Bed of Roses

‘Oh. That’s very kind,’ Fanny says vaguely. The idea doesn’t excite her much.

‘Not kind. Absolutely mutually beneficial. If I can show potential clients what I can do with a relatively high-profile, local issue like this one, well—’

‘It’s just that public relations isn’t an especially high priority – for me, anyway. I think what we need—’

‘Everything needs public relations, Fanny. Especially a school that’s just been named-and-shamed! Unless you can persuade people that the school’s turning itself around you’re going to get every bright parent pulling their children out, and you’ll be left with nothing but the dregs. I mean, you know. Not the dregs, but the—’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘Right. And you’ll be sunk. Finished. Not only that, the General’s convinced that what they really want is to close the place down. But it’s the heart of the village, Fanny. And, speaking selfishly for a minute, I’d like the twins to go there one day. I certainly don’t want it closing.’

‘Of course you don’t.’

‘See? And I mean here you are, this young whizz-kid head teacher—’

Fanny laughs out loud. ‘Hardly!’

‘—Has anyone told the press? Of course they haven’t. And yet it’s the sort of thing local media goes mad for.’

‘Oh!’ Fanny says quickly. ‘Oh, no. No, thanks.’

But Jo is already up and rifling through the dresser for a pen. ‘Plus with you being pretty and so on. They’re going to adore you.’

‘No. No, I really don’t—’

‘Trust me, Fanny. I know what I’m talking about. That’s if—’ She stops suddenly and turns back to Fanny. ‘I take it you are serious about saving our school?’

‘What? Of course I am.’

‘I mean, you do realise, don’t you, how much people around here really care about that school surviving?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Well, then!’

‘It’s just—’

‘What?’

‘It’s just—’ She offers an unconvincing laugh. ‘You know, great if you want to put out a few nice stories about the school. That would be great. Just keep me out of it. I don’t like personal—There are people I don’t want—’ Fanny stops again. But she really doesn’t want to be drawn into details. ‘Basically, I don’t want my face in the paper.’

‘Why? What are you hiding from?’

‘No one. Nothing. I didn’t say that.’

Jo laughs. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand.’

‘Plus I’ve got a lot of unpaid parking tickets…’ Fanny lapses into gloomy silence. She turns away from Jo’s neat, determined face, to the open kitchen window. The birds are singing out there and a delicious, soft breeze is blowing through the giant cedar tree. She gazes out at the park and, beyond it, to the afternoon sun on the river and the distant tower of Fiddleford’s church, and her old terrors seem briefly very distant, even a little ridiculous.

The desire to be outside, on the other hand, alone, striding through that fresh, bright grass, is altogether more immediate; in fact, it’s suddenly quite overwhelming. She stands up. ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘I should be getting off. I’ve got a lot to do. Come on, Brute!…And thanks so much for a lovely lunch…It was really…absolutely…’ But she can’t quite bring herself to finish off with the customary ‘delicious’: ‘Very nice to meet you and the twins.’ Fanny is already reaching for the door.

‘I’ll make a couple of calls then,’ Jo says, standing up. ‘Get them writing something positive about our school for a change.’

‘But please – try and keep me out of it.’

‘I’ll try, but I can’t promise.’ Jo giggles suddenly. ‘You obviously hadn’t been warned.’

‘What about?’

‘Most people refuse to eat lunch here any more.’

‘They do? Why?’

‘Because of the food, of course. Too healthy for them! By the way,’ Jo shouts after her. ‘Hope you haven’t too many skeletons in the cupboard. Along with all the parking tickets! They’ll be coming after you now you’re going to be famous.’

‘Not funny,’ mutters Fanny. ‘Not funny at all.’

But Jo is spooning soya into her twins’ neatly opened mouths. She doesn’t hear.

Fanny calls Louis, her oldest and closest friend, as soon as she gets in from the Manor. She leaves a message on his machine, sounding more cheerful than she feels, emphasising the quaintly rustic attractions of her new village, and inviting – or possibly imploring – him to come down for the weekend.

After that she feeds Brute and sets to work. She works for several hours without stopping, with the same ferocious energy with which she does everything: teaches, flirts, drinks, and even once fell in love. She pulls down the nicotinestained net curtains, washes the windows, rips away what is left of the wallpaper, scrapes off the mushrooms and throws the junk mail out. She scrubs the skirting boards with disinfectant, and the 1950s oven, the 1950s kitchen sink, the 1950s basin and bath upstairs, so that they dazzle with shiny-white retro-chic. She pulls up the dank, sickcoloured carpets and discovers there are oak floorboards underneath.

