The Wilt Alternative:

  He was just cursing Eva for her stupidity and himself for having drunk too much beer when the further consequences of too much beer made themselves felt. He needed a pee and badly. Wilt clambered out of the sleeping-bag. In the hall Eva could be heard hustling the quads into their coats. Wilt waited until the front door had closed behind them and then hobbled across the hall to the downstairs toilet. It was only then that the full magnitude of his predicament became apparent. Wilt stared down at a large and extremely tenacious piece of sticking-plaster.

  ‘Damn,’ said Wilt, ‘I must have been drunker than I thought. When the hell did I put that on?’ There was a gap in his memory. He sat down on the toilet and wondered how on earth to get the bloody thing off without doing himself any more injury. From past experience of sticking-plaster he knew the best method was to wrench the stuff off with one jerk. It didn’t seem advisable now.

  ‘Might pull the whole bloody lot off,’ he muttered. The safest thing would be to find a pair of scissors. Wilt emerged cautiously from the toilet and peered over the banisters. Just so long as he didn’t meet Irmgard coming down from the flat in the attic. Considering the hour she had got back it was extremely unlikely. She was probably still in bed with some beastly boyfriend. Wilt went upstairs and into the bedroom. Eva kept some nail-scissors in the dressing table. He found them and was sitting on the edge of the bed when Eva returned. She headed upstairs, hesitated a moment on the landing and then entered the bedroom.

  ‘I thought I’d find you here,’ she said, crossing the room to the curtains. ‘I knew the moment my back was turned you’d sneak into the house. Well don’t think you can worm your way out of this one because you can’t. I’ve made up my mind.’

  ‘What mind?’ said Wilt.

  ‘That’s right. Insult me,’ said Eva, pulling the curtains back and flooding the room with sunshine.

  ‘I am not insulting you,’ snarled Wilt, ‘I am merely asking a question. Since I can’t get it into your empty head that I am not a raving arse-bandit –’

  ‘Language, language,’ said Eva.

  ‘Yes, language. It’s a means of communication, not just a series of moos, coos and bleats the way you use it.’

  But Eva was no longer listening. Her attention was riveted on the scissors. ‘That’s right. Cut the horrid thing off,’ she squawked and promptly burst into tears. ‘To think that you had to go and …’

  ‘Shut up,’ yelled Wilt. ‘Here I am in imminent danger of bursting and you have to start howling like a banshee. If you had used your bloody head instead of a perverted imagination last night I wouldn’t have been in this predicament.’

  ‘What predicament?’ asked Eva between sobs.

  ‘This,’ shouted Wilt, waving his agonized organ.

  Eva glanced at it curiously. ‘What did you do that for?’ she asked.

  ‘To stop the damned thing from bleeding. I have told you repeatedly that I caught it on a rosebush but you had to jump to idiotic conclusions. Now I can’t get this bloody sticking-plaster off and I’ve got a gallon of beer backed up behind it.’

  ‘You really meant it about the rosebush then?’

  ‘Of course I did. I spend my life telling the truth and nothing but the truth and nobody ever believes me. For the last time I was having a pee next to a rosebush and I got snagged in the fucking thing. That is the simple truth, unembroidered, ungarnished and unexaggerated.’

  ‘And you want the sticking-plaster off?’

  ‘What the hell have I been saying for the last five minutes? I not only want it off. I need it off before I burst.’

  ‘That’s easy,’ said Eva. ‘All you’ve got to do …’

  7

  Twenty-five minutes later Wilt hobbled through the door of the Accident Centre at the Ipford Hospital, pale, pained and horribly embarrassed. He made his way to the desk and looked into the unsympathetic and obviously unimaginative eyes of the admissions clerk.

  ‘I’d like to see a doctor,’ he said with some difficulty.

  ‘Have you broken something?’ asked the woman.

  ‘Sort of,’ said Wilt, conscious that his conversation was being monitored by a dozen other patients with more obvious but less distressing injuries.

  ‘What do you mean, sort of?’

