The Wilt Alternative (7 page)

Mrs Chatterway blanched at the prospect while the Principal covered his eyes. Wilt noted their
reactions with interest.

'I don't know,' he said cheerfully. 'I'm all in favour of public debates on issues of
educational importance. Parents ought to know the way their children are being taught. I've got
four daughters and...'

'Wilt' said the Principal violently, 'the Committee has generously agreed that you cannot be
held wholly responsible for these deplorable incidents. I don't think we need detain you
further.'

But Wilt remained seated and pursued his advantage. 'I take it then that you're not willing to
bring this regrettable affair to the attention of the media. Well, if that is your
decision...'

'Listen, Wilt,' snarled the Education Officer, 'if one word of this is leaked to the press or
is discussed in any public form I'll see... Well, I wouldn't like to be in your shoes.'

Wilt stood up. 'I don't like being in them at the moment,' he said 'You call me in here and
cross-examine me about something I can't prevent because you refuse to give me any real authority
and then when I propose making this disgraceful state of affairs a public issue you start
threatening me. I've half a mind to complain to the union.' And having delivered this terrible
threat he headed for the door

'Wilt,' shouted the Principal, 'we haven't finished yet.'

'Nor have I,' said Wilt and opened the door. 'I find this whole attempt to cover up a matter
of serious public concern most reprehensible. I do indeed.'

'Christ,' said Mrs Chatterway uncharacteristically calling for Divine guidance. 'You don't
think he means it, do you?'

'I have long since given up trying to think what Wilt means,' said the Principal miserably.
'All I can be certain about is that I wish to God we'd never employed him.'

'You'd be committing promotional suicide,' Peter Braintree told Wilt as they sat over pints in
The Glassblower's Arms later that evening.

'I feel like committing real suicide,' said Wilt, ignoring the pork pie Braintree had just
bought him. 'And it's no use trying to tempt me with pork pies.'

'You've got to have some supper. In your condition it's vital.'

'In my condition, nothing is vital. On the one hand I am forced to fight battles with the
Principal, the Chief Education Officer and his foul Committee on behalf of lunatics like Bilger
who want a bloody revolution, and on the other, after I have spent years thrusting down predatory
lusts for Senior Secretaries, Miss Trott and the occasional Nursery Nurse, Eva has to introduce
into the house the most splendid, the most ravishing woman she can find. You may not believe
me... remember that summer and the Swedes?'

'The ones you had to teach Sons and Lovers to?'

'Yes,' said Wilt, 'four weeks of D. H. Lawrence and thirty delectable Swedish girls. Well, if
that wasn't a baptism of lust I don't know what is. And I came through unscathed. I went home to
Eva every evening unblemished. If the sex war was openly declared I'd have won the Marital Medal
for chastity beyond the call of duty.'

'Well we've all had to go through that phase,' said Braintree.

'And what exactly do you mean by "that phase"?' asked Wilt stiffly.

'The body beautiful, boobs, bottoms, the occasional glimpse of thigh. I remember once...'

'I prefer not to hear your loathsome fantasies,' said Wilt. 'Some other time perhaps. With
Irmgard it's different. I am not talking about the merely physical. We relate.'

'Good God, Henry...' said Braintree, flabbergasted.

'Exactly. When did you hear me use that dreaded word before?'

'Never.'

'You're hearing it now. And if that doesn't indicate the fearful predicament I'm in, nothing
will.'

'It does,' said Braintree. 'You're...'

'In love,' said Wilt.

'I was going to say out of your mind.'

'It amounts to the same thing. I am caught in the horns of a dilemma. I use that cliché
advisedly, though to be perfectly frank horns don't come into it. I am married to a formidable,
frenetic and basically insensitive wife...'

'Who doesn't understand you. We've heard all this before.'

'Who does understand me. And you haven't,' said Wilt and drank some more beer bitterly.

'Henry, someone has been putting stuff in your tea,' said Braintree.

'Yes, and we all know who that is. Mrs Crippen.'

'Mrs Crippen? What the hell are you talking about?'

