Now, Eva looked around her white room and thought, ‘But that was then and this is now. I have absolutely nothing to do but to watch light move across the sky.’
25
Eva had been in bed for seven weeks and had lost a stone in weight. Her skin was flaky and it seemed to her that she was losing too much hair.
Sometimes Brian would bring her tea and toast. He would hand it to her with a self-pitying sigh. On many occasions the tea was cold and the toast was underdone, but she would always thank him effusively.
She needed him.
On the mornings he forgot about her, or was too rushed to think about breakfast, she went hungry. By now it was against Eva’s own rules to keep food in the room. And the only drink she allowed herself was water.
One day, Ruby made an attempt to persuade Eva to drink a glass of sparking Lucozade, saying, ‘This’ll get you up and about. When I had pneumonia and were hovering between life and death – I were just at the mouth of the tunnel, I could see the light at the end -your dad came to visit me with a bottle of Lucozade. I took a sip and, well, I were like Frankenstein’s monster after lightning struck him. I got up from my bed and walked!’
Eva said, ‘So, it was nothing to do with the antibiotics they were pumping into you?’
‘No!’ Ruby snorted. ‘My consultant, Mr Briars, admitted that he was at his wits’ end. He’d tried everything, even prayer, to keep me from going down that tunnel.’
Eva said, ‘So, Mr Briars – who had trained for ten years, and given lectures and written numerous papers on pneumonia – had failed you? Whereas a few sips of a sparkling glucose drink brought you back to life?’
Ruby’s eyes were shining. ‘Yes! It were the Lucozade what done it!’
In the early days of Eva’s self-incarceration her mother-in-law, Yvonne, had cooked every other day. She was a plain, good meat and two veg cook who believed that a liberal application of Oxo gravy made every meal a gourmet feast. She was never suspicious of Eva’s clean plates, believing that Eva had, at last, given up her taste for silly foreign food and had happily reverted to the traditional English cooking that Yvonne excelled at.
Yvonne must never know that her food (cooked with bad grace and many martyred sighs, crashes of pottery and slammed-down saucepans) was given to a family of foxes who had taken up residence behind an overgrown laurel in Eva’s front garden. These outrageously confident creatures, bored of feeding on leftover risotto, taramasalata and suchlike from the authentically middle-class residents who were the majority in Eva’s road, fought over Yvonne’s chops and mince. It seemed that they too preferred traditional English food.
At about 7 p.m. on every Yvonne evening, Eva would go to the end of the bed and scrape her plate out of the open window She loved to see the foxes eating and licking their muzzles clean. Sometimes she even imagined that the vixen looked up at the house and saluted her in a gesture of female solidarity. But this was only Eva’s imagination.
Once, Yvonne had been mystified when she found a piece of liver and bacon on the porch, and one of her home-made faggots on the pavement outside Eva’s house.
One day, in mid-November, Alexander called in to see Eva on his way to a job.
He said, ‘Do you know you’re on your way to looking like a skeleton?’
‘I’m not on a diet,’ Eva said.
‘You need some good food inside you, food that you like. Write a list and I’ll sort it out with your husband.’
Eva enjoyed thinking about the food she truly liked. She had endless time in which to think, but eventually she came up with a surprisingly small and modest selection.
‘She’d soon get out of that bed if her arse was on fire,’ said Ruby to Brian. ‘You’re too soft with her.’
‘She frightens me,’ admitted Brian. ‘I used to look up from a book or from cutting a chop and she’d be looking at me.
They were walking around Morrisons with a trolley, selecting the ingredients for Brian’s evening meals. Brian had Eva’s list in his pocket.
‘She’s always had that look,’ said Ruby, pausing at the stir-fry section. ‘I’ve often fancied doing a stir-fry, but I haven’t got a wonk.’
Brian couldn’t be bothered to correct his mother-in-law. He wanted to concentrate on Eva and the reason why she wouldn’t leave what used to be called ‘their’ bed.
He wasn’t a bad husband, he thought. He’d never hit her, not hard. There had been a bit of pushing and shoving, and once – after he’d found a Valentine’s Day card she’d received and hidden behind the boiler that said:
‘Eva, leave him, come to me’ – he had dangled her upside down from the landing. It had been a joke, of course. True, he’d had trouble pulling her back over the balustrade, and at one point it had looked like he might drop her on to the tiles below. But there had been absolutely no need for Eva to scream as loudly as she did. It was pure exhibitionism.
She had very little sense of humour, he thought -though he had often heard her laughing with other people in the next room.
He and Titania were always laughing. They shared a love of Benny Hill and The Goons. Titania could do a side-splitting impression of Benny singing ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)’. She hadn’t minded being thrown in the reservoir at Rutland Water either. She’d laughed it off.
Now Ruby was asking him how much wonks cost.
He guessed and told her, ‘About forty pounds.’
She shuddered and said, ‘No, I might not get the use out of it, I’m living on borrowed time as it is.’
Brian took out Eva’s shopping list. He showed it to Ruby and they both laughed. Eva had written:
2 croissants
basil plant
large bag mixed nuts
hand of bananas
box of grapes (seedless if poss)
6 eggs laid by free roamers
2 tubes of Smarties for Alex’s kids
Red Leicester cheese
1 bag mozzarella
2 firm beef tomatoes
small sea salt
1 black and red pepper pot
4 large bottles of San Pellegrino (H2O)
2 cartons grapefruit juice
serrated-edge knife
bottle extra virgin olive oil
bottle balsamic vinegar
1 large bottle vodka (not Smirnoff)
2 large bottles diet tonic (only Schweppes)
Vogue
Private Eye
The Spectator
Dunhill Menthol cigarettes.
After crying with laughter, Ruby needed to mop her tears. Neither of them had a handkerchief but, as they were walking down the toilet roll aisle, Ruby opened a packet of Andrex and took out a roll. She failed to find the end of the tissue, so Brian took it from her and located the end, which was infuriatingly stuck to the other sheets underneath. After a few moments’ struggle, he bellowed his frustration, then tore a wad of paper out of the roll and stuffed the rest back on to the shelf.
Ruby laughed for a long time when they found the San Pellegrino, and even longer when she saw the extra virgin olive oil. ‘I used to pour olive oil in Eva’s lugholes when she had the earache,’ she said. ‘And now she’s pouring it on her salad.’ She was scandalised in the news and magazine section, when she saw the price of Vogue. ‘Four pounds ten? I can buy two bags of oven chips for that! She’s havin’ a laugh, Brian. If I were you, I’d starve her out of bed.’ The croissants provoked another outburst. ‘They’re nothing but a few flakes of pastry and air!’
‘She’s always been a snob about food,’ Brian said.
‘It’s since she went to Paris with the school,’ said Ruby. ‘She came back full of hers elf. It was all merci and bonjour and, “Oh the bread, Mum!” And she had that little woman with the voice that grates on you playing night and day.’