  Wilt eyed the woman and tried to convey wordlessly that his was a condition that required discretion. The woman was clearly extraordinarily obtuse.

  ‘If it’s not a break, cut or wound requiring immediate attention, or a case of poisoning, you should consult your own doctor.’ Wilt considered these options and decided that ‘wound requiring immediate attention’ fitted the bill.

  ‘Wound,’ he said.

  ‘Where?’ asked the woman, picking up a ballpen and a pad of forms.

  ‘Well …’ said Wilt even more hoarsely than before.

  Half the other patients seemed to have brought their wives or mothers.

  ‘I said where?’ said the woman impatiently.

  ‘I know you did,’ whispered Wilt. ‘The thing is …’

  ‘I haven’t got all day, you know.’

  ‘I realize that,’ said Wilt, ‘it’s just that … well I … Look, would you mind if I explained the situation to a doctor? You see …’ But the woman didn’t. In Wilt’s opinion she was either a sadist or mentally deficient.

  ‘I have to fill in this form and if you won’t tell me where the wound is …’ She hesitated and looked at Wilt suspiciously. ‘I thought you said it was a break. Now you say it’s a wound. You’d better make up your mind. I haven’t got all day, you know.’

  ‘Nor, at this rate, have I,’ said Wilt, irritated by the repetition. ‘In fact if something isn’t done almost immediately I may well pass out in front of you.’

  The woman shrugged. People passing out in front of her were evidently part of her daily routine. ‘I still have to state whether it is a wound or a break and its location and if you won’t tell me what it is and where it is I can’t admit you.’

  Wilt glanced over his shoulder and was about to say that he had had his penis practically scalped by his bloody wife when he caught the eyes of several middle-aged women who were paying close attention to the exchange. He changed his tactic hastily.

  ‘Poison,’ he muttered.

  ‘Are you quite sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Wilt. ‘I took the stuff, didn’t I?’

  ‘You also claimed you had a break and then a wound. Now you say you’ve taken all three … I mean you’ve taken poison. And it’s no good looking at me like that. I’m only doing my job, you know.’

  ‘At the speed you’re doing it I wonder anyone gets in here at all before they’re actually dead,’ snapped Wilt, and instantly regretted it. The woman was staring at him with open hostility. The look on her face suggested that as far as Wilt was concerned he had just expressed her most ardent hope.

  ‘Look,’ said Wilt, trying to pacify the bitch, ‘I’m sorry if I seem agitated …’

  ‘Rude, more like.’

  ‘Have it your own way. Rude then. I apologize, but if you had just swallowed poison, fallen on your arm and broken it and suffered a wound in your posterior you’d be a bit agitated.’

  To lend some sort of credibility to this list of catastrophes he raised his left arm limply and supported it with his right hand. The woman regarded it doubtfully and took up the ballpen again.

  ‘Did you bring the bottle with you?’ she asked.

  ‘Bottle?’

  ‘The bottle containing the poison you claim to have taken.’

  ‘What would I do that for?’

  ‘We can’t help you unless we know what sort of poison you took.’

  ‘It didn’t say what sort of poison it was on the bottle,’ said Wilt. ‘It was in a lemonade bottle in the garage. All I know is that it was poison.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘How what?’

  ‘How do you know it was poison?’

  ‘Because it didn’t taste like lemonade,’ said
Wilt frantically, aware that he was getting deeper and deeper into a morass of diagnostic confusion.

  ‘Because something doesn’t taste like lemonade it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s poisonous,’ said the woman, exercising an indefatigable logic. ‘Only lemonade tastes like lemonade. Nothing else does.’

  ‘Of course it doesn’t. But this stuff didn’t simply not taste like lemonade. It tasted like deadly poison. Probably cyanide.’

  ‘Nobody knows what cyanide tastes like,’ said the woman, continuing to batter Wilt’s defences. ‘Death is instantaneous.’

