Wilt

Chapter 1

Whenever Henry Wilt took the dog for a walk, or, to be more accurate, when the dog took him, or, to be exact, when Mrs Wilt told them both to go and take themselves out of the house so that she could do her yoga exercises, he always took the same route. In fact the dog followed the route and Wilt followed the dog. They went down past the Post Office, across the playground, under the railway bridge and out on to the footpath by the river. A mile along the river and then under the railway line again and back through streets where the houses were bigger than Wilt’s semi and where there were large trees and gardens and the cars were all Rovers and Mercedes. It was here that Clem, a pedigree Labrador, evidently feeling more at home, did his business while Wilt stood looking around rather uneasily, conscious that this was not his sort of neighbourhood and wishing it was. It was about the only time during their walk that he was at all aware of his surroundings. For the rest of the way Wilt’s walk was an interior one and followed an itinerary completely at variance with his own appearance and that of his route. It was in fact a journey of wishful thinking, a pilgrimage along trails of remote possibility involving the irrevocable disappearance of Mrs Wilt, the sudden acquisition of wealth, power, what he would do if he was appointed Minister of Education or, better still, Prime Minister. It was partly concocted of a series of desperate expedients and partly in an unspoken dialogue so that anyone noticing Wilt (and most people didn’t) might have seen his lips move occasionally and his mouth curl into what he fondly imagined was a sardonic smile as he dealt with questions or parried arguments with devastating repartee. It was on one of these walks taken in the rain after a particularly trying day at the Tech that Wilt first conceived the notion that he would only be able to fulfil his latent promise and call his life his own if some not entirely fortuitous disaster overtook his wife.

Like everything else in Henry Wilt’s life it was not a sudden decision. He was not a decisive man. Ten years as an Assistant Lecturer (Grade Two) at the Fenland College of Arts and Technology was proof of that. For ten years he had remained in the Liberal Studies Department teaching classes of Gasfitters, Plasterers, Bricklayers and Plumbers. Or keeping them quiet. And for ten long years he had spent his days going from classroom to classroom with two dozen copies of Sons and Lovers or Orwell’s Essays or Candide or The Lord of the Flies and had done his damnedest to extend the sensibilities of Day-Release Apprentices with notable lack of success.

‘Exposure to Culture’, Mr Morris, the Head of Liberal Studies, called it but from Wilt’s point of view it looked more like his own exposure to barbarism, and certainly the experience had undermined the ideals and illusions which had sustained him in his younger days. So had twelve years of marriage to Eva.

If Gasfitters could go through life wholly impervious to the emotional significance of the interpersonal relationships portrayed in Sons and Lovers, and coarsely amused by D.H. Lawrence’s profound insight into the sexual nature of existence, Eva Wilt was incapable of such detachment. She hurled herself into cultural activities and self-improvement with an enthusiasm that tormented Wilt. Worse still, her notion of culture varied from week to week, sometimes embracing Barbara Cartland and Anya Seton, sometimes Ouspensky, sometimes Kenneth Clark, but more often the instructor at the Pottery Class on Tuesdays or the lecturer on Transcendental Meditation on Thursdays, so that Wilt never knew what he was coming home to except a hastily cooked supper, some forcibly expressed opinions about his lack of ambition, and a half-baked intellectual eclecticism that left him disoriented.

To escape from the memory of Gasfitters as putative human beings and of Eva in the lotus position, Wilt walked by the river thinking dark thoughts, made darker still by the knowledge that for the fifth year running his application to be promoted to Senior Lecturer was almost certain to be turned down and that unless he did something soon he would be doomed to Gasfitters Three and Plasterers Two and to Eva for the rest of his life. It was not a prospect to be borne. He would act decisively. Above his head a train thundered by. Wilt stood watching its dwindling lights and thought about accidents involving level crossings.

‘He’s in such a funny state these days,’ said Eva Wilt, ‘I don’t know what to make of him.’

‘I’ve given up trying with Patrick,’ said Mavis Mottram studying Eva’s vase critically. ‘I think I’ll put the lupin just a fraction of an inch to the left. Then it will help to emphasise the oratorical qualities of the rose. Now the iris over here. One must try to achieve an almost audible effect of contrasting colours. Contrapuntal, one might say.’

Eva nodded and sighed. ‘He used to be so energetic,’ she said, ‘but now he just sits about the house watching telly. It’s as much as I can do to get him to take the dog for a walk.’

‘He probably misses the children,’ said Mavis. ‘I know Patrick does.’

