the time Henry came home he was either greeted by silence or subjected to a quite unwarranted expose of all his faults and shortcomings. On one of those days Wilt usually took the dog for an extended walk via the Ferry Path Inn and spent a restless night getting up and going to the bathroom, thus nullifying the cleansing qualities of the Harpic Eva had puffed round the pan and providing her with a good excuse to point out his faults once again in the morning.
‘What the hell am I supposed to do?’ he had asked after one of those nights. ‘If I pull the chain you grumble because I’ve woken you up and if I don’t you say it looks nasty in the morning.’
‘Well, it does, and in any case you don’t have to wash all the Harpic off the sides. And don’t say you don’t. I’ve seen you. You aim it all the way round so that it all gets taken off. You do it quite deliberately.’
‘If I pulled the chain it would all get flushed off anyway and you’d get woken up into the bargain,’ Wilt told her, conscious that he did make a habit of aiming at the Harpic. He had a grudge against the stuff.
‘Why can’t you just wait until the morning? And anyway it serves you right,’ she continued, forestalling his obvious answer, ‘for drinking all that beer. You’re supposed to be taking Clem for a walk, not swilling ale in that horrid pub.’
‘To pee or not to pee, that is the question,’ said Wilt helping himself to All-Bran. ‘What do you expect me to do? Tie a knot in the damned thing?’
‘It wouldn’t make any difference to me if you did,’ said Eva bitterly.
‘It would make a hell of a lot of difference to me, thank you very much.’
‘I was talking about our sex life and you know it.’
‘Oh, that.’ said Wilt.
But that was on one of those days.
On one of her better days something unexpected happened to inject the daily round with a new meaning and to awake in her those dormant expectations that somehow everything would suddenly change for the better and stay that way. It was on such expectations that her faith in life was based. They were the spiritual equivalent of the trivial activities that kept her busy and Henry subdued. On one of her better days the sun shone brighter, the floor in the hall gleamed brighter and Eva Wilt was brighter herself and hummed ‘Some day my prince will come’ while Hoovering the stairs. On one of her better days Eva went forth to meet the world with a disarming goodheartedness and awoke in others the very same expectations that so thrilled her in herself. And on one of her better days Henry had to get his own supper and if he was wise kept out of the house as long as possible. Eva Wilt’s expectations demanded something a sight more invigorating than Henry Wilt after a day at the Tech. It was on the evenings of such days that he came nearest to genuinely deciding to murder her and to hell with the consequences.
On this particular day she was on her way to the Community Centre when she ran into Sally Pringsheim. It was one of those entirely fortuitous meetings that resulted from Eva making her way on foot instead of by bicycle and going through Rossiter Grove instead of straight down Parkview Avenue which was half a mile shorter. Sally was just driving out of the gate in a Mercedes with a F registration which meant it was brand new. Eva noted the fact and smiled accordingly.
‘How funny me running into you like this.’ she said brightly as Sally stopped the car and unlocked the door.
‘Can I give you a lift? I’m going into town to look for something casual to wear tonight. Gaskell’s got some Swedish professor coming over from Heidelberg and we’re taking him to Ma Tante’s.
