Bed of Roses Read Online Free Page A

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 himand 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.

5
    She wakes up having dreamt of him again, as she often does at the start of her New Beginnings. She dreams of him turning up at every new front door, with a stupid grin, as if she’d be pleased to see him, and a pathetic little offering – a box of cheap chocolates, a jigsaw puzzle – as if that would make up for it all. Usually, in her dreams, she doesn’t let him into the house. But last night, for some reason, she did. He was coming through her door, stepping over her mushrooms, just as the alarm clock went off. So she wakes up in a nervous sweat. When she opens her eyes and looks around her new, small room, she remembers the day which lies ahead, and feels a lurch of a very different kind of terror. She springs out of bed.
    For her first day at Fiddleford Primary Fanny puts on the clothes she always wears on the first few days of a new job; a newly washed knee-length denim skirt (her only skirt in the world) which, for the moment, fits like rubber, and a dark blue polo-neck jersey. The effect is unfussy, like everything about her; simple and attractive, quite sexy, and scruffy. Fanny always looks scruffy. She can’t help it.
    Feeling faintly sick with nerves she forces down half acup of black coffee (still no milk in the house), picks up her bag of heavy files, takes a deep breath and steps out from her little cottage, which smells of yesterday’s disinfectant, and out into the sweet, fresh morning air of the village street.
    The school is a small, russet stone Victorian building, pretty and symmetrical, with a broken bell tower in the middle, and just two large, arched windows at the front. Three gates open on to the front yard. The one on the right is marked BOYS, the one on the left, GIRLS. The middle one, non-specific, is the only one unlocked. Everyone uses it.
    It’s as pretty a little school, Fanny thinks as she draws up in front of it, as any little school could ever hope to be. She feels a swell of warm pride. It looks more like a school in a story book. Nothing too alarming could possibly happen inside such a place.
    Children scurry around her, nudging each other and giggling. Fanny ignores them – for the moment. She looks at her feet. Doesn’t want to speak to any parents just yet. Nor to anyone. She takes one more long, slow breath, mutters something to Brute about his wishing her luck, and pushes on, through the yard, up the path, into the central hall and right, to the door of the staff room. Pauses for a second. Opens it.
    ‘Morning all!’ she says, sounding unnaturally breezy.
    The youngest head teacher in the south-west does not have a large staff to manage. There is Robert White, who wears a patchy beard and socks beneath open-toed sandals. He is the notoriously idle deputy head, still too idle to resign after being overlooked for promotion, but not, Fanny will soon discover, too idle to feel bitter and obstructive as a result of it. Robert