Wilt Read online

  ‘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 mind 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 a 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 think 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 cope with rowdies. He’s too good at his job. That’s his trouble and besides he’s not a bumsucker 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.

  When the Sunday papers came he got out of bed and went down to read them over his All-Bran. Then he fed the dog and mooched about the house in his pyjamas, walked down to the Ferry Path Inn for lunch, slept in the afternoon and watched the box all evening. Then he made the bed and got into it and spent a restless night wondering where Eva was, what she was doing, and why, since he had occupied so many fruitless hours speculating on ways of getting rid of her homicidally, he should be in the least concerned now that she had gone of her own accord.

  ‘I mean if I didn’t want this to happen why did I keep thinking up ways of killing her,’ he thought at two o’clock. ‘Sane people don’t go for walks with a Labrador and devise schemes for murdering their wives when they can just as easily divorce them.’ There was probably some foul psychological reason for it. Wilt could think of several himself, rather too many in fact to be able to decide which was the most likely one. In any case a psychological explanation demanded a degree of self-knowledge which Wilt, who wasn’t at all sure he had a self to know, felt was denied him. Ten years of Plasterers Two and Exposure to Barbarism had at least given him the insight to know that there was an answer for every question and it didn’t much matter what answer you gave so long as you gave it convincingly. In the fourteenth century they would have said the devil put such thoughts into his head, now in a post-Freudian world it had to be a complex or, to be really up-to-date, a chemical imbalance. In a hundred years they would have come up with some completely different explanation. With the comforting thought that the truths of one age were the absurdities of another and that it didn’t much matter what you thought so long as you did the right thing, and in his view he did, Wilt finally fell asleep.

  At seven he was woken by the alarm clock and by half past eight had parked his car in the parking lot behind the Tech. He walked past the building site where the workmen were already at work. Then he went up to the Staff Room and looked out of the window. The square of plywood was still in place covering the hole but the pile-boring machine had been backed away. They had evidently finished with it.

  At five to nine he collected twenty-five copies of Shane from the cupboard and took them across to Motor Mechanics Three. Shane was the ideal soporific. It would keep the brutes quiet while he sat and watched what happened down below. Room 593 in the Engineering block gave him a grandstand view. Wilt filled in the register and handed out copies of Shane and told the class to get on with it. He said it with a good deal more vigour than was usual even for a Monday morning and the class settled down to consider the plight of the homesteaders while Wilt stared out of the window, absorbed in a more immediate
drama.

  A lorry with a revolving drum filled with liquid concrete had arrived on the site and was backing slowly towards the plywood square. It stopped and there was an agonizing wait while the driver climbed down from the cab and lit a cigarette. Another man, evidently the foreman, came out of a wooden hut and wandered across to the lorry and presently a little group was gathered round the hole. Wilt got up from his desk and went over to the window. Why the hell didn’t they get a move on? Finally the driver got back into his cab and two men removed the plywood. The foreman signalled to the driver. The chute for the concrete was swung into position. Another signal. The drum began to tilt. The concrete was coming. Wilt watched as it began to pour down the chute and just at that moment the foreman looked down the hole. So did one of the workmen. The next instant all hell had broken loose. There were frantic signals and shouts from the foreman. Through the window Wilt watched the open mouths and the gesticulations but still the concrete came. Wilt shut his eyes and shuddered. They had found that fucking doll.

  *

  Outside on the building site the air was thick with misunderstanding.

  ‘What’s that? I’m pouring as fast as I can,’ shouted the driver, misconstruing the frenzied signals of the foreman. He pulled the lever still further and the concrete flood increased. The next moment he was aware that he had made some sort of mistake. The foreman was wrenching at the door of the cab and screaming blue murder.

  ‘Stop, for God’s sake stop,’ he shouted. ‘There’s a woman down that hole!’

  ‘A what?’ said the driver, and switched off the engine.

  ‘A fucking woman and look what you’ve been and fucking done. I told you to stop. I told you to stop pouring and you went on. You’ve been and poured twenty tons of liquid concrete on her.’

  The driver climbed down from his cab and went round to the chute where the last trickles of cement were still sliding hesitantly into the hole.