By eight o’clock she has unloaded everything from the Morris Minor except what’s on the roof: her solitary piece of furniture, a vile, thirty-year-old reproduction dressing table left to her (along with the car itself) by her late grandmother and which she longs, one day, to be heartless enough to throw out. She is standing in her front garden beside the mountain of discarded carpet, gazing at the van and puzzling over how to get that final piece inside when she spots two magnificent-looking men strolling down the village street towards her. She recognises them both at once.

Charlie Maxwell McDonald – owner of the Fiddleford Manor Retreat, son to the truculent General, father to the rumbustious twins and husband to Perfect Jo, tall, dark and absurdly handsome – is, Fanny realises with a thrill of excitement, like his wife, every bit as good-looking as his photographs. He has his hands in the pockets of his old black jeans and the buttons of his pale cotton shirt half-undone…And he is muttering to a man even taller than he is, and even darker, with hooded eyes and wild hair and a great black coat which swings open behind him: a man whose press photographs do him no justice at all. Grey McShane, the notorious tramp-turned-poet-turned-pin-up-proprietor of Fiddleford’s Gatehouse Restaurant, is possibly the best-looking man Fanny Flynn has ever laid eyes on. She feels, suddenly, as though she’s walked on to the set of a soft-porn movie. Any second now, God bless them both, the men are going to start stripping their clothes off.

‘Hi there,’ Charlie says, drawing to a halt in front of her.

She stares at him. Tries to stop the soundtrack in her head and manages, somehow, not to smirk.

‘You must be Fanny Flynn,’ he says. ‘I’m Charlie Maxwell McDonald. From the Retreat. And this is Grey…’ He looks at her curiously. ‘My wife thought you might need some help unloading things. Are you all right?’

Fanny laughs. And hates herself for it.

‘What’s funny?’ asks Grey.

Fanny says, ‘Nothing. It was just, you know, coming towards me there.’ She grins at them. ‘Had to pinch myself. Thought I was dreaming!’ Clearly they don’t understand. ‘I mean I thought I was in a magazine…Or something. I mean – not a magazine, but a – you’re quite a striking couple…I mean, not couple. But together…’

The job barely takes a minute, and afterwards both turn down her offer of a drink. When they leave her alone in her newly scrubbed cottage she feels unreasonably let down. Lonely. Did she flirt too much? Probably. She usually does. She can’t help imagining them now: Charlie and exquisite Jo, having a drink together in their exquisite house, putting their exquisitely rumbustious twins to bed; and then Grey, rampaging around the kitchen of his celebrated restaurant, lovingly preparing an exquisitely delicious dinner for his no doubt exquisite wife.

It is only half past eight. She hasn’t eaten (there is nothing to eat) and Louis still hasn’t rung, but she has had enough of today. She picks up a worn-out file with the exhausting words ‘NEW JOBS: APPLICATIONS/ ACCEPTED ETC.’ scrawled across the front, pours herself a dusty tumbler of red wine and takes them up with her to bed. She will have a bath in the morning.

4

Fanny Flynn met her husband while they were waiting to be served at the bar of a pub just outside Buxton and they fell in love at once. There and then. Six weeks later they had treated themselves to a spontaneous Wedding Day package in Reno, Nevada.

But the marriage turned sour within moments of their leaving the Wedding Chapel. It ended abruptly, three bitter months after it never should have begun.

They were fighting as normal when he suddenly broke the single civilising rule left between them. He lashed out. He kicked her in the stomach – and fled, tears in his eyes, jointly owned credit card in his hands. ‘I’ll come back for you,’ he said wildly. ‘I will. When it’s safe for us. OK? And I’ll always be with you, baby, in my heart. Because I love you. I always will.’

‘You’re a nutter,’ she said in amazement, seeing it all – there and then – in a flash of horrible clarity. He wasn’t poetic, he was insane. And she passed out.

It was Louis who found her – unconscious, blood from her damaged womb congealing on the kitchen floor, and the husband who loved her nowhere to be seen. Louis laid her down in the back of his van. She slid from side to side between dust sheets, tyre jacks, paint pots and coils of rope. (He was working as a freelance decorator at the time.) He crashed every light between her house and the hospital, but he probably saved her life.

