by Daisy Waugh
Children scurry around her, nudging each other and giggling. Fanny ignores them – for the moment. She looks at her feet. Doesn’t want to speak to any parents just yet. Nor to anyone. She takes one more long, slow breath, mutters something to Brute about his wishing her luck, and pushes on, through the yard, up the path, into the central hall and right, to the door of the staff room. Pauses for a second. Opens it.
‘Morning all!’ she says, sounding unnaturally breezy.
The youngest head teacher in the south-west does not have a large staff to manage. There is Robert White, who wears a patchy beard and socks beneath open-toed sandals. He is the notoriously idle deputy head, still too idle to resign after being overlooked for promotion, but not, Fanny will soon discover, too idle to feel bitter and obstructive as a result of it. Robert teaches the younger class – when he turns up. There are the only two classes in the school.
There is also a part-time teacher’s assistant, Mrs Tardy; an elderly secretary, Mrs Haywood, who entertains the children occasionally (or so legend has it) by popping her glass eye in and out; and a dinner lady playground attendant who doubles up as caretaker.
The playground attendant/caretaker was a pupil here herself not so long ago, and she still has a brother and several cousins at the school. She is Tracey Guppy, the nine-teen-year-old daughter of Fanny’s landlord, Ian, the same girl who used to keep Robert White awake at night (his attention has shifted now to a girl in the Lamsbury Safeways). Tracey Guppy doesn’t speak to Ian or to her mother, who threw her out of the house when she was fifteen. She’s been living ever since with her Uncle Russell, wheelchair bound as a result of emphysema. They live together in a council-owned bungalow directly opposite the school.
‘Morning all!’ Fanny says breezily.
But only half the staff is yet present: only Linda Tardy, the part-time teacher’s assistant, and Robert White the lazybones deputy head.
At the sight of the dog, Robert’s shoulders jolt in surprise, making the Lemsip he has been blowing to cool spill on to his sock-covered toe. ‘Ow!’ he says irritably, and then, apparently too preoccupied with the accident to look or stand up, adds a grudging and slightly pert ‘Good morning, Miss Flynn’ in the direction of the carpet.
He places the mug of Lemsip on the floor, lifts the damaged sandal on to his knee and carefully undoes the buckle.
‘No one else here yet?’ Fanny asks brightly, looking from Robert White to Linda Tardy and back again. Linda, who is trying to swallow a mouthful of the same fish-paste sandwich she has vowed not to touch before lunch, holds a hand in front of her jaw and shakes her head.
‘It’s usually a bit slow on the first day,’ mumbles Robert, removing the sandal and unrolling the sock. ‘And I’m afraid to say I’m only really popping in myself. I’m a bit under the weather.’ He examines his toe, which looks bony and a little damp, but otherwise undamaged, and stands, at last, to arrange the sock on a nearby heater. ‘I thought I should put a nose in, so to speak.’ He smiles at her, keeping his pink lips closed. He is skinny, in his mid-forties, with eyes of the palest blue, and thin sandy-coloured hair cut into a well-kept bob. He is surprisingly tall when he stands up, Fanny notices; over six foot, or he would be if he pulled his shoulders back. ‘I’ll nip back to bed later,’ he continues, ‘but I wanted to say welcome…So –’ with a burst of energy he flaps open one of the long thin arms and winks at her, ‘welcome!’ he says.
‘Thank you.’ It is unfortunate for Robert, especially since this is their first meeting (Robert having been off sick on the two previous occasions she visited the school and off sulking when the other governors were interviewing her for the job), but there’s almost nothing Fanny finds more irritating than a man with a well-kept bob, open-toed sandals and a cold. ‘Who’s going to take your class then?’
Robert looks taken aback. ‘Linda,’ he says, as if it’s obvious.
‘You mean Mrs Tardy?’
‘Linda always does it. They’re ever so used to her. The kiddies like you, don’t they, Linda?’
‘They like it with me because we always do the fun stuff,’ Linda Tardy chuckles, ‘and then when Robert’s back he has to do all the catching up for us, don’t you, Robbie?’
‘I do my best.’
‘Though generally,’ she adds, ‘there’s more to catch up on than he can manage. Isn’t that right, Robert? With you being poorly so much…But they’re lovely little children, and that’s what counts. Isn’t that right, Robert? They’re super kids.’
