Bed of Roses. Daisy Waugh
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