The Wilt Alternative

'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?

With an unusual sense of depression Eva made herself some coffee and then polished the hall floor and Hoovered the stair-carpet and tidied the living-room and put the dirty clothes in the washing-machine and brushed the rim of the Organic Toilet and did all those jobs which had to be done before she collected the quads from playschool. She had just finished and was brushing her hair in the bedroom when she heard the front door open and close and footsteps on the stairs. That couldn't be Henry. He never came up two at a time and anyway with his dooda in bandages he probably wouldn't come up at all. Eva crossed to the bedroom door and looked out at a startled young man on the landing.

'What do you think you're doing?' she asked in some alarm.

The young man raised his hands. 'Please, I am here for Miss Mueller,' he said with a thick foreign accent. 'She has borrowed me the key.' He held it up in front of him as evidence.