In 1977 Eva left the Leicester High School for Girls and trained as a telephonist at the GPO. Ruby took two-thirds of her wages for bed and board.
When Eva was sacked for constantly connecting the wrong line to the wrong customer, she was too afraid to tell her mother, so she went and sat in the little Arts and Crafts-designed library and read her way through a selection of the English classics. Then, a fortnight after her sacking, the Head Librarian — a cerebral man who had no managerial skills — put up a notice advertising a vacancy for a library assistant: ‘Qualifications Essential.’
She had no suitable qualifications. But at the informal interview the Head Librarian told Eva that in his opinion she was supremely qualified since he had seen her reading The Mill on the Floss, Lucky Jim, Bleak House and even Sons and Lovers.
Eva told her mother that she had changed her job and would in future be earning less, at the library.
Ruby said she was a fool and that books were overrated and very unhygienic. ‘You never know who’s been messing about with the pages.’
But Eva loved her job.
To unlock the heavy outer door and to walk into the hushed interior, with the morning light spilling from the high windows on to the waiting books, gave her such pleasure that she would have worked for nothing.
8
It was in the afternoon of the fifth day that Peter, the window cleaner, called. Eva had slept on and off for twelve hours. She had promised herself this indulgence ever since the twins had been lifted out of her womb, and placed into her arms over seventeen years ago.
Brianne had been a sickly child, pasty and irritable with a scribble of black hair and a permanent scowl. She slept fitfully and woke at the slightest noise. Eva would hear her baby daughter’s thin wail and dash to pick her up before it turned into relentless screaming. Brian Junior slept through the night, and when he woke in the morning he played with his toes and smiled at the Scooby-Doo mobile above his head. Ruby would say, ‘This child has come straight from heaven.’
When Brianne was screaming in Eva’s arms, Ruby’s advice was, ‘Put an inch or two of brandy in her bottle. My main used to. It didn’t do me any harm.’
Eva would look at Ruby’s raddled face and shudder.
She had spoken to her window cleaner once a month for the past ten years, yet she knew nothing about him —apart from the fact that his name was Peter Rose and he was married, with a disabled daughter called Abigail. She heard his ladder scraping up the side of the house before coming to a rest on the window sill. Had she wanted to hide, she could have run into the bathroom but she decided to ‘style it out’ — an expression which Brianne frequently used and which Eva interpreted as smiling in the face of awkward social situations.
So, Eva smiled and waved awkwardly when she saw Peter’s head appear above the sill. His cheeks reddened with embarrassment. He poked his head round the open window and said, ‘Do you want me to come back later?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You can do them now’
He smeared soapy water all over the window and asked, Are you poorly?’
‘I just wanted to stay in bed,’ she said.
‘That’s what I wanna do on my day off,’ he agreed. ‘Curl up and ‘ibernate. But I can’t. Not with Abigail…’
‘How is she?’ asked Eva.
‘Same as always,’ said Peter, ‘but heavier. She don’t talk, she can’t walk, she don’t do nothing for herself…’ He paused while he rubbed furiously at the window ‘She’s in nappies and she’s fourteen. She ain’t even pretty. Her mum dresses her beautiful. She’s always colour coordinated and her hair is always done immaculate. Abigail is lucky, I reckon. She’s got the finest mum in the world.’
Eva said, ‘I couldn’t do it.’
Peter was using a hand-held device that looked like a truncated windscreen wiper to clear the window of excess water.
Why couldn’t you do it?’ he asked, as if he genuinely wanted to know.
Eva said, ‘All that work. Humping a fourteen-year-old about and getting nothing back. I couldn’t do it.’
Peter said, ‘That’s how I feel. She never smiles, never even acknowledges you when you’ve done something nice for her. Sometimes I think she’s taking the piss. Simone tells me I’m wicked for thinking that. She says I’m stacking up bad karma. She says Abigail is the way she is because of me. She could be right. I done a lot of bad things when I was a kid.’
Eva said, ‘I’m sure it’s nothing you did. Abigail is here for a reason.
Peter asked, ‘What is the reason?’
Eva said, ‘Perhaps it’s to bring out your good side, Pete.’
As he gathered his equipment together to climb down the ladder, he said, Abigail sleeps in our bed now I’m in a single bed in the spare room. I’m living like an old man and I’m only thirty-four. I’ll be growing hairs in my ears next and singing “It’s A Long Fucking Way To Tipperary”.’
