The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year

by Sue Townsend

Miss Brawn sighed and said, ‘Both!’ Then she continued, ‘Didn’t your parents teach you that it is bad manners to ask so many personal questions?’

  ‘No,’ said Eva, ‘they didn’t.’

  Miss Brawn looked Eva full in the face and said, ‘You should only speak when you have something worth saying. Idiotic questions about my plans for Sunday lunch are not appropriate.’.

  Eva had thought to herself, ‘I’ll keep my mouth shut, and I’ll think my own thoughts.’

  And after all those years the grown-up Eva could still smell the cut grass, see the sunlight on the old red brick of the school building, and feel the thud of humiliation in her heart as she ran from Miss Brawn’s side, to find somewhere to hide until her cheeks had stopped burning.

  Eva finished her exercises and lay on the bed on top of the duvet. She could not stop thinking about food. Her principal feeder, Ruby, had a very lackadaisical attitude towards time, and the rota kept getting messed up because Ruby was increasingly forgetful, and sometimes forgot Eva’s name.

  Stanley opened the front door of Eva’s house, saying, ‘How do you do?’ to the nurse and the constable. He shook their hands, led them into the kitchen, and said, ‘I need to call on your expertise.’

  As he wandered around the kitchen making tea, he said, ‘I’m afraid Eva’s condition has deteriorated. She managed to use her considerable charm on Peter, our mutual window cleaner, and subsequently she has been barricaded into her bedroom, with only a slit in the door that we on the other side can peer through and, in theory, pass her a plate of food.’

  As soon as Stanley said the word ‘barricaded’, PC Hawk saw the scene in his head. He would provide the intelligence, call for a Special Support Unit, and would be present when Eva’s door was shattered with a metal battering ram.

  Nurse Spears saw herself at a medical tribunal, trying to justify her neglect of a bedridden patient. She would plead overwork, of course. And it was true — there were only so many diabetic foot ulcers, injections and wound dressings she could fit into one day. She said, When I get back to the surgery, I will inform her doctors. We may be talking a mental health intervention and admission to a unit.’

  Stanley lied, quickly, ‘No, she isn’t insane. She’s entirely rational. I spoke to her this morning and made her a boiled egg with white bread soldiers. She looked very happy, I thought.’

  Nurse Spears and PC Hawk exchanged a look which said, Who cares what civilians think? It’s we professionals who make the decisions.’

  Leaving their tea on the table, the three of them went up to Eva’s barricaded room.

  Stanley went up to the door and said, ‘You’ve got visitors, Eva. Nurse Spears and Constable Hawk.’

  There was no reply.

  ‘Perhaps she’s sleeping,’ he suggested.

  ‘Look here,’ asserted Nurse Spears, ‘my time is precious.’ She shouted, ‘Mrs Beaver, I want to talk to you!’

  Eva was working through songs from the musicals in her head. She sang ‘Being Alive’ from Company throughout Nurse Spears’ monologue about insane people she had cured.

  Titania put her lips to the slot in the barricaded door and said, ‘Eva, I need to talk to you.’

  Eva groaned, ‘Please, Titania, I’m not having an in-depth conversation about your relationship with my ex-husband.’

  ‘It’s about Brian,’ said Titania.

  ‘It’s always about Brian.’

  ‘Look, can you come to the door?’

  ‘No. I can’t get out of bed.’

  Titania pleaded, ‘Please, Eva, use the White Pathway.’

  ‘I can only use it for one purpose.’

  Eva had no strength left. She had felt it leaking from her for some days. She could hardly lift her arms and legs, and when she attempted to move her head off the pillows she could only manage a few seconds before dropping it back with relief.

  Titania said, ‘We could have been good friends.’

  ‘I’m not good at friendship.’

  Titania peered through the slot and thought she could see a small shining light and, below it, a prone white figure. She said, ‘I came to say how sorry I am for those eight years of lies. I’m here to ask your forgiveness.’

