A Book at Bedtime

by Barrie Shore

  She tapped on the window and waved her fingers and for a shock of a moment, he thought she meant it, she would unlock the door and beckon them in. But she sighed a sigh, let the blind drop, stood in the doorway, twisting the end of her pigtail in her fingers, looking round, in a shiver, at the shadows of the shop.

  ‘I hate this place, these blasted books. Look at the blighters, watching us, waiting to pounce. One of these days they’ll leap off the shelves and bury us both to oblivion.’

  ‘Oh, darling…’ He said it and meant it, and she didn’t object. So he went round the counter and… And did he take her into his arms in a seizing? Did he tear off her clothes, drag her to the floor? Did he open her legs?

  No, he didn’t. He smoothed a stray hair from her forehead and tucked it behind her ear, and said, ‘Is it really so bad?’

  ‘Yes. No. Yes, it is. But it needn’t be, if only…’

  And oh, baby dear, oh dear, oh, dear me, she lifted her face and smiled in such a tremble of hope and disperiousness…

  And he kissed the smile…

  And a rocket went off in the market square…

  And the crowd cheered and shouted with joy…

  So he kissed her again and she kissed him back…

  And then…

  Oh, and then what they heard was the creak of the floorboards over their heads, and a listening of footsteps, creaking the floor.

  And she said to him, ‘She must go.’

  And he said to her, ‘Yes, she must.’

  And the consequence was… what was it again? Oh, yes, I’m remembering now: she made a PS, which, baby dear, is a thought that you have after you’ve finished which maybe you shouldn’t because then it turns into a lily that’s gilded, but she did it any and way. And this was the P and the S that Eva made…

  ‘And if so and she doesn’t, I will.’

  So, well, and he tried, baby dear, he really did because he was such a fear that Eva would leave him. He fetched up a trunk from the cellar the very next day and spoke to his mother in a miserous, hiccupping way.

  ‘Mother,’ he said, said he, ‘you must go right down to the end of the town and never come back for me.’

  His mother listened with a tremble on her lip and a stone in her heart. She packed the trunk in a silence of suffering and off she setten into the night. Queen of the Night. I hope she remembered to pack her crown. She stopped at the end of the street, made a look to her left and right and lifted her nose to sniff which way the Palace might be. And she didn’t say, pity poor me, but her back did, and so did her trunk that was packed so heavy it could hardly be carried because the Devil was in it, weighing it down.

  The son watched her going in a mortification and was smoten with guilt. He ran down the street to fetch her back. And the mother smiled a triumphous smile.

  So Eva left him, just as she said.

  Not in the way that you think, baby dear. She didn’t pack up her battercase and take it away on a train, although the Dodo tried a persuasion to make her, and so did I. She didn’t go back to the Bethnal Green, to the Swan or the Edgar, to the where she knew and might have been happy. She went out to a work instead, just round the corner, not far from here, in a very grand place in a market square that was filled with books, books for borrowing not for sale. And I always thought, baby dear, what a very odd thing it was that she went to a place that was full up of books, as if in a spite of herself, she couldn’t be without them, as if they were a remind of the husband she said she would leave and found that she couldn’t. And for your future knowledge and information, baby dear, that sort of way she behaved, leaving, not leaving, is called a perversity. A thing you must avoid to your utmost when you grow up, other and wise you’ll spend the whole of your life in a disgruntle with yourself.

  Oh, and another one thing. On top and besides of everything else, Eva didn’t make a running away because she was in a damn if she’d let the mother to win.

  So and how did she manage, one way and a mother, on a day and a day? With the husband, the mother and the love that was never made? Well, I’ll tell you, baby dear. She remembered the game she used to play as a child and in every time when nobody liked her, at the school and munitions and the father who cackled and called like a crow, and the mother of the husband that was hers only wasn’t, the game she’d learned from her mother’s knee. She made herself invisibility. And it worked so well, even I couldn’t see her. And she waited, like patience on a monumental that somebody said. Waited and waited for a thousand years, until a chapter whose name was Hope was written.

