Bed of Roses

‘Of course I would.’

‘Well, if you sit down and shut up you might get a few hints on how to bring it about.’

Fanny doesn’t show her astonishment when he sits. She’s good at that. Instead she leans forward. ‘Basically,’ she says conspiratorially, and without missing a beat, ‘for those of us who want it not to close, this is the plan…’

They wait.

‘John Thomas, you should pay attention of course, because you’ll be wanting to do the opposite…’

That first morning goes well, she thinks. In spite of the local radio reporter who pitched up at break demanding to speak to her, claiming Jo Maxwell McDonald had assured him it would be OK. (Fanny finally agreed. She dispatched him with a harmless little interview, and managed, or so she believed, to make herself sound relatively professional. Incredibly professional actually, since every time the reporter had referred to Fiddleford’s ‘head teacher’, she’d had to pause for a millisecond to work out who the hell he was talking about.) In any case the interview went out live, so she didn’t have to suffer the discomfort of listening to it.

Her children, all seventeen who made up her class (and what a luxury that was!) seem bright, and for the most part, gratifyingly energised by the prospect of joining forces to save the school. They have peppered their morning’s lessons with suggestions on ways to keep the place open.

Having kicked off with some sensible maths problems, and gazed, while they counted quietly on fingers and thumbs, around her barren white classroom, Fanny had suddenly burst out, ‘Oh, it’s horrible in here!’

There was a moment of astonished silence. They stared at her, and at her dog, vacantly wagging its tail against the leg of her desk. And laughed.

‘Isn’t it, though? Don’t you think? It’s like an operating theatre. We’ll all drop dead from boredom if we sit in here a moment longer. What shall we do to brighten the place up?’

There followed a passionate class discussion, after which she set them to making a frieze of Fiddleford, an enormous one, with each pupil painting a part of the village they liked best.

It had been lovely. A lovely morning. Now her first lunch-hour is drawing to an end and she’s gazing out of the window of her tiny, upstairs office feeling unusually pleased with herself. She can see her pupils racing around in the sunny playing fields, and beyond the children the village of Fiddleford nestling around its church – and beyond the village, the river and the cedar tree rising majestically from the Manor Retreat park. It’s beautiful; the way the English country is meant to look.

She finds herself daring to wonder if this new job might indeed turn out to be the new beginning she has been hoping for. A possibility, she realises with a start, which had never seriously occurred to her until now. But she likes this little school, the pretty village, the good-looking neighbours, her tiny ivy-covered cottage…It is a peculiarly happy moment, immediately interrupted by a feeble tap on her office door.

‘Come in, come in!’ she cries bravely, since she’s already caught a whiff of Lemsip and knows perfectly well who to expect. ‘Hello, Mr White – Robert!’ she smiles. There are little red marks around the edges of his nostrils. He looks pale and stubborn and intolerably self-pitying. ‘Feeling any better? You look much better!’

Robert feels robbed of many things as he turns the corner into her office: robbed of this room and that desk, robbed of her salary, robbed of her job, and above all, above everything else, robbed of his right to spend the morning in bed. So he says nothing. He wraps his two hands around the hot mug of Lemsip, hunches his shoulders and regretfully shakes his head.

‘Sit yourself down!’ says Fanny, jumping up and pulling out a second chair.

With the two of them and Brute in the room, it’s a struggle to make enough space. Robert stands by, shivering and watching, while Fanny heaves a battered filing cabinet to one side. ‘I’m glad you came, actually,’ she pants, ‘I wanted to talk about the walls. Why are they so bare? Why is there nothing on your classroom walls?’

He’s not interested in walls. ‘The fact is, Miss Flynn—’

‘For heaven’s sake, call me Fanny.’

The chair prepared, Robert carefully lowers himself on to it. ‘The fact is, Fanny…’

Fanny has turned her own chair away from her desk so she can face him. It leaves them without any space at all. They both shuffle their bodies backwards, but the chairs, her desk, the filing cabinets are jammed together. There is absolutely no room for manoeuvre.

‘Oops,’ says Fanny, laughing, ‘sorry. Bit of a squash! Perhaps we’d be better off standing?’

