Wilt (2 page)

Wilt heard the news before lunch in the canteen.

‘I’m sorry, Henry,’ said Mr Morris as they lined up with their trays, ‘it’s this wretched
economic squeeze. Even Modern Languages had to take a cut. They only got two promotions
through.’

Wilt nodded. It was what he had come to expect. He was in the wrong department, in the
wrong marriage and in the wrong life. He took his fish forgers across to a table in the
corner and ate by himself. Around him other members of staff sat discussing A-level
prospects and who was going to sit on the course board next term. They taught Maths or
Economics or English, subjects that counted and where promotion was easy. Liberal
Studies didn’t count and promotion was out of the question. It was as simple as that. Wilt
finished his lunch and went up to the reference library to look up insulin in the
Pharmacopoeia. He had an idea it was the one untraceable poison.

At five to two, none the wiser, he went down to Room 752 to extend the sensibilities of
fifteen apprentice butchers, designated on the timetable as Meat One. As usual they
were late and drunk.

‘We’ve been drinking Bill’s health,’ they told him when they drifted in at ten past
two.

‘Really?’ said Wilt, handing out copies of The Lord of the Flies. ‘And how is he?’

‘Bloody awful,’ said a large youth with ‘Stuff Off painted across the back of his leather
jacket. ‘He’s puking his guts out. It’s his birthday and he had four Vodkas and a
Babycham…’

‘We’d got to the part where Piggy is in the forest,’ said Wilt, heading them off a
discussion of what Bill had drunk for his birthday. He reached for aboard duster and rubbed
a drawing of a Dutch Cap off the blackboard.

‘That’s Mr Sedgwick’s trademark,’ said one of the butchers, ‘he’s always going on about
contraceptives and things. He’s got a thing about them.’

‘A thing about them?’ said Wilt loyally.

‘You know, birth control. Well, he used to be a Catholic, didn’t be? And now he’s not, he’s
making up for lost time,’ said a small pale-faced youth unwrapping a Mars Bar.

‘Someone should tell him about the pill,’ said another youth lifting his head
somnolently from the desk. ‘You can’t feel a thing with a Frenchie. You get more thrill with
the pill.’

‘I suppose you do,’ said Wilt, ‘but I understood there were side-effects.’

‘Depends which side you want it,’ said a lad with sideburns.

Wilt turned back to The Lord of the Flies reluctantly. He had read the thing two hundred
times already.

Now Piggy goes into the forest…’ he began, only to be stopped by another butcher,
who evidently shared his distaste for the misfortunes of Piggy.

‘You only get bad effects with the pill if you use ones that are high in oestrogen.’

‘That’s very interesting,’ said Wilt. ‘Oestrogen? You seem to know a lot about it.’

‘Old girl down our street got a bloodclot in her leg…’

‘Silly old clot,’ said the Mars Bar.

‘Listen,’ said Wilt. ‘Either we hear what Peter has to tell us about the effects of the
pill or we get on and read about Piggy.

‘Fuck Piggy,’ said the sideburns.

‘Right,’ said Wilt heartily, ‘then keep quiet.’

‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘this old girl, well she wasn’t all that old, maybe thirty, she was on
the pill and she got this bloodclot and the doctor told my auntie it was the oestrogen and
she’d better take a different sort of pill just in case and the old girl down the street,
her old man had to go and have a vasectomy so’s she wouldn’t have another bloodclot.’

‘Buggered if anyone’s going to get me to have a vasectomy,’ said the Mars Bar, ‘I want
to know I’m all there.’

‘We all have ambitions,’ said Wilt.

‘Nobody’s going to hack away at my knackers with a bloody great knife,’ said the
sideburns.

‘Nobody’d want to,’ said someone else.

‘What about the bloke whose missus you banged,’ said the Mars Bar. ‘I bet he wouldn’t mind
having a go.’

Wilt applied the sanction of Piggy again and got them back on to vasectomy.

‘Anyway, it’s not irreversible any more,’ said Peter. ‘They ran put a tiny little gold
tap in and you can turn it as when you want a nipper.’

‘Go on. That’s not true.’

‘Well, not on the National Health you can’t, but if you pay they can read about it in a
magazine. They’ve been doing experiments in America’

‘What happens if the washer goes wrong?’ asked the Mars Bar.

‘I suppose they call a plumber in.’

