Wilt in Nowhere

‘God, what a day,’ said Wilt as he and Peter Braintree sat in the garden of the Duck and
Dragon with their beers and watched a lone oarsman scull down the river. It was summer and
the evening sun glinted on the water. ‘After that bloody Entitlement meeting I had to
tell Johnson and Miss Flour they’ve been made redundant because of the financial cuts,
and then after that I was told that the Computer Department is going to do next year’s
timetable and I don’t have to bother, the Vice-Principal sends a memo to say there’s a
glitch in the programme or something and I’ve had to do it myself.’

‘You’d think the one thing a computer would be good at was sorting classes and putting
them in the right rooms. All it requires is logic,’ said Braintree, Head of English.

‘Logic, my foot. Try using logic with Mrs Robbins who won’t teach in Room 156 because
Laurence Seaforth is next door in 155 and she can’t make herself heard for the din his drama
class makes. And Seaforth won’t move because he’s used 155 for ten solid years and the
acoustics are just right for declaiming ‘To be or not to be’ or Henry V’s speech at
Agincourt in multi-decibels. Try getting a computer to take that into account.’

‘It’s the human factor. I’ve had the same sort of trouble with Jackson and Ian Wesley.
They’re supposed to grade the same exam papers and if Jackson marks a paper high, Wesley
invariably says it’s lousy. Human factor every time.’

‘Inhuman factor in my case,’ said Wilt. ‘I’ve been dragooned into taking Ms
Lashskirt’s class in Gender Assertiveness because the Sociology Department refuse to
have her and she has been off sick for a month. You want to try coping with fifteen mature
women who are determined to assert their assertiveness and don’t need to learn how to. I
come out of that class a broken man. Last week I was fool enough to say women were more
successful on committees than men because they never stop talking. I might just as well
have stuck a stick into a hornet’s nest. And when I get home Eva gives me hell. Why does
everyone feel the need to be so bloody aggressive these days? Look at that.’

A motor launch had come round the bend in the river and swamped the lone oarsman’s boat.
He pulled in to the bank to bale it out.

‘There’s a speed limit on the river and that bastard was exceeding it,’ said
Braintree.

‘There’s a time limit in our house and I’m exceeding it,’ said Wilt. ‘Tonight we’ve got
people coming as well. All the same if I’m going to be late I may as well have another
pint to soften the blow.’

He got up and went into the pub.

‘Who’s coming tonight?’ Braintree asked when Wilt came back with two pints.

‘The usual. Mavis and Patrick Mottram and Elsa Ramsden with yet another acolyte who
writes and recites poetry, I expect. Not that I’m going to be around. I get enough hell
during the day.’

Braintree nodded.

‘I had La Lashskirt and Ronnie Lann at me the other day in the Staff Room about raising
student consciousness multi-sexually. I told them the students I have are far more
multi-sexually conscious than I am or ever was and besides I object to this emphasis
on sexuality for eleven-year-olds. Lashskirt wants to run a course on oral sex and
clitoral stimulation for Nursery Nurses. I said to hell with that.’

‘I can’t see that going down with Mrs Routledge. She’ll blow her top.’

‘Blown it already. With the Principal no less at the Recruitment Meeting,’ said
Braintree. ‘Told him she would raise the matter with the Education Authority and see how
they liked it.’

‘What did the Principal have to say about that?’ asked Wilt.

‘Said we had to keep up with modern attitudes and practices and how we needed to
attract students. Numbers are all that count these days. Old Major Millfield then joined
in and said sodomy was sodomy and since it was strictly forbidden in the Old Testament he
couldn’t see how it could possibly be described as ‘a modern practice’. There was a right
old barney.’

Wilt sipped his beer and shook his head.

‘What beats me is why anyone should think that sort of stuff is going to attract the sort
of students we need. Wait till I tell Eva. She’d go out of her mind if she thought the quads
were getting lessons about clitoral stimulation and oral sex. That’s one reason she sent
them to the Convent.’

‘I thought she did it out of religious conviction,’ said Braintree. ‘Didn’t she have
some sort of religious experience a year ago?’

‘She had something. With a creature who claimed to be a New Age Pentecostalist. I
prefer not to think what that something was. Religious conversion it wasn’t.’

‘A New Age Pentecostalist? Don’t Pentecostalists speak with tongues?’

