The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (6 page)

Nicola said, ‘I realise that this must be a dreadful
shock.’

Eva put the phone back into its cradle. She swung
her legs out of bed and waited until she felt able to walk safely to the en
suite, where she stayed upright by hanging on to the side of the washbasin.
Then she started to transform her face, taking cosmetics from the grubby
interior of her Mac make-up bag. She needed something to do with her hands.
When she was finished, she went back to bed and waited.

When the phone rang again, Nicola said, ‘I’m dreadfully
sorry for the way I blurted it out like that. It’s because I hate
unpleasantness, so I have to get myself psyched up and it comes out rather brutally.
I’m phoning you now because he’s led my sister on by promising her a happy
family life and he’s blaming you for the fact that he’s not leaving.’

Eva said, ‘Me?’

‘Yes, apparently now you’ve taken to your bed, he
feels obliged to stay and care for you. My sister is distraught.’

Eva said, ‘What’s your sister’s name?’

‘Titania. I’m awfully cross with her. It’s been one
excuse after another. First it was he couldn’t leave because of the twins’
GCSEs, then it was A levels, then it was helping them to find a university.
Titania thought that the day they left for Leeds was the day she and Brian
would finally set up their own love nest, but once again the bastard let her
down.’

Eva said, Are you sure that it’s
my
husband,
Dr Brian Beaver, she’s carrying on with? Only, he’s not the type.’

‘He’s a man, isn’t he?’ said Nicola.

‘Have you met him?’

‘Oh yes,’ replied Nicola, ‘I’ve met him many times.
He’s not exactly girl bait … but my sister has always liked a clever chap and
she’s a sucker for facial hair.’

Eva’s pulses were racing. She felt quite
exhilarated. She realised she had been waiting for something like this to
happen. She asked, ‘Do they work together? How often does he see her? Are they
in love? Is he planning to leave us and live with her?’

Nicola said, ‘He’s been planning to leave you since
they met. He sees her at least five times a week and the occasional weekend.
She works with him at the National Space Centre. She calls herself a physicist,
although she only completed her doctorate last year.’

Eva said, ‘Jesus Christ! How old is she?’

Nicola
replied, ‘She’s no Lolita.
She’s thirty-seven.’

‘He’s fifty-five,’ said Eva. ‘He’s got varicose
veins. And two children! And he loves
me.’

Nicola said, ‘Actually, he doesn’t love you. And he
told my sister that he knows you don’t love him. Do you?’

Eva said, ‘I did once,’ and crashed the phone down
into its nasty plastic holder.

Eva
and Brian had met at the university library in Leicester, where Eva was a
library assistant. Because she loved books, she forgot that a large part of her
job would be sending stern letters to students and academics whose books were
overdue or defaced — she had once found a large rubber condom being used as a
bookmark in an early edition of
On the Origin of Species.

Brian had received one of her letters and come in to
complain. ‘My name is Dr Brian Beaver,’ he said, ‘and you wrote to me recently
in very officious terms, claiming that I had not returned Dr Brady’s
simplistic
book
The Universe Explained.’

Eva nodded.

He certainly sounded angry, but his face and neck
were almost entirely hidden by a full black beard, a mass of wild hair, heavy
horn-rimmed spectacles and a black polo-neck sweater.

He looked intellectual and French. She could imagine
Brian lobbing cobbles at the despised gendarmerie as he and his fellow
revolutionaries fought to overthrow social order.

‘I won’t be returning Brady’s book,’ he continued, ‘because
it was so full of theoretical errors and textual buffoonery that I threw it
into the River Soar. I cannot take the risk of it falling into the hands of my
students.’

He looked at Eva intently as he waited for her reaction.
He told her later, on their second date, that he thought she was OK in the
looks department. A bit heavy around the haunches, perhaps, but he would soon
get the weight off her.

‘Do you have a degree?’ he had asked.

‘No,’ she said. Then added, ‘Sorry.’

‘Do you smoke?’

‘Yes.’

‘How many a day?’

‘Fifteen,’ she lied.

