Eva put the phone back into its cradle. She swung her legs out of bed and waited until she felt able to walk safely to the en suite, where she stayed upright by hanging on to the side of the washbasin. Then she started to transform her face, taking cosmetics from the grubby interior of her Mac make-up bag. She needed something to do with her hands. When she was finished, she went back to bed and waited.
When the phone rang again, Nicola said, ‘I’m dreadfully sorry for the way I blurted it out like that. It’s because I hate unpleasantness, so I have to get myself psyched up and it comes out rather brutally. I’m phoning you now because he’s led my sister on by promising her a happy family life and he’s blaming you for the fact that he’s not leaving.’
Eva said, ‘Me?’
‘Yes, apparently now you’ve taken to your bed, he feels obliged to stay and care for you. My sister is distraught.’
Eva said, ‘What’s your sister’s name?’
‘Titania. I’m awfully cross with her. It’s been one excuse after another. First it was he couldn’t leave because of the twins’ GCSEs, then it was A levels, then it was helping them to find a university. Titania thought that the day they left for Leeds was the day she and Brian would finally set up their own love nest, but once again the bastard let her down.’
Eva said, Are you sure that it’s my husband, Dr Brian Beaver, she’s carrying on with? Only, he’s not the type.’
‘He’s a man, isn’t he?’ said Nicola.
‘Have you met him?’
‘Oh yes,’ replied Nicola, ‘I’ve met him many times. He’s not exactly girl bait… but my sister has always liked a clever chap and she’s a sucker for facial hair.’
Eva’s pulses were racing. She felt quite exhilarated. She realised she had been waiting for something like this to happen. She asked, ‘Do they work together? How often does he see her? Are they in love? Is he planning to leave us and live with her?’
Nicola said, ‘He’s been planning to leave you since they met. He sees her at least five times a week and the occasional weekend. She works with him at the National Space Centre. She calls herself a physicist, although she only completed her doctorate last year.’
Eva said, ‘Jesus Christ! How old is she?’
Nicola replied, ‘She’s no Lolita. She’s thirty-seven.’
‘He’s fifty-five,’ said Eva. ‘He’s got varicose veins. And two children! And he loves me.’
Nicola said, ‘Actually, he doesn’t love you. And he told my sister that he knows you don’t love him. Do you?’
Eva said, ‘I did once,’ and crashed the phone down into its nasty plastic holder.
Eva and Brian had met at the university library in Leicester, where Eva was a library assistant. Because she loved books, she forgot that a large part of her job would be sending stern letters to students and academics whose books were overdue or defaced – she had once found a large rubber condom being used as a bookmark in an early edition of On the Origin of Species.
Brian had received one of her letters and come in to complain. ‘My name is Dr Brian Beaver,’ he said, ‘and you wrote to me recently in very officious terms, claiming that I had not returned Dr Brady’s simplistic book The Universe Explained.’
Eva nodded.
He certainly sounded angry, but his face and neck were almost entirely hidden by a full black beard, a mass of wild hair, heavy horn-rimmed spectacles and a black polo-neck sweater.
He looked intellectual and French. She could imagine Brian lobbing cobbles at the despised gendarmerie as he and his fellow revolutionaries fought to overthrow social order.
‘I won’t be returning Brady’s book,’ he continued, ‘because it was so full of theoretical errors and textual buffoonery that I threw it into the River Soar. I cannot take the risk of it falling into the hands of my students.’
He looked at Eva intently as he waited for her reaction. He told her later, on their second date, that he thought she was OK in the looks department. A bit heavy around the haunches, perhaps, but he would soon get the weight off her.
‘Do you have a degree?’ he had asked.
‘No,’ she said. Then added, ‘Sorry.’
‘Do you smoke?’
‘Yes.’
‘How many a day?’
‘Fifteen,’ she lied.
‘You’ll have to stop that,’ he said. ‘My father burned to death because of a cigarette.’
‘One single cigarette?’ she asked.
‘Our house was unheated apart from the paraffin heater, which Dad would light when the temperature dropped below freezing. He’d been filling it with paraffin and had slopped some on to his trousers and shoes. Then he lit a cigarette, dropped the match and…’ Brian’s voice constricted. Alarmingly, tears brimmed in his eyes.
Eva said, ‘You don’t have to -’
‘The house smelled of Sunday roast for years,’ said Brian. ‘It was most disconcerting. I buried myself in books…’
Eva said, ‘My dad died at work. Nobody noticed until the chicken pies started coming down the conveyor without the mushrooms.’
Brian asked, ‘Was he a mushroom operative at Pukka Pies? I did a few shifts there myself when I was a student. I put the onions into the beef and onion.’
‘Yes,’ said Eva. ‘He was clever but left school at fourteen. He had a library card,’ she said in her dead father’s defence.
Brian said, ‘We were lucky. We baby boomers benefited from the welfare state. Free milk, orange juice, penicillin, free health care, free education.’
‘Free university,’ said Eva. She continued in a bad Brooklyn accent, ‘I coulda’ been a contender.’
Brian was puzzled. He hadn’t seen many films.
Eva delayed marrying Brian for the three years of their interminable courtship because she kept hoping that he would light her sexual spark and make her desire him, but the kindling was damp and the matches spent. And anyway, she couldn’t face abandoning her maiden name, Eva Brown-Bird, for Eva Beaver. She had admired him and enjoyed the status afforded to her at university functions, but the moment she saw him standing at the altar, with his hair shorn and his beard gone, he was a stranger to her.
As she reached his side, somebody – a female voice -said in a loud whisper, ‘She’ll not be an eager beaver tonight.’
A ripple of barely suppressed laughter ran around the cold church.
Eva shivered in her white lace wedding dress, transfixed by the awfulness of Brian’s hair. Wanting to save money, he had cut it himself using a shearing device attached to a back-of-the-head mirror, sent for from a catalogue.
The Beaver family had occupied the right-hand pews. They were not an attractive brood. It would be a grave exaggeration to say that they were beaver-like, but there was something about their front teeth and their sleek brown hair… it would not be difficult to imagine them slinking through water and gnawing at the base of a young pine tree.
In the left-hand pews were the Brown-Birds. There was a lot of cleavage on view, both male and female. They were sequinned, feathered, frilled and bejewelled. They were animated, they laughed and fidgeted. Some picked up the Bible from the shelf in front of them. It was a book they were unfamiliar with. The smokers rummaged through pockets and handbags for chewing gum.
As Brian signed the register Eva saw his hair from another angle, then she noticed his extraordinary neck, which was surely the thinnest neck ever seen outside the Padaung tribe of Thailand. As they walked down the aisle as man and wife she noticed his tiny feet and, when he opened his jacket, saw his silk waistcoat decorated with rockets, sputniks and planets. She liked horses, but she didn’t want images of them galloping across her wedding dress, did she?
Before they reached the church porch where the photographer had his tripod, Eva had fallen completely out of any kind of love she had ever felt for Brian.