Bed of Roses Read Online Free PDF Page B

her desk. And laughed.
    ‘Isn’t it, though? Don’t you think? It’s like an operating theatre. We’ll all drop dead from boredom if we sit in here a moment longer. What shall we do to brighten the place up?’
    There followed a passionate class discussion, after which she set them to making a frieze of Fiddleford, an enormous one, with each pupil painting a part of the village they liked best.
    It had been lovely. A lovely morning. Now her first lunch-hour is drawing to an end and she’s gazing out of the window of her tiny, upstairs office feeling unusually pleased with herself. She can see her pupils racing around in the sunny playing fields, and beyond the children the village of Fiddleford nestling around its church – and beyond the village, the river and the cedar tree rising majestically from the Manor Retreat park. It’s beautiful; the way the English country is meant to look.
    She finds herself daring to wonder if this new job might indeed turn out to be the new beginning she has been hoping for. A possibility, she realises with a start, which had never seriously occurred to her until now. But she likes this little school, the pretty village, the good-looking neighbours, her tiny ivy-covered cottage…It is a peculiarly happy moment, immediately interrupted by a feeble tap on her office door.
    ‘Come in, come in!’ she cries bravely, since she’s already caught a whiff of Lemsip and knows perfectly well who to expect. ‘Hello, Mr White – Robert!’ she smiles. There are little red marks around the edges of his nostrils. He looks pale and stubborn and intolerably self-pitying. ‘Feeling any better? You look much better!’
    Robert feels robbed of many things as he turns the corner into her office: robbed of this room and that desk, robbedof her salary, robbed of her job, and above all, above everything else, robbed of his right to spend the morning in bed. So he says nothing. He wraps his two hands around the hot mug of Lemsip, hunches his shoulders and regretfully shakes his head.
    ‘Sit yourself down!’ says Fanny, jumping up and pulling out a second chair.
    With the two of them and Brute in the room, it’s a struggle to make enough space. Robert stands by, shivering and watching, while Fanny heaves a battered filing cabinet to one side. ‘I’m glad you came, actually,’ she pants, ‘I wanted to talk about the walls. Why are they so bare? Why is there nothing on your classroom walls?’
    He’s not interested in walls. ‘The fact is, Miss Flynn—’
    ‘For heaven’s sake, call me Fanny.’
    The chair prepared, Robert carefully lowers himself on to it. ‘The fact is, Fanny…’
    Fanny has turned her own chair away from her desk so she can face him. It leaves them without any space at all. They both shuffle their bodies backwards, but the chairs, her desk, the filing cabinets are jammed together. There is absolutely no room for manoeuvre.
    ‘Oops,’ says Fanny, laughing, ‘sorry. Bit of a squash! Perhaps we’d be better off standing?’
    ‘Standing? Where?’ asks Robert facetiously. He has her knees trapped between his long bony legs and it’s nice. It’s nice . Besides which he has a cold. He’s not feeling very well. So he stays put. ‘Fanny, as you know, the last thing I want is for you to get an impression that I’m letting you down,’ he says, ‘but I have to tell you I’m feeling pretty dreadful. I’m almost certain I’ve got a temperature. I really ought to be in bed.’
    Without thinking, as if he were one of her pupils, Fanny leans over and puts a hand to his forehead. ‘You don’t feellike you have a temperature,’ she says. ‘Perhaps you’re just hot. Why don’t you take one of your jerseys off?’
    She glances at his face, flashes him a brief, busy smile. And for one ghastly second their eyes lock. Fanny looks away. But it’s too late.
    There it is in the room between them: a tiny spark, the smallest flicker – it’s not attraction (certainly not on