by Daisy Waugh
Kitty stops laughing. ‘At Ollie Adams’s house,’ she lies. ‘If it’s any business of yours. Which it isn’t…Anyway, excuse me. I need a pee.’
Which, when Kitty finally staggers up from her seat, leaves Louis and Fanny alone. The flicker of a glance they give to each other as soon as her back is turned is filled with so much confusion, so much misunderstanding, neither has any idea what to say to begin.
Finally, Fanny says, ‘You two seem to be getting on well.’
‘Oh. She’s good fun. She’s a laugh.’
‘She’s a bitch, Louis.’
‘Well, I suppose beggars can’t be choosers. Out here in the sticks. Isn’t that right, Fan?’
She has no idea what he’s talking about. ‘So, anyway.’ She shrugs. Tries another tack. ‘When did you arrive?’
‘What, in the village? Or in the pub?’
‘I don’t know. Both. Louis, what’s the matter with you?’
‘I arrived in the village at zero hundred hours plus fourteen. I arrived in the pub at zero two hundred plus twelve.’
‘That’s not funny. You’re not making any sense.’
‘Minus a small detour at the rutting-donkey show. Eeeyyyorrr!’ He stands up suddenly, impressively steady. ‘Anyway. Got to go,’ he says, without looking at her. ‘Got to make up a bed and stuff. Open a few windows. Plus I’ve got to be in Crediton tomorrow. Don’t suppose you know where that is?’ He doesn’t look at her but as he passes his arm reaches out, almost of its own accord, and gives her a quick, tight squeeze. Can’t resist it. He’s missed her. ‘See you later, Fan.’
‘No – hey – Louis, wait! I’ll give you a hand.’
He hesitates, the arm still resting on her shoulders.
‘Hey-ho!’ bawls Kitty, bursting through the lavatory door, wiping her wet hands on her skirt. (She’s never peed so fast in her life.) ‘Where are you two off to? You’re not leaving, are you?’
He drops his arm. ‘I’m leaving, yes,’ he says. ‘Got loads to do. Nice meeting you, Kitty.’
‘Wait. I’ll come with you,’ Fanny says.
‘Thanks. But I can manage on my own. I’ll see you around, Fan.’
‘Wait for me!’ shouts Kitty. The threat of his disappearing, plus the pee-break, have combined to sober her up a bit. ‘Wait there, Louis. We haven’t finished discussing our little plan. It’s the chance of a lifetime! Darling boy, don’t you want to illustrate the most talked-about children’s book of the century?’
He strides out of the bar without looking back. Kitty, eyes wild with lust, brushes past Fanny without really seeing her.
‘Oops,’ she mutters vaguely, knocking Fanny into the table. ‘Out the light, dear.’
The door bangs and Fanny stands alone, blinking in the aftermath. She hears someone behind her clearing his throat. ‘Afternoon, Fanny.’ It’s the General, escaped from all the hectic activity at the Retreat. He’s been sitting at the bar quietly observing everything. ‘Came here for a bit of peace and quiet, I did. How about you?’
‘God. I’m not sure any more,’ says Fanny. ‘I came for a bit of company, I think.’
He pats the stool beside him. ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘over here.’ He turns to Tracey Guppy, behind the bar, slicing lemons. ‘Kitty Mozely going at full wattage this afternoon, eh, Tracey?’
Tracey rolls her eyes. ‘Kitty’s a pain.’
‘She is,’ he says. ‘Indeed she is.’ He looks at Fanny thoughtfully, moved, as he often is when he sees her, by the air of faint loneliness which always seems to surround her. ‘I was thinking,’ the General says, ‘Fanny and Solomon might make an awfully good duo, Tracey. What do you think?’ He turns back to Fanny. ‘We must reschedule that luncheon.’ Fanny’s lunch at the Manor has been cancelled twice now – as lunches at the Manor, she is discovering, so often have to be, due to the very neurotic nature of so many of their high-paying guests. It’s a mark of some optimism on the General’s part that he continues to issue invitations at all, since at least 80 per cent of them have to be withdrawn later.
‘Fanny and Solomon?’ Tracey says dubiously. Considers it a moment. Looks critically at Fanny. ‘Don’t know about that,’ she says. Tracey’s too kind to tell Fanny she’s not glamorous enough. Solomon Creasey’s girlfriends always look like supermodels.