'Has it ever occurred to you,' said Wilt pointedly shoving the pork pie down the counter,
'what would have happened if Mrs Crippen, instead of being childless and bullying her husband and
generally being in the way, had had quads? I can see it hasn't. Well, it has to me. Ever since I
taught that course on Orwell and the Art of the English Murder, I have gone into the subject
deeply on my way home to an Alternative Supper consisting of uncooked soya sausage and homegrown
sorrel washed down with dandelion coffee and I've come to certain conclusions.'

'Henry, this is verging on paranoia,' said Braintree sternly.

'Is it? Then answer my question. If Mrs Crippen had had quads who would have ended up under
the cellar floor? Dr Crippen. No, don't interrupt. You are not aware of the change that maternity
has brought to Eva. I am. I live in an oversize house with an oversize mother and four daughters
and I can tell you that I have had an insight into the female of the species which is denied more
fortunate men and I know when I'm not wanted.'

'What the hell are you on about now?

'Two more pints please,' Wilt told the barman, 'and kindly return that pie to its cage.'

'Now look here, Henry, you're letting your imagination run away with you,' said Braintree.
'You're not seriously suggesting that Eva is setting out to poison you?'

'I won't go quite that far,' said Wilt, 'though the thought did cross my mind when Eva moved
into Alternative Fungi. I soon put a stop to that by getting Samantha to taste them first. I may
be redundant but the quads aren't. Not in Eva's opinion anyway. She sees her litter as being
potential geniuses. Samantha is Einstein, Penelope's handiwork with a felt-pen on the
sitting-room wall suggested she was a feminine Michelangelo, Josephine hardly needs an
introduction with a name like that. Need I go on?'

Braintree shook his head.

'Right,' continued Wilt, despondently helping himself to the fresh beer. 'As a male I have
performed my biological function and just when I was settling down relatively happily to
premature senility Eva, with an infallible intuition, which I might add I never suspected, brings
to live under the same roof a woman who possesses all those remarkable qualities, intelligence,
beauty, a spiritual sensitivity and a radiance... all I can say is that Irmgard is the epitome of
the woman I should have married.'

'And didn't,' said Braintree emerging from the beer-mug where he had taken refuge from Wilt's
ghastly catalogue. 'You are lumbered with Eva and...'

'Lumbered is exact,' said Wilt. 'When Eva gets into bed... I'll spare you the sordid details.
Suffice it to say that she's twice the man I am.' He relapsed into silence and finished his
pint.

'Anyway, I still say you'd be making a hell of a mistake if you brought the Tech any more bad
publicity,' said Braintree, to change a distressing subject. 'Let sleeping dogs lie is my
motto.'

'Mine too if people didn't sleep with crocs on film,' said Wilt. 'As it is that bastard Bilger
has the gall to tell me I'm a deviationist swine and a lackey of capitalistic fascism... thank
you, I will have another pint... and all the time I'm protecting the sod. I've half a mind to
make a public issue of the whole damned thing. Only half a mind, because Toxted and his gang of
National Front thugs are just waiting for a chance to have a punch-up and I'm not going to be
their hero thank you very much.'

'I saw our little Hitler pinning up a poster in the canteen this morning,' said Braintree.

'Oh really, what's he advocating this time? Castration for coolies or bring back the
rack?'

'Something to do with Zionism,' said Braintree. 'I'd have ripped the thing down if he hadn't
had a bodyguard of Bedouins. He's moved in with the Arabs now, you know.'

'Brilliant,' said Wilt, 'absolutely brilliant. That's what I like about these maniacs of the
right and left, they're so bloody inconsistent There's Bilger who sends his children to a private
school and lives in a ruddy great house his father bought him and he goes round advocating world
revolution from the driving seat of a Porsche that must have cost six thousand if it cost a penny
and he calls me a fascist pig. I'm just recovering from that one when I bang into Toxted who is a
genuine fascist and lives in a council house and wants to send anyone with a pigmentation problem
back to Islamabad even though they were actually born in Clapham and haven't been out of England
since, and who does he team up with? A bunch of ruddy sheikhs with more oil dollars under their
burnouses than he's had hot dinners, can't speak more than three words of English, and own half
Mayfair. Add the fact that they're semites and he's so anti-semitic he makes Eichmann look like a
Friend of Israel, and then tell me how his bloody mind ticks. I'm damned if I know. It's enough
to drive a rational man to drink.'

As if to give point to this remark Wilt ordered two more pints.

