Alligator Playground Read online

  On leaving, and putting the key under the earthen flowerpot outside the back door, she drove down the winding cobbled track with bushes scraping the car. On the main road she already thought of her flat in Ealing, and the cat her neighbour was looking after, though she was too much a lover of France not to enjoy the scenery before reaching the more rolling country of the north. ‘What delicious onion soup. I’m feeling better already. I was done for when I arrived.’

  ‘So I noticed.’ He wanted to touch her wrist, and say how sensible she had been in agreeing to stay, but held back in case she changed her mind. A man and his soignée wife of forty-odd sat at the next table, and she saw him look at their slim daughter who had a rather mousy helmet of hair but an exquisite bust. He was merely noting how each had a plate of open baked potato with grated cheese on top, the whole in a bed of curly lettuce. ‘They believe in a healthy diet,’ he said, seeing the waiter with his steak tartare and her platter of cutlets, ‘which seems such a pity in France.’

  He leaned against the rail and levelled his binoculars, but it was hard to see the assembly lines of cars coming onto the boat, so he moved to the loading end, knowing he would curse himself for the rest of his life at not having stayed for breakfast. Hurry was in his bone marrow, and it was impossible they would meet again. Unable to stop thinking of that warm and womanly figure under her clothes, he had passed half an hour in a layby hoping to see her tuppenny sardine tin trundling along.

  Five minutes to sailing, the ship loaded with trucks, buses, caravans and cars, he supposed it was too late now for her to make it. Maybe he would have a cup of coffee at Dover, and wait to see if she was on the next boat.

  There were moments on the hundred motorway miles to Calais when she forgot who she was, whereabouts she was, even what she was doing. Everything went, the brain went, the car went from around her. All protection went, but she came back to safety – thinking herself lucky – and ran once more through her adventure of the night.

  The smell of wine on their combined breaths filling the shuttered and curtained room had not stopped them falling asleep almost immediately on their separate beds. In the middle of the night she was awakened by him going to the bathroom, flushing whatever it was, and washing his hands. Drifting back into sleep, and wishing it could happen without embarrassment, she felt him beside her, and they moved against each other to find an even greater comfort than oblivion.

  When she awoke, more raddled than after an insomniac few hours at the flat or cottage, he had gone, and his lack of politeness in not saying goodbye so that she could at least thank him properly left a sense of injury which didn’t dissipate on finding another of his cards with ‘Thank you for everything’ scrawled on the back. At breakfast she felt as if half of herself was missing, the only advantage in being so shamefully maudlin was that maybe he was in the same state.

  She made a stupid blunder in asking whether the bill had been paid, as if a man she had picked up had left her to do it. A bit more know-how would have saved her a funny look from the clerk. Carrying her overnight bag to the car, she wondered how far or if at all a respectable woman could be called sophisticated. She had always had so many and such strident opinions as to how ‘men’ ought to behave that she did not know to within any shade of accuracy what exactly ‘men’ finally were. Well, now she did, a little more anyway. They were all different, and he was the most different one she had known.

  The motorway was visible for miles ahead under high-flowing clouds, landscape hillier than she had previously noted. Every turn of the wheels brought the sea closer. A man who would use an offer to give up his room so as to get into her bed must be given top marks for ingenuity – and skill.

  A postcard, in an envelope, to his business address, could do no harm – with her own locations firmly scripted in. When he next came up from Italy he might want to stay at her place overnight, an offer almost as good as his. And the detour shouldn’t faze him.

  Beggarland

  BEST NOT TO ASK how old she was. Her letter had said eighteen, but she could be anywhere between twenty and thirty. Her reference had sounded all right, so Jane thought she would give her a try.

  She wore a red Fair Isle jersey, tartan skirt and lace-up boots, a woollen coat over all with a slim fur collar. Maybe that was how they dressed up North. Yellowish hair straggled both sides of her face below a flowerpot hat of many colours.

  ‘You’d better come in.’ The last au pair had shot off at no notice to do a tour of Europe with a boyfriend, so Jane wrote to Greta whom she had previously turned down. Beggars can’t be choosers, she said to Tim, so here she was coming up the steps, thin lips tightening as she lugged a suitcase fastened with a trouser belt.

  Jane led her into the kitchen, moving the Sunday papers for her to sit down while coffee was made. ‘Are you hungry? There’s bread and cheese. We don’t eat till two.’

  Greta’s eyelids were almost closed, as if she hadn’t had enough sleep on the way down. ‘I am ‘ungry.’ She looked around, perhaps hoping for a bed to lie on. ‘Where’s the kids?’

