Bed of Roses Read Online Free PDF Page A

Don’t worry about me!’
    ‘But you’re not a teacher.’
    ‘Oh, I know that, dear. It says it loud and clear in my pay packet every month!’ She rocks with laughter.
    ‘Well…’ Fanny hesitates. It’s a bit early to be throwing her weight around but she feels she can’t let it pass. She turns to Robert White. ‘I think,’ she says politely, ‘with the children being so behind, and with Mrs Tardy tending, as she says, to stick with the fun stuff – it might be a good idea to get a supply teacher in, don’t you?’
    ‘It isn’t ordinarily a deputy’s duty,’ he says, ‘to administrate that sort of thing.’
    ‘Isn’t it? Wasn’t it? Well, it is now!’ Fanny forces a laugh. She’s not used to this; ordering grown men about. It’s awkward. ‘Anyway, Robert, Mr White, to be frank – you don’t exactly look like you’re dying…Couldn’t you stick around, now you’ve made it this far? As it’s my first day. Would you mind?’
    ‘I had no idea,’ he says pertly, ‘that our esteemed employers now insisted we should be dying before we’re allowed time off sick.’
    ‘Oh, come on.’
    ‘And the last thing I want is to feel responsible for the kiddies catching my germs.’
    ‘Children,’ Fanny says, ‘are pretty resilient.’
    ‘In my experience, parents tend to be not unduly impressed by the sort of staff who insist on spreading their germs around. And if the parents complain—’
    ‘Yes, but they won’t,’ she says.
    There are blotches of pink at his cheek-bones. ‘But they might,’ he says.
    ‘Well,’ there are blotches at hers, too, ‘then I’m willing to risk that.’
    A long silence. It’s a battle of wills. She may be young and small and new and female and disconcertingly attractive, but it begins fuzzily to occur to Robert that she might not be the pushover Mrs Thomas had been. They stare at each other, until finally, with a huffy, superior shrug, Robert nods.
    ‘Thank you,’ Fanny grins at him. ‘You’re very kind. Thank you very much.’ Without another word he picks up his briefcase, bulging with exercise books he has failed to mark over the Easter holidays, and leaves the room.
    With a great sigh of relief Fanny throws herself into the beaten-up, brown-covered armchair beside Mrs Tardy’s. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘That wasn’t at all how I’d intended to begin.’
    ‘The thing is, what I’ve learnt in my experience, Miss Flynn, we all have to begin somehow,’ replies Linda Tardy nonsensically, but kindly, patting Fanny on the knee. ‘But you mustn’t mind Robert. He has his ways. And the main thing is, we’ve got some really super kids here at Fiddleford.’ She nods to herself. Safe on safe ground. ‘That’s the main thing. Super kids. That’s right, isn’t it, dear? Now then,’ slowly she heaves herself up from her seat, ‘we’ve got a few minutes. How about I make you a nice cup of coffee?’
    ‘I’d love some coffee,’ Miss Flynn says. ‘And please, Mrs Tardy, call me Fanny.’
    Linda Tardy hesitates. ‘It’s a strange name though, isn’t it, Miss Flynn?’ She gives one of her bosomy chuckles. ‘Not one you’d wish on a girl these days. Not really. You never thought of changing it, I suppose?’

6
    The school hall is light and airy, with worn wooden floors, high ceilings and enormous windows set high in whitepainted brick walls. Like the two classrooms on either side of it, it is clean and handsome but strangely bare; there are hardly any children’s paintings anywhere, or charts, or wall displays. Robert’s classroom has nothing at all except a laminated sign which reads:

    Fanny sits, for the moment, swinging her feet over the edge of the school hall’s tiny stage and feeling a mite peculiar. The children, all thirty-seven of them, all cross-legged on the linoleum before her, gaze up, placidly expectant, each one entrusting their fate to her as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if she had a clue what she was