The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year

To my
mother, Grace

‘Be kind, for everybody you meet is
fightin

a
hard battle’

attributed
to Plato, and many others

1

After
they’d gone Eva slid the bolt across the door and disconnected the telephone.
She liked having the house to herself. She went from room to room tidying,
straightening and collecting the cups and plates that her husband and children
had left on various surfaces. Somebody had left a soup spoon on the arm of her
special chair — the one she had upholstered at night school. She immediately
went to the kitchen and examined the contents of her Kleeneze cleaning products
box.

What would remove a Heinz tomato soup stain from
embroidered silk damask?’

As she searched, she remonstrated with herself. ‘It’s
your own fault. You should have kept the chair in your bedroom. It was pure
vanity on your part to have it on display in the sitting room. You wanted
visitors to notice the chair and to tell you how beautiful it was, so that you
could tell them that it had taken two years to complete the embroidery, and
that you had been inspired by Claude Monet’s “Water-Lily Pond and Weeping
Willow”.’

The trees alone had taken a year.

There was a small pool of tomato soup on the kitchen
floor that she hadn’t noticed until she stepped in it and left orange
footprints. The little non-stick saucepan containing half a can of tomato soup
was still simmering on the hob. ‘Too lazy to take a pan off the stove,’ she
thought. Then she remembered that the twins were Leeds University’s problem
now.

She caught her reflection in the smoky glass of the
wall-mounted oven. She looked away quickly. If she had taken a while to look
she would have seen a woman of fifty with a lovely, fine-boned face, pale
inquisitive eyes and a Clara Bow mouth that always looked as though she were
about to speak. Nobody — not even Brian, her husband — had seen her without
lipstick. Eva thought that red lips complemented the black clothes she habitually
wore. Sometimes she allowed herself a little grey.

Once, Brian had come home from work to find Eva in
the garden, in her black wellingtons, having just pulled up a bunch of turnips.
He’d said to her, ‘For Christ’s sake, Eva! You look like post-war Poland.’

Her face was currently fashionable. ‘Vintage’ according
to the girl on the Chanel counter where she bought her lipstick (always
remembering to throw the receipt away — her husband would not understand the
outrageous expense).

She picked up the saucepan, walked from the kitchen
into the sitting room and threw the soup all over her precious chair. She then
went upstairs, into her bedroom and, without removing her clothes or her shoes,
got into bed and stayed there for a year.

She didn’t know it would be a year. She climbed into
bed thinking she would leave it again after half an hour, but the comfort of
the bed was exquisite, the white sheets were fresh and smelled of new snow. She
turned on her side towards the open window and watched the sycamore in the
garden shed its blazing leaves.

She had always loved September.

She
woke when it was getting dark, and she heard her husband shouting outside. Her
mobile rang. The display showed that it was her daughter, Brianne. She ignored
it. She pulled the duvet over her head and sang the words of Johnny Cash’s ‘I
Walk The Line’.

When she next poked her head out from under the
duvet, she heard her next-door neighbour Julie’s excited voice saying, ‘It’s
not right, Brian.’

They were in the front garden.

Her husband said, ‘I mean, I’ve been to Leeds and
back, I need a shower.’

‘Of course you do.’

Eva thought about this exchange. Why would driving
to Leeds and back necessitate having a shower? Was the northern air full of
grit? Or had he been sweating on the M1? Cursing the lorries? Screaming at tailgaters?
Angrily denouncing whatever the weather was doing?

She switched on the bedside lamp.

This provoked another episode of shouting outside,
and demands that she, ‘Stop playing silly buggers and unbolt the door!’

She realised that, although she wanted to go downstairs
and let him in, she couldn’t actually leave the bed. She felt as though she had
fallen into a vat of warm quick-setting concrete, and that she was powerless to
move. She felt an exquisite languor spread throughout her body, and thought, ‘I
would have to be
mad
to leave this bed.’

There was the sound of breaking glass. Soon after,
she heard Brian on the stairs.

He shouted her name.

She didn’t answer.

He opened the bedroom door. ‘There you are,’ he
said.

‘Yes, here I am.’

‘Are you ill?’

‘No.’

Why are you in bed in your clothes and shoes? What
are you playing at?’

‘I don’t know’

‘It’s empty-nest syndrome. I heard it on
Woman’s
Hour.’
When she didn’t speak, he said, Well, are you going to get up?’

‘No, I’m not.’

He asked, ‘What about dinner?’

‘No thanks, I’m not hungry.’

‘I meant what about
my
dinner? Is there
anything?’ She said, ‘I don’t know, look in the fridge.’ He stomped downstairs.
She heard his footsteps on the laminate floor he’d laid so ineptly the year
before. She knew by the squeak of the floorboards that he’d gone into the
sitting room. Soon he was stomping back up the stairs.

‘What the bloody hell has happened to your chair?’
he asked.

‘Somebody left a soup spoon on the arm.

‘There’s soup all over the bloody thing.’

‘I know I did it myself.’

‘What — threw the soup?’

Eva nodded.

‘You’re having a nervous breakdown, Eva. I’m ringing
your mum.’

‘No!’

He flinched at the ferocity in her voice.

