Wilt

Chapter 20

Inspector Flint switched the tape recorder off and looked at wilt.

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’ said Wilt.

‘Is that her? Is that Mrs Wilt?’

Wilt nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’

‘What do you mean you’re afraid so? The damned woman is alive. You should be fucking grateful. Instead of that you sit there saying you’re afraid so.’

Wilt sighed. ‘I was just thinking what an abyss there is between the person as we remember and imagine them and the reality of what they are. I was beginning to have fond memories of her and now…’

‘You ever been to Waterswick?’

Wilt shook his head. ‘Never.’

‘Know the Vicar there?’

‘Didn’t even know there was a Vicar there.’

‘And you wouldn’t know how she got there?’

‘You heard her,’ said Wilt. ‘She said she’d been on a boat.’

‘And you wouldn’t know anyone with a boat, would you?’

‘People in my circle don’t have boats, Inspector. Maybe the Pringsheims have a boat.’

Inspector Flint considered the possibility and rejected it. They had checked the boatyards out and the Pringsheims didn’t have a boat and hadn’t hired one either.

On the other hand the possibility that he had been the victim of some gigantic hoax, a deliberate and involved scheme to make him look an idiot, was beginning to take shape in his mind. At the instigation of this infernal Wilt he had ordered the exhumation of an inflatable doll and had been photographed staring lividly at it at the very moment it changed sex. He had instituted a round-up of pork pies unprecedented in the history of the country. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sweetbreads instituted legal proceedings for the damage done to their previously unspotted reputation. And finally, he had held an apparently innocent man for questioning for a week and would doubtless be held responsible for the delay and additional cost in building the new Administration block at the Tech. There were, in all probability, other appalling consequences to be considered, but that was enough to be going on with. And he had nobody to blame but himself. Or…Wilt. He looked at Wilt venomously.

Wilt smiled. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.

‘You don’t,’ said the Inspector. ‘You’ve no idea.’

‘That we are all the creatures of circumstance, that things are never what they seem, that there’s more to this than meets…’

‘We’ll see about that,’ said the Inspector.

Wilt got up. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll want me for anything else,’ he said. ‘I’ll be getting along home.’

‘You’ll be doing no such thing. You’re coming with us to pick up Mrs Wilt.’

They went out into the courtyard and got into a police car. As they drove through the suburbs, past the filling stations and factories and out across the fens Wilt shrank into the back seat of the car and felt the sense of freedom he had enjoyed in the Police Station evaporate. And with every mile it dwindled farther and the harsh reality of choice, of having to earn a living, of boredom and the endless petty arguments with Eva, of bridge on Saturday nights with the Mottrams and drives on Sundays with Eva, reasserted itself. Beside him, sunk in sullen silence, Inspector Flint lost his symbolic appeal. No longer the mentor of Wilt’s self-confidence, the foil to his inconsequentiality, he had became a fellow sufferer in the business of living almost a mirror-image of Wilt’s own nonentity. And ahead, across this flat bleak landscape with its black earth and cumulus skies, lay Eva and a lifetime of attempted explanations and counter-accusations. For a moment Wilt considered shouting ‘Stop the car. I want to get out’, but the moment passed. Whatever the future held he would learn to live with it. He had not discovered the paradoxical nature of freedom only to succumb once more to the servitude of Parkview Avenue, the Tech and Eva’s trivial enthusiasms. He was Wilt, the man with the grasshopper mind.

