went through to the bathroom. Wilt sat on the
bed and looked at the card. The beastly thing was shaped like a…What the hell was it shaped
like? Anyway it was pink and opened out and inside were all these ambiguous words. Come and
Touch and Come. Anyone touched him and they’d get an earful. And what about pot luck? A lot
of trendy dons smoking joints and talking about set-theoretic data-manipulation
systems or the significance of pre-Popper Hegelianism in the contemporary
dialectical scene, or something equally unintelligible, and using fuck and cunt
every now and then to show that they were still human.
‘And what do you do?’ they would ask him.
‘Well, actually I teach at the Tech.’
‘At the Tech? How frightfully interesting,’ looking over his shoulder towards more
stimulating horizons, and he would end the evening with same ghastly woman who felt
strongly that Techs fulfilled a real function and that intellectual achievement was
vastly overrated and that people should be, oriented in a way that would make them
community coordinated and that’s what Techs were doing, weren’t they? Wilt knew what
Techs were doing. Paying people like him £3500 a year to keep Gasfitters quiet for an
hour.
And Pringsheim Punch. Planters Punch. Printers Punch. He’d had enough punches
recently.
‘What the hell am I to wear?’ he asked.
‘There’s that Mexican shirt you bought on the Costa del Sol last year,’ Eva called from
the bathroom. ‘You haven’t had a chance to wear it since’
‘And I don’t intend to now,’ muttered Wilt, rummaging through a drawer in search of
something nondescript that would demonstrate his independence. In the end he put on a
striped shirt with blue jeans.
‘You’re surely not going like that?’ Eva told him emerging from the bathroom largely
naked. Her face was plastered with white powder and her lips were carmine.
‘Jesus wept,’ said Wilt, ‘Mardi Gras with pernicious anaemia.’
Eva pushed passed him. ‘I’m going as The Great Gatsby,’ she announced,’ ‘and if you had
any imagination you’d think of something better than a business shirt with blue jeans’
‘The Great Gatsby happened to be a man,’ said Wilt.
‘Bully for him,’ said Eva and put on her lemon loungers.
Wilt shut his eyes and took off his shirt. By the time they left the house he was wearing a
red shirt with jeans while Eva, in spite of the hot night, insisted on putting on her new
raincoat and trilby.
‘We might as well walk.’ said Wilt.
They took the car. Eva wasn’t yet prepared to walk down Parkview Avenue in a trilby, a
belted raincoat and lemon loungers. On the way they stopped at an off-licence where Wilt
bought a bottle of Cyprus red.
‘Don’t think I’m going to touch the muck,’ he said, ‘and you had better take the car keys
now. If it’s as bad as I think it will be, I’m walking home early.’
It was. Worse. In his red shirt and blue jeans Wilt looked out of place.
‘Darling Eva,’ said Sally, when they finally found her talking to a man in a loincloth
made out of a kitchen towel advertising Irish cheeses, ‘you look great. The twenties suit
you. And so this is Henry.’ Henry didn’t feel Henry at all. ‘In period costume too.
Henry meet Raphael.’
The man in the loincloth studied Wilt’s jeans. ‘The fifties are back,’ he said
languidly, ‘I suppose it was bound to happen.’
Wilt looked pointedly at a Connemara Cheddar and tried to smile.
‘Help yourself, Henry,’ said Sally, and took Eva off to meet the freest but the most
liberated woman who was simply dying to meet booby baby. Wilt went into the garden
and put his bottle on the table and looked for a corkscrew. There wasn’t one. In the end he
looked into a large bucket with a ladle in it. Half an orange and segments of bruised
peach floated in a purple liquid. He poured himself a paper cup and tried it. As he had
anticipated,