middle way.
He was still puzzling over the problem when he crossed Bilton Street and walked up Hillbrow Avenue. Here too, the signs told him that almost everyone was content with his lot. The cherry trees were in bloom, and pink and white petals littered the pavement like confetti. Wilt noted each front garden, most of them neat and bright with wallflowers, but some, where academics from the University lived, unkempt and overgrown with weeds. On the corner of Pritchard Street, Mr Sands was busy among his heathers and azaleas, proving to an uninterested world that it was possible for a retired bank manager to find satisfaction by growing acid-loving plants on an alkaline soil. Mr Sands had explained the difficulties to Wilt one day, and the need to replace all the topsoil with peat to lower the pH. Since Wilt had no idea what pH stood for, he hadn't a clue what Mr Sands had been talking about, and in any case, he had been more interested in Mr Sands' character and the enigma of his contentment. The man had spent forty years presumably fascinated by the movement of money from one account to the other, fluctuations in the interest rate and the granting of loans and overdrafts, and now all he seemed prepared to talk about were the needs of his camellias and miniature conifers. It didn't make sense and was just as unfathomable as the character of Mrs Cranley who had once figured so spectacularly in a trial to do with a brothel in Mayfair, but who now sang in the choir at St Stephens and wrote children's stories filled with remorseless whimsy and an appalling innocence. It was beyond him. He could only deduce one fact from his observations. People could and did change their lives from one moment to the next, and quite fundamentally at that. And if they could, there was no reason why he shouldn't. Fortified with the knowledge, he strode on more confidently and with the determination not to put up with any nonsense from the quads tonight.
As usual he was proved wrong. He had no sooner opened the front door, than he was under siege. 'Ooh, Daddy, what have you done to your face?' demanded Josephine.
'Nothing,' said Wilt, and tried to escape upstairs before the real inquisition could begin. He needed a bath and his clothes stank of disinfectant. He was stopped by Emmeline who was playing with her hamster halfway up.
'Don't step on Percival,' she said, 'she's pregnant.'
'Pregnant?' said Wilt, momentarily nonplussed. 'He can't be. It's impossible.'
'Percival's a she, so it is.'
'A she? But the man at the petshop guaranteed the thing was a male. I asked him specifically.'
'And she's not a thing,' said Emmeline. 'She's an expectant mummy.'
'Better not be,' said Wilt. 'I'm not having the house overrun by an exploding population of hamsters. Anyway, how do you know?'
'Because we put her in with Julian's to see if they'd fight to the death like the book said, and Pervical went into a trance and didn't do anything.'
'Sensible fellow,' said Wilt, immediately identifying with Pervical in such horrid circumstances.
'She's not a fellow. Mummy hamsters always go into a trance when they want to be done.'
'Done?' said Wilt inadvisedly.
'What you do to Mummy on Sunday mornings and Mummy goes all funny afterwards.'
'Christ,' said Wilt, cursing Eva for not shutting the bedroom door. Besides, the mixture of accuracy and baby-talk was getting to him. 'Anyway, never mind what we do. I want to...'
'Does Mummy go into a trance, too?' asked Penelope, who was coming down the stairs with a doll in a pram.
'It's not something I'm prepared to discuss,' said Wilt. 'I need a bath and I'm going to have one. And now.'
'Can't,' said Josephine. 'Sammy's having her hair washed. She's got nits. You smell funny too.
