Wilt (3 page)

‘Well it wasn’t my class and they got my goat by gloating about Pinkerton’s suicide. If
Williams hadn’t been off sick it wouldn’t have happened,’ Wilt explained. ‘He’s always sick
when he has to take Printers Three.’

Mr Morris shook his head dispiritedly. ‘I don’t care who they were. You simply can’t go
around assaulting students…’

‘Assaulting students? I never touched…’

‘All right, but you did use offensive language. Bob Fenwick was in the next classroom
and he heard you call this Allison fellow a fucking little shit and an evil-minded
moron. Now, is it any wonder he took a poke at you?

‘I suppose not,’ said Wilt. ‘I shouldn’t have lost my temper. I’m sorry.’

‘In that case we’ll just forget it happened,’ said Mr Morris. ‘But just remember if I’m
to get you a Senior Lectureship I can’t have you blotting your copybook having punch-ups
with students.’

‘I didn’t have a punch-up,’ said Wilt, ‘he punched me.’

‘Well, let’s just hope he doesn’t go to the police and charge you with assault. That’s the
last sort of publicity we want.’

‘Just take me off Printers Three,’ said Wilt, ‘I’ve had my fill of the brutes.’

He went down the corridor and collected his coat and briefcase from the Staff Room. His
nose felt twice its normal size and his eyebrow hurt abominably. On his way out to the
carpark he passed several other members of staff but no one stopped to ask him what had
happened. Henry Wilt passed unnoticed out of the Tech and got into his car. He shut the
door and sat for several minutes watching the piledrivers at work on the new block. Up,
down, up, down. Nails in a coffin. And one day one inevitable day he would be in his coffin,
still unnoticed, still an Assistant Lecturer (Grade Two) and quite forgotten by
everyone except some lout in Printers Three who would always remember the day he had
punched a Liberal Studies lecturer on the nose and got away with it. He’d probably boast
about it to his grandchildren.

Wilt started the car and drove out onto the main road filled with loathing for Printers
Three, the Tech, life in general and himself in particular. He understood now why
terrorists were prepared to sacrifice themselves for the good of some cause. Given a
bomb and a cause he would cheerfully have blown himself and any innocent bystanders to
Kingdom Come just to prove for one glorious if brief moment that he was an effective
force. But he had neither bomb nor cause. Instead he drove home recklessly and parked
outside 34 Parkview Avenue. Then he unlocked the front door and went inside.

There was a strange smell in the hall. Some sort of perfume. Musky and sweet. He put his
brief-case down and looked into the living-room. Eva was evidently out. He went into the
kitchen and put the kettle on and felt his nose. He would have a good look at it in the
bathroom mirror. He was halfway upstairs and conscious that there was a positively
miasmic quality about the perfume when he was brought to a halt. Eva Wilt stood in the
bedroom doorway in a pair of astonishingly yellow pyjamas with enormously flared
trousers. She looked quite hideous, and to make matters worse she was smoking a long thin
cigarette in a long thin holder and her mouth was a brilliant red.

‘Penis baby,’ she murmured hoarsely and swayed. ‘Come in here. I’m going to suck your
nipples till you come me oralwise.’

Wilt turned and fled downstairs. The bitch was drunk. It was one of her better days.
Without waiting to turn the kettle off, Henry Wilt went out of the front door and got back
into the ear. He wasn’t staying around to have her suck his nipples. He’d had all he could
take for one day.

Eva Wilt went downstairs and looked for penis baby halfheartedly. For one thing she
didn’t want to find him and for another she didn’t feel like sucking his nipples and for a
third she knew she shouldn’t have spent seventy pounds on a raincoat and a pair of beach
pyjamas she could have got for thirty at Blowdens. She didn’t need them and she couldn’t
see herself walking down Parkview Avenue looking like The Great Gatsby. Besides, she felt
a bit sick.

