Wilt w-1

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘Let us pray,’ he muttered hoarsely.

  The ghastly apparition slumped heavily forward clutching the shroud to its bosom. Together they kneeled in prayer.

  ‘Check it out? What the hell do you mean “check it out”?’ said Inspector Flint who objected strongly to being woken in the middle of the afternoon when he had had no sleep for thirty-six hours and was trying to get some. ‘You wake me with some damned tomfoolery about a Vicar called Sigmund Freud…’

  ‘St John Froude,’ said Yates.

  ‘I don’t care what he’s called. It’s still improbable. If the bloody man says she isn’t there, she isn’t there. What am I supposed to do about it?’

  ‘I just thought we ought to get a patrol car to check, that’s all.’

  ‘What makes you think…’

  ‘There was definitely a call from a woman claiming to be Mrs Wilt and it came from that number. She’s called twice now. We’ve got a tape of the second call. She gave details of herself and they sound authentic. Date of birth, address, Wilt’s occupation, even the right name of their dog and the fact that they have yellow curtains in the lounge.’

  ‘Well, any fool can tell that. All they’ve got to do is walk past the house,’

  ‘And the name of the dog. It’s called Clem. I’ve checked that and she’s right.’

  ‘She didn’t happen to say what she’d been doing for the past week did she?’

  ‘She said she’d been on a boat,’ said Yates. ‘Then she rang off.’

  Inspector Flint sat up in bed. ‘A boat? What boat?’

  ‘She rang off. Oh and another thing, she said she takes a size ten shoe. She does.’

  ‘Oh shit.’ said Flint, ‘All right, I’ll come down.’ He got out of bed and began to dress.

  In his cell Wilt stared at the ceiling. After so many hours of interrogation his mind still reverberated with questions. ‘How did you kill her? Where did you put her? What did you with the weapon?’ Meaningless questions continually reiterated in the hope they would finally break him. But Wilt hadn’t broken. He had triumphed. For once in his life he knew himself to be invincibly right and everyone else totally wrong. Always before he had had doubts. Plasterers Two might after all, have been right about there being too many wogs in the country. Perhaps hanging was a deterrent. Wilt didn’t think so but he couldn’t be absolutely certain. Only time would tell. But in the case of Regina versus Wilt re the murder of Mrs Wilt there could be no question of his guilt. He could be tried, found guilty and sentenced, it would make no difference. He was innocent of the charge and if he was sentenced to life imprisonment the very enormity of the injustice done to him would compound his knowledge of his own innocence. For the very first time in his life Wilt knew himself to be free. It was as though the original sin of being Henry Wilt, of 34 Parkview Avenue, Ipford, lecturer in Liberal Studies at the Fenland College of Arts and Technology, husband of Eva Wilt and father of none, had been lifted from him. All the encumbrances of possessions, habits, salary and status, all the social conformities, the niceties of estimation of himself and other people which he and Eva had acquired, all these had gone. Locked in his cell Wilt was free to be. And whatever happened he would never again succumb to the siren calls of self-effacement. After the flagrant contempt and fury of Inspector Flint, the abuse and the opprobrium heaped on him for a week, who needed approbation? They could stuff their opinions of him. Wilt would pursue his independent course and put to good use his evident gifts of inconsequence. Give him a life sentence and a progressive prison governor and Wilt would drive the man mad within a month by the sweet reasonableness of his refusal to obey the prison rules. Solitary confinement and a regime of bread and water, if such punishments still existed, would not deter him. Give him his freedom and he would apply his new found talents at the Tech. He would sit happily on committees and reduce them to dissensions by his untiring adoption of whatever argument was most contrary to the consensus opinion. The race was not to the swift after all, it was to the indefatigably inconsequential and life was random, anarchic and chaotic. Rules were made to be broken and the man with the grasshopper mind was one jump ahead of all the others. Having established this new rule, Wilt turned on his side and tried to sleep but sleep wouldn’t come. He tried his other side with equal lack of success. Thoughts, questions, irrelevant answers and imaginary dialogues filled his mind. He tried counting sheep but found himself thinking of Eva. Dear Eva, damnable Eva, ebullient Eva and Eva irrepressibly enthusiastic. Like him she had sought the Absolute, the Eternal Truth which would save her the bother of ever having to think for herself again. She had sought it in Pottery, in Transcendental Meditation, in judo, on trampolines and most incongruously of all in Oriental Dance. Finally she had tried to find it in sexual emancipation, Women’s Lib and the Sacrament of the Orgasm in which she could forever lose herself. Which, come to think of it, was what she appeared to have done. And taken the bloody Pringsheims with her. Well she would certainly have some explaining to do when and if she ever returned. Wilt smiled to himself at the thought of what she would say when she discovered what her latest infatuation with the infinite had led to. He’d see to it that she had cause to regret it to her dying day.

