‘I heard,’ said Wilt, and saw that she was naked. Eva Wilt naked at eight o’clock in the morning was almost as startling a sight as Eva Wilt drunk, smoking and dressed in lemon yellow pyjamas at six o’clock at night. And even less enticing. ‘What the hell are you going about like that for?’
‘If it comes to that, what’s wrong with your nose? I suppose you got drunk and fell down. It looks all red and swollen.’
‘It is all red and swollen. And if you must know I didn’t fall, down. Now for goodness sake get out of the way. I’ve got a lecture at nine.’
He pushed past her and went into the bathroom and looked at his nose. It looked awful. Eva followed him in. ‘If you didn’t fall on it what did happen?’ she demanded.
Wilt squeezed foam from an aerosol and patted it gingerly on his chin.
‘Well?’ said Eva.
Wilt picked up his razor and put it under the hot tap. ‘I had an accident,’ he muttered.
‘With lamp-post, I suppose. I knew you’d been drinking.’
‘With a Printer,’ said Wilt indistinctly and started to shave.
‘With a Printer?’
‘To be precise, I got punched in the face by a particularly pugnacious apprentice printer.’
Eva stared at hire in the mirror. ‘You mean to say a student hit you in the classroom?’
Wilt nodded.
‘I hope you hit him back’
Wilt cut himself.
‘No I bloody didn’t,’ he said, dabbing his chits with a finger. ‘Now look what you’ve made me do.’
Eva ignored his complaint. ‘Well you should have. You’re not a man. You should have hit him back.’
Wilt put clown the razor. ‘And got the sack. Got hauled up in court for assaulting a student. Now that’s what I call a brilliant idea.’ He reached for the sponge and washed his face.
Eva retreated to the bedroom satisfied. There would be no mention of her lemon loungers now. She had taken his mind off her own little extravagance and given him a sense of grievance that would keep him occupied for the time being. By the time she had finished dressing, Wilt had eaten a bowl of All-Bran, drunk half a cup of coffee and was snarled up in a traffic jam at the roundabout. Eva went downstairs and had her own breakfast and began the daily round of washing up and Hoovering and cleaning the bath and…
‘Commitment,’ said Dr Mayfield, ‘to an integrated approach is an essential element in…’
‘The Joint Committee for the Further Development of Liberal Studies was in session. Wilt squirmed in his chair and wished to hell it wasn’t. Dr Mayfield’s paper ‘Cerebral Content and the Non-Academic Syllabus’ held no interest for him, and besides, it was delivered in such convoluted sentences and with so much monotonous fervour that Wilt found it difficult to stay awake. He stared out of the window at the machines boring away on the site of the new Admin block. There was a reality about the work going on down there that was in marked contrast to the impractical theories Dr Mayfield was expounding. If the man really thought he could instil Cerebral Content, whatever that was, into Gasfitters Three he was out of his mind. Worse still, his blasted paper was bound to provoke an argument at question time. Wilt looked round the room. The
