The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year by Sue Townsend Read Free Book Online

‘Me?’
    ‘Yes, apparently now you’ve taken to your bed, he
feels obliged to stay and care for you. My sister is distraught.’
    Eva said, ‘What’s your sister’s name?’
    ‘Titania. I’m awfully cross with her. It’s been one
excuse after another. First it was he couldn’t leave because of the twins’
GCSEs, then it was A levels, then it was helping them to find a university.
Titania thought that the day they left for Leeds was the day she and Brian
would finally set up their own love nest, but once again the bastard let her
down.’
    Eva said, Are you sure that it’s my husband,
Dr Brian Beaver, she’s carrying on with? Only, he’s not the type.’
    ‘He’s a man, isn’t he?’ said Nicola.
    ‘Have you met him?’
    ‘Oh yes,’ replied Nicola, ‘I’ve met him many times.
He’s not exactly girl bait … but my sister has always liked a clever chap and
she’s a sucker for facial hair.’
    Eva’s pulses were racing. She felt quite
exhilarated. She realised she had been waiting for something like this to
happen. She asked, ‘Do they work together? How often does he see her? Are they
in love? Is he planning to leave us and live with her?’
    Nicola said, ‘He’s been planning to leave you since
they met. He sees her at least five times a week and the occasional weekend.
She works with him at the National Space Centre. She calls herself a physicist,
although she only completed her doctorate last year.’
    Eva said, ‘Jesus Christ! How old is she?’
    Nicola
replied, ‘She’s no Lolita. She’s thirty-seven.’
    ‘He’s fifty-five,’ said Eva. ‘He’s got varicose
veins. And two children! And he loves me.’
    Nicola said, ‘Actually, he doesn’t love you. And he
told my sister that he knows you don’t love him. Do you?’
    Eva said, ‘I did once,’ and crashed the phone down
into its nasty plastic holder.
     
    Eva
and Brian had met at the university library in Leicester, where Eva was a
library assistant. Because she loved books, she forgot that a large part of her
job would be sending stern letters to students and academics whose books were
overdue or defaced — she had once found a large rubber condom being used as a
bookmark in an early edition of On the Origin of Species.
    Brian had received one of her letters and come in to
complain. ‘My name is Dr Brian Beaver,’ he said, ‘and you wrote to me recently
in very officious terms, claiming that I had not returned Dr Brady’s simplistic book The Universe Explained.’
    Eva nodded.
    He certainly sounded angry, but his face and neck
were almost entirely hidden by a full black beard, a mass of wild hair, heavy
horn-rimmed spectacles and a black polo-neck sweater.
    He looked intellectual and French. She could imagine
Brian lobbing cobbles at the despised gendarmerie as he and his fellow
revolutionaries fought to overthrow social order.
    ‘I won’t be returning Brady’s book,’ he continued, ‘because
it was so full of theoretical errors and textual buffoonery that I threw it
into the River Soar. I cannot take the risk of it falling into the hands of my
students.’
    He looked at Eva intently as he waited for her reaction.
He told her later, on their second date, that he thought she was OK in the
looks department. A bit heavy around the haunches, perhaps, but he would soon
get the weight off her.
    ‘Do you have a degree?’ he had asked.
    ‘No,’ she said. Then added, ‘Sorry.’
    ‘Do you smoke?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘How many a day?’
    ‘Fifteen,’ she lied.
    ‘You’ll have to stop that,’ he said. ‘My father
burned to death because of a cigarette.’
    ‘One single cigarette?’ she asked.
    ‘Our house was unheated apart from the paraffin
heater, which Dad would light when the temperature dropped below freezing. He’d
been filling it with paraffin and had slopped some on to his trousers and
shoes. Then he lit a cigarette, dropped the match and …’ Brian’s voice
constricted. Alarmingly, tears brimmed in his