  Wilt glared at her bleakly. ‘All right,’ he said finally, ‘forget the poison. I’ve still got a broken arm and a wound that requires immediate attention. I demand to see a doctor.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to wait your turn. Now where did you say this wound was?’

  ‘On my backside,’ said Wilt, and spent the next hour regretting it. To substantiate his claim he had to stand while the other patients were treated and the admissions clerk continued to eye him with a mixture of outright suspicion and dislike. In an effort to avoid her eye Wilt tried to read the paper over the shoulder of a man whose only apparent claim to be in need of urgent attention was a bandaged toe. Wilt envied him and, not for the first time, considered the perversity of circumstances which rendered him incapable of being believed.

  It wasn’t as simple as Byron had suggested with his ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’. If his own experience was anything to go by, truth and fiction were equally unacceptable. Some element of ambiguity in his own character, perhaps the ability to see every side of every problem, created an aura of insincerity around him and made it impossible for anyone to believe what he was saying. The truth, to be believed, had first to be plausible and probable, to fall into some easy category of pre-digested opinion. If it didn’t conform to the expected, people refused to believe it. But Wilt’s mind did not conform. It followed possibilities wherever they led in labyrinths of speculation beyond most people’s ken. Certainly beyond Eva’s. Not that Eva ever speculated. She leapt from one opinion to another without that intermediate stage of bewilderment which was Wilt’s perpetual condition. In her world, every problem had an answer; in Wilt’s, every problem had about ten, each of them in direct contradiction to all the others. Even now in this bleak waiting-room where his own immediate misery might have been expected to spare him concern for the rest of the world, Wilt’s febrile intelligence found material to speculate upon.

  The headlines in the paper OIL DISASTER: SEA BIRDS THREATENED dominated a page filled with apparently minor horrors. Apparently, because they occupied such little space. There had been another terrorist raid on a security truck. The driver had been threatened with a rocket launcher and a guard had been callously shot through the head. The murderers had got away with £250,000 but this was of less importance than the plight of seagulls threatened by an oil slick off the coast. Wilt noted this distinction and wondered how the widow of the shot guard felt about her late husband’s relegation to second place in public concern compared to the sea birds. What was it about the modern world that wildlife took precedence over personal misery? Perhaps the human species was so fearful of extinction that it no longer cared what happened to individuals, but closed collective ranks and saw the collision of two supertankers as a foretaste of its own eventual fate. Or perhaps …

  Wilt was interrupted from this reverie by the sound of his name and looking up from the paper his eyes met those of a hatchet-faced nurse who was talking to the admissions clerk. The nurse disappeared and a moment later the admissions clerk was joined by an elderly and evidently important specialist, if his retinue of young doctors, a Sister and two nurses was anything to go by. Wilt watched unhappily while the man studied his record of injuries, looked over his spectacles at Wilt as at some specimen beneath his dignity to treat, nodded to one of the housemen and, smiling sardonically, departed.

  ‘Mr Wilt,’ called the young doctor. Wilt stepped cautiously forward.

  ‘If you’ll just go through to a cubicle and wait,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Excuse me, doctor,’ said Wilt, ‘I would like a word with you in private.’

  ‘In due course, Mr Wilt, we will have words in private and now if you have nothing better to do kindly go through to a cubicle.’ He turned on his heel and walked down the corridor. Wilt was about to hobble after him when the admissions clerk stopped him.

  ‘Accident cubicles are that way,’ she said, pointing to curtains down another corridor. Wilt grimaced at her and went down to a cubicle.

  *

  At Willington Road Eva was on the telephone. She had called the Tech to say that Wilt was unavoidably detained at home by sickness and she was now in conference with Mavis Mottram.

  ‘I don’t know what to think,’ said Eva miserably. ‘I mean it seemed so unlikely and when I found out he was really hurt I felt so awful.’

  ‘My dear Eva,’ said Mavis, who knew exactly what to think, ‘you are far too ready to blame yourself and of course Henry exploits that. I mean that doll business must have given you some indication that he was peculiar.’

  ‘I don’t like to think about that,’ said Eva. ‘It was so long ago and Henry has changed since then.’