That was in 1994, eleven years ago now, and he hasn’t come back for her. She’s moved many times. (Too many; since the marriage she has found it very difficult to stay still.) She moved from Buxton to London, four or five times in London, then from London to a refugee camp in northern Kenya, where she worked for a year, and from there to Lichfield, from Lichfield to Mexico City, where she taught businessmen to speak English; from Mexico City to Weston-Super-Mare, and now to Fiddleford. She tries to forget him. Yet, still, wherever she is, whenever it’s dark and she’s alone, the questions flit through her mind: Has he followed? Is he out there? Is he looking in?

She never mentions him to anyone, except to Louis, but she believes that he sometimes tries to communicate. And it frightens her. There was an anonymous valentine card in Lichfield: a picture of roses speckled with yellow-brown drops of dried blood, and tucked inside it a message linking American Imperialism with Cryogenics, with Fanny’s ‘Frozen Passion, unstarched by eternality’. She threw the card in the bin.

Then in London she thought she saw him leaning against a postbox outside her flat. She closed the windows, locked them, and called Louis, who rushed over on his new motorbike. By the time Louis arrived the man was gone. He asked her if she had been certain. She wasn’t, of course. But the following week Fanny moved yet again.

And finally, in Weston-Super-Mare, there was the puppy – sitting in a cardboard box and dumped inexplicably on her doorstep. She had picked it up, thought she smelt him and gagged. But she was lonely. She kept the puppy – it was a cross between a golden Labrador and something mysterious. It was small and wiry, and it was very charming. She called him Brute. Now of course, except for Louis, Brute is probably her best friend in the world.

5

She wakes up having dreamt of him again, as she often does at the start of her New Beginnings. She dreams of him turning up at every new front door, with a stupid grin, as if she’d be pleased to see him, and a pathetic little offering – a box of cheap chocolates, a jigsaw puzzle – as if that would make up for it all. Usually, in her dreams, she doesn’t let him into the house. But last night, for some reason, she did. He was coming through her door, stepping over her mushrooms, just as the alarm clock went off. So she wakes up in a nervous sweat. When she opens her eyes and looks around her new, small room, she remembers the day which lies ahead, and feels a lurch of a very different kind of terror. She springs out of bed.

For her first day at Fiddleford Primary Fanny puts on the clothes she always wears on the first few days of a new job; a newly washed knee-length denim skirt (her only skirt in the world) which, for the moment, fits like rubber, and a dark blue polo-neck jersey. The effect is unfussy, like everything about her; simple and attractive, quite sexy, and scruffy. Fanny always looks scruffy. She can’t help it.

Feeling faintly sick with nerves she forces down half a cup of black coffee (still no milk in the house), picks up her bag of heavy files, takes a deep breath and steps out from her little cottage, which smells of yesterday’s disinfectant, and out into the sweet, fresh morning air of the village street.

The school is a small, russet stone Victorian building, pretty and symmetrical, with a broken bell tower in the middle, and just two large, arched windows at the front. Three gates open on to the front yard. The one on the right is marked BOYS, the one on the left, GIRLS. The middle one, non-specific, is the only one unlocked. Everyone uses it.

It’s as pretty a little school, Fanny thinks as she draws up in front of it, as any little school could ever hope to be. She feels a swell of warm pride. It looks more like a school in a story book. Nothing too alarming could possibly happen inside such a place.

Children scurry around her, nudging each other and giggling. Fanny ignores them – for the moment. She looks at her feet. Doesn’t want to speak to any parents just yet. Nor to anyone. She takes one more long, slow breath, mutters something to Brute about his wishing her luck, and pushes on, through the yard, up the path, into the central hall and right, to the door of the staff room. Pauses for a second. Opens it.

‘Morning all!’ she says, sounding unnaturally breezy.

The youngest head teacher in the south-west does not have a large staff to manage. There is Robert White, who wears a patchy beard and socks beneath open-toed sandals. He is the notoriously idle deputy head, still too idle to resign after being overlooked for promotion, but not, Fanny will soon discover, too idle to feel bitter and obstructive as a result of it. Robert teaches the younger class – when he turns up. There are the only two classes in the school.

There is also a part-time teacher’s assistant, Mrs Tardy; an elderly secretary, Mrs Haywood, who entertains the children occasionally (or so legend has it) by popping her glass eye in and out; and a dinner lady playground attendant who doubles up as caretaker.