Still, he had left the kettle on so he must be somewhere. It wasn’t like Henry to go out
and leave the kettle on. She looked in the lounge. It had been the sitting-room until
lunchtime when Sally called her sitting-room a lounge. She looked in the dining-room, now
the diner, and even in the garden but Henry had vanished, taking, with him the car, and
her hopes that nipple-sucking would bring new meaning to their marriage and put an end to
her body contact deprivation. Finally she gave up the search and made herself a nice pot
of tea and sat in the kitchen wondering what on earth had induced her to marry a male
chauvinist pig like Henry Wilt who wouldn’t have known a good fuck if he had been handed
one on a plate and whose idea of a sophisticated evening was a boneless chicken curry at
the New Delhi and a performance of King Lear at the Guildhall. Why couldn’t she have
married someone like Gaskell Pringsheim who entertained Swedish professors at Ma Tante
and who understood the importance of clitoral stimulation as a necessary
con-something-or-other of a truly satisfying interpersonal penetration? Other
people still found her attractive. Patrick Mottram did and so did John Frost who taught her
pottery, and Sally had said she was lovely. Eva sat staring into space, the space between
the washing-up rack and the Kenwood mixer Henry had given her for Christmas, and thought
about Sally and how she had looked at her so strangely when she was changing into her lemon
loungers. Sally had stood, in the doorway of the Pringsheims’ bedroom, smoking a cigar and
watching her movements with a sensual calculation that had made Eva blush.

‘Darling, you have such a lovely body,’ she had said as Eva turned hurriedly and
scrambled into the trousers to avoid revealing the hole in her panties. ‘You mustn’t let it
go to waste.’

‘Do you really think they suit me?’

But Sally had been staring at her breasts intently. ‘Booby baby,’ she murmured. Eva
Wilt’s breasts were prominent and Henry, in one of his many off moments, had once said
something about the dogs of hell going dingalingaling for you but not for me. Sally was
more appreciative, and had insisted that Eva remove her bra and bum it. They had gone
down to the kitchen and had drunk Tequila and had put the bra on a dish with a sprig of holly
on it and Sally had poured brandy over it and had set it alight. They had to carry the dish
out into the garden because it smelt so horrible and smoked so much and they had lain on
the grass laughing as it smouldered. Looking back on the episode Eva regretted her
action. It had been a good bra with double-stretch panels designed to give confidence
where a woman needs it, as the TV adverts put it. Still, Sally had said she owed it to
herself as a free woman and with two drinks inside her Eva was in no mood to argue.

‘You’ve got to feel free,’ Sally had said. ‘Free to be. Free to be.’

‘Free to be what?’ said Eva.

‘Yourself, darling,’ Sally whispered, ‘your secret self,’ and had touched her
tenderly where Eva Wilt, had she been sober and less elated, would staunchly have denied
having a self. They had gone back into the house and had lunch, a mixture of more Tequila,
salad and Ryvita and cottage cheese which Eva, whose appetite for food was almost as
omnivorous as her enthusiasm for new experiences, found unsatisfying. She had
hinted as much but Sally had poohpoohed the idea of three good meals a day.

‘It’s not good caloriewise to have a high starch intake,’ she said, ‘and besides it’s not
how much you put into yourself but what. Sex and food, honey, are much the same. A little a
lot is better than a lot a little. ‘ She had poured Eva another Tequila, insisted she
take a bite of lemon before knocking it back and had helped her upstairs to the big bedroom
with the big bed and the big mirror in the ceiling.

‘It’s time for TT,’ she said adjusting the slats of the Venetian blinds.

‘Tea tea,’ Eva mumbled. ‘but we’ve just had din din.’

‘Touch Therapy, darling,’ said Sally and pushed her gently back on to the bed. Eva Wilt
stared up at her reflection in the mirror; a large woman, two large women in yellow
pyjamas lying on a large bed, a large crimson bed; two large women without yellow
pyjamas on a large crimson bed; four women naked on a large crimson bed.

‘Oh Sally, no Sally.’

‘Darling,’ said Sally and silenced her protest oralwise. It had been a startlingly new
experience though only partly remembered. Eva had fallen asleep before the Touch
Therapy had got well under way and had woken an hour later to find Sally fully dressed
standing by the bed with a cup of black coffee.

‘Oh I do feel bad,’ Eva said, referring as much to her moral condition as to her
physical.

‘Drink this and you’ll feel better.’

Eva had drunk the coffee and got dressed while Sally explained that post-contact
inhibitory depression was a perfectly natural reaction to Touch Therapy at first.

‘You’ll find it comes naturally after the first few sessions. You’ll probably break
down and cry and scream and then feel tremendously liberated and relieved.’

‘Do you think so? I’m sure I don’t know.’

