Wilt in Nowhere (3 page)

For the next fortnight Wilt kept out of the house as much as possible and occupied
himself with finishing next year’s timetable while Eva bustled about trying to think of
essential things she might have forgotten to tell Henry to do while she was away.

‘Now don’t forget to give Tibby her dried food at night. She has her main tin of
Cattomeat in the morning. Oh, and there’s her vitamin supplement. You crush that up in a
saucer and put some cream from the top of the milk on it and stir…’

‘Yes,’ said Wilt, who had no intention of feeding the cat. Tibby was going into the
cattery on Roltay Road as soon as Eva and the girls were on their way to Wilma.

He solved another problem too.

He would take cash and use his Building Society savings. They had always been reserved
for personal emergencies and he’d never told Eva of their existence.

He made another decision. He wasn’t going to take a map. Wilt wanted to see things
with a fresh eye and make his own discoveries. He would go wherever the countryside took
his fancy without any idea where he was and without consulting any map. He would simply
go over to the West and catch the first bus he could find and get out when he saw something
that interested him. Chance would determine his holiday.

A week later, having driven Eva and the girls to Heathrow and seen them disappear
through the Departures Gate, Wilt came back to Oakhurst Avenue and took Tibby to the
Bideawhile cats’ home in Oldsham secure in the knowledge that since he had paid cash and
hadn’t used the usual cattery Eva always went to she was unlikely to find out. Having
dealt with that problem Wilt had supper and went to bed. Next morning he was up early and
out of the house by seven. He walked down to the railway station to catch a train to
Birmingham. From there he would travel by bus. His escape from Ipford and the Tech had
begun. That evening would find him comfortably installed in a pub with a log fire and with
a good meal inside him and a pint of beer or better still real ale in front of him.

Eva wasn’t having quite the wonderful time she had expected. The flight had been
delayed for over an hour. The plane had reached the end of the runway at Heathrow and was
preparing for take-off when the Captain announced that a passenger in first class had
been taken ill and was too sick to make the journey, and they were therefore having to
return to the terminal to have him carried off. As a result they lost their turn in the
take-off line and worse still, because they weren’t allowed to fly with the baggage of an
absent passenger, his bags had to be found and removed too. Finding the sick man’s
luggage meant taking all the bags out of the hold and sorting through them one by one. By
that time they were well behind schedule and Eva, who had never flown in such a big plane
before, was beginning to become genuinely alarmed. Of course she couldn’t show it in
front of the girls who were thoroughly enjoying themselves pressing buttons so that the
seats tilted backwards and trying on the earphones and letting down the tables from the
seat in front and generally occupying themselves to the discomfort of other
passengers.

Then Penelope had insisted in a loud voice that she had to go to the loo and Eva had had
to squeeze past the man at the end of the row to go with her. When they got back and Eva had
squeezed back to her seat, Josephine said she had to go too. Eva took her and Emmeline and
Samantha just to be on the safe side. By this time–and they had taken their time trying out
various buttons and the toilet water–Eva needed to go herself and just at that moment it
was announced that passengers had to return to their seats for take-off. Eva once more
made the difficult passage past the man at the end of the row who said something in a
foreign language which she didn’t understand but which she suspected wasn’t very nice.
Then when they had reached cruising height and she could go again and in something of a
hurry too, what he had to say didn’t require any knowledge of a foreign language to tell
her that it wasn’t nice at all. Eva got her own back by treading on his foot when she resumed
her seat. This time there could be no mistaking his feelings. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Mind where
you’re treading, lady. I ain’t no doormat.’

Eva pressed the button for the stewardess and reported the matter.

‘This man–I won’t call him a gentleman–said…’ She paused and remembered the quads.
‘Well, he used a rude word.’

‘He said ‘Fuck’,’ Josephine explained.

‘He said ‘Fuck you’,’ Penelope added.

The stewardess looked from Eva to the girls and knew it was going to be a bad trip.

‘Yes, well, some men do,’ she said pacifically.

‘No, they don’t,’ said Samantha. ‘Not impotent ones. They can’t.’

‘Shut your mouth,’ Eva snapped and tried to smile apologetically at the stewardess who
wasn’t smiling at all.

‘It’s true,’ Emmeline joined in from across the aisle. ‘They can’t get erections.’

‘Emmeline, if I hear another word out of you,’ Eva bawled. ‘I’ll…’ She was getting to
her feet when the man beside her got there first.

‘Listen, lady, I don’t give a goddam fuck what she said. You ain’t corn-crushing my
feet again.’

Eva looked triumphantly at the stewardess.

‘There you are, what did I tell you?’

But the man was also appealing to the stewardess.

