Brianne forced herself to smile.
Poppy declared, in her normal voice, ‘I’m a good actress. It was a toss-up between coming here and going to RADA. To be honest, I don’t like the look of the students here. They’re so utterly provincial. And I’m dreading starting American Studies – you don’t even get to visit America. I’m thinking of changing to what you’re doing. What is it again?’
‘Astrophysics,’ said Brianne.
There was a gentle knocking on the door. Brianne opened it. Brian Junior stood in the doorway. ‘Sultry’ was the word to describe Brian’s early morning appearance. His lids were heavy and his bedhair was seductively tousled.
Poppy shouted, ‘Hi, Bri! What have you been doing in your room all this time, you dirty boy?’
Brian Junior blushed and said, ‘I’ll come back later… when…’
‘No,’ said Brianne, ‘tell me now.
Brian Junior said, ‘It’s nothing much, but Dad rang and said that after we’d gone Mum went to bed wearing all her clothes, even her shoes, and she’s still there.’
Poppy said, ‘I’ve often worn shoes in bed. There’s not a man alive that doesn’t like to see a woman in stilettos.’ She elbowed her way past the twins, into the corridor and knocked on the next door along where Ho Lin – a Chinese boy studying medicine – lived. When he came to the door wearing his blue and white striped English pyjamas, Poppy said, ‘An emergency, darling! Can I use your phone?’ She pushed in and closed the door.
Brianne and Brian Junior looked at each other. Neither of them wanted to say what a monster Poppy was, and admit that she had singlehandedly made their first taste of freedom miserable. They had been brought up to think that if you didn’t speak it aloud, it didn’t exist. Their mother was a reticent woman who had passed her reticence on to them.
Brianne said, ‘That’s what happens to women when they get to be fifty. It’s called the men-o-pause.’
‘So, what do they do?’ Brian Junior asked.
‘Oh, they go mad, shoplift, stab their husbands, go to bed for three days… that kind of thing.’
Brian Junior said, ‘Poor Mum. We’ll phone her after the Freshers’ Fair.’
When they got to the Students Union, they headed straight for the Mathematics Club. They pushed through the crowds of drunken students, and eventually stood in front of a trestle table covered in large laminated photocopied equations.
A youth wearing a tight knitted hat gasped and said, ‘Jesus Christ, you’re the Beaver twins! Huge respect. You two dudes are awesome! No, no, you’re legends. A gold medal each at the IMO.’ He looked at Brian Junior and said, ‘And the Special Prize. Mega respect. ‘A solution of outstanding elegance.” Can you talk me through it? It would be an honour.’
Brian Junior said, ‘Well, yes, if you’ve got a spare two hours.’
The youth in the hat said, ‘Listen, any time, anywhere. A tutorial from Brian Beaver Junior would look sooperb on my CV. Let me get a pen?’
A small crowd of onlookers had gathered around Brian Junior and Brianne. Word had spread that the Beaver twins were in the hall. As Brian Junior recited from memory the proof he had conjured up from nowhere – the examining professors had never even imagined it as an answer – he heard Brianne say, ‘Oh shit!’
Poppy had stolen up behind them. She shouted, ‘Found you!’ Then, playfully wagging a finger at them both, said, ‘You really must get into the habit of letting me know where you’re going After all, you are my best friends.’ She was wearing an old taffeta evening dress over a black polo neck. She turned to the youth in the hat and said, ‘May I join, please? Although I’m a bear of very little brain, I might give your serious little group a bit of badly needed glam. And I wouldn’t disturb you in your calculations. I would sit at the back and keep my pretty mouth shut until I’m up to speed?’
Brian Junior temporarily forgotten, the student handed Poppy an application form with an eager smile.
7
Eva regretted the day that Marks & Spencer had introduced elastane pyjamas for men. They did not flatter the middle-aged body. Brian’s genitals looked like a small bag of spanners through the unforgiving material.
After three nights’ troubled sleep, Brian had pleaded to be allowed to return to the marital bed, citing his bad back.
Eva reluctantly gave in.
Brian went through his pre-bed routine, as he always had: gargling and spitting in the bathroom, winding the alarm clock, turning the shipping forecast on, hunting in each corner of the room and under the bed for spiders with a child’s fishing net he kept inside the wardrobe, switching what he called ‘the big light’ off, opening the small window, then sitting on the side of the bed and removing his slippers, always the left one first.
Eva couldn’t remember when Brian had turned into a middle-aged man. Perhaps it was when he had started to make a noise as he got up from a chair.
Normally he would talk about his day in monotonous detail, about people she had never met, but tonight he was silent. When he got into bed, he lay so close to the edge that Eva was reminded of a man teetering on the edge of a snake pit.
She said, ‘Goodnight, Brian,’ in her normal voice.
He said, out of the darkness, ‘I don’t know what to say when people ask me why you’ve taken to your bed. It’s embarrassing for me. I can’t concentrate at work. And I’ve got my mother and your mother asking questions I can’t answer. And I’m used to knowing the answers – I’m a Doctor of Astronomy, for fuck’s sake. And Planetary Science.’
Eva said, ‘You’ve never once answered me properly when I ask you if God exists.’
Brian threw his head back and shouted, ‘For God’s sake! Use your own bloody brain!’
Eva said, ‘I haven’t used my brain for so long, the poor thing is huddled in a corner, waiting to be fed.’
‘You’re constantly mixing up the concept of heaven with the bloody cosmos! And if your mother asks me one more time to read her stars… I have explained the difference between an astronomer and an astrologer a million fucking times!’ He jumped out of bed, stubbed his toe on the bedside cabinet, screamed and limped out of the room. She heard the door to Brian Junior’s room slam.
Eva fumbled in the cupboard of her bedside table, where she kept her most precious things, and pulled out her school exercise books. She had kept them clean and safe for over thirty years. As she leafed through them the moonlight shone on the golden stars she had won for her excellent work.
She had been a very clever girl whose essays were always read aloud in class, and she was told by her teachers that with hard study and a grant she might even get to university. But she had been needed to go to work and bring in a wage. And how could Ruby afford to buy a grammar school uniform from a specialist shop on a widow’s pension?
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.