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.
The telephone rings. Fanny hesitates. She has no choice but to stretch across him to pick it up.
‘There’s a gentleman here says he’s an old friend. Says he just heard you on the wireless,’ Mrs Haywood the glass-eyed secretary growls into her ear. ‘Of course, they’ll all be coming out of the woodwork now.’
‘Oh!’ A flicker of fear.
‘He wants to talk to you about it—’
‘No! I mean, no. Sorry. I’m a bit busy at the moment, Mrs Haywood. Could you—’ But Mrs Haywood has already put him through. ‘Hello?’
She hears the laugh. She recognises the laugh. ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ he says. ‘Remember me?’
She throws down the receiver as if it’s burnt her. Stares at the telephone. All the colour has drained from her face.
‘Hey,’ says Robert, jolted briefly to concern. ‘What’s up? Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine.’ She’s still staring.
‘Who was that?’ Robert asks.
‘No one. Nothing. I’m fine.’ She tries to collect herself. But then it starts ringing again and she leaps immediately away.
‘Hey,’ he says, almost kindly. He puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s OK. It’s OK. What’s up?’ He nods at the telephone. ‘Do you want me to answer it?’
‘No. Don’t. I mean, yes, do. Answer it! Answer it!’
He leans across her for the receiver: ‘He-llo?’ he says. ‘Thank you, Mrs Haywood. Fiddleford Primary? Can I help you?’ And listens a minute. Fanny scrutinises his face. And then, ‘Oh, yes.’ Smile. ‘That would have been myself…I requested a supply teacher for this afternoon…’ Another pause. A show of heroic stoicism. He looks across at Fanny and shakes his head. ‘Mmm, actually no,’ he says at last. ‘On second thoughts, not to worry. No. But thanks for getting back. I’m going to battle on today, after all.’ He winks at Fanny. ‘If I can…Yes…Looks like there’s a young lady here in need of a little help! First-day jitters…Yes…Nothing serious!’ He laughs. ‘I’ll give you a call tomorrow, yes? Depending on how I feel…Thanks ever so much, Sally. It is Sally, isn’t it? Super. Bye-bye.’
He hangs up and slowly, meticulously, with a secret smile hovering over those lips, he uncoils his long bony body until he is on his feet again. He looks down at Fanny, who is too ashamed to ask him any details about the call. ‘As it’s your first day, Fanny, I’m going to make an exception, and sweat it out until home time. OK? But you should know this is not a precedent. Working in this kind of hyper-stressful environment, we teachers have a responsibility to look after ourselves.’ He pauses in front of her as he passes to the door. ‘And that includes you, young lady.’ She can feel his hot Lemsip breath on her cheek. ‘You and I won’t be doing the kiddies any favours if we go forgetting that…So relax, OK?’ He motions at the telephone. ‘It’s not going to bite!’
‘Of course not,’ she says. ‘Thank you, Robert.’
‘My pleasure,’ he says, and winks.
While Robert relaxes at home, nursing his long thin body back to full strength, Fanny works harder than she ever has before. She teaches morning and afternoon and spends the evenings at home, alone at her kitchen table, wading dutifully through school paperwork. It occurs to her at the end of her third solid six-hour stint that she’s made no noticeable dent in the stack of papers still waiting to be dealt with: she could spend the rest of her life filling in forms and then what? Some poor sod would only have to process them. She picks them up and stuffs them tidily into a damp cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. To be looked at another day. In the future.
And even then Fanny can’t quite bring herself to stop worrying. Instead of calling friends, or sitting in the pub getting drunk with the locals, as she had previously imagined she would spend evenings in her new bucolic life, she puts brushes, paint pots and a long folding ladder into the back of the Morris Minor mini van, drives through the village to the school, and she stays up most of the night painting the central assembly room bright yellow.
Friday arrives – the day, as everyone in Fiddleford would tell you, of the great limbo cotillion. Fanny and her seventeen pupils, as a result of a deal cracked earlier in the week, spend the day dedicated to their village mural, which, by mid-afternoon, takes up an entire wall-and-a-half of her classroom. It’s a multi-spangled, multi-styled, glorious, uneven affair, and it transforms the room, just as Fanny had hoped it would.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Fanny announces, standing back to admire. ‘But CARTOGRAPHERS might find the total DISREGARD for any kind of CONSISTENT SCALE, quite INFURIATING…if not altogether INTOLERABLE.’ Her pupils write the words on the board and compete with each other to see who can use which one most effectively in conversation.
And so on. Fanny’s a good teacher. The children aren’t accustomed to being taught by someone with so much energy, so little regard for dreary adult protocols, and with a dog called Brute. They think she’s wonderful.
By the time they leave her alone, at the end of Friday, she is truly exhausted. Exhausted and, with the building quiet at last, even a little flat. She’s thought of nothing but the school since she walked into the building that first morning of term. And now it’s the weekend. Now what?
Somewhere on her desk, under the piles of paperwork, lies Mrs Haywood’s extended list of telephone callers, among them, calling for a second time, an ex-boyfriend from teacher training who was driving through the area and heard the radio interview; also Jo, who heard the radio interview; her mother, calling from her retirement flat in southern Spain, who hadn’t, and a triumphant message from her previous landlord, announcing he had discovered a coffee stain in the bedroom and would therefore be withholding her £950 deposit. But still no message from bloody Louis.
So. Unless she can make a friend at the village hall tonight, or she gets lucky with another call-up to eat sodium-free pulses at the Manor, she faces spending the rest of the weekend alone. Which is OK. Of course…
Slowly, more slowly than she needs to, Fanny first closes her office, and then locks up the school. (Tracey Guppy the caretaker won’t do it, having recently declared the building spooked her. She won’t go near it when it’s empty.) She heads out, turns down the lane towards the village and begins the short trudge home.
But the gloom soon leaves her. It would be very hard, after all, not to be soothed by such a commute. The air smells so sweet, and the sun is warm on her back. Before long she is plucking idly at the long grass by the side of the road, and her mind has buried itself in her work. She has plans – for the school, for her tiny cottage, for making new friends in the village. Hundreds of plans. She thinks about Robert White, who’s a lecher, she decides, on top of everything else, on top of being an overall creep. She makes a mental note to find out the union rules on lechers and skivers, wonders how she might ever be able to get rid of him. Reminds herself to buy paint for her front door. Red, perhaps. Or dark pink. And to dig out her copy of Tom’s