Wilt:

  *

  ‘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.

  ‘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 car park 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 on to 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 briefcase 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 car. He wasn’t staying around to have her suck his nipples. He’d had all he could take for one day.

  3

  Eva Wilt went downstairs and looked for penis baby half-heartedly. 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 dugs of hell going dingalingaling for you but not for me. Sally was more appreciative, and had insisted that Eva remove her bra and burn 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 di
n.’

  ‘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 him. ‘Pissed and wearing some 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 phoney “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 Tante’s 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 buy 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 a 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 him 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 chin 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 down 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 …