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

Soon he was driving through a blizzard. He opened his window but could not see the verge of the pavement. He carried on for a few minutes and then, only a hundred yards from the house, he stopped the car but kept the engine running.

Poppy sat up and said weakly, ‘I love the snow, don’t you, Dr Beaver?’

Brian said, ‘Please, call me Brian. It’s certainly a fascinating substance. Did you know, Poppy, that no two snowflakes are the same?’

Poppy gasped, though she had known this about snowflakes since she was at infants school. ‘So, each is unique?’ she said, with wonderment in her voice.

Brian recalled, ‘The twins played snowflakes in their first nativity play. The imbecilic teacher had made them identical costumes. Nobody else in the audience noticed, but I did. It spoiled the whole thing for me.’

Poppy said, ‘I was always Mary.’

Brian looked at her intently. ‘Yes, I can see why you were chosen.’

‘Do you mean you can tell that I’m the chosen one?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Brian.

Poppy reached forward, took Brian’s hand off the steering wheel and kissed it. She manoeuvred herself into the front of the car, over the gearstick, and sat on his lap. She said in her little-girl voice, ‘Are you my new daddy?’

Brian remembered the last time Titania had sat on his knee. She’d put on weight recently and the experience had been rather painful. Now he wanted to push Poppy Into the passenger seat, before his todger came to life, but she had her arms around his neck and was stroking his beard and calling him ‘Daddy’.

He found all of this to be irresistible. He did things that were, as everyone said these days, ‘completely Inappropriate’. And he was flattered to think that such a lovely young innocent girl could be attracted to a 55-year-old fool like himself.

He wondered if Titania would be waiting for him in the shed. Perhaps the snow had prevented her from making her usual journey – he hoped not, because he needed a woman tonight.

When the blizzard had abated, and it was a mere snowstorm, Brian and Poppy got out of the car and walked to the house.

Eva saw them arrive at the gate.

Brian was beaming, and Poppy was whispering something in his ear.

Eva knocked so fiercely on the window that one of the panes broke. Snow rushed in like water through a dyke, then melted slowly in the heat.

The next morning, Eva was sitting cross-legged on the bed as Alexander replaced the broken glass, squeezing putty around the pane like she used to squeeze pastry around the edge of a pie to make a fluted pattern.

She said, ‘Is there anything you can’t do?’

‘I can’t play the saxophone, I don’t know the rules of croquet, I can’t remember my wife’s face. My navigation is crap. I can’t pole-vault, and I’m hopeless at fist-fighting.’

Eva admitted, ‘I can’t tune a digital radio. I gave up after a day with my smartphone. On my computer the Microsoft wouldn’t engage with the internet, and neither could I. I couldn’t watch a film on an iPad – and why should I, when there’s a cinema half a mile away? I should have been born a hundred years ago. I can’t download on my MP3 machine. Why do people keep buying me these gadgets? I’d be happier with a simple radio, a television with knobs on the front, a Dansette record player and a phone like we had when I was a child. Something important that stood on the hall table. It rang so loudly that we could hear it all over the house and garden. And it only rang when there was something important to say. Somebody was ill. An arrangement had to be changed. Or the person who had been ill had died. People ring now to say that they’ve arrived in McDonald’s and are about to order a cheeseburger and fries.’

Alexander laughed. ‘You’re a technophobe like me, Eva. We’re happier with a simpler way of life. I should go back to Tobago.’

Eva said, vehemently, ‘No! You can’t!’

He laughed again. ‘Take it easy, Eva. I’m going nowhere. It costs a lot of money to have a slower pace of life, and I had my one shot at that.’

She asked, ‘Do you ever talk about your wife?’

‘No. Never. If the kids ask, I lie and say she’s gone to heaven. My children believe that she is up there in the arms of Jesus, and I ain’t gonna disabuse them of that comforting picture.’

‘Was your wife beautiful?’ Eva said, quietly.

‘No, not beautiful. Pretty, elegant – and she looked after herself. Her clothes were always good, she had her own style. Other women were a bit afraid of her. She never wore a tracksuit, didn’t own a pair of trainers. She didn’t do casual.’

Eva glanced at her ragged nails and slid them under the duvet.

The door opened abruptly, and Brianne said, ‘Oh, Alex, I didn’t know you were here. Would you like a cup of tea, or a drink perhaps? It is nearly Christmas, after all.’

‘Thank you, but I have to work and drive.’

Eva said, ‘I’d love a cup of tea.’

Brianne’s expression changed when she looked at her mother. Well, I am busy, but I’ll try to bring you one up.’

There were a few moments of awkwardness between the three of them.

Brianne said to Alexander, ‘Bye then. See you downstairs?’

He said, ‘Maybe,’ and turned back to the window ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea, Eva, when I’ve finished this.’

There was an uneasy atmosphere in the house over the next week.

There were silences and whisperings and slammed doors. The women circled around each other. Eva tried to interest them in decorating the house and stringing up the fairy lights, and they would agree with her that it should be done – however, nobody actually did anything.

Poppy had made her base in the sitting room. She had commandeered every item of furniture for her possessions and clothes, so the Beavers had taken to sitting in the kitchen. Whenever Brian and Poppy met accidentally in the house, they managed to touch each other briefly, and both enjoyed the conspiracy. Brian particularly relished the contact – especially on the nights when Titania was waiting for him in the shed.

On the evening of the 19th of December, Brian asked Eva, What are we doing for Christmas?’

Eva said, ‘I’ll be doing nothing at all.’

Brian was shocked. ‘So, you’re expecting me to do Christmas?’ He rose from the soup chair and walked up and down the room, looking like a prisoner on Death Row waiting for the dawn.

Eva forced herself to stay silent as Brian faced the awful fact that he might have to be responsible for Christmas, the Becher’s Brook of family festivals. Many good women, and a few men, have fallen due to the weight of expectation that rests on their shoulders.

‘I don’t even know where you keep Christmas,’ he said, as though in previous years Eva had deposited Christmas inside a locked container at an out-of-town storage depot, and all she had to do was pick Christmas up and take it home before December the 25th.

‘Do you want me to tell you how to do Christmas, Brian?’

‘I suppose so.’

Eva advised him, ‘You may want to take notes.’

Brian took out of his pocket the little black notebook with moleskin covers that Eva had bought for him as compensation for fading his motorcycle exam. (He had argued with the examiner over the precise meaning of the phrase ‘full throttle’.) He unclipped his fountain pen (a school prize) and waited.

‘OK,’ said Eva. ‘I’m going to talk you through. Stop me at any time.’

Brian sat back down in the soup chair with his pen poised above his notebook.

Eva took a breath and started.

‘You’ll find the Christmas card list in the bureau in the sitting room, together with stamps and unused cards. Write them tonight, before you go to bed. After work tomorrow, drive around garden centres and garage forecourts looking at Christmas trees. In your mind’s eye you are seeing a perfect tree, lushly green and aromatic, rounded at the bottom and rising in ever-decreasing circles until topped with a single branch. However, there are no such trees. You drive around all week and fail to find one. At nine p.m. the day before Christmas Eve, just as Homebase is closing, you will panic and push through the doors and snatch at the nearest tree. Do not be too disappointed when you end up with a tree a social worker would describe as “fading to thrive”.’