by Daisy Waugh
‘Over my dead body!’ cries the General.
Fanny ignores him. She nods to herself, turns to the vicar. Silence. She clears her throat. ‘Reverend Hodge, I resign.’
‘Nonsense!’ the General shouts.
‘Too bloody right, it’s nonsense. You’re not “resigning”, Fanny Flynn,’ shouts Kitty as Fanny walks away, towards the door she’d burst through so happily only a few moments earlier. ‘You’re fired! Isn’t that right, vicar? Eh, Robert? We’re voting you off the board, baby. And it’s good riddance –’
Bang! The door closes.
‘– to bad rubbish!’ A silence. Kitty clears her throat, rolls back her head and begins to laugh. ‘Good work, Robert. Well done! Didn’t think you had it in you.’
71
Fanny walks for miles after that, saying her goodbyes to the landscape; she and Brute walk until it’s dark. Perhaps, she thinks, they will move to America now. Or maybe to Spain; spend some time with her mother and the retired tax inspector. Or maybe to Edinburgh…Or Australia. Australia sounded good. It was miles away.
She sighs. ‘That’s what we need, isn’t it, Brute? You and me. And Louis. If he wants to come. We can go anywhere. Anywhere in the world! We’ll have a new beginning.’ But even thick Brute fails to be fooled by her optimism. ‘Eh, Brute? What do you reckon? How about a new beginning?’
He ignores her.
She returns to the cottage – where there is still no sign of Louis. She should pack, she thinks. That’s what she normally does at this stage in the cycle. Get busy. Move on. Start the packing.
Instead, she takes a packet of Marlboro Lights and a bottle of whisky, and wanders out into the garden…Lavender and sandalwood. Solomon must be home. She breathes in. Must be out in his garden…She finds herself wishing she could go over and join him. Tell him all her problems, while his three sweet little daughters sleep upstairs. Lie under the stars drinking wine, putting the universe to rights with him. And his new girlfriend, if he has one yet. She feels a sharp internal shrivelling. Jealousy, for crying out loud. Where had that come from? As if she doesn’t already have enough to worry about.
She spots Macklan at the far end of their own, shared garden, sitting under the peach tree, in the very place she’d been planning to sit herself. The moonlight on his handsome face makes him look pale and drawn. She smiles – an exhausted smile – and plops herself down beside him. ‘You and Grey McShane look just like vampires,’ she says. ‘After dark. Budge up.’
He budges up. She offers him a cigarette, which he takes. She lights his and her own, and they sit in silence, listening to the quiet breeze and to the Maxwell McDonald lambs, chattering away in the field behind them.
‘Good day?’ she enquires eventually.
He smiles. ‘Shitty day…What about you?’
‘Yeah, well.’ She shrugs. ‘I suppose it could have been better…Tracey working tonight? Why aren’t you at the pub?’
‘Her Uncle Russell told me yesterday. She’s pregnant.’
‘She’s pregnant?’
‘I suppose you knew all along, did you?’
‘No. Of course not. I noticed she’d been putting on weight. But I thought, you know, looking at her mother…’
He laughs. ‘So did I, if you want the honest truth. But it’s pretty bloody obvious, isn’t it? When you know. I feel such an idiot.’
Fanny doesn’t reply. Doesn’t know what to say, where to start. Tracey’s Uncle Russell had been making himself very busy recently.
‘She’s staying at her mum’s. She won’t speak to me. Won’t tell me anything.’
‘At her mum’s?’ says Fanny. ‘Bloody hell. Things must be bad.’
‘I don’t even know who the father is.’
‘Oh! I assumed—Macklan, I’m sorry.’
He shakes his head. ‘The stupid thing is I don’t even care. If she came to me with a Martian in her belly, I wouldn’t care. I’d love it. I would – if she wanted me to. I mean,’ he laughs, ‘it’s not like I was the most carefully planned baby of all time…I’d do anything for her, Fanny. I love her.’
‘I know you do,’ says Fanny, taking a swig from the whisky and passing it to him. ‘It’s very obvious.’
‘So why won’t she trust me, then? Why won’t she talk to me about it? Why?’
Fanny doesn’t have an answer to that. She takes the bottle back, swigs it down again, takes another pull from the cigarette. ‘Got fired this evening, Macklan. Can you believe it? Incidentally,’ she adds, after a pause, ‘have you seen Louis today?’
