The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (36 page)

Titania said, ‘I feel we ought to gird our loins.’

They waited — in silence, apart from Brian’s sobs —
for Ruby and Alexander to make their way upstairs. They heard Ruby asking him,
Why has God punished me, by taking Yvonne away?’

He answered, ‘Isn’t he meant to move in mysterious
ways, your God?’

As Ruby came into the room and saw Brian, she said, ‘I
thought God would take me first. I’ve got a mystery lump. I could be dead in a
week. A gypsy told me in the year 2000 that I wouldn’t make eighty. Ever since
that day, I’ve been living on borrowed time.’

As Brian vacated the chair for her he said,
furiously, ‘Could we concentrate on my mother d’you think? After all, she is,
actually,
dead.’

Ruby said, ‘It’s made me poorly, Yvonne dying like
that with no warning. My lump is throbbing. Yvonne was going to take me to the
doctor’s. Being as my daughter won’t get out of bed.’ Ruby touched her breast
and grimaced, waiting for someone to question her.

Alexander said, ‘Be nice, Ruby,’ as though he were
talking to a recalcitrant toddler.

Eva said, dutifully, ‘Your lump is probably a cyst,
Mum. Why didn’t you tell me to my face?’

‘I hoped it would go away. I told Yvonne, she knew
everything about me.’ She turned to Brian. ‘And she told me everything about
you.’ This was an implicit threat.

Brian said, ‘I blame you for my mother’s death. If
you hadn’t bought those ludicrous kangaroo slippers, she’d be alive today.’

Ruby shouted, ‘So, you’re blaming me for Yvonne’s
passing?’

Titania said, ‘I know I’m not strictly family, but —’

Alexander interrupted her. ‘Titania, I think we should
keep out of this.’

A gang of teenage girls in school uniform had joined
the crowd and were encouraging them to chant, ‘Eva! Eva! Eva!’ Somebody was
keeping their finger on the doorbell. Eva clapped her hands over her ears.

Ruby said, ‘And don’t expect me to answer that door.
That was Yvonne’s job. I wondered where she’d been for the last three days. She
liked people. Me, I can take them or leave them, but mostly leave them. Yvonne
was a big help to me. I can’t deal with those people over the road on my own.
There’s more every day.’

Titania said, hurriedly, ‘I have my work. And a life
to run.

Brian stood at the end of Eva’s bed and snarled, ‘And
now, as usual, we’re talking about Eva. I should have listened to my dear
dead
mother. She advised me to move out of this house, and reminded me that my
marriage is over. So, my contribution to Eva’s care ends here. As a bereaved
son, and now an orphan, please allow me to mourn for my mother.’

Ruby ploughed on, regardless, ‘And there’s the
funeral to think about. And it’s February. I could catch pneumonia. What will
happen to Eva, if I’m in hospital, on oxygen?’

Alexander said, ‘I’ll look after Eva. I’ll open the
door. I’ll decide who comes in. I’ll cook, I’ll wash her linen.’

‘The flowers, Alexander, they are perfect,’ said
Eva. ‘Thank you. But you can’t look after me, you have your own work.’

‘I’ve just been paid for a commission. I’ll be OK
for a few weeks.’

What about your kiddies?’ asked Ruby. ‘You can’t
drag them out of their beds at night.’

Alexander looked into Eva’s face. ‘No, we would have
to live here.’

Brian turned to Alexander. ‘My mother is dead, and
you take the opportunity to move yourself and your family into my house. Do you
think you’re going to live here rent free, using my electricity, my hot water,
my fibre-optic broadband? Well, sorry, chummy, but there’s no room at the inn.’

Titania said, ‘Bri, it’s awful, ghastly, dreadful
beyond words, that Yvonne is dead, but it could be advantageous to all of us if
Alexander was on hand.’

Ruby said, ‘In Blackpool, that gypsy, she said there’d
be a tall dark man.’

Brian finally lost his temper. What in God’s holy
name are you blathering about? My mother is dead! Will you just shut your
bloody trap, woman! As to your earlier lamentation, I too wonder why my
loving, unselfish mother was taken and you — with your fatuous observations
and antediluvian brain — were left behind!’

Ruby cried, ‘I didn’t murder your main!’ and threw
her hands up to cover her face.

Eva shouted, ‘Don’t call my mother stupid! She can’t
help how she is!’ She felt so enraged that she began to shuffle on her knees
towards Brian, who was sitting at the end of the bed.

There was a loud cheer and some screaming when the crowd
saw her pass the window for the first time in several days.

Eva felt a rage build up and then burst out of her
body, transforming itself into words of anger and recrimination. ‘You lied to
me every day for eight years! You told me that you finished work at six thirty
every evening because of your passion for your moon project. But your real
passion was for Titania Noble-Forester! I always wondered why you were so
exhausted and ravenous, and able to eat a three-course meal.’

Titania yelled at Brian, ‘So, that’s the reason you
would never take me for dinner, is it? You couldn’t wait to get home to wifey’s
prawn cocktail, pork chop and plum duff!’

Brian said, quietly, ‘I have never stopped loving my
wife. I thought it was possible to love two women. Well, three women, including
my poor mother.’

‘You’ve never said that you loved me before,’ said
Titania, her rage dispersed. She spoke into Brian’s ear. ‘Oh wow! That is such
an aphrodisiac. Why don’t we have some “us” time, Squirrel? C’mon, we’ll go to
the shed.’

The doorbell rang as though a mad person were desperate
to gain entry to the house.

After a few moments, when nobody moved, Alexander
looked at Brian and asked, ‘Shall I go?’

Brian snapped, ‘Please your bloody self.’

Alexander asked, ‘Eva, shall I?’

She nodded. He was a good man to have around when
there was a maniac at the door.

