by Tom Sharpe
“What? This fellow must be a genius if he can get your son into any dashed university. Now what did you say his name is?”
“Wilt…Henry Wilt.”
“Wilt? Sounds an appropriate name, at any rate. By the time he’s done his damnedest to get that son of yours through any exam, he’ll have wilted all right. That is if he’s as intelligent as you say he is.”
“He must be. After all, he’s a lecturer at Fenland University.”
“All the same, I’d keep your eye on Eddie. I mean, for all you know, the bloody fellow could be a paedophile, and next thing he’ll be messing about with your son. Yes, better watch him.”
“Oh, don’t be so ridiculous, George! Even if Eddie wasn’t more than big enough to look after himself, which he is, having met his wife, I’m absolutely certain that Wilt is nothing of the kind. Or she’d have killed him long ago. With her bare hands.”
And on this ominous note she’d left her husband to stew.
Now, as Lady Clarissa wandered through the garden, she planned her future tactics. She’d managed to calm down Herb’s wife for the time being, and ought to be able to keep things ticking along if she forbade her to serve any more soup, just sticking to sausages or roasts with potatoes and a variety of veg. For afters it might not be a bad idea to have rice pudding or tapioca, both of which she knew Sir George loathed, with just occasionally a fruit salad thrown in, to make him realise it was time they got a proper cook.
In fact, the more she thought about it, the more convenient it seemed to have yet another reason to make frequent trips back to Ipford. She would tell George that there was a first-rate agency there where one could hire a really good cook. She rather thought that he’d been becoming a little suspicious of her Ipford jaunts of late and couldn’t afford to have him find out what she really got up to there. Clarissa smiled to herself at the thought of her usual suite at the Black Bull.
In fact, she decided, she ought to make another trip there very soon, in order to check Uncle Harold into the Last Post and to make absolutely sure Mrs Wilt’s husband was prepared to tutor Edward. It would actually be doubly beneficial if the presence of an educated man about the house made George less irritable. She’d have to warn Mr Wilt – what was his first name? Henry? – to keep off the subjects of taxation and politics at any cost, though. Forewarned was forearmed, after all.
On this cheerful note she went back into the Hall to get the key of the vacant cottage in which she intended to house Wilt and Eva. She would walk down there, to check that it was relatively clean and not harbouring any bats or other unwelcome intruders. To be on the safe side she took a notebook with her, so as to write down anything she may need to buy. But the place was in good shape and only required a spring clean. She presumed the children could all share one bedroom. Eva had spoken of their having teenage girls. Clarissa only hoped they wouldn’t prove to be too much of a distraction for Edward. Not that he had showed much sign of being interested in girls so far.
The truth was he hadn’t actually showed much sign of being interested in anything on his brief visits home from school. Apart from a rather alarming tendency to throw stones at anything that moved, that was. Nothing, be it small animal or small child, was entirely safe when Edward was around. There had been a couple of unfortunate run ins with some of the townsfolk, who seemed not to accept the argument that if their children would trespass on the Estate then they only had themselves to blame. A lot of silly fuss about nothing really. After all, what were a few stitches here and there? And it wasn’t as if the child was good-looking in the first place.
Lady Clarissa sighed as she walked back to the house, reflecting that if only George would take more of an interest in Edward – include him in a bit of hunting or fishing – all of this inconvenience might have been avoided. After wandering into the drawing room, she helped herself to two large dry martinis and decided to spend the rest of the day in bed, knowing her husband would be back late as usual. Thank goodness he slept in a separate room and was too old to take any interest in her sexually.
∗
At 35 Oakhurst Avenue lived someone who shared her views on the desirability of separate bedrooms: Henry Wilt. For one thing it put a stop to Eva’s spasmodic and thoroughly undesirable attempts to arouse him for sex by what she termed ‘manual stimulation’. Wilt had frequently feigned sleep in the face of that, though without much success. Eva had once consulted Mavis Mottram, who had advised that the use of scrotal pressure was a sure way of waking him.
