The Wilt Alternative (9 page)

'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 predigested 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 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.

And the house had seemed right too. A big house with high ceilings and thick walls and a
garden and orchard in which the quads could grow up happily and at a further remove from
unsettling reality than Parkview Road would have allowed. But Henry hadn't liked the move. She
had had to force it on him and he had never succumbed to the call of the domesticated wildness of
the orchard or the sense of social invulnerability she had found in the house and Willington
Road. Not that Eva was a snob but she didn't like anyone to look down on her and now they
couldn't. Even Mavis didn't patronize her any longer and that story about Patrick and the panties
was something Mavis would never have told her if she had still been living two streets away.
Anyway, Mavis was a bitch. She was always running Patrick down and if he was unfaithful
physically Mavis was morally disloyal. Henry had said she committed adultery by gossip, and there
was something in what he said. But there was also something in what Mavis said about Irmgard
Mueller. She would keep an eye on her. There was a strange coldness about her and what did she
mean by saying she would help around the house and then suddenly enrolling at the Tech?