Bed of Roses

by Daisy Waugh

  ‘No, no, absolutely not.’

  ‘Kitty, I’m sure, will get you another drink. If you prod her hard enough! And I shall be back in a tick. I’m just going to run Robert up to the school. In fact, I shall probably leave him there because, Robert, there’ll be various bods wanting to talk to you: Health and Safety and so on. I’m only wondering whether we should get on to the Maxwell McDonalds. Kitty, what do you think? You seem to get on with them frightfully well.’

  ‘Do I?’ says Kitty. ‘Which ones?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. All of them,’ says Geraldine, as if she didn’t care. ‘They’ll have to loan us the area beyond the playing field, I imagine. Tony’s people are going to have objections to putting their cabins too close to a burnt building. For obvious reasons.’ She smiles at Robert once again, who hasn’t yet moved. Her voice has a little ice in it now. ‘Are you ready, Robert?’

  Robert jumps. Places his empty glass on the mantelpiece, stretches an obedient arm into the jacket Clive is holding out to him. ‘You’re a star,’ says Geraldine. ‘I honestly don’t know what we’d all do without you!’ She leads the way out of the room. ‘Honestly, Fanny had better watch out or she’ll find herself holidayed out of a job, don’t you think, Robert?’

  Robert laughs. ‘I don’t think the union would take too kindly to that!’

  ‘Well! Or she’ll find we’ve all staged a little coup and the governing body’s voted the deputy head to take over. What do you think about that?’

  His excitable laughter can still be heard as they close the front door behind them.

  39

  Fanny and Louis spend a lazy, blissful week dodging the Andalusian sun, mostly in bed or on shady wisteria-clad terraces. They drink Rioja, eat paella (the only two things they understand on the menu), talk, squabble, laugh – and make love. And return to Fiddleford on a rainy Saturday evening, as happy as either can ever remember being.

  Tracey Guppy tells them the news. She bangs on Fanny’s door just as the two of them are settling down in front of Fanny’s hearth for a good-natured argument about who should do what, and when, about their collective lack of groceries.

  ‘All right, you two?’ Tracey says, smiling on the doorstep.

  She looks a bit chubby, it occurs to Fanny. Poor girl. Obviously inherited her mother’s genes. Fanny smiles at her kindly. ‘You look very well,’ she says stupidly. She needn’t have said anything. ‘How’s it all going? Come on in.’

  Tracey shakes her head. ‘Macklan’s cooking sausages. D’you want to come over?’

  ‘Oh. Well, yes. Please. Fantastic. We would, wouldn’t we, Louis? You’ve just saved us a trip to Lamsbury.’

  Tracey searches Fanny’s carefree face, feels a flash of sympathy. ‘You still don’t know, then?’

  ‘How did it start?’ asks Fanny, as the four of them tramp through the rain towards the school. ‘It was an accident, wasn’t it?’

  Nobody answers. They walk in silence for another minute, until the building comes into view. They stop. Louis gives a low whistle. The front playground is a wreck of abandoned building materials. The school – what’s left of it – is black with soot; Robert’s classroom and the cloakroom beside it are draped in a giant green tarpaulin. Thanks to Geraldine’s turbo efficiency, repairs have already begun. But the place looks terrible.

  Fanny feels a lump in her throat. ‘Oh, my school!’ she whimpers.

  ‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ Tracey says softly. ‘You can still use your classroom, and the assembly room. And the boys’ cloakroom. And your and Mrs Haywood’s offices. They’re all OK…It’s only this end, see? Robert’s classroom, mostly. Girls’ toilets. And the stationery cupboard. It’s one reason it burnt so well, apparently. Because of all the stationery…’

  Fanny looks at her. She can tell from the nervous way Tracey’s talking but she still has to ask, ‘How did it happen, Tracey?’

  Tracey looks away. Macklan puts a protective arm around her. He says, ‘Nobody knows. But there are some unfair rumours. A lot of people are jumping to conclusions.’

  ‘About Dane?’ demands Fanny. ‘For God’s sake, you two. Spit it out! I’m going to find out anyway.’