Sally had driven her home. ‘You and Henry must come to our barbecue Thursday night,’
she said. ‘I know G baby will want to meet you. You’ll like him. He’s a breast baby. He’ll go
crazy about you.’

‘I tell you she was pissed,’ said Wilt as he sat in the Braintrees’ kitchen while Peter
Braintree opened a bottle of beer for hint. ‘Pissed and wearing same Godawful yellow
pyjamas,’ and smoking a cigarette in a long bloody holder.’

‘What did she say?’

Well if you must know, she said, “Come here…” No, it’s too much. I have a perfectly foul
day at the Tech. Morris tells me I haven’t got my senior lectureship. Williams is off sick
again so I lose a free period. I get punched in the face by a great lout in Printers Three
and I come home to a drunk wife who calls me penis baby.’

‘She called you what?’ said Peter Braintree, staring at him.

‘You heard me.’

‘Eva called you penis baby? I don’t believe it.’

‘Well you go round there and see what she calls you,’ said Wilt bitterly, ‘and don’t blame
me if she sucks your nipples off oralwise while she’s about it.’

‘Good Lord. Is that what she threatened to do?’

‘That and more,’ said Wilt.

‘It doesn’t sound like Eva. It really doesn’t.’

‘It didn’t fucking look like her either, come to that. She was all dolled up in yellow
beach pyjamas. You should have seen the colour. It would have made a buttercup look drab.
And she’d got some ghastly scarlet lipstick smeared round her mouth and she was smoking…She
hasn’t smoked for six years and then all this penis baby nipple-sucking stuff. And
oralwise.’

Peter Braintree shook his head. ‘That’s a filthy word,’ he said.

‘It’s a perfectly filthy act too, if you ask me’ said Wilt.

‘Well, I must say it all sounds pretty peculiar,’ said Braintree, ‘God knows what I’d do
if Susan came home and started insisting on sucking my teats.’

‘Do what I did. Get out of the house,’ said Wilt. ‘And anyway it isn’t just nipples
either. Damn it, we’ve been married twelve long years. It’s a bit late in the day to start
arsing about oralwise. The thing is she’s on this sexual liberation kick. She came home
last night from Mavis Mottram’s flower arrangement do jabbering about clitoral
stimulation and open-ended freewheeling sexual options.’

‘Freewheeling what?’

‘Sexual options. Perhaps I’ve got it wrong. I know sexual options came into it
somewhere. I was half asleep at the time.’

‘Where the hell did she get all this from?’ asked Braintree.

‘Some bloody Yank called Sally Pringsheim,’ said Wilt. ‘You know what Eva’s like. I mean
she can smell intellectual claptrap a mile off and homes in on it like a bloody
dung-beetle heading for an open sewer. You’ve no idea how many phone “latest ideas” I’ve
had to put up with. Well, most of them I can manage to live with. I just let her get on with
it and go my own quiet way, but when it comes to participating oralwise while she
blathers on about Women’s Lib, well you can count me out.’

‘What I don’t understand about Sexual Freedom and Women’s Lib is why you have to go
back to the nursery to be liberated,’ said Braintree. ‘There seems to be this loony idea
that you have to be passionately in love all the time.’

‘Apes,’ said Wilt morosely.

‘Apes? What about apes?’

‘It’s all this business about the animal model. If animals do it then humans must.
Territorial Imperative and the Naked Ape. You stand everything on its head and instead
of aspiring you retrogress a million years. Hitch your wagon to an orang-outang. The
egalitarianism of the lowest common denominator.’

‘I don’t quite see what that has to do with sex,’ said Braintree.

‘Nor do I,’ said Wilt. They went down to the Pig In A Poke and got drunk.

It was midnight before Wilt got home and Eva was asleep. Wilt climbed surreptitiously
into bed and lay in the darkness thinking about high levels of oestrogen.

In Rossiter Grove the Pringsheims came back from Ma Tame tired and bored.

‘Swedes are the bottom,’ said Sally as she undressed.

Gaskell sat down and took off his shoes. ‘Ungstrom’s all right. His wife has just left him
for a low-temperature physicist at Cambridge. He’s not usually so depressed.’

‘You could have fooled me. And talking about wives, I’ve met the most unliberated
woman you’ve ever set eyes on. Name of Eva Wilt. She’s got boobs like cantaloupes.’