‘You got another seat? I’m not spending seven hours sitting next to this
hippopotamus, I’m telling you I’m not.’

It was a thoroughly unpleasant scene and when it had been cooled down and the man had
been found another seat as far away from Eva and the quads as possible, the stewardess
went back to the galley.

‘Row 31 is trouble. Keep your eyes open. Four girls and a mother who is built like a
power lifter. Sperm bank her with Tyson and there’s no one would go a single round with the
baby.’

The steward looked down the rows.

‘Thirty-one is suspect,’ he said.

‘Don’t I know it.’

But the steward was looking at the man in the window seat. So were two men in grey suits
five seats behind him.

That was the beginning of the flight. It didn’t get much better. Samantha spilt her
Coke, all of it, on the trousers of the man by the window, who said, ‘Forget it, these things
happen,’ though he didn’t say it very nicely and then went off to the toilet. On the way
there he noticed something that caused him to spend a far longer time locked inside than was
needed for cleaning his trousers or even relieving himself. Still in the end he came out
looking fairly calm and went back to his seat. But before sitting down he opened the
hand-luggage compartment above and found a book. It took him some moments to get it out
but in the end he succeeded and to avoid having a Coca-Cola spilt on his trousers again
he offered to sit in the aisle seat.

‘The little lady can have the window,’ he said with a sweet smile. ‘I got more room for
my legs here.’

Eva said that was real kind of him. (She was beginning to adjust her language to
American and ‘real’ was just as good as ‘really’.) She was also beginning to
distinguish between nice Americans who didn’t complain when one of the quads spilt things
on them and were polite and called them little ladies, and the other sort who said ‘Fuck’
and called her a hippopotamus just because she stepped on their toes. After that the flight
continued pretty harmoniously. There was a movie which kept the girls interested and
Eva concentrated on what she was going to say to Uncle Wally and Auntie Joan about how
kind it had been of them to invite them over and pay for the tickets especially as there
was no way she could have come; the quads’ education cost so much and clothing them etc. In
fact she dozed for a while and it was only when the stewardesses came round with the
trolley again and they had something more to eat that she woke up and took particular care
to see that there was no more spilling on people’s trousers.

In fact she got talking with the nice man in the aisle seat who asked if this was her first
trip to the USA and where she was going, and who was real interested to learn everything
about her and the girls and even went so far as to write their names down and said if they
ever came down Florida way this was his address. Eva really liked him; he was so
charming. And she told him all about how Wally Immelmann was head of Immelmann
Enterprises in Wilma, Tennessee, and had a lakeside house up in the Smokies and how her
Auntie Joan had married him when he was at the airbase and an Air Force pilot flying out
of Lakenheath, and the man said he was Sol Campito and he worked with a Miami-based
finance corporation and sure he’d heard of Immelmann Enterprises, like everyone had
it was so important. An hour later he took another ‘hygiene break’ which was a new term
for Eva and meant going to the toilet again. This time he didn’t take so long and when he
came back he put his book away in the luggage compartment and said he was going to get some
shut-eye because he had to catch the shuttle flight down to Miami and it was a long trip
from where he’d come, like Munich, Germany, where he’d had some business. And so the flight
wore on and nothing untoward occurred except that Penelope kept asking when they were
going to get to Atlanta because she was bored and Sammy wouldn’t let her have the window
seat so she could look out at the clouds. Behind them the two men in grey suits watched the
man who had given up his window seat for Samantha. One of them took himself off to the
toilet and was in there for five minutes. He was followed half an hour later by the second
suit who stayed even longer. When he came back he shrugged as he sat down. Finally by the
time Eva was getting really tired the Jumbo was slowly dropping down towards the land
and the countryside seemed to be coming up to them and the undercarriage was locked down
and the flaps were up and they were down with only a slight thump and lurch and into reverse
thrust.

‘The land of the free,’ said the man with a smile when they were at the terminal and could
collect their bags from the overhead lockers; he was on his feet helping to get Eva’s and
the quads’ stuff for them. And then he very politely stood in the aisle in the way of the
other passengers to let them file out first. In fact he let a number of other passengers
go in front of him and only then moved himself. By the time they had collected their hold
luggage from the carousel he was nowhere to be seen. He sat in the toilet writing the
address and the names Eva had given him before he came out. Twenty minutes later Eva and
the quads passed through Immigration and Customs where they were held up for some time and
a German Shepherd took an interest in Emmeline’s hand luggage. Two men studied the
family for two minutes and then they were through and there was Uncle Wally and Auntie
Joan and there was all the hugging and kissing imaginable. It was wonderful.