  The chapter began with a death, my dear, and it skipped along in the way the best stories do, and you know all along what the ending will be, or you hope that you do, but you have to keep on at the reading just to make sure.

  The church was cold and forbidden and hardly an anyone there because it was the mother of the son that was the husband of Eva that was dead, and nobody was in much of a minding, except for the son. He gazed at the coffin with a fruzzle on his face, as if he didn’t know what it was or why he was there. One of his eyelids was all of a droop, like a palsy had got him, and when he sang the hymns he was all out of tune.

  I sat at the back in a wonder to myself if the Devil had carried the mother away on a cotton wool cloud and crowned her queen as he promised he would. Or did she find out in the end that the Devil had lied? And did she lie now in the cold of her coffin, rigid and frigid, in a thwart of desire and no one for comfort? Did she beat at the lid, did she call in vain, ‘Oh, my son, my son, what wrong have I done?’ Did she try for a sorry, but was it too late. Far too. Far too late?

  We went to the churchyard for the dust and ashes. The coffin lurched as they lowered it in and a cold thought struck at my heart, that it wasn’t the mother inside because she died of a cancer and wouldn’t be buried in a holy ground in case it caught a contamination. That’s what they said in olden days. They’d have burned her instead, a suitability end for the witch she was. And yet I felt in a sudden of sorrow for her. Poor woman, poor thing, poor delusion, poor waste.

  There was a parting after. An after parting, that was half awake and almost asleep. I sat on a sofa with the Cahoots, squitched in between, like Alice in a wonder. I counted the creak of their corsets whenever they moved, forty for the Moxie and none for the Maiden, she was as thin as a string and wore a bodice instead, so the Moxie won. And I heard the smell of their breaths, a lavender and a violet, and a faint eucalyptus that came from the mother and didn’t know it was dead.

  The Cahoots were looking at a malbum of pictures, black and white and a seeping of brown like old blood that was dried. The Moxie pointed the people and places and told me their names. She had a wart on her finger painted with purple. I listened with only half of myself because I was in a watching of Eva. I hadn’t seen her in an ever and age, and although she was dulldy and dowed in her funeral clothes, there was a shining underneath her, a glimble of hope that she tried to hide, but couldn’t, not quite. You see, baby dear, what she was thinking at the bottom of her heartsome was that all would be well now that the mother was dead. All would be well, and all would be well, and all manner of thing would be well.

  But it wasn’t.

  Only she didn’t know.

  Not then.

  So she slippered about with a tea on a tray and her heart in a lift, and listened to the man from the church that had buried the mother. His name was a Vicarage and he was a man in a mighty pomposity who warbled finery words such as ‘pillar’ and ‘noble’ and ‘parish’ and ‘mourning’. He was lying between his jaggedly teeth, a misfortunate thing for a man in a cloth, but I suspose he had the ear of the Lord and hadn’t a conscience to prickle him. Suppose.

  The Moxie turned a page and stabbed it with her purply wart. ‘Will you look at that face of hers, the sour puss.’

  ‘Aye,’ said the Maiden with a sadness in her, ‘on the happiest
day of her life, look, and her with a face like a wet weekend.’

  The picture was a bride in a wedding dress, not dewy-eyed or trying to stifle a coyfulish smile. Straight-backed on a spindle chair she was, with her head held high and her nose in defiance. She was pretty enough in a pinching way with a curl peeping out from under her veil, but her nose was sharp and her mouth was tight like a buttonhole that’s made too small. There was an urn beside, on top of a plinth, with a long-leaf of a plant, a spider it was, leaning and hungry, as if it wanted to gobble her up. Which it should if it had a mind on its own but it didn’t.

  The bridegroom behind had a hand on his breast, in a swearing it looked of undying of love. The other on the back of her chair, like a brush and comb on a dresser, close beside just only not touching. He had one of his eyebrows upraised, as if he had a joke he wanted to tell, and a look of panic in the other as if in a wonder how he’d got there at all.

