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

She smiled as she read the last item, then stopped as she heard Sandy Lake shout, ‘I’m back! I’m here! I would die for you, angel Eva! I’ll never leave you! They can’t separate us! You are my other half!’

Eva wished that Sandy Lake would die. She didn’t want her to feel any pain, only to die in her sleep. She wanted to tell somebody that Sandy Lake frightened her, but she did not want to appear weak and needy.

When Alexander returned with a plate of sandwiches, Eva took one, bit into it, then immediately spat it out.

She shouted, ‘I asked for bread and cheese or bread and jam, not all three! Who eats all three at the same time?’

Alexander said, quietly, ‘Somebody eccentric perhaps? Somebody who can’t, or won’t, get out of bed? Somebody who is besieged by her fellow eccentrics?’

Eva pulled the slices of cheese out of the sandwiches and tore at the bread and jam, not stopping until the plate was empty. She licked her jammy fingers clean.

Alexander watched.

He said, ‘I’m going to fetch the kids from school, then I’m going home. I’ll say goodbye.’

Eva said, ‘You make it sound so final.’

‘I can’t do it, Eva. It’s like caring for an ungrateful baby.’ He bent down and kissed her on the cheek.

She turned her back on him. She heard the sounds of his departure, his feet on the hall floor, the front door opening and closing, the shouts and whistles from the crowd as he passed them, the sound of his engine, the gear change as he turned the corner, then nothing.

She was alone.

She missed him immediately.

Brian’s sheds were still filled almost to overflowing with Titania’s possessions. He had forbidden her to bring anything else from the house she had once shared with her husband, but there were certain things she could not do without: her autumn and winter wardrobe, the Welsh spinning wheel she had picked up in Florida, the postmodern cuckoo clock from Habitat, the Victorian chaise longue she had bought for £50 from a stallholder who she thought of as gullible (only to find it was riddled with woodworm and cost her £500 plus VAT to be restored and recovered).

Brian was manoeuvring his bulk around Titania’s stuff in the extension shed they called the ‘kitchenette’. Titania looked up irritably from the book she was reading, Hadrons and Quark-Gluon Plasma. She had just noted in the margin, ‘Not according to Prof Yagi. See his paper ref: JCAPVol. 865, 2 (2010).’

She said, ‘Brian, you’re tutting like a village gossip. I know it’s inconvenient to have my things here, but I can’t store them at the old house, can I? Not now he’s renting it.’

Brian said, forcing himself to sound reasonable, ‘Tit, I admit I’m a little annoyed that I’m sharing my space with the culmination of the junk you’ve collected over the years, but have I once complained? No. Will I be pleased when it’s gone? Yes.’

Titania said, ‘Please! If you ask a question and answer it yourself again, will I go mad and do you serious harm? Yes, yes I will!’

They lapsed into sullen silence, each knowing that, if certain words were said, it would be like leaving the comparative safety of a muddy trench at Ypres and going over the top to the carnage of the battlefield.

In the long, tense silence, Titania reassessed their affair. It had been quite exciting, at times, and what other man would understand and sympathise when the particles were not behaving themselves and refused to correspond to her theories?

Brian knocked his ankle bone on the Welsh spinning wheel. He shouted, ‘The fucking thing!’ and kicked out at it, hard.

He was not to know that the spinning wheel represented Titania’s bucolic retirement – she and Brian would keep hens, and there would be a good-natured dog with a black patch over one eye. They would take Patch to the village shop to pick up Nature and Sky & Telescope. She would buy bags of wool from the cooperative sheep farm, spin it and knit Brian a sweater in a pattern of his choice. She couldn’t knit or sew, but there were classes she could take. It wasn’t rocket science. The seeing would be good in the Welsh hills. There was a tiny Spaceguard outpost at the 24-inch reflector observatory in Powys. They would link up with the scientists there, and Brian would advise them and carry out consultancy work. He was a well-known and highly respected astronomer. They could easily avoid the peak hours for school tour groups.

Titania saw the spinning wheel rolling towards her, the wooden spokes clattering as it turned. She screamed, as though the wheel were an errant heat-seeking missile. She shouted, ‘Go on! Why not kick all my lovely things to pieces! You’re nothing but a bully!’

Brian shouted back, ‘You can’t bully furniture, woman!’

Titania yelled, ‘It’s no wonder Eva’s mad and lives in a room with no furniture at all! You drove her to it!’

To her amazement, Brian wove through her possessions, took a couple of boxes off the chaise longue, lay down and started to sob.

She was bewildered by the drama of it all, and said, ‘I’m sorry, Brian, but I cannot live like this. I want to settle down in a house with proper designated rooms. Henry Thoreau may have been happy living in a shed, and three cheers and multiple gold stars for him, but I want to live in a house. I want to live in your house.’

She was pleading now. Their honeymoon period of living together in the sheds was long over. She was looking forward to being a seasoned and contented couple.

Brian whined, ‘You know we can’t live in my house. Eva wouldn’t like it.’

Titania felt a switch click inside her head. It was raging jealousy kicking in. ‘I’m sick of hearing about Eva and I hate the sheds! I can’t stand to live in them for a minute longer!’

Brian shouted, ‘Good, go home to Guy the fucking Gorilla!’

She screamed, ‘You know I can’t go home! Guy has rented it out to the Vietnamese cannabis farmers!’

She ran out of the shed complex, across the lawn and into the main house.

Brian had a fantasy that Titania would run through the middle of the house, out through the open front door, and then down the street and round the corner. She would carry on running: through back gardens, on to minor roads, on cart tracks, on a winding path up the hills, down the hills and far away.

Brian wished that Titania would vanish, just vanish.

Alexander carefully let himself out of his mother’s small terraced house in Jane Street. He did not want to wake her, she would ask him where he was going and he didn’t want to tell her.

He was nervous about leaving the kids in her sole care – she was too frail now to pick them up and, being an old-school disciplinarian, she was not sympathetic when Thomas screamed with the night terrors or Venus cried for her mother.

He crept along the pavement until he was out of earshot of the house, then he quickened his pace. He could tell from the cool night air and the faint smell of decay that autumn was waiting to take its place. The streets were quiet. Cars were sleeping next to the pavements.

He had three miles in which to rehearse what he was going to say to Eva about their relationship. Although perhaps he should first establish whether or not they had a relationship?

Back in the day, after Alexander had returned from Charterhouse with an alien upper-class accent that even his mother had laughed at, he had spent many hours in his room with an old-fashioned tape recorder, trying to minimise his vowels and slacken his jaw He kept well away from the local gangs, the Northanger Abbey Crew and the Mansfield Park Boyz. Alexander wondered if Miss Bennet would have liked Mr Darcy more, or less, had he strolled through the Pump Room with his arse hanging out of his baggy jeans, showing the label of his Calvin Klein underwear?