  ‘He didn’t do it,’ Tracey says stubbornly.

  ‘Has he been charged?’

  ‘No, he hasn’t been charged. No one’s been charged, Fanny,’ snaps Tracey. ‘And no one’s going to be. It was an accident.’

  Fanny wanders ahead to look more closely at the damage. She walks slowly across the front, weaving through the scaffolding, between the sacks of cement mix, the planks, bricks and wheelbarrows…

  Rarely, if ever, have Her Majesty’s Inspectors noted such improvement in such a short period of time. Rarely if ever…She continues around the side of the building towards the playing field. There is a mountain of sand and a cement mixer where last week the children’s vegetable garden had been. And onwards, beyond the playing field, churned to mud by the wheels of the tipper truck, there is a Portakabin, vast and oddly luxurious, with pink curtains hanging at the windows and a pair of elaborate brass lanterns on either side of the door.

  Tracey comes up behind her, breaks the sombre silence. ‘We’ve Geraldine Adams to thank for that,’ she says quietly. ‘Geraldine’s been amazing. She’s organised everything.’

  ‘I bet she has,’ mutters Fanny.

  ‘She organised a Village Scrub-a-Thon, she called it, didn’t she, Macklan? And Mrs Maxwell McDonald brought down all her newspaper people.’ Tracey laughs. ‘They were all elbowing each other out the way, posing for the cameras with their scrubbing brushes…Maurice Morrison the politician chappie. He was there. And Kitty Mozely, and Clive and Geraldine and Ollie. And Scarlett, and the General and everyone from the Manor…and Grey and Messy…and Mrs Hooper was here. Even your dad was here, wasn’t he, Macklan? With the three girls.’

  ‘And Robert White,’ adds Macklan, ‘giving little interviews and so on.’ He smiles slyly. ‘Should have been there, Fanny.’

  ‘I should, shouldn’t I?’ she mutters. She feels sick. Standing there, looking at the wreckage of her lovely school, hearing everything that’s been done to save it in her absence, she feels sick, and very threatened. She glances across at Louis, smiles at him guiltily, as if he could read her thoughts.

  He smiles back at her ruefully. ‘I guess you’re kind of wishing you’d never gone away.’

  ‘Oh, no. Not exactly,’ she says.

  They return to Macklan’s cottage, where Macklan lights a fire and the four of them sit around it, eating sausages, cold and burnt, and washing them down with a bottle of Louis’s whisky.

  ‘So,’ says Macklan finally, pushing his plate away, stretching his legs out in front of him. ‘One minute you’re storming out of pubs not speaking to each other. Next minute you’ve buggered off to Spain on the back of his motorbike! Is there anything else you might want to tell us?’

  Fanny laughs. ‘No,’ she says, looking back at them both. ‘And what about you two?’

  Tracey stands up. Abruptly. ‘I’m going to head home, Macklan.’

  ‘What? Just like that? Don’t go, Trace! Stay here with me. It’s much nicer.’

  She shakes her head. ‘They’ll be wondering where I’ve got to. Dane will. And Uncle Russell.’

  ‘I guess we should waddle off home ourselves,’ mutters Louis, hauling himself up. ‘But thanks, Macklan. For some of the most outrageously delicious sausages I’ve ever eaten. Thank you.’ Macklan barely hears him. He smiles distractedly as Louis claps him on the back. ‘Wait!’ he shouts at Tracey, already heading for the door. ‘Wait, Tracey. I’ll go with you. Wait for me.’

  As Fanny draws closed her upstairs curtains she glimpses them walking tightly arm in arm up the rain-drenched street, Tracey’s hideous white, belted macintosh shining in the moonlight, her permed head resting on Macklan’s shoulder. They look so young, Fanny thinks, and yet welded together; a natural couple. As if they were born never to be apart.

  She wonders
if she and Louis appear like that, or if…She’s distracted by his hands on her waist, his lips on the back of her neck. She turns around to face him – and stops worrying, at least for a while.

  40

  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.’

  41

  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 wait
ed 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.