The Wilt Alternative:

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘You’ve done what?’ he said.

  ‘Let it to a very nice young German girl,’ said Eva. ‘She’s paying fifteen pounds a week and promises to be very quiet. You won’t even know she’s there.’

  ‘I bloody well will. She’ll have lovers fumbling their lascivious way up and down stairs all night and the house will reek of sauerkraut.’

  ‘It won’t. There’s an extractor fan in the kitchenette up there and she’s entitled to have boyfriends so long as they behave themselves nicely.’

  ‘Nicely! Show me some loutish lover behaving nicely and I’ll show you a camel with four humps …’

  ‘They’re called dromedaries,’ said Eva, using the tactic of muddled information that usually distracted Wilt and lured him into correcting her. But Wilt was too distracted already to bother.

  ‘They’re not. They’re called fucking foreigners and I’m using fucking properly for once and if you think I want to lie in bed every night listening to some ruddy Latin prove his virility by imitating Popocatepetl in eruption on an inner sprung mattress eight feet above my head –’

  ‘Dunlopillo,’ said Eva. ‘You never get things right.’

  ‘Oh yes I do,’ snarled Wilt. ‘I knew this was in the wind ever since your bloody aunt had to die and leave you a legacy and you had to buy this miniature hotel. I knew then that you would turn it into some foul commune.’

  ‘It’s not a commune, and anyway Mavis says the extended family was one of the good things about the old days.’

  ‘She’d know all about extended families, Mavis would. Patrick has been extending his family for as long as I can remember, and into other people’s.’

  ‘Mavis has given him an ultimatum,’ said Eva. ‘She’s not putting up with his carryings on any longer.’

  ‘And I’m giving you an ultimatum,’ said Wilt. ‘One squeak out of those bedsprings up there, one whiff of pot, one twang of a guitar, one giggle on the stairs and I’ll extend this family by finding digs in town until Miss Schickelgruber has moved out.’

  ‘Her name isn’t Schickelwhatchamacallit. It’s Mueller. Irmgard Mueller.’

  ‘So was one of Hitler’s nastier Obergruppenführers, and all I’m saying is –’

  ‘You’re just jealous,’ said Eva. ‘If you were a proper man and hadn’t got hang-ups about sex from your parents you wouldn’t get so hot under the collar about what other people do.’

  Wilt regarded her balefully. Whenever Eva wanted to subdue him she launched a sexual offensive. Wilt retired to bed defeated. Discussions of his sexual inadequacies tended to result in his having to prove Eva wrong practically, and after that stew he didn’t feel up to it.

  *

  He didn’t feel up to much by the time he reached the Tech next morning. The quads had fought their usual intersororial war about who was going to wear what dress before being dragged off to playgroup and there had been another letter in The Times from Lord Longford demanding the release of Myra Hindley, the Moors murderess, from prison on the grounds that she was now thoroughly reformed, a convinced Christian and a socially valuable citizen. ‘In which case she can prove her social value and Christian charity by staying in prison and helping her fellow-convicts,’ had been Wilt’s infuriated reaction. The other news was just as depressing. Inflation was up again. Sterling down. North Sea gas would run out in five years. All in all the world was in its usual filthy mess and now he had to listen to Dr Mayfield extol the virtues of the Advanced English for Foreigners course for several intolerably boring hours before dealing with complaints from his Liberal Studies lecturers about the way he had done the timetable.

  One of the worst things about being Head of Liberal Studies was that he had to spend a large part of his summer vacation fitting classes into rooms and lecturers into classes, and when he had finished and had defeated the Head of Art who wanted Room 607 for Life Studies while Wilt needed it for Meat Three, he was still faced with a hassle at the beginning of the year and had to readjust the timetable because Mrs Fyfe couldn’t make Tuesday at two with DMT One because her husband … It was on such occasions that Wilt wished he was back teaching Lord of the Flies to Gasfitters instead of running the department. But his salary was good, the rates on Willington Road were exorbitant, and for the rest of the year he could spend much of his time sitting in his office dreaming.

  He could sit through most committee meetings in a coma too, but Dr Mayfield’s course board was the one exception. Wilt had to stay awake to prevent Mayfield lumbering him with several more lectures in his relative absence. Besides, Dr Board would start the term off with a row.