  On the floor of the sitting-room at the Vicarage Eva Wilt struggled with the growing conviction that her dying day-was already over and done with. Certainly everyone she came into contact with seemed to think she was dead. The policeman she had spoken to on the phone had seemed disinclined to believe her assertion that she was alive and at least relatively well and had demanded proofs of her identity in the most disconcerting fashion. Eva had retreated stricken from the encounter with her confidence in her own continuing existence seriously undermined and it had only needed the reaction of the Rev St John Froude to her appearance in his house to complete her misery. His frantic appeals to the Almighty to rescue the soul of our dear departed, one Eva Wilt, deceased, from its present shape and unendurable form had affected Eva profoundly. She knelt on the carpet and sobbed while the Vicar stared at her over his glasses, shut his eyes, lifted up a shaky voice in prayer, opened his eyes, shuddered and generally behaved in a manner calculated to cause gloom and despondency in the putative corpse and when, in a last desperate attempt to get Eva Wilt, deceased, to take her proper place in the heavenly choir he cut short a prayer about ‘Man that is born of Woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery and struck up ‘Abide with me’ with many a semi-quaver, Eva abandoned all attempt at self-control and wailed ‘Fast falls the eventide’ most affectingly. By the time they had got to ‘I need thy presence every passing hour’ the Rev St John Froude was of an entirely contrary opinion. He staggered from the room and took sanctuary in his study. Behind him Eva Wilt espousing her new role as deceased with all the enthusiasm she had formerly bestowed on trampolines, judo and pottery, demanded to know where death’s sting was and where, grave, thy victory. ‘As if I bloody knew,’ muttered the Vicar and reached for the whisky bottle only to find that it too was empty. He sat down and put his hands over his ears to shut out the dreadful noise. On the whole ‘Abide with me’ was the last hymn he should have chosen. He’d have been better off with ‘there is a green hill far away’. It was less open to misinterpretation.

  When at last the hymn ended he sat relishing the silence and was about to investigate the possibility that there was another bottle in the larder when there was a knock on the door and Eva entered.

  ‘Oh Father I have sinned,’ she shrieked, doing her level best, to wail and gnash her teeth at the same time. The Rev St John Froude gripped the arms of his chair and tried to swallow. It was not easy. Then overcoming the reasonable fear that delirium tremens had come all too suddenly he managed to speak. ‘Rise, my child.’ he gasped as Eva writhed on the rugs before him, ‘I will hear your confession.’

  Chapter 20

  Inspector Flint switched the tape recorder off and looked at wilt.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’ said Wilt.

/>   ‘Is that her? Is that Mrs Wilt?’

  Wilt nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘What do you mean you’re afraid so? The damned woman is alive. You should be fucking grateful. Instead of that you sit there saying you’re afraid so.’

  Wilt sighed. ‘I was just thinking what an abyss there is between the person as we remember and imagine them and the reality of what they are. I was beginning to have fond memories of her and now…’

  ‘You ever been to Waterswick?’

