There are no wicked celebrities in Fiddleford Manor’s worn and welcoming old kitchen that day; only the two rumbustious children and the elegantly jean-clad Jo, looking just as she does in the magazines, Fanny thinks. Possibly slightly better. She is long, lean and fit, clear eyed and clear skinned, and her sunkissed, clean brown hair is cut into a perfectly understated short, shaggy bob. She makes Fanny feel short, and as though she ought to have taken that bath this morning.
‘No one else? Only us?’ Fanny asks, peering hopefully round the corner of the door. But Jo explains (and she is infuriatingly discreet about who’s staying) that Retreat guests usually pay extra to eat in a private dining room at Grey McShane’s Gatehouse Restaurant at the bottom of the drive. ‘Thank goodness!’ she laughs. ‘In the early days we never had any privacy at all!’
So while Fanny sits at the large oak table pushing saltfree kidney-bean salad from one side of her plate to the other and feeling dirty, there are only the twins to distract Jo from providing an uninterrupted run-down of who’s who in the village.
‘
So
,’ asks Jo with a malicious glint in her eye, ‘what do you make of your new landlord, Mr Guppy?’
Fanny’s met Ian Guppy only once, back in March, when he showed her round the cottage. He is tiny – hardly taller than she is, with greased-back jet black hair and a gypsyweathered face. She pictures him, leaning his filthy trousers against the dilapidated Alms Cottage kitchen sink and leering at her. She agreed to pay rent well over the odds solely so she wouldn’t have to continue talking to him. ‘Horrible,’ she says bluntly. ‘What a creep.’
Jo nods. ‘And you should meet the wife. They bought those Old Alms Cottages off my father-in-law in the early seventies, and I don’t think they’ve done a thing to them since. But one of these days,’ she smiles, ‘if I have anything to do with it, we’re going to get them back.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘We need them, for the business. We need the office space.’
She and Jo are more or less the same age and yet Fanny – with her lack of twins, lack of thriving business, lack of representation in the tabloids, lack of outstandingly beautiful Queen Anne manor house, lack of direction, or of any serious acquisitive urges, lack of husband, lack of inches in the leg – feels a whole evolutionary species behind her. By the time the sugar-free herbal teas arrive Fanny’s spirit is buckling. Jo still hasn’t mentioned her proposition, and Fanny can’t help wondering what she could possibly do for Jo Maxwell McDonald that Jo Maxwell McDonald couldn’t do better for herself.
‘…I don’t know how she finds the time to organise it, what with the coffee ads, and all the boozing,’ Jo burbles on, ‘but the Fiddleford Dramatic Society is surprisingly good, thanks to her. They did
The Importance of Being Earnest
last summer. It was actually very funny. We had the soap star Julia Biggleton staying with us at the Retreat at the time.
Remember her? We had her playing Lady Bracknell down in the village hall! You should have seen the press! She’s the one—’
‘Do you know, Jo,’ Fanny bursts out, suddenly desperate to keep her own end up, ‘that tomorrow, when I start work, I’m going to be the youngest primary school head teacher in the whole of the south-west of England.’
‘Hmm?’
And then Fanny blushes, and laughs. ‘Crikey. Did I really say that?’
‘Well, actually,’ says Jo, not missing a beat, ‘I’m glad you mention it, because it’s just the sort of thing I wanted to talk to you about. Basically, Fanny—Have you got a minute?’ She doesn’t wait to be assured. She tells Fanny about her background in PR. ‘Before I married Charlie,’ she says, ‘and became this dreadful sort of country bumpkin—’
‘You!’ interrupts Fanny with a burst of laughter. ‘A country bumpkin?’
Jo shrugs. She knows she isn’t really. ‘I used to work in a big PR company in London. Used to represent nightclubs, restaurants, personalities. All very glamorous, I suppose. In retrospect…Anyway, it’s pretty much how I – we – Charlie and I came to be doing this. I mean, it’s one of the reasons why we thought of turning this place into a celebrity retreat.’
‘I know,’ Fanny smiles. ‘I’ve read all about it. Like most people in Britain.’
‘Right.’ Jo nods. Smiles. ‘But now the Retreat more or less runs itself and I want to broaden the business out a bit. Take on new clients.’ She pauses for a small breath, leans a little closer. ‘And what I want to do now, Fanny, is to use my public-relations skills, absolutely free of charge, to help you and your school!’
‘Oh. That’s very kind,’ Fanny says vaguely. The idea doesn’t excite her much.
‘Not kind. Absolutely mutually beneficial. If I can show potential clients what I can do with a relatively high-profile, local issue like this one, well—’
‘It’s just that public relations isn’t an especially high priority – for me, anyway. I think what we need—’
‘Everything needs public relations, Fanny. Especially a school that’s just been named-and-shamed! Unless you can persuade people that the school’s turning itself around you’re going to get every bright parent pulling their children out, and you’ll be left with nothing but the dregs. I mean, you know. Not the
dregs
, but the—’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘Right. And you’ll be sunk. Finished. Not only that, the General’s convinced that what they really want is to close the place down. But it’s the heart of the village, Fanny. And, speaking selfishly for a minute, I’d like the twins to go there one day. I certainly don’t want it closing.’