It wasn’t quite so wonderful in a little room back in Customs for the man who’d called
himself Sol Campito. The things from his travel bags were spread out on the floor and he was
standing naked in another booth with a man with plastic gloves on his hand telling him to
get his legs open.

‘Wasting time,’ said one of the men in the room. ‘Give him the castor oil and blow the
fucking condoms out quicker, eh Joe? You crazy enough to have swallowed the stuff?’

‘Shit,’ said Campito. ‘I don’t do no drugs. You got the wrong guy.’

Four men in an office next door watched him through a darkened observation window.

‘So he’s clean. Met the contact in Munich and left with the stuff. Now he’s clean. Then
it’s got to be the fat Brit with the kids. How did you assess her?’

‘Dumb. Dumb as hell.’

‘Nervous?’

‘Not at all. Excited yes but nervous no way.’

The second man nodded.

‘To Wilma, Tennessee.’

‘And we know where she’s going. So we keep her under observation. The tightest
possible. OK?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Just make sure you keep under cover. The stuff that bastard’s said to have picked up
from Poland is lethal. The good thing is we know from his notebook where that Wilt woman is
heading with that foursome. Get there fast. This surveillance has top priority. I want to
know all there is to know about this Immelmann guy.’

Wilt’s day had begun badly and got steadily worse. All his hopes and expectations of
the previous evening had proved terribly wrong. Instead of the homely pub with a log
fire, and a good meal and several pints of beer or better still real ale inside him, and a
warm bed waiting for him, he found himself trudging along a country lane with dark clouds
closing in from the West. In many respects it had been a disastrous day. He had walked the
mile and a half to the station with his knapsack on his back only to find that there were no
trains to Birmingham because of work on the line. Wilt had had to take a bus. It was a
comfortable enough bus–or would have been if it hadn’t been half filled with hyperactive
schoolchildren under the charge of a teacher who did his level best to ignore them. The
rest of the passengers were Senior, and in Wilt’s opinion Senile, Citizens, out on a
day-trip to enjoy themselves, a process that seemed to consist of complaining loudly
about the behaviour of the hyperactive kids and insisting on stopping at every service
station on the motorway to relieve themselves. In between service stations they sang
songs Wilt had seldom heard before and never wanted to hear again. And when finally they
reached Birmingham and he bought a ticket for Hereford he had difficulty finding the
bus. In the end he did. It was a very old double-decker bus with a faded ‘Hereford’ sign
on the front. Wilt thanked God there were no other passengers in it. He’d had enough of
small boys with sticky fingers climbing across his lap to look out the window and of old age
pensioners singing, or at any rate caterwauling, ‘Ganging along the Scotswood Road to see
the Blaydon Races’ and ‘We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’. Wilt
climbed wearily into the back and lay down across the seat and fell asleep. When the bus left
he woke up and was surprised to find he was still the only passenger. He went back to sleep
again. He had only had two sandwiches and a bottle of beer all day and he was hungry.
Still, when the bus got to Hereford he’d find a café and have a good meal and look for a bed
and breakfast and in the morning set out on his walking tour. The bus didn’t get to
Hereford. Instead it stopped outside a shabby bungalow on what was clearly a
distinctly B road and the driver got out. Wilt waited ten minutes for him to return and
then got out himself and was about to knock on the door when it opened and a large angry man
looked out.

‘What do you want?’ he demanded. In the bungalow a Staffordshire bull terrier growled
menacingly.

‘Well, as a matter of fact I want to go to Hereford,’ said Wilt, keeping a wary eye on
the dog.

‘So what are you doing here? This isn’t bloody Hereford.’

Wilt produced his ticket.

‘I paid my fare for Hereford in Birmingham and that bus’

‘Isn’t going nowhere near Hereford. It’s going to the fucking knacker’s yard if I can’t
flog the fucker first.’

‘But it says ‘Hereford’ on the front.’

‘My, oh, my,’ said the man sarcastically. ‘You could have fooled me. You sure it don’t
say ‘New York’? Go and take a dekko and don’t come back and tell me. Just bugger off. You come
back and I’ll set the dog on you.’