‘Standing? Where?’ asks Robert facetiously. He has her knees trapped between his long bony legs and it’s nice. It’s nice. Besides which he has a cold. He’s not feeling very well. So he stays put. ‘Fanny, as you know, the last thing I want is for you to get an impression that I’m letting you down,’ he says, ‘but I have to tell you I’m feeling pretty dreadful. I’m almost certain I’ve got a temperature. I really ought to be in bed.’

Without thinking, as if he were one of her pupils, Fanny leans over and puts a hand to his forehead. ‘You don’t feel like you have a temperature,’ she says. ‘Perhaps you’re just hot. Why don’t you take one of your jerseys off?’

She glances at his face, flashes him a brief, busy smile. And for one ghastly second their eyes lock. Fanny looks away. But it’s too late.

There it is in the room between them: a tiny spark, the smallest flicker – it’s not attraction (certainly not on Fanny’s part), only a faint, disturbing recognition of their different genders. Fanny drops her hand at once. She stands up and tries, as elegantly as possible, and with minimal contact, to create some kind of gulf between them.

She has to clamber over his bony thighs.

‘Bother,’ she says irritably, nearly treading on Brute with her free foot and then having to grasp hold of Robert’s shoulder to recover balance. ‘It really is bloody cramped in here. I’m going to open the window.’

Robert watches her confusion with sly enjoyment and doesn’t bother to help. ‘I’m ever so sorry, Fanny,’ he says. ‘But you know what it’s like with these colds…’ He smiles at her, keeping the pink lips closed.

‘I do,’ snaps Fanny, free at last, grasping the window latch in relief. She opens the window, turns back to him with a forced smile of sympathy. ‘Bloody awful. You poor thing. But couldn’t you just hang on until school finishes? And then after school you can go straight to bed and you’ll probably feel so much better in the morning…’

Outside, Tracey Guppy, the nineteen-year-old caretaker/dinner lady, rings her bell. Lunch-break is over.

Robert looks quietly at his hands.

‘Please, Robert,’ Fanny says, ‘I know it’s awkward, me storming in here, taking a job which you probably feel – probably rightly feel…’

Robert purses his mouth.

‘But I need your help…to get this school back on its feet.’

Robert’s chapped white hands clench tight around the Lemsip.

‘Not that you haven’t already done so much for the school, I’m sure. But we need to work together…’

A silence between them. Robert sits, thinking, his long thin legs neatly folded in the space where Fanny had once been. She stands by the window waiting for his decision, wondering if she should stop begging and begin to flatter, or stop flattering, if that’s what she’s doing, and start to bully. She has no idea. She’s never been a boss before. Not to an adult. Not to a chippy, insecure male. And looking at Robert, she has her first blinding flash of just how complicated it’s going to be.

The telephone rings. Fanny hesitates. She has no choice but to stretch across him to pick it up.

‘There’s a gentleman here says he’s an old friend. Says he just heard you on the wireless,’ Mrs Haywood the glass-eyed secretary growls into her ear. ‘Of course, they’ll all be coming out of the woodwork now.’

‘Oh!’ A flicker of fear.

‘He wants to talk to you about it—’

‘No! I mean, no. Sorry. I’m a bit busy at the moment, Mrs Haywood. Could you—’ But Mrs Haywood has already put him through. ‘Hello?’

She hears the laugh. She recognises the laugh. ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ he says. ‘Remember me?’

She throws down the receiver as if it’s burnt her. Stares at the telephone. All the colour has drained from her face.

‘Hey,’ says Robert, jolted briefly to concern. ‘What’s up? Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine.’ She’s still staring.

‘Who was that?’ Robert asks.

‘No one. Nothing. I’m fine.’ She tries to collect herself. But then it starts ringing again and she leaps immediately away.

‘Hey,’ he says, almost kindly. He puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s OK. It’s OK. What’s up?’ He nods at the telephone. ‘Do you want me to answer it?’

‘No. Don’t. I mean, yes, do. Answer it! Answer it!’