'You've had six already,' said Braintree doubtfully. 'Eva will give you hell when you get
home.'

'Eva gives me hell, period,' said Wilt. 'When I consider how my life is spent...'

'Yes, well I'd just as soon you didn't,' said Braintree, 'there's nothing worse than an
introspective drunk.'

'I was quoting from the first line of "Testament of Beauty" by Robert Bridges,' said Wilt.
'Not that it's relevant. And I may be introspective but I am not introspectively drunk. I am
merely pissed. If you'd had the sort of day I've had and were faced with the prospect of climbing
into bed with Eva in a foul temper you would seek oblivion in beer too. Added to which is the
knowledge that ten feet above my head, separated only by a ceiling, a floor and some wall-to-wall
rush matting, will be lying the most beautiful, intelligent, radiant, sensitive creature...'

'If you mention the word Muse again, Henry...' said Braintree threateningly.

'I don't intend to,' said Wilt. 'Such ears as yours are far too coarse. Come to think of it,
that almost rhymes. Has it ever occurred to you that English is a language most naturally fitted
for poetry which rhymes?'

Wilt launched into this more agreeable topic and finished more beers. By the time they left
The Glassblower's Arms Braintree was too drunk to drive home.

'I'll leave the car here and fetch it in the morning,' he told Wilt who was propping up a
telegraph pole, 'and if I were you I'd ring for a taxi. You're not even fit to walk.'

'I shall commune with nature,' said Wilt. 'I have no intention of hastening the time between
now and reality. With any luck it'll be asleep by the time I get back.'

And he wobbled off in the direction of Willington Road, stopping occasionally to steady
himself against a gatepost and twice to pee into someone else's garden. On the second occasion he
mistook a rosebush for a hydrangea and scratched himself rather badly and was sitting on the
grass verge attempting to use a handkerchief as a tourniquet when a police car pulled up beside
him. Wilt blinked into the flashlight which shone in his face before travelling down to the
bloodstained handkerchief.

'Are you all right?' asked the voice behind the flashlight, rather too obsequiously for Wilt's
taste.

'Does it look like it?' he asked truculently. 'You find a bloke sitting on the kerb tying a
handkerchief round the remains of his once-proud manhood and you ask a bloody fool question like
that?'

'If you don't mind, sir, I'd lay off the abusive language,' said the policeman. 'There's a law
against using it on the public highway.'

'There ought to be a law about planting ruddy rosebushes next to the fucking pavement,' said
Wilt.

'And may one ask what you were doing to the rose, sir?'

'One may,' said Wilt, 'if one can't bloody well surmise for one's ruddy self, one may
indeed.'

'Mind telling me, then?' said the policeman taking out a notebook. Wilt told him with a wealth
of description and a volubility that brought the lights on in several houses down the road. Ten
minutes later he was helped out of the police car into the station. 'Drunk and disorderly, using
abusive language, disturbing the peace...'

Wilt intervened. 'Peace my bloody foot,' he shouted. 'That was no Peace. We've got a Peace in
our front garden and it hasn't got thorns a foot long. And anyway I wasn't disturbing it. You
want to try partial circumcision on flaming floribunda to find out what disturbs what. All I was
doing was quietly relieving myself or in plain language having a slash when that infernal thicket
of climbing cat's claws took it into its vegetable head to have a slash at me and if you don't
believe me, go back and try for yourselves...'

'Take him down to the cells,' said the desk sergeant to prevent Wilt upsetting an elderly
woman who had come in to report the loss of her Pekinese. But before the two constables could
drag Wilt away to a cell they were interrupted by a shout from Inspector Flint's office. The
Inspector had been called back to the station by the arrest of a long-suspected burglar and was
happily interrogating him when the sound of a familiar voice reached him. He erupted from his
office and stared lividly at Wilt.

'What the hell is he doing here?' he demanded.

'Well, sir...' one constable began but Wilt broke loose.

'According to your goons I was attempting to rape a rosebush. According to me I was having a
quiet pee.'

'Wilt,' yelled the Inspector, 'if you've come down here to make my life a misery again, forget
it. And as for you two, take a good look at this bastard, a very good, long look and unless you
catch him in the act of actually murdering someone, or better still wait until you've seen him do
it, don't lay a finger on the brute. Now get him out of here.'