He went back into the bungalow and slammed the door. Wilt retreated and looked at the
sign on the bus. It was blank. Wilt stared up and down the road and decided to go to the
left. It was then he noticed the scrapyard behind the house. It was full of old rusting
cars and lorries. Wilt walked on. There was bound to be a village somewhere down the road
and where there was a village there was bound to be a pub. And beer. But after an hour in
which he passed nothing more accommodating than another awful bungalow with a ‘For
Sale’ sign outside it, he took his knapsack off and sat down on the grass verge opposite
and considered his situation. The bungalow with its boarded windows and overgrown
garden wasn’t a pleasing prospect. Lugging his knapsack Wilt moved a couple of hundred
yards down the lane and sat down again and wished he’d bought some more sandwiches. But the
evening sun shone down and the sky to the east was clear so things weren’t all that bad. In
fact in many ways this was exactly what he had set out to experience. He had no idea where
he was and no wish to know. Right from the start he had intended to erase the map of England
he carried in his head. Not that he ever could; he had memorised it since his first
geography lessons and over the years that internal map had been enlarged as much by his
reading as by the places he’d visited. Hardy was Dorset or Wessex, and Bovington was
Egdon Heath in _The Return of the Native_ as well as where Lawrence of Arabia had been
killed on his motorcycle; _Bleak House_ was Lincolnshire; Arnold Bennett’s _Five Towns_
were the Potteries in Staffordshire; even Sir Walter Scott had contributed to Wilt’s
literary cartography with _Woodstock_ and _Ivanhoe._ Graham Greene too. Wilt’s Brighton
had been defined for ever by Pinkie and the woman waiting on the pier. But if he couldn’t
erase that map he could at any rate do his best to ignore it by not having a clue where he
was, by avoiding large towns and even by disregarding place names that might prevent him
from finding the England he was looking for. It was a romantic, nostalgic England. He
knew that but he was indulging his romantic streak. He wanted to look at old houses, at
rivers and streams, at old trees and ancient woods. The houses could be small, mere cottages
or large houses standing in parkland, once great mansions but now in all probability
divided up into apartments or turned into nursing homes or schools. None of that
mattered to Wilt. He just wanted to wash Oakhurst Avenue, the Tech and the
meaninglessness of his own routine out of his system and see England with new eyes, eyes
unsullied by the experience of so many years as a teacher.

Feeling more cheerful he got to his feet and set off again; he passed a farm and came to a
T-junction where he turned left towards a bridge over a river. Beyond it there was the
village he had been looking for. A village with a pub. Wilt hurried on only to discover
that the pub was shut for refurbishment and that there were no cafés or B&B
guest-houses in the place. There was a shop but that too was shut. Wilt trudged on and
finally found what he was looking for, an old woman who told him that, while she didn’t
take lodgers in the normal way, he could stay the night in her spare bedroom and just hoped
he didn’t snore. And so after a supper of eggs and bacon and the down payment of £15 he
went to bed in an old brass bedstead with a lumpy mattress and slept like a log.

At 7 the old woman woke him with a cup of tea and told him where the bathroom was. Wilt
drank the tea and studied the tintypes on the wall, one of General Buller in the Boer War
with troops crossing the river. The bathroom looked as if it had been around during the
Boer War too but he had a shave and a wash and then another apparently inevitable
helping of bacon and eggs for breakfast, and thanked the old woman and set off down the
road.

‘You’ll have to get to Raughton before you find a hostel,’ the old woman, Mrs Bishop,
told him. ‘It’s five miles down thataway.’

Wilt thanked her and went down thataway until he came to a path that led uphill into
some woods and turned off along it. He tried to forget the name Raughton, perhaps it was
Rorton, and whatever it was he no longer cared. He was in the English countryside, old
England, the England he had come to discover for himself. For half a mile he climbed up
the hill and came out on to a stunning view. Below him a patchwork of meadows and beyond
them a river. He went down and crossed the empty fields and presently was standing looking
at a river that flowed, as it must have done for thousands of years, down the valley, in the
process creating the flat empty fields he had just crossed. This was what he had come to
find. He took off his knapsack and sat on the bank and watched the water drifting by with
the occasional ripple that suggested a fish or an undercurrent, some hidden
obstacle or pile of rubbish that was sliding past under the surface. Above him the sky
was a cloudless blue. Life was marvellous. He was doing what he had come to do. Or so he
thought. As ever in Wilt’s life he was moving towards his Nemesis.

