Wilt (20 page)

‘Well, any fool can tell that. All they’ve got to do is walk past the house,’

‘And the name of the dog. It’s called Clem. I’ve checked that and she’s right.’

‘She didn’t happen to say what she’d been doing for the past week did she?’

‘She said she’d been on a boat,’ said Yates. ‘Then she rang off.’

Inspector Flint sat up in bed. ‘A boat? What boat?’

‘She rang off. Oh and another thing, she said she takes a size ten shoe. She does.’

‘Oh shit.’ said Flint, ‘All right, I’ll come down.’ He got out of bed and began to
dress.

In his cell Wilt stared at the ceiling. After so many hours of interrogation his mind
still reverberated with questions. ‘How did you kill her? Where did you put her? What did
you with the weapon?’ Meaningless questions continually reiterated in the hope they
would finally break him. But Wilt hadn’t broken. He had triumphed. For once in his life he
knew himself to be invincibly right and everyone else totally wrong. Always before he
had had doubts. Plasterers Two might after all, have been right about there being too many
wogs in the country. Perhaps hanging was a deterrent. Wilt didn’t think so but he couldn’t
be absolutely certain. Only time would tell. But in the case of Regina versus Wilt re
the murder of Mrs Wilt there could be no question of his guilt. He could be tried, found
guilty and sentenced, it would make no difference. He was innocent of the charge and if he
was sentenced to life imprisonment the very enormity of the injustice done to him would
compound his knowledge of his own innocence. For the very first time in his life Wilt knew
himself to be free. It was as though the original sin of being Henry Wilt, of 34 Parkview
Avenue, Ipford, lecturer in Liberal Studies at the Fenland College of Arts and
Technology, husband of Eva Wilt and father of none, had been lifted from him. All the
encumbrances of possessions, habits, salary and status, all the social conformities,
the niceties of estimation of himself and other people which he and Eva had acquired,
all these had gone. Locked in his cell Wilt was free to be. And whatever happened he would
never again succumb to the siren calls of self-effacement. After the flagrant contempt
and fury of Inspector Flint, the abuse and the opprobrium heaped on him for a week, who
needed approbation? They could stuff their opinions of him. Wilt would pursue his
independent course and put to good use his evident gifts of inconsequence. Give him a
life sentence and a progressive prison governor and Wilt would drive the man mad within a
month by the sweet reasonableness of his refusal to obey the prison rules. Solitary
confinement and a regime of bread and water, if such punishments still existed, would
not deter him. Give him his freedom and he would apply his new found talents at the Tech.
He would sit happily on committees and reduce them to dissensions by his untiring
adoption of whatever argument was most contrary to the consensus opinion. The race was
not to the swift after all, it was to the indefatigably inconsequential and life was
random, anarchic and chaotic. Rules were made to be broken and the man with the
grasshopper mind was one jump ahead of all the others. Having established this new rule,
Wilt turned on his side and tried to sleep but sleep wouldn’t come. He tried his other side
with equal lack of success. Thoughts, questions, irrelevant answers and imaginary
dialogues filled his mind. He tried counting sheep but found himself thinking of Eva. Dear
Eva, damnable Eva, ebullient Eva and Eva irrepressibly enthusiastic. Like him she had
sought the Absolute, the Eternal Truth which would save her the bother of ever having to
think for herself again. She had sought it in Pottery, in Transcendental Meditation, in
judo, on trampolines and most incongruously of all in Oriental Dance. Finally she
had tried to find it in sexual emancipation, Women’s Lib and the Sacrament of the Orgasm
in which she could forever lose herself. Which, come to think of it, was what she appeared
to have done. And taken the bloody Pringsheims with her. Well she would certainly have some
explaining to do when and if she ever returned. Wilt smiled to himself at the thought of
what she would say when she discovered what her latest infatuation with the infinite
had led to. He’d see to it that she had cause to regret it to her dying day.

