The Wilt Alternative

'I prefer not to hear your loathsome fantasies,' said Wilt. 'Some other time perhaps. With Irmgard it's different. I am not talking about the merely physical. We relate.'

'Good God, Henry...' said Braintree, flabbergasted.

'Exactly. When did you hear me use that dreaded word before?'

'Never.'

'You're hearing it now. And if that doesn't indicate the fearful predicament I'm in, nothing will.'

'It does,' said Braintree. 'You're...'

'In love,' said Wilt.

'I was going to say out of your mind.'

'It amounts to the same thing. I am caught in the horns of a dilemma. I use that cliché advisedly, though to be perfectly frank horns don't come into it. I am married to a formidable, frenetic and basically insensitive wife...'

'Who doesn't understand you. We've heard all this before.'

'Who does understand me. And you haven't,' said Wilt and drank some more beer bitterly.

'Henry, someone has been putting stuff in your tea,' said Braintree.

'Yes, and we all know who that is. Mrs Crippen.'

'Mrs Crippen? What the hell are you talking about?'

'Has it ever occurred to you,' said Wilt pointedly shoving the pork pie down the counter, 'what would have happened if Mrs Crippen, instead of being childless and bullying her husband and generally being in the way, had had quads? I can see it hasn't. Well, it has to me. Ever since I taught that course on Orwell and the Art of the English Murder, I have gone into the subject deeply on my way home to an Alternative Supper consisting of uncooked soya sausage and homegrown sorrel washed down with dandelion coffee and I've come to certain conclusions.'

'Henry, this is verging on paranoia,' said Braintree sternly.

'Is it? Then answer my question. If Mrs Crippen had had quads who would have ended up under the cellar floor? Dr Crippen. No, don't interrupt. You are not aware of the change that maternity has brought to Eva. I am. I live in an oversize house with an oversize mother and four daughters and I can tell you that I have had an insight into the female of the species which is denied more fortunate men and I know when I'm not wanted.'

'What the hell are you on about now?

'Two more pints please,' Wilt told the barman, 'and kindly return that pie to its cage.'

'Now look here, Henry, you're letting your imagination run away with you,' said Braintree. 'You're not seriously suggesting that Eva is setting out to poison you?'

'I won't go quite that far,' said Wilt, 'though the thought did cross my mind when Eva moved into Alternative Fungi. I soon put a stop to that by getting Samantha to taste them first. I may be redundant but the quads aren't. Not in Eva's opinion anyway. She sees her litter as being potential geniuses. Samantha is Einstein, Penelope's handiwork with a felt-pen on the sitting-room wall suggested she was a feminine Michelangelo, Josephine hardly needs an introduction with a name like that. Need I go on?'

Braintree shook his head.

'Right,' continued Wilt, despondently helping himself to the fresh beer. 'As a male I have performed my biological function and just when I was settling down relatively happily to premature senility Eva, with an infallible intuition, which I might add I never suspected, brings to live under the same roof a woman who possesses all those remarkable qualities, intelligence, beauty, a spiritual sensitivity and a radiance... all I can say is that Irmgard is the epitome of the woman I should have married.'

'And didn't,' said Braintree emerging from the beer-mug where he had taken refuge from Wilt's ghastly catalogue. 'You are lumbered with Eva and...'

'Lumbered is exact,' said Wilt. 'When Eva gets into bed... I'll spare you the sordid details. Suffice it to say that she's twice the man I am.' He relapsed into silence and finished his pint.

'Anyway, I still say you'd be making a hell of a mistake if you brought the Tech any more bad publicity,' said Braintree, to change a distressing subject. 'Let sleeping dogs lie is my motto.'

'Mine too if people didn't sleep with crocs on film,' said Wilt. 'As it is that bastard Bilger has the gall to tell me I'm a deviationist swine and a lackey of capitalistic fascism... thank you, I will have another pint... and all the time I'm protecting the sod. I've half a mind to make a public issue of the whole damned thing. Only half a mind, because Toxted and his gang of National Front thugs are just waiting for a chance to have a punch-up and I'm not going to be their hero thank you very much.'

'I saw our little Hitler pinning up a poster in the canteen this morning,' said Braintree.

'Oh really, what's he advocating this time? Castration for coolies or bring back the rack?'

'Something to do with Zionism,' said Braintree. 'I'd have ripped the thing down if he hadn't had a bodyguard of Bedouins. He's moved in with the Arabs now, you know.'

'Brilliant,' said Wilt, 'absolutely brilliant. That's what I like about these maniacs of the right and left, they're so bloody inconsistent There's Bilger who sends his children to a private school and lives in a ruddy great house his father bought him and he goes round advocating world revolution from the driving seat of a Porsche that must have cost six thousand if it cost a penny and he calls me a fascist pig. I'm just recovering from that one when I bang into Toxted who is a genuine fascist and lives in a council house and wants to send anyone with a pigmentation problem back to Islamabad even though they were actually born in Clapham and haven't been out of England since, and who does he team up with? A bunch of ruddy sheikhs with more oil dollars under their burnouses than he's had hot dinners, can't speak more than three words of English, and own half Mayfair. Add the fact that they're semites and he's so anti-semitic he makes Eichmann look like a Friend of Israel, and then tell me how his bloody mind ticks. I'm damned if I know. It's enough to drive a rational man to drink.'

As if to give point to this remark Wilt ordered two more pints.

'You've had six already,' said Braintree doubtfully. 'Eva will give you hell when you get home.'

'Eva gives me hell, period,' said Wilt. 'When I consider how my life is spent...'

'Yes, well I'd just as soon you didn't,' said Braintree, 'there's nothing worse than an introspective drunk.'

'I was quoting from the first line of "Testament of Beauty" by Robert Bridges,' said Wilt. 'Not that it's relevant. And I may be introspective but I am not introspectively drunk. I am merely pissed. If you'd had the sort of day I've had and were faced with the prospect of climbing into bed with Eva in a foul temper you would seek oblivion in beer too. Added to which is the knowledge that ten feet above my head, separated only by a ceiling, a floor and some wall-to-wall rush matting, will be lying the most beautiful, intelligent, radiant, sensitive creature...'

'If you mention the word Muse again, Henry...' said Braintree threateningly.

'I don't intend to,' said Wilt. 'Such ears as yours are far too coarse. Come to think of it, that almost rhymes. Has it ever occurred to you that English is a language most naturally fitted for poetry which rhymes?'

Wilt launched into this more agreeable topic and finished more beers. By the time they left The Glassblower's Arms Braintree was too drunk to drive home.

'I'll leave the car here and fetch it in the morning,' he told Wilt who was propping up a telegraph pole, 'and if I were you I'd ring for a taxi. You're not even fit to walk.'

'I shall commune with nature,' said Wilt. 'I have no intention of hastening the time between now and reality. With any luck it'll be asleep by the time I get back.'

And he wobbled off in the direction of Willington Road, stopping occasionally to steady himself against a gatepost and twice to pee into someone else's garden. On the second occasion he mistook a rosebush for a hydrangea and scratched himself rather badly and was sitting on the grass verge attempting to use a handkerchief as a tourniquet when a police car pulled up beside him. Wilt blinked into the flashlight which shone in his face before travelling down to the bloodstained handkerchief.