He leans across her for the receiver: ‘He-llo?’ he says. ‘Thank you, Mrs Haywood. Fiddleford Primary? Can I help you?’ And listens a minute. Fanny scrutinises his face. And then, ‘Oh, yes.’ Smile. ‘That would have been myself…I requested a supply teacher for this afternoon…’ Another pause. A show of heroic stoicism. He looks across at Fanny and shakes his head. ‘Mmm, actually no,’ he says at last. ‘On second thoughts, not to worry. No. But thanks for getting back. I’m going to battle on today, after all.’ He winks at Fanny. ‘If I can…Yes…Looks like there’s a young lady here in need of a little help! First-day jitters…Yes…Nothing serious!’ He laughs. ‘I’ll give you a call tomorrow, yes? Depending on how I feel…Thanks ever so much, Sally. It is Sally, isn’t it? Super. Bye-bye.’

He hangs up and slowly, meticulously, with a secret smile hovering over those lips, he uncoils his long bony body until he is on his feet again. He looks down at Fanny, who is too ashamed to ask him any details about the call. ‘As it’s your first day, Fanny, I’m going to make an exception, and sweat it out until home time. OK? But you should know this is not a precedent. Working in this kind of hyper-stressful environment, we teachers have a responsibility to look after ourselves.’ He pauses in front of her as he passes to the door. ‘And that includes you, young lady.’ She can feel his hot Lemsip breath on her cheek. ‘You and I won’t be doing the kiddies any favours if we go forgetting that…So relax, OK?’ He motions at the telephone. ‘It’s not going to bite!’

‘Of course not,’ she says. ‘Thank you, Robert.’

‘My pleasure,’ he says, and winks.

7

While Robert relaxes at home, nursing his long thin body back to full strength, Fanny works harder than she ever has before. She teaches morning and afternoon and spends the evenings at home, alone at her kitchen table, wading dutifully through school paperwork. It occurs to her at the end of her third solid six-hour stint that she’s made no noticeable dent in the stack of papers still waiting to be dealt with: she could spend the rest of her life filling in forms and then what? Some poor sod would only have to process them. She picks them up and stuffs them tidily into a damp cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. To be looked at another day. In the future.

And even then Fanny can’t quite bring herself to stop worrying. Instead of calling friends, or sitting in the pub getting drunk with the locals, as she had previously imagined she would spend evenings in her new bucolic life, she puts brushes, paint pots and a long folding ladder into the back of the Morris Minor mini van, drives through the village to the school, and she stays up most of the night painting the central assembly room bright yellow.

Friday arrives – the day, as everyone in Fiddleford would tell you, of the great limbo cotillion. Fanny and her seventeen pupils, as a result of a deal cracked earlier in the week, spend the day dedicated to their village mural, which, by mid-afternoon, takes up an entire wall-and-a-half of her classroom. It’s a multi-spangled, multi-styled, glorious, uneven affair, and it transforms the room, just as Fanny had hoped it would.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Fanny announces, standing back to admire. ‘But CARTOGRAPHERS might find the total DISREGARD for any kind of CONSISTENT SCALE, quite INFURIATING…if not altogether INTOLERABLE.’ Her pupils write the words on the board and compete with each other to see who can use which one most effectively in conversation.

And so on. Fanny’s a good teacher. The children aren’t accustomed to being taught by someone with so much energy, so little regard for dreary adult protocols, and with a dog called Brute. They think she’s wonderful.

By the time they leave her alone, at the end of Friday, she is truly exhausted. Exhausted and, with the building quiet at last, even a little flat. She’s thought of nothing but the school since she walked into the building that first morning of term. And now it’s the weekend. Now what?

Somewhere on her desk, under the piles of paperwork, lies Mrs Haywood’s extended list of telephone callers, among them, calling for a second time, an ex-boyfriend from teacher training who was driving through the area and heard the radio interview; also Jo, who heard the radio interview; her mother, calling from her retirement flat in southern Spain, who hadn’t, and a triumphant message from her previous landlord, announcing he had discovered a coffee stain in the bedroom and would therefore be withholding her £950 deposit. But still no message from bloody Louis.

So. Unless she can make a friend at the village hall tonight, or she gets lucky with another call-up to eat sodium-free pulses at the Manor, she faces spending the rest of the weekend alone. Which is OK. Of course…

Slowly, more slowly than she needs to, Fanny first closes her office, and then locks up the school. (Tracey Guppy the caretaker won’t do it, having recently declared the building spooked her. She won’t go near it when it’s empty.) She heads out, turns down the lane towards the village and begins the short trudge home.