‘That’s not the only thing this one did with her tongue. In the shower. Yes, I know, you
want to know, what were they doing in the shower together? Well, as a matter of fact this
mad cow–her name was Erin Moore by the way–well, Erin said it was a necessary part of the
rebirth or baptismal process, a form of total immersion so that the spirit could enter
the body. I think there was some confusion about spirits and tongues. I wasn’t in the house
at the time, thank heaven, and Eva wouldn’t tell me afterwards. Said it was too
disgusting. The long and the short of it was Eva came off Pentecostalism like a shot and
so did the mad cow with the tongue. Eva half killed her and the damage in the bathroom had to
be seen to be believed. The shower rail came down and the shower head. Eva used it as a
battleaxe. And the wall cabinet. There was glass from broken bottles everywhere and of
course the shower pipe went berserk and writhed all over the place. Eva was too intent on
murdering the bloody woman to think of turning the water off. She chased the creature
round the house and out into the street, naked of course and bleeding. By that time the
bathroom was flooded and water was stacking up above the kitchen ceiling. Naturally that
came down and burst. Half a ton of water cascaded down on to the top of the fridge. I
suppose it’s warm and if there’s one thing Tibby doesn’t like it’s water. Got a phobia
about the stuff ever since the girls tried to give her swimming lessons in the garden pond
and damned near drowned the poor beast. The consequence of the downpour from the bathroom
was that she went up the wall, literally, and round it. Eva’s very proud of the
ornamental plates she’s collected on the Welsh dresser. They weren’t there by the time
that cat had finished. The electric kettle went for a burton, and the Magimix machine.
Both on the floor. And just to round things off the lights blew. In fact the entire
electricity failed. Looked like the place had been hit by a bomb and it certainly cost a
bomb to repair. As if that wasn’t bad enough the insurance people wouldn’t cough up
because Eva refused to tell the bloke who came round what had actually happened. Said it
had been an accident. He didn’t believe that for a moment. Shower heads don’t get ripped
off by accident and the insurance company wasn’t going to be ripped off either. The
only good thing to come out of the ghastly business was that it got Eva off the God trot and
no mistake.’

‘And what happened to the tongue lady?’

‘Went back into the loony bin she’d come out of. That is, when she was well enough to leave
hospital. Turned out she was a card-carrying schizophrenic with religious mania.
Fortunately she explained her injuries by saying she had been wrestling with an angel or
a devil though she had no idea why she’d been wearing a shower cap.’

‘Yes, but I still don’t understand why Eva sent the quads to the Convent if she’s gone
off religion. The whole point about the Convent is that it’s religious and Catholic at
that.’

‘Ah, but that’s because you don’t understand how her mind works. Eva goes from one
extreme to another. She’s not having the girls go to a state school because at the
primary school they went to in Newhall the teacher had the entire class sit in cardboard
boxes all morning one day–they were six at the time–because this was supposed to make them
‘aware’. Yes I know how you feel about ‘awareness’, it’s the same as
‘consciousness-raising’, but they had to learn what it felt like to sleep rough in a
cardboard box in the street in London. That finished Eva. She told the Headmistress her
daughters weren’t going to end up sleeping rough and she’d sent them to school to learn to
read and write and do arithmetic, not to play silly games in cardboard boxes. She made the
same point at the Parent-Teacher Association meeting and wanted to know when the school
was going to issue the six-year-olds with leather miniskirts and boots so they could
become ‘aware’ what it was like to be a teenage whore. And you know what the people in
Newhall are like.’

‘Don’t I just. Betty’s mother lives over there and the house is always full of Gucci
socialists with incomes up in the six figures who still think Lenin had his heart in the
right place.’

‘After that and the tongue lady Eva went to the other end of the spectrum. Costs a small
fortune at the Convent but at least they teach them properly and believe in authority.
Which reminds me, I’d better be getting back. Eva’s in a nasty temper these days because I
won’t go hillwalking in the Lake District for the fifth year running. Says she wants a
family holiday.’

He finished his beer and cycled back to Oakhurst Avenue to find Eva in a surprisingly
good mood.

‘Oh, Henry, isn’t it wonderful. We’re going to America,’ she said excitedly. ‘Uncle
Wally has sent us free tickets. Auntie Joan’s ever so pleased. She phoned to see if we’d
got the tickets and they arrived this morning. Isn’t it’

‘Wonderful,’ said Wilt and went into the lavatory to rid himself of the beer and hide
from the jubilation.