‘You’ll have to stop that,’ he said. ‘My father
burned to death because of a cigarette.’

‘One single cigarette?’ she asked.

‘Our house was unheated apart from the paraffin
heater, which Dad would light when the temperature dropped below freezing. He’d
been filling it with paraffin and had slopped some on to his trousers and
shoes. Then he lit a cigarette, dropped the match and …’ Brian’s voice
constricted. Alarmingly, tears brimmed in his eyes.

Eva said, ‘You don’t have to —’

‘The house smelled of Sunday roast for years,’ said
Brian. ‘It was most disconcerting. I buried myself in books …’

Eva said, ‘My dad died at work. Nobody noticed until
the chicken pies started coming down the conveyor without the mushrooms.’

Brian asked, ‘Was he a mushroom operative at Pukka
Pies? I did a few shifts there myself when I was a student. I put the onions
into the beef and onion.’

‘Yes,’ said Eva. ‘He was clever but left school at
fourteen. He had a library card,’ she said in her dead father’s defence.

Brian said, ‘We were lucky. We baby boomers
benefited from the welfare state. Free milk, orange juice, penicillin, free
health care, free education.’

‘Free university,’ said Eva. She continued in a bad
Brooklyn accent, ‘I coulda’ been a contender.’

Brian was puzzled. He hadn’t seen many films.

Eva
delayed marrying Brian for the three years of their interminable courtship
because she kept hoping that he would light her sexual spark and make her
desire him, but the kindling was damp and the matches spent. And anyway, she
couldn’t face abandoning her maiden name, Eva Brown-Bird, for Eva Beaver. She
had admired him and enjoyed the status afforded to her at university functions,
but the moment she saw him standing at the altar, with his hair shorn and his
beard gone, he was a stranger to her.

As she reached his side, somebody — a female voice
—said in a loud whisper, ‘She’ll not be an eager beaver tonight.’

A ripple of barely suppressed laughter ran around
the cold church.

Eva shivered in her white lace wedding dress, transfixed
by the awfulness of Brian’s hair. Wanting to save money, he had cut it himself
using a shearing device attached to a back-of-the-head mirror, sent for from a
catalogue.

The Beaver family had occupied the right-hand pews.
They were not an attractive brood. It would be a grave exaggeration to say that
they were beaver-like, but there was something about their front teeth and
their sleek brown hair … it would not be difficult to imagine them slinking
through water and gnawing at the base of a young pine tree.

In the left-hand pews were the Brown-Birds. There
was a lot of cleavage on view, both male and female. They were sequinned,
feathered, frilled and bejewelled. They were animated, they laughed and
fidgeted. Some picked up the Bible from the shelf in front of them. It was a
book they were unfamiliar with. The smokers rummaged through pockets and
handbags for chewing gum.

As Brian signed the register Eva saw his hair from
another angle, then she noticed his extraordinary neck, which was surely the
thinnest neck ever seen outside the Padaung tribe of Thailand. As they walked
down the aisle as man and wife she noticed his tiny feet and, when he opened
his jacket, saw his silk waistcoat decorated with rockets, sputniks and
planets. She liked horses, but she didn’t want images of them galloping across
her wedding dress, did she?

Before they reached the church porch where the photographer
had his tripod, Eva had fallen completely out of any kind of love she had ever
felt for Brian.

They had been husband and wife for eleven minutes.

After Brian’s speech at the sit-down wedding
breakfast, when he did not compliment his wife or the bridesmaids, but instead
urged the baffled wedding guests to give their full support to Britain’s
emerging space programme, Eva did not even like him.

Nobody is surprised by a bride’s tears — some women cry
with happiness, some with relief — but when the bride sobs for over an hour,
her new husband is bound to be a little irritated. And if he enquires of his
wife the reason for her tears and receives the answer, ‘You. Sorry’, What does
a man do then?

9

After
Brian came back from work that evening, he appeared in Eva’s bedroom doorway
with a side plate on which stood a mug of milky tea and two digestive biscuits.
He sighed as he placed the plate on the bedside table. The tea slopped over on
to the biscuits, but he didn’t appear to notice that they were quickly turning
to mush.