She saw from the stricken look in his eyes that
after twenty-five years of marriage his familiar domestic world had come to an
end. He went downstairs. She heard him cursing at the disconnected phone then,
after a moment, stabbing at the keys. As she picked up the bedroom extension
her mother was laboriously giving her phone number down the line, ‘0116 2 444
333, Mrs Ruby Brown-Bird speaking.’

Brian said, ‘Ruby, it’s Brian. I need you to come
over straight away.

‘No can do, Brian. I’m in the middle of having a
perm. What’s up?’

‘It’s Eva —’he lowered his voice ‘—I think she must
be ill.’

‘Send for an ambulance then,’ said Ruby irritably.

‘There’s nothing wrong with her physically.’

‘Well, that’s all right then.’

‘I’ll come and pick you up and bring you back so you
can see for yourself.’

‘Brian, I can’t. I’m hosting a perm party and I’ve
got to have my own personal solution rinsed off in half an hour. If I don’t, I
shall look like Harpo Marx. ‘Ere, talk to Michelle.’

After a few muffled noises a young woman came on the
line.

‘Hello … Brian, is it? I’m Michelle. Can I talk
you through what would happen if Mrs Bird abandoned the perm at this stage? I
am insured, but it would be extremely inconvenient for me if I had to appear in
court. I’m booked up until New Year’s Eve.’

The phone was handed back to Ruby. ‘Brian, are you
still there?’

‘Ruby, she’s in bed wearing her clothes and shoes.’

‘I
did
warn you, Brian. We were in the church
porch about to go in, and I turned round and said to you, “Our Eva’s a dark
horse. She doesn’t say much, and you’ll never know what she’s thinking…”‘ There
was a long pause, then Ruby said, ‘Phone your own mam.’

The phone was disconnected.

Eva was astounded that her mother had made a
last-minute attempt to sabotage her wedding. She picked up her handbag from the
side of the bed and rooted through the contents, looking for something to eat.
She always kept food in her bag. It was a habit from when the twins were young
and hungry, and would open their mouths like the beaks of fledgling birds. Eva
found a squashed packet of crisps, a flattened Bounty bar and half a packet of
Polos.

She heard Brian stabbing at the keys again.

Brian was always slightly apprehensive when he
called his mother. His tongue couldn’t form words properly.

She had a way of making him feel guilty, whatever
the subject of the conversation.

His mother answered promptly with a snappy, ‘Yes?’

Brian said, ‘Is that you, Mummy?’

Eva picked up the extension again, being careful to
muffle the mouthpiece with her hand.

‘Who else would it be? Nobody else phones this
house. I’m on my own seven days a week.’

Brian said, ‘But … er … you … er … don’t
like visitors.’

‘No, I don’t like visitors but it would be nice to
have to turn them away. Anyway, what is it? I’m halfway through
Emmerdale.’

Brian said, ‘Sorry, Mummy. Do you want to ring me
back when the adverts come on?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Let’s get it over with, whatever it
is.’

‘It’s Eva.’

‘Ha! Why am I not surprised? Has she left you? The
first time I clapped eyes on that girl I knew she’d break your heart.’

Brian wondered if his heart had ever been broken. He
had always had difficulty in recognising an emotion. When he had brought his
First Class Bachelor of Science degree home to show his mother, her current
boyfriend had said, ‘You must be very happy, Brian.’

Brian had nodded his head and forced a smile, but
the truth was that he didn’t feel any happier than he had felt the day before,
when nothing remarkable had happened.

His mother had taken the embossed certificate, examined
it carefully and said, ‘You’ll struggle to find an astronomy job. There are men
with more superior qualifications than you’ve got who can’t find work.’

Now Brian said, mournfully, ‘Eva’s gone to bed in
her clothes and shoes.’

His mother said, ‘I can’t say I’m surprised, Brian.
She’s always brought attention to herself. Do you remember when we all went to
the caravan that Easter in 1986? She took a suitcase full of her ridiculous
beatnik clothes. You don’t wear beatnik clothes at Wells-Next-The-Sea.
Everybody was staring at her.’

Eva screamed from upstairs, ‘You shouldn’t have
thrown my lovely black clothes into the sea!’

Brian hadn’t heard his wife scream before.

Yvonne Beaver asked, ‘What’s that screaming?’

Brian lied. ‘It’s the television. Somebody’s just
won a lot of money on
Eggheads.’

His mother said, ‘She looked very presentable in the
holiday wear I bought her.’

As Eva listened, she remembered taking the hideous
clothes out of the carrier bag. They had smelled as if they had been in a damp
warehouse in the Far East for years, and the colours were lurid mauves, pinks
and yellows. There had been a pair of what Eva thought looked like men’s
sandals and a beige, pensioner-style anorak. When she tried them on, she looked
twenty years older.

Brian said to his mother, ‘I don’t know what to do,
Mummy.’

Yvonne said, ‘She’s probably drunk. Leave her to
sleep it off.’

Eva threw the phone across the room and screamed, ‘They
were men’s sandals she bought me in Wells-Next-The-Sea! I saw
men
wearing
them with white socks! You should have protected me from her, Brian! You should
have said, “My wife would not be seen dead in these hideous sandals!”‘