Bed of Roses (19 page)

Fanny bumps into Grey McShane at the Safeways checkout as she’s paying for the champagne, but is still so consumed by the threat of Geraldine Adams on her governing body that she forgets even to explain to him, her fellow governor, the reason for buying it. ‘
We’ve got to stop her!
’ she cries, without telling him who to stop, or from what, or anything about her recent triumph. Without even remembering to say hello. ‘She’ll take over the school!’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Geraldine Adams! She’s demanding to be a governor. Can you believe it? And Kitty Mozely, too! God knows…I couldn’t think of a single reason to say no…and she just sort of
sat
there, looking hurt. But it can’t happen! It can’t. I’d end up killing them both.’

Grey laughs his deep, rich laugh. ‘You’ll have a job stopping either of them, Fanny. The vicar’s got the General down for a meeting Monday evening to elect them in. It’s as good as done. So,’ Grey gives her an evil grin, ‘much more interesting than that – what did you make of him, Fanny? Handsome, eh? He’s bloody rich, too.’

‘Who?’

‘Who? Solomon Creasey, of course. What did you think of him?’

‘Solomon? Grey, this is serious.’

Grey clicks his tongue. ‘Come on, Fanny. He must have made some impression.’

Solomon Creasey had spoken twice to Mrs Haywood the glass-eyed school secretary, during which Mrs Haywood, thinking he was a delightful gentleman and much better than his reputation, had blithely assured him there was ‘more than enough space’ for his three children to join the school after half-term. But Mrs Haywood hadn’t seen fit to pass any of this on to Fanny. And what with the darts and croquet to organise, and all the other house-moving diversions, Solomon Creasey had failed to pursue the point himself, or tried to talk to Fanny in person. In truth, having been so reassured by Mrs Haywood, he too had forgotten. And this accidental gossip with Grey McShane, in Safeways on the last day before half-term, is the first time Fanny has heard that the population of her small school is about to be increased – by almost 10 per cent.

‘But he can’t do that!’ Fanny says angrily. ‘Doesn’t he realise? There are
systems
and
procedures
and things. I’m not just a dropping-off place for his children. I mean, doesn’t he realise this school is a publicly funded—It’s a government—I mean, fuck, Grey. Doesn’t he realise there are probably about six million forms to fill in?’

Grey just giggles. ‘I take it you don’t know about the petition, then?’

‘Hmm?’

Last weekend Dora, Flora and Clara Creasey, riding small ponies and dressed as ancient Romans, delivered darts and croquet day invitations around the village. (Fanny must have been out. She found her own invitation on her doormat.) At the same time they presented a petition: ‘SIGN HERE IF YOU
WANT SOLOMON CREASEY AS SCHOOL GOVERNOR’. The girls had collected almost seventy signatures – more signatures than there were parents in the school…

‘Which makes him one of us, eh?’ Grey McShane smirks. ‘Solomon’s very keen to play an active role in his children’s schooling,’ he deadpans. ‘He takes that sort of thing very seriously. He told me so himself.’

‘What? He’s a governor? But why didn’t he tell me? For God’s sake, this isn’t how it’s supposed to work!’

‘Och, Fanny. Who cares? You just said you needed governors, and he’s better than Geraldine. Don’t be so bloody prissy.’

‘I’m not being prissy,’ says Fanny. ‘I’m just saying, I can’t believe I’m having to find this out in Safeways. Who the fuck does Solomon Creasey think he is?’

It turns out nobody wants to drink champagne with Fanny that afternoon. Linda Tardy the teacher’s assistant announces she never drinks; Tracey Guppy takes one look at the bottle and runs out of the staff room; Robert is off sick; Geraldine Adams has left the building; and Mrs Martin the supply teacher has to rush off to pick up her own children from school. They leave Fanny and her champagne all alone, still smiling to hide the fact that she minds, and then her mobile rings.

It’s her mother. ‘Is that you, Fanny, sweetheart?’ she says, sounding a bit feeble.

‘Hello, Mum!’ Fanny cries, feeling full of warmth, feeling suddenly less lonely. ‘This time tomorrow!…I can’t wait!’

‘
Oh, Fanny love
—’ Her mother bursts into tears. She and Derek (a retired tax collector, also her mother’s new boyfriend) have been vomiting all night. ‘There’s a bug going round. We’ve all got it in the Pueblo, and I’m sorry, Fanny,
because I’ve been so looking forward to seeing you. And Derek’s been so excited. But I think you’ll be better off staying at home.’

