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

Once, only last spring, he had joined her on the wooden bench he had bought as a memorial to his wife, Peggy. They had exchanged banal observations about the weather. Then, out of nowhere, he had talked about Sir Archie McIndoe, the surgeon who had reconstructed his face, giving him eyelids, a nose and ears.

‘I was a boy,’ he had said. ‘Eighteen. I had been handsome. There were no mirrors in the Nissen huts where the other boys and I lived.’

Eva had thought that he might continue, but he had got up from the bench, tipped his hat and made his ungainly way to the local shops.

Now Eva lay back on the pillows. She could hear Brian Junior and Brianne bickering in the next room.

She had meant to visit Stanley, who only lived a hundred or so yards away. She had intended to invite him for tea. She imagined a white tablecloth, a cake stand, and cucumber sandwiches arranged in triangles on a china platter. But to her shame, despite passing his front door at least twice a day, she had issued no such invitation.

Eva was furious with Brian. Bringing Poppy into an already tense household was like introducing nitro-glycerine into a bouncy castle. She said, ‘Brian, go and find that malicious little cow. She is your responsibility.’

A couple of minutes later, she watched Brian hurrying in his carpet slippers towards the end of the road, where police cars, motorcycles and a dog van were trying to park.

Brian approached a thickset policewoman. He wondered who or what had given her such a very badly broken nose.

He said, ‘I think I can clear up this stalking nonsense.’

Are you the gentleman we are looking for, sir?’ asked Sergeant Judith Cox.

‘Certainly not! I am Dr Brian Beaver. ‘Are you here in a medical capacity, Dr Beaver?’

‘No, I am an astronomer.’

‘So, you are you not a medical doctor, sir?’

‘I believe a medical doctor trains for only seven years, whereas we professional astronomers are still in training until the day we die. New stars and new theories are born every day, Sergeant -’

‘Beaver, sir? As in “agile little dam-builder”?’

Before Brian could speak again, she added, ‘There is one question I’d like you to answer, Dr Beaver.’

Brian put on his professional, listening face.

‘I’m Aries. I’ve just been asked out by a constable of my acquaintance. My question is, he’s Sagittarius, are we compatible?’

Brian retorted angrily, ‘I said astronomer. Are you trying to provoke me, Sergeant?’

She laughed. ‘Only joking, sir! I don’t like being called a pig by the public either.’

Brian failed to see the comparison, but he went on, ‘I can personally vouch for the character of Stanley Crossley. He is a scholar and a gentleman, and I only wish that England had more like him.’

Sergeant Cox said, ‘That may be true, sir, but I believe Peter Sutcliffe’s exquisite manners are legendary in Broadmoor.’ She listened to the crackling of her lapel radio, said, ‘No, mine’s the beef chow mein with the oyster sauce,’ into it, raised her hand to Brian and went into the park to interview Poppy, the stalkee.

Eva was kneeling on her bed, looking out of the window, when Stanley Crossley went by in a police car. She thought he might look at the house, so she waved, but he stared ahead. There was nothing she could do to help him, and there was nothing she could do to help herself. She was filled with a savage rage and understood, for the first time, how easy it would be to murder somebody.

Another police car passed the house. Poppy was sitting in the back, apparently weeping.

Eva watched Brian plodding up the road, his beard blowing in the wind, his head down against a flurry of snow She dreaded him coming upstairs and reporting what had happened.

‘In fact, at this moment,’ she thought, ‘I could happily murder him.’

Brian bustled into Eva’s dark room, looking like an eager, hairy, Hermes anxious to impart his message. He switched the overhead light on and said, ‘Poppy is distraught, suicidal and downstairs. I don’t know what to do with her.’

Eva asked, ‘How is Stanley?’

‘You know what these old servicemen are like – stiff upper lip. Oh Christ!’ Brian exclaimed. ‘I shouldn’t have said that, given that he actually has a stiff upper lip. What’s the politically correct way of referring to somebody like Stanley, I wonder?’

Eva said, ‘You simply call him Stanley.’

‘I have a message from him. He’d like to call and see you, before Christmas.’

‘Can you bring my chair up?’ Eva asked.

‘The soup chair?’

She nodded, and said, ‘I need to talk to people face to face, and with Christmas coming…’

The next morning, when Brian and Brian Junior carried the lovely chair in and set it at the side of the bed, Eva asked, ‘So, what’s Ms Melodrama doing now?’

‘She says she’s got pains in her belly,’ said Brianne, appearing in the doorway.

‘The police were quite rough with her, apparently,’ said Brian.

‘That could mean a police officer raised their voice to her. She doesn’t look like somebody who’s been roughed up in the cells.’ Brianne looked accusingly at Brian. ‘Send her away, Dad! Now!’

‘I can’t send a penniless young girl out into the snow a fortnight before Christmas, can I?’

‘She’s hardly the Little Match Girl! She’ll always land on her feet!’

Brian Junior agreed. ‘Poppy will always win. She believes that she is superior to everybody else in the world. She thinks we are subhuman, here only to serve her.’

Poppy appeared in the doorway, clutching her belly. She said faintly, ‘I’ve sent for an ambulance. I think I’m having a miscarriage.’

Brian moved forward and supported her to the soup chair.

She said, ‘I can’t lose this baby, Brian Junior. It’s all I have… now that I’ve lost you.’

Eva remarked, ‘The awful dilemma we have here, Brian, is that she might be telling the truth.’

Eva watched from her bed as Poppy was carried out to the ambulance. She was wrapped in a red blanket.

Snow was falling heavily now.

Poppy raised a hand and waved weakly to Eva.

Eva did not wave back. Her heart was as cold as the pavement outside. She wanted rid of the interloper.

At eleven o’clock that night, a hospital clerk rang to say that Poppy had been discharged, and could someone give her a lift home?

When Brian arrived at the Accident and Emergency waiting room, he found Poppy lying across three plastic chairs, with a cardboard bowl in her hands and a wad of tissues held to her mouth.

She said, ‘Thank God you’re here, Dr Beaver! I was hoping it would be you.

Brian was touched by her pallor and the delicacy of her fingers holding the bowl. He put a hand beneath her shoulders and lifted her until she was upright. She was shivering Brian took off his fleece jacket and made her put it on. He borrowed a wheelchair and asked her to sit in it, though she protested, ‘I’m perfectly able to walk.’

The snow had coated the pavements and buildings, giving a gentle edge to the brutalist hospital blocks. When they got to Brian’s car, he unlocked the doors, picked Poppy up in his arms, lowered her gently on to the back seat and covered her with a blanket. He abandoned the wheelchair on the edge of the car park. Normally, he would have taken it back to where he found it, but he did not want to be away from her for too long.

He drove home carefully. The main roads had been gritted, but the snow was falling so fast that the grit was soon covered in fresh snow.

Every now and then, Poppy whimpered.

Brian turned his head as far as it would go and said, ‘Not long now, little one. We’ll soon have you home and in bed.’ He wanted to ask her if she had miscarried the baby, but he recognised that he knew very little about women and their emotions, and he was nervous about discussing gynaecological mechanics.