anguish of anticipation. Looking back on those moments he could only compare them to the feeling he now had when he came out of the dentist's surgery without the need for any fillings. On an intellectual plane, of course. Spiritual, with smoke-filled, cork-lined rooms and pages of illegible but beautiful prose littering, almost fluttering from, his desk in some deliciously nondescript street in Paris. Or in a white-walled bedroom on white sheets entwined with a tanned woman with the sun shining through the shutters and shimmering on the ceiling from the azure sea somewhere near Hyeres. Wilt had tasted all these pleasures in advance at twenty-one. Fame, fortune, the modesty of greatness, bons mots drifting effortlessly from his tongue over absinthe, allusions tossed and caught, tossed back again like intellectual shuttlecocks, and the intense walk home through dawn-deserted streets in Montparnasse.
About the only thing Wilt had eschewed from his borrowings off Proust and Gide had been small boys. Small boys and plastic dustbins. Not that he could see Gide buggering about brewing beer anyway, let alone in plastic dustbins. The sod was probably a teetotaller. There had to be some deficit to make up for the small boys. So Wilt had lifted Frieda from Lawrence while hoping to hell he didn't get TB, and had endowed her with a milder temperament. Together they had lain on the sand making love while the ripples of the azure sea broke over them on an empty beach. Come to think of it, that must have been about the time he saw From Here to Eternity and Frieda had looked like Deborah Kerr. The main thing was she had been strong and firm and in tune, if not with the infinite as such, with the infinite variations of Wilt's particular lusts. Only they hadn't been lusts. Lust was too insensitive a word for the sublime contortions Wilt had had in mind. Anyway, she had been a sort of sexual muse, more sex than muse, but someone to whom he could confide his deepest perceptions without being asked who Rochefou...what's-his-name was which was about as near being a blasted muse as Eva ever got. And now look at him, lurking in a bleeding Spockery drinking himself into a beer belly and temporary oblivion on something pretending to be lager that he'd brewed in a plastic dustbin. It was the plastic that got Wilt. At least a dustbin was appropriate for the muck but it could have had the dignity of being a metal one. But no, even that slight consolation had been denied him. He'd tried one and had damned near poisoned himself. Never mind that. Dustbins weren't important and what he had just seen had been his Muse. Wilt endowed the word with a capital M for the first time in seventeen disillusioning years and then promptly blamed the bloody lager for this lapse. Irmgard wasn't a muse. She was probably some dumb, handsome bitch whose Vater was Lagermeister of Cologne and owned five Mercedes. He got up and went into the house.
When Eva and the quads returned from the theatre he was sitting morosely in front of the television ostensibly watching football but inwardly seething with indignation at the dirty tricks life played on him.
'Now then you show Daddy how the lady danced,' said Eva, 'and I'll put the supper on.'
'She was ever so beautiful, Daddy,' Penelope told him. 'She went like this and there was this man and he...' Wilt had to sit through a replay of The Rite of Spring by four small lumpish girls who hadn't been able to follow the story anyway and who took turns to try to do a pas de chat off the arm of his chair.
'Yes, well, I can see she must have been brilliant from your performance,' said Wilt. 'Now if you don't mind I want to see who wins...'
But the quads took no notice and continued to hurl themselves about the room until Wilt was driven to take refuge in the kitchen.
'They'll never get anywhere if you don't take an interest in their dancing,' said Eva.
'They won't get anywhere anyway if you ask me and if you call that dancing I don't. It's like watching hippos trying to fly. They'll bring the bloody ceiling down if you don't look out.'
Instead Emmeline banged her head on the fireguard and Wilt had to put a blob of Savlon on the scratch. To complete the evening's miseries Eva announced that she had asked the Nyes round after supper.
