mean what did you do?’
‘Equivocated,’ said Wilt.
‘That’s a new word for it,’ said Braintree. ‘You go upstairs with Mrs Pringsheim and equivocate while she lies on a bed with her legs open and you want to know why Eva hasn’t come home? She’s probably round at same lawyer’s office filing a petition for divorce right now.’
‘But I tell you I didn’t screw the bitch,’ said Wilt, ‘I told her to hawk her pearly somewhere else.’
‘And you call that equivocating? Hawk her pearly? Where the hell did you get that expression from?’
‘Meat One,’ said Wilt and got up and fetched himself another cup of coffee.
By the time he came back to his seat he had decided on his version.
‘I don’t know what happened after that,’ he said when Braintree insisted on hearing the next episode. ‘I passed out. It must have been the vodka.’
‘You just passed out in a locked room with a naked woman? Is that what happened?’ said Braintree. He didn’t sound as if he believed a word of the story.
‘Precisely,’ said Wilt.
‘And when you came to?’
‘I was walking home,’ said Wilt. ‘I’ve no idea what happened in between.’
‘Oh well, I daresay we’ll hear about that from Eva,’ said Braintree. ‘She’s bound to know.’
He got up and went off and Wilt was left alone to consider his next mane. The first thing to do was to make sure that Eva didn’t say anything. He went through to the telephone in the corridor and dialled his home number. There was no reply. Wilt went along to Room 187 and spent an hour with Turners and Fitters. Several times during the day he tried to telephone Eva but there was no answer.
‘She’s probably spent the day round at Mavis Mottram’s weeping on her shoulder and telling all and sundry what a pig I am,’ he thought. ‘She’s bound to be waiting for me when I get home tonight.’
But she wasn’t. Instead there was a note on the kitchen table and a package. Wilt opened the note.
‘I’m going away with Sally and Gaskell to think things over. What you did last night was horrible. I won’t ever forgive you. Don’t forget to buy some dog food. Eva. P.S. Sally says next time you want a blow job get Judy to give you one.’
Wilt looked at the package. He knew without opening it what it contained. That infernal doll. In a sudden paroxysm of rage Wilt picked it up and hurled it across the kitchen at the sink. Two plates and a saucer bounced off the washing-up rack and broke on the floor.
‘Bugger the bitch,’ said Wilt inclusively, Eva, Judy, and Sally Pringsheim all coming within the ambit of his fury. Then he sat down at the table and looked at the note again. ‘Going away to think things over.’ Like hell she was. Think? The stupid cow wasn’t capable of thought. She’d emote, drool over his deficiencies and work herself into an ecstasy of self-pity. Wilt could hear her now blathering on about that blasted bank manager and how she should have married him instead of saddling herself with a man who couldn’t even get promotion at the Tech and who went around fucking inflatable dolls in other people’s bathrooms. And there was that filthy slut, Sally Pringsheim, egging her on. Wilt looked at the postscript. ‘Sally says next time you want a blow job…’Christ. As if he’d wanted a blow job the last time. But there it was, a new myth in the making, like the business of his being in love with Betty Crabtree when all he had done was give her a lift home one night after an Evening Class. Wilt’s home life was punctuated by such myths, weapons in Eva’s