But the gloom soon leaves her. It would be very hard, after all, not to be soothed by such a commute. The air smells so sweet, and the sun is warm on her back. Before long she is plucking idly at the long grass by the side of the road, and her mind has buried itself in her work. She has plans – for the school, for her tiny cottage, for making new friends in the village. Hundreds of plans. She thinks about Robert White, who’s a lecher, she decides, on top of everything else, on top of being an overall creep. She makes a mental note to find out the union rules on lechers and skivers, wonders how she might ever be able to get rid of him. Reminds herself to buy paint for her front door. Red, perhaps. Or dark pink. And to dig out her copy of Tom’s Midnight Garden to read to the older children. She is far from unhappy.

8

Fanny’s put on make-up for the Fiddleford limbo: sweeping black lines around her large grey eyes, and a lot of lip gloss. She’s wearing a pair of very fitted low-slung jeans, a transparent grey silk shirt with the top four buttons undone and a fancy black bra on show underneath.

She’s pulled her curly, paint-speckled hair into a pony-tail to camouflage the fact that she still can’t be bothered to wash it, and on her feet she’s wearing trainers – suede and still quite clean. All in all the look she has gone for is not, perhaps, ideal for a village headmistress on the evening she first properly meets her students’ parents. But Fanny’s not yet used to being a village headmistress, so she doesn’t think of that.

She decides it would be a friendly gesture to take a bottle of vodka with her because in her experience a lot of people, herself included, prefer drinking spirits to wine. So, with a pack and a half of Marlboro Lights, and a bottle of vodka only short of a few shots, she heads out.

The village hall is a few minutes’ walk away, beside the council-owned bungalow (where Tracey Guppy lives with her uncle), and just opposite the school. It’s a dreary little building; a 1940s pebble-dashed hut, usually musty and empty, with a noticeboard outside advertising Wednesday Morning Bridge Club, Tuesday and Thursday Toddler Group, and not much else.

But that Friday evening it is throbbing. Fanny can hear the calypso beat, jaunty and foreign and completely incongruous, as soon as she steps out of her front door. In fact, though Fanny couldn’t have known it, Fiddleford village hall hasn’t seen so much action since the previous summer, when half the nation’s hacks squeezed in to witness the famous soap star Julia Biggleton (staying at the Manor Retreat after being outed as a transsexual) attempt to resuscitate her career by playing Lady Bracknell in Fiddleford Dramatic Society’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

This evening there is no Julia Biggleton expected. And yet by the time Fanny arrives, half an hour late, there must be sixty people standing awkwardly around that pebble-dashed hut, wishing they were somewhere else. It is an unlikely crowd for a limbo dance. At least half the people present are over seventy and by the look of them, too creaky even to stand for more than a few minutes without having to call for an ambulance. But a social occasion in a small village, even if it must include bending backwards under poles, is something the majority would be unwilling to miss. Needs must, as Jo would say. In the country. Needs must.

Fanny, of course, knows hardly anyone. She pauses at the door, vodka in hand, and casts a hopeful eye over the crowd. She sees old General Maxwell McDonald in blazer and tie, deep in conversation with the glass-eyed school secretary, Mrs Haywood. And his good-looking son Charlie at the far end of the room, smoking a cigarette with the limbo teacher from Exeter, who is wearing leggings. And there is Jo, of course, working another corner, in low-slung jeans and trainers, like Fanny, but with no make-up on, shiny clean hair, and an opaque, exquisitely cut white shirt with not a hint of any underwear showing.

She spots Ian Guppy, her wily landlord, cowering in a space near the door immediately behind her. Clasping a can of cider in one hand and the burning butt of a cigarette in the other, and wearing a patterned brown jersey which seems to be choking him, he’s staring into the middle of the room desperate – or so it appears – to avoid eye contact with anyone.

Standing guard beside him and all around him is the reason why: a vast mountain of flesh which Fanny correctly assumes to be his wife. She is alarmingly large. Actually, she is obese. Next to her, Ian Guppy appears like a frightened pixie, half the man – an eighth the man – he was the only other time Fanny saw him, and with no trace of the horrible leer which had previously been stuck to his face.

On this occasion Mrs Guppy happens to be wearing a blue nylon leisure suit with a pair of new lilac slippers. But the main point about Mrs Guppy is her size. She is very large. And, in spite of her efforts with the talcum powder, which she has sprinkled liberally over her thick wiry hair and her great body, she smells strongly of frying and sweat.