Eva was drunk. The Rev St John Froude’s automatic reaction to her appalling confession had been to turn from whisky to 150% Polish spirit which he kept for emergencies and Eva in between agonies of repentance and the outpourings of lurid sins, had wet her whistle with the stuff. Encouraged by its effect, by the petrified benevolence of the Vicar’s smile and by the growing conviction that if she was dead eternal life demanded an act of absolute contrition while if she wasn’t it allowed her to avoid the embarrassment of explaining what precisely she was doing naked in someone else’s house, Eva confessed her sins with an enthusiasm that matched her deepest needs. This was what she had sought in judo and pottery and Oriental dance, an orgiastic expiation of her guilt. She confessed sins she had committed and sins she hadn’t, sine that had occurred to her and sins she had forgotten. She had betrayed Henry, she had wished him dead, she had lusted after other men, she was an adulterated woman, she was a lesbian, she was a nymphomaniac. And interspersed with these sins of the flesh there were sins of omission Eva left nothing out. Henry’s cold suppers, his lonely walks with the dog, her lack of appreciation for all he had done for her, her failure to be a good wife, her obsession with Harpic…everything poured out. In his chair the Rev St John Froude sat nodding incessantly like a toy dog in the back window of a car, raising his head to stare at her when she confessed to being a nymphomaniac and dropping it abruptly at the mention of Harpic, and all the time desperately trying to understand what had brought a fat naked–the shroud kept falling off her–lady, no definitely not lady, woman to his house with all the symptoms of religious mania upon her.

‘My child, is that all?’ he muttered when Eva finally exhausted her repertoire.

‘Yes, Father,’ sobbed Eva.

‘Thank God,’ said the Rev St John Froude fervently and wondered what to do next. If half the things he had heard were true he was in the presence of a sinner so depraved as to make the ex-Archdeacon of Ongar a positive saint. On the other hand, there were incongruities about her sins that made him hesitate before granting absolution. A confession full of falsehoods was no sign of true repentance.

‘I take it that you are married,’ he said doubtfully, ‘and that Henry is your lawful wedded husband?’

‘Yes,’ said Eva. ‘Dear Henry.’

Poor sod, thought the Vicar but he was too tactful to say so. ‘And you have left him?’

‘Yes’

‘For another man?’

Eva shook her head. ‘To teach him a lesson,’ she said with sudden belligerence.

‘A lesson?’ said the Vicar, trying frantically to imagine what sort of lesson the wretched Mr Wilt had learnt from her absence. ‘You did say a lesson?’

‘Yes,’ said Eva, ‘I wanted him to learn that he couldn’t get along without me.’

The Rev St John Froude sipped his drink thoughtfully. If even a quarter of her confession was to be believed her husband must be finding getting along without her quite delightful. ‘And now you want to go back to him?’

‘Yes,’ said Eva.

‘But he won’t have you?’

‘He can’t. The police have got him.’

‘The police?’ said the Vicar. ‘And may one ask what the police have got him for?’

‘They say he’s murdered me,’ said Eva.

The Rev St John Froude eyed her with new alarm. He knew now that Mrs Wilt was out of her mind. He glanced round for something to use as a weapon should the need arise and finding nothing better to choose from than a plaster bust of the poet Dante and the bottle of Polish spirit, picked up the latter by its neck. Eva held her glass out.

‘Oh you are awful,’ she said. ‘You’re getting me tiddly.’

‘Quite,’ said the Vicar and put the bottle down again hastily. It was bad enough being alone in the house with a large, drunk, semi-naked woman who imagined that her husband had murdered her and who confessed to sins he had previously only read about without her jumping to the conclusion that he was deliberately trying to make her drunk. The Rev St John Froude had no desire to figure prominently in next Sunday’s News of the World.

‘You were saying that your husband murdered…’ He stopped. That seemed an unprofitable subject to pursue.

‘How could he have murdered me?’ asked Eva. ‘I’m here in the flesh, aren’t I?’

‘Definitely,’ said the Vicar. ‘Most definitely.’

‘Well then,’ said Eva. ‘And anyway Henry couldn’t murder anyone. He wouldn’t know how. He can’t even change a fuse in a plug. I have to do everything like that in the house.’ She stared at the Vicar balefully. ‘Are you married?’

‘No,’ said the Rev St John Froude, wishing to hell that he was.

