‘All night, and an hour or two this morning.’ She added, ‘Is that bastard Dr Beaver at home?’
Thomas said, ‘Yes,’ and remained standing in front of the door.
‘I’d like to speak to him. Would you move away from the door, please?’
Titania could hear raised voices coming from the back of the house. One of them was Brian’s. He was shouting something about Norse mythology, pagan symbolism and Odinism.
‘Do you want to come in?’ asked Thomas.
‘Yes, please,’ said Titania.
Thomas led Titania into the kitchen.
Brian almost choked on the skin of his baked potato. Titania announced, ‘He’s thrown me out, Brian. I can’t go to my mother’s, it would kill her. And I can’t go to my sister’s. I wouldn’t give that bitch the satisfaction. You said you would leave Eva after Christmas. Well, it’s after Christmas now.’
There was a general gasp of surprise from everybody except Brian. He propelled his heavy bulk from his chair, as though he’d been shot from a cannon. He landed at Titania’s side, the floor joists groaning suddenly under his weight. He tried frantically to push her out of the kitchen, but she stood her ground.
Stanley Crossley, who had risen to his feet when Titania first came in, said, ‘Madam, you look distressed. May I offer you a drink?’
Brian roared, ‘It’s my bloody house! I’ll decide who drinks in it!’
Titania crossed her arms and planted her feet. She had not moved from the doorway. She said, ‘I would like a double vodka, diet tonic, a slice of lemon and half a handful of crushed ice, with a pink drinking straw, if you have one. Thank you.
Ruby enquired, ‘So, who’s she when she’s at home?’
Titania said, ‘Old lady, I have been Dr Brian Beaver’s lover for many years.’
‘Lover?’ said Ruby. Brian was one of the people, together with the Queen, who Ruby could not equate with any kind of sexuality.
Brian looked around his kitchen.
What had happened to his world? He seemed to strongly dislike all the people in it. There was a man with a burned face mixing a drink for Titania – a woman he used to desire. There was a little boy in a ballet tutu and a seven-year-old girl who appeared to practise her own school of Utilitarian philosophy, two old women who belonged in the Middle Ages (or the mid-1950s), his twins who were cleverer than he was and had ostentatiously turned their chairs and their backs to his lover, and an annoyingly well-educated black man with hair that fell almost to his waist. And, to put a tin lid on it, upstairs there was a wife who needed to think and was taking her time over it.
Was he the only normal Homo sapiens left? Did the ignorant public really expect to find people like themselves living on a planet on the far side of the cosmos? It was highly unlikely that any of these aliens wrote notes to the milkman or paid pet insurance. Didn’t these ignoramuses understand that human beings were the real aliens?
He thought back to his childhood, when breakfast had been at 7.30 a.m., lunch at 12.45 p.m. and their evening meal at 6 p.m. on the dot. Bedtime was 7.15 p.m. until he was twelve, and 8 p.m. until he was thirteen, when it increased by half an hour. There were no computers to distract him then – though he had read about them in the comic Look and Learn. For a treat his mother had taken him to see Leicester’s first computer, which was housed in the offices of a hosiery factory and was twice as big as his bedroom. Yet again, he began to mourn the fact that he would be dead for certain in fifty years, and would not see the rise of nanotechnology, quantum computing or the subsequent planetary consciousness. With his high blood pressure he would be lucky to see the Mars landing.
Yvonne said sharply, ‘Brian!’
‘Yeah?’
‘You’re doing that thing again.’
What thing?’
‘That moaning thing you did when you were a boy, looking at the sky.’
Brian aggressively cleared his throat, as though there were some physical obstruction.
Ruby said, ‘I know I’m a bit old-fashioned, but is it only me who thinks this whole situation is disgraceful?’ She glared at Titania. ‘In my day, Brian, you’d have been beaten up by the woman’s husband. You would have been lucky to keep your kneecaps. You should be ashamed of yourself.’
Titania said, emphatically, ‘Brian has been unhappily married for years.’ Then, addressing him, she said, ‘I’m going upstairs to talk to your wife, Brian.’
Thomas asked, ‘Can I come?’
Titania gave one of her barking laughs and said, Why not, little boy? You are not too young to find out that your sex is inherently simple-minded and cruel.’
Alexander said, ‘Thomas, sit down.’
Taking her vodka with her, Titania stalked out of the kitchen and shouted, ‘Eva!’
‘Up here!’
Eva’s first thought on seeing Titania was that she looked like a funeral director, in her black skirt and white shirt. The skin around her eyes was so puffy that she had either developed a serious allergy, or the poor woman had been crying for a very long time.
Titania said, ‘He didn’t tell me you were beautiful. He told me you were a scrag-hag. Are you a natural blonde?’
‘Yes,’ said Eva. ‘Are you a natural redhead, Titania?’
Titania sat on the soup chair and began to cry, again. ‘He promised he would leave you after Christmas.’
‘Perhaps he will,’ said Eva. ‘Boxing Day is still Christmas. Perhaps he’ll leave me tomorrow’
‘My husband has thrown me out,’ said Titania. ‘I’ve got nowhere to go.’
Eva was rarely malicious – she had a heart as soft as her goose-down pillows – but she resented the eight years she had been lied to. ‘Come and live here,’ she said. ‘You can join Brian in his main shed. There’s plenty of wardrobe space. As we both know, Brian has no clothes to speak of.’
Titania said, ‘I don’t sense that this is an altruistic gesture.’
Eva admitted, ‘No, it’s not. He likes his solitude. He will hate having somebody else living full-time in his precious shed.’
The two women laughed, though not companionably. Titania said, ‘I’ll finish my drink, then I’ll get my stuff out of the car.’
Eva said, ‘Tell me something. Do you fake your orgasms?’
‘There usually isn’t time, he’s finished in a couple of minutes. I sort myself out.’
Eva said, ‘Poor Brian, in the football league of lovers, he’s Accrington Stanley.’
Why has nobody told him?’ said Titania.
‘It’s because we pity him,’ said Eva, ‘and we’re stronger than him.’
Titania confided, ‘When I was invited to CERN to work on the collider, he said, “Really? They must be in trouble.”‘
Eva said, ‘When I first showed him the embroidered chair that I’d worked on for two years, he said, “I could learn to embroider, if I put my mind to it. It’s only cloth, needle and thread, isn’t it?”‘
Titania ran her hands over the arms of the chair, and said, ‘It’s exquisite.’
When she’d gone, Eva knelt at the window and watched Titania struggle to bring in what looked like the contents of a small household.
35
In the kitchen, Titania and Brian started to row over his reluctance to carry her belongings down to the shed. The others drifted away from the kitchen table and sat on the stairs, not knowing where to go or what to do.
Eva heard their subdued voices echoing in the hallway, and invited them into her room.
Ruby lowered herself into the soup chair, Stanley perched on the end of the bed, using his walking stick as a support, and the others sat cross-legged on the floor, with their backs against the walls.
Alexander caught Eva’s gaze, and held it for a moment. Thomas and Venus began to play Cruel Russian Ballet Teacher, a game they had perfected over Christmas. When Venus ranted at Thomas that his arabesque was ‘rubbish’, and threatened to beat him with an imaginary stick, Alexander sent them downstairs to play.