Eva was kneeling on her bed, looking out of the window, when Stanley Crossley went by in a police car. She thought he might look at the house, so she waved, but he stared ahead. There was nothing she could do to help him, and there was nothing she could do to help herself. She was filled with a savage rage and understood, for the first time, how easy it would be to murder somebody.
Another police car passed the house. Poppy was sitting in the back, apparently weeping.
Eva watched Brian plodding up the road, his beard blowing in the wind, his head down against a flurry of snow She dreaded him coming upstairs and reporting what had happened.
‘In fact, at this moment,’ she thought, ‘I could happily murder him.’
Brian bustled into Eva’s dark room, looking like an eager, hairy, Hermes anxious to impart his message. He switched the overhead light on and said, ‘Poppy is distraught, suicidal and downstairs. I don’t know what to do with her.’
Eva asked, ‘How is Stanley?’
‘You know what these old servicemen are like – stiff upper lip. Oh Christ!’ Brian exclaimed. ‘I shouldn’t have said that, given that he actually has a stiff upper lip. What’s the politically correct way of referring to somebody like Stanley, I wonder?’
Eva said, ‘You simply call him Stanley.’
‘I have a message from him. He’d like to call and see you, before Christmas.’
‘Can you bring my chair up?’ Eva asked.
‘The soup chair?’
She nodded, and said, ‘I need to talk to people face to face, and with Christmas coming…’
29
The next morning, when Brian and Brian Junior carried the lovely chair in and set it at the side of the bed, Eva asked, ‘So, what’s Ms Melodrama doing now?’
‘She says she’s got pains in her belly,’ said Brianne, appearing in the doorway.
‘The police were quite rough with her, apparently,’ said Brian.
‘That could mean a police officer raised their voice to her. She doesn’t look like somebody who’s been roughed up in the cells.’ Brianne looked accusingly at Brian. ‘Send her away, Dad! Now!’
‘I can’t send a penniless young girl out into the snow a fortnight before Christmas, can I?’
‘She’s hardly the Little Match Girl! She’ll always land on her feet!’
Brian Junior agreed. ‘Poppy will always win. She believes that she is superior to everybody else in the world. She thinks we are subhuman, here only to serve her.’
Poppy appeared in the doorway, clutching her belly. She said faintly, ‘I’ve sent for an ambulance. I think I’m having a miscarriage.’
Brian moved forward and supported her to the soup chair.
She said, ‘I can’t lose this baby, Brian Junior. It’s all I have… now that I’ve lost you.’
Eva remarked, ‘The awful dilemma we have here, Brian, is that she might be telling the truth.’
Eva watched from her bed as Poppy was carried out to the ambulance. She was wrapped in a red blanket.
Snow was falling heavily now.
Poppy raised a hand and waved weakly to Eva.
Eva did not wave back. Her heart was as cold as the pavement outside. She wanted rid of the interloper.
At eleven o’clock that night, a hospital clerk rang to say that Poppy had been discharged, and could someone give her a lift home?
When Brian arrived at the Accident and Emergency waiting room, he found Poppy lying across three plastic chairs, with a cardboard bowl in her hands and a wad of tissues held to her mouth.
She said, ‘Thank God you’re here, Dr Beaver! I was hoping it would be you.
Brian was touched by her pallor and the delicacy of her fingers holding the bowl. He put a hand beneath her shoulders and lifted her until she was upright. She was shivering Brian took off his fleece jacket and made her put it on. He borrowed a wheelchair and asked her to sit in it, though she protested, ‘I’m perfectly able to walk.’
The snow had coated the pavements and buildings, giving a gentle edge to the brutalist hospital blocks. When they got to Brian’s car, he unlocked the doors, picked Poppy up in his arms, lowered her gently on to the back seat and covered her with a blanket. He abandoned the wheelchair on the edge of the car park. Normally, he would have taken it back to where he found it, but he did not want to be away from her for too long.
He drove home carefully. The main roads had been gritted, but the snow was falling so fast that the grit was soon covered in fresh snow.
Every now and then, Poppy whimpered.
Brian turned his head as far as it would go and said, ‘Not long now, little one. We’ll soon have you home and in bed.’ He wanted to ask her if she had miscarried the baby, but he recognised that he knew very little about women and their emotions, and he was nervous about discussing gynaecological mechanics.
Soon he was driving through a blizzard. He opened his window but could not see the verge of the pavement. He carried on for a few minutes and then, only a hundred yards from the house, he stopped the car but kept the engine running.
Poppy sat up and said weakly, ‘I love the snow, don’t you, Dr Beaver?’
Brian said, ‘Please, call me Brian. It’s certainly a fascinating substance. Did you know, Poppy, that no two snowflakes are the same?’
Poppy gasped, though she had known this about snowflakes since she was at infants school. ‘So, each is unique?’ she said, with wonderment in her voice.
Brian recalled, ‘The twins played snowflakes in their first nativity play. The imbecilic teacher had made them identical costumes. Nobody else in the audience noticed, but I did. It spoiled the whole thing for me.’
Poppy said, ‘I was always Mary.’
Brian looked at her intently. ‘Yes, I can see why you were chosen.’
‘Do you mean you can tell that I’m the chosen one?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Brian.
Poppy reached forward, took Brian’s hand off the steering wheel and kissed it. She manoeuvred herself into the front of the car, over the gearstick, and sat on his lap. She said in her little-girl voice, ‘Are you my new daddy?’
Brian remembered the last time Titania had sat on his knee. She’d put on weight recently and the experience had been rather painful. Now he wanted to push Poppy Into the passenger seat, before his todger came to life, but she had her arms around his neck and was stroking his beard and calling him ‘Daddy’.
He found all of this to be irresistible. He did things that were, as everyone said these days, ‘completely Inappropriate’. And he was flattered to think that such a lovely young innocent girl could be attracted to a 55-year-old fool like himself.
He wondered if Titania would be waiting for him in the shed. Perhaps the snow had prevented her from making her usual journey – he hoped not, because he needed a woman tonight.
When the blizzard had abated, and it was a mere snowstorm, Brian and Poppy got out of the car and walked to the house.
Eva saw them arrive at the gate.
Brian was beaming, and Poppy was whispering something in his ear.
Eva knocked so fiercely on the window that one of the panes broke. Snow rushed in like water through a dyke, then melted slowly in the heat.
30
The next morning, Eva was sitting cross-legged on the bed as Alexander replaced the broken glass, squeezing putty around the pane like she used to squeeze pastry around the edge of a pie to make a fluted pattern.
She said, ‘Is there anything you can’t do?’
‘I can’t play the saxophone, I don’t know the rules of croquet, I can’t remember my wife’s face. My navigation is crap. I can’t pole-vault, and I’m hopeless at fist-fighting.’