Bed of Roses. Daisy Waugh
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.
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.
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