The Woman who Went to Bed for a Year

7

Eva regretted the day that Marks & Spencer had introduced elastane pyjamas for men. They did not flatter the middle-aged body. Brian’s genitals looked like a small bag of spanners through the unforgiving material.

After three nights’ troubled sleep, Brian had pleaded to be allowed to return to the marital bed, citing his bad back.

Eva reluctantly gave in.

Brian went through his pre-bed routine, as he always had: gargling and spitting in the bathroom, winding the alarm clock, turning the shipping forecast on, hunting in each corner of the room and under the bed for spiders with a child’s fishing net he kept inside the wardrobe, switching what he called ‘the big light’ off, opening the small window, then sitting on the side of the bed and removing his slippers, always the left one first.

Eva couldn’t remember when Brian had turned into a middle-aged man. Perhaps it was when he had started to make a noise as he got up from a chair.

Normally he would talk about his day in monotonous detail, about people she had never met, but tonight he was silent. When he got into bed, he lay so close to the edge that Eva was reminded of a man teetering on the edge of a snake pit.

She said, ‘Goodnight, Brian,’ in her normal voice.

He said, out of the darkness, ‘I don’t know what to say when people ask me why you’ve taken to your bed. It’s embarrassing for me. I can’t concentrate at work. And I’ve got my mother and your mother asking questions I can’t answer. And I’m used to knowing the answers – I’m a Doctor of Astronomy, for fuck’s sake. And Planetary Science.’

Eva said, ‘You’ve never once answered me properly when I ask you if God exists.’

Brian threw his head back and shouted, ‘For God’s sake! Use your own bloody brain!’

Eva said, ‘I haven’t used my brain for so long, the poor thing is huddled in a corner, waiting to be fed.’

‘You’re constantly mixing up the concept of heaven with the bloody cosmos! And if your mother asks me one more time to read her stars… I have explained the difference between an astronomer and an astrologer a million fucking times!’ He jumped out of bed, stubbed his toe on the bedside cabinet, screamed and limped out of the room. She heard the door to Brian Junior’s room slam.

Eva fumbled in the cupboard of her bedside table, where she kept her most precious things, and pulled out her school exercise books. She had kept them clean and safe for over thirty years. As she leafed through them the moonlight shone on the golden stars she had won for her excellent work.

She had been a very clever girl whose essays were always read aloud in class, and she was told by her teachers that with hard study and a grant she might even get to university. But she had been needed to go to work and bring in a wage. And how could Ruby afford to buy a grammar school uniform from a specialist shop on a widow’s pension?

In 1977 Eva left the Leicester High School for Girls and trained as a telephonist at the GPO. Ruby took two-thirds of her wages for bed and board.

When Eva was sacked for constantly connecting the wrong line to the wrong customer, she was too afraid to tell her mother, so she went and sat in the little Arts and Crafts-designed library and read her way through a selection of the English classics. Then, a fortnight after her sacking, the Head Librarian – a cerebral man who had no managerial skills – put up a notice advertising a vacancy for a library assistant: ‘Qualifications Essential.’

She had no suitable qualifications. But at the informal interview the Head Librarian told Eva that in his opinion she was supremely qualified since he had seen her reading The Mill on the Floss, Lucky Jim, Bleak House and even Sons and Lovers.

Eva told her mother that she had changed her job and would in future be earning less, at the library.

Ruby said she was a fool and that books were overrated and very unhygienic. ‘You never know who’s been messing about with the pages.’

But Eva loved her job.

To unlock the heavy outer door and to walk into the hushed interior, with the morning light spilling from the high windows on to the waiting books, gave her such pleasure that she would have worked for nothing.