‘Of course you don’t.’
‘See? And I mean here
you
are, this young whizz-kid head teacher—’
Fanny laughs out loud. ‘Hardly!’
‘—Has anyone told the press? Of course they haven’t. And yet it’s the sort of thing local media goes mad for.’
‘Oh!’ Fanny says quickly. ‘Oh, no. No, thanks.’
But Jo is already up and rifling through the dresser for a pen. ‘Plus with you being pretty and so on. They’re going to adore you.’
‘No. No, I really don’t—’
‘Trust me, Fanny. I know what I’m talking about. That’s if—’ She stops suddenly and turns back to Fanny. ‘I take it you are serious about saving our school?’
‘What? Of course I am.’
‘I mean, you do realise, don’t you, how much people around here really care about that school surviving?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Well, then!’
‘It’s just—’
‘What?’
‘It’s just—’ She offers an unconvincing laugh. ‘You know, great if you want to put out a few nice stories about the school. That would be great. Just keep me out of it. I don’t like personal—There are people I don’t want—’ Fanny stops again. But she really doesn’t want to be drawn into details. ‘Basically, I don’t want my face in the paper.’
‘Why? What are you hiding from?’
‘No one. Nothing. I didn’t say that.’
Jo laughs. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand.’
‘Plus I’ve got a lot of unpaid parking tickets…’ Fanny lapses into gloomy silence. She turns away from Jo’s neat, determined face, to the open kitchen window. The birds are singing out there and a delicious, soft breeze is blowing through the giant cedar tree. She gazes out at the park and, beyond it, to the afternoon sun on the river and the distant tower of Fiddleford’s church, and her old terrors seem briefly very distant, even a little ridiculous.
The desire to be outside, on the other hand, alone, striding through that fresh, bright grass, is altogether more immediate; in fact, it’s suddenly quite overwhelming. She stands up. ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘I should be getting off. I’ve got a lot to do. Come on, Brute!…And thanks so much for a lovely lunch…It was really…absolutely…’ But she can’t quite bring herself to finish off with the customary ‘delicious’: ‘Very nice to meet you and the twins.’ Fanny is already reaching for the door.
‘I’ll make a couple of calls then,’ Jo says, standing up. ‘Get them writing something positive about our school for a change.’
‘But please – try and keep me out of it.’
‘I’ll try, but I can’t promise.’ Jo giggles suddenly. ‘You obviously hadn’t been warned.’
‘What about?’
‘Most people refuse to eat lunch here any more.’
‘They do? Why?’
‘Because of the food, of course. Too healthy for them! By the way,’ Jo shouts after her. ‘Hope you haven’t too many skeletons in the cupboard. Along with all the parking tickets! They’ll be coming after you now you’re going to be famous.’
‘Not funny,’ mutters Fanny. ‘Not funny at all.’
But Jo is spooning soya into her twins’ neatly opened mouths. She doesn’t hear.
Fanny calls Louis, her oldest and closest friend, as soon as she gets in from the Manor. She leaves a message on his machine, sounding more cheerful than she feels, emphasising the quaintly rustic attractions of her new village, and inviting – or possibly imploring – him to come down for the weekend.
After that she feeds Brute and sets to work. She works for several hours without stopping, with the same ferocious energy with which she does everything: teaches, flirts, drinks, and even once fell in love. She pulls down the nicotinestained net curtains, washes the windows, rips away what is left of the wallpaper, scrapes off the mushrooms and throws the junk mail out. She scrubs the skirting boards with disinfectant, and the 1950s oven, the 1950s kitchen sink, the 1950s basin and bath upstairs, so that they dazzle with shiny-white retro-chic. She pulls up the dank, sickcoloured carpets and discovers there are oak floorboards underneath.
By eight o’clock she has unloaded everything from the Morris Minor except what’s on the roof: her solitary piece of furniture, a vile, thirty-year-old reproduction dressing table left to her (along with the car itself) by her late grandmother
and which she longs, one day, to be heartless enough to throw out. She is standing in her front garden beside the mountain of discarded carpet, gazing at the van and puzzling over how to get that final piece inside when she spots two magnificent-looking men strolling down the village street towards her. She recognises them both at once.
