1

      So. That’s where the story begins. With Fanny Flynn and her ghosts, and Brute the dog, and an ancient Morris Minor half-filled with all their belongings, pulling up outside number 2 Old Alms Cottages, in the village of Fiddleford, near the market town of Lamsbury, deep in the heart of England’s south-west.

      Fanny’s new home is in the centre of the village, beside the post office/shop and opposite Fiddleford’s fourteenth-century church. It is a few minutes’ walk from the pub and the primary school where she will be teaching, and within shouting distance of the excellent Gatehouse Restaurant. From the Alms Cottage front door, if she cranes her neck, Fanny can see not only the restaurant but, right beside it, the notorious, grand old iron gates of the Fiddleford Manor Retreat, behind which so many disgraced public figures have withdrawn to lick wounds and rebuild images.

      It is April, bright and warm; the first morning in many for the sun to shine and the year’s first believable indication that winter is moving on. Fanny and Brute scramble down from the van. They stretch, dog and mistress, as engagingly compact, vital and untidy as each other. Fanny breathes in the spring-like air, glances across at the press people lolling beneath the famous gates, and waves. They gaze morosely back, having long ago made it a sort of Cool Club rule to be disdainful with the villagers.

      ‘Bit rude, eh Brute?’ she says vaguely. ‘Go and bite.’

      Brute, moronic but good-natured, sits on Fanny’s feet in gay confusion, and dribbles.

      Number 2 Old Alms Cottages is a minuscule affair. It’s in the middle of a row of three two-hundred-year-old red stone terraced cottages, all of them empty. It has a single room and a bathroom upstairs, a single room with a kitchen downstairs and ceilings so low that the landlord has waited two years to find a tenant small enough to fit in. Fanny, at five foot three inches, fits the house as well as any modern human could hope to.

      She stands in front of it now, jingling her new keys, pausing for a brief, thoughtful moment before launching on to this next new chapter of her many-chaptered life. She notices the faint, sour smell of old urine (old paparazzi hacks’ urine, as it happens; with the pub being a few minutes’ walk away, and the cottages empty, they often pee against her garden fence). She notices the paint-chipped, dirty-brown front door; the missing roof tiles; the sprawling ivy all but obscuring the single window upstairs – and feels a familiar rush of excitement.

      New house. New job. New challenges. Another beginning. There is nothing quite like a new beginning, Fanny thinks – and she should know. This time, she tells herself (she mutters to Brute, still sitting on her feet), this time she is going to stick around to make it work. She is going to make roots. This small house and this fine spring day are to mark the beginning of Fanny Flynn’s new life. Her real life.

      She laughs out loud. As if. And immediately resents herself for it. ‘Not bloody funny,’ she says aloud, shunting Brute off her feet as if it were all his fault. ‘Thirty-four years old next month. Thirty-four. Thirty-bloody-four. At this rate I’m going to wind up old and alone, and I’ll be dead and rotting for a fortnight before anyone even notices the stink. Got to stop farting around.’

      Truth is, Fanny is growing jaded. After eleven years of wandering from place to place, picking up jobs and boyfriends on passionate whims and then passionately dropping them again, she is in danger of running out of mojo, or worse still, of becoming a caricature of her ebullient, spontaneous younger self. She longs to find a job or a man – or an unquenchable passion for woodcarving (but preferably a man). She longs to find something which might give her a little meaning, or at the very least might persuade her to stay still.

      Last November she was once again focusing her search for meaning on the very large Jobs section of the Times Educational Supplement, when her eye fell upon the advertisement for Fiddleford Church of England Primary School. It had, she thought, an engagingly desperate ring to it:

      TO START AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

      Successful applicants should ideally have some previous experience as a Head or Deputy (although this is not essential)…

      Perfect, she thought. Why not? A tiny village school, a challenge, a small and friendly community, a place where old-fashioned rural values might mean something, to someone – or something. Anything. Besides which Fanny had lived in many places before, but