She and Ian have eight children, so Mrs Haywood the glass-eyed secretary has informed Fanny. Three of them are currently in jail. One, now twenty-five, has been missing since he was fifteen. Two are in foster homes. Tracey Guppy the school caretaker, nineteen, is honest and drug free but not on speaking terms with either parent. Their youngest is Dane Guppy, eleven. He is the student who interrupted Fanny’s first assembly. (She’s taken to calling him John Thomas whenever he’s difficult, and each time he bellows with laughter. It lights up his waxy, suspicious face.)

At first glance Mr and Mrs Guppy look almost comical, Fanny thinks, huddled together, like Fatipuff and Thinnifer, in the corner of the room. And yet there is something menacing about them too. Perhaps she imagines it – after all that Mrs Haywood said. But Fanny gets the impression that everybody in the hall is a little wary of them. They stand very much alone; the husband cringing under her giant wing, the wife with beady eyes flickering suspiciously through the crowd. Mrs Guppy exudes a quiet proprietorial violence which, since the publican’s wife was found with blood gushing down her legs and both arms broken, has kept libidinous females and her libidinous husband well apart. Or so Mrs Haywood said. Ian Guppy may leer, but after the incident with the publican’s wife he never strayed again. Apparently.

Fanny knows she ought to go up and say hello. But they look very uninviting. She scans the room for a more appealing alternative and unconsciously, out of nerves, twists the lid off her vodka bottle and takes a swig.

Tracey Guppy is glancing her way; hovering a good distance from her parents and managing to look pretty and optimistic in spite of the gene pool; in spite of a wretched perm and a chilly, tatty lime green mini-dress. Fanny starts walking towards her just as a young man – tall, with curly russet hair – attracts Tracey’s attention. The two of them fall immediately into animated conversation and Fanny hesitates, slightly embarrassed. She fiddles again with the cap on her vodka bottle.

‘Hey! Teacher!’ Fanny turns. Behind her Mrs Guppy, with an imperious nod of that vast head, is beckoning her over.

Shit, Fanny thinks. Never should have hesitated.

‘Hello,’ Fanny says pleasantly, walking towards them. ‘And hello to you, too, Mr Guppy. This is quite a party.’

Mr Guppy mumbles something unintelligible, keeps his eyes to the floor.

‘Go and get Teacher a cup,’ snaps his wife. ‘You seen her! She’s been drinking out the bottle.’

He begins to move away.

‘Go on,’ she nudges him forward. ‘Don’t stand there with your eyes gogglin’ out like you never seen underwear before. Hurry up!’ Before Fanny has a chance to speak, Mrs Guppy motions her décolletage. ‘I didn’t know you head teachers was paid so short.’

‘What’s that?’ smiles Fanny.

‘I should cover y’self up before the men go shoving their cash down there.’

Fanny glances at her shirt. ‘Well!’ she says in astonishment. ‘Ha ha…goodness! And there was me thinking I was looking quite nice this evening!’ Mrs Guppy doesn’t smile. Fanny tries again. ‘Mind you – if there are any people shoving money around tonight, Mrs Guppy, I’d much prefer they shoved it down my shirt than anywhere else! You are Mrs Guppy, aren’t you? I’m Fanny Flynn.’ She holds out her hand. ‘I teach your son.’ Mrs Guppy doesn’t take the hand. It hangs in mid-air. ‘He’s…’ Fanny can’t quite think what to add. ‘Well – he has a wonderful sense of humour, doesn’t he?’

Mrs Guppy is not impressed. She stares coldly at Fanny. ‘It’s not Stinglefellows in ’ere, Miss Flynn.’

‘Yes. Yes, I noticed.’

‘Go home and put something decent on. You look worse than a prostitute.’

Fanny’s not easily bullied; not any more. Not ever again. She flushes, first in shock, and then anger, but she does not go home and put something decent on. She fixes her eyes on Mrs Guppy and slowly, deliberately, she undoes three more buttons, until her shirt is hanging open all the way to the navel.

‘And now, Mrs Guppy, what do I look like?’ she says. ‘What do I look like now?’ She turns away, without waiting for a reply.

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