‘Have you met Solomon yet?’ asks the General. ‘You must have done.’
‘Not yet,’ Fanny says. She sits down beside him.
‘What? Haven’t met him yet?’ The General stares at her, finding it hard to imagine there’s anyone in Fiddleford who hasn’t yet met Solomon Creasey. ‘How extraordinary! He’s in the pub most weekends, isn’t he, Tracey?’
Tracey shrugs. ‘I don’t work weekends, General.’
‘Well. He’s never in when I’m in,’ Fanny says.
‘What’s that?’ The General’s not listening. ‘Well, well. Plenty more opportunities. In the mean time, what can I get you two girls to drink?’
Louis moves into the cottage that night and continues, in spite of Fanny’s efforts, to treat her with distant hostility. And although Fanny is truly bewildered and hurt by it, she is distracted, within a couple of days, by the arrival of the dreaded letter, announcing the arrival at the school of Her Majesty’s Inspectors within the next couple of weeks. Fanny’s been expecting to hear from them ever since her job began, since the inspectors come once every term to a school in Special Measures. Nevertheless the now very real prospect of their descent sends her into a spin of hasty amendments, and yet more intensive form filling.
The children are ordered to hide their descriptions of the pheasant dissection. They have to put their tadpoles back in the river, clear away their untidy nature tables, set aside their weaving looms and focus exclusively on the official Curriculum.
‘But we can make it interesting,’ Fanny pleads with her little students. ‘And if we concentrate hard enough we can get through it all very quickly, and go back to the other stuff as soon as the inspectors have gone.’
Robert White, meanwhile, refuses to come to work at all. He won’t even take her calls any more. After her fourth message on his machine goes unanswered, she grows worried; worried enough to call Robert’s brother-in-law, Dr Curry. But Dr Curry refuses to give any information out. He’s curt. Especially when she suggests that Mrs Curry (Robert’s sister) should go round to Robert’s house and check if he’s all right. Dr Curry, font of so many unwarranted sick notes, has a feeling she may be mocking him.
‘I’m sure he’s perfectly fine, Miss Flynn,’ he says briskly. ‘Probably just another of his colds. Now if you’ll excuse me…’
After a long week struggling to bring Robert’s class, as well as her own, up to scratch for the inspectors, and with only the help of a series of dozy supply teachers and the feeble Linda Tardy, Fanny leaves Robert a final message, threatening to bring in the LEA if he doesn’t call back at once. He calls back at once.
‘I’ll return to work as soon as I feel sufficiently able,’ he says in the monotone he’d used at her front door, after the slap. ‘I don’t want to bring the union into this but I can and I will if you continue to harass me like this. And I would be grateful, Miss Flynn—’
‘Miss Flynn?’ repeats Fanny, with a burst of laughter. ‘Sorry, Mr White, but last time I saw you you were trying to stick your tongue in my throat!’
‘That isn’t the case, Miss Flynn. And I find that suggestion exceptionally offensive. If you repeat that allegation, I can and will—’
‘Oh, fuck off,’ she says. ‘Fact is, Robert, if you stay away another week I shall call in the authority and you can call in the union if you want.’ She slams the telephone down.
Robert, who had been lifting weights in his garage when the initial call came through, replaces his own receiver with a little smirk, pads through the kitchen and into his bedroom, and pulls out his new diary:
10.45 a.m. Acute migraine. Stress induced. Miss Flynn contacts me once again, making accusations of a sexual nature, a
lso questioning veracity of my condition. Miss Flynn terminates call by telling me to f*** off.
He’s put away the diary with the poems he wrote to her, and diagrams, and little fantasies. Once he’d cross-checked the dates of her other managerial misdemeanours, he locked the old diary into the little safe beneath his bed. Though he knows it can’t stand as evidence, he has an instinct that the diary may come in handy when the time comes for lodging his complaints.
24
Geraldine Adams enjoyed riotous sex last night (unlike her friend Kitty, who was offered none to enjoy). Actually, astonishingly, Geraldine’s enjoyed riotous sex for several nights in a row, and it’s beginning to show in one or two minor details: there’s a jaunty light in her nicely made-up eyes, a subtle loosening of the muscles around the side of her mouth. Or maybe she’s just smiling more. And she and Clive are being embarrassing together: patting each other’s bottoms at breakfast, giggling at the most tenuous double entendres. It all makes Ollie feel a bit sick.