On the floor of the sitting-room at the Vicarage Eva Wilt struggled with the growing
conviction that her dying day-was already over and done with. Certainly everyone she
came into contact with seemed to think she was dead. The policeman she had spoken to on
the phone had seemed disinclined to believe her assertion that she was alive and at least
relatively well and had demanded proofs of her identity in the most disconcerting
fashion. Eva had retreated stricken from the encounter with her confidence in her own
continuing existence seriously undermined and it had only needed the reaction of
the Rev St John Froude to her appearance in his house to complete her misery. His frantic
appeals to the Almighty to rescue the soul of our dear departed, one Eva Wilt, deceased,
from its present shape and unendurable form had affected Eva profoundly. She knelt on the
carpet and sobbed while the Vicar stared at her over his glasses, shut his eyes, lifted up a
shaky voice in prayer, opened his eyes, shuddered and generally behaved in a manner
calculated to cause gloom and despondency in the putative corpse and when, in a last
desperate attempt to get Eva Wilt, deceased, to take her proper place in the heavenly
choir he cut short a prayer about ‘Man that is born of Woman hath but a short time to live and
is full of misery and struck up ‘Abide with me’ with many a semi-quaver, Eva abandoned all
attempt at self-control and wailed ‘Fast falls the eventide’ most affectingly. By the
time they had got to ‘I need thy presence every passing hour’ the Rev St John Froude was of
an entirely contrary opinion. He staggered from the room and took sanctuary in his
study. Behind him Eva Wilt espousing her new role as deceased with all the enthusiasm
she had formerly bestowed on trampolines, judo and pottery, demanded to know where
death’s sting was and where, grave, thy victory. ‘As if I bloody knew,’ muttered the Vicar
and reached for the whisky bottle only to find that it too was empty. He sat down and put
his hands over his ears to shut out the dreadful noise. On the whole ‘Abide with me’ was the
last hymn he should have chosen. He’d have been better off with ‘there is a green hill far
away’. It was less open to misinterpretation.

When at last the hymn ended he sat relishing the silence and was about to investigate
the possibility that there was another bottle in the larder when there was a knock on the
door and Eva entered.

‘Oh Father I have sinned,’ she shrieked, doing her level best, to wail and gnash her
teeth at the same time. The Rev St John Froude gripped the arms of his chair and tried to
swallow. It was not easy. Then overcoming the reasonable fear that delirium tremens had
come all too suddenly he managed to speak. ‘Rise, my child.’ he gasped as Eva writhed on the
rugs before him, ‘I will hear your confession.’

Inspector Flint switched the tape recorder off and looked at wilt.

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’ said Wilt.

‘Is that her? Is that Mrs Wilt?’

Wilt nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’

‘What do you mean you’re afraid so? The damned woman is alive. You should be fucking
grateful. Instead of that you sit there saying you’re afraid so.’

Wilt sighed. ‘I was just thinking what an abyss there is between the person as we
remember and imagine them and the reality of what they are. I was beginning to have fond
memories of her and now…’

‘You ever been to Waterswick?’

Wilt shook his head. ‘Never.’

‘Know the Vicar there?’

‘Didn’t even know there was a Vicar there.’

‘And you wouldn’t know how she got there?’

‘You heard her,’ said Wilt. ‘She said she’d been on a boat.’

‘And you wouldn’t know anyone with a boat, would you?’

‘People in my circle don’t have boats, Inspector. Maybe the Pringsheims have a
boat.’

Inspector Flint considered the possibility and rejected it. They had checked the
boatyards out and the Pringsheims didn’t have a boat and hadn’t hired one either.

On the other hand the possibility that he had been the victim of some gigantic hoax,
a deliberate and involved scheme to make him look an idiot, was beginning to take shape
in his mind. At the instigation of this infernal Wilt he had ordered the exhumation of
an inflatable doll and had been photographed staring lividly at it at the very moment it
changed sex. He had instituted a round-up of pork pies unprecedented in the history of
the country. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sweetbreads instituted legal
proceedings for the damage done to their previously unspotted reputation. And
finally, he had held an apparently innocent man for questioning for a week and would
doubtless be held responsible for the delay and additional cost in building the new
Administration block at the Tech. There were, in all probability, other appalling
consequences to be considered, but that was enough to be going on with. And he had nobody
to blame but himself. Or…Wilt. He looked at Wilt venomously.

Wilt smiled. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.

‘You don’t,’ said the Inspector. ‘You’ve no idea.’

‘That we are all the creatures of circumstance, that things are never what they seem,
that there’s more to this than meets…’

‘We’ll see about that,’ said the Inspector.

Wilt got up. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll want me for anything else,’ he said. ‘I’ll be
getting along home.’

‘You’ll be doing no such thing. You’re coming with us to pick up Mrs Wilt.’

