By the time he had got it back in place, panic had set in. He had to get out of the doll. He just had to. There would be a razor in the bathroom or a pair of scissors. But where on earth was the bathroom? Never mind about that. He’d find the damned thing. Carefully, very carefully he rolled the doll on to her hack and followed her over. Then he inched his knees up until he was straddling the thing. All he needed now was something to hold on to while he got to his feet. Wilt leant over and grasped the edge of a chair with one hand while lifting Judy’s head off the floor with the other. A moment later he was on his feet. Holding the doll to him he shuffled towards the door and opened it. He peered out into the passage. What if someone saw him? To hell with that. Wilt no longer cared what people thought about him. But which way was the bathroom? Wilt turned right, and peering frantically over Judy’s shoulder, shuffled off down the passage.
Downstairs, Eva was having a wonderful time. First Christopher, then the man in the Irish Cheese loincloth and finally Dr Scheimacher, had all made advances to her and been rebuffed. It was such a change from Henry’s lack of interest showed she was still attractive. Dr Scheimacher had said that she was an interesting example of latent steatopygia, Christopher tried to kiss her breasts and the man in the loincloth had made the most extraordinary suggestion to her. And through it all, Eva had remained entirely virtuous. Her massive skittishness, her insistence on dancing and, most effective of all, her habit of saying in a loud and not wholly cultivated voice, ‘Oh you are awful’ at moments of their greatest ardour, had had a markedly deterrent effect. Now she sat on the floor in the living-room, while Sally and Gaskell and the bearded man from the institute of Ecological Research argued about sexually interchangeable role-playing in a population-restrictive society. She felt strangely elated. Parkview Avenue and Mavis Mottram and her work at the Harmony Community Centre seemed to belong to another world. She had been accepted by people who flew to California or Tokyo to conferences and Think Tanks as casually as she took the bus to town. Dr Scheimacher had mentioned that he was flying to New Delhi in the morning, and Christopher had just come back from photographic assignment in Trinidad. Above all, there was an aura of importance about what they were doing, a glamour that was wholly lacking in Henry’s job at the Tech. If only she could get him to do something interesting and adventurous. But Henry was such a stick-in-the-mud. She had made mistake in marrying him. She really had. All he was interested in was books, but life wasn’t to be found in books. Like Sally said, life was for living. Life was people and experiences and fun. Henry would never see that.
In the bathroom Wilt could see very little. He certainly couldn’t see any way of getting out of the doll. His attempt to slit the beastly thing’s throat with a razor had failed, thank largely to the fact that the razor in question was a Wilkinson bonded blade. Having failed with the razor be had tried shampoo as a lubricant but apart from working up a lather which even to his jaundiced eye looked as though he had aroused the doll to positively frenzied heights of sexual expectation the shampoo had achieved nothing. Finally he had reverted to a quest for the valve. The damned thing had one somewhere if only he could find it. In this endeavour he peered into the mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet but the mirror was too small. There was a large one over the washbasin. Wilt pulled down the lid of the toilet and climbed on to it. This way he would be able to get a clear view of the doll’s back. He was just inching his way round when there were footsteps in the passage. Wilt stopped inching and stood rigid on the toilet lid. Someone tried the door and found it locked. The footsteps retreated and Wilt breathed a sigh of relief. Now then, just let him find that valve.
And at that moment disaster struck. Wilt’s left foot stepped in the shampoo that had dripped on to the toilet seat, slid sideways off the edge and Wilt, the doll and the door of the medicine cabinet with which he had attempted to save himself were momentarily airborne. As they hurtled into the bath, as the shower curtain and fitting followed, as the contents of the medicine cabinet cascaded on to the washbasin, Wilt gave a last despairing scream. There was a pop reminiscent of champagne corks and Judy, finally responding to the pressure of Wilt’s eleven stone dropping from several feet into the bath, ejected him. But Wilt no longer cared. He had in every sense passed out. He was only dimly aware of shouts in the corridor, of someone breaking the door down, of faces peering at him and of hysterical laughter. When he came to be was lying on the bed in the toy room. He got up and put on his clothes and crept downstairs and out of the front door. It was 3 AM.
Chapter 5
Eva sat on the edge of the bed crying.
‘How could he? How could he do a thing like that? she said, ‘in front of all these people.’
‘Eva baby, men are like that. Believe me,’ said Sally.
‘But with a doll…’
‘That’s symbolic of the male chauvinist pig attitude to women. We’re just fuck artefacts to them. Objectification. So now you know how Henry feels about you.’
‘It’s horrible,’ said Eva.
‘Sure it’s horrible. Male domination debases us to the level of objects.’
‘But Henry’s never done anything like that before,’ Eva wailed.
‘Well, he’s done it now.’
‘I’m not going back to him. I couldn’t face it. I feel so ashamed.’
‘Honey, you just forget about it. You don’t have to go anywhere. Sally will look after you. You just lie down and get some sleep.’
Eva lay back, but sleep was impossible. The image of Henry lying naked in the bath on top of that horrible doll was faced in her mind. They had to break the door down and Dr Scheimacher find cut his hand on a broken bottle trying to get Henry out of the bath…Oh, it was all too awful. She would never be able to look people in the face again. The story was bound to get about and she would be known as the woman whose husband went around…With a fresh paroxysm of embarrassment Eva buried her head in the pillow and wept.
‘Well that sure made the party go with a bang,’ said Gaskell. ‘Guy screws a doll in the bathroom and everyone goes berserk.’ He looked round the living-room at the mess. ‘If anyone thinks I’m going to start clearing this lot up now they’d better think again. I’m going to bed.’
‘Just don’t wake Eva up. She’s hysterical,’ said Sally.
‘Oh great. Now we’ve got a manic obsessive compulsive woman with hysteria in the house.’
‘And tomorrow she’s coming with us on the boat.’
‘She’s what?’
‘You heard me. She’s coming with us on the boat.’
‘Now wait a bit…’
‘I’m not arguing with you, G. I’m telling you. She’s coming with us.’