Walter, Walter!

Lead me to the altar!

It’s either the workhouse or you.

There was a horrified, enthralled silence. For a moment everyone paused in mid-handshake, or with overcoat half on to shoulders. To see Chiddingfold drunkenly assaulted was delicious horror enough, but to hear a Christian name postulated for him sent a delectable shiver down even the strongest spine. Then Riddle tried to move, apparently with the object of dragging Walter to the altar, and the two of them fell heavily to the floor still clasped together. The last thing Goldwasser saw before responsible citizens rushed in to raise the wreck was Chiddingfold’s face, still articulating no complaint, still firmly locked in its polite, embarrassed smile.

16

Riddle was not easily abashed, but when she thought about her indecent assault upon Chiddingfold she felt something that was definitely less than aplomb. When she thought about it at home, among the comforting shambles of books, fag packets, and old fag ends in her flat – a huge empty Victorian room suitable for accommodating forty people each eighteen feet tall, or one Riddle and the copious offscourings of her daily life – it seemed to her that it was just the sort of laughable little incident in which any good party abounded. But when she thought about it at work, in the somehow more alien shambles of books, fag packets, and old fag ends in her laboratory at the Institute, she did feel something that was undeniably abashment. Assault – all right. Anyone might leap on someone in an unguarded moment. But on Chiddingfold! Why had she had to pick Chiddingfold?

She could no longer remember exactly what she had had in mind when she emerged from behind the pulpit and caught sight of Chiddingfold smiling his small social smile. She could not recall quite whether she had felt an urgent desire to love or to mock that great-headed, polite, vulnerable-impregnable totem. Or whether she felt both. Or whether she had thought for a moment that they were almost the same thing.

Anyway, she felt a certain relief when one of her laboratory assistants told her that Goldwasser had launched some sort of assault on Mrs. Plushkov at the same party. Dear old Goldwasser! At least she wasn’t the only person in the Institute with normal sexual vitality. The more she thought about Goldwasser the more surprised she was that she had not realised he was a sexual dynamo before. He was so gentle and nervous and considerate – the paradox cried out for completion.

She felt a touch of jealousy that Goldwasser had chosen to assault Mrs. Plushkov rather than her. A great prurient curiosity – or a great tenderness – seized her, and one afternoon when she knew he would be alone, she called on Goldwasser in his laboratory.

‘Well,’ she wheezed, perching provocatively on the corner of his desk and tilting her head back to keep the cigarette smoke out of her eyes, ‘how’s tricks, Goldwasser, old cock?’