The Wilt Alternative (3 page)

'Well, I said it, but I can't be too sure,' answered the English lecturer. 'That's what I
meant about a communications problem. He doesn't speak a word of English and my Tibetanese isn't
exactly fluent. It's the same with the Japanese.'

The Vice-Principal looked round the room. 'I suppose it is too much to expect anyone here to
have a smattering of Japanese?'

'I've got a bit,' said the Head of Art, 'but I'm damned if I'm going to use it. When you've
spent four years in a Nip prisoner-of-war camp the last thing you want is to have to talk to the
bastards in later life. My digestive system is still in a hell of a mess.'

'Perhaps you could tutor our Chinese student instead. Tibet is part of China now and if we
include him with the four girls from Hong Kong...'

'We'll be able to advertise Take-Away Degrees,' said Dr Board and provoked another acrimonious
exchange which lasted until lunchtime.

Wilt returned to his office to find that Mrs Fyfe couldn't take Mechanical Technicians at two
on Tuesday because her husband had... It was exactly as he had anticipated. The Tech's year had
begun as it always did. It continued in the same trying vein for the next four days. Wilt
attended meetings on Interdepartmental Course Collaboration, gave a seminar to student teachers
from the local training college on The Meaning of Liberal Studies, which was a contradiction in
terms as far as he was concerned, was lectured by a sergeant from the Drug Squad on Pot Plant
Recognition and Heroin Addiction and finally managed to fit Mrs Fyfe into Room 29 with Bread Two
on Monday at 10 a.m. And all the time he brooded over Eva and her wretched lodger.

While Wilt busied himself lethargically at the Tech, Eva put her own plans implacably into
operation. Miss Mueller arrived two mornings later and installed herself inconspicuously in the
flat; so inconspicuously that it took Wilt two more days to realize she was there, and then only
the delivery of nine milk bottles where there were usually eight gave him the clue. Wilt said
nothing but waited for the first hint of gaiety upstairs before launching his counter-offensive
of complaints.

But Miss Mueller lived up to Eva's promise. She was exceedingly quiet, came in unobtrusively
when Wilt was still at the Tech and left in the morning after he had begun his daily walk. By the
end of a fortnight he was beginning to think his worst fears were unjustified. In any case, he
had his lectures to foreign students to prepare and the teaching term had finally started. The
question of the lodger receded into the background as he tried to think what the hell to tell
Mayfield's Empire, as Dr Board called it, about Progressive Social Attitudes in English Society
since 1688. If Gasfitters were any indication there had been a regression, not a progressive
development. The bastards had graduated to queer-bashing.

But if Wilt's fears were premature they were not long in being realized. He was sitting one
Saturday evening in the Piagetory, the purpose-built summerhouse at the bottom of the garden in
which Eva had originally tried to play conceptual games with the 'wee ones', a phrase Wilt
particularly detested, when the first blow fell.

It was less a blow than a revelation. The summerhouse was nicely secluded, set back among old
apple trees with an arbour of clematis and climbing roses to hide it from the world and Wilt's
consumption of homemade beer from Eva. Inside, it was hung with dried herbs. Wilt didn't approve
of the herbs but he preferred them in their hung form rather than in the frightful infusions Eva
sometimes tried to inflict on him, and they seemed to have the added advantage of keeping the
flies from the compost heap at bay. He could sit there with the sun dappling the grass around and
feel at relative peace with the world, and the more beer he drank the greater that peace became.
Wilt prided himself on the effect of his beer. He brewed it in a plastic dustbin and occasionally
fortified it with vodka before bottling it in the garage. After three bottles even the quads' din
somehow receded and became almost natural, a chorus of whines, squeals and laughter, usually
malicious when someone fell off the swing, but at least distant. And even that distraction was
absent this evening. Eva had taken them to the ballet in the hope that early exposure to
Stravinsky would turn Samantha into a second Margot Fonteyn. Wilt had his doubts about Samantha
and Stravinsky. As far as he was concerned his daughter's talents were more suitable for an
all-in wrestler, and Stravinsky's genius was overrated. It had to be if Eva approved it. Wilt's
own taste ran to Mozart and Mugsy Spanier, an eclecticism Eva couldn't understand but which
allowed him to annoy her by switching from a piano sonata she was enjoying to twenties jazz which
she didn't.