‘That’s because he has some to miss,’ said Eva Wilt bitterly. ‘Henry can’t even whip up the energy to have any’

‘I’m so sorry, Eva. I forgot,’ said Mavis, adjusting the lupin so that it clashed more significantly with a geranium.

‘There’s no need to be sorry,’ said Eva, who didn’t number self-pity among her failings, ‘I suppose I should be grateful. I mean, imagine having children like Henry. He’s so uncreative, and besides children are so tiresome. They take up all one’s creative energy.’

Mavis Mottram moved away to help someone else to achieve a contrapuntal effect, this time with nasturtiums and hollyhocks in a cerise bowl. Eva fiddled with her rose. Mavis was so lucky. She had Patrick, and Patrick Mottram was such an energetic man. Eva, in spite of her size, placed great-emphasis on energy, energy and creativity, so that even quite sensible people who were not unduly impressionable found themselves exhausted after ten minutes in her company. In the lotus position at her yoga class she managed to exude energy, and her attempts at Transcendental Meditation had been likened to a pressure-cooker on simmer. And with creative energy there came enthusiasm, the febrile enthusiasms of the evidently unfulfilled woman for whom each new idea heralds the dawn of a new day and vice versa. Since the ideas she espoused were either trite or incomprehensible to her, her attachment to them was correspondingly brief and did nothing to fill the gap left in her life by Henry Wilt’s lack of attainment. While he lived a violent life in his imagination, Eva, lacking any imagination at all, lived violently in fact. She threw herself into things, situations, new friends, groups and happenings with a reckless abandon that concealed the fact that she lacked the emotional stamina to stay for more than a moment. Now, as she backed away from her vase, she bumped into someone behind her.

‘I beg your pardon,’ she said and turned to find herself looking into a pair of dark eyes.

‘No need to apologise,’ said the woman in an American accent. She was slight and dressed with a simple scruffiness that was beyond Eva Wilt’s moderate income.

‘I’m Eva Wilt,’ said Eva, who had once attended a class on Getting to Know People at the Oakrington Village College. ‘My husband lectures at the Tech and we live at 34 Parkview Avenue.’

‘Sally Pringsheim,’ said the woman with a smile. ‘We’re in Rossiter Grove. We’re over on a sabbatical. Gaskell’s a biochemist.’

Eva Wilt accepted the distinctions and congratulated herself on her perspicacity about the blue jeans and the sweater. People who lived in Rossiter Grove were a cut above Parkview Avenue and husbands who were biochemists on sabbatical were also in the University. Eva Wilt’s world was made up of such nuances.

‘You know, I’m not at all that sure I could live with an oratorical rose,’ said Sally Pringsheim. ‘Symphonies are OK in auditoriums but I can do without them in vases.’

Eva stared at her with a mixture of astonishment and admiration. To be openly critical of Mavis Mottram’s flower arrangements was to utter blasphemy in Parkview Avenue. ‘You know, I’ve always wanted to say that,’ she said with a sudden surge of warmth, ‘but I’ve never had the courage.’

Sally Pringsheim smiled. ‘I think one should always say what one thinks. Truth is so essential in any really meaningful relationship. I always tell G baby exactly what I’m thinking.’

‘Gee baby?’ said Eva Wilt.

‘Gaskell’s my husband,’ said Sally. ‘Not that he’s really a husband. It’s just that we’ve got this open-ended arrangement for living together. Sure, we’re legal and all that, but I think it’s important sexually to keep one’s options open, don’t you?’

By the time Eva got home her vocabulary had come to include several new words. She found Wilt in bed pretending to be asleep and woke him up and told him about Sally Pringsheim. Wilt turned over and tried to go back to sleep wishing to God she had stuck to her contrapuntal flower arrangements. Sexually open-ended freewheeling options were the last thing he wanted just now, and, coming from the wife of a biochemist who could afford to live in Rossiter Grove, didn’t augur well for the future. Eva Wilt was too easily influenced by wealth, intellectual status and new acquaintances to be allowed out with a woman who believed that clitoral stimulation oralwise was a concomitant part of a fully emancipated relationship and that unisex was here to stay. Wilt had enough troubles with his own virility without having Eva demand that her conjugal rights be supplemented oralwise. He spent a restless night thinking dark thoughts about accidental deaths involving fast trains, level crossings, their Ford Escort and Eva’s seat belt, and got up early and made himself breakfast. He was just going off to a nine o’clock lecture to Motor Mechanics Three when Eva came downstairs with, a dreamy look on her face.

‘I’ve just remembered something I wanted to ask you last night,’ she said. ‘What does “transexual diversification” mean?’

