of credit cards. But she was enjoying herself too much to let the thought of his reaction spoil her day.
‘I think teats are so important,’ Sally went on. Two women at the next table paid their bill and walked out.
‘I suppose they must be,’ said Eva Wilt uneasily. ‘I’ve never had much use for mine.’
‘Haven’t you?’ said Sally. ‘We’ll have to do something about that.’
‘I don’t see that there is much anyone can do about it,’ said Eva. ‘Henry never takes his pyjamas off and my nightie gets in the way.’
‘Don’t tell me you wear things in bed. Oh you poor thing. And nighties, God, how humiliating for you! I mean it’s typical of a male-dominated society, all this costume differentiation. You must be suffering from touch deprivation. Gaskell says it’s as bad as vitamin deficiency.’
‘Well, Henry is always tired when he gets home,’ Eva told her. ‘And I go out a lot.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Sally, ‘Gaskell says male fatigue is a symptom of penile insecurity. Is Henry’s big or small?’
‘Well it depends,’ said Eva hoarsely. ‘Sometimes it’s big and sometimes it isn’t.’
‘I much prefer men with small ones,’ said Sally, ‘they try so much harder.’
They finished their coffee and went back to the car discussing Gaskell’s penis and his theory that in a sexually undifferentiated satiety nipple stimulation would play an increasingly important role in developing the husband’s sense of his hermapharoditic nature,’ ‘He’s written an article on it,’ Sally said as they drove home. ‘It’s called “The Man As Mother.” It was published in Suck last year.’
‘Suck?’ said Eva.
‘Yes, it’s a journal published by the Society for Undifferentiated Sexual Studies in Kansas. G’s done a lot of work for them on animal behaviour. He did his thesis on Role Play in Rats there.’
‘That sounds very interesting,’ said Eva uncertainly. Roll or role? Whichever it was it was impressive and certainly Henry’s occasional pieces on Day Release Apprentices and Literature in the Liberal Studies Quarterly hardly measured up to Dr Pringsheim’s monographs.
‘Oh I don’t know. It’s all so obvious really. If you put two male rats together in a cage long enough one of them is simply bound to develop active tendencies and the other passive ones,’ said Sally wearily. ‘But Gasket was absolutely furious. He thought they ought to alternate. That’s G all over. I told him how silly he was being. I said, “G honey, rats are practically undifferentiated anyway. I mean how can you expect them to be able to make an existential choice?” and you know what he said? He said, “Pubic baby, rats are the paradigm. Just remember that and you won’t go far wrong. Rats are the paradigm.” What do you think of that?’
‘I think rats are rather horrid,’ said Eva without thinking. Sally laughed and put her hand on her knee.
‘Oh Eva, darling,’ she murmured, ‘you’re so adorably down to earth. No, I’m not taking you back to Parkview Avenue. You’re coming home with me for a drink and lunch. I’m simply dying to see you in those lemon loungers.’
They turned into Rossiter Grove.
If rats were a paradigm for Dr Pringsheim, Printers Three were a paradigm for Henry Wilt, though of a rather different sort. They represented all that was most difficult, insensitive and downright bloodyminded about Day Release Classes and to make matters worse the sods thought they were literate because they could actually read and Voltaire