But it won’t last. Obviously. Because in spite of one very merry, drunken night, when they recaptured a glimmer of the fun they had together before money and success and offspring made life so very serious, and in spite of the astonishing number of passion-filled nights which have followed – nothing has changed. Their elegant offices in Lamsbury remain as dull and quiet as the grave, and their beautiful Georgian rectory still feels like a pointless toy they haven’t yet learnt how to play with.
But at least, amid all that tumultuous shagging, they have finally found the time and the nerve to admit that not everything in their almost perfect lives is quite as perfect as they were pretending. They miss their important jobs, their frantic, adrenalin-filled lifestyles, all the money that used to pour into their bank accounts, and they have agreed that somehow or other, if they are ever to be happy in Fiddleford, they must find a way to recapture those things again.
Step One: Of course. To get the practice working.
‘I don’t think we interact enough,’ declared Geraldine during one of their inter-coital breathers. ‘People don’t believe we’re for real. They think we’re stuck up. We need to get more involved with the community.’
She called on the drunken, former sex siren Annie Millbank (who lives a mile out of the village at the Mill House, and stars in a series of coffee ads) and has now signed them both up with the Fiddleford Dramatic Society, whose summer production rehearsals for The Duchess of Malfi are due to get under way shortly.
Geraldine has ordered a copy of the play to be sent to her by Amazon, and is, though she tries to sound weary when she discusses it with Clive, secretly quite excited about the whole thing. Cerebral Clive, on the other hand, is dreading it. But he understands clearly (very clearly; it’s how his mind works) that spending a couple of evenings humiliating himself in fancy dress in front of the simple people of Fiddleford is merely a means to an end. He and Geraldine, if they are to expand their practice, if they are to put themselves in a position where they can pick and choose from the county of Lamsford’s most important, interesting and remunerative cases, need to be liked and trusted. Need to be known about. Need to know what’s going on.
‘I ran into Jo Maxwell McDonald this morning. She’s wanting to take on new clients. She says the Retreat more or less runs itself now.’
‘Clever girl,’ says Clive. He rather fancies Jo.
‘Well, clever both of them, to be fair,’ says Geraldine who, like every woman in the county, fancies Jo’s husband, Charlie. ‘I think Charlie does a hell of a lot behind the scenes. He just doesn’t feel the need to show off about it. Anyway, I’m wondering if we shouldn’t employ her. Not just for the practice, but for us. As the practice. Sort of thing. What do you think?’
Clive considers it. He always considers before he speaks. It can mean he sometimes misses the chance altogether.
‘Because, Clive,’ she continues, ‘I don’t think we really communicate to people how much we care about this village. This county. And about the issues that worry them. And we do. I mean, we care about the school. We care about the lack of public transport for our kids. About maintaining rural post offices and mobile libraries…the tax on petrol…all those sorts of things. I care about them passionately. Don’t you?’
‘Very much so,’ says clear-thinking Clive. ‘Very much so.’
‘Well, I think we should try and get that across. And I think Jo Maxwell McDonald’s the person to help us. So I’ll give her a call, yes?…They’ve still got that ghastly Transport Minister up there, apparently. Still refusing to resign…’
To make her twice-weekly sessions at Fiddleford Primary more endurable, Geraldine has taken to spending less of each pupil’s allotted ten minutes actually listening to them reading, and more time making them listen to her chat.
She was sitting fighting sleep again the other day, while a young plodder called Simon struggled over the word ‘rug’, when her own intense boredom forced her to interrupt him.
‘It’s rug, dear. Mmm. RUG. Do you know, Simon, before I was a mummy I was something else. I was something called a lawyer. And I still am a law-yer. When I’ve got my law-yer’s hat on! Do you know what a law-yer is, Simon?’
Simon shrugged. ‘Dunno.’
‘A law-yer is somebody you call when you need help with the law. A law-yer is somebody who sticks up for people’s Rights. Do you know what Rights are, Simon?’
Simon shrugged. ‘Dunno.’
‘What do you know about children’s Rights, Simon? Do you think children have Rights? Can you think of a children’s Right, Simon?’
Simon shrugged. ‘Prob’ly it’s about signs and so on. For your bicycling.’
The answer shocks Geraldine. (‘As a lawyer and a mum,’ she explained to Clive a little later.)
