Bed of Roses (22 page)

The next couple of days are fraught for Fanny as she tries to settle her children – including the new Creasey trio – into what is left of the school, and to grapple back the control of it from the new power duo: Geraldine Adams and her suddenly not-so-work-shy deputy, Robert White. Geraldine’s been strutting around the school like a newly appointed Minister for Education, barging in and out of classrooms, clutching various forms, her thin face stiff with business as she arranges all the various donations from her own very influential friends.

There has also been an anonymous donation of £50,000 which is to be spent, when the rebuilding is done, on extra library books and artwork for the walls.

‘And I think it would be nice, Fanny,’ Geraldine says, ‘if you dropped a line to the marvellous Maurice Morrison. Have you met him?’

‘No,’ Fanny says sulkily. ‘Not yet.’ While she was away in Spain Mr Morrison, the former New Labour minister, and now Lamsbury’s prospective MP, had been billeted by the LEA to be Fiddleford’s eleventh – and final – school governor, and the high-handed manner of his appointment
is just one more reason for Fanny to feel her position threatened.

‘Only we’re fairly certain,’ (We? Who the bloody hell is ‘we’ in all this? Fanny is much too proud to ask) ‘he’s our secret donor. He’s very rich, as you probably know. I’ve already sent him an enormous bunch of flowers, by way of implied thanks. And I’m hoping to get him over to dinner shortly. You must come, Fanny! You must come! Wouldn’t it be nice?’

‘Lovely. Thank you,’ says Fanny dutifully.

‘Nothing to thank me for, Fanny dear. At times like this we’ve all got to pull together.’ Of course, if Geraldine does manage to lure the mighty Morrison to din-dins, Fanny Flynn would be the last person on her list of glamorous guests. Charlie and Jo Maxwell McDonald would be invited, perhaps. And Solomon Creasey, of whom she and Clive instinctively disapprove, but who is, after all, handsome, extremely rich, and possibly in need of a new, Lamsburybased solicitor. Geraldine snaps her mind back to the matter in hand. ‘In any case, Fanny, Maurice has been inordinately generous, not only with his purse but with his time. So maybe a little letter of thanks wouldn’t go amiss…’

‘Yes. I’ll do that, Geraldine. Thank you. Was there anything else?’

The same few days have been noticeably less busy for Louis, whose mobile, since he picked it up from Fanny’s hall, has remained disconcertingly silent. He still has a couple of jobs lined up, but – as he is now learning to his cost – newspaper editors forget nothing more quickly than a freelancer who doesn’t answer his telephone. After a handful of wasted evenings in the Fiddleford Arms, talking to passing traffic and waiting (always waiting) for Fanny to tear herself away from her work, Louis decides he has to go back up to
London, briefly, to jog their memories and try to drum up some more commissions.

He and Fanny spend a final evening in the pub together before he leaves. But she is distracted. And though he tries to understand how terrible she must have felt, coming back to such carnage after a week in the sun, her subsequent inability to stop thinking about anything else is beginning to get on his nerves.

He relights his cigarette, pulls a strand of tobacco from his mouth, takes a slurp of his Taunton cider, and still she burbles on. ‘I should have reported Dane to social services after that first bonfire. That’s what I should have done. And I should have called the police…’

‘What’s done is done,’ says Louis, soothingly.

‘I should have insisted he saw a psychiatrist. I should have talked to his parents…’

Louis sighs. ‘For all you know, he didn’t even do it.’

Fanny laughs. ‘Yes, right.’

‘Frankly, Fan. It could have been any number of people. Let’s face it. It’s not like you’re the most popular girl in the village.’

‘Shut up,’ she says. ‘OK. So who do
you
think set fire to my school, then?’

‘“
My school
”,’ mimics Louis.

Fanny ignores it. ‘Maybe you think Kitty Mozely did it? Overcome by jealousy when she saw us riding off into the distance on your motorbike?’

‘Wouldn’t rule it out,’ he shrugs. ‘Or Robert White…Now there’s a man with issues.’

‘That’s ridiculous…’

‘It’s possible,’ he says idly. ‘Does anyone know where he was when it started? People go mad in the country, Fan. Haven’t you noticed? They get things out of proportion.’

‘Robert wouldn’t have it in him,’ she says, frowning.

Louis shrugs. ‘Or Mrs Fatty Guppy might have done it,’ he continues. ‘Come on, you’ve got to admit, she
hates
you…Or Geraldine Adams. You said she was pretty pissed with you.’ He chortles, beginning to enjoy himself. ‘Or maybe it was someone from LEA trying to find an alternative way of shutting the place down.’

Fanny gives a grudging laugh.

