‘Edith Piaf,’ said Brian. ‘A frog I’m very familiar with indeed.’
‘She went back after she left school,’ said Ruby. ‘She worked in a chip shop doing double shifts for her ticket to Paris.’
Brian was amazed. ‘She didn’t tell me this. How long was she there?’
‘It were exactly a year. She came back with a Louis Vuitton case full of the most beautiful clothes and shoes.
Handmade! And the perfume! Big bottles. She’d never talk about it. I think some rich French ponce broke her heart.’
They were blocking the aisle. A young woman with a toddler sitting in the trolley crashed into them. The toddler shouted, ‘Again!’
What did she do in France?’ asked Brian. ‘And why didn’t she tell me about this Paris jaunt?’
Ruby said, ‘She was a secretive girl, and she’s turned into a secretive woman. Now, where’s this bleedin’ sea salt when it’s at home?’
Eva gave Brian instruction on how to assemble a tomato and mozzarella salad.
She said, ‘Please don’t add or subtract any of the ingredients, and I beg you to keep to the quantities.’
She told him which plate to use and which napkin. This precision made Brian even more cack-handed than usual.
Had he overdone the extra virgin oil? Did she say to tear the basil, or cut? Should he add lemon and ice to her vodka and tonic? She hadn’t said, so he left them out.
She could smell the basil and tomatoes before he pushed the bedroom door open with his foot.
He placed the tray on her lap and stood by the bed, waiting for her approval.
She saw at once that the tomatoes had been cut thickly with a blunt knife, that the stalks were still on the basil and that it obviously hadn’t been washed. Despite her strict instruction not to add anything else, Brian had improvised a pattern around the edge of the plate with dried oregano.
She managed to contain herself, and when he asked, ‘All right?’ she answered, ‘My mouth is watering.’
She was truly grateful to him. She knew how difficult it was to run a household and keep down a full-time job.
And she suspected he was missing Titania.
26
It was six thirty in the morning. Hoar frost had decorated the trees and shrubs overnight, giving an ethereal glow to the Space Centre car park as Mrs Hordern approached. It was obvious to her by the positions of the randomly parked cars that something big had happened. Normally, each member of staff parked strictly in their designated places. In the past, there had been fist fights over trivial infringements of the Conditions of Use (which were displayed behind glass in a slender cabinet on top of a wooden stake in a far corner of the car park).
Mrs Hordern met Wayne Tonkin coming out of the Research Block as she was going in.
What’s up?’ she asked, nodding towards the car park.
Wayne said, ‘I hope you’ve not booked yer ‘olidays, Mrs Hordern, cos we’re all being burned to a crisp next week.’
What time?’
‘High noon,’ he said, making an effort to pronounce the aitch.
‘So, I needn’t bother buying a Christmas tree then?’ She gave a little laugh, expecting Wayne to join in.
‘No,’ said Wayne.
When Mrs Hordern went inside, she saw that the staff had come straight from their beds.
Leather Trousers was in a pair of pale-blue silk pyjamas. For once, he did not give her his Hollywood smile.
What’s goin’ on?’ she asked.
‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ he replied. ‘The earth is still turning.’
Mrs Hordern went into the staff cloakroom to hang her coat and change out of her boots into the Crocs she wore at work. She heard sobbing coming from a lavatory cubicle. She knew it was Titania because Dr Clever Clogs often went to the cloakroom to cry. Mrs Hordern knocked on the lavatory door and asked Titania if she could help in any way.
She was rebuffed when the door opened and Titania shouted, ‘I think not! Do you understand the Standard Model of particle physics and its place in the space-time continuum, Mrs Hordern?’
The cleaner admitted that she did not.
Well, butt out then! My problem is entirely related to my research, which I will now never complete. I’ve given my life to those particles!’
As Mrs Hordern walked the corridor, pushing the floor-washing machine in front of her, she thought, ‘Things are not right.’
When she passed the door labelled ‘Near-Earth Objects’, Brian Beaver burst out and shouted, ‘For Christ’s sake, turn that fucking machine off! We’re trying to think in here!’
Mrs Hordern said, ‘That may be so, but this floor’s not going to clean itself, is it? No need to swear. I won’t have it at home, and I’m not having it here!’
Brian retreated to his desk, where banks of computers were displaying rapidly scrolling numbers and a flashing red trajectory that intersected with a large spherical object. The room was crowded with people silently watching the screens. Several of his colleagues jostled closer and peered nervously over his shoulder as his fingers flew across the keyboard.
Leather Trousers said, ‘It might be good if you checked your Australian data again, Dr Beaver, before the eyes of the world are upon us. It’s kinda important that we get this right.’
Brian said, ‘I’m almost certain. But the computer models don’t all agree.’
‘Almost!’ bellowed Leather Trousers. ‘Do we wake the Prime Minister, the Secretary General of the United Nations and the President of the United States and tell them that we’re almost certain that the earth is fucked?’
Brian explained pedantically, ‘You don’t wake the President. The call will go to the NASA Political Liaison officer in Washington.’ Then he continued weakly, ‘It could be that the metadata from the star maps is corrupted. We’ve always known that our database integration was potentially suspect. And I trusted Dr Abbot’s interpolation techniques -’
Leather Trousers shouted, ‘And where is she when we need her? On fucking maternity leave up her precious Welsh mountain, suckling that moon-faced dribbler, with no landline, no mobile signal, and the most high-tech thing she’s got in that mould-filled hovel she calls a cottage is a fucking Dualit toaster! Get hold of the leek-muncher!’
Several hours later, when Mrs Hordern passed the office again with the electric polishing machine, she looked in warily through the half-open door and saw a small crowd of people laughing and shaking hands. The scene reminded her of Skippy, the television kangaroo, when he and his human friends had overcome their difficulties at the end of each episode.
Brian was sitting apart, with his hands linked together, staring down at the floor.
As Mrs Hordern left work, she passed Wayne Tonkin. He was polishing his new sit-on lawnmower.
He stopped and said, ‘So, the world ain’t finishin’ next week. Dickhead Beaver got his sums wrong. That asteroid’s gonna miss us by twenty-seven million miles.’
‘I was sort of looking forward to there being no Christmas,’ said Mrs Hordern. ‘It’s such hard work. No bugger lifts a finger in my house, ‘part from me.’
Wayne rolled his eyes and turned the lawnmower engine on. He was longing to use it, but the bastard weather wouldn’t let him for a few months yet.
27
Brian Junior and Brianne were not quite sure how Poppy came to be in their dad’s car when he drove them back from Leeds to Leicester for the Christmas holiday. Neither of them wanted her in the car, or in their house, and the prospect of spending four weeks with her appalled and horrified them both.
Poppy had been told that Brian was expected and she hung about in the lobby downstairs, waiting to introduce herself to him. She had overheard the twins laughing about their father’s abysmal dress sense – and she had seen a photograph she knew to be Dr Beaver, in which his face was lurking behind a straggling black beard – so she knew what to look for. Several likely candidates walked through the lobby before Dr Beaver appeared.