  ‘Look at him, mind,’ said the Maiden, all in a blush, ‘how handsome he was in his army suit.’ She liked him more than she should, poor shrink of a violet, with her spinstery ways.

  ‘The postboy is handsome enough in his uniform, that’s not to say he’s good for a husband.’ The Moxie was sharp as knives when she wanted, maybe it was the wart was the cause.

  I must have been in a sigh as I looked at the picture in the malbum that was seeped. A husband and wife on a wedding day and bedoomed to a misery. The Maiden noticed the sigh and patted my hand.

  ‘Poor thing,’ she said with a tear in her eye, ‘no wonder it is that you’re so upset.’

  ‘Why, for the love of God, should she be upset? That mother-in-law of hers was a dragon, a Gorgon they called it in classical times, that turned all she looked on into a stone.’

  ‘Shame on you, to say such a thing,’ the Maiden was in a sudden bold with her shock. ‘And the poor soul not yet cold in her grave.’

  ‘That woman was cold from the time she was born. She never warmed up for the rest of her life, and it’s my belief she froze to her death. Why that boy married her is beyond my guessing.’

  ‘You know perfectly well why it was.’ The Maiden nudged me, all of a tither. ‘There was love in them both.’

  ‘And what would you know, that’s never been wed? Nor bedded neither so far as a mortal knows.’ How horrid the Moxie had got, all sideways and byways and full of spite, as if the mother of the man that was the husband of Eva had left her a legacy that she couldn’t resist. ‘Four months gone she was when she married.’

  ‘She never was?’ The Maiden smothered her hurt and fell into an oh of shock, with maybe an envy in the oh, and a wondering. Wedding and bedding, was it so much as it was cracked up? And would she wonder for the rest of her life?

  ‘Ho, yes.’ The Moxie was in a gleeful of gossip. ‘I mind my husband before he was dead saying how the poor soul came home from the front in a terrible shell-shocked state. And her so silly and selfish and unthinking flirtatious.’

  I tried to snuff her but she wouldn’t not stop, and I hadn’t my liking of her after that.

  ‘Just the once they did it, you can be sure of that.’ No snuffing the Moxie now in her spite. ‘And both disappointed, I haven’t a doubt, her with her skirts up to her waist and him all atremble, firing his shots in the wrong direction. The wonder is she got pregnated at all.’

  ‘Sorry it is I am for her,’ said the Maiden, in a saddening smile. ‘She was a poor thing, unhappy in her soul, but she turned a collar better and a man ever did see.’ Poor little Miss Maiden, how nice she was in her bundle of innocence, trying to make a best of the world.

  The Moxie spat so hard a spray of saliva fell on the bridegroom’s face and made his cheeks seem covered in tears. ‘Pity the husband, not the wife, she made him pay for the rest of his life.’ She tapped the tears away with her wart. ‘And pity the son with such a mother.’

  I looked at the son to see if he’d heard. He was in a solemn stand with the warble from the church who was busy in a supping of tea and a cram of cake, his warble put by into a temporary parenthesis. The son held his head bent down, as if he was searching for crumbs on the carpet, or answers, with Eva in a hover behind him, clutching the teapot close to her chest, and I knew from the thin look in her face that if she didn’t hold on tight to the tea, she would tip and it up all over the warble’s head. I wanted to go to her then to put her in a comfort, but the Moxie took grip of my arm and wouldn’t let go.

  ‘Ten years married? And no little ones still.’ She looked at me with a relishing smile. ‘Let him look to his wife before she ups and offs and finds somebody else to fulfil the needs that nature intended.’

  And she snapped the amalbum shut as if she were closing a history.

  Needs. Like beads. Only not so frivolity.