‘Or maybe it was the vicar,’ he continues. ‘Maybe he’s fallen in love with you. Maybe he knows he can’t have you…And would rather see you burn than have you give yourself to another…’

‘Very possible. Except then he would have set fire to the place when I was in there, don’t you think? Anyway, this isn’t funny, Louis. It’s not…Because I’m beginning…’ Carefully, she puts aside the seductive prospect of Robert’s guilt; it would have been too good to be true. Besides which, though Robert has many weaknesses, so far as she knows being an arsonist is not among them. ‘I’m beginning to think Dane Guppy’s a real danger, not just to himself, but to everyone. I mean, to all of us. And I don’t think he should be allowed in school until this thing is cleared up.’

‘He hasn’t even been charged yet, Fanny.’

‘He was
there
. He called the fucking fire brigade. Yesterday some of the children found a petrol can in the field behind the school. Louis,
it had Russell Guppy’s name on it!
He lives with his Uncle Russell, and – seriously, Louis,
he’s done it before! I
mean, come on!’

‘Mmm,’ he says blandly. ‘Put like that it doesn’t sound so good, does it? You should throw him out before he tries it again. D’you want another drink? Or shall we go home where I can ravish you? What shall we do? Your choice.’

But Fanny doesn’t seem to be listening. She shakes her head. ‘It could
only
have been Dane…’

‘Actually, no. Second thoughts. My choice.’ He stretches
across the table and takes the half-filled beer glass from Fanny’s hand, and knocks it back in one.

‘Hey!’

‘You’re being boring, Fan. Come on. Let’s go back to yours.’

Last week Solomon Creasey recognised the unsigned other half to a well-known portrait by Sargent. He reunited it with the owner of the original half and came away with a profit of just under $1 million. The following day his Beauty, whom he’d been seeing regularly since early spring, broke a three-month stretch of almost total catatonia, put on a shimmering Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress and a black silk g-string with diamanté studs going all the way up the back crack, which must have been agony, slipped into his office on Duke Street, closed the door behind her, untied the dress with a single, expert flourish, and proposed to him.

He smiled, because he could see that she’d made an effort, but the exhibition made him feel depressed and oddly lonely. He couldn’t help wondering if she would have gone to so much effort, if he’d been the same man, only without the money. It’s not a question which usually troubles him – or not until recently, anyway.

That night he chucked her – very politely. She seemed to take it well, at first. Afterwards he took her out to dinner at the Caprice, drenched her in gratitude, apologies and gentle compliments and finally he drove her in his big, vulgar
Bentley, back to her lovely Chelsea flat. He waited patiently for her to climb out of the car.

He waited and waited. But she stayed where she was. After a while he noticed she was trembling, and asked her if she was all right. That was when hell broke out. The floodgates opened, and out gushed a torrent of hatred – not just against Solomon but against all the men she had ever known; every gift-bearing, bill-footing escort she’s ever deigned to share her great beauty with.

On her lovely, skinny hands, she began to list her many admirers – and a truly impressive collection of names it was too, in a way; a veritable
Who’s Who
of Europe’s Most Eligible.

‘I’m sorry, angel,’ he interrupted, with the engine still purring, stifling a little yawn. Cursing himself, actually. Feeling more lonely and detached than ever. ‘I don’t deserve you. I never did. If I’d had any idea—’

‘
Fuck off
,’ she yelled in her sexy, mysterious Ruski-Euro-Texan accent. (Solomon had never properly noticed it before.) ‘All di money you make and you give me
sorry!
Fuck you and fuck your sorry!’ But she still didn’t get out of the Bentley.

Eventually, with a resigned, apologetic sigh, he climbed out of it himself. He left her there in the passenger seat, screaming at him above the purring engine. He left the key in the ignition. ‘Vait!’ she howled. ‘Vhere are you going? I haven’t finished—’ And then, in blank astonishment, ‘But, Solomon, vat about your motor car?’

Solomon, already heading off towards the taxis on the King’s Road, turned briefly and winked at her. ‘You keep it, angel,’ he said. ‘As a token of my – ah – a token of my…’ But he couldn’t think of what.
Desperation to get away?
That would have been rude. And Solomon didn’t feel she deserved rudeness. So he watched her beautiful jaw dropping and waved a final goodbye.

A moment’s stunned silence while she wondered if he was joking, shattered almost immediately by a final ‘Fuck you!’ It echoed shrilly down the white-stuccoed Chelsea street. And then, very quickly, before it had died, before he could change his mind, she clambered into the empty driving seat and accelerated away.

The following day he remembered to ask his assistant to transfer the car’s ownership into her name. As a bonus, really, for all the lovely things she’d done for him. It would bring an amicable conclusion, or so he hoped, to what had always, until the very end, been a very amicable arrangement. A businesslike arrangement.

