‘Do what I did. Get out of the house,’ said Wilt. ‘And anyway it isn’t just nipples either. Damn it, we’ve been married twelve long years. It’s a bit late in the day to start arsing about oralwise. The thing is she’s on this sexual liberation kick. She came home last night from Mavis Mottram’s flower arrangement do jabbering about clitoral stimulation and open-ended freewheeling sexual options.’
‘Freewheeling what?’
‘Sexual options. Perhaps I’ve got it wrong. I know sexual options came into it somewhere. I was half asleep at the time.’
‘Where the hell did she get all this from?’ asked Braintree.
‘Some bloody Yank called Sally Pringsheim,’ said Wilt. ‘You know what Eva’s like. I mean she can smell intellectual claptrap a mile off and homes in on it like a bloody dung-beetle heading for an open sewer. You’ve no idea how many phone “latest ideas” I’ve had to put up with. Well, most of them I can manage to live with. I just let her get on with it and go my own quiet way, but when it comes to participating oralwise while she blathers on about Women’s Lib, well you can count me out.’
‘What I don’t understand about Sexual Freedom and Women’s Lib is why you have to go back to the nursery to be liberated,’ said Braintree. ‘There seems to be this loony idea that you have to be passionately in love all the time.’
‘Apes,’ said Wilt morosely.
‘Apes? What about apes?’
‘It’s all this business about the animal model. If animals do it then humans must. Territorial Imperative and the Naked Ape. You stand everything on its head and instead of aspiring you retrogress a million years. Hitch your wagon to an orang-outang. The egalitarianism of the lowest common denominator.’
‘I don’t quite see what that has to do with sex,’ said Braintree.
‘Nor do I,’ said Wilt. They went down to the Pig In A Poke and got drunk.
It was midnight before Wilt got home and Eva was asleep. Wilt climbed surreptitiously into bed and lay in the darkness thinking about high levels of oestrogen.
In Rossiter Grove the Pringsheims came back from Ma Tame tired and bored.
‘Swedes are the bottom,’ said Sally as she undressed.
Gaskell sat down and took off his shoes. ‘Ungstrom’s all right. His wife has just left him for a low-temperature physicist at Cambridge. He’s not usually so depressed.’
‘You could have fooled me. And talking about wives, I’ve met the most unliberated woman you’ve ever set eyes on. Name of Eva Wilt. She’s got boobs like cantaloupes.’
‘Don’t,’ said Dr Pringsheim, ‘if there’s one thing I don’t need right now it’s unliberated wives with breasts.’ He climbed into bed and took his glasses off.
‘I had her round here today.’
‘Had her?’
Sally smiled. ‘Gaskell, honey, you’ve got a toadsome mind’
Gaskell Pringsheim smiled myopically at himself in the mirror above. He was proud of his mind. ‘I just know you, lover,’ he said. ‘I know your funny little habits. And while we’re on the subject of habits what are all those boxes in the guest room? You haven’t been spending money again? You know our budget this month…’
Sally flounced into bed. ‘Budget fudget,’ she said, ‘I’m sending them all back tomorrow.’
‘All?’
‘Well, not all, but most. I had to impress booby baby somehow.’
‘You didn’t have to cop half a shop just to…’
‘Gaskell, honey, if you would just let me finish,’ said Sally, ’she’s a manic, a lovely, beautiful, obsessive compulsive manic. She can’t sit still for half a minute without tidying and cleaning and polishing and washing up.’
‘That’s all we need, a manic compulsive woman around the house all the time. Who needs two?’
‘Two? I’m not manic’
‘You’re manic enough for me,’ said Gaskell.
‘But this one’s got boobs, baby, boobs. Anyway I’ve invited them over on Thursday for the barbecue.’
‘What the hell for?’
‘Well, if you won’t buy me a dishwasher like I’ve asked you a hundred times, I’m going out to get me one. A nice manic compulsive dishwasher with boobs on.’
‘Jesus.’ sighed Gaskell, ‘are you a bitch.’
‘Henry Wilt, you are a sod,’ Eva said next morning. Wilt sat up in bed. He felt terrible. His nose was even more painful than the day before, his head ached and he had spent much of the night expunging the Harpic from the bowl in the bathroom.
He was in no mood to be woken and told he was a sod. He looked at the clock. It was eight o’clock and he had Bricklayers Two at nine. He got out of bed and made for the bathroom.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ Eva demanded, getting out of bed herself.
‘I heard,’ said Wilt, and saw that she was naked. Eva Wilt naked at eight o’clock in the morning was almost as startling a sight as Eva Wilt drunk, smoking and dressed in lemon yellow pyjamas at six o’clock at night. And even less enticing. ‘What the hell are you going about like that for?’
‘If it comes to that, what’s wrong with your nose? I suppose you got drunk and fell down. It looks all red and swollen.’
‘It is all red and swollen. And if you must know I didn’t fall, down. Now for goodness sake get out of the way. I’ve got a lecture at nine.’
He pushed past her and went into the bathroom and looked at his nose. It looked awful. Eva followed him in. ‘If you didn’t fall on it what did happen?’ she demanded.
Wilt squeezed foam from an aerosol and patted it gingerly on his chin.
‘Well?’ said Eva.
Wilt picked up his razor and put it under the hot tap. ‘I had an accident,’ he muttered.
‘With lamp-post, I suppose. I knew you’d been drinking.’
‘With a Printer,’ said Wilt indistinctly and started to shave.
‘With a Printer?’
‘To be precise, I got punched in the face by a particularly pugnacious apprentice printer.’
Eva stared at hire in the mirror. ‘You mean to say a student hit you in the classroom?’
Wilt nodded.
‘I hope you hit him back’
Wilt cut himself.
‘No I bloody didn’t,’ he said, dabbing his chits with a finger. ‘Now look what you’ve made me do.’
Eva ignored his complaint. ‘Well you should have. You’re not a man. You should have hit him back.’
Wilt put clown the razor. ‘And got the sack. Got hauled up in court for assaulting a student. Now that’s what I call a brilliant idea.’ He reached for the sponge and washed his face.
Eva retreated to the bedroom satisfied. There would be no mention of her lemon loungers now. She had taken his mind off her own little extravagance and given him a sense of grievance that would keep him occupied for the time being. By the time she had finished dressing, Wilt had eaten a bowl of All-Bran, drunk half a cup of coffee and was snarled up in a traffic jam at the roundabout. Eva went downstairs and had her own breakfast and began the daily round of washing up and Hoovering and cleaning the bath and…
‘Commitment,’ said Dr Mayfield, ‘to an integrated approach is an essential element in…’
‘The Joint Committee for the Further Development of Liberal Studies was in session. Wilt squirmed in his chair and wished to hell it wasn’t. Dr Mayfield’s paper ‘Cerebral Content and the Non-Academic Syllabus’ held no interest for him, and besides, it was delivered in such convoluted sentences and with so much monotonous fervour that Wilt found it difficult to stay awake. He stared out of the window at the machines boring away on the site of the new Admin block. There was a reality about the work going on down there that was in marked contrast to the impractical theories Dr Mayfield was expounding. If the man really thought he could instil Cerebral Content, whatever that was, into Gasfitters Three he was out of his mind. Worse still, his blasted paper was bound to provoke an argument at question time. Wilt looked round the room. The various factions were all there, the New Left, the Left, the Old Left, the Indifferent Centre, the Cultural Right and the Reactionary Right.