  Eva said, ‘Of course I forgive you. I forgive everybody everything. I even forgive myself.’

  Titania had been surprised at the awful state of the house. It appeared that most of the machines had broken down. Ominous cracks had appeared in the kitchen walls. The drains were stinking.

  Titania said, ‘Look, let me take this door down, Eva. I want to talk to you face to face.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Titania, but I’m going to sleep now’

  Eva could tell from the lack of light on the wall that it was dark outside. She was hungry, but it was her own rule now that she would not ask for food. If people wanted to feed her, they would come.

  When Titania went downstairs, she found Ruby making a pile of sandwiches. Titania was shocked at how much Ruby had aged.

  68

  Ruby apologised to the two doctors and the nurse for the unswept dead leaves in the front porch. ‘As soon as I sweep ‘em up, others blow in.’

  ‘It is the nature of things,’ said Dr Lumbogo. When they had congregated at the bottom of the stairs, Ruby said, ‘I can’t remember the last time she ate anything hot. I chuck food in to her.’

  Nurse Spears said, ‘You make it sound like the lion house at the zoo.’

  Ruby said, ‘My memory lets me down now and again. And anyway, I can’t get up the stairs easy now I’m still waiting for that new hip!’

  She looked at Dr Lumbogo, who said, ‘You are on the list, Mrs Brown-Bird.’

  Dr Bridges asked, ‘Do we know if she’s likely to harm herself or others?’

  Ruby said, ‘I’ve only seen her violent once, and that was at a woman dragging a kiddy along on its knees.’

  Nurse Spears said, ‘There has been an aggressive undercurrent in all my dealings with Mrs Beaver.’

  ‘But no overt aggression?’ queried Dr Bridges. Nurse Spears said, ‘I wouldn’t turn my back if I was alone with her.’

  They climbed the stairs and stood around outside.

  Eva’s door. Eva was huddled in a corner of the room against the bedhead and the outside wall. She hadn’t washed for days and she could smell an earthy pungent odour that was not unpleasant to her.

  She was so hungry that it felt as if her flesh were melting away. She lifted her white nightgown and felt her ribs — she could have played a melancholy tune on them. There was food next to the door. Local people had posted sandwiches, fruit, biscuits and cakes, but she wouldn’t get out of bed to pick them up. In desperation, Ruby had thrown apples, oranges, plums and pears, hoping to hit the bed.

  When Eva was asked who the Prime Minister was, she replied, ‘Does it really matter?’

  Dr Lumbogo laughed. ‘No, they are all blockheads.’

  Dr Bridges asked, ‘Have you ever harmed yourself?’

  Eva said, ‘Only when I have a bikini wax.’

  When asked if she had thoughts about harming others, she replied, ‘Nothing really matters, does it? Not compared to infinity. Look at you, Dr Bridges, you’re composed of a mass of particles. You could be in Leicester one second and an eighth of a second later be on the far side of the universe.’

  The two doctors exchanged a complicit glance.

  Dr Lumbogo whispered to Dr Bridges, ‘Perhaps a rest in the Brandon Unit?’

  Nurse Spears said, ‘You’ll need an approved mental health professional, and may I suggest a Section Four?’

  Later, when the doctors had gone, Ruby put her hat and coat on and went to Stanley Crossley’s house.

  When he opened the door, she said, ‘They’re taking Eva away.’ She couldn’t bring herself to say Mental Health Unit. There was something about the word ‘unit’ that chilled her.

  He steered her through the books in the hallway and sat her down in the neat sitting room, where the books were in stacks against
the walls.

  Stanley said, ‘She isn’t mad, I’ve known mad people. I’ve been mad myself.’ He laughed, quietly. Then he asked, ‘Does Alexander know about this?’

  Ruby said, ‘I’ve not seen hide nor hair of him. Brian’s never in, now that Tit woman has gone. Yvonne’s in a better place, and we haven’t heard from the twins in months. I feel as if I’m on my own.’