“I always use it when I want Patrick,” she’d said. “I’ve never found it to fail.”
Wilt had. He called it the ‘nutcracker method’ and, on the few occasions when Eva used both hands, had leapt out of bed with a yell, demanding to know if she was trying to castrate him.
“If you want to prove you’re bloody strong, try using two blasted walnuts!” he’d squawked one night, hobbling downstairs to fetch a bowl of the things.
His reaction had had the desired effect from his point of view, if not from Eva’s.
His screams inevitably woke the quads when they were at home from boarding school, and all too often they’d surge out of their two bedrooms to ask what had happened.
“Nothing,” whimpered Wilt on that occasion as he crawled upstairs, holding the bowl with one hand and his scrotum with the other. “It’s just that Mummy is hungry.”
“For walnuts?”
“Yes, for walnuts. You know she says they’re good for you.”
“Then why are you all doubled up?” Penelope had asked on that memorably agonising night.
“Because she mistook me for a damned tree,” groaned Wilt, and shut the bedroom door.
The quads were not deceived. Emmeline’s penetrating voice could be heard quite clearly. “Mummy’s got the hot pants again,” she told the others on the landing. “I think she’s into S & M.”
An observation that put all thought of sex from Eva’s mind. She got out of bed, poked her head round the door and gave the quads hell. Then she got back into bed and gave Wilt hell, too, though in a way which thankfully didn’t involve anything physically disabling.
Tonight he went to sleep with the consoling thought that having the quads at home for the holidays would have its advantages after all.
6
Meanwhile at the police station Inspector Flint had time on his hands. He spent it staring out of the window and mulling over that perennial puzzle, Mr Henry Wilt. Ever since the sense of liberation he’d felt when Wilt had been mugged the previous summer, he’d come to the conclusion that the man was some sort of born victim, with a genius for getting himself into catastrophic situations and then wriggling out of them like a greased eel. On the other hand, he had a truly God-given and at times diabolical capacity for equivocation and, while being interrogated, for giving answers of such dizzying inconsequentiality that they had on a number of occasions driven Flint almost to the point of lunacy himself. The Inspector had looked up both ‘equivocation ‘and ‘inconsequentiality’ in the dictionary at the public library and had concluded both words definitely applied to Henry Wilt. In fact, the fellow was almost admirable in his own diabolical sort of way.
Flint’s feelings about Superintendent Hodge were, however, quite the opposite. There was absolutely nothing to admire about Hodge. In short, Flint loathed him, and would have termed him a ‘bloody nincompoop’ to his face if Hodge hadn’t wielded influence higher up the chain of command.
Instead he expressed his opinion in private to Sergeant Yates, who demonstrated that he shared Flint’s feelings for the Superintendent by referring to Hodge as ‘that stupid bugger’. Outside the sun shone down. Staring across the park from his window, the Inspector idly wondered what Wilt was up to now.
∗
Wilt was definitely not looking forward to being inspected by Lady Clarissa.
“Now you’ve got to be on your best behaviour,” Eva had told him rather more often than he liked. “And don’t forget to say you went
to Porterhouse College in Cambridge.”
“In other words, lie through my teeth? I told you, I never went near the place.”
“That isn’t a nice thing to say to me, and it’s only a small fib anyway. You’ve got to impress her.”
“Oh, sure. And all she’s got to do is phone the college, ask if I went there, and then she’ll be hellishly impressed, won’t she just! And her bloody husband’s bound to ask me if I was in the First Boat and what I think about the new Master who’s probably a woman in any case.”
Eva was looking puzzled.
“I don’t see what boats have to do with it. We’ve all been in boats at some point or other. Even I’ve been on a boat…it was on the Norfolk Broads, and rather jolly now I come to think of it.”
“They have to do with rowing, dear, and Porterhouse is a rowing college. It has frequently been Head of the River and is renowned for being filled with hearties. Do you know the difference between a hearty and an arty, by the way?”