Anyway, this evening there was no need to play his tape-recorder. It was sufficient to sit in
the summerhouse and know that even if the quads woke him at five next morning be could still stay
in bed until ten, and he was just uncorking his fourth bottle of fortified lager when his eye
caught sight of a figure on the wooden balcony outside the dormer window of the top floor flat.
Wilt's hand on the bottle loosened and a moment later he was groping for the binoculars Eva had
bought for bird-watching. He focused on the figure through a gap in the roses and forgot about
beer. All his attention was riveted on Miss Irmgard Mueller.

She was standing looking out over the trees to the open country beyond, and from where Wilt
sat and focused he had a particularly interesting view of her legs. There was no denying that
they were shapely legs. In fact they were startlingly shapely legs and her thighs... Wilt moved
up, found her breasts beneath a cream blouse entrancing, and finally reached her face. He stayed
there. It wasn't that Irmgard Miss Mueller and that bloody lodger were instantaneously words of
the past was an attractive young woman. Wilt had been faced by attractive young women at the Tech
for too many years, young women who ogled him and sat with their legs distractingly apart, not to
have built up sufficient sexual antibodies to deflect their juvenile charms. But Irmgard was not
a juvenile. She was a woman, a woman of around twenty-eight, a beautiful woman with glorious
legs, discreet and tight breasts, 'unsullied by suckling' was the phrase that sprang to Wilt's
mind, with firm neat hips, even her hands grasping the balcony rail were somehow delicately
strong with tapering fingers, lightly tanned as by some midnight sun. Wilt's mind spun into
meaningless metaphors far removed from Eva's washing-up mitts, the canyon wrinkles of her
birth-pocked belly, the dugs that haunched her flaccid hips and all the physical erosion of
twenty years of married life. He was swept into fancy by this splendid creature, but above all by
her face.

Irmgard's face was not simply beautiful. In spite of the beer Wilt might have withstood the
magnetism of mere beauty. He was defeated by the intelligence of her face. In fact there were
imperfections in that face from a purely physical point of view. It was too strong for one thing,
the nose was a shade retroussé to be commercially perfect, and the mouth too generous but it was
individual, individual and intelligent and sensitive and mature and thoughtful and...Wilt gave up
the addition in despair and as he did so it seemed to him that Irmgard was gazing down into his
two adoring eyes, or anyway into the binoculars, and that a subtle smile played about her
gorgeous lips. Then she turned away and went back into the flat. Wilt dropped the binoculars and
reached trancelike for the beer bottle. What he had just seen had changed his view of life.

He was no longer Head of Liberal Studies, married to Eva, the father of four quarrelsome
repulsive daughters, and thirty-eight. He was twenty-one again, a bright, lithe young man who
wrote poetry and swam on summer mornings in the river and whose future was alight with achieved
promise. He was already a great writer. The fact that being a writer involved writing was wholly
irrelevant. It was being a writer that mattered and Wilt at twenty-one had long since settled his
future in advance by reading Proust and Gide, and then books on Proust and Gide and books about
books on Proust and Gide, until he could visualize himself at thirty-eight with a delightful
anguish of anticipation. Looking back on those moments he could only compare them to the feeling
he now had when he came out of the dentist's surgery without the need for any fillings. On an
intellectual plane, of course. Spiritual, with smoke-filled, cork-lined rooms and pages of
illegible but beautiful prose littering, almost fluttering from, his desk in some deliciously
nondescript street in Paris. Or in a white-walled bedroom on white sheets entwined with a tanned
woman with the sun shining through the shutters and shimmering on the ceiling from the azure sea
somewhere near Hyères. Wilt had tasted all these pleasures in advance at twenty-one. Fame,
fortune, the modesty of greatness, bons mots drifting effortlessly from his tongue over absinthe,
allusions tossed and caught, tossed back again like intellectual shuttlecocks, and the intense
walk home through dawn-deserted streets in Montparnasse.

