‘Christ, you look bloody awful,’ said Peter Braintree as Wilt stood on the doorstep.
‘I feel bloody awful,’ said Wilt. ‘It’s all this gin.’
‘You mean Eva’s not back?’ said Braintree, leading the way down the passage to the kitchen.
‘She wasn’t there when I got home. Just a note saying she was going away with the Pringsheims to think things over.’
‘To think things over? Eva? What things?’
‘Well…’ Wilt began and thought better of it, ‘that business with Sally I suppose. She says she won’t ever forgive me.’
‘But you didn’t do anything with Sally. That’s what you told me.’
‘I know I didn’t. That’s the whole point. If I had done what that nymphomaniac bitch wanted there wouldn’t have been all this bloody trouble.’
‘I don’t see that, Henry. I mean if you had done what she wanted Eva would have had something to grumble about. I don’t see why she should be up in the air because you didn’t.’
‘Sally must have told her that I did do something,’ said Wilt, determined not to mention the incident in the bathroom with the doll.
‘You mean the blow job?’
‘I don’t know what I mean. What is a blow job anyway?’
Peter Braintree looked puzzled
‘I’m not too sure,’ he said, ‘but it’s obviously something you don’t want your husband to do. If I came home and told Betty I’d done a blow job she’d think I’d been robbing a bank.’
‘I wasn’t going to do it anyway,’ said Wilt. ‘She was going to do it to me.’
‘Perhaps it’s a suck off,’ said Braintree, putting a kettle on the stove. ‘That’s what it sounds like to me.’
‘Well it didn’t sound like that to me,’ said Wilt with a shudder. ‘She made it sound like a paint-peeling exercise with a blow lamp. You should have seen the look on her face.’
He sat down at the kitchen table despondently.
Braintree eyed him curiously. ‘You certainly seem to have been in the wars,’ he said.
Wilt looked down at his trousers. They were covered with mud and there were round patches caked to his knees. ‘Yes…well…well I had a puncture on the way here,’ he explained with lack of conviction. ‘I had to change a tyre and I knelt down. I was a bit pissed.’
Peter Braintree grunted doubtfully. It didn’t sound very convincing to him. Poor old Henry was obviously a bit under the weather. ‘You can wash up in the sink,’ he said.
Presently Betty Braintree came downstairs. ‘I couldn’t help hearing what you said about Eva,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. Henry. I wouldn’t worry. She’s bound to come back.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure,’ said Wilt, gloomily, ‘and anyway I’m not so sure I want her back.’
‘Oh, Eva’s all right,’ Betty said. ‘She gets these sudden urges and enthusiasms but they don’t last long. It’s just the way she’s made. It’s easy come and easy go with Eva.’
‘I think that’s what’s worrying Henry,’ said Braintree, ‘the easy come bit.’
‘Oh surely not. Eva isn’t that sort at all.’
Wilt sat at the kitchen table and sipped his coffee. ‘I wouldn’t put anything past her in the company she’s keeping now,’ he muttered lugubriously. ‘Remember what happened when she went through, that macrobiotic diet phase? Dr Mannix told me I was the nearest thing to a case of scurvy he’d seen since the Burma railway. And then there was that episode with the trampoline. She went to a Keep Fit Class at Bulham Village College and bought herself a fucking trampoline. You know she put old Mrs Portway in hospital with that contraption.’
‘I knew there was some sort of accident but Eva never told me what actually happened,’ said Betty.
‘She wouldn’t. It was a ruddy miracle we didn’t get sued,’ said Wilt. ‘It threw Mrs Portway clean through the greenhouse roof. There was glass all over the lawn and it wasn’t even as though Mrs Portway was a healthy woman at the best of times.’
‘Wasn’t she the woman with the rheumatoid arthritis?’
Wilt nodded dismally. ‘And the duelling scars on her face,’ he said. ‘That was our greenhouse, that was.’
‘I must say I can think of better places for trampolines than greenhouses,’ said Braintree. ‘It wasn’t a very big greenhouse was it?’
‘It wasn’t a very big trampoline either, thank God,’ said Wilt, ’she’d have been in orbit otherwise.’
‘Well it all goes to prove one thing,’ said Betty, looking on the bright side, ‘Eva may do crazy things but she soon, gets over them.’
‘Mrs Portway didn’t.’ said Wilt, not to be comforted. ‘She was in hospital for six weeks and the skin grafts didn’t take. She hasn’t been near our house since.’
‘You’ll see. Eva will get fed up with these Pringsheim people in a week or two. They’re just another fad.’
‘A fad with a lot of advantages if you ask me,’ said Wilt. ‘Money, status and sexual promiscuity. All the things I couldn’t give her and all dressed up in a lot of intellectual claptrap about Women’s Lib and violence and the intolerance of tolerance and the revolution of the sexes and you’re not fully mature unless you’re ambisextrous. It’s enough to make you vomit and it’s just the sort of crap Eva would fall for. I mean she’d buy rotten herrings if some clown up the social scale told her they were the sophisticated things to eat. Talk about being gullible!’
‘The thing is that Eva’s got too much energy,’ said Betty. You should try and persuade her to get a full-time job.’
‘Full-time job?’ said Wilt. ‘She’s had more full-time jobs than I’ve had hot dinners. Mind you, that’s not saying much these days. All I ever get is a cold supper and a note saying she’s gone to Pottery or Transcendental Meditation or something equally half-baked. And anyway Eva’s idea of a job is to take over the factory. Remember Potters, that engineering firm that went broke after a strike a couple of years ago? Well, if you ask me that was Eva’s fault. She got this job with a consultancy firm doing time and motion study and they sent her out to the factory and the next thing anyone knew they had a strike on their hands.’
They went on talking for another hour until the Braintrees asked him to stay the night. But Wilt wouldn’t. ‘I’ve got things to do tomorrow.’
‘Such as?’
‘Feed the dog for one thing.’
‘You can always drive over and do that. Clem won’t starve overnight’
But Wilt was too immersed in self-pity to be persuaded and besides he was still worried about that doll. He might have another go at getting the thing out of that hole. He drove home and went to bed in a tangle of sheets and blankets. He hadn’t made it in the morning.
‘Poor old Henry.’ said Betty as she and Peter went upstairs. ‘He did look pretty awful.’
‘He said he’d had a puncture and had to change the wheel.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of his clothes. It was the look on his face that worried me. You don’t drink he’s on the verge of a breakdown?’
Peter Braintree shook his head. ‘You’d look like that if you had Gasfitters Three and Plasterers Two every day of your life for ten years and then your wife ran away,’ he told her.
‘Why don’t they give him something better to teach?’
‘Why? Because the Tech wants to become a Poly and they keep starting new degree courses and hiring people with PhDs to teach them and then the students don’t enrol and they’re lumbered with specialists like Dr Fitzpatrick who knows all there is to know about child labour in four cotton mills in Manchester in 1837 and damn all about anything else. Put him in front of a class of Day Release Apprentices and all hell would break loose. As it is I have to go into his A-level classes once a week and tell them to shut up. On the other hand Henry looks, meek but he can cape with rowdies. He’s too good at his job. That’s his trouble and besides he’s not a bum sucker and that’s the kiss of death at the Tech. If you don’t lick arses you get nowhere.’