They went out into the courtyard and got into a police car. As they drove through the
suburbs, past the filling stations and factories and out across the fens Wilt shrank into
the back seat of the car and felt the sense of freedom he had enjoyed in the Police Station
evaporate. And with every mile it dwindled farther and the harsh reality of choice, of
having to earn a living, of boredom and the endless petty arguments with Eva, of bridge
on Saturday nights with the Mottrams and drives on Sundays with Eva, reasserted itself.
Beside him, sunk in sullen silence, Inspector Flint lost his symbolic appeal. No longer
the mentor of Wilt’s self-confidence, the foil to his inconsequentiality, he had
became a fellow sufferer in the business of living almost a mirror-image of Wilt’s
own nonentity. And ahead, across this flat bleak landscape with its black earth and
cumulus skies, lay Eva and a lifetime of attempted explanations and
counter-accusations. For a moment Wilt considered shouting ‘Stop the car. I want to get
out’, but the moment passed. Whatever the future held he would learn to live with it. He
had not discovered the paradoxical nature of freedom only to succumb once more to the
servitude of Parkview Avenue, the Tech and Eva’s trivial enthusiasms. He was Wilt, the
man with the grasshopper mind.

Eva was drunk. The Rev St John Froude’s automatic reaction to her appalling
confession had been to turn from whisky to 150% Polish spirit which he kept for
emergencies and Eva in between agonies of repentance and the outpourings of lurid sins,
had wet her whistle with the stuff. Encouraged by its effect, by the petrified
benevolence of the Vicar’s smile and by the growing conviction that if she was dead
eternal life demanded an act of absolute contrition while if she wasn’t it allowed her
to avoid the embarrassment of explaining what precisely she was doing naked in someone
else’s house, Eva confessed her sins with an enthusiasm that matched her deepest needs.
This was what she had sought in judo and pottery and Oriental dance, an orgiastic
expiation of her guilt. She confessed sins she had committed and sins she hadn’t, sine
that had occurred to her and sins she had forgotten. She had betrayed Henry, she had
wished him dead, she had lusted after other men, she was an adulterated woman, she was a
lesbian, she was a nymphomaniac. And interspersed with these sins of the flesh there were
sins of omission Eva left nothing out. Henry’s cold suppers, his lonely walks with the
dog, her lack of appreciation for all he had done for her, her failure to be a good wife,
her obsession with Harpic…everything poured out. In his chair the Rev St John Froude sat
nodding incessantly like a toy dog in the back window of a car, raising his head to stare
at her when she confessed to being a nymphomaniac and dropping it abruptly at the
mention of Harpic, and all the time desperately trying to understand what had brought a
fat naked–the shroud kept falling off her–lady, no definitely not lady, woman to his house
with all the symptoms of religious mania upon her.

‘My child, is that all?’ he muttered when Eva finally exhausted her repertoire.

‘Yes, Father,’ sobbed Eva.

‘Thank God,’ said the Rev St John Froude fervently and wondered what to do next. If half
the things he had heard were true he was in the presence of a sinner so depraved as to make
the ex-Archdeacon of Ongar a positive saint. On the other hand, there were incongruities
about her sins that made him hesitate before granting absolution. A confession full of
falsehoods was no sign of true repentance.

‘I take it that you are married,’ he said doubtfully, ‘and that Henry is your lawful
wedded husband?’

‘Yes,’ said Eva. ‘Dear Henry.’

Poor sod, thought the Vicar but he was too tactful to say so. ‘And you have left him?’

‘Yes’

‘For another man?’

Eva shook her head. ‘To teach him a lesson,’ she said with sudden belligerence.

‘A lesson?’ said the Vicar, trying frantically to imagine what sort of lesson the
wretched Mr Wilt had learnt from her absence. ‘You did say a lesson?’

‘Yes,’ said Eva, ‘I wanted him to learn that he couldn’t get along without me.’

The Rev St John Froude sipped his drink thoughtfully. If even a quarter of her
confession was to be believed her husband must be finding getting along without her
quite delightful. ‘And now you want to go back to him?’

‘Yes,’ said Eva.

‘But he won’t have you?’

‘He can’t. The police have got him.’

‘The police?’ said the Vicar. ‘And may one ask what the police have got him for?’

‘They say he’s murdered me,’ said Eva.

The Rev St John Froude eyed her with new alarm. He knew now that Mrs Wilt was out of her
mind. He glanced round for something to use as a weapon should the need arise and finding
nothing better to choose from than a plaster bust of the poet Dante and the bottle of
Polish spirit, picked up the latter by its neck. Eva held her glass out.

‘Oh you are awful,’ she said. ‘You’re getting me tiddly.’

‘Quite,’ said the Vicar and put the bottle down again hastily. It was bad enough being
alone in the house with a large, drunk, semi-naked woman who imagined that her husband had
murdered her and who confessed to sins he had previously only read about without her
jumping to the conclusion that he was deliberately trying to make her drunk. The Rev St
John Froude had no desire to figure prominently in next Sunday’s News of the World.

