Wilt (7 page)

Here he ran into more trouble. The bicycle was on the other side. He fetched a plank,
leant it against the fence and climbed over. Now to carry the bike back to the shed. Oh
bugger the bicycle. It could stay where it was. He was fed up with the whole business. He
couldn’t even dispose of a plastic doll properly. It was ludicrous to think that he could
plan, commit and carry through a real murder with any hope of success. He must have been
mad to think of it. It was all that blasted gin.

‘That’s right, blame the gin,’ Wilt muttered to himself, as he trudged back to his car.
‘You had this idea months ago.’ He climbed into the car and sat there in the darkness
wondering what on earth had ever possessed him to have fantasies of murdering Eva. It
was insane, utterly insane, and just as mad as to imagine that he could train himself to
become a cold-blooded killer. Where had the idea originated from? What was it all about?
All right, Eva was a stupid cow who made his life a misery by nagging at him and by
indulging a taste for Eastern mysticism with a frenetic enthusiasm calculated to
derange the soberest of husbands, but why his obsession with murder? Why the need to
prove his manliness by violence? Where had he got that from? In the middle of the car park,
Henry Wilt, suddenly sober and clear-headed, realised the extraordinary effect that
ten years of Liberal Studies had had upon him. For ten long years Plasterers Two and Meat
One had been exposed to culture in the shape of Wilt and The Lord of the Flies, and for as
many years Wilt himself had been exposed to the barbarity, the unhesitating readiness
to commit violence of Plasterers Two and Meat One. That was the genesis of it all. That
and the unreality of the literature he had been forced to absorb. For ten years Wilt had
been the duct along which travelled creatures of imagination, Nostromo, Jack and Piggy,
Shane, creatures who acted and whose actions effected something. And all the time he saw
himself, mirrored in their eyes, an ineffectual passive person responding solely to
the dictates of circumstance. Wilt shook his head. And out of all that and the traumas of
the past two days had been born this acte gratuit, this semi-crime, the symbolic murder
of Eva Wilt.

He started the car and drove out of the car park. He would go and see the Braintrees. They
would still be up and glad to see him and besides he needed to talk to someone. Behind him
on the building site his notes on violence and the Break-Up of Family Life drifted about
in the night wind and stuck in the mud.

‘Nature is so libidinous.’ said Sally, shining a torch through the porthole at the
reeds. ‘I mean take bullrushes. I mean they’re positively archetypally phallus. Don’t
you think so, G?’

‘Bullrushes?’ said Gaskell, gazing helplessly at a chart. ‘Bullrushes do nothing for
me.’

‘Maps neither, by the look of it’

‘Charts, baby, charts.’

‘What’s in a name?’

‘Right now, a hell of a lot. We’re either in Frogwater Reach or Fen Broad. No telling
which.’

‘Give me Fen Broad every time. I just adore broads. Eva sweetheart, how’s about another
pot of coffee? I want to stay awake all night and watch the dawn come up over the
bullrushes.’

‘Yes, well I don’t,’ said Gaskell. ‘Last night was enough for me. That crazy guy with the
doll in the bath and Schei cutting himself. That’s enough for one day. I’m going to hit the
sack.’

‘The deck,’ said Sally, ‘hit the deck, G. Eva and I are sleeping down here. Three’s a
crowd.’

‘Three? With boobs around it’s five at the least. OK, so I sleep on deck. We’ve got to be up
early if we’re to get off this damned sandbank.’

‘Has Captain Pringsheim stranded us, baby?’

‘It’s these charts. If only they would give an exact indication of depth.’

‘If you knew where we were, you’d probably find they do. It’s no use knowing it’s three
feet–’

‘Fathoms, honey, fathoms.’

‘Three fathoms in Frogwater Reach if we’re really in Fen Broad.’

‘Well, wherever we are, you’d better start hoping there’s a tide that will rise and
float us off,’ said Gaskell.

‘And if there isn’t?’

‘Then we’ll have to think of something else. Maybe someone will come along and tow us
off.’

