something, you don’t want to know.’
‘Yeah, and when you take it into your goddam head to do something who takes the can back? I do. Where’s petticoats then? Who got you out of that mess in Omaha? Who paid the fuzz in Houston that time…’
‘So you did. So why did you marry me? Just why?’
Gaskell polished his glasses with the edge of the chef’s hat. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ’so help me I don’t know.’
‘For kicks, baby, for kicks. Without me you’d have died of boredom. With me you get excitement. With me you get kicks in the teeth.’
Gaskell got up wearily and headed for the stairs. It was at times like these that he wondered why he had married.
Wilt walked home in agony. His pain was no longer physical. It was the agony of humiliation, hatred and self-contempt. He had been made to look a fool, a pervert and an idiot in front of people he despised. The Pringsheims and their set were everything he loathed, false, phoney, pretentious, a circus of intellectual clowns whose antics had not even the merit of his own, which had at least been real. Theirs were merely a parody of enjoyment. They laughed to hear themselves laughing and paraded a sensuality that had nothing to do with feelings or even instincts but was dredged up from shallow imaginations to mimic lust. Copulo ergo sum. And that bitch, Sally, had taunted him with not having the courage of his instincts as if instinct consisted of ejaculating into the chemically sterilized body of a woman he had first met twenty minutes before. And Wilt had reacted instinctively, shying away from a concupiscence that had to do with power and arrogance and an intolerable contempt for him which presupposed that what he was, what little he was, was a mere extension of his penis and that the ultimate expression of his thoughts, feelings, hopes and ambitions was to be attained between the legs of a trendy slut. And that was being liberated.
‘Feel free,’ she had said and had knotted him into that fucking doll. Wilt ground his teeth underneath a streetlamp.
And what about Eva? What sort of hell was she going to make for him now? If life had been intolerable with her before this, it was going to be unadulterated misery now, she wouldn’t believe that he hadn’t been screwing that doll, that he hadn’t got, into it of his own accord, that he had been put into it by Sally. Not in a month of Sundays. And even if by some miracle she accepted his story, a fat lot of difference that would make.
‘What sort of man do you think you are, letting a woman do a thing like that to you?’ she would ask. There was absolutely no reply to the question. What sort of man was he? Wilt had no idea. An insignificant little man to whom things happened and for whom life was a chapter of indignities. Printers punched him in the face and he was blamed for it. His wife bullied him and other people’s wives made a laughing-stock out of him. Wilt wandered on along suburban streets past semi-detached houses and little gardens with a mounting sense of determination. He had had enough of being the butt of circumstance. From now on things would happen because he wanted them to. He would change from being the recipient of misfortune. He would be the instigator. Just let Eva try anything now. He would knock the bitch down.
Wilt stopped. It was all very well to talk. The bloody woman had a weapon she wouldn’t hesitate to use. Knock her down, my eye. If anyone went down it would be Wilt, and in addition she would parade his affair with the doll to everyone they knew. It wouldn’t be long before the story reached the Tech. In the darkness of Parkview Avenue Wilt shuddered at the thought. It would be the end of his career. He went through the gate of Number 34 and unlocked the front door with the feeling that unless he took some drastic action in the
