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

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

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.