  Stanley put his arms around Ruby and felt her yield against him. She was gloriously soft and squashy, he thought.

  He asked, ‘Doesn’t my face bother you, Ruby?’

  Ruby said, ‘When I look at you, I can see the face you used to have. And anyway, by the time you get to our age everybody’s face is buggered up, i’n’t it?’

  Now that there was no chance of an audience with Eva, her acolytes drifted away until only Sandy Lake and William Wainwright remained.

  The two of them had many long conversations. They kept their voices low out of consideration for the neighbours. They both agreed that Prince Philip had murdered Princess Diana, that the first moon landing had been filmed in a studio lot in Hollywood, and that George Bush had ordered the Twin Towers to be destroyed.

  Sandy had made cocoa for them on her Primus stove. While they were sipping the hot liquid, William told Sandy about the slaves who processed the cocoa beans.

  Sandy said, ‘I can’t sleep without my cocoa!’

  William said, ‘We’ll nick the next tin, right?’

  He put his arm around her broad shoulders. She pressed her cheek against his prickly five o’clock shadow. An owl screeched behind them. Sandy jumped in alarm and William tightened his grip, pulling her towards him.

  He said, ‘It’s only a owl.’

  ‘An owl,’ she corrected him.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘a owl.’ They sat together and talked until the moon bathed them in a milky warm light.

  69

  In the early hours of the 19th of September, Eva woke to darkness. She immediately broke into a cold sweat. She was afraid of the dark. The house was quiet, other than the small noises that all houses make when their occupants are out.

  She tried to control her rising panic by talking to herself, asking why she feared the dark. She said aloud, ‘There was an army greatcoat on a coat hanger on the back of my bedroom door. It looked like a man. I lay awake all night, staring at the coat. I thought I’d seen it move — imperceptibly, perhaps, but it definitely moved. I felt the same terror when I walked by Leslie Wilkinson’s house. When he saw me coming, he would stand in my path and demand money or sweets before he let me go. I would look towards his house for help, and saw and heard Mrs Wilkinson singing as she washed up at the sink. Sometimes she would look up and wave while I was being tormented.’

  Eva told herself the story of how she had fallen into a deep ditch lined with ice and snow and couldn’t escape. How her friend had gone home and left her there most of the night, still trying to find a foothold that would enable her to clamber out. It had taken three blankets and two counterpanes before she stopped shivering.

  The day a man, a stranger, had called her ‘a big ox’ when she trod on his toes in the scrum of Christmas shoppers outside Woolworths. She had taken his voice with her into every changing room since.

  Once, she had found a decomposing human hand in the reeds of the canal bank. The school had not believed her and had punished her for being late and, again, for lying about the hand.

  She didn’t want to think about the baby she had miscarried in Paris, to whom she had given the name Babette, and how she had returned from the hospital to the spacious apartment to find him gone, taking his elegant possessions and her young heart with him.

  She wanted to cry, but the tears were stopped somewhere in her throat. Her eyes were desert dry, and there was a ring of ice around her heart, which she feared would never melt.

  She spoke to herself again, harshly this time. ‘Eva! Far worse things have happened to other people. You have been happy in your life. Remember the snowdrops in the birch wood, drinking from the brook on your way back from school, running downhill into sweet velvety grass with the edible stalks. The smell of baking potatoes as they cooked in the embers of the bonfire. Your earliest memory — opening a horse chestnut with help from Dad and finding a shiny brown conker inside. A miraculous surprise. Defying the “No Trespassing” signs and dancing in the ballroom of an abandoned mansion. And the books! Laughing in the middle of the night reading P. G. Wodehouse. And in summer, lying on a cool bedcover reading, with a bag of sherbet lemons by my side. Yes, I have been happy. Listening to my first Elvis LP with my first boyfriend, Gregory Davis — both equally beautiful.’

  She remembered watching surreptitiously as Brian tenderly fed the twins, in the middle of the night. It was a lovely sight.