Fanny swallows her disappointment, listens patiently, even when information begins to emerge regarding the tax collector’s high turd count. She assures her mother that she isn’t too disappointed, that she’ll come out in the summer holidays, that she has plenty of things to do instead…

…except Louis’s not speaking to her, and her three closest girlfriends (all teachers) have gone off to Helsinki for half-term. They had asked her if she wanted to come.

She hangs up the mobile, glances across the empty staff room at the unopened bottle of champagne, decides that if she’s going to drink it alone, which of course she is, then she’ll drink it alone at home, at least.

Fanny approaches her little cottage in a fog of loneliness. It’s the proudest day of her professional life. And she can find not a single soul to celebrate it with. Not even Brute, whom Fanny, thinking she was going to Spain, has already consigned to the local kennels.

As she pushes open the front door her foot slides on a large brown envelope. ‘Fuck it,’ she mutters irritably, wrapping her arms protectively around the champagne, and in doing so, knocking her head against her newly repainted red hall wall. Fanny’s cottage is fully adorned now with all the trinkets – the Indian sari curtains, African woodcarvings, Mexican lanterns, Chinese wall hangings, Turkish kilim floor cushions – all the junk she has picked up on her travels and which she has lugged, but never unpacked until now, from one unloved place to another.

Without bothering to close the front door behind her she bends over to pick up the envelope. On the front her name has been enclosed by a large heart shape, marked out with Xs. She opens it up and laughs as the contents fall out: prints
of the photographs of Dane’s bonfire, which Louis took the last time he and Fanny spoke. In the first picture Fanny is flying through the air towards Dane Guppy, mouth open, screaming; the next shows her landing beside the bonfire, on top of him; the third has her finger pointing at the camera, her face distorted with rage, while Dane Guppy struggles for breath underneath her.

Darling Fan,

Sorry I’ve been such a jerk.

I’m a bit lost without you. Can we be friends again?

L.

P.S. I guess you may not enjoy these photos as much as I do…

She hears him behind her, clearing his throat. It’s a sound she would recognise anywhere, half-contrite, half-confident – it’s the noise he uses to attract her attention whenever he tips up to surprise her. As he loves to do.

He loves it because each time it has the same effect. Her face breaks into a smile, she spins around – just as she’s doing now…

…and Fanny sees him looking back at her with that same sexy, easy smile. She feels her heart leap and more than that, the familiar lurch of desire. She doesn’t return the smile.

‘Hey, Louis,’ she says, sounding bemused. She walks the few steps towards him.

‘I missed you, Fan,’ he murmurs. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘You should be…’

‘I mean, what I meant to say is—’

‘What did I do wrong?’

‘Nothing. I’ve been a jerk.’ Hands both deep in his back
pockets, shoulders hunched, he falters, suddenly uncertain, insecure. She’s never seen him look so ill at ease. A gurgle of laughter escapes her. ‘What’s up, Louis? Are you OK?’

‘
Fine
.’ Suddenly, in one swift movement, he pulls his hands from the pockets and pitches towards her, grasping her head in both hands –

‘Hey!’

– and kissing her.

It takes a minute to adjust, after so many years of not, but then Fanny lets the photographs flutter to the ground and within moments they are both lying on top of them, a tangled mess of limbs and long-repressed yearnings. They are tugging at each other’s clothes, oblivious even to the front door, still half-ajar behind them.

After so long waiting for each other (and imagining it) neither lasts too long. A glimmer of time, and then they have both collapsed into a heap, the one on top of the other, both scarcely undressed, and the front door still banging softly in the breeze behind them.

‘Well!’ laughs Fanny, lying back on the wooden floor beside him, her body still glowing. ‘Hi, Louis. Nice to see you, too. How’s life with you?’

Louis doesn’t reply. He traces a thumb over her cheek, down her neck. ‘I love you,’ he says simply.

Fanny sits up. ‘Oh, Jesus, Louis.
The door!
’

Louis turns to it incidentally, without interest; maybe he saw a figure flitting by, maybe he didn’t. It doesn’t matter. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he says to Fanny. ‘I love you. I’ve loved you for years.’

She smiles. ‘What? Me as well? As well as all those others? Are you sure? What about…’ She looks at him gazing levelly back at her, with such certainty. And of course she loves him too. And she has for years. But she can’t say it. Yet.

