He sat down at the kitchen table despondently.
Braintree eyed him curiously. ‘You certainly seem to have been in the wars,’ he said.
Wilt looked down at his trousers. They were covered with mud and there were round patches caked to his knees. ‘Yes…well…well I had a puncture on the way here,’ he explained with lack of conviction. ‘I had to change a tyre and I knelt down. I was a bit pissed.’
Peter Braintree grunted doubtfully. It didn’t sound very convincing to him. Poor old Henry was obviously a bit under the weather. ‘You can wash up in the sink,’ he said.
Presently Betty Braintree came downstairs. ‘I couldn’t help hearing what you said about Eva,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. Henry. I wouldn’t worry. She’s bound to come back.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure,’ said Wilt, gloomily, ‘and anyway I’m not so sure I want her back.’
‘Oh, Eva’s all right,’ Betty said. ‘She gets these sudden urges and enthusiasms but they don’t last long. It’s just the way she’s made. It’s easy come and easy go with Eva.’
‘I think that’s what’s worrying Henry,’ said Braintree, ‘the easy come bit.’
‘Oh surely not. Eva isn’t that sort at all.’
Wilt sat at the kitchen table and sipped his coffee. ‘I wouldn’t put anything past her in the company she’s keeping now,’ he muttered lugubriously. ‘Remember what happened when she went through, that macrobiotic diet phase? Dr Mannix told me I was the nearest thing to a case of scurvy he’d seen since the Burma railway. And then there was that episode with the trampoline. She went to a Keep Fit Class at Bulham Village College and bought herself a fucking trampoline. You know she put old Mrs Portway in hospital with that contraption.’
‘I knew there was some sort of accident but Eva never told me what actually happened,’ said Betty.
‘She wouldn’t. It was a ruddy miracle we didn’t get sued,’ said Wilt. ‘It threw Mrs Portway clean through the greenhouse roof. There was glass all over the lawn and it wasn’t even as though Mrs Portway was a healthy woman at the best of times.’
‘Wasn’t she the woman with the rheumatoid arthritis?’
Wilt nodded dismally. ‘And the duelling scars on her face,’ he said. ‘That was our greenhouse, that was.’
‘I must say I can think of better places for trampolines than greenhouses,’ said Braintree. ‘It wasn’t a very big greenhouse was it?’
‘It wasn’t a very big trampoline either, thank God,’ said Wilt, ’she’d have been in orbit otherwise.’
‘Well it all goes to prove one thing,’ said Betty, looking on the bright side, ‘Eva may do crazy things but she soon, gets over them.’
‘Mrs Portway didn’t.’ said Wilt, not to be comforted. ‘She was in hospital for six weeks and the skin grafts didn’t take. She hasn’t been near our house since.’
‘You’ll see. Eva will get fed up with these Pringsheim people in a week or two. They’re just another fad.’
‘A fad with a lot of advantages if you ask me,’ said Wilt. ‘Money, status and sexual promiscuity. All the things I couldn’t give her and all dressed up in a lot of intellectual claptrap about Women’s Lib and violence and the intolerance of tolerance and the revolution of the sexes and you’re not fully mature unless you’re ambisextrous. It’s enough to make you vomit and it’s just the sort of crap Eva would fall for. I mean she’d buy rotten herrings if some clown up the social scale told her they were the sophisticated things to eat. Talk about being gullible!’
‘The thing is that Eva’s got too much energy,’ said Betty. You should try and persuade her to get a full-time job.’
