The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (18 page)

Silence.

‘Oh no! Should I come up?’

Silence.

‘Are you sure? I could easily —’

Silence.

‘How long do you think they’ve got? Tell me, I need
to know!’

Silence.

‘No! No! Not six weeks! I wanted them to
be
there
when I graduated.’

Silence.

‘It breaks my heart when I think that this will be
their last Christmas! [Pause] Thank you, Sister, but I only do what any loving
daughter would do for her dying parents.’

Silence.

‘Yes, I wish I had the money to visit them over the
Christmas holiday, but I am penniless, Sister. I’ve spent my money on rail
fares and, er… grapes.’

Silence.

‘No, I am an only child and I have no living
relations. My family were wiped out in the last Chicken Flu epidemic. But, hey
ho.’

Silence.

‘No, I’m not brave. If I were [sob] brave [sob], I
wouldn’t be crying now.’

Eva slid down the pillows and pretended to be
asleep. She heard Poppy come back into the bedroom, give a tut of annoyance and
stomp out in her workman’s boots, which she wore without laces. The boots
clumped down the stairs, out of the front door and into the street.

Brian, Brianne and Brian Junior were on the landing,
discussing whose room they should take Poppy’s luggage to.

Brian Junior sounded uncharacteristically vehement. ‘Not
mine,
please,
not mine.’

Brianne said, ‘You invited her, Dad. She ought to
sleep in
your
room.

Brian said, ‘Things are bad between me and Mum. I’m
sleeping in the shed, at Mum’s request.’

Brianne said, ‘Oh God! Are you getting a divorce?’

Brian Junior asked, at exactly the same time, ‘So,
will we be buying two Christmas trees this year. Dad? One for us in the house,
and one for you in the shed?’

Brian said, ‘Why are you wittering on about divorce
and bloody Christmas trees? My heart is breaking as we speak here. But never
mind about silly old Dad! Why should he enjoy the warmth and light of the house
he’s still bloody paying for?’

He would have liked his children to give him a comforting
hug. He remembered watching
The Waltons
on television, when he was
young. His mother would be making up her face, preparing to go out with whoever
was the latest ‘uncle’. Brian remembered the smell of her powder and how deft
she was with the little brushes. The last scene, when the whole family said
goodnight to each other, had always brought a lump to his throat.

But instead, Brianne said angrily, ‘So, where do we
put the mad cow’s luggage?’

Brian said, ‘She’s your best pal, Brianne. I
naturally assumed that she would sleep in your room.

‘My best pal! I’d sooner have an incontinent tramp
with mental health issues as my “best pal” than that…’

Brianne could not properly articulate her loathing.
She had come home to find her mother permanently in bed, in a stark-white box,
obviously mad, and now her father expected her to share a room with that bloodsucking
vampire, Poppy, who had ruined her first term at university.

The
luggage was still on the landing when Poppy rang Brian to say that ‘an old man
with a horribly scarred face’ had followed her from the newsagent’s where she’d
been buying her Rizlas. She had called the police and was hiding from him in a
park nearby.

Brian said into his mobile, ‘That’s almost certainly.

Stanley Crossley, he’s a lovely man, he lives at the
end of our road.’

Brianne snatched the phone from her father. ‘His
face is scarred because he was almost burned alive in a Spitfire. Or have you
never heard of the Second World War? Phone the police now and tell them you’ve
made a mistake!’

But it was too late. They could hear the sirens
wailing outside. Poppy disconnected the call.

Eva punched the pillows in her rage and frustration.
Her peace had been shattered. She didn’t want to hear raised voices outside her
bedroom door, or sirens in the street. And she didn’t want that mad girl to
spend another five minutes in her house. The Stanley Crossley she knew was a
reserved and polite man who never failed to lift his hat when he and Eva passed
in the street.

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…’

29

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.

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.