‘But Mrs Tardy,’ says Fanny, ‘if you don’t mind me being frank—’
‘Oh, say what you like, dear. Don’t worry about me!’
‘But you’re not a teacher.’
‘Oh, I know that, dear. It says it loud and clear in my pay packet every month!’ She rocks with laughter.
‘Well…’ Fanny hesitates. It’s a bit early to be throwing her weight around but she feels she can’t let it pass. She turns to Robert White. ‘I think,’ she says politely, ‘with the children being so behind, and with Mrs Tardy tending, as she says, to stick with the fun stuff – it might be a good idea to get a supply teacher in, don’t you?’
‘It isn’t ordinarily a deputy’s duty,’ he says, ‘to administrate that sort of thing.’
‘Isn’t it? Wasn’t it? Well, it is now!’ Fanny forces a laugh. She’s not used to this; ordering grown men about. It’s awkward. ‘Anyway, Robert, Mr White, to be frank – you don’t exactly look like you’re dying…Couldn’t you stick around, now you’ve made it this far? As it’s my first day. Would you mind?’
‘I had no idea,’ he says pertly, ‘that our esteemed employers now insisted we should be dying before we’re allowed time off sick.’
‘Oh, come on.’
‘And the last thing I want is to feel responsible for the kiddies catching my germs.’
‘Children,’ Fanny says, ‘are pretty resilient.’
‘In my experience, parents tend to be not unduly impressed by the sort of staff who insist on spreading their germs around. And if the parents complain—’
‘Yes, but they won’t,’ she says.
There are blotches of pink at his cheek-bones. ‘But they might,’ he says.
‘Well,’ there are blotches at hers, too, ‘then I’m willing to risk that.’
A long silence. It’s a battle of wills. She may be young and small and new and female and disconcertingly attractive, but it begins fuzzily to occur to Robert that she might not be the pushover Mrs Thomas had been. They stare at each other, until finally, with a huffy, superior shrug, Robert nods.
‘Thank you,’ Fanny grins at him. ‘You’re very kind. Thank you very much.’ Without another word he picks up his briefcase, bulging with exercise books he has failed to mark over the Easter holidays, and leaves the room.
With a great sigh of relief Fanny throws herself into the beaten-up, brown-covered armchair beside Mrs Tardy’s. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘That wasn’t at all how I’d intended to begin.’
‘The thing is, what I’ve learnt in my experience, Miss Flynn, we all have to begin somehow,’ replies Linda Tardy nonsensically, but kindly, patting Fanny on the knee. ‘But you mustn’t mind Robert. He has his ways. And the main thing is, we’ve got some really super kids here at Fiddleford.’ She nods to herself. Safe on safe ground. ‘That’s the main thing. Super kids. That’s right, isn’t it, dear? Now then,’ slowly she heaves herself up from her seat, ‘we’ve got a few minutes. How about I make you a nice cup of coffee?’
‘I’d love some coffee,’ Miss Flynn says. ‘And please, Mrs Tardy, call me Fanny.’
Linda Tardy hesitates. ‘It’s a strange name though, isn’t it, Miss Flynn?’ She gives one of her bosomy chuckles. ‘Not one you’d wish on a girl these days. Not really. You never thought of changing it, I suppose?’
6
The school hall is light and airy, with worn wooden floors, high ceilings and enormous windows set high in whitepainted brick walls. Like the two classrooms o
n either side of it, it is clean and handsome but strangely bare; there are hardly any children’s paintings anywhere, or charts, or wall displays. Robert’s classroom has nothing at all except a laminated sign which reads:
Fanny sits, for the moment, swinging her feet over the edge of the school hall’s tiny stage and feeling a mite peculiar. The children, all thirty-seven of them, all cross-legged on the linoleum before her, gaze up, placidly expectant, each one entrusting their fate to her as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if she had a clue what she was really meant to be doing with it.