‘Writing poems about queers,’ said Wilt hastily and went out to the car. He drove down Parkview Avenue and got stuck in a traffic jam at the roundabout. He sat and cursed silently. He was thirty-four and his talents were being dissipated on MM 3 and a woman who was clearly educationally subnormal. ‘Worst of all, he had to recognise the truth of Eva’s constant criticism that he wasn’t a man. ‘If you were a proper man,’ she was always saying, ‘you would show more initiative. You’ve got to assert yourself.’

Wilt asserted himself at the roundabout and got into an altercation with a man in a mini-bus. As usual, he came off second best.

‘The problem with Wilt as I see it is that he lacks drive,’ said the Head of English, himself a nerveless man with a tendency to see and solve problems with a degree of equivocation that made good his natural lack of authority.

The Promotions Committee nodded its joint head for the fifth year running.

‘He may lack drive but he is committed,’ said Mr Morris, fighting his annual rearguard on Wilt’s behalf.

‘Committed?’ said the Head of Catering with a snort. ‘Committed to what? Abortion, Marxism or promiscuity? It’s bound to be one of the three. I’ve yet to come across a Liberal Studies lecturer who wasn’t a crank, a pervert or a red-hot revolutionary and a good many have been all three.’

‘Hear, hear,’ said the Head of Mechanical Engineering, on whose lathes a demented student had once turned out several pipe bombs.

Mr Morris bristled. ‘I grant you that one or two lecturers have been…er…a little overzealous politically but I resent the imputation that…’

‘Let’s leave generalities aside and get back to Wilt,’ said the Vice-Principal. ‘You were saying that he is committed.’

‘He needs encouragement,’ said Mr Morris. ‘Damn it, the man has been with us ten years and he’s still only Grade Two.’

‘That’s precisely what I mean about his lacking drive,’ said the Head of English. ‘If he had been worth promoting he’d have been a Senior Lecturer by now.’

‘I must say I agree,’ said the Head of Geography. ‘Any man who is content to spend ten years taking Gasfitters and Plumbers is clearly unfit to hold an administrative post’

‘Do we always have to promote solely for administrative reasons?’ Mr Morris asked wearily, ‘Wilt happens to be a good teacher.’

‘If I may just make a point,’ said Dr Mayfield, the Head of Sociology. ‘at this moment in time it is vital we bear in mind that, in the light of the forthcoming introduction of the Joint Honours degree in Urban Studies and Medieval Poetry, provisional approval for which degree by the Council of National Academic Awards I am happy to announce at least in principle, that we maintain a viable staff position in regard to Senior Lectureships by allocating places for candidates with specialist knowledge in particular spheres of academic achievement rather than–’

‘If I may just interrupt for a moment, in or out of time,’ said Dr Board, Head of Modern Languages, ‘are you, saying we should have Senior Lectureships for highly qualified specialists who can’t teach rather than promote Assistant Lecturers without doctorates who can?’

‘If Dr Board, had allowed me to continue,’ said Dr Mayfield, ‘he would have understood that I was saying…’

‘I doubt it,’ said Dr Board, ‘quite apart from your syntax…’

And so for the fifth year running Wilt’s promotion was forgotten. The Fenland College of Arts and Technology was expanding. New degree courses proliferated and more students with fewer qualifications poured in to be taught by more staff with higher qualifications until one day the Tech would cease to be a mere Tech and rise in status to became a Poly. It was the dream of every Head of Department and in the process Wilt’s self-esteem and the hopes of Eva Wilt were ignored.

Wilt heard the news before lunch in the canteen.

‘I’m sorry, Henry,’ said Mr Morris as they lined up with their trays, ‘it’s this wretched economic squeeze. Even Modern Languages had to take a cut. They only got two promotions through.’

Wilt nodded. It was what he had come to expect. He was in the wrong department, in the wrong marriage and in the wrong life. He took his fish forgers across to a table in the corner and ate by himself. Around him other members of staff sat discussing A-level prospects and who was going to sit on the course board next term. They taught Maths or Economics or English, subjects that counted and where promotion was easy. Liberal Studies didn’t count and promotion was out of the question. It was as simple as that. Wilt finished his lunch and went up to the reference library to look up insulin in the Pharmacopoeia. He had an idea it was the one untraceable poison.

At five to two, none the wiser, he went down to Room 752 to extend the sensibilities of fifteen apprentice butchers, designated on the timetable as Meat One. As usual they were late and drunk.

‘We’ve been drinking Bill’s health,’ they told him when they drifted in at ten past two.

