The Wilt Alternative (2 page)

She went out to her car and drove home wondering what there was about Eva's simplicity that
was so sinister. The Wilts were an odd couple, but since their move to Willington Road, Mavis
Mottram's dominance had diminished. The days when Eva had been her protégée in flower-arranging
were over and Mavis was frankly jealous. On the other hand Willington Road was definitely in one
of the best neighbourhoods in Ipford and there were social advantages to be gained from knowing
the Wilts.

At the corner of Regal Gardens her headlights picked Wilt out as he walked slowly home and she
called out to him. But he was deep in thought and didn't hear her.

As usual Wilt's thoughts were dark and mysterious and made the more so by the fact that he
didn't understand why he had them. They had to do with strange violent fantasies that welled up
inside him, with dissatisfactions which could only be partly explained by his job, his marriage
to a human dynamo, the dislike he felt for the atmosphere of Willington Road where everyone else
was something important in high-energy physics or low-temperature conductivity and made more
money than he did. And after all these explicable grounds for grumbling there was the feeling
that his life was largely meaningless and that beyond the personal there was a universe which was
random, chaotic and yet had some weird coherence about it which he would never fathom. Wilt
speculated on the paradox of material progress and spiritual decadence and as usual came to no
conclusion except that beer on an empty stomach didn't agree with him. One consolation was that
now Eva was into Alternative Gardening he was likely to get a good supper and the quads would be
fast asleep. If only the little buggers didn't wake in the night. Wilt had had his fill of broken
sleep in the early years of breast-feeding and bottle-warming. Those days were largely over now
and, apart from Samantha's occasional bout of sleepwalking and Penelope's bladder problem, his
nights were undisturbed. And so he made his way along the trees that lined Willington Road and
was greeted by the smell of casserole from the kitchen. Wilt felt relatively cheerful

He left the house next morning in a far more despondent mood. 'I should have been warned by
that casserole that she had some bloody ominous message to impart,' he muttered as he set off for
the Tech. And Eva's announcement that she had found a lodger for the top flat had been ominous
indeed. Wilt had been alert to the possibility ever since they had bought the house but Eva's
immediate enthusiasms gardening, herbalism, progressive playgrouping for the quads, redecorating
the house and designing the ultimate kitchen had postponed any decision about the top flat. Wilt
had hoped that the matter would be forgotten. Now she had let the rooms without even bothering to
tell him Wilt felt distinctly aggrieved. Worse still, he had been outwitted by the decoy of that
splendid stew. When Eva wanted to cook she could, and Wilt had finished his second helping and a
bottle of his better Spanish burgundy before she had announced this latest disaster. It had taken
Wilt several seconds before he could focus on the problem.

'You've done what?' he said.

'Let it to a very nice young German girl,' said Eva. 'She's paying fifteen pounds a week and
promises to be very quiet. You won't even know she's there.'

'I bloody well will. She'll have lovers fumbling their lascivious way up and down stairs all
night and the house will reek of sauerkraut.'

'It won't. There's an extractor fan in the kitchenette up there and she's entitled to have
boyfriends so long as they behave themselves nicely.'

'Nicely! Show me some loutish lover behaving nicely and I'll show you a camel with four
humps

'They're called dromedaries,' said Eva using the tactic of muddled information that usually
distracted Wilt and lured him into correcting her. But Wilt was too distracted already to
bother.

'They're not. They're called fucking foreigners and I'm using fucking properly for once and if
you think I want to lie in bed every night listening to some ruddy Latin prove his virility by
imitating Popocatepetl in eruption on an inner sprung mattress eight feet above my head '

'Dunlopillo,' said Eva. 'You never get things right.'

'Oh yes I do,' snarled Wilt, 'I knew this was in the wind ever since your bloody aunt had to
die and leave you a legacy and you had to buy this miniature hotel. I knew then that you would
turn it into some foul commune.'

'It's not a commune and anyway Mavis says the extended family was one of the good things about
the old days.'

'She'd know all about extended families. Mavis would. Patrick has been extending his family
for as long as I can remember, and into other people's.'