Wilt sat and listened while Meat One ranged far and wide about vasectomy and the coil
and Indians getting free transistors and the plane that landed at Audley End with a lot
of illegal immigrants and what somebody’s brother who was a policeman in Brixton said
about blacks and how the Irish were just as bad and bombs and back to Catholics and birth
control and who’d want to live in Ireland where you couldn’t even buy French letters and so
back to the Pill. And all the time his mind filled itself obsessively with ways and means
of getting rid of Eva. A diet of birth-control pills high on oestrogen? If he ground them
up and mixed them with the Ovaltine she took at bedtime there was a chance she’d develop
bloodclots all over the place in no time at all. Wilt put the notion out of his head. Eva
with bloodclots was too awful to stomach, and anyway it might not work. No, it would have
to be something quick, certain and painless. Preferably an accident.

At the end of the hour Wilt collected the books and made his way back to the Staff Room.
He had a free period. On the way he passed the site of the new Administration block. The
ground had been cleared and the builders had moved in and were boring pile holes for the
foundations. Wilt stopped and watched as the drilling machine wound slowly down into the
ground. They were making wide holes. Very wide. Big enough for a body.

‘How deep are you going?’ he asked one of the workmen.

‘Thirty feet.’

‘Thirty feet?’ said Wilt. ‘When’s the concrete going in?’

‘Monday, with any luck,’ said the man.

Wilt passed on. A new and quite horrible idea had just occurred to him.

It was one of Eva Wilt’s better days. She had days, better days, and one of those days.
Days were just days when nothing went wrong and she got the washing-up done and the front
room vacuumed and the windows washed and the beds made and the bath Vimmed and the lavatory
pan Harpicked and went round to the Harmony Community Centre and helped with Xeroxing
or sorted old clothes for the Jumble Sale and generally made herself useful and came
home for lunch and went to the library and had tea with Mavis or Susan or Jean and talked
about life and how seldom Henry made love to her even perfunctorily nowadays and how she
had missed her opportunity by refusing a bank clerk who was a manager now and came home
and made Henry’s supper and went out to Yoga or Flower Arrangement or Meditation or
Pottery and finally climbed into bed with the feeling that she had got something
done.

On one of those days nothing went right. The activities were exactly the same but each
episode was tainted with some minor disaster like the fuse blowing on the
vacuum-cleaner or the drain in the sink getting blocked with a piece of carrot so that by
the time Henry came home he was either greeted by silence or subjected to a quite
unwarranted exposé of all his faults and shortcomings. On one of those days Wilt
usually took the dog for an extended walk via the Ferry Path Inn and spent a restless
night getting up and going to the bathroom, thus nullifying the cleansing qualities of
the Harpic Eva had puffed round the pan and providing her with a good excuse to point out
his faults once again in the morning.

‘What the hell am I supposed to do?’ he had asked after one of those nights. ‘If I pull
the chain you grumble because I’ve woken you up and if I don’t you say it looks nasty in the
morning.’

‘Well, it does, and in any case you don’t have to wash all the Harpic off the sides. And
don’t say you don’t. I’ve seen you. You aim it all the way round so that it all gets taken
off. You do it quite deliberately.’

‘If I pulled the chain it would all get flushed off anyway and you’d get woken up into
the bargain,’ Wilt told her, conscious that he did make a habit of aiming at the Harpic. He
had a grudge against the stuff.

‘Why can’t you just wait until the morning? And anyway it serves you right,’ she
continued, forestalling his obvious answer, ‘for drinking all that beer. You’re
supposed to be taking Clem for a walk, not swilling ale in that horrid pub.’

‘To pee or not to pee, that is the question,’ said Wilt helping himself to All-Bran.
‘What do you expect me to do? Tie a knot in the damned thing?’

‘It wouldn’t make any difference to me if you did,’ said Eva bitterly.

‘It would make a hell of a lot of difference to me, thank you very much.’

‘I was talking about our sex life and you know it.’

‘Oh, that.’ said Wilt.

But that was on one of those days.

On one of her better days something unexpected happened to inject the daily round
with a new meaning and to awake in her those dormant expectations that somehow
everything would suddenly change for the better and stay that way. It was on such
expectations that her faith in life was based. They were the spiritual equivalent of the
trivial activities that kept her busy and Henry subdued. On one of her better days the
sun shone brighter, the floor in the hall gleamed brighter and Eva Wilt was brighter herself
and hummed ‘Some day my prince will come’ while Hoovering the stairs. On one of her better
days Eva went forth to meet the world with a disarming goodheartedness and awoke in
others the very same expectations that so thrilled her in herself. And on one of her
better days Henry had to get his own supper and if he was wise kept out of the house as long
as possible. Eva Wilt’s expectations demanded something a sight more invigorating
than Henry Wilt after a day at the Tech. It was on the evenings of such days that he came
nearest to genuinely deciding to murder her and to hell with the consequences.

