Bed of Roses (14 page)

‘And the fact is,’ says Geraldine, ‘I don’t suppose that poor boy’s uttered those three words together in his life before. “I LOVE YOU!” Not to anyone. So it was terribly, terribly touching…and it makes it all the more difficult to understand what happened afterwards…’

What happened, in a nutshell, was that later that day Dane, feeling overshadowed by Oliver Adams, nipped home to Uncle Russell’s place and brought back a penknife and a dead blackbird, which he then handed to Ollie, daring him to saw off the bird’s head. Ollie sawed, threw the decapitated head at Dane, and accidentally hit him with it on the edge of the mouth, which made nearby children scream in disgust. Fanny, glancing out of her office window, saw the knife blade glinting in Ollie’s hand, and ran downstairs to get it off him.

‘It’s not mine, it’s his,’ Ollie said.

‘It’s not mine,’ said Dane, wiping the blackbird’s innards from his chin.

Fanny confiscated the knife. ‘And you, Ollie,’ she said, ‘don’t you ever bring a knife into this school again.’ After lessons that day Dane and Ollie went for each other. It took
Lenka, Geraldine’s au pair, Mrs Cooke from the pub, Mrs Norman, in her tight leather trousers, and Linda Tardy the teacher’s assistant to pull them apart, and Mrs Norman (Matthew’s mum) lost a gold hoop earring in the kerfuffle.

So that’s what happened (in a nutshell). Two days later, as Kitty is discovering to her cost, Geraldine is still a long way from closure. ‘I just can’t help feeling a teeny bit let down. Why didn’t Fanny speak to me first? I could have told her, Ollie doesn’t even
possess
a penknife any more. Not since they took it off him at the airport, coming back from St Barts.’

She and Kitty are grabbing a quick lunch at the Old Rectory, and have been for several hours now. They’ve nibbled their way through rocket salad and sear-grilled tuna, and Kitty’s nibbled her way through an entire camembert, and she’s well into the second bottle of wine. It’s a weekday. Clive is at the office, and Lenka the au pair has just set out to pick up the two children from school.

‘I feel for little Dane. I do. And I want to
help
him,’ Geraldine declares, not for the first time.

‘I say,’ interrupts Kitty, ‘have you got anything sweet in the house? I could really do with a taste of chocolate. Don’t you think?’ She hates it when Geraldine talks about her school work. She puts on a soppy, conceited voice, Kitty thinks, and drones on, as if simply because she’s doing something worthy, she has free rein to be as boring about it as she likes.

‘The thing about Dane Guppy,’ continues Geraldine, ‘which Fanny simply doesn’t pick up with all her mania about “reading”, with the literacy
boot camp
she’s got running up there, is that he’s actually a very sensitive little person.’

‘Which of us isn’t, sweetheart? Have you got any chocolate?’ Kitty glances, once again, at her mobile telephone. She
doesn’t normally carry it around with her (chiefly because she’s never learnt how to work it) but today she has it, and she’s made a great fuss of putting it in the middle of the table. She’s asked Geraldine six times whether the Rectory kitchen has a signal.

‘By the way, you know I’m with
Vodaphone
, Geraldine, don’t you?’ she adds, forgetting about the chocolate for an instant. ‘Is that the same as Orange, do you think?’

‘Of course it isn’t.’

‘Well, so how do you know if Vodaphone gets a signal out here?’

‘I don’t,’ Geraldine snaps. ‘Just look on your telephone. There are meant to be bars on the display thing.’

‘I know, but how can you be sure—’

‘Kitty, I’m in the middle of saying something. Something quite important, as it happens. Because frankly, Kitty, I’m beginning to have very serious doubts about that head teacher of ours. I think she’s irresponsible, inconsistent, arrogant. She’s unsettling Ollie and Dane. And I’m seriously considering lodging some kind of complaint…So I would have thought you might be interested.’

Last night, after supper, Kitty came into her daughter’s bedroom to wish her goodnight. Scarlett couldn’t see her mother properly because she’d already folded her pebble glasses on to the bedside table, but she could smell her – a familiar musky scent, French tobacco, alcohol – and she could hear her – brittle, awkward,
bored
– obviously longing to get away. But nevertheless, Kitty sat on Scarlett’s bed. She said, ‘Things are going to get better for us now, Scarlett.’ She was slurring her words. But it didn’t matter. She’d never said ‘us’ like that before, as though they were actually on the same side.

‘You and me, darling girl,’ Kitty said, and she patted
Scarlett’s knee through the blanket. ‘In spite of everything…we’re a fabulous team.’