Eva had had a glorious day. From the moment the tickets had arrived she had been busy
calculating how much Uncle Wally was worth, wondering what clothes would make the best
impression in Wilma, Tennessee and how she was going to make the quads stop using foul
language. The latter point was the most important. Uncle Wally was deeply religious and
didn’t approve of strong language. He was also a Founding Father of the Church of the
Living Lord in Wilma and it wouldn’t do to have Samantha saying ‘Fuck’ or something worse
in his presence. Wouldn’t do at all. Auntie Joan would be shocked too. Eva had hopes for the
quads: Mr and Mrs Walter J. Immelmann had never been blessed with a family and Auntie
Joan had once told Eva that Wally was thinking of making a will out in favour of the Wilt
girls. Yes, it was vital for Samantha to be on her best behaviour. And of course Penelope,
Josephine and Emmeline too. In fact the whole family, the only exception being Henry.
Uncle Wally didn’t approve of Henry.

‘That husband of yours, honey, I guess he’s a typical Englishman and got his good
points but I have to tell you with those four lovely girls of yours you’re going to need a
breadwinner. And I mean a real one. Henry doesn’t strike me as being that ambitious and
enterprising. Like he takes life too easy. You got to put some spunk into him, know what I
mean? Like jack him up and get him out there fighting. Make a financial contribution to
your wonderful family life. Seems to me he doesn’t do much of that.’

Eva had privately agreed that Henry wasn’t ambitious. She had spoken to him time and
time again about getting a better job, leaving the Tech and going into industry or
insurance where there was lots of money to be made. It hadn’t done any good. Henry was a
stick-in-the-mud. So now she placed all her hopes for the girls and her own old age on
Uncle Wally and Auntie Joan–who had met Wally when he was a USAF pilot at Lakenheath in
the fifties and she’d been working in the PX. Eva had always been fond of her auntie and she
was particularly fond of her now that she was married to Wally Immelmann of Immelmann
Enterprises in Wilma, Tennessee and had a new ante-bellum mansion there as well as a
lake house up in the woods someplace whose name Eva could never remember. So as she
bustled about the house and vacuumed and did the chores before going off to the
Community Centre to help out with the old people–it was Thursday and Third Age lunch and
a tea dance afterwards–her mind was filled with glorious expectations. She couldn’t
exactly bring herself to hope that Uncle Wally have an infarct and die, or better still
that he crash that twin-engine plane he flew and that Auntie Joan be with him at the time;
such thoughts were wicked and hid below the surface of Eva’s kindly mind. All the same they
weren’t in their first youth and…No, she mustn’t think like that. She must think of the girls’
future and that was all a long way off. Besides just going to America was a great
adventure and it would broaden the quads’ outlook and give them an opportunity to see
for themselves how in America anyone could make it big. Even Wally Immelmann, who before
he’d joined the US Air Force had been a simple country boy on a small farm, had gone on to
become a multimillionaire. And all because he had initiative. Eva saw Uncle Wally as
a far better role model for her daughters than Wilt. Which brought her all the way back to
the problem of Henry. She knew what he’d be like in Wilma, getting drunk in low bars and
refusing to go to church and arguing with Wally about just about everything. There’d
been that horrible evening in London when the Immelmanns had come over and taken them out
to dinner at their terribly smart and fearfully expensive hotel. What was it called?
The Tavern by the Park. Henry had got disgustingly drunk and Uncle Wally had said
something about Limeys not being able to hold their liquor. Eva pushed the memory to the
back of her mind and gave her attention to old Mr Ackroyd who said his piss bag had come
undone and would she put it back for him. All you had to do was…No, she most certainly
wouldn’t. He’d caught her out before like that and she’d found herself kneeling in front of
his wheelchair holding his penis while the other old people looked on with prurient
interest and had laughed at her. She wasn’t going to get caught out again by the dirty old
man.

‘I’ll get Nurse Turnbull,’ she told him. ‘She’ll put it back so it won’t come out again.’
And leaving the miserable Mr Ackroyd begging her not to, she went out and fetched the
formidable Nurse Turnbull. After that she had trouble with Mrs Limley who wanted to know
when the bus for Crowborough left.

‘In a little while, dear,’ Eva told her. ‘You won’t have to wait long now but I had to wait
more than half an hour before it came yesterday.’