‘Oh God, G, you’re the skilfullest,’ said Sally. ‘I mean why couldn’t we have just stayed
out in the middle? But no, you had to come steaming up this creek wham into a mudbank and
all because of what? Ducks, goddamned ducks.’

‘Waders, baby, waders. Not just ducks.’

‘OK, so they’re waders. You want to photograph them so now we’re stuck where no one in
their right minds would come in a boat. Who do you think is going to come up here? Jonathan
Seagull?’

In the galley Eva made coffee. She was wearing the bright red plastic bikini Sally had
lent her. It was rather too small for her so that she bulged round it uncomfortably and it
was revealingly tight but at least it was better than going around naked even though
Sally said nudity was being liberated and look at the Amazonian Indians. She should
have brought her own things but Sally had insisted on hurrying and now all she had were
the lemon loungers and the bikini. Honestly Sally was so
authora…authorasomething…well, bossy then.

‘Dual-purpose plastic, baby, apronwise,’ she had said, ‘and G has this thing about
plastic, haven’t you, G?’

‘Bio-degradably yes.’

‘Bio-degradably?’ asked Eva, hoping to be initiated into some new aspect of women’s
liberation.

‘Plastic bottles that disintegrate instead of lying around making an ecological
swamp,’ said Sally, opening a porthole and dropping an empty cigar packet over the side,
‘that’s G’s lifework. That and recyclability. Infinite recyclability.’

‘Right,’ said Gaskell. ‘We’ve got in-built obsolescence in the automotive field where
it’s outmoded. So what we need now is in-built bio-degradable deliquescence in
ephemera.’

Eva listened uncomprehendingly but with the feeling that she was somehow at the
centre of an intellectual world far surpassing that of Henry and his friends who talked
about new degree courses and their students so boringly.

‘We’ve got a compost heap at the bottom of the garden,’ she said when she finally
understood what they were talking about. ‘I put the potato peelings and odds and ends on
it.’

Gaskell raised his eyes to the cabin roof. Correction. Deckhead.

‘Talking of odds and ends.’ said Sally, running a fond hand over Eva’s bottom, ‘I
wonder how Henry is getting along with Judy.’

Eva shuddered. The thought of Henry and the doll lying in the bath still haunted
her.

‘I can’t think what had got into him.’ she said, and looked disapprovingly at Gaskell
when he sniggered. ‘I mean it’s not as if he has ever been unfaithful or anything like
that. And lots of husbands are. Patrick Mottram is always going off and having affairs
with other women but Henry’s been very good in that respect. He may be quiet and not very
pushing but no one could call him a gadabout.’

‘Oh sure,’ said Gaskell, ’so he’s got a hang-up about sex. My heart bleeds for him.’

‘I don’t see why you should say he’s got something wrong with him because he’s faithful,’
said Eva.

‘G didn’t mean that, did you, G?’ said Sally. ‘He meant that there has to be true freedom
in a marriage. No dominance, no jealousy, no possession. Right, G?’

‘Right.’ said Gaskell.

‘The test of true love is when you can watch your wife having it off with someone else and
still love her,’ Sally went on.

‘I could never watch Henry…’ said Eva. ‘Never.’

‘So you don’t love him. You’re insecure. You don’t trust him.’

‘Trust him?’ said Eva. ‘If Henry went to bed with another woman I don’t see how I could
trust him. I mean if that’s what he wants to do why did he marry me?’

‘That,’ said Gaskell. ‘is the sixty-four-thousand dollar question.’ He picked up his
sleeping bag and went out on deck. Behind him Eva had begun to cry.

‘There, there,’ said Sally, putting her arm round her. ‘G was just kidding. He didn’t mean
anything.’

‘It’s not that.’ said Eva, ‘it’s just that I don’t understand anything any more. It’s all
so complicated.’

‘Christ, you look bloody awful,’ said Peter Braintree as Wilt stood on the doorstep.

‘I feel bloody awful,’ said Wilt. ‘It’s all this gin.’

‘You mean Eva’s not back?’ said Braintree, leading the way down the passage to the
kitchen.