She leant over and pecked Scarlett on the top of her head. It was so quick, so light, Scarlett barely felt it, but her eyes welled with tears, and as her mother stood up again and then paused at the bookshelf beside the door, and then slowly, excruciatingly slowly, opened the door and shuffled back out on to the landing, Scarlett lay in her bed, afraid to move, and the tears rolled down her cheeks, the snot rolled down her nostrils and on to her upper lip; and she could do nothing about either because she didn’t want her mother to know she was crying.

This morning, as she does every morning, Scarlett took coffee in to her mother before leaving for school. Kitty, as is often the way, only managed to mumble something sleepy, didn’t quite open her eyes, so they haven’t spoken yet. But today, of course, is the Big Day.
Their big day
. Scarlett hasn’t been able to think of anything else.

Right now she’s in the hall at school, hiding from Lenka the au pair, who is waiting with Ollie to take her back to the Old Rectory. She knows her mother is having lunch with Geraldine and that she’s expected to join them. But there’s only one thing Scarlett hates more than going to Ollie’s house on her own, and that’s going to Ollie’s house with her mother.

She’s spent her life watching out for Kitty’s mood swings, and she reckons she knows most of the triggers. Being At Home with Geraldine is definitely one of the worst. Kitty exhausts herself with her jovial not-being-jealous show, and it’s guaranteed to put her in a foul mood for several hours afterwards. Scarlett can’t remember the last time Kitty didn’t find something to yell at her about on the way home.

The minutes pass by, stubbornly slowly. It’s a quarter of an hour after lessons ended and everyone else has gone home, but she can still hear Ollie and Lenka out there squabbling.

‘Oh. Hello, there, Scarlett.’ Scarlett jumps at the sound of Fanny’s voice. ‘What are you doing still here? I thought you’d all gone home.’

‘I was just – resting my back,’ Scarlett says. ‘My back was hurting.’

‘Oh. Well, shouldn’t you be sitting down?’

‘I’m OK.’ She examines Fanny, standing there with a ramshackle pile of posters in her arms, and a staple gun. She looks shattered. ‘Are you all right, Miss Flynn?’

‘Me? I’m fine, Scarlett. Thanks for asking.’ Fanny grins, quite touched. ‘Spent the weekend in London. I think I’m still recovering.’ As it happens, Fanny’s weekend, when she and Brute finally made it up on the Saturday, hadn’t had quite the effect she’d been hoping for. Instead of revelling in the big-city crowd and bustle she’d persuaded herself she was missing, she found herself longing to get away from it all. She missed the sound of the sheep in the field behind her house, and the smell of the jasmine outside her window. She missed the church bells and her early-morning walks with Brute along the river. She missed stepping out of her front door and seeing people she knew, and knowing that if she went into the pub somebody there would probably offer to buy her a drink. In fact, for the first time in her adult life, Fanny was reminded of what it felt like to be homesick. Fanny was homesick.

‘Did you drink too much alcohol in London?’ asks Scarlett.

‘I’m afraid I did. By the way,’ Fanny says, changing tack, ‘I haven’t seen your big red book out recently. Whatever happened to that story you were writing?’

Scarlett blushes. ‘My novel?’

‘That’s right. I’d still love to read it.’

‘But you can’t!’

‘Oh…Ok.’

‘I mean, you
can’t
. You mustn’t even tell anyone you know about it.’

‘I mustn’t?…I mean, I won’t, of course. But—’

‘But seriously.’ Scarlett looks terrified.

‘OK. Well, never mind. Don’t worry, Scarlett. I’m sorry I mentioned it.’

‘Mentioned what? What red book? Miss Flynn,
I don’t even know what you’re talking about
.’

‘It seems ridiculous, Kit, and you’ll probably laugh at me, but I don’t think Fanny really understands kids,’ Geraldine says, closing her lovely larder door and tossing some dark organic chocolate on to the table. ‘She certainly doesn’t understand Ollie.’

‘How can you tell,’ says Kitty, squinting once more at her telephone, ‘if this useless object’s battery is flat?’

‘What kids need these days is Nurture-to-Go. As I said to Fanny. Because every kid is special. Ollie, Dane, Scarlett. And by that I don’t mean—’

‘Geraldine, angel, I hate to be a bore but do you think if you just dialled my mobile number on your telephone…Only, then I could be absolutely sure it was working.’

‘I’m sorry, Scarlett,’ Fanny says again. ‘I swear I’ll never mention the book again. Ever. Which I can’t. Obviously. Because I understand now that it doesn’t exist – and never has.’

Scarlett glances at her through the thick glasses. ‘Now you’re laughing at me.’