  ‘Men don’t change fundamentally and Henry is at a dangerous age. I warned you when you insisted on taking that German au pair girl.’

  ‘That’s another thing. She’s not an au pair. She’s paying much more rent than I asked for the flat but she won’t help in the house. She has enrolled in the Foreigners’ Course at the Tech and she speaks perfect English already.’

  ‘What did I tell you, Eva? She never mentioned anything about the Tech when she came to you for a room, did she?’

  ‘No,’ said Eva.

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me to find that Henry knew her already and told her you were letting the attic.’

  ‘But how could he? He seemed very surprised and angry when I told him.’

  ‘My dear, I hate to say this but you always look on the good side of Henry. Of course he would pretend to be surprised and angry. He knows exactly how to manipulate you and if he had seemed pleased you’d have known there was something wrong.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Eva doubtfully.

  ‘And as for knowing her before,’ continued Mavis, waging war vicariously against her Patrick by way of Wilt, ‘I seem to remember he spent a lot of time at the Tech at the beginning of the summer vac and that’s when the foreign students enrol.’

  ‘But Henry doesn’t have anything to do with that department. He was busy on the timetable.’

  ‘He doesn’t have to belong to the department to meet the slut, and for all you know when he was supposed to be doing the timetable the two of them were doing something quite different in his office.’

  Eva considered this possibility only to dismiss it. ‘Henry isn’t like that, and anyway I would have noticed the change in him,’ she said.

  ‘My dear, what you have got to realize is that all men are like that. And I didn’t notice any change in Patrick until it was too late. He’d been having an affair with his secretary for over a year before I knew anything about it,’ said Mavis. ‘And then it was only when he blew his nose on her panties that I got an inkling what was going on.’

  ‘Blew his nose on her what?’ said Eva, intrigued by the extraordinary perversion the statement conjured up.

  ‘He had a streaming cold and at breakfast one morning he took out a pair of red panties and blew his nose on them,’ said Mavis. ‘Of course I knew then what he had been up to.’

  ‘Yes, well you would, wouldn’t you?’ said Eva. ‘What did he say when you asked him?’

  ‘I didn’t ask him. I knew. I told him that if he thought he could provoke me into divorcing him he was quite mistaken because …’

  Mavis chattered on about her Patrick while Eva’s mind turned slowly as she listened. There was something in her memory of the night that was coming to the surface. Something to do
with Irmgard Mueller. After that awful row with Henry she hadn’t been able to sleep. She had lain awake in the darkness wondering why Henry had to … well of course now she knew he hadn’t but at the time … Yes, that was it, the time. At four o’clock she had heard someone come upstairs very quietly and she had been sure it was Henry and then there had been sounds of creaking from the steps up to the attic and she had known it was Irmgard coming home. She remembered looking at the luminous dial of the alarm clock and seeing the hands at four and twelve and for a moment she had thought they pointed to twenty past twelve only Henry had come in at three and … She had drifted off to sleep with a question half-formed in her mind. Now, against Mavis’ chatter, the question completed itself. Had Henry been out with Irmgard? It wasn’t like Henry to come in so late. She couldn’t remember when he had done it before. And Irmgard certainly didn’t behave like an au pair girl. She was too old for one thing, and she had so much money. But Mavis Mottram interrupted this slow train of thought by stating the conclusion Eva was moving towards.

  ‘I know I’d keep an eye on that German girl,’ she said. ‘And if you take my advice you’ll get rid of her at the end of the month.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Eva. ‘Yes, I’ll think about that, Mavis. Thank you for being so sympathetic.’

  Eva put the phone down and stared out of the bedroom window at the beech tree that stood on the front lawn. It had been one of the first things to attract her to the house, the copper beech in the front garden, a large comfortable solid tree with roots that stretched as far underground as the branches did above. She had read that somewhere, and the balance between branches seeking the light and roots searching for water had seemed so right and so, somehow, organic, as to explain what she wanted from the house and could give it in return.