Oblivious of the ill-feeling building up behind her Eva drove steadily towards the airbase. She had no conscious plan, only the determination to force the truth, and Wilt, out of somebody even if that meant setting fire to the car or lying naked in the roadway outside the gates. Anything to gain publicity. And for once Mavis had agreed with her and been helpful too. She had organized a group of Mothers Against The Bomb, some of whom were in fact grandmothers, had hired a coach and had telephoned all the London papers and BBC and Fenland Television to ensure maximum coverage for the demonstration.
'It gives us an opportunity to focus the world's attention on the seductive nature of capitalist military-industrial world domination,' she had said, leaving Eva with only the vaguest idea what she meant but with the distinct feeling that Wilt was the 'It' at the beginning of the sentence. Not that Eva cared what anyone said; it was what they did that counted. And Mavis's demonstration would help divert attention away from her own efforts to get into the camp. Or, if she failed to do that, she would see to it that the name Henry Wilt reached the millions of viewers who watched the news that night.
'Now I want you all to behave nicely,' she told the quads as they drove up to the camp gates. 'Just do what Mummy tells you and everything is going to be all right.'
'It isn't going to be all right if Daddy's been staying with an American lady,' said Josephine.
'Fucking,' said Penelope, 'not staying with.'
Eva braked sharply. 'Who said that?' she demanded, turning a livid face on the quads in the back seat.
'Mavis Motty did,' said Penelope. 'She's always going on about fucking.'
Eva took a deep breath. There were times when the quads' language, so carefully nurtured towards mature self-expression at the School for the Mentally Gifted, seemed appallingly inappropriate. And this was one of those times. 'I don't care what Mavis said,' she declared, 'and anyway it isn't like that. Your father has simply been stupid again. We don't know what's happened to him. That's why we've come here. Now you behave yourselves and'
'If we don't know what's happened to him how do you know he's been stupid?' asked Samantha, who had always been hot on logic.
'Shut up,' said Eva and started the car again.
Behind her the quads silently assumed the guise of four nice little girls. It was misleading. As usual they had prepared themselves for the expedition with alarming ingenuity. Emmeline had armed herself with several hatpins that had once belonged to Grandma Wilt; Penelope had filled two bicycle pumps with ammonia and sealed the ends with chewing-gum; Samantha had broken into all their piggy banks and had then bought every tin of pepper she could from a perplexed greengrocer; while Josephine had taken several of Eva's largest and most pointed Sabatier knives from the magnet board in the kitchen. In short the quads were happily looking forward to disabling as many airbase guards as they could and were only afraid that the affair would pass off peacefully. In the event their fears were almost realized.
As they stopped at the gatehouse and were approached by a sentry there were none of those signs of preparedness that had been so obvious the day before. In an effort to maintain that everything was normal and in a 'No Panic Situation' Colonel Urwin had ordered the removal of the concrete blocks in the roadway and had instilled a fresh sense of politeness in the officer in charge of entry to civilian quarters. A large Englishwoman with permed hair and a carload of small girls didn't seem to pose any threat to USAAF security.
'If you'll just pull over there I'll call up the Education Office for you,' he told Eva who had decided not to mention Captain Clodiak this time. Eva drove past the barrier and parked. This was proving much easier than she had expected. In fact for a moment she doubted her judgement. Perhaps Henry wasn't there after all and she had made some terrible mistake. The notion didn't last long. Once again the Wilts' Escort had signalled its presence and Eva was just telling the