‘By the way, I’ve got the car today. Got so much to carry back. If you don’t mind waiting I can give you a lift home.’

Scarlett doesn’t answer. Her mother has sworn her to secrecy but now that Fanny’s asked, now that it’s more or
less out in the open, she can’t – she
can’t
– keep it to herself any longer. ‘I actually finished that story,’ she bursts out. ‘My novel. I mean, in the red book. I finished it and I showed it to Kitty.’ (Kitty insists on the ‘Kitty’. She says ‘Mum’, ‘Mummy’ etc. sound bourgeois and sentimental.)

‘Really? That’s nice. How nice. And did she enjoy it?’

Scarlett smiles slyly. ‘I know what you’re thinking, you know.’

‘You do?’

‘You think Kitty’s a bad mother.’

‘Oh!’ Fanny laughs in surprise. ‘Well, I wasn’t. No, I wasn’t thinking that.’

‘I don’t think you like her very much.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I mean, of course – I mean, yes, I do.’

Scarlett rolls her eyes. ‘No, you don’t. It doesn’t matter. Loads of people don’t.’ She shrugs. ‘She’s hard to get to like, in a way. But once you’re used to her you realise…’ She falls silent, remembering her mother coming in to her room last night. She remembers the warm smell as she swooped down, and brushed her lips against Scarlett’s hair. ‘She’s a bit of a
wild flower
, that’s all.’

Fanny laughs. ‘A wild flower?’

‘I know,’ Scarlett nods. ‘You were going to say we’re all wild flowers, really.’

‘Was I?’

‘Of course we are. Especially you.’

Fanny’s not sure whether to be flattered or offended. ‘I am?’

‘But she’s had a horrendous time, you know,’ continues Scarlett smoothly. ‘Having to look after me…’

Fanny frowns, shakes her head. ‘I don’t believe that, Scarlett. I can’t think of a nicer child to look after than you. I think your mother’s incredibly lucky.’

‘No. I mean because of my back and everything. I’m very hard work.’

‘You’re not hard work. You’re lovely,’ she says quietly. ‘And if, as you say, we are all wild flowers, Scarlett, then I reckon you’re one of those rare wild orchids people risk their lives to steal from dangerous jungles.’

Scarlett giggles.

‘And, seriously, if your mother doesn’t appreciate that—’

‘That’s not what I meant. My mother appreciates me…She appreciates me a lot…’ But suddenly Scarlett looks as though she’s going to cry.

‘Well, good,’ Fanny says briskly. ‘I’m glad to hear it. Right then, Wild Flower, where shall we put these wretched posters?’

They settle on a space outside Robert White’s classroom and Fanny climbs on to a chair to staple them to the wall.

‘Because you can actually read it, if you want. Would you like to?’

‘Read what?’ Fanny says vaguely, distracted for the moment by negative thoughts of Kitty.

‘Kitty sent it off to her agent in London, who says he’s going to sell it for lots of money to an actual publisher. He says he’s very confident he can sell it. That’s what he said.’

Fanny swivels round on the chair, dropping the poster.

‘It’s going to be all my words. And on the cover it’s going to be by me and my mother:
by Scarlett and Kitty Mozely
. It’s going to be like that.’
By Scarlett and Kitty Mozely
. The five words fill the room, Scarlett’s pleasure in putting them together making them come out unnecessarily loud.

‘By Scarlett
and
Kitty? But Kitty didn’t—’

‘It’s better like that. Apparently, we’ll get lots of “sympathy votes”.’ Scarlett rolls her eyes. ‘With us being mother and daughter, and me—Looking like this. He says we’ll get our pictures in all the newspapers.’

‘I’m not sure I understand. Am I being stupid, Scarlett?’ Fanny jumps down from the chair and sets herself on the edge of a nearby table. ‘I mean, it’s fantastic. Obviously. But I don’t see why a novel which you’ve written—That’s right, isn’t it?
You
wrote it.’

‘I told you I wrote it. You saw me writing it. In my red book.’

‘No, I know you wrote it. I’m just saying I don’t understand why your mother’s putting her name on it as well.’

Scarlett sighs. ‘I just explained.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter,’ Scarlett snaps. ‘For God’s sake, who cares?’

Fanny takes a second to absorb this. ‘Of course. I’m sorry.’ She laughs. ‘Well, congratulations!’

Scarlett nods. ‘You can read it if you want,’ she says again.

‘I’d love to.’

Immediately, Scarlett undoes her satchel and pulls out the red book. ‘Only don’t show it to anyone. If they see it like that, they’ll know it was all written by me. And that would be awful.’