‘What do you know about life if you aren’t married?’ asked Eva truculently. The Polish spirit was getting to her now and with it there came a terrible sense of grievance. ‘Men. What good are men? They can’t even keep a house tidy. Look at this room. I ask you.’ She waved her arms to emphasize the point and the dustcover dropped. Just look at it.’ But the Rev St John Froude had no eyes for the room. What he could see of Eva was enough to convince him that his life was in danger. He bounded from the chair, trod heavily on an occasional table, overturned the wastepaper basket and threw himself through the door into the hall. As he stumbled away in search of sanctuary the front door bell rang. The Rev St John Froude opened it and stared into Inspector Flint’s face.

‘Thank God, you’ve come,’ he gasped, ’she’s in there.’

The Inspector and two uniformed constables went across the hall. Wilt followed uneasily. This was the moment he had been dreading. In the event it was better than he had expected. Not so for Inspector Flint. He entered the study and found himself confronted by a large naked woman.

‘Mrs Wilt…’ he began but Eva was staring at the two uniformed constables.

‘Where’s my Henry?’ Eva shouted. ‘You’ve got my Henry.’ She hurled herself forward. Unwisely the Inspector attempted to restrain her.

‘Mrs Wilt, if you’ll just…’ A blow on the side of his head ended the sentence.

‘Keep your hands off me,’ yelled Eva, and putting her knowledge of judo to good use hurled him to the floor. She was about to repeat the performance with the constables when Wilt thrust himself forward.

‘Here I am, dear,’ he said. Eva stopped in her tracks. For a moment she quivered and, seen from Inspector Flint’s viewpoint, appeared to be about to melt. ‘Oh Henry,’ she said, ‘what have they been doing to you?’

‘Nothing at all, dear,’ said Wilt. ‘Now get your clothes on. We’re going home.’ Eva looked down at herself, shuddered and allowed him to lead her out of the room.

Slowly and wearily Inspector Flint got to his feet. He knew now why Wilt had put that bloody doll down the hole and why he had sat so confidently through days and nights of interrogation. After twelve years of marriage to Eva Wilt the urge to commit homicide if only by proxy would be overwhelming. And as for Wilt’s ability to stand up to cross-examination…it was self-evident. But the Inspector knew too that he would never be able to explain it to anyone else. There were mysteries of human relationships that defied analysis. And Wilt had stood there calmly and told her to get her clothes on. With a grudging sense of admiration Flint went out into the hall. The little sod had guts, whatever else you could say about him.

They drove back to Parkview Avenue in silence. In the back seat Eva, wrapped in a blanket, slept with her head lolling on Wilt’s shoulder. Beside her Henry Wilt sat proudly. A woman who could silence Inspector Flint with one swift blow to the head was worth her weight in gold and besides that scene in the study had given him the weapon he needed. Naked and drunk in a Vicar’s study…There would be no questions now about why he had put that doll down the hole. No accusations, no recriminations. The entire episode would be relegated to the best forgotten. And with it would go all doubts about his virility or his ability to get on in the world. It was checkmate. For a moment Wilt almost lapsed into sentimentality and thought of love before recalling just how dangerous a topic that was. He would be better off sticking to indifference and undisclosed affection. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ he muttered.

It was an opinion shared by the Pringsheims. As they were helped from the cruiser to a police launch, as they climbed ashore, as they explained to a sceptical Inspector Flint how they had come to be marooned for a week in Eel Stretch in a boat that belonged to someone else, they were strangely uncommunicative. No they didn’t know how the door of the bathroom had been bust down. Well maybe there had been an accident. They had been too drunk to remember. A doll? What doll? Grass? You mean marijuana? They had no idea. In their house?

Inspector Flint let them go finally. ‘I’ll be seeing you again when the charges have been properly formulated,’ he said grimly. The Pringsheims left for Rossiter Grove to pack. They flew out of Heathrow next morning.