‘Don’t,’ said Dr Pringsheim, ‘if there’s one thing I don’t need right now it’s
unliberated wives with breasts.’ He climbed into bed and took his glasses off.

‘I had her round here today.’

‘Had her?’

Sally smiled. ‘Gaskell, honey, you’ve got a toadsome mind’

Gaskell Pringsheim smiled myopically at himself in the mirror above. He was proud of
his mind. ‘I just know you, lover,’ he said. ‘I know your funny little habits. And while
we’re on the subject of habits what are all those boxes in the guest room? You haven’t been
spending money again? You know our budget this month…’

Sally flounced into bed. ‘Budget fudget,’ she said, ‘I’m sending them all back
tomorrow.’

‘All?’

‘Well, not all, but most. I had to impress booby baby somehow.’

‘You didn’t have to cop half a shop just to…’

‘Gaskell, honey, if you would just let me finish,’ said Sally, ’she’s a manic, a
lovely, beautiful, obsessive compulsive manic. She can’t sit still for half a minute
without tidying and cleaning and polishing and washing up.’

‘That’s all we need, a manic compulsive woman around the house all the time. Who needs
two?’

‘Two? I’m not manic’

‘You’re manic enough for me,’ said Gaskell.

‘But this one’s got boobs, baby, boobs. Anyway I’ve invited them over on Thursday for
the barbecue.’

‘What the hell for?’

‘Well, if you won’t buy me a dishwasher like I’ve asked you a hundred times, I’m going
out to get me one. A nice manic compulsive dishwasher with boobs on.’

‘Jesus.’ sighed Gaskell, ‘are you a bitch.’

‘Henry Wilt, you are a sod,’ Eva said next morning. Wilt sat up in bed. He felt
terrible. His nose was even more painful than the day before, his head ached and he had
spent much of the night expunging the Harpic from the bowl in the bathroom.

He was in no mood to be woken and told he was a sod. He looked at the clock. It was eight
o’clock and he had Bricklayers Two at nine. He got out of bed and made for the bathroom.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ Eva demanded, getting out of bed herself.

‘I heard,’ said Wilt, and saw that she was naked. Eva Wilt naked at eight o’clock in the
morning was almost as startling a sight as Eva Wilt drunk, smoking and dressed in lemon
yellow pyjamas at six o’clock at night. And even less enticing. ‘What the hell are you
going about like that for?’

‘If it comes to that, what’s wrong with your nose? I suppose you got drunk and fell down.
It looks all red and swollen.’

‘It is all red and swollen. And if you must know I didn’t fall, down. Now for goodness sake
get out of the way. I’ve got a lecture at nine.’

He pushed past her and went into the bathroom and looked at his nose. It looked awful.
Eva followed him in. ‘If you didn’t fall on it what did happen?’ she demanded.

Wilt squeezed foam from an aerosol and patted it gingerly on his chin.

‘Well?’ said Eva.

Wilt picked up his razor and put it under the hot tap. ‘I had an accident,’ he
muttered.

‘With lamp-post, I suppose. I knew you’d been drinking.’

‘With a Printer,’ said Wilt indistinctly and started to shave.

‘With a Printer?’

‘To be precise, I got punched in the face by a particularly pugnacious apprentice
printer.’

Eva stared at hire in the mirror. ‘You mean to say a student hit you in the
classroom?’

Wilt nodded.

‘I hope you hit him back’

Wilt cut himself.

‘No I bloody didn’t,’ he said, dabbing his chits with a finger. ‘Now look what you’ve made
me do.’

Eva ignored his complaint. ‘Well you should have. You’re not a man. You should have hit
him back.’

Wilt put clown the razor. ‘And got the sack. Got hauled up in court for assaulting a
student. Now that’s what I call a brilliant idea.’ He reached for the sponge and washed his
face.

Eva retreated to the bedroom satisfied. There would be no mention of her lemon
loungers now. She had taken his mind off her own little extravagance and given him a sense
of grievance that would keep him occupied for the time being. By the time she had finished
dressing, Wilt had eaten a bowl of All-Bran, drunk half a cup of coffee and was snarled up
in a traffic jam at the roundabout. Eva went downstairs and had her own breakfast and
began the daily round of washing up and Hoovering and cleaning the bath and…