  Wilt shook his head. ‘Never.’

  ‘Know the Vicar there?’

  ‘Didn’t even know there was a Vicar there.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t know how she got there?’

  ‘You heard her,’ said Wilt. ‘She said she’d been on a boat.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t know anyone with a boat, would you?’

  ‘People in my circle don’t have boats, Inspector. Maybe the Pringsheims have a boat.’

  Inspector Flint considered the possibility and rejected it. They had checked the boatyards out and the Pringsheims didn’t have a boat and hadn’t hired one either.

  On the other hand the possibility that he had been the victim of some gigantic hoax, a deliberate and involved scheme to make him look an idiot, was beginning to take shape in his mind. At the instigation of this infernal Wilt he had ordered the exhumation of an inflatable doll and had been photographed staring lividly at it at the very moment it changed sex. He had instituted a round-up of pork pies unprecedented in the history of the country. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sweetbreads instituted legal proceedings for the damage done to their previously unspotted reputation. And finally, he had held an apparently innocent man for questioning for a week and would doubtless be held responsible for the delay and additional cost in building the new Administration block at the Tech. There were, in all probability, other appalling consequences to be considered, but that was enough to be going on with. And he had nobody to blame but himself. Or…Wilt. He looked at Wilt venomously.

  Wilt smiled. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t,’ said the Inspector. ‘You’ve no idea.’

  ‘That we are all the creatures of circumstance, that things are never what they seem, that there’s more to this than meets…’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ said the Inspector.

  Wilt got up. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll want me for anything else,’ he said. ‘I’ll be getting along home.’

  ‘You’ll be doing no such thing. You’re coming with us to pick up Mrs Wilt.’

  They went out into the courtyard and got into a police car. As they drove through the suburbs, past the filling stations and factories and out across the fens Wilt shrank into the back seat of the car and felt the sense of freedom he had enjoyed in the Police Station evaporate. And with every mile it dwindled farther and the harsh reality of choice, of having to earn a living, of boredom and the endless petty arguments with Eva, of bridge on Saturday nights with the Mottrams and drives on Sundays with Eva, reasserted itself. Beside him, sunk in sullen silence, Inspector Flint lost his symbolic appeal. No longer the mentor of Wilt’s self-confidence, the foil to his inconsequentiality, he had became a fellow sufferer in the business of living almost a mirror-image of Wilt’s own nonentity. And ahead, across this flat bleak landscape with its black earth and cumulus skies, lay Eva and a lifetime of attempted explanations and counter-accusations. For a moment Wilt considered shouting ‘Stop the car. I want to get out’, but the moment passed. Whatever the future held he would learn to live with it. He had not discovered the paradoxical nature of freedom only to succumb once more to the servitude of Parkview Avenue, the Tech and Eva’s trivial enthusiasms. He was Wilt, the man with the grasshopper mind.

  Eva was drunk. The Rev St John Froude’s automatic reaction to her appalling confession had been to turn from whisky to 150% Polish spirit which he kept for emergencies and Eva in between agonies of repentance and the outpourings of lurid sins, had wet her whistle with the stuff. Encouraged by its effect, by the petrified benevolence of the Vicar’s smile and by the growing conviction that if she was dead eternal life demanded an act of absolute contrition while if she wasn’t it allowed her to avoid the embarrassment of explaining what precisely she was doing naked in someone else’s house, Eva confessed her sins with an enthusiasm that matched her deepest needs. This was what she had sought in judo and pottery and Oriental dance, an orgiastic expiation of her guilt. She confessed sins she had committed and sins she hadn’t, sine that had occurred to her and sins she had forgotten. She had betrayed Henry, she had wished him dead, she had lusted after other men, she was an adulterated woman, she was a lesbian, she was a nymphomaniac. And interspersed with these sins of the flesh there were sins of omission Eva left nothing out. Henry’s cold suppers, his lonely walks with the dog, her lack of appreciation for all he had done for her, her failure to be a good wife, her obsession with Harpic…everything poured out. In his chair the Rev St John Froude sat nodding incessantly like a toy dog in the back window of a car, raising his head to stare at her when she confessed to being a nymphomaniac and dropping it abruptly at the mention of Harpic, and all the time desperately trying to understand what had brought a fat naked–the shroud kept falling off her–lady, no definitely not lady, woman to his house with all the symptoms of religious mania upon her.