In half an hour, with any luck, Mrs Limley would have forgotten that she was nowhere near
Crowborough and that the Community Centre was not the bus station, and she’d be quite
happy again. And that after all was what Eva came to the Community Centre for, did
everything for, to make people happy. In short she spent the morning doing her little
bit of good for the Third Age and went home still thinking about going to America and how
jealous Mavis Mottram would be when she heard about it. In the afternoon she prepared the
smoked salmon sandwiches and dip for tonight’s meeting of the Environmental Protection
Group. And because there didn’t seem enough smoked salmon she went round to the delicatessen
and bought some rollmops just in case more people turned up than usual. And she put the
vinho verde in the fridge to cool. But all the time her thoughts reverted to the problem of
what the quads should wear on the trip to Wilma. She wanted them to look respectable but on
the other hand if she dressed them too smartly Auntie Joan might think…well, that she was
spoiling them, and spending too much money or worse still, had the money to spend. Eva went
through a series of permutations involving Auntie Joan being English herself, having
been a barmaid and, according to Eva’s mum, something else on the side which was probably
why she was so generous now. Against that there was the fact that Auntie Joan’s own mum had
been a tight old skinflint and no better than she ought to have been herself, not when she
was a girl that is, again according to Mum in one of her bad moods; though Eva had once heard
Mrs Denton having an awful row with Joanie and shouting at her for giving herself to them
Yanks for practically nothing. ‘It’s ten pounds in the back of a car and twenty-five if
they want to go the whole way. You’re just demeaning yourself for anything less.’ Eva had
been eight at the time and had made herself scarce before they knew she’d been listening.
So now when it was important to play her cards right she had to be careful and not overdo
things. Maybe if she didn’t look smart herself Auntie Joan would feel sorry for her and
think she spent all her money on the quads. Not that Eva minded what Auntie Joan had done in
her teens. Not when she was so rich and respectable now and married to a
multimillionaire. Anyway the main thing was to see that the girls behaved nicely and
that Henry didn’t get drunk and say rude things about America not having a National Health
Service.

In the lavatory Wilt was already thinking rude things. He was buggered if he was going
to the States to be patronised by Uncle Wally and Auntie Joan. She’d once sent him a pair
of Bermuda shorts with a tartan pattern and Wilt had refused to wear them even for the
photo Eva had wanted to send back with a thank-you letter. He had to find some excuse.

‘What are you doing in there?’ Eva demanded through the door after ten minutes.

‘What do you think I’m doing? Having a crap of course.’

‘Well, open the window when you’ve finished. We’ve got visitors coming.’

Wilt opened the window and came out. He’d made up his mind.

‘It sounds a great opportunity. Going to the States,’ he said as he washed his hands in
the kitchen sink and dried them on a cloth Eva had laid out to shake some lettuce in. Eva
looked at him suspiciously. When Henry said something sounded great, it usually meant
the opposite and he wasn’t going to do it. This time she was going to see he did.

‘It’s just a pity I can’t come,’ he continued and looked in the fridge.

Eva, who’d been putting the lettuce in a clean, dry cloth, stopped.

‘What do you mean, you can’t come?’

‘I’ve got that Canadian course to teach. You know, the one on British Culture and
Tradition I did last year.’

‘You said you weren’t going to do it again. Not after all that trouble there was last
time.’

‘I know I did,’ said Wilt and helped himself to the hummus with a piece of Ryvita. ‘But
Swinburne’s wife is in hospital and he can’t leave the children. So I’ve got to take his
place. I can’t get out of it.’

‘You could if you really wanted to,’ said Eva and vented her feelings by shaking the
lettuce cloth vigorously out the back door. ‘You just want an excuse, that’s all. You’re
frightened of flying. Look how you were when we went to Marbella that time.’

‘I am not frightened of flying. It was all those football hooligans getting pissed and
fighting on the plane that had me worried. Anyway that’s beside the point. I’ve agreed to
take Swinburne’s place. And we’ll need the money the way you’re bound to spend it over
there.’

‘You haven’t been listening. Uncle Wally’s paying for the trip and all our expenses
and…’

But before they could get into a real argument the doorbell rang and Sarah Bevis
arrived. She was carrying a roll of posters. Behind her a young man held a cardboard box.
Wilt hurried out the back door. He’d go to an Indian restaurant for a meal.