About the only thing Wilt had eschewed from his borrowings off Proust and Gide had been small
boys. Small boys and plastic dustbins. Not that he could see Gide buggering about brewing beer
anyway, let alone in plastic dustbins. The sod was probably a teetotaller. There had to be some
deficit to make up for the small boys. So Wilt had lifted Frieda from Lawrence while hoping to
hell he didn't get TB, and had endowed her with a milder temperament. Together they had lain on
the sand making love while the ripples of the azure sea broke over them on an empty beach. Come
to think of it, that must have been about the time he saw From Here to Eternity and Frieda had
looked like Deborah Kerr. The main thing was she had been strong and firm and in tune, if not
with the infinite as such, with the infinite variations of Wilt's particular lusts. Only they
hadn't been lusts. Lust was too insensitive a word for the sublime contortions Wilt had had in
mind. Anyway, she had been a sort of sexual muse, more sex than muse, but someone to whom he
could confide his deepest perceptions without being asked who Rochefou...what's-his-name was
which was about as near being a blasted muse as Eva ever got. And now look at him, lurking in a
bleeding Spockery drinking himself into a beer belly and temporary oblivion on something
pretending to be lager that he'd brewed in a plastic dustbin. It was the plastic that got Wilt.
At least a dustbin was appropriate for the muck but it could have had the dignity of being a
metal one. But no, even that slight consolation had been denied him. He'd tried one and had
damned near poisoned himself. Never mind that. Dustbins weren't important and what he had just
seen had been his Muse. Wilt endowed the word with a capital M for the first time in seventeen
disillusioning years and then promptly blamed the bloody lager for this lapse. Irmgard wasn't a
muse. She was probably some dumb, handsome bitch whose Vater was Lagermeister of Cologne and
owned five Mercedes. He got up and went into the house.

When Eva and the quads returned from the theatre he was sitting morosely in front of the
television ostensibly watching football but inwardly seething with indignation at the dirty
tricks life played on him.

'Now then you show Daddy how the lady danced,' said Eva, 'and I'll put the supper on.'

'She was ever so beautiful, Daddy,' Penelope told him. 'She went like this and there was this
man and he...' Wilt had to sit through a replay of The Rite of Spring by four small lumpish girls
who hadn't been able to follow the story anyway and who took turns to try to do a pas de chat off
the arm of his chair.

'Yes, well, I can see she must have been brilliant from your performance,' said Wilt. 'Now if
you don't mind I want to see who wins...'

But the quads took no notice and continued to hurl themselves about the room until Wilt was
driven to take refuge in the kitchen.

'They'll never get anywhere if you don't take an interest in their dancing,' said Eva.

'They won't get anywhere anyway if you ask me and if you call that dancing I don't. It's like
watching hippos trying to fly. They'll bring the bloody ceiling down if you don't look out.'

Instead Emmeline banged her head on the fireguard and Wilt had to put a blob of Savlon on the
scratch. To complete the evening's miseries Eva announced that she had asked the Nyes round after
supper.

'I want to talk to him about the Organic Toilet. It's not working properly.'

'I don't suppose it's meant to,' said Wilt. 'The bloody thing is a glorified earth closet and
all earth closets stink.'

'It doesn't stink. It has a composty smell, that's all, but it doesn't give off enough gas to
cook with and John said it would.'

'It gives off enough gas to turn the downstairs loo into a death-chamber if you ask me. One of
these days some poor bugger is going to light a cigarette in there and blow us all to Kingdom
Come.'

'You're just biased against the Alternative Society in general,' said Eva. 'And who was it who
was always complaining about my using chemical toilet cleaner? You were. And don't say you
didn't.'

'I have enough trouble with society as it is without being bunged into an alternative one,
and, while we are on the subject, there must be an alternative to poisoning the atmosphere with
methane and sterilizing it with Harpic. Frankly I'd say Harpic had something to recommend it. At
least you could flush the bloody stuff down the drain. I defy anyone to flush Nye's filthy
crap-digester with anything short of dynamite. It's a turd-encrusted drainpipe with a barrel at
the bottom.'

'It has to be like that if you're going to put natural goodness back into the earth.'

'And get food poisoning,' said Wilt.

'Not if you compost it properly. The heat kills all the germs before you empty it.'