“No,” said Eva, “I don’t. And if you’re talking about gays, I don’t want to hear any more.”
“Nothing could be further from my mind,” said Wilt. “What I’m trying to din into your head is that when I was at Fitzherbert, a hearty was an undergraduate – all right, a student – who was good at sport. An arty was lousy at sport. If I was anything, I was an arty. Is that clear?”
“As mud,” said his wife. “I shouldn’t have thought you were good at anything.”
“Agreed,” said Wilt. “On the other hand, this Gadsley bloke must have been a rowing or rugger sort, and thanks to your telling his wife I went to Porterhouse, the bloody man will undoubtedly talk sport – if he bothers to take the slightest notice of me at all, that is. I’ll just have to try and keep out of his way.”
“You’ll be too busy tutoring his step-son to have to go anywhere near Sir George. Besides he’s probably too busy being a landowner, and playing golf, and hunting, shooting and fishing…or whatever it is that landowners do.”
“There is that, though I’m not going to spend all day, every day, teaching the boy if I can help it.”
“Of course not. It will be a lovely peaceful holiday for all of us,” Eva said, then went back upstairs to carry on packing the suitcases, satisfied that Henry fully understood the importance of his coming interview.
“Peaceful?” muttered Wilt. “Fat chance of that.” And with the accompanying thought that the quads would almost certainly create chaos wherever they were, went back to reading about the First World War since it seemed Edward’s examining board had based their syllabus around modern European history.
∗
Meanwhile at St Barnaby’s School, Sussex, the Headmistress was in consultation with two teachers there, Miss Sanger and Ms Young, about the quads.
“I simply can’t cope with them any longer,” Ms Young was saying. “They create havoc in their house practically every day. Take last night, for example, when the fire alarm went off at two in the morning and we had to evacuate the dormitories. Who do you think was responsible? One of those horrid Wilt girls, that’s who.”
“Are you absolutely certain?” asked the Headmistress.
“I can’t prove it but I’m pretty certain. In the first place there was no fire, and secondly, Sandra Clalley told me that one of them – Emmeline, I think – had left the dormitory not long beforehand, ostensibly to go to the lavatory. By the time she came back to her bed, the glass had been smashed on the alarm.”
“It could have been broken before or by someone else.”
“Hmmm, I would agree with you there were it not for the fact that she was wearing gloves, and leather ones too, Sandra told me she was.”
“Did you ask Emmeline about it? What did she say?”
“She looked at me blankly and had the cheek to say she didn’t know anything about leather gloves or fire alarms. For all I know, it might have been another one of them…I still can’t tell those girls apart. In any case, she accused Sandra Clalley of lying and trying to get her into trouble because she was jealous of her and her sisters.”
“But that might well have been the case. After all, Sandra has come up with absurd stories about other girls,” said Miss Sanger. “In my experience, she is not to be trusted in the slightest. Anna Mayle was nearly expelled because Sandra accused her of stealing her knickers, all of them, from the laundry while she was in the Sanatorium with glandular fever. That turned out to be a downright lie. We eventually found them behind one of the washing machines.”
The Headmistress nodded.
“Mrs Bluwell admitted she’d left a pile of wet underwear on top of the machine and so Sandra’s could have fallen down behind it. There was absolutely no proof Anna was involved. Besides her father is a bishop and she’s always been very well behaved. I don’t see how we can ask Mr and Mrs Wilt to remove their girls just because Sandra Clalley accuses them of setting off the fire alarm last night.”
“But the fire alarm is the very least of it!” cried Ms Young, who went on to produce a catalogue of other misdemeanours – putting it mildly – that the Wilt girls had committed, and was in nearly all cases backed up by Miss Sanger. By the time the little meeting was over the Headmistress was forced to admit it was very difficult to know how best to deal with the four girls. In the end she agreed she would write to Mr and Mrs Wilt, telling them that she would have to consider asking them to remove their daughters the following year unless their behaviour improved.
