‘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.
