points but I have to tell you with those four lovely girls of yours you’re going to need a breadwinner. And I mean a real one. Henry doesn’t strike me as being that ambitious and enterprising. Like he takes life too easy. You got to put some spunk into him, know what I mean? Like jack him up and get him out there fighting. Make a financial contribution to your wonderful family life. Seems to me he doesn’t do much of that.’
Eva had privately agreed that Henry wasn’t ambitious. She had spoken to him time and time again about getting a better job, leaving the Tech and going into industry or insurance where there was lots of money to be made. It hadn’t done any good. Henry was a stick-in-the-mud. So now she placed all her hopes for the girls and her own old age on Uncle Wally and Auntie Joan–who had met Wally when he was a USAF pilot at Lakenheath in the fifties and she’d been working in the PX. Eva had always been fond of her auntie and she was particularly fond of her now that she was married to Wally Immelmann of Immelmann Enterprises in Wilma, Tennessee and had a new ante-bellum mansion there as well as a lake house up in the woods someplace whose name Eva could never remember. So as she bustled about the house and vacuumed and did the chores before going off to the Community Centre to help out with the old people–it was Thursday and Third Age lunch and a tea dance afterwards–her mind was filled with glorious expectations. She couldn’t exactly bring herself to hope that Uncle Wally have an infarct and die, or better still that he crash that twin-engine plane he flew and that Auntie Joan be with him at the time; such thoughts were wicked and hid below the surface of Eva’s kindly mind. All the same they weren’t in their first youth and…No, she mustn’t think like that. She must think of the girls’ future and that was all a long way off. Besides just going to America was a great adventure and it would broaden the quads’ outlook and give them an opportunity to see for themselves how in America anyone could make it big. Even Wally Immelmann, who before he’d joined the US Air Force had been a simple country boy on a small farm, had gone on to become a multimillionaire. And all because he had initiative. Eva saw Uncle Wally as a far better role model for her daughters than Wilt. Which brought her all the way back to the problem of Henry. She knew what he’d be like in Wilma, getting drunk in low bars and refusing to go to church and arguing with Wally about just about everything. There’d been that horrible evening in London when the Immelmanns had come over and taken them out to dinner at their terribly smart and fearfully expensive hotel. What was it called? The Tavern by the Park. Henry had got disgustingly drunk and Uncle Wally had said something about Limeys not being able to hold their liquor. Eva pushed the memory to the back of her mind and gave her attention to old Mr Ackroyd who said his piss bag had come undone and would she put it back for him. All you had to do was…No, she most certainly wouldn’t. He’d caught her out before like that and she’d found herself kneeling in front of his wheelchair holding his penis while the other old people looked on with prurient interest and had laughed at her. She wasn’t going to get caught out again by the dirty old man.
‘I’ll get Nurse Turnbull,’ she told him. ‘She’ll put it back so it won’t come out again.’ And leaving the miserable Mr Ackroyd begging her not to, she went out and fetched the formidable Nurse Turnbull. After that she had trouble with Mrs Limley who wanted to know when the bus for Crowborough left.
‘In a little while, dear,’ Eva told her. ‘You won’t have to wait long now but I had to wait more than half an hour before it came yesterday.’
In half an hour, with any luck, Mrs Limley would have forgotten that she was nowhere near Crowborough and that the Community Centre was not the bus station, and she’d be quite happy again. And that after all was what Eva came to the Community Centre for, did everything for, to make people happy. In short she spent the morning doing her little