His hand slides under her T-shirt, strokes the small of her back ‘
What about…?
’

She realises she doesn’t want to mention names. Not right now. She doesn’t want to mention all the women he’s declared he was in love with over the years. ‘It doesn’t matter. For God’s sake, Louis. Close the door!’ But then she can’t stop herself. She half-sits up. ‘I mean – I suppose I mean
what about Kitty?
’

‘Kitty?’ he laughs, kicks the door closed with his foot and pulls Fanny back down to the floor again. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’

Later, when they’re upstairs – Fanny in the bath, Louis sitting on the edge of it, sharing the champagne and one of Louis’s oversized spliffs – Fanny mentions her aborted trip to Spain which was meant to have started tomorrow.

‘But Mum and the new boyfriend are both sick,’ she says.

Louis isn’t really listening.

‘She gave me half an hour’s worth of details about the state of his’n’her bloody bowel movements, which I could have done without.’

Louis pulls on the spliff, watches the Badedas bubbles sliding slowly between her breasts. ‘I bet,’ he says vaguely.

‘And then she cancelled me!’

He holds the cigarette to Fanny’s lips. She inhales, flinches slightly as the hot smoke hits the back of her throat.

‘So,’ she says, exhaling, ‘what was I saying?’

‘Bowel movements?’ Louis says politely.

‘That’s right…Waste of a ticket, really.’

‘Ticket to where?’

She rolls her eyes. ‘Spain, of course. Weren’t you listening?’

‘I most certainly was,’ he says.

‘What?’

He laughs, slightly uncertain. ‘What?’

‘You…’ she frowns, trying to remember. Louis’s spliffs are always too strong. ‘Most certainly was what?’ She giggles suddenly. ‘Scarlett Mozely reckons we’re all wild flowers.’

‘Mmm?’

‘So what does that make her mother?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Deadly nightshade! Geddit?’ She slaps her thigh, spraying water around the bathroom.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘If we’re all flowers…see?’ she giggles pointlessly.

‘Flowers?’ Louis repeats.

‘Wild flowers. I’m a dog rose. You’re a – dandelion, let’s say. OK? Or a pimpernel. Tracey Guppy’s probably a buttercup.’

‘What’s a pimpernel?’

‘Geraldine Adams is obviously a thistle. And Kitty Mozely’s deadly nightshade…’

‘You’re talking crap, Fanny,’ he says amiably, leaning forward to kiss her. But she’s still laughing. She can’t stop, and then neither can Louis.

In the morning Fanny wakes to see him, head propped up on one arm and gazing down at her. He smiles. He says, ‘Were you saying something last night about going to Spain today? Or did I dream it? Or was everything that happened between us last night a dream?’

‘I bloody hope it wasn’t,’ she says, pulling him towards her. ‘Oh. And by the way,’ she pulls back, takes his head in her hands, ‘Louis, you never actually answered. About you and Kitty Mozely – or Deadly Nightshade, as I shall now be calling her.’

He smiles. ‘What about us?’

‘Are you and she having a – thing?’

‘Come on, Fan. Don’t be disgusting,’ he says mildly,
moving on top of her, his words muffled as his lips work down her body. ‘Oh.’ He looks up. ‘And I finally worked out she was jerking me around about you and that skinnyass teacher from school, right? I was right, wasn’t I? To decide that?’

‘Robert White?’ Fanny laughs in disbelief. ‘Kitty Mozely told you Robert and I were—And you believed her? Louis! You met him! He’s repulsive!’

Louis considers her for a second. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Stupid of me.’

‘It certainly was.’

‘I guess I should have asked you earlier.’

And then, later still, while they’re lying in each other’s arms, Louis suddenly frowns. ‘What was that you were saying before, about Spain? It’s pretty damn goofy, you know, us starting conversations over and over…’

‘I said,’ she says, ‘several times, in fact, but I don’t think you were listening—’

‘Sure I was! I hang on every word you utter, Fanny Flynn. You know that.’

‘I was saying that I was meant to be flying to Malaga this afternoon.’ She looks at the clock beside her bed. ‘In five hours and forty minutes, to be exact. But Mum’s ill. So…’ She shrugs. ‘It means we can spend the week together. Which is nice. Which is much nicer. Isn’t it?’

‘You’ve got a ticket to Malaga?’

‘Yes. Well, I did have.’

‘And you’ve got a week’s holiday?’

‘A week and a day. Not due back until next Monday.’

‘
So what are we waiting for?
’ He leaps out of bed. I’ve got…’ he pauses, ‘three jobs lined up so far this week, and I can cancel them all on the way to the airport.’