  Are you there, baby dear? Are you still in a listen? I have a question I want to ask. What were the needs the Moxie meant? What was the need that Eva needed? Was it a baby, baby dear? And did she get one in the end? I think she did, but I can’t be sure. It might have been me. Except I never was married, so it can’t have been. No, it was Eva, I knew all along. But it wasn’t the husband who gave her the baby, because Eva was in her invisibility still, she’d done it so long she was forgotten how to stop, so that the husband couldn’t know where to find her. And besides, he had a grave in his heart that was too heavy to lift and made him in a blindness to his wife.

  So. And then. What happened next?

  Somebody told me, was it you, baby dear? After and all, you were an eye and a witness when you were begot. Somebody told me, whoever it was, that your mother, Eva she was called because she was born at the end of the day and before the night, that your mother went out on a day to borrow a book and came back with a baby instead.

  A book.

  A baby.

  Baby.

  Book.

  We know, don’t we baby, my love, my life and my heart, we know which one of the two we like the best.

  It was a sunshine day in the middling of summer, with a heat and a sweat in it. And bodies. And panting. And silence. And a sadness in the silence. A sadness in Eva. Because you see, baby dear, there was a notice she noticed in the heat and the moment, it was only a moment, which was part of the sadness, the other part of the sadness was the husband in her head. The notice was up high on a wall over her head, written in pomposity letters with a flourishment on the N at the start and the tail of the y at the end. She read it three times and never forgot.

  No Talking.

  No Talking.

  No Talking In The Library.

  So she didn’t.

  And there should have been a notice that said, in an upright of letters, straight and forbidding.

  No Sex.

  No Sex.

  No Sex In The Library.

  But there wasn’t. So she did.

  And so it was that in the Year of Our Lord, nineteen hundred and fifty-nine, in Romantic Fiction, A to G, that a woman called Evelyn, Virgin of this Parish, bestowed the gift of her maidenhood on a man who was not worthy to receive it.

  But oh, baby dear, I want you to know that it wasn’t a rape, it was a taking that your mother allowed because of the want that she was in.

  Are you listening, my baby? Are you in a listening to me?

  Hello?

  Hello?

  My heart’s in a crying and nobody knows.

  So.

  And.

  Now, baby dear, a story isn’t a story unless it has an end on it. But I’m sorry to tell you I don’t know what it is. The ending will be when Eva comes.

  When she comes.

  When she hears me she’ll be in a coming.

  She will.

  I’m a know that she will.

  Tip, tap, tippety tap.

  Someone is knocking utmost at the window.

  Eva?

&nbs
p; Is it you?

  Hello?

  Mother?

  Are you there?

  Jack?

  Will somebody come?

  Will somebody tell me?

  Will somebody tell me what happened to Eva?

  I knew a girl called Eva once. She lived in a place called Bedlam Green.

  JACK AND EVA

  Sunday, 3rd December, 2006

  This is Jack.

  Who has washed and shaved and dressed with care. Not in his best clothes, the kind he used to wear on a Sunday when his mother was alive; nor the shirt, slacks and comfortable jacket he wears in the shop. He’s armed himself with Eva, as it were, in an ancient pair of corduroy trousers that she always liked, and the jersey she’d knitted for him when the baby was due, frayed at the cuffs, darned at the elbows, knitted with love.

  He’s been pottering about for an hour and more with resentment in his heart and a twinge to his knee. Up and down stairs half a dozen times, clearing the breakfast tray, setting the kitchen to rights, hanging the washing out in the yard, bringing it in when it starts to rain; he’s aired the bathroom, opened the windows; banned his mother from manifestations in mirrors, or anywhere else for the matter of that. And all for the sake of his honoured guest, an old family friend by the name of Dodie. Dorothy Jones, a woman of small compassion who’s been summoned by Margaret to inspect the premises; to review Eva’s purported state of deterioration; to assess her food and drinks chart; to infer therefrom that she, Eva, is in imminent danger of starving to death; to make negative comment on Jack’s negligence in his duty of care; and to conclude, no doubt, that he must accept the inevitable: sell the shop, move Eva into a nursing home and himself to sheltered accommodation. Oh, traitor Margaret, and I thought that you loved me.