The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (16 page)

Eva said, ‘They were very beautiful rockets, Brian.’
She felt genuinely sorry for him.

She had watched his face each time he launched a
rocket. He was as excited as a child, and had followed each projectile’s
trajectory and height with the look of a proud father watching his baby walk
for the first time.

Now,
Eva looked around her white room and thought, ‘But that was then and this is
now. I have absolutely nothing to do but to watch light move across the sky.’

25

Eva
had been in bed for seven weeks and had lost a stone in weight. Her skin was
flaky and it seemed to her that she was losing too much hair.

Sometimes Brian would bring her tea and toast. He
would hand it to her with a self-pitying sigh. On many occasions the tea was
cold and the toast was underdone, but she would always thank him effusively.

She needed him.

On the mornings he forgot about her, or was too
rushed to think about breakfast, she went hungry. By now it was against Eva’s
own rules to keep food in the room. And the only drink she allowed herself was
water.

One
day, Ruby made an attempt to persuade Eva to drink a glass of sparking
Lucozade, saying, ‘This’ll get you up and about. When I had pneumonia and were
hovering between life and death — I were just at the mouth of the tunnel, I
could see the light at the end —your dad came to visit me with a bottle of
Lucozade. I took a sip and, well, I were like Frankenstein’s monster after
lightning struck him. I got up from my bed and walked!’

Eva said, ‘So, it was nothing to do with the
antibiotics they were pumping into you?’

‘No!’ Ruby snorted. ‘My consultant, Mr Briars, admitted
that he was at his wits’ end. He’d tried everything, even prayer, to keep me
from going down that tunnel.’

Eva said, ‘So, Mr Briars — who had trained for ten
years, and given lectures and written numerous papers on pneumonia — had failed
you? Whereas a few sips of a sparkling glucose drink brought you back to life?’

Ruby’s eyes were shining. ‘Yes! It were the Lucozade
what done it!’

In
the early days of Eva’s self-incarceration her mother-in-law, Yvonne, had
cooked every other day. She was a plain, good meat and two veg cook who
believed that a liberal application of Oxo gravy made every meal a gourmet
feast. She was never suspicious of Eva’s clean plates, believing that Eva had,
at last, given up her taste for silly foreign food and had happily reverted to
the traditional English cooking that Yvonne excelled at.

Yvonne must never know that her food (cooked with
bad grace and many martyred sighs, crashes of pottery and slammed-down
saucepans) was given to a family of foxes who had taken up residence behind an
overgrown laurel in Eva’s front garden. These outrageously confident
creatures, bored of feeding on leftover risotto, taramasalata and suchlike
from the authentically middle-class residents who were the majority in Eva’s
road, fought over Yvonne’s chops and mince. It seemed that they too preferred
traditional English food.

At about 7 p.m. on every Yvonne evening, Eva would
go to the end of the bed and scrape her plate out of the open window She loved
to see the foxes eating and licking their muzzles clean. Sometimes she even
imagined that the vixen looked up at the house and saluted her in a gesture of
female solidarity. But this was only Eva’s imagination.

Once, Yvonne had been mystified when she found a
piece of liver and bacon on the porch, and one of her home-made faggots on the
pavement outside Eva’s house.

One
day, in mid-November, Alexander called in to see Eva on his way to a job.

He said, ‘Do you know you’re on your way to looking
like a skeleton?’

‘I’m not on a diet,’ Eva said.

‘You need some good food inside you, food that you
like. Write a list and I’ll sort it out with your husband.’

Eva enjoyed thinking about the food she truly liked.
She had endless time in which to think, but eventually she came up with a
surprisingly small and modest selection.

‘She’d
soon get out of that bed if her arse was on fire,’ said Ruby to Brian. ‘You’re
too soft with her.’

‘She frightens me,’ admitted Brian. ‘I used to look
up from a book or from cutting a chop and she’d be
looking
at me.

They were walking around Morrisons with a trolley,
selecting the ingredients for Brian’s evening meals. Brian had Eva’s list in
his pocket.

‘She’s always had that look,’ said Ruby, pausing at
the stir-fry section. ‘I’ve often fancied doing a stir-fry, but I haven’t got a
wonk.’

Brian couldn’t be bothered to correct his
mother-in-law. He wanted to concentrate on Eva and the reason why she wouldn’t
leave what used to be called ‘their’ bed.

He wasn’t a bad husband, he thought. He’d never hit
her, not hard. There had been a bit of pushing and shoving, and once — after
he’d found a Valentine’s Day card she’d received and hidden behind the boiler
that said:

‘Eva, leave him, come to me’ — he had dangled her
upside down from the landing. It had been a joke, of course. True, he’d had trouble
pulling her back over the balustrade, and at one point it had looked like he
might drop her on to the tiles below. But there had been absolutely no need for
Eva to scream as loudly as she did. It was pure exhibitionism.

She had very little sense of humour, he thought
—though he had often heard her laughing with other people in the next room.

He and Titania were always laughing. They shared a
love of Benny Hill and The Goons. Titania could do a side-splitting impression
of Benny singing ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)’. She hadn’t minded
being thrown in the reservoir at Rutland Water either. She’d laughed it off.

Now Ruby was asking him how much wonks cost.

He guessed and told her, ‘About forty pounds.’

She shuddered and said, ‘No, I might not get the use
out of it, I’m living on borrowed time as it is.’