So now, in whispered ten-minute sessions in the corner of Fanny’s classroom, Fiddleford’s pupils are learning all about their legal rights: about how to protect themselves from police harassment, how to access their personal health and education records, what constitutes a physical assault and at what age they’re allowed to decide on their own body piercings. And it keeps Geraldine awake.
25
‘Hey! Fanny! Wait there!’ Fanny, hurrying home that Friday night, tired, fed up and looking forward to spending a weekend in London seeing old friends, glances up to see Tracey Guppy rushing out from the bungalow she shares with her Uncle Russell. Fanny curses softly to herself, fixes on a well-mannered smile and crosses over to the wire fence which separates Tracey’s garden from the lane.
‘Hey, Tracey.’
‘I’ve got you-know-who inside.’
‘Louis?’ (Two weeks now, and Louis still isn’t speaking to her.)
‘Louis? Don’t be daft!’ Tracey giggles. ‘Not Louis. I mean Dane. I’ve got my brother Dane inside. Mum’s sent him over because of the skiving fine. So he’s shacking up with me and Uncle Russell. Only he’s been with us a couple of days and he still won’t go to school.’ A gust of wind. Tracey, bursting out of a denim mini-skirt and spaghetti-strap electric-pink vest with FOXY LADY across the front, hugs herself with arms covered in goose bumps. She looks as anxious as a mother. ‘You don’t see it, Fanny. I know you don’t. But underneath all the struttin’ he gets ever so shy.’
Fanny manages not to glance at her watch. She has just over an hour to catch her train and the station is thirty-five miles away. ‘Shall I come in and say hi quickly? Might it help?’
Fanny follows Tracey through a small, clean kitchen, into the front room, stuffy and stale with the smell of smoke. It has a sliding glass door looking out on to the grass, from which Fanny can see the school, the playground and most of the playing field behind. There is a large television at the far end of the room, and against the wall, an enormous turquoise sofa still covered in cellophane. In front of it, in a giant, modern wheelchair, sits Uncle Russell Guppy. He has a brimming ashtray resting on one knee and the mouthpiece of his respirator on the other. He and his apparatus are the only untidy
things in the room.
The television is blasting out, loud enough for Uncle Russell to hear it over his own breathing, so he and Dane don’t hear Fanny and Tracey come in. Dane isn’t watching the television, Fanny sees as she draws closer. He’s lying with his bored, grey face turned in towards the back of the sofa, melting bits of the cellophane with his lighter.
‘Hello, John Thomas,’ says Fanny. ‘Watch out, there. You’ll set fire to it in a minute.’ At the sound of her voice Uncle Russell doesn’t bother to turn around, but Dane Guppy jumps. Literally: his entire body jerks with fear and guilt. In less than a second he’s on his feet.
Fanny giggles. ‘Sorry. Did I startle you?’
‘No. What’re you doing in my house? I didn’t say you could come here.’
Uncle Russell, who’s watching Changing Rooms, says, ‘It’s not his house. It’s my house.’
‘Ah-ha! See?!’ Dane Guppy cries victoriously, waving a finger at his uncle. ‘It’s not your house, Uncle Russell. It’s the council’s.’
Uncle Russell ignores him. As he has done ever since Dane moved in. As he has done, in fact, ever since the day he was born. Uncle Russell only rarely speaks to Tracey, either, though they’ve lived together for four years, and she cooks for him and cleans for him and sometimes, more recently especially, has to help him to the toilet in the middle of the night.
Uncle Russell hates both his brothers, and by association, all his brothers’ offspring. In fact hatred for his only two brothers has been the ruling emotion of his adult life, ever since 1963 when their father died and they cheated him out of his inheritance. Uncle Russell has spent the intervening years (until his illness prevented it and he was forced to stay at home) sitting on the same corner stool in the Fiddleford Arms silently mulling over that injustice, while his brothers have become husbands, fathers and rich men. It would be hard to comprehend the depths of Uncle Russell’s bitterness.
‘It’s not your house, Uncle Russell. It’s the council’s,’ Dane is saying again. ‘See? Plus my dad gives you cash, doesn’t he? He gives you loads of cash, as I know. So it’s not your house, Uncle Russell. It’s more like my dad’s house, and that’s why we’re staying here!’ Uncle Russell, his eyes fixed steadily on the television, holds the respirator mouthpiece up to his face and inhales. He does not intend to respond.