'Mavis has given him an ultimatum said Eva. She's not putting up with his carryings on any
longer.'

'And I'm giving you an ultimatum,' said Wilt. 'One squeak out of those bedsprings up there,
one whiff of pot, one twang of a guitar, one giggle on the stairs and I'll extend this family by
finding digs in town until Miss Schickelgruber has moved out.'

'Her name isn't Schickelwhatchamacallit. It's Mueller. Irmgard Mueller.'

'So was one of Hitler's nastier Obergruppenführers and all I'm saying is '

'You're just jealous,' said Eva. 'If you were a proper man and hadn't got hang-ups about sex
from your parents you wouldn't get so hot under the collar about what other people do.'

Wilt regarded her hatefully. Whenever Eva wanted to subdue him she launched a sexual
offensive. Wilt retired to bed defeated. Discussions of his sexual inadequacies tended to result
in his having to prove Eva wrong practically and after that stew he didn't feel up to it.

He didn't feel up to much by the time he reached the Tech next morning. The quads had fought
their usual intersororial war about who was going to wear what dress before being dragged off to
playgroup and there had been another letter in The Times from Lord Longford demanding the release
of Myra Hindley, the Moors murderess, from prison on the grounds that she was now thoroughly
reformed, a convinced Christian and a socially valuable citizen. 'In which case she can prove her
social value and Christian charity by staying in prison and helping her fellow-convicts,' had
been Wilt's infuriated reaction. The other news was just as depressing. Inflation was up again.
Sterling down. North Sea gas would run out in five years. All in all the world was in its usual
filthy mess and now he had to listen to Dr Mayfield extol the virtues of the Advanced English For
Foreigners course for several intolerably boring hours before dealing with complaints from his
Liberal Studies lecturers about the way he had done the timetable.

One of the worst things about being Head of Liberal Studies was that he had to spend a large
part of his summer vacation fitting classes into rooms and lecturers into classes, and when he
had finished and had defeated the Head of Art who wanted Room 607 for Life Studies while Wilt
needed it for Meat Three, he was still faced with a hassle at the beginning of the year and had
to readjust the timetable because Mrs Fyfe couldn't make Tuesday at two with DMT One because her
husband...It was on such occasions that Wilt wished he was back teaching The Lord of the Flies to
Gasfitters instead of running the department. But his salary was good, the rates on Willington
Road were exorbitant, and for the rest of the year he could spend much of his time sitting in his
office dreaming.

He could sit through most committee meetings in a coma too, but Dr Mayfield's course board was
the one exception. Wilt had to stay awake to prevent Mayfield lumbering him with several more
lectures in his relative absence. Besides, Dr Board would start the term off with a row.

He did. Mayfield had only just begun to stress the need for a more student-oriented curriculum
with special emphasis on socio-economic awareness when Dr Board intervened.

'Codswallop,' he said. 'The business of my department is to teach English students how to
speak German, French, Spanish and Italian, not to explain the origins of their own languages to a
whole lot of aliens, and as for socio-economic awareness, I suggest that Dr Mayfield has his
priorities wrong. If the Arabs I had last year were anything to go by they were economically
aware to the nth degree about the purchasing power of oil and so socially backward that it will
take more than a three-year course to persuade the sods that stoning women to death for being
unfaithful isn't cricket. Perhaps if we had three hundred years...'

'Dr Board, this meeting may well last as long if you keep interrupting,' said the
Vice-Principal. 'Now if Dr Mayfield will just continue...'

The Head of Academic Development continued for another hour, and was all set for the entire
morning when the Head of Engineering objected.

'I see that several of my staff are scheduled to deliver lectures on British Engineering
Achievements in the Nineteenth Century. Now I would like to inform Dr Mayfield and this board
that my department consists of engineers, not historians, and quite frankly they see no reason
why they should be asked to lecture on topics outside their field.'

'Hear, hear,' said Dr Board.

'What is more, I would like to be informed why so much emphasis is being placed on a course
for foreigners at the expense of our own British students.'