‘You were saying that your husband murdered…’ He stopped. That seemed an unprofitable
subject to pursue.

‘How could he have murdered me?’ asked Eva. ‘I’m here in the flesh, aren’t I?’

‘Definitely,’ said the Vicar. ‘Most definitely.’

‘Well then,’ said Eva. ‘And anyway Henry couldn’t murder anyone. He wouldn’t know how.
He can’t even change a fuse in a plug. I have to do everything like that in the house.’ She
stared at the Vicar balefully. ‘Are you married?’

‘No,’ said the Rev St John Froude, wishing to hell that he was.

‘What do you know about life if you aren’t married?’ asked Eva truculently. The Polish
spirit was getting to her now and with it there came a terrible sense of grievance. ‘Men.
What good are men? They can’t even keep a house tidy. Look at this room. I ask you.’ She waved
her arms to emphasize the point and the dustcover dropped. Just look at it.’ But the Rev St
John Froude had no eyes for the room. What he could see of Eva was enough to convince him that
his life was in danger. He bounded from the chair, trod heavily on an occasional table,
overturned the wastepaper basket and threw himself through the door into the hall. As he
stumbled away in search of sanctuary the front door bell rang. The Rev St John Froude opened
it and stared into Inspector Flint’s face.

‘Thank God, you’ve come,’ he gasped, ’she’s in there.’

The Inspector and two uniformed constables went across the hall. Wilt followed
uneasily. This was the moment he had been dreading. In the event it was better than he had
expected. Not so for Inspector Flint. He entered the study and found himself confronted
by a large naked woman.

‘Mrs Wilt…’ he began but Eva was staring at the two uniformed constables.

‘Where’s my Henry?’ Eva shouted. ‘You’ve got my Henry.’ She hurled herself forward.
Unwisely the Inspector attempted to restrain her.

‘Mrs Wilt, if you’ll just…’ A blow on the side of his head ended the sentence.

‘Keep your hands off me,’ yelled Eva, and putting her knowledge of judo to good use hurled
him to the floor. She was about to repeat the performance with the constables when Wilt
thrust himself forward.

‘Here I am, dear,’ he said. Eva stopped in her tracks. For a moment she quivered and, seen
from Inspector Flint’s viewpoint, appeared to be about to melt. ‘Oh Henry,’ she said,
‘what have they been doing to you?’

‘Nothing at all, dear,’ said Wilt. ‘Now get your clothes on. We’re going home.’ Eva looked
down at herself, shuddered and allowed him to lead her out of the room.

Slowly and wearily Inspector Flint got to his feet. He knew now why Wilt had put that
bloody doll down the hole and why he had sat so confidently through days and nights of
interrogation. After twelve years of marriage to Eva Wilt the urge to commit homicide
if only by proxy would be overwhelming. And as for Wilt’s ability to stand up to
cross-examination…it was self-evident. But the Inspector knew too that he would never
be able to explain it to anyone else. There were mysteries of human relationships that
defied analysis. And Wilt had stood there calmly and told her to get her clothes on. With a
grudging sense of admiration Flint went out into the hall. The little sod had guts,
whatever else you could say about him.

They drove back to Parkview Avenue in silence. In the back seat Eva, wrapped in a
blanket, slept with her head lolling on Wilt’s shoulder. Beside her Henry Wilt sat
proudly. A woman who could silence Inspector Flint with one swift blow to the head was
worth her weight in gold and besides that scene in the study had given him the weapon he
needed. Naked and drunk in a Vicar’s study…There would be no questions now about why he had
put that doll down the hole. No accusations, no recriminations. The entire episode would
be relegated to the best forgotten. And with it would go all doubts about his virility or
his ability to get on in the world. It was checkmate. For a moment Wilt almost lapsed into
sentimentality and thought of love before recalling just how dangerous a topic that
was. He would be better off sticking to indifference and undisclosed affection. ‘Let
sleeping dogs lie,’ he muttered.

It was an opinion shared by the Pringsheims. As they were helped from the cruiser to a
police launch, as they climbed ashore, as they explained to a sceptical Inspector Flint
how they had come to be marooned for a week in Eel Stretch in a boat that belonged to
someone else, they were strangely uncommunicative. No they didn’t know how the door of
the bathroom had been bust down. Well maybe there had been an accident. They had been too
drunk to remember. A doll? What doll? Grass? You mean marijuana? They had no idea. In their
house?

Inspector Flint let them go finally. ‘I’ll be seeing you again when the charges have
been properly formulated,’ he said grimly. The Pringsheims left for Rossiter Grove to
pack. They flew out of Heathrow next morning.