He gave her an ironic salute and went to answer it.

Titania passed the package of letters she was
holding to Eva. ‘Half of it’s junk, the rest are all for you.’ She led Brian by
the hand, as if he were a small child.

Eva said, ‘Squirrel?’

She looked at the package of letters with dismay.
They were mostly addressed to ‘The Woman in Bed, Leicester’. A few from the
United States said, ‘To the Angel in Bed, England’. One from Malaysia said,
simply, ‘Eva UK’. After the first three, Eva pushed the bundle away.

Each letter contained pain and false expectation.

She could not help people, and the weight of their
suffering was too much for her to bear.

She often distracted herself by compiling lists
inside her head, and now she stared at the white wall until her eyes were out
of focus, and waited for a topic to emerge. Today it was pain.

Worst
pain

1. Giving birth to twins

2. Falling from high branch on to concrete

3. Fingers slammed in car door

4. Ulcerated milk ducts

5. Falling into bonfire

6. Bitten by pig at Farm Park

7. Tooth abscess on Bank Holiday

8. Trapped by wheel — Brian reversing car

9. Drawing pin in knee

10. Sea urchins in feet, Majorca

53

There
was pain of a different sort the next day, when Brian Junior emailed Eva via
Alexander’s phone. Alexander printed it out using a complicated chain of Wi-Fi
devices, and brought it up to her with a cup of real coffee.

Mother, I do not find it agreeable to speak on the phone, and shall not
do so again. In future, I may occasionally communicate with you by use of
electronic means or even risk the vagaries of the postal system.

‘Pretentious little shit,’ said Eva. ‘Who does he
think he is — Anthony Trollope?’

She continued to read her son’s message.

I hear from my father that my paternal grandmother is dead. It would be
hypocritical of me to affect sadness, since I feel indifferent to her fate. She
was a foolish old woman, as was proved by the farcical manner of her dying.
However, I shall attend her funeral on Thursday. (I cannot speak for Brianne,
she has a tutorial on that day with visiting God-tier professor Shing-Tung Yau.
It is rare for a first-year undergraduate to be so honoured. Although I fear he
will be less than ecstatic when he hears what she has to say about Calabi-Yau
manifolds.)

Eva broke off. ‘I pity the poor man. Do you know,
Alexander, I don’t understand my children at all. I never have.’

Alexander assured her, ‘Eva, none of us know our
children. Because they are not us.’

She turned back to the email with less enthusiasm.

Since we won’t be meeting at the graveside, you may be interested to
know that my paper proving that the Bohnenblust-Hille inequality for
homogeneous polynomials is hyper conductive has been accepted by
Annals of
Mathematics
for possible publication in the September issue, and that I
have been offered a scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford. However, I may
turn the latter down. It is hardly Cambridge, and my present location is
agreeable to me. There is a café nearby that provides a full English breakfast
at a price I can afford. This sustains me throughout the day. Then all I
require in the late evening is a little bread and a lump of Edam cheese.

Eva tried to make light of this evidence of Brian
Junior’s increasing peculiarity. She was alarmed by this email. He had always
been the weaker twin — slower to talk and walk — and the one who clung to her
skirt when she first took them to nursery school. But she remembered it was
also Brian Junior who had charmed passers-by with his smile when she took the twins
out in the double buggy. Even then, Brianne had been less attractive. If somebody
approached her, she would scowl and hide her face.

Eva continued to read. She felt nothing but a sense
of failure, and perhaps, for the first time, had to face the realisation that
Brian Junior might have to move to Silicon Valley where he would be able to
live and work with his own kind.

I find it a matter of regret that you will not be attending your late
mother-in-law’s funeral. My father is, and I quote, ‘Devastated.’ I have also
spoken to Barbara Lomax, the head of the Student Psychology Service, and she
assures me that the reason you are ‘unable’ to leave your bed is that you are
in the grip of agoraphobia, probably as a result of childhood trauma.

Alexander, attempting to lighten the mood, laughed
and said, ‘Did you see something nasty in the woodshed, Eva?’

She was unable to join in. She read the next few sentences
to herself, not wanting Alexander to hear them and judge her.

Ms Lomax stressed that she has known people to be cured within six
weeks. However, diet, exercise, self-discipline and courage are needed. I
informed Barbara that, in my opinion, you have no courage, because you
knowingly allow my father to fornicate under your roof and say nothing.

Eva could no longer control herself, and shouted
aloud, ‘He’s not under my roof! He’s in his sodding shed!’ Then she continued
reading to herself.

Barbara enquired of me, ‘Do you have anger issues with your mother?’ I
told her that I can hardly bear to be in the same room as my mother lately.

Eva read the last sentence again. And then again.
What had she done wrong?

She had fed him, kept him clean, bought him decent
shoes, taken him to the dentist and the optician, built a rocket out of Lego,
taken him on zoo trips and cleaned out his room. He’d been on a steam train,
the medical box was always at hand, and she’d hardly raised her voice to him
throughout his childhood.

She folded the email printout in half, then into
quarters, then into eighths, then into sixteenths, then into thirty-secondths
and sixty-fourths. She tried to make it even smaller, gave up and put the wad
of paper in her mouth. It was unpleasant, but she could not take it out.
Alexander undemonstratively passed her a glass of water and she began to soften
the wad of paper like a cow chewing cud, until gradually it turned into a pulp.

With her tongue, she pushed the wad into her cheek
and said to Alexander, ‘I need a blind at this window. A white blind.’

On
the night before his mother’s funeral, Brian went to see Eva. He asked her to
reconsider her decision to stay away from the church service and the following
interment.

Eva assured Brian that she had loved Yvonne, and
would think about her while the funeral was in progress, but she could not
leave her bed.