‘He went to Kidstead, I think. Or somewhere. One of the newspapers sent him. He was very pleased about it. Fanny,’ he adds suddenly, ‘maybe now’s not the time to mention this but there’s something you should probably know about Louis…Louis and Kitty Mozely…’
‘Ahhh yes,’ she says quietly. ‘Of course. Kitty and Louis. Kitty more or less told me this evening.’ She smiles, and feels a wave of unmistakable relief wash through her. And sadness. And no surprise, not even a flicker. So it’s over. Over. They are free to stop pretending. She is free to go. ‘Well…’ She sighs. ‘We had to give it a try, didn’t we, Mack? I don’t think Louis and I were ever honestly cut out to be anything more than friends. Not like you and Tracey…’
He shakes his head. ‘Sorry, Fanny.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she says, more to herself than to Macklan. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ She’s not going to cry. ‘At least not very much.’ She won’t cry. ‘And we’ll still be friends. Eventually. Definitely, we will.’
A pause, broken by Macklan, unable, in spite of Fanny’s troubles, to stay off the topic closest to his heart for very long. ‘But do you seriously thinks she loves me, Fanny?’
Fanny laughs. He’d not even remembered to commiserate about the job – not that she cared. ‘I’d lay my last 20p on it, Mack. When you two are together there’s something…’ she searches for the right word, ‘luminous about you, a sort of luminous happiness that makes other couples look a bit pathetic, makes us feel like we’re trying too hard. I think you two were born to be together. Seriously. I do.’
He beams at her.
She gives him a wan smile. ‘Anyway, I don’t really know what you’re doing talking to me about it. You should get yourself down to the pub. Talk to her. She’s working tonight, isn’t she?’
‘Of course she is.’
‘Well, go on then!’
‘She won’t speak to me.’ But he’s leaning forward, hopeful again. ‘I’m standing there on the side of the bar calling her name and she acts like she’s deaf. She won’t bloody well answer.’
‘But she can’t stop you talking to her, can she? Does she know how you feel – about the baby? That you’ll love it like your own? Have you told her what you just told me? Because if you haven’t—’ Fanny laughs. ‘I mean, Christ, Mack. There aren’t many men—She certainly won’t be assuming it.’
‘She won’t?’ He sounds surprised.
Again Fanny laughs. ‘Erm – no, Mack.’
‘I’m going to tell her.’ He springs up, stops, glances back down at Fanny. ‘You’ll be all right, though, won’t you, Fanny?’
‘I’ll be fine. Go on, Macklan, GO!’
He’s already halfway across the garden.
72
She’s still sitting there, alone under the peach tree two hours later, when Louis finally returns from Kidstead. He’d assumed Fanny would be working, since she usually was, and had stopped off at the pub on the way home, vaguely hoping to bump into Kitty. He found an edgy-looking Macklan Creasey instead, perched on a stool at the corner of the bar, being ignored by Tracey.
Macklan didn’t greet Louis warmly. Didn’t feel like it. ‘Fanny knows,’ he said, without even a hello. ‘She knows about you and Kitty. Plus she got fired today. She’s on her own in the garden, drinking whisky.’
‘She knows—Did you tell her?’
‘I was about to, Louis. Didn’t think you were being very fair, keeping secret
s from her, since you were supposed to be together…’ He sent a pointed look towards Tracey, busy polishing glasses. ‘But she already knew.’
‘The whole ruddy village knows,’ snapped Tracey. It was the first time Macklan had heard her speak since she ran out of her uncle’s bungalow the previous evening.
‘That’s true, Tracey,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘I agree with you! That is very, very true.’
She slid him a furtive glance, caught his eye, quickly looked away. ‘I reckon Fanny could do with some company, Louis,’ she said.
‘Ohhh,’ Louis groaned, ‘fuck and damn,’ pocketing his wallet, forgetting the drink. ‘I’m a jerk…I’m a stupid fucking jerk.’
So Louis found her, propped up against the trunk of the peach tree, whisky bottle in one hand, burning cigarette in the other. As he stalks across the grass towards her he can hear her muttering to herself; banging on about new beginnings again. He halts in front of her, slides gracefully to his knees.