On this particular day she was on her way to the Community Centre when she ran into
Sally Pringsheim. It was one of those entirely fortuitous meetings that resulted from
Eva making her way on foot instead of by bicycle and going through Rossiter Grove instead
of straight down Parkview Avenue which was half a mile shorter. Sally was just driving out
of the gate in a Mercedes with a F registration which meant it was brand new. Eva noted
the fact and smiled accordingly.

‘How funny me running into you like this.’ she said brightly as Sally stopped the car
and unlocked the door.

‘Can I give you a lift? I’m going into town to look for something casual to wear
tonight. Gaskell’s got some Swedish professor coming over from Heidelberg and we’re
taking him to Ma Tante’s.

Eva Wilt climbed in happily, her mind computing the cost of the car and the house and
the significance of wearing something casual at Ma Tante’s (where she had heard that
starters like Prawn Cocktails cost 95p) and the fact that Dr Pringsheim entertained Swedish
professors when they came to Ipford.

‘I was going to walk to town,’ she lied. ‘Henry’s taken the car and it’s such a lovely
day.’

‘Gaskell’s bought a bicycle. He says it’s quicker and it keeps him fit,’ said Sally,
thus condemning Henry Wilt to yet another misfortune. Eva made a note to see that he
bought a bike at the police auction and cycled to work in rain or snow. ‘I was thinking of
trying Felicity Fashions for a shantung poncho. I don’t know what they’re like but I’ve
been told they’re good. Professor Grant’s wife goes there and she says they have the best
selection.’

‘I’m sure they must have.’ said Eva Wilt, whose patronage of Felicity Fashions had
consisted off looking in the window and wondering who on earth could afford dresses at
forty pounds. Now she knew. They drove into town and parked in the multi-storey car park. By
that time Eva had stored a lot more information about the Pringsheims in her memory. They
came from California. Sally had met Gaskell while hitchhiking through Arizona. She had
been to Kansas State but had dropped out to live on a commune. There had been other men in
her life. Gaskell loathed cats. They gave him hay fever. Women’s Lib meant more than burning
your bra. It meant total commitment to the programme of women’s superiority over men.
Love was great if you didn’t let it get to you. Compost was in and colour TV out. Gaskell’s
father had owned a chain of stores which was sordid. Money was handy and Rossiter Grove was
a bore. Above all, fucking had to be, just had to be fun whichever way you looked at it.

Eva Wilt received this information with a jolt. In her circle ‘fuck’ was a word
husbands used when they hit their thumbs with hammers. When Eva used it she did so in the
isolation of the bathroom and with a wistfulness that robbed it of its crudity and
imbued it with a splendid virility so that a good fuck became the most distant and
abstract of all her expectations and quite removed from Henry’s occasional early
morning fumblings. And if ‘fuck’ was reserved for the bathroom, fucking was even more
remote. It suggested an almost continuous activity, a familiar occurrence that was
both casual and satisfying and added a new dimension to life. Eva Wilt stumbled out of
the car and followed Sally to Felicity Fashions in a state of shock.

If fucking was fun, shopping with Sally Pringsheim was a revelation. It was marked by
a decisiveness that was truly breathtaking. Where Eva would have hummed and haaed, Sally
selected and having selected moved on down the racks, discarded things she didn’t like
leaving them hanging over chairs, seized others, glanced at them and said she supposed they
would do with a bored acceptance that was infectious, and left the shop with a pile of
boxes containing two hundred pounds’ worth of shantung ponchos, silk summer coats,
scarves and blouses. Eva Wilt had spent seventy on a pair of yellow lounging pyjamas and
a raincoat with lapels and a belt that Sally said was pure Gatsby.

‘Now all you need is the hat and you’ll be it,’ she said as they loaded the boxes into
the car. They bought the hat, a trilby, and then had coffee at the Mombasa Coffee House
where Sally leant across the table intensely, smoking a long thin cigar, and talking
about body contact in a loud voice so that Eva was conscious that the women at several
nearby tables had stopped tacking and were listening rather disapprovingly.

‘Gaskell’s nipples drive me wild,’ Sally said. ‘They drive him wild too when I suck
them.’

Eva drank her coffee and wondered what Henry would do if she took it into her head to
suck his nipples. Drive him wild was hardly the word and besides she was beginning to
regret having spent seventy pounds. That would drive him wild too. Henry didn’t approve
of credit cards. But she was enjoying herself too much to let the thought of his reaction
spoil her day.

‘I think teats are so important,’ Sally went on. Two women at the next table paid their
bill and walked out.

‘I suppose they must be,’ said Eva Wilt uneasily. ‘I’ve never had much use for
mine.’

‘Haven’t you?’ said Sally. ‘We’ll have to do something about that.’

‘I don’t see that there is much anyone can do about it,’ said Eva. ‘Henry never takes his
pyjamas off and my nightie gets in the way.’