  He did. Mayfield had only just begun to stress the need for a more student-oriented curriculum with special emphasis on socio-economic awareness when Dr Board intervened.

  ‘Codswallop,’ he said. ‘The business of my department is to teach English students how to speak German, French, Spanish and Italian, not to explain the origins of their own languages to a whole lot of aliens, and as for socio-economic awareness, I suggest that Dr Mayfield has his priorities wrong. If the Arabs I had last year were anything to go by they were economically aware to the nth degree about the purchasing power of oil and so socially backward that it will take more than a three-year course to persuade the sods that stoning women to death for being unfaithful isn’t cricket. Perhaps if we had three hundred years …’

  ‘Dr Board, this meeting may well last as long if you keep interrupting,’ said the Vice-Principal. ‘Now if Dr Mayfield will just continue …’

  The Head of Academic Development continued for another hour, and was all set for the entire morning when the Head of Engineering objected.

  ‘I see that several of my staff are scheduled to deliver lectures on British Engineering Achievements in the Nineteenth Century. Now I would like to inform Dr Mayfield and this board that my department consists of engineers, not historians, and quite frankly they see no reason why they should be asked to lecture on topics outside their field.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ said Dr Board.

  ‘What is more, I would like to be informed why so much emphasis is being placed on a course for foreigners at the expense of our own British students.’

  ‘I think I can answer that,’ said the Vice-Principal. ‘Thanks to the cuts that have been imposed on us by the local authority we have been forced to subsidize our existing non-paying courses and staff numbers by expanding the foreign sector where students pay substantial fees. If you want the figures of the profit we made last year …’

  But no one took up the invitation. Even Dr Board was momentarily silenced.

  ‘Until such time as the economy improves,’ continued the Vice-Principal, ‘a great many lecturers are only going to keep their jobs because we are running this course. What is more, it may well be possible to expand Advanced English for Foreigners into a degree course approved by the CNAA. I think you will all agree that anything which increases our chances of becoming a polytechnic is to everyone’s advantage.’ The Vice-Principal stopped and looked round the room but nobody demurred. ‘In which case all that remains is for Dr Mayfield to allocate the new lectures to the various departmental heads.’

  Dr Mayfield distributed xeroxed lists. Wilt studied his new burden and found that it included The Development of Liberal and Progressive Social Attitudes in English Society, 1688 to 1978, and was just about to protest when the Head of Zoology got in first.

  ‘I see here that I am down for Animal Husbandry and Agriculture with special reference to Intensive Farming of Pigs, Hens, and Stock-Rearing.’

  ‘The subject has ecological significance –’

  ‘And is student-oriented,’ said Dr Board. ‘Battery Education or possibly Hog Raising by Continuous Assessment. Perhaps we could even run a course on Composting.’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Wilt with a shudder. Dr Board looked at him with interest.

  ‘Your magnificent wife?’ he enquired.

  Wilt nodded dolefully. ‘Yes, she has taken up –’

 
‘If I may just get back to my original objection instead of hearing about Mr Wilt’s matrimonial problems,’ said the Head of Zoology. ‘I want to make it absolutely clear now that I am not qualified to lecture on Animal Husbandry. I am a zoologist, not a farmer, and what I know about Stock-Rearing is zero.’

  ‘We must all extend ourselves,’ said Dr Board. ‘After all, if we are to acquire the doubtful privilege of calling ourselves a polytechnic we must put the College before personal interest.’

  ‘Perhaps you haven’t seen what you’re down to teach, Board,’ Zoology continued. ‘Sementic Influences … shouldn’t that be Semantic, Mayfield?’

  ‘Must be the typist’s error,’ said Mayfield. ‘Yes it should read Semantic Influences on Current Sociological Theories. The bibliography includes Wittgenstein, Chomsky and Wilkes …’

  ‘It doesn’t include me,’ said Board. ‘You can count me out. I don’t care if we descend to the level of a primary school but I am not going to mug up Wittgenstein or Chomsky for the benefit of anyone.’

  ‘Well then, don’t talk about my having to extend myself,’ said the Head of Zoology. ‘I am not going into a lecture room filled with Moslems to explain, even with my limited knowledge of the subject, the advantages of raising pigs in the Persian Gulf.’