  When she was half asleep she surveyed her happy memories and found that cruel reality kept crowding in on them. The birch wood had been replaced by an estate of tiny houses, the brook was full of tipping waste. The hill had been flattened, there was a One Stop Centre in its place, and Brian had never again fed the twins in the middle of the night.

  Alexander was in a late-sown barley field with the permission of the farmer. They had exchanged emails, and the farmer had waved from his tractor when they saw each other in the middle distance.

  He was using oil paints now, and was trying to convey the importance of every blade of barley, the feeling that without one there would not be a hundred or a thousand or however many millions of barley stalks there are in a seven-acre field.

  He felt his phone vibrate against his heart. He answered it reluctantly. He had just reached a place where his brush had become an extension of his body. He didn’t recognise the number but answered anyway.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Is that Alexander Tate?’

  ‘It is, and you are?’

  ‘It’s Ruby! Eva’s mother.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘That’s why I’m ringing. She’s gone downhill, Alex. They’re sending a —’ Ruby glanced down at a scrap of paper and read ‘— a “mental health professional” with a “Section Four”. He’s bringing the police with a battering ram.

  Alexander quickly packed his painting equipment and ran with it to where his van was parked on a grass verge. He drove along the country roads at speed, recklessly cutting corners and impatiently overtaking slow-moving vehicles. He used the horn so many times that he reminded himself of Mr Toad.

  Parp! Parp! Parp!

  He pulled up outside Eva’s house and was dismayed to see that the tree she was so fond of had gone. He ran to the front door, and realised that the crowd had gone, leaving nothing but a few stains on the pavement.

  Stanley and Ruby came to the front door together. Alexander could tell from Ruby’s face that there was something very wrong. The three of them went into the kitchen and Ruby recounted what had happened since Alexander had last seen Eva.

  ‘That tree coming down was the last straw,’ she said.

  Alexander looked around the kitchen. There was a patina of grease and dust on the surfaces, upturned cups were stuck to the draining board. He declined Ruby’s offer of tea, and ran upstairs.

  He saw Eva’s door and, through the slot, the darkness within. He called to her. ‘Eva! Listen, my love, I’m going to my van. I’ll be less than two minutes.’

  Inside her room, Eva nodded.

  Life was too difficult to travel alone.

  He returned with his toolbox. He said, through the slot, ‘Don’t be scared, I’m here.’

  He began to kick at the door to the sound of splintering wood. He used a crowbar to remove the remaining nailed-in pieces. When the door was fully open, he saw her on the bed hunched against the boarded-up window.

  She had set herself the task of facing up to all the unhappiness and disappointments in her life.

  Ruby and Stanley hovered behind him.

  He asked Ruby to run a bath for Eva and find her a fresh nightgown. To Stanley he said, ‘Turn all th
e lights off, will you, Stan? I don’t want her to be dazzled.’

  He stepped over the decaying food and splintered wood and went to Eva. He took her hand and held it tight.

  Neither of them spoke.

  At first Eva allowed herself a few polite tears, but within seconds she was crying open-mouthed and without restraint for all three of her children and her seventeen-year-old self.

  When Ruby shouted, ‘Bath’s ready!’ Alexander scooped Eva up, carried her into the bathroom and lowered her into the warm water.

  Her nightgown floated to the top.

  Ruby said, ‘Let’s take it off. Put your arms up, there’s a good girl.’

  Alexander said, ‘I can take over now, Ruby.’

  Eva said, ‘No, let Mum.’

  Eva slid down and allowed herself to dip her head under the water.

  Downstairs, in the sitting room, Stanley was building a log fire.

  It wasn’t a cold day, but he thought Eva would like it after being shut in for so long.

  He was right.

  When Alexander carried her in and put her on the sofa in front of the fire, she said, ‘It’s kindness, isn’t it? Simple kindness.’

  Acknowledgements

  I send my thanks to Sean, Colin, Bailey, Louise and everyone at Michael Joseph who helped me with this book.