Charlie Maxwell McDonald – owner of the Fiddleford Manor Retreat, son to the truculent General, father to the rumbustious twins and husband to Perfect Jo, tall, dark and absurdly handsome – is, Fanny realises with a thrill of excitement, like his wife, every bit as good-looking as his photographs. He has his hands in the pockets of his old black jeans and the buttons of his pale cotton shirt half-undone…And he is muttering to a man even taller than he is, and even darker, with hooded eyes and wild hair and a great black coat which swings open behind him: a man whose press photographs do him no justice at all. Grey McShane, the notorious tramp-turned-poet-turned-pin-up-proprietor of Fiddleford’s Gatehouse Restaurant, is possibly the best-looking man Fanny Flynn has ever laid eyes on. She feels, suddenly, as though she’s walked on to the set of a soft-porn movie. Any second now, God bless them both, the men are going to start stripping their clothes off.
‘Hi there,’ Charlie says, drawing to a halt in front of her.
She stares at him. Tries to stop the soundtrack in her head and manages, somehow, not to smirk.
‘You must be Fanny Flynn,’ he says. ‘I’m Charlie Maxwell McDonald. From the Retreat. And this is Grey…’ He looks at her curiously. ‘My wife thought you might need some help unloading things. Are you all right?’
Fanny laughs. And hates herself for it.
‘What’s funny?’ asks Grey.
Fanny says, ‘Nothing. It was just, you know, coming towards me there.’ She grins at them. ‘Had to pinch myself.
Thought I was dreaming!’ Clearly they don’t understand. ‘I mean I thought I was in a magazine…Or something. I mean – not a magazine, but a – you’re quite a striking couple…I mean, not couple. But together…’
The job barely takes a minute, and afterwards both turn down her offer of a drink. When they leave her alone in her newly scrubbed cottage she feels unreasonably let down. Lonely. Did she flirt too much? Probably. She usually does. She can’t help imagining them now: Charlie and exquisite Jo, having a drink together in their exquisite house, putting their exquisitely rumbustious twins to bed; and then Grey, rampaging around the kitchen of his celebrated restaurant, lovingly preparing an exquisitely delicious dinner for his no doubt exquisite wife.
It is only half past eight. She hasn’t eaten (there is nothing to eat) and Louis still hasn’t rung, but she has had enough of today. She picks up a worn-out file with the exhausting words ‘NEW JOBS: APPLICATIONS/ ACCEPTED ETC.’ scrawled across the front, pours herself a dusty tumbler of red wine and takes them up with her to bed. She will have a bath in the morning.
Fanny Flynn met her husband while they were waiting to be served at the bar of a pub just outside Buxton and they fell in love at once. There and then. Six weeks later they had treated themselves to a spontaneous Wedding Day package in Reno, Nevada.
But the marriage turned sour within moments of their leaving the Wedding Chapel. It ended abruptly, three bitter months after it never should have begun.
They were fighting as normal when he suddenly broke the single civilising rule left between them. He lashed out. He kicked her in the stomach – and fled, tears in his eyes, jointly owned credit card in his hands. ‘I’ll come back for you,’ he said wildly. ‘I will. When it’s safe for us. OK? And I’ll always be with you, baby, in my heart. Because I love you. I always will.’
‘You’re a nutter,’ she said in amazement, seeing it all – there and then – in a flash of horrible clarity. He wasn’t poetic, he was insane. And she passed out.
It was Louis who found her – unconscious, blood from her damaged womb congealing on the kitchen floor, and the husband who loved her nowhere to be seen. Louis laid her
down in the back of his van. She slid from side to side between dust sheets, tyre jacks, paint pots and coils of rope. (He was working as a freelance decorator at the time.) He crashed every light between her house and the hospital, but he probably saved her life.
That was in 1994, eleven years ago now, and he hasn’t come back for her. She’s moved many times. (Too many; since the marriage she has found it very difficult to stay still.) She moved from Buxton to London, four or five times in London, then from London to a refugee camp in northern Kenya, where she worked for a year, and from there to Lichfield, from Lichfield to Mexico City, where she taught businessmen to speak English; from Mexico City to Weston-Super-Mare, and now to Fiddleford. She tries to forget him. Yet, still, wherever she is, whenever it’s dark and she’s alone, the questions flit through her mind: Has he followed? Is he out there? Is he looking in?
She never mentions him to anyone, except to Louis, but she believes that he sometimes tries to communicate. And it frightens her. There was an anonymous valentine card in Lichfield: a picture of roses speckled with yellow-brown drops of dried blood, and tucked inside it a message linking American Imperialism with Cryogenics, with Fanny’s ‘Frozen Passion, unstarched by eternality’. She threw the card in the bin.
Then in London she thought she saw him leaning against a postbox outside her flat. She closed the windows, locked them, and called Louis, who rushed over on his new motorbike. By the time Louis arrived the man was gone. He asked her if she had been certain. She wasn’t, of course. But the following week Fanny moved yet again.
And finally, in Weston-Super-Mare, there was the puppy – sitting in a cardboard box and dumped inexplicably on her doorstep. She had picked it up, thought she smelt him
and gagged. But she was lonely. She kept the puppy – it was a cross between a golden Labrador and something mysterious. It was small and wiry, and it was very charming. She called him Brute. Now of course, except for Louis, Brute is probably her best friend in the world.