by Daisy Waugh
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.
42
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.
43
Louis’s week-long mission to meet with newspaper editors and pick up work has been hampered slightly by his pleasure at being back in London and meeting up with his friends. His search for commissions was interspersed with a lot of parties, exhibitions, and pub crawls and he has returned from London with just one photographic assignment, which will pay him very slightly less than the figure he put on to his credit card last night when he paid for himself and two old girlfriends to eat curry.
In spite of this he is full of the joys of summer as he bounds into Fanny’s cottage that Friday evening. He notices the painting at once. He and Fanny are in the sitting room, mid-reunion embrace when he stops suddenly—
‘Bloody hell, Fan! Have you been robbing galleries? Where the hell did you get that?’
‘Solomon Creasey gave it me. To say sorry for sending his children to my school without asking. Stupid, really.’ She giggles. ‘Because I’d completely forgotten…It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’
‘I guess he wants to fuck you.’
‘Don’t be annoying, Louis. We haven’t even met.’
He steps around her, closer to the mantelpiece, to get a better look. ‘Seriously, Fan,’ he says. ‘That’s not some piece of crap he picked up in a junk shop. Personal taste aside, that’s a fine piece of work.’
‘I can see that,’ she lies. ‘Anyway, who cares? It’s here now. And it’s mine. And it’s the most beautiful painting I’ve ever owned. Actually, it’s the only painting I’ve ever owned. And I love it.’
‘It’s OK.’ Louis pulls a face. ‘Kind of sentimental.’ He pats the pockets of his suede jacket, pulls out a pouch of tobacco. ‘Victorian paintings of rosy-looking kids always make me feel a little nauseous.’
‘It’s not sentimental,’ Fanny says coldly. ‘Not if you look at it properly. So don’t be a smart arse.’
‘Can’t help it, Fan,’ he says mildly, rolling a cigarette with one hand, peering closer at the painting. ‘I hate to sound like those guys on the Antiques Roadshow, but do you
have any idea how much this thing is worth?’
‘It doesn’t matter, does it? Seeing as it’s not for sale.’
‘You sure about that?’ He flicks her a glance. ‘You might change your opinion when you find out what you could get…Know what?’ he adds, peering closer still. ‘The guy’s signed it! We should look him up on the Net.’
Fanny is beginning to feel uncomfortable. The question of the painting’s value has, in fact, been niggling at her all day, and she’s been trying to ignore it. Because if the painting really is valuable she’ll feel duty bound to give it back. ‘Oh, don’t, Louis,’ she says quickly. ‘Please. Don’t look it up. I don’t want to know.’
‘Besides which,’ Louis adds slyly – urbane, good-natured, easygoing, cultivated he may be, and a fine lover and a very old friend, all those things, he may be, but he doesn’t appreciate unattached millionaires plying his girlfriend with works of art while he’s away – ‘you might decide that accepting it isn’t so cool. I mean, it’s probably not illegal. But it sure isn’t—My guess is, a painting as fine as that’s going to be worth at least £20–£25,000. And I don’t know, Fan,’ he says, looking away from it at last, lighting his cigarette, ‘corruption and bribery inside the English education system, or whatever, it’s hardly my area, but…’
‘What are you talking about?’
He picks a loose strand of tobacco off his tongue, smiles at her. ‘But I think you should give it back.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! Honestly…Don’t be ridiculous.’
He shrugs. ‘I’m only saying what I think.’
They don’t talk about the painting again that night. They open a bottle of wine, and then another. It’s a horrible rainy evening. They smoke a spliff together and stagger up to bed. But long after she and Louis have rolled away from one another, and while Louis lies snoring peacefully beside her, Fanny stays awake.
She lies there, thinking about her painting, listening to Louis’s snores and the heavy patter of the rain against her window until the day begins to break.
At five o’clock she dresses quietly in winter jersey and jeans, since it’s early and cold and still raining, and tiptoes downstairs. In the sitting room she stands before her mantelpiece, takes one last, long look at her painting and carefully takes it down from the wall. She wraps it in a dustbin bag.
Fanny had been planning to write a letter to him, explaining why she couldn’t accept such a valuable present, and had spent much of the night composing it in her head. But now that it comes to the moment of setting pen to paper none of the words she prepared seem to make any sense. She can’t think of anything to say. She feels a fool. Angry with herself for accepting the thing. Angry with Solomon for having given it to her. Angry with having to give the painting back.
She gives up on the letter. She throws it away, half-finished, picks up the dustbin bag and heads out. Solomon’s house is very close. Sometimes, if the breeze is right, and Solomon is outside, she can catch wafts of his delicious lavender and sandalwood aftershave from her front garden. Not today, however. It’s pouring with rain and it’s still only five o’clock in the morning. She doesn’t want to see him, anyway. She just wants to leave the painting on his doorstep, as he left it on hers, and then, if possible, never have to think about it again.
Half an hour later she is sitting at her kitchen table marking exercise books while Louis still sleeps upstairs, when she hears a loud clattering noise outside her door. Fanny tiptoes to the window to discover the cause of it. She peers nervously out from behind the ill-fitting sari curtains and discovers a man, tall, lean, with a face not unlike an eagle: nose, bony and straight, with a dent, as if it’s been broken once; eyes heavy; jaw dark with early-morning stubble. He has tripped on one of her metal dustbin lids.