The playground attendant/caretaker was a pupil here herself not so long ago, and she still has a brother and several cousins at the school. She is Tracey Guppy, the nine-teen-year-old daughter of Fanny’s landlord, Ian, the same girl who used to keep Robert White awake at night (his attention has shifted now to a girl in the Lamsbury Safeways). Tracey Guppy doesn’t speak to Ian or to her mother, who threw her out of the house when she was fifteen. She’s been living ever since with her Uncle Russell, wheelchair bound as a result of emphysema. They live together in a council-owned bungalow directly opposite the school.

‘Morning all!’ Fanny says breezily.

But only half the staff is yet present: only Linda Tardy, the part-time teacher’s assistant, and Robert White the lazybones deputy head.

At the sight of the dog, Robert’s shoulders jolt in surprise, making the Lemsip he has been blowing to cool spill on to his sock-covered toe. ‘Ow!’ he says irritably, and then, apparently too preoccupied with the accident to look or stand up, adds a grudging and slightly pert ‘Good morning, Miss Flynn’ in the direction of the carpet.

He places the mug of Lemsip on the floor, lifts the damaged sandal on to his knee and carefully undoes the buckle.

‘No one else here yet?’ Fanny asks brightly, looking from Robert White to Linda Tardy and back again. Linda, who is trying to swallow a mouthful of the same fish-paste sandwich she has vowed not to touch before lunch, holds a hand in front of her jaw and shakes her head.

‘It’s usually a bit slow on the first day,’ mumbles Robert, removing the sandal and unrolling the sock. ‘And I’m afraid to say I’m only really popping in myself. I’m a bit under the weather.’ He examines his toe, which looks bony and a little damp, but otherwise undamaged, and stands, at last, to arrange the sock on a nearby heater. ‘I thought I should put a nose in, so to speak.’ He smiles at her, keeping his pink lips closed. He is skinny, in his mid-forties, with eyes of the palest blue, and thin sandy-coloured hair cut into a well-kept bob. He is surprisingly tall when he stands up, Fanny notices; over six foot, or he would be if he pulled his shoulders back. ‘I’ll nip back to bed later,’ he continues, ‘but I wanted to say welcome…So –’ with a burst of energy he flaps open one of the long thin arms and winks at her, ‘welcome!’ he says.

‘Thank you.’ It is unfortunate for Robert, especially since this is their first meeting (Robert having been off sick on the two previous occasions she visited the school and off sulking when the other governors were interviewing her for the job), but there’s almost nothing Fanny finds more irritating than a man with a well-kept bob, open-toed sandals and a cold. ‘Who’s going to take your class then?’

Robert looks taken aback. ‘Linda,’ he says, as if it’s obvious.

‘You mean Mrs Tardy?’

‘Linda always does it. They’re ever so used to her. The kiddies like you, don’t they, Linda?’

‘They like it with me because we always do the fun stuff,’ Linda Tardy chuckles, ‘and then when Robert’s back he has to do all the catching up for us, don’t you, Robbie?’

‘I do my best.’

‘Though generally,’ she adds, ‘there’s more to catch up on than he can manage. Isn’t that right, Robert? With you being poorly so much…But they’re lovely little children, and that’s what counts. Isn’t that right, Robert? They’re super kids.’

‘But Mrs Tardy,’ says Fanny, ‘if you don’t mind me being frank—’

‘Oh, say what you like, dear. Don’t worry about me!’

‘But you’re not a teacher.’

‘Oh, I know that, dear. It says it loud and clear in my pay packet every month!’ She rocks with laughter.

‘Well…’ Fanny hesitates. It’s a bit early to be throwing her weight around but she feels she can’t let it pass. She turns to Robert White. ‘I think,’ she says politely, ‘with the children being so behind, and with Mrs Tardy tending, as she says, to stick with the fun stuff – it might be a good idea to get a supply teacher in, don’t you?’

‘It isn’t ordinarily a deputy’s duty,’ he says, ‘to administrate that sort of thing.’

‘Isn’t it? Wasn’t it? Well, it is now!’ Fanny forces a laugh. She’s not used to this; ordering grown men about. It’s awkward. ‘Anyway, Robert, Mr White, to be frank – you don’t exactly look like you’re dying…Couldn’t you stick around, now you’ve made it this far? As it’s my first day. Would you mind?’

‘I had no idea,’ he says pertly, ‘that our esteemed employers now insisted we should be dying before we’re allowed time off sick.’

‘Oh, come on.’

‘And the last thing I want is to feel responsible for the kiddies catching my germs.’