‘Really?’ said Wilt, handing out copies of The Lord of the Flies. ‘And how is he?’

‘Bloody awful,’ said a large youth with ‘Stuff Off painted across the back of his leather jacket. ‘He’s puking his guts out. It’s his birthday and he had four Vodkas and a Babycham…’

‘We’d got to the part where Piggy is in the forest,’ said Wilt, heading them off a discussion of what Bill had drunk for his birthday. He reached for aboard duster and rubbed a drawing of a Dutch Cap off the blackboard.

‘That’s Mr Sedgwick’s trademark,’ said one of the butchers, ‘he’s always going on about contraceptives and things. He’s got a thing about them.’

‘A thing about them?’ said Wilt loyally.

‘You know, birth control. Well, he used to be a Catholic, didn’t be? And now he’s not, he’s making up for lost time,’ said a small pale-faced youth unwrapping a Mars Bar.

‘Someone should tell him about the pill,’ said another youth lifting his head somnolently from the desk. ‘You can’t feel a thing with a Frenchie. You get more thrill with the pill.’

‘I suppose you do,’ said Wilt, ‘but I understood there were side-effects.’

‘Depends which side you want it,’ said a lad with sideburns.

Wilt turned back to The Lord of the Flies reluctantly. He had read the thing two hundred times already.

Now Piggy goes into the forest…’ he began, only to be stopped by another butcher, who evidently shared his distaste for the misfortunes of Piggy.

‘You only get bad effects with the pill if you use ones that are high in oestrogen.’

‘That’s very interesting,’ said Wilt. ‘Oestrogen? You seem to know a lot about it.’

‘Old girl down our street got a bloodclot in her leg…’

‘Silly old clot,’ said the Mars Bar.

‘Listen,’ said Wilt. ‘Either we hear what Peter has to tell us about the effects of the pill or we get on and read about Piggy.

‘Fuck Piggy,’ said the sideburns.

‘Right,’ said Wilt heartily, ‘then keep quiet.’

‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘this old girl, well she wasn’t all that old, maybe thirty, she was on the pill and she got this bloodclot and the doctor told my auntie it was the oestrogen and she’d better take a different sort of pill just in case and the old girl down the street, her old man had to go and have a vasectomy so’s she wouldn’t have another bloodclot.’

‘Buggered if anyone’s going to get me to have a vasectomy,’ said the Mars Bar, ‘I want to know I’m all there.’

‘We all have ambitions,’ said Wilt.

‘Nobody’s going to hack away at my knackers with a bloody great knife,’ said the sideburns.

‘Nobody’d want to,’ said someone else.

‘What about the bloke whose missus you banged,’ said the Mars Bar. ‘I bet he wouldn’t mind having a go.’

Wilt applied the sanction of Piggy again and got them back on to vasectomy.

‘Anyway, it’s not irreversible any more,’ said Peter. ‘They ran put a tiny little gold tap in and you can turn it as when you want a nipper.’

‘Go on. That’s not true.’

‘Well, not on the National Health you can’t, but if you pay they can read about it in a magazine. They’ve been doing experiments in America’

‘What happens if the washer goes wrong?’ asked the Mars Bar.

‘I suppose they call a plumber in.’

Wilt sat and listened while Meat One ranged far and wide about vasectomy and the coil and Indians getting free transistors and the plane that landed at Audley End with a lot of illegal immigrants and what somebody’s brother who was a policeman in Brixton said about blacks and how the Irish were just as bad and bombs and back to Catholics and birth control and who’d want to live in Ireland where you couldn’t even buy French letters and so back to the Pill. And all the time his mind filled itself obsessively with ways and means of getting rid of Eva. A diet of birth-control pills high on oestrogen? If he ground them up and mixed them with the Ovaltine she took at bedtime there was a chance she’d develop bloodclots all over the place in no time at all. Wilt put the notion out of his head. Eva with bloodclots was too awful to stomach, and anyway it might not work. No, it would have to be something quick, certain and painless. Preferably an accident.

At the end of the hour Wilt collected the books and made his way back to the Staff Room. He had a free period. On the way he passed the site of the new Administration block. The ground had been cleared and the builders had moved in and were boring pile holes for the foundations. Wilt stopped and watched as the drilling machine wound slowly down into the ground. They were making wide holes. Very wide. Big enough for a body.

‘How deep are you going?’ he asked one of the workmen.

‘Thirty feet.’

‘Thirty feet?’ said Wilt. ‘When’s the concrete going in?’

‘Monday, with any luck,’ said the man.

Wilt passed on. A new and quite horrible idea had just occurred to him.