Bed of Roses by Daisy Waugh Page B

crying, and that he hasn’t pissed off, far from it. And that the telephone is ringing again. He’s slid further across the desk and now he has both hands on her shoulders, massaging, stroking and she’s still bloody well crying.
    ‘ Shhh…Shhhh ,’ it’s barely a whisper, ‘ relax. Relax, Fanny. Why so tense? Hmm?…Why so tense? ’
    Out of desperation, to get him away – to bring a third party into the room – she picks up the telephone. ‘ Louis? ’ she says. ‘Is that you?’
    Panting .
    ‘Oh…Fuck off!’ She bends her head to the desk, with the telephone still rammed to her ear.
    Robert eases the receiver from her hand and gently returns it to its cradle, and as he does so his soft pink lips burrow beneath her hair, and he kisses her neck. ‘Louis isn’t here now,’ he murmurs, ‘I’m here… I’m here. ’
    And though she tells him to fuck off, more than once, itsounds muffled, with her face on the desk. It’s possible Robert doesn’t hear.
    And from nowhere, for the moment, can she seem to find the strength to push him off…

13
    Louis grew up in Baton Rouge, the son of an Anglican vicar and a classics professor at Louisiana State University. His parents sent him to England for his degree, because it was something they had both always wanted to do themselves, and because he asked, and they could just about afford it. He and Fanny were both enrolled on the same course and have been friends since the first week of their first term together. Louis is happy in England (he tends to be happy wherever he finds himself), and except for the occasional holiday, he hasn’t quite got around to going home since.
    He spent a couple of years after university driving removal vans. Then he went to art school. He worked briefly as a children’s illustrator. He trained as a TEFL teacher and for a year or two made a fortune giving private English lessons to Japanese bankers. He worked as a park attendant. He took a course in cabinet-making.
    For the past year Louis has been working as a freelance news photographer which, with the occasional boost from painting and decorating jobs, more or less pays his way. He enjoys the work: it allows him to travel, and to chat to people (which he loves) and he’s actually a pretty goodphotographer, too. But Louis isn’t somebody who lays much weight on his ‘career’, nor has he ever been. In fact he’s always found other people’s career obsessions very comical.
    And yet, to his own dismay, he finds himself more than a little undermined by Fanny’s recent stride towards adulthood and respectability. He feels as though he’s dragging behind. After all, he has two degrees, one in English, another from the Camberwell School of Art, and almost nothing to show for either of them: a rented flat in horrible Hackney, a part-time job, a motorbike with two helmets, an overdrawn bank account and a credit card that’s just hit its limit.
    When, the day after the limbo cotillion, Louis had ambled into the Fiddleford village post office to ask, on a whim, about local housing, Mrs Hooper had recognised him at once. Mrs Hooper (who was feeling a little lousy that Saturday morning) told Louis she was aware of only three places which were available in the area: one, a cottage on the road to Lamsbury, close to the famous hat maker’s, large and newly refurbished, and likely to be expensive. The other two, she said with a smirk, Louis would probably already be familiar with. Numbers 1 and 3 Old Alms Cottages, she explained, on either side of Miss Fanny Flynn, had been empty for years and would certainly be going cheap. They, like number 2, belonged to Mr and Mrs Guppy.
    ‘Ah…’ Louis smiled with his usual deprecating charm. ‘After last night I guess that might prove something of a problem.’ To which Mrs Hooper had thrown back her aching head and cackled.
    ‘Believe you me,’ she said, ‘nothing’s a problem for Ian Guppy, except missing out on the chance to make money.