think he liked taking you out."

"What's that supposed to mean?"