‘Fan?’
She looks back at him. Smiles. ‘Cheater,’ she says. ‘God, you’re a waste of time.’
‘I know.’
‘Kitty thinks all men should be circumcised. She says there is probably nothing on God’s earth more beautiful than a nicely proportioned dick. When it’s been circumcised.’
He smiles; that lazy smile. ‘So she keeps telling me.’
‘Oh, Louis.’ At last, the tears that have been waiting to spill all this time, begin slowly to run down her cheeks. He puts his arms around her.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
‘We really believed we had something though, didn’t we? I mean, for a little while. When we were in Spain. We did, didn’t we?’
‘Yeah. We did.’
‘We thought we’d cracked it. We were so smug. We’d found the holy fucking grail.’
‘I’m seriously beginning to wonder if it exists.’
‘Oh, it exists,’ says Fanny bleakly. ‘It’s just it comes along when you’re standing in a bar, minding your own business, in Buxton, and then it turns out to be—’
‘Crap,’ Louis finishes for her.
‘Horrible. Maybe it wasn’t the real thing, anyway. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe—’
‘It was crap, Fan. Come on,’ he nudges her. ‘We were better than that.’
She chuckles limply, more than a little drunk. ‘Maybe the harder you look the better it hides. Maybe that’s it…I got fired, by the way.’
‘Mack told me.’
‘Robert White says I’ve been molesting the children.’ She giggles – it turns into a tiny, feeble retch – and falls silent again.
They hold each other for a while, hearts aching with their own failure, with the endless, exhausting loneliness of their free-floating lives. Finally she disentangles herself. ‘Got a call from Ian Guppy, too,’ she says. ‘Don’t know what took him so long, except of course I’ve just paid him the rent. He says he wants me out by the weekend.’
‘He can’t do that!’
She shrugs. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow, anyway. Tomorrow morning, preferably. Pack up tonight. Write a letter to the children. Can’t see much point in hanging around.’
‘Do you want a hand? Can I help you?’
‘No. Thanks.’ She hauls herself up from the grass. ‘Thanks, Louis.’ She smiles at him, and he at her. ‘What are you going to do?’
He glances away. ‘Oh, you know,’ he says evasively. ‘Maybe stick around here a while. Maybe, gosh, I dunno. But the work’s picking up again, so I guess I’ll hang around a couple more months.’
Fanny smiles. ‘Of course you will. Well – goodbye, Louis. See you later.’
And with that she turns and walks unsteadily back into the house.
She spends most of the night struggling to write a separate farewell letter to each of her pupils, which she intends to post (since Robert would be unlikely to distribute them) through Grey and Messy’s door as she leaves.
Finally, as the dawn seeps in beneath her hand-made curtains, she climbs up to the loft and pulls out the giant red New Beginnings trunk she’d been hoping not to use again. She throws it open in the middle of the sitting room and stops; gazes at her small house, at all the little artefacts arranged so lovingly around the place – those sari curtains, the Iranian embroidered wall hangings, the Peruvian llama rug, the broken Mexican silver lamp, the African animal carvings, the wretched dressing table left her by her grandmother…She looks at all the random tat she’s been amassing through life, lugging from one New Beginning to the next, and she thinks, What’s the point?
Minutes later she stands with Brute and a small suitcase and two Safeways plastic bags full of chosen belongings: clothes, make-up, CVs, a couple of unread novels. The front door is open and she’s ready to leave. She takes a last look around her: at the bright red trunk, open and empty, and everything else still in place. As if she were only nipping to the pub. She falters. The room glimmers slightly with all the hope she invested in it once, and it makes her wish she could stick around and fight. She would like to stick around and fight…
She picks up her bag, ‘Come on, Brute. Let’s go.’ She steps out into the cold, clear, early morning, slams the door behind her, and quickly, before she can change her mind, posts the key inside.
73
Solomon has a ten a.m. meeting at his London gallery with an exciting new Russian client, a man with two bodyguards and a feverish gleam which reminds Solomon of some of his old prison associates. Not a man who would appreciate being kept waiting.
