Eva stared down at the jar. Even by the peculiar standards of 45 Oakhurst Avenue there was something disorientating about the conjunctionand conjunction was the right wordof Wilt's thingamajig and the icing syringe and the presence on the kitchen floor of a jar of her moisturizing cream. She sat down on a stool.
'And for your further information,' Wilt went on, but Eva stopped him. 'I don't want to hear,' she said.
Wilt glared at her lividly. 'And I don't want to feel,' he snarled. 'If you think I find any satisfaction in squirting whatever's in that emulsifier you use for your face up my whatsit at three o'clock in the morning, I can assure you I don't.'
'I don't see why you're doing it then,' said Eva, beginning to have an awful feeling herself.
'Because, if I didn't know better, I'd think some bloody sadist had larded my waterworks with pepper, that's why.'
'With pepper?'
'Or ground glass and curry powder,' said Wilt. Add a soupcon of mustard gas and you'll have the general picture. Or sensation. Something ghastly anyway. And now if you don't mind...'
But before he could get to work with the icing syringe again Eva had stopped him. 'There must be an antidote,' she said. 'I'll phone Dr Kores.'
Wilt's eyes bulged in his head. 'You'll do what?' he demanded.
'I said I'll'
'I heard you,' shouted Wilt. 'You said you'd ring that bloody herbal homothrope Dr Kores and I want to know why.'
Eva looked desperately round the kitchen but there was no comfort now to be found in the Magimix or the le Creuset saucepans hanging by the stove and certainly none in the herb chart on the wall. That beastly woman had poisoned Henry and it was all her own fault for having listened to Mavis. But Wilt was staring at her dangerously and she had to do something immediately. 'I just think you ought to see a doctor,' she said. 'I mean, it could be serious.'
'Could be?' yelled Wilt, now thoroughly alarmed. 'It fucking well is and you still haven't told me'
'Well, if you must know,' interrupted Eva, fighting back, 'you shouldn't have had so much beer.'
'Beer? My God, you bitch, I knew there was something wrong with the muck,' shouted Wilt and hurled himself at her across the kitchen.
'I only meant' Eva began, and then dodged round the pine table to avoid the syringe. She was saved by the quads.
'What's Daddy doing with cream all over his genitals?' asked Emmeline. Wilt stopped in his tracks and stared at the four faces in the doorway. As usual, the quads were employing tactics that always nonplussed him. To combine the whimsy of 'Daddy', particularly with the inflection Emmeline gave the word, with the anatomically exact was calculated to disconcert him. And why not ask him instead of referring to him so objectively? For a moment he hesitated and Eva seized her opportunity.
'That's nothing to do with you,' she said and ostentatiously shielded them from the sight. 'It's just that your father isn't very well and'
'That's right,' shouted Wilt, who could see what was coming, 'slap all the blame on me.'
'I'm not blaming you,' said Eva over her shoulder. 'It's'
'That you lace my beer with some infernal irritant and bloody well poison me, and then you have the gall to tell them I'm not very well. I'll say I'm not well. I'm'
A hammering sound from the Gamers' wall diverted his attention. As Wilt hurled the syringe at the Laughing Cavalier his mother-in-law had given them when she'd sold her house and which Eva claimed reminded her of her happy childhood there, Eva hustled the quads upstairs. When she came
