Bed of Roses Read Online Free

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.

4
    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 herdown 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.