He ought to have travelled up to London last night, but it had been a beautiful evening in Fiddleford and he’d spent all day in the car going to St Ives and back. Apart from which his darts and croquet party was on Saturday, and Macklan had vaguely mentioned he might come round for dinner to drop off his trophy stand. (Macklan didn’t show, of course, but true to form where his father is concerned, he forgot to call or to cancel.) Which is why, at five thirty-five that Friday morning, just as Fanny is listening to her front-door key drop on to the inside mat, she hears Solomon’s new Bentley purring elegantly up the village street behind her.
She listens, panic-stricken, frozen to the spot. But to her surprise the car makes its way on and past her.
‘Lucky!’ she says to Brute, as the engine sound fades. ‘Lucky!’ again, to cover the sharp pang of disappointment. ‘Come on. Let’s go. It’s time to go.’
But then, distantly, she hears the car brake. Stop. And slowly start reversing.
‘Oh, shit!’ She turns back towards the cottage again, squeezing her hand through the letter-box, in the wild hope of somehow retrieving the keys. She can hear his car drawing nearer. ‘Shit…fuck! Shit!’ She doesn’t need this. Not now. She can’t face this. Desperately, she drops into a crouching position beside the garden gate, shunts the suitcase behind her and pretends to be searching for something on the ground.
He stops. Winds down the window.
‘Fanny?’ Wonderful deep voice, she thinks: authoritative, confident. Bloody sexy, actually.
‘Hmm?’ She glances up. ‘Oh! Goodness! Hello, Solomon! I didn’t see you there!’
He frowns. ‘What are you doing?’
‘What am I doing?…Nothing!’
‘Where are you going, at this time in the morning?’
‘Nowhere!’
‘Nowhere? What are you doing with those bags?’
‘What bags? Oh. Well, that’s because I was on my way—’ She stops. Tries again. ‘I seem to have lost my keys. I’m sort of locked out. Actually. Gone and posted my house keys through my own postbox!’ She rolls her eyes. ‘That’s the problem.’
He eyes her suspiciously. ‘Are you all right?’ he says. ‘How did the meeting go last night? Sorry I couldn’t come along and support you.’
‘Ah. The meeting. Didn’t miss much. No. I was fired, actually.’ A breathless, dry-throated laugh. ‘Well – suspended. I mean, I resigned. Robert White said I’d been molesting the
children. Which I haven’t,’ she feels compelled to add, ‘by the way.’
‘Well, I’d be very surprised.’
‘So – when I said I wasn’t going anywhere it wasn’t strictly true. I was actually on my way, Solomon.’ She gives a little shrug. ‘I mean, I’m off. So,’ she continues quickly, not giving him a chance to speak, ‘well. Thank you for everything. For being my friend. And – telling me about Nick. And I’m sorry, actually I’m really sorry, about that time I called you…It was Louis, of course, who’d been jabbering my business around the place. Louis.’ She glances resentfully up at his window. (He’s not there. He’s over at Kitty’s, snoring peacefully.) ‘Who’s having it off with Kitty Mozely, it turns out. Probably as we speak. Anyway, sorry. More than you needed to know.’ She realises, distantly, that she needs to shut up. ‘So. What with this and that and the other, and bloody Ian Guppy’s chucking me out of the cottage, there’s not a great deal to keep me here any more. Not really—’
‘Bollocks,’ he interrupts. ‘Only a school full of children, all of whom seem to worship the ground you walk on. And, with the exception of four or five idiots, a bloody village full of supporters. Supporters and friends, Fanny. Christ. What more do you want?’
‘Well,’ she says pertly, fighting back tears yet again, eyes already stinging, ‘a job might come in handy.’
‘You’ve got a fucking job!’ The words explode from him. They roar down the empty street. Silence. ‘Apart from Robert White,’ he adds more quietly, ‘and Kitty, I presume, have any other governors accepted your resignation? I know I haven’t.’
‘Solomon,’ she laughs, ‘you can’t force me to stay.’
‘Probably not.’ He sighs. ‘But I thought you might want to. After all the effort you’ve put in. I thought you were a fighter, Fanny Flynn. I thought you and I were fighters…Shame.’ He sounds disproportionately cast down. ‘I was obviously wrong.’
‘Obviously,’ Fanny says. She looks at the ground, mortified. She knows, if she moves her eyeballs, her tears will spill over, and he’ll see. ‘I’m sorry.’