  ‘My child, is that all?’ he muttered when Eva finally exhausted her repertoire.

  ‘Yes, Father,’ sobbed Eva.

  ‘Thank God,’ said the Rev St John Froude fervently and wondered what to do next. If half the things he had heard were true he was in the presence of a sinner so depraved as to make the ex-Archdeacon of Ongar a positive saint. On the other hand, there were incongruities about her sins that made him hesitate before granting absolution. A confession full of falsehoods was no sign of true repentance.

  ‘I take it that you are married,’ he said doubtfully, ‘and that Henry is your lawful wedded husband?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Eva. ‘Dear Henry.’

  Poor sod, thought the Vicar but he was too tactful to say so. ‘And you have left him?’

  ‘Yes’

  ‘For another man?’

  Eva shook her head. ‘To teach him a lesson,’ she said with sudden belligerence.

  ‘A lesson?’ said the Vicar, trying frantically to imagine what sort of lesson the wretched Mr Wilt had learnt from her absence. ‘You did say a lesson?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Eva, ‘I wanted him to learn that he couldn’t get along without me.’

  The Rev St John Froude sipped his drink thoughtfully. If even a quarter of her confession was to be believed her husband must be finding getting along without her quite delightful. ‘And now you want to go back to him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Eva.

  ‘But he won’t have you?’

  ‘He can’t. The police have got him.’

  ‘The police?’ said the Vicar. ‘And may one ask what the police have got him for?’

  ‘They say he’s murdered me,’ said Eva.

  The Rev St John Froude eyed her with new alarm. He knew now that Mrs Wilt was out of her mind. He glanced round for something to use as a weapon should the need arise and finding nothing better to choose from than a plaster bust of the poet Dante and the bottle of Polish spirit, picked up the latter by its neck. Eva held her glass out.

  ‘Oh you are awful,’ she said. ‘You’re getting me tiddly.’

  ‘Quite,’ said the Vicar and put the bottle down again hastily. It was bad enough being alone in the house with a large, drunk, semi-naked woman who imagined that her husband had murdered her and who confessed to sins he had previously only read about without her jumping to the conclusion that he was deliberately trying to make her drunk. The Rev St John Froude had no desire to figure prominently in next Sunday’s News of the World.

  ‘You were saying that your husband murdered…’ He stopped. That seemed an unprofitable subject to pursue.

&nb
sp; ‘How could he have murdered me?’ asked Eva. ‘I’m here in the flesh, aren’t I?’

  ‘Definitely,’ said the Vicar. ‘Most definitely.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Eva. ‘And anyway Henry couldn’t murder anyone. He wouldn’t know how. He can’t even change a fuse in a plug. I have to do everything like that in the house.’ She stared at the Vicar balefully. ‘Are you married?’

  ‘No,’ said the Rev St John Froude, wishing to hell that he was.

  ‘What do you know about life if you aren’t married?’ asked Eva truculently. The Polish spirit was getting to her now and with it there came a terrible sense of grievance. ‘Men. What good are men? They can’t even keep a house tidy. Look at this room. I ask you.’ She waved her arms to emphasize the point and the dustcover dropped. Just look at it.’ But the Rev St John Froude had no eyes for the room. What he could see of Eva was enough to convince him that his life was in danger. He bounded from the chair, trod heavily on an occasional table, overturned the wastepaper basket and threw himself through the door into the hall. As he stumbled away in search of sanctuary the front door bell rang. The Rev St John Froude opened it and stared into Inspector Flint’s face.