“It’s probably a waste of time,” sighed Ms Young as she and Miss Sanger walked down the corridor. “Have you ever seen their mother?” Miss Sanger hadn’t. “A dreadfully vulgar woman – and I do mean vulgar. I don’t know why the Headmistress agreed to let them come here in the first place.”
“Possibly because their father is the head of some sort of university faculty,” Miss Sanger suggested.
“I think it more likely it’s because we’ve never had quadruplets in the school before. And because enrolment figures have shrunk so. I suppose having quads in the school makes us appear interesting. The little bitches are certainly unique, but in a truly dreadful sort of way. I’m just hoping they do something really appalling and get themselves expelled. I can’t take much more.”
They parted and Ms Young marched back to her house with a very nasty expression on her face.
∗
Outside the Headmistress’s study, Samantha waited until she’d heard her leave the room before emerging cautiously from the shrubbery next to the window. She raced off to report back to the other three.
“The old cow is going to write to Mum and Dad to warn them we’ll have to leave if we don’t behave really well next term.”
“Ms Young said Emmy’s setting off the fire alarm was the last straw. She thinks we’re a pack of savages.”
“I like that! They’re all snobs. Especially the Young bitch. I vote we do something to her car,” said Emmeline. “That’ll teach her.”
“Like what? Stuff a potato up the exhaust pipe like we did to that beastly old man at home, Mr Floren? He had to have the engine taken to bits before they found it.”
Emmeline shook her head.
“Something much better. Something that will wreck the motor and stop her driving for a long time.”
“Sugar in the petrol tank would do that,” said Penelope, thoughtfully. “It takes some time though. Coats the pistons and valves gradually and then the engine seizes up.”
“Wait, I know,” interrupted Josephine. “I heard the mechanic who services our car telling a man that carborundum powder ruins an engine for good.”
“And where do we get carborundum powder? Sugar’s easier.”
“What if she locks the petrol-tank cap?” asked Samantha.
“She didn’t when she took Martha and me to the dentist last week,” Emmeline told them. “She needed more petrol and just got out and unscrewed the cap with the keys still in the car.”
“You mean, she left the engine running?”
> “Of course not. She’s not a complete idiot. She turned off the engine and left the keys in the car, which means it must be the sort which doesn’t lock. Should be easy to pour a bag of sugar down it.”
“And have it stick to the side of the inlet where she can see it? Don’t be so lame,” Samantha dismissed this suggestion.
“Oh, brilliant,” retorted Emmeline. “Have you ever seen anyone peering down into their petrol tank? Even at the garage they’re only looking at the pump to see if it’s working properly and how much they’re putting in.”
“All the same, we ought to test if sugar dissolves in alcohol,” was Penelope’s comment. “I’ve got some eau de cologne we could use, and we can buy a bag of sugar from the shop in the village.”
“We don’t need to. I’ve got some in my locker. I pinched it during Cookery when Mrs Drayton wasn’t looking. We can use that,” said Emmeline.
An hour later they’d tried dissolving sugar in eau de cologne, which didn’t work, and then in hot water, which did.
“Great! We’ll just have to dissolve a lot of sugar in hot water and keep it in a bottle. That way Ms Young won’t see any traces of it even if she looks.”
“She’s going up to Scotland for the summer holidays. If this works, she’ll end up having to go by train, which will serve her right. I know! I know! We ought to put it in right at the very end of term then she might break down on her way up there, miles and miles from a garage with any luck.”
And on this happy note the quads came out from behind the hockey pavilion and split up.
7
At home Wilt was swotting up his notes on Edward’s A-level history course. He was planning to run through a few points with Braintree over a beer at the Dog and Duck, after having first had his hair cut on Eva’s instructions.
“We can’t have you looking like some of these footballers you see on telly,” she had told him, determined to remain optimistic in spite of the recent warning letter from St Barnaby’s. “So don’t let whoever cuts it leave it too long. I’ve had your suit dry-cleaned too. You’ve got to look really smart and be very polite.”