He disappeared from view and, moments later, the ladder was removed.
Eva was overwhelmed by Peter’s sad story. She imagined him passing the bedroom where his wife and daughter lay together, before going into the spare room and lying down on the single bed. She started to cry and found that she couldn’t stop.
She eventually slept and dreamed of being stuck on the top of a ladder.
The cordless phone in its flimsy holder startled her with its high-pitched electronic chirp. Eva looked at it with loathing. She hated this phone. She could never remember the combination of beige buttons she had to press to connect her to whoever was phoning. Sometimes a clipped voice informed the caller: ‘Eva and Brian are not available to take your call. Leave a message after the beep.’ Eva would run out of the room and close the door. Later, she would listen to the caller’s message in an agony of embarrassment.
Eva tried to answer the phone but activated a message from the answering machine that she had not heard before. She wanted to run but, trapped in bed, all she could do was barricade her ears with pillows. Even so, her mother’s voice came through.
‘Eva! Eva? Oh, I hate these bleddy answerwhatsits! I’m ringing to tell you that Mrs Whatsit, the one who kept the wool shop, you know the one — tall, thin, big Adam’s apple, always knitting, knit, knit, knit, had a little mongol boy what she put in a home, called him Simon, which is quite cruel when you think about it — her name’s gone right out of my … it begins with a “B”. That’s it! Pamela Oakfield! Well, she’s dead! Found her in the shop. She fell on one of her own knitting needles! Went straight through her heart. The question is who’s going to run the shop? Simon can’t do it in his condition. Anyway, funeral’s a week on Thursday. I shall wear black. I know it’s the trend to dress like clowns nowadays, but I’m too old to change now So, anyway … Oh, I hate these answering whatsits. I never know what to say!’
Eva imagined a Down’s Syndrome boy running a wool shop. And then wondered why the boy and his friends had an extra chromosome? Did we normal people lack a chromosome? Had nature miscalculated her ratios? Were the narrow-eyed kindly souls with their short tongues and ability to fall in and out of love in a day meant to rule the world?
Ruby’s old message played for two minutes, but when it finally ended the phone continued to ring. Eva reached down and pulled the cord from its wall socket. Then she thought about the children. How else would they reach her in an emergency? Her mobile had run out of battery and she had no intention of charging it. She reconnected the phone. It was still ringing. She picked up the receiver and waited for someone to speak.
Eventually, an educated voice said, ‘Hello, I’m Nicola Forester. Is this Mrs Eva Beaver breathing down the phone or is it a household pet?’
Eva said, ‘It’s me, Eva.’
The voice said, ‘Oh dear, and you sound so nice. I’m going to throw a bucket of cold water over your marriage, I’m afraid.’
Eva thought, ‘Why do posh people always bring bad news?’
The voice continued, ‘Your husband has been having an a
ffair with my sister for the last eight years.
A few seconds of time stretched into an eternity. Eva’s brain could not quite compute the words she had just heard. Her first reaction was to laugh aloud at the thought of Brian cavorting with another woman in a house she did not know, with a person she had never met. It was impossible to think that Brian had a life outside of his work and their home.
She said to the woman, ‘Forgive me, but could you possibly ring back in ten minutes?’
Nicola said, ‘I realise that this must be a dreadful shock.’
Eva put the phone back into its cradle. She swung her legs out of bed and waited until she felt able to walk safely to the en suite, where she stayed upright by hanging on to the side of the washbasin. Then she started to transform her face, taking cosmetics from the grubby interior of her Mac make-up bag. She needed something to do with her hands. When she was finished, she went back to bed and waited.
When the phone rang again, Nicola said, ‘I’m dreadfully sorry for the way I blurted it out like that. It’s because I hate unpleasantness, so I have to get myself psyched up and it comes out rather brutally. I’m phoning you now because he’s led my sister on by promising her a happy family life and he’s blaming you for the fact that he’s not leaving.’
Eva said, ‘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 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 biscuits. He sighed as he placed the plate on the bedside table. The tea slopped over on to the biscuits, but he didn’t appear to notice that they were quickly turning to mush.
Eva looked at him with new eyes, trying to imagine him making love to the stranger called Titania. Would he use the same technique he employed once a week with Eva — a bit of back stroking, nipple twirling — would he mistake Titania’s inner labia for her clitoris, as he did Eva’s? Would he shout ‘Come to Big Daddy!’ seconds before he ejaculated, as he always did with her?