'Brilliant,' said Wilt, 'absolutely brilliant. That's what I like about these maniacs of the right and left, they're so bloody inconsistent There's Bilger who sends his children to a private school and lives in a ruddy great house his father bought him and he goes round advocating world revolution from the driving seat of a Porsche that must have cost six thousand if it cost a penny and he calls me a fascist pig. I'm just recovering from that one when I bang into Toxted who is a genuine fascist and lives in a council house and wants to send anyone with a pigmentation problem back to Islamabad even though they were actually born in Clapham and haven't been out of England since, and who does he team up with? A bunch of ruddy sheikhs with more oil dollars under their burnouses than he's had hot dinners, can't speak more than three words of English, and own half Mayfair. Add the fact that they're semites and he's so anti-semitic he makes Eichmann look like a Friend of Israel, and then tell me how his bloody mind ticks. I'm damned if I know. It's enough to drive a rational man to drink.'
As if to give point to this remark Wilt ordered two more pints.
'You've had six already,' said Braintree doubtfully. 'Eva will give you hell when you get home.'
'Eva gives me hell, period,' said Wilt. 'When I consider how my life is spent...'
'Yes, well I'd just as soon you didn't,' said Braintree, 'there's nothing worse than an introspective drunk.'
'I was quoting from the first line of 'Testament of Beauty' by Robert Bridges,' said Wilt. 'Not that it's relevant. And I may be introspective but I am not introspectively drunk. I am merely pissed. If you'd had the sort of day I've had and were faced with the prospect of climbing into bed with Eva in a foul temper you would seek oblivion in beer too. Added to which is the knowledge that ten feet above my head, separated only by a ceiling, a floor and some wall-to-wall rush matting, will be lying the most beautiful, intelligent, radiant, sensitive creature...'
'If you mention the word Muse again, Henry...' said Braintree threateningly.
'I don't intend to,' said Wilt. 'Such ears as yours are far too coarse. Come to think of it, that almost rhymes. Has it ever occurred to you that English is a language most naturally fitted for poetry which rhymes?'
Wilt launched into this more agreeable topic and finished more beers. By the time they left The Glassblower's Arms Braintree was too drunk to drive home.
'I'll leave the car here and fetch it in the morning,' he told Wilt who was propping up a telegraph pole, 'and if I were you I'd ring for a taxi. You're not even fit to walk.'
'I shall commune with nature,' said Wilt. 'I have no intention of hastening the time between now and reality. With any luck it'll be asleep by the time I get back.'
And he wobbled off in the direction of Willington Road, stopping occasionally to steady himself against a gatepost and twice to pee into someone else's garden. On the second occasion he mistook a rosebush for a hydrangea and scratched himself rather badly and was sitting on the grass verge attempting to use a handkerchief as a tourniquet when a police car pulled up beside him. Wilt blinked into the flashlight which shone in his face before travelling down to the bloodstained handkerchief.
'Are you all right?' asked the voice behind the flashlight, rather too obsequiously for Wilt's taste.
'Does it look like it?' he asked truculently. 'You find a bloke sitting on the kerb tying a handkerchief round the remains of his once-proud manhood and you ask a bloody fool question like that?'
'If you don't mind, sir, I'd lay off the abusive language,' said the policeman. 'There's a law against using it on the public highway.'
'There ought to be a law about planting ruddy rosebushes next to the fucking pavement,' said Wilt.
'And may one ask what you were doing to the rose, sir?'