  ‘Gentlemen, while recognizing that there are one or two minor amendments necessary to the lecture titles, I think they can be ironed out –’

  ‘Wiped out more likely,’ said Dr Board.

  The Vice-Principal ignored his interruption. ‘– and the main thing is to keep the lectures in their present format while presenting them at a level suitable for the individual students.’

  ‘I’m still not mentioning pigs,’ said Zoology.

  ‘You don’t have to. You can do an elementary series of talks on plants,’ said the Vice-Principal wearily.

  ‘Great. And will someone tell me how in God’s name I can even begin to talk in an elementary way about Wittgenstein? I had an Iraqi last year who couldn’t even spell his own name, so what’s the poor bugger going to do with Wittgenstein?’ said Dr Board.

  ‘And if I may just bring another subject up,’ said a lecturer from the English Department rather diffidently, ‘I think we are going to have something of a communications problem with the eighteen Japanese and the young man from Tibet.’

  ‘Oh really,’ said Dr Mayfield. ‘A communications problem. You know, it might be as well to add a lecture or two on Intercommunicational Discourse. It’s the sort of subject which is likely to appeal to the Council for National Academic Awards.’

  ‘It may appeal to them but it certainly doesn’t appeal to me,’ said Board. ‘I’ve always said they were the scourings of the Academic world.’

  ‘Yes, and we’ve already heard you on the subject,’ said the Vice-Principal. ‘And now to get back to the Japanese and the young man from Tibet. You did say Tibet, didn’t you?’

  ‘Well, I said it, but I can’t be too sure,’ answered the English lecturer. ‘That’s what I meant about a communications problem. He doesn’t speak a word of English and my Tibetanese isn’t exactly fluent. It’s the same with the Japanese.’

  The Vice-Principal looked round the room. ‘I suppose it is too much to expect anyone here to have a smattering of Japanese?’

  ‘I’ve got a bit,’ said the Head of Art, ‘but I’m damned if I’m going to use it. When you’ve spent four years in a Nip prisoner-of-war camp the last thing you want is to have to talk to the bastards in later life. My digestive system is still in a hell of a mess.’

  ‘Perhaps you could tutor our Chinese student instead. Tibet is part of China now and if we include him with the four girls from Hong Kong …’

  ‘We’ll be able to advertise Take-Away Degrees,’ said Dr Board and provoked another acrimonious exchange which lasted until lunchtime.

  Wilt returned to his office to find that Mrs Fyfe couldn’t take Mechanical Technicians at two on Tuesday because her husband had … It was exactly as he had anticipated. The Tech’s year had begun as it always did. It continued in the same trying vein for the next four days. Wilt attended meetings on Interdepartmental Course Collaboration, gave a seminar to student teachers from the local training college on The Meaning of Liberal Studies, which was a contradiction in terms as far as he was concerned, was lectured by a sergeant from the Drug Squad on Pot Plant Recognition and Heroin Addiction and finally managed to fit Mrs Fyfe into Room 29 with Bread Two on Monday at 10 a.m. And all the time he brooded over Eva and her wretched lodger.

  *

  While Wilt busied himself lethargically at the Tech, Eva put her own plans implacably into operation. Miss Mueller arrived two mornings later and installed herself inconspicuously in the flat; so inconspicuously that it took Wilt two more days to realize she was there, and then only the delivery of nine milk bottles where there were usually eight gave him the clue. Wilt said nothing but waited for the first hint of gaiety upstairs before launching his counter-offensive of complaints.

  But Miss Mueller lived up to Eva’s promise. She was exceedingly quiet, came in unobtrusively when Wilt was still at the Tech and left in the morning after he had begun his daily walk. By the end of a fortnight he was beginning to think his worst fears were unjustified. In any case, he had his lectures to foreign students to prepare and the teaching term had finally started. The question of the lodger receded into the background as he tried to think what the hell to tell Mayfield’s Empire, as Dr Board called it, about Progressive Social Attitudes in English Society since 1688. If Gasfitters were any indication there had been a regression, not a progressive development. The bastards had graduated to queer-bashing.