‘She wasn’t there when I got home. Just a note saying she was going away with the
Pringsheims to think things over.’

‘To think things over? Eva? What things?’

‘Well…’ Wilt began and thought better of it, ‘that business with Sally I suppose. She
says she won’t ever forgive me.’

‘But you didn’t do anything with Sally. That’s what you told me.’

‘I know I didn’t. That’s the whole point. If I had done what that nymphomaniac bitch
wanted there wouldn’t have been all this bloody trouble.’

‘I don’t see that, Henry. I mean if you had done what she wanted Eva would have had
something to grumble about. I don’t see why she should be up in the air because you
didn’t.’

‘Sally must have told her that I did do something,’ said Wilt, determined not to
mention the incident in the bathroom with the doll.

‘You mean the blow job?’

‘I don’t know what I mean. What is a blow job anyway?’

Peter Braintree looked puzzled

‘I’m not too sure,’ he said, ‘but it’s obviously something you don’t want your husband
to do. If I came home and told Betty I’d done a blow job she’d think I’d been robbing a
bank.’

‘I wasn’t going to do it anyway,’ said Wilt. ‘She was going to do it to me.’

‘Perhaps it’s a suck off,’ said Braintree, putting a kettle on the stove. ‘That’s what it
sounds like to me.’

‘Well it didn’t sound like that to me,’ said Wilt with a shudder. ‘She made it sound like a
paint-peeling exercise with a blow lamp. You should have seen the look on her face.’

He sat down at the kitchen table despondently.

Braintree eyed him curiously. ‘You certainly seem to have been in the wars,’ he
said.

Wilt looked down at his trousers. They were covered with mud and there were round patches
caked to his knees. ‘Yes…well…well I had a puncture on the way here,’ he explained with lack
of conviction. ‘I had to change a tyre and I knelt down. I was a bit pissed.’

Peter Braintree grunted doubtfully. It didn’t sound very convincing to him. Poor old
Henry was obviously a bit under the weather. ‘You can wash up in the sink,’ he said.

Presently Betty Braintree came downstairs. ‘I couldn’t help hearing what you said about
Eva,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. Henry. I wouldn’t worry. She’s bound to come back.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure,’ said Wilt, gloomily, ‘and anyway I’m not so sure I want her
back.’

‘Oh, Eva’s all right,’ Betty said. ‘She gets these sudden urges and enthusiasms but
they don’t last long. It’s just the way she’s made. It’s easy come and easy go with Eva.’

‘I think that’s what’s worrying Henry,’ said Braintree, ‘the easy come bit.’

‘Oh surely not. Eva isn’t that sort at all.’

Wilt sat at the kitchen table and sipped his coffee. ‘I wouldn’t put anything past her in
the company she’s keeping now,’ he muttered lugubriously. ‘Remember what happened when
she went through, that macrobiotic diet phase? Dr Mannix told me I was the nearest thing
to a case of scurvy he’d seen since the Burma railway. And then there was that episode with
the trampoline. She went to a Keep Fit Class at Bulham Village College and bought herself
a fucking trampoline. You know she put old Mrs Portway in hospital with that
contraption.’

‘I knew there was some sort of accident but Eva never told me what actually
happened,’ said Betty.

‘She wouldn’t. It was a ruddy miracle we didn’t get sued,’ said Wilt. ‘It threw Mrs
Portway clean through the greenhouse roof. There was glass all over the lawn and it wasn’t
even as though Mrs Portway was a healthy woman at the best of times.’

‘Wasn’t she the woman with the rheumatoid arthritis?’

Wilt nodded dismally. ‘And the duelling scars on her face,’ he said. ‘That was our
greenhouse, that was.’

‘I must say I can think of better places for trampolines than greenhouses,’ said
Braintree. ‘It wasn’t a very big greenhouse was it?’

‘It wasn’t a very big trampoline either, thank God,’ said Wilt, ’she’d have been in
orbit otherwise.’

