Wilt classed himself with the Indifferents. In earlier years he had belonged to the Left politically and to the Right culturally. In other words he had banned the bomb, supported abortion and the abolition of private education and had been against capital punishment, thus earning himself something of a reputation as a radical while at the same time advocating a return to the craft of the wheelwright, the blacksmith and the handloom weaver which had done much to undermine the efforts of the Technical staff to instil in their students an appreciation of the opportunities provided by modern technology. Time and the intransigent coarseness of Plasterers had changed all that. Wilt’s ideals had vanished, to be replaced by the conviction that the man who said the pen was mightier than the sword ought to have tried reading The Mill on the Floss to Motor Mechanics Three before he opened his big mouth. In Wilt’s view, the sword had much to recommend it.
As Dr Mayfield droned on, as question time with its ideological arguments followed, Wilt studied the pile hole on the building site. It would make an ideal depository for a body and there would be something immensely satisfying in knowing that Eva, who in her lifetime had been so unbearable, was in death supporting the weight of a mufti-storey concrete building. Besides it would make her discovery an extremely remote possibility and her identification out of the question. Not even Eva, who boasted a strong constitution and a stronger will, could maintain an identity at the bottom of a pile shaft. The difficulty would be in getting her to go down the hole in the first place. Sleeping pills seemed a sensible preliminary but Eva was a sound sleeper and didn’t believe in pills of any sort.
‘I can’t imagine why not,’ Wilt thought grimly, ’she’s prepared to believe in just about everything else.’
His reverie was interrupted by Mr Morris who was bringing the meeting to a close. ‘Before you all go,’ he said. ‘there is one more subject I want to mention. We have been asked by the Head of Engineering to conduct a series of one-hour lectures to Sandwich-Course Trainee Firemen. The theme this year will be Problems of Contemporary Society. I have drawn up a list of topics and the lecturers who will give them.’
Mr Morris handed out subjects at random. Major Millfield got Media, Communications and Participatory Democracy about which he knew nothing and cared less. Peter Braintree was given The New Brutalism in Architecture, Its Origins and Social Attributes, and Wilt ended up with Violence and the Break-Up of Family Life. On the whole he thought he had done rather well. The subject fitted in with his present preoccupations. Mr Morris evidently agreed.
‘I thought you might like to have a go at it after yesterday’s little episode with Printers Three,’ he said, as they went out. Wilt smiled wanly and went off to take Fitters and Turners Two. He gave them Shane to read and spent the hour jotting down notes for his lecture. In the distance he could hear the pile-boring machines grinding away. Wilt could imagine Eva lying at the bottom as they poured the concrete in. In her lemon pyjamas. It was a nice thought, and helped him with his notes. He wrote down a heading, Crime in the family, subheading (A) Murder of Spouse, decline in since divorce laws.
Yes, he should be able to talk about that to Trainee Firemen.
Chapter 4
‘I loathe parties,’ said Wilt on Thursday night, ‘and if there’s one thing worse than parties it’s university parties and bottle parties are worst of all. You take along a bottle of decent burgundy and end up drinking someone else’s rotgut.’
‘It isn’t a party,’ said Eva, ‘it’s a barbecue.’
‘It says here “Come and Touch and Come with Sally and Gaskell 9 PM Thursday. Bring your own ambrosia or take pot luck with the Pringsheim punch.” If ambrosia doesn’t mean Algerian bilgewater I’d like to know what it does mean.’
‘I thought it was that stuff people take to get a hard-on,’ said Eva.
Wilt looked at her with disgust. ‘You’ve picked up some choice phrases since you’ve met these bloody people. A hard-on! I don’t know what’s got into you.’
‘You haven’t. That’s for sure,’ said Eva, and went through to the bathroom. Wilt sat on the bed and looked at the card. The beastly thing was shaped like a…What the hell was it shaped like? Anyway it was pink and opened out and inside were all these ambiguous words. Come and Touch and Come. Anyone touched him and they’d get an earful. And what about pot luck? A lot of trendy dons smoking joints and talking about set-theoretic data-manipulation systems or the significance of pre-Popper Hegelianism in the contemporary dialectical scene, or something equally unintelligible, and using fuck and cunt every now and then to show that they were still human.
‘And what do you do?’ they would ask him.
‘Well, actually I teach at the Tech.’
‘At the Tech? How frightfully interesting,’ looking over his shoulder towards more stimulating horizons, and he would end the evening with same ghastly woman who felt strongly that Techs fulfilled a real function and that intellectual achievement was vastly overrated and that people should be, oriented in a way that would make them community coordinated and that’s what Techs were doing, weren’t they? Wilt knew what Techs were doing. Paying people like him £3500 a year to keep Gasfitters quiet for an hour.
And Pringsheim Punch. Planters Punch. Printers Punch. He’d had enough punches recently.
‘What the hell am I to wear?’ he asked.
‘There’s that Mexican shirt you bought on the Costa del Sol last year,’ Eva called from the bathroom. ‘You haven’t had a chance to wear it since’
‘And I don’t intend to now,’ muttered Wilt, rummaging through a drawer in search of something nondescript that would demonstrate his independence. In the end he put on a striped shirt with blue jeans.
‘You’re surely not going like that?’ Eva told him emerging from the bathroom largely naked. Her face was plastered with white powder and her lips were carmine.
‘Jesus wept,’ said Wilt, ‘Mardi Gras with pernicious anaemia.’
Eva pushed passed him. ‘I’m going as The Great Gatsby,’ she announced,’ ‘and if you had any imagination you’d think of something better than a business shirt with blue jeans’
‘The Great Gatsby happened to be a man,’ said Wilt.
‘Bully for him,’ said Eva and put on her lemon loungers.
Wilt shut his eyes and took off his shirt. By the time they left the house he was wearing a red shirt with jeans while Eva, in spite of the hot night, insisted on putting on her new raincoat and trilby.
‘We might as well walk.’ said Wilt.
They took the car. Eva wasn’t yet prepared to walk down Parkview Avenue in a trilby, a belted raincoat and lemon loungers. On the way they stopped at an off-licence where Wilt bought a bottle of Cyprus red.
‘Don’t think I’m going to touch the muck,’ he said, ‘and you had better take the car keys now. If it’s as bad as I think it will be, I’m walking home early.’
It was. Worse. In his red shirt and blue jeans Wilt looked out of place.