Wilt Read Free Page A

there was a chance she’d develop

    bloodclots all over the place in no time at all. Wilt put the notion out of his head. Eva

    with bloodclots was too awful to stomach, and anyway it might not work. No, it would have

    to be something quick, certain and painless. Preferably an accident.
    At the end of the hour Wilt collected the books and made his way back to the Staff Room.

    He had a free period. On the way he passed the site of the new Administration block. The

    ground had been cleared and the builders had moved in and were boring pile holes for the

    foundations. Wilt stopped and watched as the drilling machine wound slowly down into the

    ground. They were making wide holes. Very wide. Big enough for a body.
    ‘How deep are you going?’ he asked one of the workmen.
    ‘Thirty feet.’
    ‘Thirty feet?’ said Wilt. ‘When’s the concrete going in?’
    ‘Monday, with any luck,’ said the man.
    Wilt passed on. A new and quite horrible idea had just occurred to him.

Chapter 2
    It was one of Eva Wilt’s better days. She had days, better days, and one of those days.

    Days were just days when nothing went wrong and she got the washing-up done and the front

    room vacuumed and the windows washed and the beds made and the bath Vimmed and the lavatory

    pan Harpicked and went round to the Harmony Community Centre and helped with Xeroxing

    or sorted old clothes for the Jumble Sale and generally made herself useful and came

    home for lunch and went to the library and had tea with Mavis or Susan or Jean and talked

    about life and how seldom Henry made love to her even perfunctorily nowadays and how she

    had missed her opportunity by refusing a bank clerk who was a manager now and came home

    and made Henry’s supper and went out to Yoga or Flower Arrangement or Meditation or

    Pottery and finally climbed into bed with the feeling that she had got something

    done.
    On one of those days nothing went right. The activities were exactly the same but each

    episode was tainted with some minor disaster like the fuse blowing on the

    vacuum-cleaner or the drain in the sink getting blocked with a piece of carrot so that by

    the time Henry came home he was either greeted by silence or subjected to a quite

    unwarranted exposé of all his faults and shortcomings. On one of those days Wilt

    usually took the dog for an extended walk via the Ferry Path Inn and spent a restless

    night getting up and going to the bathroom, thus nullifying the cleansing qualities of

    the Harpic Eva had puffed round the pan and providing her with a good excuse to point out

    his faults once again in the morning.
    ‘What the hell am I supposed to do?’ he had asked after one of those nights. ‘If I pull

    the chain you grumble because I’ve woken you up and if I don’t you say it looks nasty in the

    morning.’
    ‘Well, it does, and in any case you don’t have to wash all the Harpic off the sides. And

    don’t say you don’t. I’ve seen you. You aim it all the way round so that it all gets taken

    off. You do it quite deliberately.’
    ‘If I pulled the chain it would all get flushed off anyway and you’d get woken up into

    the bargain,’ Wilt told her, conscious that he did make a habit of aiming at the Harpic. He

    had a grudge against the stuff.
    ‘Why can’t you just wait until the morning? And anyway it serves you right,’ she

    continued, forestalling his obvious answer, ‘for drinking all that beer. You’re

    supposed to be taking Clem for a walk, not swilling ale in that horrid pub.’
    ‘To pee or not to pee, that is the question,’ said Wilt helping himself to All-Bran.

    ‘What do you expect me to do? Tie a knot in the damned thing?’
    ‘It wouldn’t make any difference to me if you did,’ said Eva bitterly.
    ‘It would make a hell of a lot of difference to me, thank you very much.’
    ‘I was talking about our sex life and you know it.’
    ‘Oh, that.’ said Wilt.
    But that was on one of those days.
    On