‘Don’t tell me you wear things in bed. Oh you poor thing. And nighties, God, how
humiliating for you! I mean it’s typical of a male-dominated society, all this
costume differentiation. You must be suffering from touch deprivation. Gaskell says
it’s as bad as vitamin deficiency.’

‘Well, Henry is always tired when he gets home,’ Eva told her. ‘And I go out a lot.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Sally, ‘Gaskell says male fatigue is a symptom of penile
insecurity. Is Henry’s big or small?’

‘Well it depends,’ said Eva hoarsely. ‘Sometimes it’s big and sometimes it isn’t.’

‘I much prefer men with small ones,’ said Sally, ‘they try so much harder.’

They finished their coffee and went back to the car discussing Gaskell’s penis and his
theory that in a sexually undifferentiated satiety nipple stimulation would play
an increasingly important role in developing the husband’s sense of his
hermapharoditic nature,’ ‘He’s written an article on it,’ Sally said as they drove home.
‘It’s called “The Man As Mother.” It was published in Suck last year.’

‘Suck?’ said Eva.

‘Yes, it’s a journal published by the Society for Undifferentiated Sexual
Studies in Kansas. G’s done a lot of work for them on animal behaviour. He did his thesis
on Role Play in Rats there.’

‘That sounds very interesting,’ said Eva uncertainly. Roll or role? Whichever it was
it was impressive and certainly Henry’s occasional pieces on Day Release Apprentices
and Literature in the Liberal Studies Quarterly hardly measured up to Dr Pringsheim’s
monographs.

‘Oh I don’t know. It’s all so obvious really. If you put two male rats together in a
cage long enough one of them is simply bound to develop active tendencies and the other
passive ones,’ said Sally wearily. ‘But Gasket was absolutely furious. He thought they
ought to alternate. That’s G all over. I told him how silly he was being. I said, “G
honey, rats are practically undifferentiated anyway. I mean how can you expect them
to be able to make an existential choice?” and you know what he said? He said, “Pubic
baby, rats are the paradigm. Just remember that and you won’t go far wrong. Rats are the
paradigm.” What do you think of that?’

‘I think rats are rather horrid,’ said Eva without thinking. Sally laughed and put her
hand on her knee.

‘Oh Eva, darling,’ she murmured, ‘you’re so adorably down to earth. No, I’m not taking
you back to Parkview Avenue. You’re coming home with me for a drink and lunch. I’m simply
dying to see you in those lemon loungers.’

They turned into Rossiter Grove.

If rats were a paradigm for Dr Pringsheim, Printers Three were a paradigm for Henry Wilt,
though of a rather different sort. They represented all that was most difficult,
insensitive and downright bloodyminded about Day Release Classes and to make matters
worse the sods thought they were literate because they could actually read and Voltaire
was an idiot because he made everything go wrong for Candide. Coming after Nursery
Nurses and during his Stand-to period, Printers Three brought out the worst in him. They
had obviously brought out the worst in Cecil Williams who should have been taking
them.

‘It’s the second week he’s been off sick,’ they told Wilt.

‘I’m not at all surprised,’ said Wilt. ‘You lot are enough to make anyone sick.’

‘We had one bloke went and gassed himself. Pinkerton his name was. He took us for a term
and made us read this book Jude the Obscure. That wasn’t half a depressing book. All about
this twit Jude.’

‘I had an idea it was,’ said Wilt.

‘Next term old Pinky didn’t come back. He went down by the river and stuck a pipe up the
exhaust and gassed himself.’

‘I can’t say I blame him,’ said Wilt.

‘Well I like that. He was supposed to set us an example.’

Wilt looked at the class grimly.

‘I’m sure he had that in mind when he gassed himself,’ he said. ‘And now if you’ll just get
on and read quietly, eat quietly and smoke so that no one can see you from the Admin.
block, I’ve got work to do.’

‘Work? You lot don’t know what work is. All you do is sit at a desk all day and read. Call
that work? Buggered if I do and they pay you to do it…’

‘Shut up,’ said Wilt with startling violence. ‘Shut your stupid trap.’

‘Who’s going to make me?’ said the Printer.

Wilt tried to control his temper and for once found it impossible. There was something
incredibly arrogant about Printers Three.

‘I am,’ he shouted.

‘You and who else? You couldn’t make a mouse shut its trap, not if you tried all day.’

Wilt stood up. ‘You fucking little shit,’ he shouted. ‘You dirty snivelling…’

‘I must say, Henry, I’d have expected you to show more restraint,’ said the Head of
Liberal Studies an hour later when Wilt’s nose had stopped bleeding and the Tech Sister
had put a Band-Aid on his eyebrow.