Eva Wilt climbed in happily, her mind computing the cost of the car and the house and the significance of wearing something casual at Ma Tante’s (where she had heard that starters like Prawn Cocktails cost 95p) and the fact that Dr Pringsheim entertained Swedish professors when they came to Ipford.
‘I was going to walk to town,’ she lied. ‘Henry’s taken the car and it’s such a lovely day.’
‘Gaskell’s bought a bicycle. He says it’s quicker and it keeps him fit,’ said Sally, thus condemning Henry Wilt to yet another misfortune. Eva made a note to see that he bought a bike at the police auction and cycled to work in rain or snow. ‘I was thinking of trying Felicity Fashions for a shantung poncho. I don’t know what they’re like but I’ve been told they’re good. Professor Grant’s wife goes there and she says they have the best selection.’
‘I’m sure they must have.’ said Eva Wilt, whose patronage of Felicity Fashions had consisted off looking in the window and wondering who on earth could afford dresses at forty pounds. Now she knew. They drove into town and parked in the multi-storey car park. By that time Eva had stored a lot more information about the Pringsheims in her memory. They came from California. Sally had met Gaskell while hitchhiking through Arizona. She had been to Kansas State but had dropped out to live on a commune. There had been other men in her life. Gaskell loathed cats. They gave him hay fever. Women’s Lib meant more than burning your bra. It meant total commitment to the programme of women’s superiority over men. Love was great if you didn’t let it get to you. Compost was in and colour TV out. Gaskell’s father had owned a chain of stores which was sordid. Money was handy and Rossiter Grove was a bore. Above all, fucking had to be, just had to be fun whichever way you looked at it.
Eva Wilt received this information with a jolt. In her circle ‘fuck’ was a word husbands used when they hit their thumbs with hammers. When Eva used it she did so in the isolation of the bathroom and with a wistfulness that robbed it of its crudity and imbued it with a splendid virility so that a good fuck became the most distant and abstract of all her expectations and quite removed from Henry’s occasional early morning fumblings. And if ‘fuck’ was reserved for the bathroom, fucking was even more remote. It suggested an almost continuous activity, a familiar occurrence that was both casual and satisfying and added a new dimension to life. Eva Wilt stumbled out of the car and followed Sally to Felicity Fashions in a state of shock.
If fucking was fun, shopping with Sally Pringsheim was a revelation. It was marked by a decisiveness that was truly breathtaking. Where Eva would have hummed and haaed, Sally selected and having selected moved on down the racks, discarded things she didn’t like leaving them hanging over chairs, seized others, glanced at them and said she supposed they would do with a bored acceptance that was infectious, and left the shop with a pile of boxes containing two hundred pounds’ worth of shantung ponchos, silk summer coats, scarves and blouses. Eva Wilt had spent seventy on a pair of yellow lounging pyjamas and a raincoat with lapels and a belt that Sally said was pure Gatsby.
‘Now all you need is the hat and you’ll be it,’ she said as they loaded the boxes into the car. They bought the hat, a trilby, and then had coffee at the Mombasa Coffee House where Sally leant across the table intensely, smoking a long thin cigar, and talking about body contact in a loud voice so that Eva was conscious that the women at several nearby tables had stopped tacking and were listening rather disapprovingly.
‘Gaskell’s nipples drive me wild,’ Sally said. ‘They drive him wild too when I suck them.’
Eva drank her coffee and wondered what Henry would do if she took it into her head to suck his nipples. Drive him wild was hardly the word and besides she was beginning to regret having spent seventy pounds. That would drive him wild too. Henry didn’t approve