‘Well it all goes to prove one thing,’ said Betty, looking on the bright side, ‘Eva may do
crazy things but she soon, gets over them.’

‘Mrs Portway didn’t.’ said Wilt, not to be comforted. ‘She was in hospital for six
weeks and the skin grafts didn’t take. She hasn’t been near our house since.’

‘You’ll see. Eva will get fed up with these Pringsheim people in a week or two. They’re
just another fad.’

‘A fad with a lot of advantages if you ask me,’ said Wilt. ‘Money, status and sexual
promiscuity. All the things I couldn’t give her and all dressed up in a lot of
intellectual claptrap about Women’s Lib and violence and the intolerance of
tolerance and the revolution of the sexes and you’re not fully mature unless you’re
ambisextrous. It’s enough to make you vomit and it’s just the sort of crap Eva would fall
for. I mean she’d buy rotten herrings if some clown up the social scale told her they were
the sophisticated things to eat. Talk about being gullible!’

‘The thing is that Eva’s got too much energy,’ said Betty. You should try and persuade
her to get a full-time job.’

‘Full-time job?’ said Wilt. ‘She’s had more full-time jobs than I’ve had hot dinners.
Mind you, that’s not saying much these days. All I ever get is a cold supper and a note
saying she’s gone to Pottery or Transcendental Meditation or something equally
half-baked. And anyway Eva’s idea of a job is to take over the factory. Remember
Potters, that engineering firm that went broke after a strike a couple of years ago?
Well, if you ask me that was Eva’s fault. She got this job with a consultancy firm doing
time and motion study and they sent her out to the factory and the next thing anyone knew
they had a strike on their hands.’

They went on talking for another hour until the Braintrees asked him to stay the night.
But Wilt wouldn’t. ‘I’ve got things to do tomorrow.’

‘Such as?’

‘Feed the dog for one thing.’

‘You can always drive over and do that. Clem won’t starve overnight’

But Wilt was too immersed in self-pity to be persuaded and besides he was still
worried about that doll. He might have another go at getting the thing out of that hole. He
drove home and went to bed in a tangle of sheets and blankets. He hadn’t made it in the
morning.

‘Poor old Henry.’ said Betty as she and Peter went upstairs. ‘He did look pretty
awful.’

‘He said he’d had a puncture and had to change the wheel.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of his clothes. It was the look on his face that worried me. You don’t
drink he’s on the verge of a breakdown?’

Peter Braintree shook his head. ‘You’d look like that if you had Gasfitters Three and
Plasterers Two every day of your life for ten years and then your wife ran away,’ he told
her.

‘Why don’t they give him something better to teach?’

‘Why? Because the Tech wants to become a Poly and they keep starting new degree courses
and hiring people with PhDs to teach them and then the students don’t enrol and they’re
lumbered with specialists like Dr Fitzpatrick who knows all there is to know about child
labour in four cotton mills in Manchester in 1837 and damn all about anything else. Put him
in front of a class of Day Release Apprentices and all hell would break loose. As it is I
have to go into his A-level classes once a week and tell them to shut up. On the other
hand Henry looks, meek but he can cape with rowdies. He’s too good at his job. That’s his
trouble and besides he’s not a bum sucker and that’s the kiss of death at the Tech. If you
don’t lick arses you get nowhere.’

‘You know,’ said Betty, ‘teaching at that place has done horrible things to your
language.’

‘It’s done horrible things to my outlook on life, never mind my language,’ said
Braintree. ‘It’s enough to drive a man to drink.’

‘It certainly seems to have done that to Henry. His breath reeked of gin.’

‘He’ll get over it’

But Wilt didn’t. He woke in the morning with the feeling that something was missing
quite apart from Eva. That bloody doll. He lay in bed trying to think of some way of
retrieving the thing before the workmen arrived on the site on Monday morning but apart
from pouring a can of petrol down the hole and lighting it, which seemed on reflection the
best way of drawing attention to the fact that he had stuffed a plastic doll dressed in his
wife’s clothes down there, he could think of nothing practical. He would just have to trust
to luck.