Wilt considered the implications of mugging as part of an intellectual’s education. After his experience the previous night he was inclined to think there was something to be said for it. He would have liked to have duffed up half the people at the Pringsheims’ party.
‘So none of you feel there’s anything wrong with beating a student up if he gets in your way?’ he asked.
‘Wrong?’ said the bricklayers in unison, ‘What’s wrong with a good punch-up? It’s not as if a grad is an old woman or something. He can always hit back, can’t he?’
They spent the rest of the hour discussing violence in the modern world. On the whole, the bricklayers seemed to think it was a good thing.
‘I mean what’s the point of going out on a Saturday night and getting pissed if you can’t have a bit of a barney at the same time? Got to get rid of your aggression somehow.’ said an unusually articulate bricklayer, ‘I mean it’s natural isn’t it?’
‘So you think man is a naturally aggressive animal,’ said Wilt.
‘Course he is. That’s history for you, all them wars and things. It’s only bloody poofters don’t like violence.’
Wilt took this view of things along to the Staff Room for his free period and collected a cup of coffee from the vending machine. He was joined by Peter Braintree.
‘How did the party got’ Braintree asked.
‘It didn’t,’ said Wilt morosely.
‘Eva enjoy it?’
‘I wouldn’t know. She hadn’t come home by the time I got up this morning.’
‘Hadn’t come home?’
‘That’s what I said,’ said Wilt.
‘Well did you ring up and find out what had happened to her?’
‘No,’ said Wilt.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’d look a bit of a twit ringing up and being told she was shacked up with the Abyssinian ambassador, wouldn’t I?’
‘The Abyssinian ambassador? Was he there?’
‘I don’t know and I don’t want to know.’ The last I saw of her she was being chatted up by this big black bloke from Ethiopia. Something to do with the United Nations. She was making fruit salad and he was chopping bananas for her.’
‘Doesn’t sound a very compromising sort of activity to me,’ said Braintree.
‘No, I daresay it doesn’t. Only you weren’t there and don’t know what sort of party it was,’ said Wilt rapidly coming to the conclusion that an edited version of the night’s events was called for. ‘A whole lot of middle-aged with-it kids doing their withered thing.!
‘It sounds bloody awful. And you think Eva…’
‘I think Eva got pissed and somebody gave her a joint and she passed out,’ said Wilt, ‘that’s what I think. She’s probably sleeping it off in the downstairs loo.’
‘Doesn’t sound like Eva to me,’ said Braintree. Wilt drank his coffee and considered his strategy. If the story of his involvement with that fucking doll was going to come out, perhaps it would be better if he told it his way first. On the other hand…
‘What were you doing while all this was going on?’ Braintree asked.
‘Well’ said Wilt, ‘as a matter of fact…’ He hesitated. On second thoughts it might be better not to mention the doll at all. If Eva kept her trap shut…’I got a bit slewed myself.’
‘That sounds more like it,’ said Braintree, ‘I suppose you made a pass at another woman too.’
‘If you must know,’ said Wilt, ‘another woman made a pass at me. Mrs Pringsheim.’
‘Mrs Pringsheim made a pass at you?’
‘Well, we went upstairs to look at her husband’s toys…’
‘His toys? I thought you told me he was a biochemist.’
‘He is a biochemist. He just happens to like playing with toys. Model trains and Teddy Bears and things. She says he’s a case of arrested development. She would, though. She’s that sort of loyal wife.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Apart from her locking the door and lying on the bed with her legs wide open and asking me to screw her and threatening me with a blow job, nothing happened,’ said Wilt.
Peter Braintree looked at him sceptically. ‘Nothing?’ he said finally. ‘Nothing? I mean what did you do?’
‘Equivocated,’ said Wilt.
‘That’s a new word for it,’ said Braintree. ‘You go upstairs with Mrs Pringsheim and equivocate while she lies on a bed with her legs open and you want to know why Eva hasn’t come home? She’s probably round at same lawyer’s office filing a petition for divorce right now.’
‘But I tell you I didn’t screw the bitch,’ said Wilt, ‘I told her to hawk her pearly somewhere else.’
‘And you call that equivocating? Hawk her pearly? Where the hell did you get that expression from?’
‘Meat One,’ said Wilt and got up and fetched himself another cup of coffee.
By the time he came back to his seat he had decided on his version.
‘I don’t know what happened after that,’ he said when Braintree insisted on hearing the next episode. ‘I passed out. It must have been the vodka.’
‘You just passed out in a locked room with a naked woman? Is that what happened?’ said Braintree. He didn’t sound as if he believed a word of the story.
‘Precisely,’ said Wilt.
‘And when you came to?’
‘I was walking home,’ said Wilt. ‘I’ve no idea what happened in between.’
‘Oh well, I daresay we’ll hear about that from Eva,’ said Braintree. ‘She’s bound to know.’
He got up and went off and Wilt was left alone to consider his next mane. The first thing to do was to make sure that Eva didn’t say anything. He went through to the telephone in the corridor and dialled his home number. There was no reply. Wilt went along to Room 187 and spent an hour with Turners and Fitters. Several times during the day he tried to telephone Eva but there was no answer.
‘She’s probably spent the day round at Mavis Mottram’s weeping on her shoulder and telling all and sundry what a pig I am,’ he thought. ‘She’s bound to be waiting for me when I get home tonight.’
But she wasn’t. Instead there was a note on the kitchen table and a package. Wilt opened the note.
‘I’m going away with Sally and Gaskell to think things over. What you did last night was horrible. I won’t ever forgive you. Don’t forget to buy some dog food. Eva. P.S. Sally says next time you want a blow job get Judy to give you one.’
Wilt looked at the package. He knew without opening it what it contained. That infernal doll. In a sudden paroxysm of rage Wilt picked it up and hurled it across the kitchen at the sink. Two plates and a saucer bounced off the washing-up rack and broke on the floor.
‘Bugger the bitch,’ said Wilt inclusively, Eva, Judy, and Sally Pringsheim all coming within the ambit of his fury. Then he sat down at the table and looked at the note again. ‘Going away to think things over.’ Like hell she was. Think? The stupid cow wasn’t capable of thought. She’d emote, drool over his deficiencies and work herself into an ecstasy of self-pity. Wilt could hear her now blathering on about that blasted bank manager and how she should have married him instead of saddling herself with a man who couldn’t even get promotion at the Tech and who went around fucking inflatable dolls in other people’s bathrooms. And there was that filthy slut, Sally Pringsheim, egging her on. Wilt looked at the postscript. ‘Sally says next time you want a blow job…’Christ. As if he’d wanted a blow job the last time. But there it was, a new myth in the making, like the business of his being in love with Betty Crabtree when all he had done was give her a lift home one night after an Evening Class. Wilt’s home life was punctuated by such myths, weapons in Eva’s armoury to be brought out when the occasion demanded and brandished above his head. And now Eva had the ultimate deterrent at her disposal, the doll and Sally Pringsheim and a blow job. The balance of recrimination which had been the sustaining factor in their relationship had shifted dramatically. It would take an act of desperate invention on Wilt’s part to restore it.