It lay in the vengeful mind of a justifiably embittered old woman in Meldrum Slocum.
All her working life, ever since she had entered the service of General and Mrs
Battleby forty-five years before, Martha Meadows had been the cleaner, the cook, the
housekeeper, the every help the General and his wife depended on at Meldrum Manor. She
had been devoted to the old couple and the Manor had been the centre of her life but the
General and his wife had been killed five years before in an accident with a drunken
lorry driver; the estate had been taken over by their nephew Bob Battleby and
everything had changed. From being what the old General had called ‘our faithful
retainer, Martha’, a title of which she had been exceedingly proud, she had found
herself being called that ‘bloody woman’. In spite of it she had stayed on. Bob Battleby
was a drunk, and a nasty drunk at that, but she had her husband to think of. He’d been the
gardener at the Manor but a bout of pneumonia followed by arthritis had forced him to
leave his job. Martha had to work and there was nowhere else in Meldrum she could find
employment. Besides, she had hopes that Battleby would drink himself to death before too
long. Instead he began an affair with Ruth Rottecombe, the wife of the local MP and
Shadow Minister for Social Enhancement. It was largely thanks to her that Martha had
been replaced by a Filipino maid who was less disapproving of what they called their
little games. Martha Meadows had kept her thoughts to herself but one morning Battleby,
after a particularly drunken night, had lost his temper and had thrown her things–the
clothes she came in before changing into her working ones–into the muddy yard outside
the kitchen; he had called her a fucking old bitch and better off dead at that. Mrs Meadows
had walked home seething with rage, and determined on getting her own back. Day after day
she had sat at home beside her sick husband–who’d recently had a stroke and couldn’t
talk–grimly determined to get her revenge. She had to be very, very careful. The
Battlebys were a rich and influential family in the county and she had often thought of
appealing to them, but for the most part they were of a different generation to the
General’s nephew and seldom came to the Manor. No, she would have to act on her own. Two
empty years passed before she thought of her own husband’s nephew, Bert Addle. Bert had
always been a bit of a tearaway but she’d always had a soft spot for him, had lent him
money when he was in trouble and had never asked for it back. Been like a mother to him,
she had. Yes, Bert would help, especially now he’d just lost his job at the shipyard at
Barrow-in-Furness. What she had in mind would certainly give him something to do.

‘He called you that?’ Bert said when she told him. ‘Why, I’ll kill the bastard. Calling my
auntie a thing like that when you’ve been with the family all those years. By God, I
will.’

But Martha shook her head.

‘You’ll do no such thing. I’m not having you go to prison. I’ve got a better idea.’

Bert looked at her questioningly.

‘Like what?’

‘Disgrace him in public, so he can’t show his face round here no more, him and that hussy
of his. That’s what I want.’

‘How you going to do that?’ Bert asked. He’d never seen Martha so furious.

‘Him and that Rottecombe bitch get up to some strange things, I can tell you,’ she said
darkly.

‘What sort of things?’

‘Sex,’ said Mrs Meadows. ‘Unnatural sex. Like him being tied up and…Well, Bert, I don’t
like to say. But what I do say is I’ve seen the things they use. Whips and hoods and
handcuffs. He keeps them locked away along of the magazines. Pornography and pictures of
little boys and worse. Horrible.’

‘Little boys? He could go to prison for that.’

‘Best place for him.’

‘But how come you’ve seen them if they’re locked away?’

‘Cos he was so drunk one morning he was dead to the world in the old General’s dressing
room and the cupboard was open and the key still in the lock. And I know where he keeps his
keys, like the spare ones. He don’t know I do but I found them. On a beam over the old tractor
in the barn he don’t ever use and can’t cos it’s broken. Shoves them up there where no one
would think of looking. I seen him from the kitchen window. Keys of the back and front doors,
key of his study and his Range Rover and the key of that cupboard with all that filth in it.
Right, now here’s what I want you to do. That is if you’re prepared to, like.’

‘I’d do anything for you, Aunt Martha. You knows that.’

By the time he left Bert knew exactly what he had to do.

‘And don’t you come in your car,’ Martha told him. ‘I don’t want you getting into
trouble. You hire one or something. I’ll give you the money.’

Bert shook his head.

‘Don’t need to. I’ve got enough and I know where I can get something to use, never you
worry,’ he said and drove off happily, filled with admiration for his auntie. She was a
sly one, Auntie Martha was. Thursday, she’d said.

‘Unless I phones you otherwise. And I’ll use a public phone. I’ve heard they can trace
calls from homes and suchlike, the police can. Can’t be too careful. I’ll say…’ She looked
at the calendar with the kitten on the wall. ‘I’ll say Thursday 7th or 14th or whatever
Thursday you’re to do it. And that’s all.’

‘Why Thursday?’ Bert asked.

‘Cos that’s when they play bridge at the Country Club till after midnight and he gets so
drunk she can do what she likes with him and she don’t go home till 4 or 5 in the morning.
You’ll have time enough to do what I told you.’

Bert drove past the Manor House, checked the lane behind it and then drove north with the
map Martha Meadows had given him. He paused for a moment outside the Rottecombes’ house,
Leyline Lodge, and decided to come down again and make sure he knew exactly where to go.
He’d borrow a friend’s car for that trip too. He’d learnt a lot from Martha and he didn’t want
to get her into trouble.