  3

  But if Wilt’s fears were premature they were not long being realized. He was sitting one Saturday evening in the Piagetory, the purpose-built summerhouse at the bottom of the garden in which Eva had originally tried to play conceptual games with the ‘wee ones’, a phrase Wilt particularly detested, when the first blow fell.

  It was less a blow than a revelation. The summerhouse was nicely secluded, set back among old apple trees with an arbour of clematis and climbing roses to hide it from the world and Wilt’s consumption of homemade beer from Eva. Inside, it was hung with dried herbs. Wilt didn’t approve of the herbs but he preferred them in their hung form rather than in the frightful infusions Eva sometimes tried to inflict on him, and they seemed to have the added advantage of keeping the flies from the compost heap at bay. He could sit there with the sun dappling the grass around and feel at relative peace with the world, and the more beer he drank the greater that peace became. Wilt prided himself on the effect of his beer. He brewed it in a plastic dustbin and occasionally fortified it with vodka before bottling it in the garage. After three bottles even the quads’ din somehow receded and became almost natural, a chorus of whines, squeals and laughter, usually malicious when someone fell off the swing, but at least distant. And even that distraction was absent this evening. Eva had taken them to the ballet in the hope that early exposure to Stravinsky would turn Samantha into a second Margot Fonteyn. Wilt had his doubts about Samantha and Stravinsky. As far as he was concerned his daughter’s talents were more suitable for an all-in wrestler, and Stravinsky’s genius was overrated. It had to be if Eva approved it. Wilt’s own taste ran to Mozart and Mugsy Spanier, an eclecticism Eva couldn’t understand but which allowed him to annoy her by switching from a piano sonata she was enjoying to twenties jazz which she didn’t.

  Anyway, this evening there was no need to play his tape recorder. It was sufficient to sit in the summerhouse and know that even if the quads woke him at five next morning he could still stay in bed until ten, and he was just uncorking his fourth bottle of fortified lager when his eye caught sight of a figure on the wooden balcony outside the dormer window of the top-floor flat. Wilt’s hand on the bottle loosened and a moment later he was groping for the binoculars Eva had bought for bird-watching. He focused on the figure through a gap in the roses and forgot about beer
. All his attention was riveted on Miss Irmgard Mueller.

  She was standing looking out over the trees to the open country beyond, and from where Wilt sat and focused he had a particularly interesting view of her legs. There was no denying that they were shapely legs. In fact they were startlingly shapely legs and her thighs … Wilt moved up, found her breasts beneath a cream blouse entrancing, and finally reached her face. He stayed there. It wasn’t that Irmgard – Miss Mueller and that bloody lodger were instantaneously words of the past – was an attractive young woman. Wilt had been faced by attractive young women at the Tech for too many years, young women who ogled him and sat with their legs distractingly apart, not to have built up sufficient sexual antibodies to deflect their juvenile charms. But Irmgard was not a juvenile. She was a woman, a woman of around twenty-eight, a beautiful woman with glorious legs, discreet and tight breasts, ‘unsullied by suckling’ was the phrase that sprang to Wilt’s mind, with firm neat hips; even her hands grasping the balcony rail were somehow delicately strong with tapering fingers, lightly tanned as by some midnight sun. Wilt’s mind spun into meaningless metaphors far removed from Eva’s washing-up mitts, the canyon wrinkles of her birth-pocked belly, the dugs that haunched her flaccid hips and all the physical erosion of twenty years of married life. He was swept into fancy by this splendid creature, but above all by her face.

  Irmgard’s face was not simply beautiful. In spite of the beer Wilt might have withstood the magnetism of mere beauty. He was defeated by the intelligence of her face. In fact there were imperfections in that face from a purely physical point of view. It was too strong for one thing, the nose was a shade retroussé to be commercially perfect, and the mouth too generous, but it was individual, individual and intelligent and sensitive and mature and thoughtful and … Wilt gave up the addition in despair and as he did so it seemed to him that Irmgard was gazing down into his two adoring eyes, or anyway into the binoculars, and that a subtle smile played about her gorgeous lips. Then she turned away and went back into the flat. Wilt dropped the binoculars and reached trancelike for the beer bottle. What he had just seen had changed his view of life.