bottle of decent burgundy and end up drinking someone else’s rotgut.’
‘It isn’t a party,’ said Eva, ‘it’s a barbecue.’
‘It says here “Come and Touch and Come with Sally and Gaskell 9 PM Thursday. Bring your own ambrosia or take pot luck with the Pringsheim punch.” If ambrosia doesn’t mean Algerian bilgewater I’d like to know what it does mean.’
‘I thought it was that stuff people take to get a hard-on,’ said Eva.
Wilt looked at her with disgust. ‘You’ve picked up some choice phrases since you’ve met these bloody people. A hard-on! I don’t know what’s got into you.’
‘You haven’t. That’s for sure,’ said Eva, and went through to the bathroom. Wilt sat on the bed and looked at the card. The beastly thing was shaped like a…What the hell was it shaped like? Anyway it was pink and opened out and inside were all these ambiguous words. Come and Touch and Come. Anyone touched him and they’d get an earful. And what about pot luck? A lot of trendy dons smoking joints and talking about set-theoretic data-manipulation systems or the significance of pre-Popper Hegelianism in the contemporary dialectical scene, or something equally unintelligible, and using fuck and cunt every now and then to show that they were still human.
‘And what do you do?’ they would ask him.
‘Well, actually I teach at the Tech.’
‘At the Tech? How frightfully interesting,’ looking over his shoulder towards more stimulating horizons, and he would end the evening with same ghastly woman who felt strongly that Techs fulfilled a real function and that intellectual achievement was vastly overrated and that people should be, oriented in a way that would make them community coordinated and that’s what Techs were doing, weren’t they? Wilt knew what Techs were doing. Paying people like him ?3500 a year to keep Gasfitters quiet for an hour.
And Pringsheim Punch. Planters Punch. Printers Punch. He’d had enough punches recently.
‘What the hell am I to wear?’ he asked.
‘There’s that Mexican shirt you bought on the Costa del Sol last year,’ Eva called from the bathroom. ‘You haven’t had a chance to wear it since’
‘And I don’t intend to now,’ muttered Wilt, rummaging through a drawer in search of something nondescript that would demonstrate his independence. In the end he put on a striped shirt with blue jeans.
‘You’re surely not going like that?’ Eva told him emerging from the bathroom largely naked. Her face was plastered with white powder and her lips were carmine.
‘Jesus wept,’ said Wilt, ‘Mardi Gras with pernicious anaemia.’
Eva pushed passed him. ‘I’m going as The Great Gatsby,’ she announced,’ ‘and if you had any imagination you’d think of something better than a business shirt with blue jeans’
‘The Great Gatsby happened to be a man,’ said Wilt.
‘Bully for him,’ said Eva and put on her lemon loungers.
Wilt shut his eyes and took off his shirt. By the time they left the house he was wearing a red shirt with jeans while Eva, in spite of the hot night, insisted on putting on her new raincoat and trilby.
‘We might as well walk.’ said Wilt.
They took the car. Eva wasn’t yet prepared to walk down Parkview Avenue in a trilby, a belted raincoat and lemon loungers. On the way they stopped at an off-licence where Wilt bought a bottle of Cyprus red.
‘Don’t think I’m going to touch the muck,’ he said, ‘and you had better take the car keys now. If it’s as bad as I think it will be, I’m walking home early.’
