plan, commit and carry through a real murder with any hope of success. He must have been mad to think of it. It was all that blasted gin.
‘That’s right, blame the gin,’ Wilt muttered to himself, as he trudged back to his car. ‘You had this idea months ago.’ He climbed into the car and sat there in the darkness wondering what on earth had ever possessed him to have fantasies of murdering Eva. It was insane, utterly insane, and just as mad as to imagine that he could train himself to become a cold-blooded killer. Where had the idea originated from? What was it all about? All right, Eva was a stupid cow who made his life a misery by nagging at him and by indulging a taste for Eastern mysticism with a frenetic enthusiasm calculated to derange the soberest of husbands, but why his obsession with murder? Why the need to prove his manliness by violence? Where had he got that from? In the middle of the car park, Henry Wilt, suddenly sober and clear-headed, realised the extraordinary effect that ten years of Liberal Studies had had upon him. For ten long years Plasterers Two and Meat One had been exposed to culture in the shape of Wilt and The Lord of the Flies, and for as many years Wilt himself had been exposed to the barbarity, the unhesitating readiness to commit violence of Plasterers Two and Meat One. That was the genesis of it all. That and the unreality of the literature he had been forced to absorb. For ten years Wilt had been the duct along which travelled creatures of imagination, Nostromo, Jack and Piggy, Shane, creatures who acted and whose actions effected something. And all the time he saw himself, mirrored in their eyes, an ineffectual passive person responding solely to the dictates of circumstance. Wilt shook his head. And out of all that and the traumas of the past two days had been born this acte gratuit, this semi-crime, the symbolic murder of Eva Wilt.
He started the car and drove out of the car park. He would go and see the Braintrees. They would still be up and glad to see him and besides he needed to talk to someone. Behind him on the building site his notes on violence and the Break-Up of Family Life drifted about in the night wind and stuck in the mud.
Chapter 7
‘Nature is so libidinous.’ said Sally, shining a torch through the porthole at the reeds. ‘I mean take bullrushes. I mean they’re positively archetypally phallus. Don’t you think so, G?’
‘Bullrushes?’ said Gaskell, gazing helplessly at a chart. ‘Bullrushes do nothing for me.’
‘Maps neither, by the look of it’
‘Charts, baby, charts.’
‘What’s in a name?’
‘Right now, a hell of a lot. We’re either in Frogwater Reach or Fen Broad. No telling which.’
‘Give me Fen Broad every time. I just adore broads. Eva sweetheart, how’s about another pot of coffee? I want to stay awake all night and watch the dawn come up over the bullrushes.’
‘Yes, well I don’t,’ said Gaskell. ‘Last night was enough for me. That crazy guy with the doll in the bath and Schei cutting himself. That’s enough for one day. I’m going to hit the sack.’
‘The deck,’ said Sally, ‘hit the deck, G. Eva and I are sleeping down here. Three’s a crowd.’
‘Three? With boobs around it’s five at the least. OK, so I sleep on deck. We’ve got to be up