Eva looked at him with new eyes, trying to imagine
him making love to the stranger called Titania. Would he use the same technique
he employed once a week with Eva — a bit of back stroking, nipple twirling —
would he mistake Titania’s inner labia for her clitoris, as he did Eva’s? Would
he shout ‘Come to Big Daddy!’ seconds before he ejaculated, as he always did
with her?

Eva thought, ‘Thank you, Titania. I’m truly
grateful. I’ll never have to go through that weekly ordeal again.

Why are you walking backwards, Brian?’ she laughed. ‘You
look as if you’ve just laid a wreath at the Cenotaph.’

The answer to Eva’s question was that Brian no
longer felt safe to turn his back on her. She was no longer the compliant woman
he had married, and he feared her mockery — her two fingers gesturing behind
his back. He couldn’t allow that, especially not after his recent humiliation
at work when Mrs Hordern, the cleaner, had discovered Titania and himself engaged
in a sex act involving a model of the Large Hadron Collider.

Brian said, ‘I’m glad you find it amusing. Haven’t
you noticed that my health is suffering? And, unbearably, my paper on Olympus
Mons has been discredited by Professor Lichtenstein. I’m on the edge, Eva.’

‘You look all right to me. Energetic,
virile
…
positively brimming with testosterone.’

Brian looked at his wife. ‘Virile? I’m exhausted.
Why does housework take up so much time?’

Eva said, ‘It’s not the housework that’s exhausting you.’

They stared at each other.

Eventually, Brian dropped his gaze and said, ‘I’ve
hardly been in the sheds.’ He carried on aggressively, ‘But I’m going now. The
ironing can wait.’ He stamped down the stairs and went out of the back door.

The house had an unusually large garden. The original
owner, a Mr Tobias Harold Eddison, had taken advantage of his immediate
neighbours’ post-World War One financial difficulties and, over time, had
induced them to sell small parcels of land — until he had enough to plant a small
orchard, build a large ornamental fish pond and, unusual for the times, a
children’s tree house.

Brian’s sheds were at the very bottom of the garden,
shielded by a row of holly trees which bore a heavy crop of red berries in the
winter months.

Over the years Brian had built a model of the solar
system in his original shed, using reinforced drinking straws, ping-pong balls
and further assorted spherical objects, such as the fruit he had bought from
Leicester market and which had been given many coats of varnish until they were
rock hard. Jupiter had been a problem — but then, Jupiter’s huge dimensions
were always a problem. He had tried using a modified Space Hopper, cutting off
the horns, applying increasingly stronger patches, but Jupiter continued losing
atmospheric pressure — or, as the ordinary bloke in the street called it, air.

Brian’s three-dimensional interpretation had been
slowly superseded by a network of computers and projection screens that
attempted to model the visible universe, but he often looked back fondly to
those nights when he had painted his planets to the accompaniment of Radio 4.

At the Space Centre he was one of the masters of the
banks of mainframe computers and the encrypted information they held. But the
sheds were where his heart was. As the known universe expanded, so did Brian’s
mother shed, which was now connected to three slightly smaller sheds. Brian had
built doorways and corridors and laid an electricity cable from the house. And
four years ago, after complaints from Titania that she had hurt her back after
making love on a computer desk, Brian had bought two massive floor cushions —
pink for her, blue for him. These had also been superseded by a standard double
bed, smuggled into the shed complex when Eva was at work.

The original shed had a retractable roof, which
allowed his home-built telescope to scan the night skies. There had been
complaints from the neighbours — the ratcheting noise that the roof made when
it was opening or closing ‘could be annoying’, Brian had conceded, as could the
grinding of the gears as the instrument slewed across the sky. But didn’t ‘those
intellectual pygmies’ understand? They were rubbing shoulders with Brian
Beaver, a true space explorer. There was nothing on the earth left to find — not
when remote South American primitives were smoking Marlboro Lights.