Baconheath Airbase he devoted himself on Mondays to tutoring a Mr McCullum at Ipford Prison and then led her to suppose he had another tutorial with him four evenings later. He felt rather guilty about this subterfuge but excused himself with the thought that if Eva wanted to buy an expensive education plus computers for four daughters, she couldn't seriously expect his salary, however augmented by HM Prison Service, to pay for it. The airbase lectures did that and anyway Mr McCullum's company constituted a form of penance. It also had the effect of assuaging Wilt's sense of guilt. Not that his pupil didn't do his damnedest to instil one. A sociology lecturer from the Open University had given him a solid grounding in that subject and Wilt's attempts to further Mr McCullum's interest in E. M. Foster and Howards End were constantly interrupted by the convict's comments on the socio-economically disadvantaged environment which had led him to end up where and what he was. He was also fairly fluent on the class war, the need for a preferably bloody revolution and the total redistribution of wealth. Since he had spent his entire life pursuing riches by highly illegal and unpleasant means, ones which involved the deaths of four people and the use of a blowtorch as a persuader on several gentlemen in his debt, thus earning himself the soubriquet 'Fireworks Harry' and 25 years from a socially prejudiced judge, Wilt found the argument somewhat suspect.
He didn't much like Mr McCullum's changes of mood either. They varied from whining self-pity, and the claim that he was deliberately being turned into a cabbage, through bouts of religious fervour during which the name Longford came up rather too often, and finally to a bloody-minded belligerence when he threatened to roast the fucking narks who'd shopped him. On the whole, Wilt preferred McCullum the cabbage and was glad that the tutorials were conducted through a grill of substantial wire mesh and in the presence of an even more substantial warder. After Miss Hare and the verbal battering he'd had from Eva, he could do with some protection and this evening Mr McCullum's mood had nothing to do with vegetables. 'Listen,' he told Wilt thickly, 'you don't have a clue, do you? Think you know everything but you haven't done time. Same with this E. M. Forster. He was a middle-class scrubber too.'
'Possibly,' said Wilt, recognizing that this was not one of the nights on which to press Mr McCullum too frankly on the need to stick to the subject. 'He was certainly middle-class. On the other hand, this may have endowed him with the sensitivity needed to'
'Fuck sensitivity. Lived with a pig, that's how sensitive he was, dirty sod.'
Wilt considered this estimation of the private life of the great author dubious. So, evidently, did the warder. 'Pig?' said Wilt, 'I don't think he did you know. Are you sure?'
'Course I'm sure. Fucking pig by the name of Buckingham.'
'Oh, him,' said Wilt, cursing himself for having encouraged the beasdy man to read Forster's biography as background material to the novels. He should have realized that any mention of policemen was calculated to put 'Fireworks Harry' in a foul mood. 'Anyway, if we look at his work as a writer, as an observer of the social scene and...'
McCullum wasn't having any of that. 'The social scene my eye and Betty Martin. Spent more time looking up his own arsehole.'
'Well, metaphorically I suppose you could...'
'Literally,' snarled McCullum, and turned the pages of the book. 'How about this? January second '...have the illusion I am charming and beautiful...blah, blah...but would powder my nose if I wasn't found out...blah, blah...The anus is clotted with hairs...' And that's in your blooming Forster's diary. A self-confessed narcissistic fairy.'
'Must have used a mirror, I suppose,' said Wilt, temporarily thrown by this revelation. 'All the same his novels reflect...'
'I know what you're going to say,' interrupted McCullum. 'They have social relevance for dieir time. Balls. He could have got nicked for what he did, slumming it with one of the State's sodding hatchet men. His books have got about as much social relevance as Barbara bloody Cartland's. And we all know what they are, don't we? Literary asparagus.'