This is her first assembly and, although there will be complaints about it later, she has decided on the spur of that moment to tell the students of the shadow which hangs over their school’s future. It seems only fair, she thinks, that they should know as much as she does. ‘So you see,’ she says emphatically, ‘I don’t think we’ve got all that much time. And unless we can totally and completely –’ in her zeal her shoulders, her entire body, give an unconscious leap of enthusiasm, and the children chortle, they like her; children always do, ‘transform this place, work some kind of miracle and somehow improve every single thing about it, well then—’
The door is kicked open by a gangly boy in loose-fitting Nike nylon. He stands facing her, arms crossed and legs apart. He can’t be more than eleven or he wouldn’t still be at the school, but he’s tall for his age.
‘O’right, miss?’ he says. His voice is breaking.
‘Thank you. I’m OK,’ she says brightly. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’
‘Eh?’
‘“Eh?”…I said why don’t you—’
‘Yeah, I know. But what if I don’t want to?’
Fanny looks at him briefly and shrugs. She turns back to the other children, leaving him standing there, bewildered, brimming with thwarted urges. ‘So the thing is,’ she continues, ‘unless we all decide to make a massive effort—’
‘And my mum says it’s disgusting as well, because I know what your name is, and it’s disgusting. Your name’s Fanny.’
Fanny smiles. ‘And what’s your name?’ she asks. There is something vaguely familiar about him.
‘Never mind what my name is. I tell you it ain’t John Thomas! At least I ain’t called penis!’
A wave of uncertain laughter.
‘That’s very fanny,’ she nods. More laughter. ‘You are a fanny boy. Well done.’ She’s made a similar joke at every school she’s ever worked at. ‘We were talking about how a lot of influential people think this school is utterly useless and that unless we can prove them wrong, it may one day have to be closed down,’ Fanny continues. ‘Aren’t you interested in that? Wouldn’t you like to see the school close down for ever?’
‘Of course I would.’
‘Well, if you sit down and shut up you might get a few hints on how to bring it about.’
Fanny doesn’t show her astonishment when he sits. She’s good at that. Instead she leans forward. ‘Basically,’ she says conspiratorially, and without missing a beat, ‘for those of us who want it not to close, this is the plan…’
They wait.
‘John Thomas, you should pay attention of course, because you’ll be wanting to do the opposite…’
That first morning goes well, she thinks. In spite of the local radio reporter who pitched up at break demanding to speak to her, claiming Jo Maxwell McDonald had assured him it would be OK. (Fanny finally agreed. She dispatched him with a harmless little interview, and managed, or so she believed, to make herself sound relatively professional. Incredibly professional actually, since every time the reporter had referred to Fiddleford’s ‘head teacher’, she’d had to pause for a millisecond to work out who the hell he was talking about.) In any case the interview went out live, so she didn’t have to suffer the discomfort of listening to it.
Her children, all seventeen who made up her class (and what a luxury that was!) seem bright, and for the most part, gratifyingly energised by the prospect of joining forces to save the school. They have peppered their morning’s lessons with suggestions on ways to keep the place open.
Having kicked off with some sensible maths problems, and gazed, while they counted quietly on fingers and thumbs, around her barren white classroom, Fanny had suddenly burst out, ‘Oh, it’s horrible in here!’
There was a moment of astonished silence. They stared at her, and at her dog, vacantly wagging its tail against the leg of her desk. And laughed.
‘Isn’t it, though? Don’t you think? It’s like an operating theatre. We’ll all drop dead from boredom if we sit in here a moment longer. What shall we do to brighten the place up?’
There followed a passionate class discussion, after which she set them to making a frieze of Fiddleford, an enormous one, with each pupil painting a part of the village they liked best.
It had been lovely. A lovely morning. Now her first lunch-hour is drawing to an end and she’s gazing out of the window of her tiny, upstairs office feeling unusually pleased with herself. She can see her pupils racing around in the sunny playing fields, and beyond the children the village of Fiddleford nestling around its church – and beyond the village, the river and the cedar tree rising majestically from the Manor Retreat park. It’s beautiful; the way the English country is meant to look.
She finds herself daring to wonder if this new job might indeed turn out to be the new beginning she has been hoping for. A possibility, she realises with a start, which had never seriously occurred to her until now. But she likes this little school, the pretty village, the good-looking neighbours, her tiny ivy-covered cottage…It is a peculiarly happy moment, immediately interrupted by a feeble tap on her office door.