He’s out there in the pelting rain dressed only in his pyjama bottoms and a grey silk dressing gown. And he has the painting. He raps impatiently on the front door – an economic, graceful movement, pent with energy. And the cottage rattles. Fanny hesitates.
He bends down and flicks open the letter-box. ‘FANNY!’ he yells. ‘MISS FLYNN?’
Miss Flynn? She smiles. She tiptoes back to her seat at the kitchen table and waits silently for him to go away again.
But Solomon has no intention of leaving. She hears him laughing through the open letter-box. It’s a nice laugh – heartfelt and infectious. ‘I know you’re up because you’ve just been to my house and left a bloody good painting outside in the pouring rain. And I know you’re there, because I’ve just seen the bloody curtains moving…And not only that,’ he adds, after a pause, ‘not only that, the curtains don’t fit! Fanny, I can see you. For heaven’s sake, come to the door.’
She’s not sure what to do. She feels cornered.
‘Come to the door.’ An edge to the voice now. She can smell sandalwood and lavender. Solomon Creasey is apparently unaccustomed to waiting.
Kind of sexy, Fanny thinks. Except it’s half past five in the morning. Why should she come to the door just because a delicious-smelling, unattached multimillionaire James-Bond-Villain lookalike in a grey silk dressing gown is demanding it?
As she pulls back the latch he straightens up, surveys her, and reminds himself never to listen to Grey McShane’s thoughts on women ever again.
Very small, he thinks. Very scruffy. Is that last night’s make-up she has smudged all over her face? He is confused, briefly. He doesn’t know any other women who would open the door looking like this. The women he knows spend hours locked away in their bathrooms. And when they finally emerge, they look sensational. They look—But does that, he wonders wildly, as Fanny looks up at him, apparently waiting for him to speak, does the fact that she comes to the door looking like a draggletail make her better or worse than the other women? BETTER OR WORSE??
Well, worse, obviously. Stupid bloody question.
Solomon gives himself a mental shake. The incident with the Bentley has clearly unsettled him more than he realised.
He still hasn’t spoken but otherwise his examination of Fanny – and ensuing disappointment – have been meticulously hidden. Solomon hides everything from his face. Instinctively.
Finally, Fanny speaks, with more hostility than she meant. (His silence is making her awkward. The aura of ruthlessness about him, and confidence and faint depravity, combine to quite an intimidating effect. There is, she thinks, without doubt, something horribly, deliciously carnal about him as he stands there. Not helped by his still being in his dressing gown.) ‘What do you want, anyway?’ she snaps. ‘It’s half past five in the morning. I’m trying to work.’
‘What do you think I want?’ he says. ‘I want to know why you’ve left this excellent painting outside in the rain, where it would have been destroyed if I hadn’t happened to be up.’
‘I wrapped it in a dustbin bag.’
‘And rested the dustbin bag in a fucking puddle.’
‘There wasn’t a puddle there when I left it,’ she says. Though there might have been. She had been keen to get away.
‘Apart from which, yesterday you sent me a thank-you letter saying how much you liked it. Actually,’ he adds, ‘one of the loveliest thank-you letters I’ve ever received.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Yes, you did. I have it here.’ He reaches into his dressinggown pocket, produces a sheet of paper. ‘What changed? What happened between yesterday and this morning?’
‘Nothing. I mean, I should never have written that letter. I’m sorry. But at the time I had no idea how much…And I’m sorry, but I really don’t think it’s appropriate…’
He rolls his eyes, groans.
‘And the fact is, when I found out,’ she continues, ‘I mean, I certainly don’t mean to be ungrateful, but I was a little annoyed. In a way. Because I’m not some sort of – I don’t know – one of your mafioso business associate…’
‘Mafioso?’ He laughs. ‘You’ve been listening to village rumours.’
‘I’m actually yo
ur children’s teacher,’ she continues, feeling silly.
‘I’m aware of that.’
‘And I’m certainly not the sort of person who…’ She stops, uncertain how to finish.
‘What?’
She shrugs. ‘I dunno. Gets given lovely paintings.’
He smiles. Lets the comment hang there for a moment. ‘Well, you should be,’ he says, his voice rich as velvet.
She looks away. ‘I mean, I just can’t be seen to be taking bribes…’
He bursts out laughing. ‘Fanny, I hate to be rude, and I’m not in the least averse to providing bribes when necessary – but what reason on earth would I possibly have to bribe you?’
‘I don’t know…How do I know?’ She’s beginning to feel very stupid. ‘I’m just saying I don’t want to be a part of it. I mean, the school isn’t for sale. And nor am I.’
The sound of Solomon’s heartfelt laughter wakes Macklan and Tracey in the house next door, wakes Mrs Hooper at the post office, wakes the vicar in his bungalow vicarage behind the church. Upstairs, even Louis stirs.
‘You can laugh as much as you like,’ snaps Fanny. ‘I’m sure in your world people accept bloody great presents like that without thinking twice about them.’
‘They certainly do,’ says Solomon.
‘Well, bloody well bully for them.’
He looks at her. His children had been quite right, of course; the woman in the painting looks just like her. ‘Only I don’t know any other anxious, brown-haired, untidylooking village schoolteachers to give this to, and since you happen to be teaching three of my children…’ He pauses to wipe the rain from his eyes, looks up at the sky and then down at the offending painting. ‘Look, I don’t suppose we could discuss this inside? This painting’s going to be destroyed.’