Fanny’s put on make-up for the Fiddleford limbo: sweeping black lines around her large grey eyes, and a lot of lip gloss. She’s wearing a pair of very fitted low-slung jeans, a transparent grey silk shirt with the top four buttons undone and a fancy black bra on show underneath.
She’s pulled her curly, paint-speckled hair into a pony-tail to camouflage the fact that she still can’t be bothered to wash it, and on her feet she’s wearing trainers – suede and still quite clean. All in all the look she has gone for is not, perhaps, ideal for a village headmistress on the evening she first properly meets her students’ parents. But Fanny’s not yet used to being a village headmistress, so she doesn’t think of that.
She decides it would be a friendly gesture to take a bottle of vodka with her because in her experience a lot of people, herself included, prefer drinking spirits to wine. So, with a pack and a half of Marlboro Lights, and a bottle of vodka only short of a few shots, she heads out.
The village hall is a few minutes’ walk away, beside the council-owned bungalow (where Tracey Guppy lives with her uncle), and just opposite the school. It’s a dreary little building; a 1940s pebble-dashed hut, usually musty and empty, with a noticeboard outside advertising Wednesday Morning Bridge Club, Tuesday and Thursday Toddler Group, and not much else.
But that Friday evening it is throbbing. Fanny can hear the calypso beat, jaunty and foreign and completely incongruous, as soon as she steps out of her front door. In fact, though Fanny couldn’t have known it, Fiddleford village hall hasn’t seen so much action since the previous summer, when half the nation’s hacks squeezed in to witness the famous soap star Julia Biggleton (staying at the Manor Retreat after being outed as a transsexual) attempt to resuscitate her career by playing Lady Bracknell in Fiddleford Dramatic Society’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
This evening there is no Julia Biggleton expected. And yet by the time Fanny arrives, half an hour late, there must be sixty people standing awkwardly around that pebble-dashed hut, wishing they were somewhere else. It is an unlikely crowd for a limbo dance. At least half the people present are over seventy and by the look of them, too creaky even to stand for more than a few minutes without having to call for an ambulance. But a social occasion in a small village, even if it must include bending backwards under poles, is something the majority would be unwilling to miss. Needs must, as Jo would say. In the country. Needs must.
Fanny, of course, knows hardly anyone. She pauses at the door, vodka in hand, and casts a hopeful eye over the crowd. She sees old General Maxwell McDonald in blazer and tie, deep in conversation with the glass-eyed school secretary, Mrs Haywood. And his good-looking son Charlie at the far end of the room, smoking a cigarette with the limbo teacher from Exeter, who is wearing leggings. And there is Jo, of course, working another corner, in low-slung jeans and trainers, like Fanny, but with no make-up on, shiny clean hair, and an opaque, exquisitely cut white shirt with not a hint of any underwear showing.
She spots Ian Guppy, her wily landlord, cowering in a space near the door immediately behind her. Clasping a can of cider in one hand and the burning butt of a cigarette in the other, and wearing a patterned brown jersey which seems to be choking him, he’s staring into the middle of the room desperate – or so it appears – to avoid eye contact with anyone.
Standing guard beside him and all around him is the reason why: a vast mountain of flesh which Fanny correctly assumes to be his wife. She is alarmingly large. Actually, she is obese. Next to her, Ian Guppy appears like a frightened pixie, half the man – an eighth the man – he was the only other time Fanny saw him, and with no trace of the horrible leer which had previously been stuck to his face.
On this occasion Mrs Guppy happens to be wearing a blue nylon leisure suit with a pair of new lilac slippers. But the main point about Mrs Guppy is her size. She is very large. And, in spite of her efforts with the talcum powder, which she has sprinkled liberally over her thick wiry hair and her great body, she smells strongly of frying and sweat.
She and Ian have eight children, so Mrs Haywood the glass-eyed secretary has informed Fanny. Three of them are currently in jail. One, now twenty-five, has been missing since he was fifteen. Two are in foster homes. Tracey Guppy the school caretaker, nineteen, is honest and drug free but not on speaking terms with either parent. Their youngest is Dane Guppy, eleven. He is the student who interrupted Fanny’s first assembly. (She’s taken to calling him John Thomas whenever he’s difficult, and each time he bellows with laughter. It lights up his waxy, suspicious face.)
At first glance Mr and Mrs Guppy look almost comical, Fanny thinks, huddled together, like Fatipuff and Thinnifer, in the corner of the room. And yet there is something menacing about them too. Perhaps she imagines it – after all that Mrs Haywood said. But Fanny gets the impression that everybody in the hall is a little wary of them. They stand very much alone; the husband cringing under her giant wing, the wife with beady eyes flickering suspiciously through the crowd. Mrs Guppy exudes a quiet proprietorial violence which, since the publican’s wife was found with blood gushing down her legs and both arms broken, has kept libidinous females and her libidinous husband well apart. Or so Mrs Haywood said. Ian Guppy may leer, but after the incident with the publican’s wife he never strayed again. Apparently.
Fanny knows she ought to go up and say hello. But they look very uninviting. She scans the room for a more appealing alternative and unconsciously, out of nerves, twists the lid off her vodka bottle and takes a swig.
Tracey Guppy is glancing her way; hovering a good distance from her parents and managing to look pretty and optimistic in spite of the gene pool; in spite of a wretched perm and a chilly, tatty lime green mini-dress. Fanny starts walking towards her just as a young man – tall, with curly russet hair – attracts Tracey’s attention. The two of them fall immediately into animated conversation and Fanny hesitates, slightly embarrassed. She fiddles again with the cap on her vodka bottle.
‘Hey! Teacher!’ Fanny turns. Behind her Mrs Guppy, with an imperious nod of that vast head, is beckoning her over.
Shit, Fanny thinks. Never should have hesitated.
‘Hello,’ Fanny says pleasantly, walking towards them. ‘And hello to you, too, Mr Guppy. This is quite a party.’
Mr Guppy mumbles something unintelligible, keeps his eyes to the floor.
‘Go and get Teacher a cup,’ snaps his wife. ‘You seen her! She’s been drinking out the bottle.’
He begins to move away.
‘Go on,’ she nudges him forward. ‘Don’t stand there with your eyes gogglin’ out like you never seen underwear before. Hurry up!’ Before Fanny has a chance to speak, Mrs Guppy motions her décolletage. ‘I didn’t know you head teachers was paid so short.’
‘What’s that?’ smiles Fanny.
‘I should cover y’self up before the men go shoving their cash down there.’
Fanny glances at her shirt. ‘Well!’ she says in astonishment. ‘Ha ha…goodness! And there was me thinking I was looking quite nice this evening!’ Mrs Guppy doesn’t smile. Fanny tries again. ‘Mind you – if there are any people shoving money around tonight, Mrs Guppy, I’d much prefer they shoved it down my shirt than anywhere else! You are Mrs Guppy, aren’t you? I’m Fanny Flynn.’ She holds out her hand. ‘I teach your son.’ Mrs Guppy doesn’t take the hand. It hangs in mid-air. ‘He’s…’ Fanny can’t quite think what to add. ‘Well – he has a wonderful sense of humour, doesn’t he?’
Mrs Guppy is not impressed. She stares coldly at Fanny. ‘It’s not Stinglefellows in ’ere, Miss Flynn.’
‘Yes. Yes, I noticed.’
‘Go home and put something decent on. You look worse than a prostitute.’
Fanny’s not easily bullied; not any more. Not ever again. She flushes, first in shock, and then anger, but she does not go home and put something decent on. She fixes her eyes