To all of the protests and reassurances Francesca had said, ‘Yes, but the dogs. Trixie would never go off and leave the dogs,’ and people had said vaguely, oh well, you could never tell, and had melted away because no one had really wanted to take on the responsibility.
That had been when Francesca had known she would have to take the responsibility herself, because Trixie had been good to her since the day Fran had got home early and found Marcus in their bed with a blonde. Trixie had been the one who had come into the senior staff-room that day and said that if Fran liked, she could have the spare room for a few weeks. Until things got sorted out, she had said, and Francesca had accepted, because there had not seemed to be anything else to do and she could not think where else to go. Walking out on your husband in just the clothes you had on and with only the money you had in your handbag was a deeply satisfying gesture, but it brought a few practical problems – especially when you tried to sneak back later to pack a suitcase and retrieve your credit cards, and discovered your husband had changed all the locks and that his blonde was already firmly in residence.
Fran had tried not to be a nuisance to Trixie, who thought nearly all emotions a waste of time, and she had taken on a share of the household expenses, along with half the cooking and cleaning. She had tried not to mind the smell of the dogmeat that had to be stewed for four hours at weekends and stank out the house for the rest of the week, and she had tried not to mind Trixie’s habit of noisily getting up at six a.m. every morning so that the dogs could be exercised on the heath. In her gruff way, Trixie had been very kind. Fran had been in pieces all over the floor about Marcus, and Trixie had been the only one to offer any kind of help, especially after everyone heard how Fran had burst into tears in the middle of taking Middle Year Three for English Literature.
‘I dare say,’ the Deputy Head had said, interviewing Francesca in some embarrassment, ‘that it was the Shakespeare lesson, was it?’ Fran had said, yes, that was what it had been, but had not bothered to try explaining how the words of Shakespeare – and come to that, the words of John Donne and Robert Browning and his Elizabeth, and all the rest of that gang – could suddenly come smack-down on a tender spot and send you into floods of stupid tears in Middle Three’s English-lit class. The Deputy Head, who taught maths and chemistry, would not have understood, although some of Middle Three might have understood it only too well, providing you discounted the bored and sophisticated fourteen-going-on-twenty-five-year-olds, condom-carrying as a matter of course and imbued with the your-place-or-mine culture.
So in view of Trixie’s brusque kindness, Francesca could not simply let her vanish and do nothing about it, and after thinking it over, she decided to begin the search with Lucretia von Wolff’s family. Trixie had been in the process of arranging an interview with the surviving daughter – an elderly lady called Deborah Fane. Mrs Fane had died before the interview could take place, although Trixie had driven up to her home all the same, Fran did know that, and she also knew that Deborah Fane’s address was in Trixie’s address book. It had felt like the worst kind of intrusion to go through this, but Fran had done it because she had needed a starting-point. And there the address had been, in Trixie’s firm clear writing.