‘I’ll borrow this,’ Poppy said.
‘No!’ Brianne shouted. ‘Not that! It’s precious to me.’ She took it from Poppy and slipped it on to her own wrist.
Poppy said, ‘Omigod, you’re such a materialist. Chill out.’
Meanwhile, Brian Junior paced up and down in his shockingly tiny room. It took only three steps to move from the door to the window He wondered why his mother had not rung as she had promised.
He had unpacked earlier and everything had been neatly put away. His pens and pencils were lined up in colour order, starting with yellow and finishing with black. It was important to Brian Junior that a red pen came exactly at the centre of the line.
Earlier that day, once the twins’ belongings had been brought up from the car, their laptops were being charged, and the new Ikea kettles, toasters and lamps had been plugged in, Brian, Brianne and Brian Junior had sat in a line on Brianne’s bed with nothing to say to each other.
Brian had said, ‘So,’ several times.
The twins were expecting him to go on to speak, but he had relapsed into silence.
Eventually, he cleared his throat and said, ‘So, the day has come, eh? Daunting for me and Mum, and even more so for you two – standing on your own two feet, meeting new people.’
He stood up and faced them. ‘Kids, make a bit of an effort to be friendly to the other students. Brianne, introduce yourself, try to smile. They won’t be as clever as you and Brian Junior, but being clever isn’t everything.’
Brian Junior said, in a flat tone, ‘We’re here to work, Dad. If we needed “friends” we’d be on Facebook.’
Brianne took her brother’s hand and said, ‘It might be good to have a friend, Bri. Y’know, like, somebody I could talk to about…’ She hesitated.
Brian supplied, ‘Clothes and boys and hairdos.’
Brianne thought, ‘Ugh! Hairdos? No, I’d want to talk about the wonders of the world, the mysteries of the universe.’
Brian Junior said, ‘We can make friends once we ye obtained our doctorates.’
Brian laughed, ‘Loosen up, BJ. Get drunk, get laid, hand an essay in late, for once. You’re a student, steal a traffic cone!’
Brianne looked at her brother. She could no more imagine him roaring drunk with a traffic cone on his head than she could see him on that stupid programme
Before Brian left, there were some badly executed hugs and backslaps. Noses were kissed instead of lips and cheeks. They trod on each other’s toes in their haste to leave the cramped room and get to the lift. Once there, they waited an interminable time for the lift to travel up six floors. They could hear it wheezing and grinding its way towards them.
When the doors opened, Brian almost ran inside. He waved goodbye to the twins and they waved back. After a few seconds, Brian stabbed at the Ground Floor button, the doors closed and the twins did a high five.
Then the lift returned with Brian its captive.
The twins were horrified to see that their father was crying. They were about to step in when the doors crushed shut, and the lift jerked and groaned itself downstairs.
‘Why is Dad
Brianne said, ‘I think it’s because he’s sad we’ve left home.’
Brian Junior was amazed. ‘And is that a normal response?’
‘I think so.’
‘Mum didn’t cry when we said goodbye.’
‘No, Mum thinks tears should be reserved for nothing less than tragedy.’
They had waited by the lift for a few moments to see if it would return their father again. When it did not, they went to their rooms and tried, but failed, to contact their mother.
3
At ten o’clock Brian Senior came into the bedroom and started to get undressed.
Eva closed her eyes. She heard his pyjama drawer open and close. She gave him a minute to climb into his pyjamas and then, with her back turned to him, she said, ‘Brian.’ I don’t want you to sleep in this bed tonight. Why don’t you sleep in Brian Junior’s room? It’s guaranteed to be clean, neat and unnaturally tidy.’
‘Are you feeling poorly?’ Brian asked. ‘Physically?’ he added.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m fine.’
Brian lectured, ‘Did you know, Eva, that in certain therapeutic communities, patients are banned from using the words, “I’m fine.”? Because invariably, they are
‘No, I’m glad to see the back of them.’
Brian’s voice trembled with anger. ‘That’s a very wicked thing for a mother to say.’
Eva turned over and looked at him. We made a pig’s ear of bringing them up,’ she said. ‘Brianne lets people walk all over her, and Brian Junior panics if he has to talk to another human.’
Brian sat on the edge of the bed. ‘They’re sensitive children, I’ll give you that.’
‘Neurotic is the word,’ Eva said. ‘They spent their early years sitting inside a cardboard box for hours at a time.’
Brian said, ‘I didn’t know that! What were they doing?’
‘Just sitting there in silence,’ Eva replied. ‘Occasionally they would turn and look at each other. If I tried to take them out of the box they would bite and scratch. They wanted to be together in their own box-world.’
‘They’re gifted children.’
‘But are they happy.’ Brian? I can’t tell.’ I love them too much.’
Brian went to the door and stood there for a while, as though he were about to say something more. Eva hoped that he wouldn’t make any kind of dramatic statement. She was already worn out by the strong emotion of the day. Brian opened his mouth, then evidently changed his mind, because he went out and closed the door quietly.
Eva sat up in bed, peeled the duvet away and was shocked to see that she was still wearing her black high heels. She looked at her bedside table, which was crowded with almost identical pots and tubes of moisturising cream. ‘I only need one,’ she thought. She chose the Chanel and threw the others one by one into the waste-paper basket on the far side of the room. She was a good thrower. She had represented Leicester High School for Girls in the javelin at the County Games.
When her Classics teacher had congratulated her on setting the new school record, he had murmured, ‘You’re quite an Athena, Miss Brown-Bird. And by the way, you’re a smashing-looking girl.’
Now she needed the lavatory. She was glad that she had persuaded Brian to knock through into the box room and create an en-suite bathroom and toilet. They were the last in their street of Edwardian houses to do so.
The Beavers’ house had been built in 1908. It stated so under the eaves. The Edwardian numbers were surrounded by a stone frieze of stylised ivy and sweet woodbine. There are a few house buyers who choose their next property for purely romantic reasons, and Eva was such a person. Her father had smoked Woodbine cigarettes and the green packet, decorated with wild woodbine, was a fixture of her childhood. Luckily, the house had been lived in by a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge who had resisted the 1960s hysteria to modernise. It was intact, with spacious rooms, high ceilings, mouldings, fireplaces and solid oak doors and floors.
Brian hated it. He wanted a ‘machine for living’. He imagined himself in a sleek white kitchen waiting by the espresso machine for his morning coffee. He did not want to live a mile from the city centre. He wanted a Le Corbusier-style glass and steel box with rural views and a big sky. He had explained to the estate agent that he was an astronomer and that his telescopes would not cope with light pollution. The estate agent had looked at Brian and Eva and been mystified as to how two such extremes of personality and taste could have married in the first place.
Eventually, Eva had informed Brian that she could not live in a minimalist modular system, far away from street