'I think I can answer that,' said the Vice-Principal. 'Thanks to the cuts that have been
imposed on us by the local authority we have been forced to subsidize our existing non-paying
courses and staff numbers by expanding the foreign sector where students pay substantial fees. If
you want the figures of the profit we made last year...'

But no one took up the invitation. Even Dr Board was momentarily silenced.

'Until such time as the economy improves,' continued the Vice-Principal, 'a great many
lecturers are only going to keep their jobs because we are running this course. What is more, it
may well be possible to expand Advanced English for Foreigners into a degree course approved by
the CNAA. I think you will all agree that anything which increases our chances of becoming a
Polytechnic is to everyone's advantage.' The Vice-Principal stopped and looked round the room but
nobody demurred. 'In which case all that remains is for Dr Mayfield to allocate the new lectures
to the various departmental heads.'

Dr Mayfield distributed xeroxed lists. Wilt studied his new burden and found that it included
The Development of Liberal and Progressive Social Attitudes in English Society, 1688 to 1978, and
was just about to protest when the Head of Zoology got in first.

'I see here that I am down for Animal Husbandry and Agriculture with special reference to
Intensive Farming of Pigs, Hens, and Stock-Rearing.'

'The subject has ecological significance '

'And is student-oriented,' said Dr Board. 'Battery Education or possibly Hog Raising by
Continuous Assessment. Perhaps we could even run a course on Composting.'

Don't,' said Wilt with a shudder. Dr Board looked at him with interest.

'Your magnificent wife?' he enquired.

Wilt nodded dolefully. 'Yes, she has taken up '

'If I may just get back to my original objection instead of hearing about Mr Wilt's
matrimonial problems,' said the Head of Zoology. 'I want to make it absolutely clear now that I
am not qualified to lecture on Animal Husbandry. I am a zoologist not a farmer and what I know
about Stock-Rearing is zero.'

'We must all extend ourselves,' said Dr Board. 'After all if we are to acquire the doubtful
privilege of calling ourselves a Polytechnic we must put the College before personal
interest.'

'Perhaps you haven't seen what you're down to teach, Board,' Zoology continued, 'Sementic
Influences... shouldn't that be Semantic, Mayfield?'

'Must be the typist's error,' said Mayfield. 'Yes it should read Semantic Influences on
Current Sociological Theories. The bibliography includes Wittgenstein, Chomsky and Wilkes...'

'It doesn't include me,' said Board. 'You can count me out. I don't care if we descend to the
level of a primary school but I am not going to mug up Wittgenstein or Chomsky for the benefit of
anyone.'

'Well then, don't talk about my having to extend myself,' said the Head of Zoology. 'I am not
going into a lecture room filled with Moslems to explain, even with my limited knowledge of the
subject, the advantages of raising pigs in the Persian Gulf.'

'Gentlemen, while recognizing that there are one or two minor amendments necessary to the
lecture titles I think they can be ironed out '

'Wiped out more likely,' said Dr Board. The Vice-Principal ignored his interruption. ' and the
main thing is to keep the lectures in their present format while presenting them at a level
suitable for the individual students.'

'I'm still not mentioning pigs,' said Zoology.

'You don't have to. You can do an elementary series of talks on plants,' said the
Vice-Principal wearily.

'Great. And will someone tell me how in God's name I can even begin to talk in an elementary
way about Wittgenstein? I had an Iraqi last year who couldn't even spell his own name, so what's
the poor bugger going to do with Wittgenstein?' said Dr Board.

'And if I may just bring another subject up,' said a lecturer from the English department
rather diffidently, 'I think we are going to have something of a communications problem with the
eighteen Japanese and the young man from Tibet.'

'Oh really,' said Dr Mayfield. 'A communications problem. You know, it might be as well to add
a lecture or two on Inter-communicational Discourse. It's the sort of subject which is likely to
appeal to the Council for National Academic Awards.'

'It may appeal to them but it certainly doesn't appeal to me,' said Board. 'I've always said
they were the scourings of the Academic world.'

'Yes, and we've already heard you on the subject,' said the Vice-Principal. 'And now to get
back to the Japanese and the young man from Tibet. You did say Tibet, didn't you?'