‘Come in, come in!’ she cries bravely, since she’s already caught a whiff of Lemsip and knows perfectly well who to expect. ‘Hello, Mr White – Robert!’ she smiles. There are little red marks around the edges of his nostrils. He looks pale and stubborn and intolerably self-pitying. ‘Feeling any better? You look much better!’
Robert feels robbed of many things as he turns the corner into her office: robbed of this room and that desk, robbed of her salary, robbed of her job, and above all, above everything else, robbed of his right to spend the morning in bed. So he says nothing. He wraps his two hands around the hot mug of Lemsip, hunches his shoulders and regretfully shakes his head.
‘Sit yourself down!’ says Fanny, jumping up and pulling out a second chair.
With the two of them and Brute in the room, it’s a struggle to make enough space. Robert stands by, shivering and watching, while Fanny heaves a battered filing cabinet to one side. ‘I’m glad you came, actually,’ she pants, ‘I wanted to talk about the walls. Why are they so bare? Why is there nothing on your classroom walls?’
He’s not interested in walls. ‘The fact is, Miss Flynn—’
‘For heaven’s sake, call me Fanny.’
The chair prepared, Robert carefully lowers himself on to it. ‘The fact is, Fanny…’
Fanny has turned her own chair away from her desk so she can face him. It leaves them without any space at all. They both shuffle their bodies backwards, but the chairs, her desk, the filing cabinets are jammed together. There is absolutely no room for manoeuvre.
‘Oops,’ says Fanny, laughing, ‘sorry. Bit of a squash! Perhaps we’d be better off standing?’
‘Standing? Where?’ asks Robert facetiously. He has her knees trapped between his long bony legs and it’s nice. It’s nice. Besides which he has a cold. He’s not feeling very well. So he stays put. ‘Fanny, as you know, the last thing I want is for you to get an impression that I’m letting you down,’ he says, ‘but I have to tell you I’m feeling pretty dreadful. I’m almost certain I’ve got a temperature. I really ought to be in bed.’
Without thinking, as if he were one of her pupils, Fanny leans over and puts a hand to his forehead. ‘You don’t feel like you have a temperature,’ she says. ‘Perhaps you’re just hot. Why don’t you take one of your jerseys off
?’
She glances at his face, flashes him a brief, busy smile. And for one ghastly second their eyes lock. Fanny looks away. But it’s too late.
There it is in the room between them: a tiny spark, the smallest flicker – it’s not attraction (certainly not on Fanny’s part), only a faint, disturbing recognition of their different genders. Fanny drops her hand at once. She stands up and tries, as elegantly as possible, and with minimal contact, to create some kind of gulf between them.
She has to clamber over his bony thighs.
‘Bother,’ she says irritably, nearly treading on Brute with her free foot and then having to grasp hold of Robert’s shoulder to recover balance. ‘It really is bloody cramped in here. I’m going to open the window.’
Robert watches her confusion with sly enjoyment and doesn’t bother to help. ‘I’m ever so sorry, Fanny,’ he says. ‘But you know what it’s like with these colds…’ He smiles at her, keeping the pink lips closed.
‘I do,’ snaps Fanny, free at last, grasping the window latch in relief. She opens the window, turns back to him with a forced smile of sympathy. ‘Bloody awful. You poor thing. But couldn’t you just hang on until school finishes? And then after school you can go straight to bed and you’ll probably feel so much better in the morning…’
Outside, Tracey Guppy, the nineteen-year-old caretaker/dinner lady, rings her bell. Lunch-break is over.
Robert looks quietly at his hands.
‘Please, Robert,’ Fanny says, ‘I know it’s awkward, me storming in here, taking a job which you probably feel – probably rightly feel…’
Robert purses his mouth.
‘But I need your help…to get this school back on its feet.’
Robert’s chapped white hands clench tight around the Lemsip.
‘Not that you haven’t already done so much for the school, I’m sure. But we need to work together…’
A silence between them. Robert sits, thinking, his long thin legs neatly folded in the space where Fanny had once been. She stands by the window waiting for his decision, wondering if she should stop begging and begin to flatter, or stop flattering, if that’s what she’s doing, and start to bully. She has no idea. She’s never been a boss before. Not to an adult. Not to a chippy, insecure male. And looking at Robert, she has her first blinding flash of just how complicated it’s going to be.
