The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year by Sue Townsend

Author:Sue Townsend
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-07-05T15:49:21+00:00

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.

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