Sue Townsend - The Woman who Went to Bed for a Year

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?

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.

Brian wanted something named after him, and any old star wouldn’t do. After all, you could name one for f 50 and give the certificate to your wife for Christmas. Brian had given Eva such a certificate on her fortieth birthday. She hadn’t looked as thrilled as he had hoped -especially when he told her that Eva Beaver, the star, more usually known as SAO 101276, had died 380 million years ago and that it was only the ghostly light that could be seen from the earth.

No, Brian wanted something truly remarkable to bear his name, something that would bring him respect from the worldwide astronomical community. When he was a little boy of ten, he had watched some of the Nobel Prize awards ceremony on television with his mother.

She had said, ‘If you work hard at your science, Brian, you could win the Nobel Prize. That would make Mummy very happy.’

Brian had taught himself to say, in Swedish, ‘I could not have discovered [blank] without the backing of my mother, Yvonne Beaver.’

Swedish was a very difficult language. He wasn’t sure about his pronunciation, and was unable to check. Real Swedish people were thin on the ground in Leicester in those days.

Brian had worked so hard at school that he had alienated his fellow pupils, but he soared academically. Now, in late middle age, he had hit the ground and come to the cruel realisation that he was no longer especially gifted, was one of many clever scientists whose name the public would never know, and that he had been a fool to imagine that he could ever win the Nobel Prize.