‘Full-time job?’ said Wilt. ‘She’s had more full-time jobs than I’ve had hot dinners. Mind you, that’s not saying much these days. All I ever get is a cold supper and a note saying she’s gone to Pottery or Transcendental Meditation or something equally half-baked. And anyway Eva’s idea of a job is to take over the factory. Remember Potters, that engineering firm that went broke after a strike a couple of years ago? Well, if you ask me that was Eva’s fault. She got this job with a consultancy firm doing time and motion study and they sent her out to the factory and the next thing anyone knew they had a strike on their hands.’
They went on talking for another hour until the Braintrees asked him to stay the night. But Wilt wouldn’t. ‘I’ve got things to do tomorrow.’
‘Such as?’
‘Feed the dog for one thing.’
‘You can always drive over and do that. Clem won’t starve overnight’
But Wilt was too immersed in self-pity to be persuaded and besides he was still worried about that doll. He might have another go at getting the thing out of that hole. He drove home and went to bed in a tangle of sheets and blankets. He hadn’t made it in the morning.
‘Poor old Henry.’ said Betty as she and Peter went upstairs. ‘He did look pretty awful.’
‘He said he’d had a puncture and had to change the wheel.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of his clothes. It was the look on his face that worried me. You don’t drink he’s on the verge of a breakdown?’
Peter Braintree shook his head. ‘You’d look like that if you had Gasfitters Three and Plasterers Two every day of your life for ten years and then your wife ran away,’ he told her.
‘Why don’t they give him something better to teach?’
‘Why? Because the Tech wants to become a Poly and they keep starting new degree courses and hiring people with PhDs to teach them and then the students don’t enrol and they’re lumbered with specialists like Dr Fitzpatrick who knows all there is to know about child labour in four cotton mills in Manchester in 1837 and damn all about anything else. Put him in front of a class of Day Release Apprentices and all hell would break loose. As it is I have to go into his A-level classes once a week and tell them to shut up. On the other hand Henry looks, meek but he can cape with rowdies. He’s too good at his job. That’s his trouble and besides he’s not a bum sucker and that’s the kiss of death at the Tech. If you don’t lick arses you get nowhere.’
‘You know,’ said Betty, ‘teaching at that place has done horrible things to your language.’
‘It’s done horrible things to my outlook on life, never mind my language,’ said Braintree. ‘It’s enough to drive a man to drink.’
‘It certainly seems to have done that to Henry. His breath reeked of gin.’
‘He’ll get over it’
But Wilt didn’t. He woke in the morning with the feeling that something was missing quite apart from Eva. That bloody doll. He lay in bed trying to think of some way of retrieving the thing before the workmen arrived on the site on Monday morning but apart from pouring a can of petrol down the hole and lighting it, which seemed on reflection the best way of drawing attention to the fact that he had stuffed a plastic doll dressed in his wife’s clothes down there, he could think of nothing practical. He would just have to trust to luck.
When the Sunday papers came he got out of bed and went down to read them over his