All of which isn’t strictly relevant. Except that Solomon, in spite of having been through such an action-packed and glamorous week in London, has now returned to Fiddleford to find his mind still dominated by just one thing, and he’s bewildered as to why it’s bothering him so much. His children have already been welcomed into Fiddleford Primary (thanks to Fanny’s magnanimity. She could well have refused to take them), and from what Solomon can gather, they are very happy there. Yet he still hasn’t managed to make contact with Fanny Flynn, let alone apologise, and he feels extremely uncomfortable about it.

He sent flowers to her cottage during half-term, while she and Louis were away in Spain. Macklan, painting his front door at the time, intercepted the flower deliverer and had the flowers returned to Solomon, but forgot to include any kind of explanation with them.

Solomon called Fanny at the school on the Monday morning, the first morning his three children began, but in all the chaos of the fire, the message he left went astray. She never received it. That was over a week ago now. He has called several times since, but his children tell him that the school is still in chaos as a result of the fire.

Sitting at his desk in Fiddleford, gazing uncharacteristically listlessly over the freshly mowed lawn, Solomon mulls tenaciously over the offence he must have caused. He is unaccustomed to women who return his flowers but not his calls. Which is partly why, in spite of dramas with the diamanté underpants, the Bentley, and the Sargent sales, he finds he can think of nothing but Miss Fanny Flynn, and of the increasingly extravagant ways he might try to make his amends.

Louis calls from a noisy pub somewhere in Paddington just as Fanny is heading out to the Lamsbury Safeways to buy him a welcome-home dinner.

‘Not going to be able to make it home tonight, Fan,’ he shouts. ‘Sorry. But it’ll give you a bit of time to get some work done without me getting in the way.’

‘But you’re never in the way,’ says Fanny politely.

‘What? Can’t hear. Anyway, I’m missing you, Fan.’ He is, too. ‘Can’t wait to get back.’

‘So why don’t you?’

He says he can’t hear, and Fanny doesn’t push it. He sounds happy. And he’s right, of course. She’ll be able to get a lot more done. He says he’ll be back on Friday.

On the Thursday evening she arrives home after a long and hard day at work, to find a package leaning against her door. It is large and flat, beautifully wrapped in brown paper and thick green cotton ribbon. She stares at it. A present from Louis, perhaps? Missing her, after all?

She dumps her bag and takes the parcel into the kitchen. Stares at it. Sniffs it. It smells delicious. Cigars and sandalwood. She’s never received such an elegant-looking parcel.

Nor, she soon discovers, has she ever received such a gift. Inside is a painting. Fanny knows almost nothing about art, but it’s an oil, about 75 centimetres x 50 centimetres, framed in worn gilt. A dark-eyed woman wearing a long grey crumpled dress and dishevelled cap stands in front of a village school surrounded by a gaggle of children. At first glance, the rosy children, the merry schoolmistress, look a picture of rustic mid-Victorian perfection and yet—Fanny stares at them. Not all the children are laughing. There are three children, hungry looking and awkward, hovering apart from the group, gazing on resentfully. And the woman is smiling, certainly. But there is something disturbing about her, too: the intent brown eyes, the bony white hands, the tiny lines around her mouth – in spite of her laughter, in spite of all the jovial activity surrounding her, she looks restless, harried, worn out. She looks miserable.

Fanny rummages through the brown paper in search of a note, turns the painting over and finds, wedged between canvas and frame, a thick creamy envelope with his card inside.

With many thanks for taking on my trio, and many apologies for my appalling manners,

Solomon Creasey

The painting doesn’t match with the ruby-red brothel theme of Fanny’s eccentric sitting room but Fanny’s not like Geraldine Adams. She shunts aside the gold-and-purple Chinese embroidery currently above her mantelpiece, tugs out the silver candle holder from Mexico – which never attached properly to the wall anyway – and immediately hangs her new picture in pride of place.

She stands back to wonder at it, and at the mythical benefactor,
Solomon Creasey, about whom she has already heard so much. She writes him a letter.

…I have never possessed anything so beautiful. Thank you. Your apology was completely unnecessary, since I must admit I couldn’t even remember what you were apologising for when I first read your note, and anyway it’s hardly your fault Mrs Haywood didn’t pass on the message. However…unnecessary apology entirely accepted! Thank you.

Your lovely daughters are a pleasure to have in our school, and seem to be very happy. I’m glad they’ve joined us. Here’s hoping we meet one day.

With best wishes and the best of luck in your new Fiddleford life—

She spends a long time worrying about how to sign off: Fanny Flynn? Unfriendly. Or just Fanny? Or Fanny (Flynn)? Or…She signs it Fanny, and beside it, in the same flourish, automatically scribbles a couple of Xes.

Fanny XX.

Shit.

She copies it all out again, without the XXes this time, and slips it through his letter-box on her way to work the following morning.