Brian took out Eva’s shopping list. He showed it to
Ruby and they both laughed. Eva had written:

2
croissants

basil
plant

large
bag mixed nuts

hand
of bananas

box
of grapes (seedless if poss)

6
eggs
laid by free roamers

2
tubes of Smarties for Alex’s kids

Red
Leicester cheese

1 bag
mozzarella

2
firm beef tomatoes

small
sea salt

1
black and red pepper pot

4
large bottles of San Pellegrino (H2O)

2
cartons grapefruit juice

serrated-edge
knife

bottle
extra virgin olive oil

bottle
balsamic vinegar

1
large bottle vodka (not Smirnoff)

2
large bottles diet tonic (only Schweppes)

Vogue

Private
Eye

The
Spectator

Dunhill
Menthol cigarettes.

After crying with laughter, Ruby needed to mop her
tears. Neither of them had a handkerchief but, as they were walking down the
toilet roll aisle, Ruby opened a packet of Andrex and took out a roll. She
failed to find the end of the tissue, so Brian took it from her and located the
end, which was infuriatingly stuck to the other sheets underneath. After a few
moments’ struggle, he bellowed his frustration, then tore a wad of paper out of
the roll and stuffed the rest back on to the shelf.

Ruby laughed for a long time when they found the San
Pellegrino, and even longer when she saw the extra virgin olive oil. ‘I used to
pour olive oil in Eva’s lugholes when she had the earache,’ she said. ‘And now
she’s pouring it on her salad.’ She was scandalised in the news and magazine
section, when she saw the price of
Vogue.
‘Four pounds ten? I can buy
two bags of oven chips for that! She’s havin’ a laugh, Brian. If I were you, I’d
starve her out of bed.’ The croissants provoked another outburst. ‘They’re
nothing but a few flakes of pastry and air!’

‘She’s always been a snob about food,’ Brian said.

‘It’s since she went to Paris with the school,’ said
Ruby. ‘She came back full of hers elf. It was all
merci
and
bonjour
and,
“Oh the
bread,
Mum!” And she had that little woman with the voice that
grates on you playing night and day.’

‘Edith Piaf,’ said Brian. ‘A frog I’m very familiar
with indeed.’

‘She went back after she left school,’ said Ruby. ‘She
worked in a chip shop doing double shifts for her ticket to Paris.’

Brian was amazed. ‘She didn’t tell me this. How long
was she there?’

‘It were exactly a year. She came back with a Louis
Vuitton case full of the most beautiful clothes and shoes.

Handmade! And the perfume! Big bottles. She’d never
talk about it. I think some rich French ponce broke her heart.’

They were blocking the aisle. A young woman with a
toddler sitting in the trolley crashed into them. The toddler shouted, ‘Again!’

What did she do in France?’ asked Brian. ‘And why
didn’t she tell me about this Paris jaunt?’

Ruby said, ‘She was a secretive girl, and she’s
turned into a secretive woman. Now, where’s this bleedin’ sea salt when it’s at
home?’

Eva
gave Brian instruction on how to assemble a tomato and mozzarella salad.

She said, ‘Please don’t add or subtract any of the
ingredients, and I beg you to keep to the quantities.’

She told him which plate to use and which napkin.
This precision made Brian even more cack-handed than usual.

Had he overdone the extra virgin oil? Did she say to
tear the basil, or cut? Should he add lemon and ice to her vodka and tonic? She
hadn’t said, so he left them out.

She could smell the basil and tomatoes before he
pushed the bedroom door open with his foot.

He placed the tray on her lap and stood by the bed,
waiting for her approval.

She saw at once that the tomatoes had been cut
thickly with a blunt knife, that the stalks were still on the basil and that it
obviously hadn’t been washed. Despite her strict instruction not to add
anything else, Brian had improvised a pattern around the edge of the plate with
dried oregano.

She managed to contain herself, and when he asked, ‘All
right?’ she answered, ‘My mouth is watering.’

She was truly grateful to him. She knew how
difficult it was to run a household and keep down a full-time job.

And she suspected he was missing Titania.

26

It
was six thirty in the morning. Hoar frost had decorated the trees and shrubs
overnight, giving an ethereal glow to the Space Centre car park as Mrs Hordern
approached. It was obvious to her by the positions of the randomly parked cars
that something big had happened. Normally, each member of staff parked
strictly in their designated places. In the past, there had been fist fights
over trivial infringements of the Conditions of Use (which were displayed
behind glass in a slender cabinet on top of a wooden stake in a far corner of
the car park).

Mrs Hordern met Wayne Tonkin coming out of the
Research Block as she was going in.

What’s up?’ she asked, nodding towards the car park.

Wayne said, ‘I hope you’ve not booked yer ‘olidays,
Mrs Hordern, cos we’re all being burned to a crisp next week.’

What time?’

‘High noon,’ he said, making an effort to pronounce
the aitch.

‘So, I needn’t bother buying a Christmas tree then?’
She gave a little laugh, expecting Wayne to join in.

‘No,’ said Wayne.

When Mrs Hordern went inside, she saw that the staff
had come straight from their beds.

Leather Trousers was in a pair of pale-blue silk
pyjamas. For once, he did not give her his Hollywood smile.

What’s goin’ on?’ she asked.

‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ he replied. ‘The earth is
still turning.’

Mrs Hordern went into the staff cloakroom to hang
her coat and change out of her boots into the Crocs she wore at work. She heard
sobbing coming from a lavatory cubicle. She knew it was Titania because Dr
Clever Clogs often went to the cloakroom to cry. Mrs Hordern knocked on the
lavatory door and asked Titania if she could help in any way.

She was rebuffed when the door opened and Titania
shouted, ‘I think not! Do you understand the Standard Model of particle physics
and its place in the space—time continuum, Mrs Hordern?’