‘Children,’ Fanny says, ‘are pretty resilient.’

‘In my experience, parents tend to be not unduly impressed by the sort of staff who insist on spreading their germs around. And if the parents complain—’

‘Yes, but they won’t,’ she says.

There are blotches of pink at his cheek-bones. ‘But they might,’ he says.

‘Well,’ there are blotches at hers, too, ‘then I’m willing to risk that.’

A long silence. It’s a battle of wills. She may be young and small and new and female and disconcertingly attractive, but it begins fuzzily to occur to Robert that she might not be the pushover Mrs Thomas had been. They stare at each other, until finally, with a huffy, superior shrug, Robert nods.

‘Thank you,’ Fanny grins at him. ‘You’re very kind. Thank you very much.’ Without another word he picks up his briefcase, bulging with exercise books he has failed to mark over the Easter holidays, and leaves the room.

With a great sigh of relief Fanny throws herself into the beaten-up, brown-covered armchair beside Mrs Tardy’s. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘That wasn’t at all how I’d intended to begin.’

‘The thing is, what I’ve learnt in my experience, Miss Flynn, we all have to begin somehow,’ replies Linda Tardy nonsensically, but kindly, patting Fanny on the knee. ‘But you mustn’t mind Robert. He has his ways. And the main thing is, we’ve got some really super kids here at Fiddleford.’ She nods to herself. Safe on safe ground. ‘That’s the main thing. Super kids. That’s right, isn’t it, dear? Now then,’ slowly she heaves herself up from her seat, ‘we’ve got a few minutes. How about I make you a nice cup of coffee?’

‘I’d love some coffee,’ Miss Flynn says. ‘And please, Mrs Tardy, call me Fanny.’

Linda Tardy hesitates. ‘It’s a strange name though, isn’t it, Miss Flynn?’ She gives one of her bosomy chuckles. ‘Not one you’d wish on a girl these days. Not really. You never thought of changing it, I suppose?’

6

The school hall is light and airy, with worn wooden floors, high ceilings and enormous windows set high in whitepainted brick walls. Like the two classrooms on either side of it, it is clean and handsome but strangely bare; there are hardly any children’s paintings anywhere, or charts, or wall displays. Robert’s classroom has nothing at all except a laminated sign which reads:

Fanny sits, for the moment, swinging her feet over the edge of the school hall’s tiny stage and feeling a mite peculiar. The children, all thirty-seven of them, all cross-legged on the linoleum before her, gaze up, placidly expectant, each one entrusting their fate to her as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if she had a clue what she was really meant to be doing with it.

This is her first assembly and, although there will be complaints about it later, she has decided on the spur of that moment to tell the students of the shadow which hangs over their school’s future. It seems only fair, she thinks, that they should know as much as she does. ‘So you see,’ she says emphatically, ‘I don’t think we’ve got all that much time. And unless we can totally and completely –’ in her zeal her shoulders, her entire body, give an unconscious leap of enthusiasm, and the children chortle, they like her; children always do, ‘transform this place, work some kind of miracle and somehow improve every single thing about it, well then—’

The door is kicked open by a gangly boy in loose-fitting Nike nylon. He stands facing her, arms crossed and legs apart. He can’t be more than eleven or he wouldn’t still be at the school, but he’s tall for his age.

‘O’right, miss?’ he says. His voice is breaking.

‘Thank you. I’m OK,’ she says brightly. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

‘Eh?’

‘“Eh?”…I said why don’t you—’

‘Yeah, I know. But what if I don’t want to?’

Fanny looks at him briefly and shrugs. She turns back to the other children, leaving him standing there, bewildered, brimming with thwarted urges. ‘So the thing is,’ she continues, ‘unless we all decide to make a massive effort—’

‘And my mum says it’s disgusting as well, because I know what your name is, and it’s disgusting. Your name’s Fanny.’

Fanny smiles. ‘And what’s your name?’ she asks. There is something vaguely familiar about him.

‘Never mind what my name is. I tell you it ain’t John Thomas! At least I ain’t called penis!’

A wave of uncertain laughter.

‘That’s very fanny,’ she nods. More laughter. ‘You are a fanny boy. Well done.’ She’s made a similar joke at every school she’s ever worked at. ‘We were talking about how a lot of influential people think this school is utterly useless and that unless we can prove them wrong, it may one day have to be closed down,’ Fanny continues. ‘Aren’t you interested in that? Wouldn’t you like to see the school close down for ever?’