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

eyes.
    Eva said, ‘You don’t have to —’
    ‘The house smelled of Sunday roast for years,’ said
Brian. ‘It was most disconcerting. I buried myself in books …’
    Eva said, ‘My dad died at work. Nobody noticed until
the chicken pies started coming down the conveyor without the mushrooms.’
    Brian asked, ‘Was he a mushroom operative at Pukka
Pies? I did a few shifts there myself when I was a student. I put the onions
into the beef and onion.’
    ‘Yes,’ said Eva. ‘He was clever but left school at
fourteen. He had a library card,’ she said in her dead father’s defence.
    Brian said, ‘We were lucky. We baby boomers
benefited from the welfare state. Free milk, orange juice, penicillin, free
health care, free education.’
    ‘Free university,’ said Eva. She continued in a bad
Brooklyn accent, ‘I coulda’ been a contender.’
    Brian was puzzled. He hadn’t seen many films.
     
    Eva
delayed marrying Brian for the three years of their interminable courtship
because she kept hoping that he would light her sexual spark and make her
desire him, but the kindling was damp and the matches spent. And anyway, she
couldn’t face abandoning her maiden name, Eva Brown-Bird, for Eva Beaver. She
had admired him and enjoyed the status afforded to her at university functions,
but the moment she saw him standing at the altar, with his hair shorn and his
beard gone, he was a stranger to her.
    As she reached his side, somebody — a female voice
—said in a loud whisper, ‘She’ll not be an eager beaver tonight.’
    A ripple of barely suppressed laughter ran around
the cold church.
    Eva shivered in her white lace wedding dress, transfixed
by the awfulness of Brian’s hair. Wanting to save money, he had cut it himself
using a shearing device attached to a back-of-the-head mirror, sent for from a
catalogue.
    The Beaver family had occupied the right-hand pews.
They were not an attractive brood. It would be a grave exaggeration to say that
they were beaver-like, but there was something about their front teeth and
their sleek brown hair … it would not be difficult to imagine them slinking
through water and gnawing at the base of a young pine tree.
    In the left-hand pews were the Brown-Birds. There
was a lot of cleavage on view, both male and female. They were sequinned,
feathered, frilled and bejewelled. They were animated, they laughed and
fidgeted. Some picked up the Bible from the shelf in front of them. It was a
book they were unfamiliar with. The smokers rummaged through pockets and
handbags for chewing gum.
    As Brian signed the register Eva saw his hair from
another angle, then she noticed his extraordinary neck, which was surely the
thinnest neck ever seen outside the Padaung tribe of Thailand. As they walked
down the aisle as man and wife she noticed his tiny feet and, when he opened
his jacket, saw his silk waistcoat decorated with rockets, sputniks and
planets. She liked horses, but she didn’t want images of them galloping across
her wedding dress, did she?
    Before they reached the church porch where the photographer
had his tripod, Eva had fallen completely out of any kind of love she had ever
felt for Brian.
    They had been husband and wife for eleven minutes.
    After Brian’s speech at the sit-down wedding
breakfast, when he did not compliment his wife or the bridesmaids, but instead
urged the baffled wedding guests to give their full support to Britain’s
emerging space programme, Eva did not even like him.
    Nobody is surprised by a bride’s tears — some women cry
with happiness, some with relief — but when the bride sobs for over an hour,
her new husband is bound to be a little irritated. And if he enquires of his
wife the reason for her tears and receives the answer, ‘You. Sorry’, What does
a man do then?

 
     
    9
     
     
     
    After
Brian came back from work that evening, he appeared in Eva’s bedroom doorway
with a side plate on which stood a mug of milky tea and two digestive