  ‘In Holland Park, with my husband. They’ll be glad to see you when they get back, I know.’

  ‘I’ope so.’

  Jane put a full spoon of Instant in the mug. ‘The reason you’re here is to keep them amused while I do my work. That’s the main thing. I’m working to a deadline on a book, and can’t have them scratching at my door all summer wanting to be let in.’

  Greta cupped her coffee and stared at the steam. ‘My sister’s got three, so I’m used to kids. Where’s that bread and cheese, though?’

  ‘Oh yes, I’d forgotten.’ Too late to say she might not want her. ‘Then I’ll show you your room.’

  In the lounge after dinner Tim said: ‘Where did you find that funny little thing?’

  They had been married seven years, and such questions always implied that she had made a mistake. ‘Why?’

  ‘Doesn’t look up to much. Not like the last one.’

  ‘She ran out on us, remember? And I have to work, remember?’ He had been redundant for three months, though was to begin a new job on Monday – funnily enough for a bigger salary.

  ‘Touché,’ he said.

  If she put back half a bottle of wine on her own she felt cheerful, and if he did the same while alone he turned benign, but a bottle between them always brought on a skirmish. ‘Anyway, listen to them laughing and screaming upstairs. They’ve never taken to anyone so quickly.’

  ‘Now then, kids, we’re going to play a game called ‘‘Washing Up’’, and the one who don’t break any pots can come to the sink and squirt in the detergent.’ Greta had lost her sleepy aspect. Her bustling body and shining eyes showed that she liked the game as well.

  Jane looked in from her work. Sturdy blond Ben had the dreamy and cunning eyes of his father, while malleable and well-behaved Angela could suddenly break into hellerdom, like herself at that age. By the end of the game the kitchen was brilliant. If they were all like that from the North she couldn’t have enough of them.

  ‘Oh, mummy, thanks a lot,’ Ben said, when she gave Greta ten pounds to take them out. ‘You’re wonderful.’

  ‘Where to?’ Greta fitted them into their coats.

  ‘Anywhere you like.’ As long as you get them off my hands. ‘Just pop into the kitchen and make them something to eat. You needn’t come back for lunch. Then I’ll give you a map of the Underground.’

  Greta made Ben leave his plastic gun. ‘Yer don’t want that.’ He would normally have argued, but put it by without a murmur. ‘We aren’t going to rob a bank!’

  Funny how she could get twice as much done when the house was empty. At this rate the deadline would be easy. Then the resident neighbourhood pneumatic drill started up, and the first car alarm went off. Still, you couldn’t have everything, and double glazing cut most of the noise.

  ‘Mummy! Mummy!’ Ben screamed when they came in at six, a little late but better that than too early. ‘We went on the Circle L
ine, round and round, and played counting the stations. We passed Notting Hill Gate three times.’ He showed a pencil scrawled Tube map. ‘I went up and down the exerlators, and Angie got caught in a door.’

  Greta took them upstairs for a bath, then asked would it be all right if they ate in her room? It certainly would. Jane had noted how snappy Tim was at such family meals, especially since Greta was as far from a so-called sex object as it was possible to get.

  ‘We’re playing ‘‘Restaurants’’.’ Ben scooped up knives and forks. ‘We’re in a caff on the M1, and Greta’s serving us.’

  ‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ Jane and Tim sat down to a quiet supper. ‘What a rich fantasy life they’re having.’

  ‘They’ll probably turn into writers.’

  ‘Don’t be so contemptuous.’ The arrangement was so good he was hoping to spoil it, but at least he was laughing.

  Next day Ben ran to her. ‘Mummy, can we have those big boxes the stereos came in? Me and Angie want to play “Cardboard City” in the garden.’

  She frowned. ‘How do you know about that?’

  He squeezed her hand, as always when wanting something badly. ‘Greta took us doing hide-and-seek at the South Bank, and I saw ‘em. All those beggars in cardboard boxes! Me and Angie want to play beggars, don’t we, Angie? You can come by and give us five pee now and again.’

  ‘You certainly can’t play “Cardboard City”.’ Jane talked about the unfortunate people who had to live there, mostly through no fault of their own. ‘And don’t say “Me and Angie”. It’s “Angie and I”, as you know.’

  Ben’s tears dropped on the sleeve of his blazer. ‘We still want to play it, though. It’s only a game.’

  ‘All right, but don’t make a noise.’ She looked for her purse: no use moaning about what the world was coming to when it had come to it already.

  Obsessive Ben found Tim’s hiking gear and lay in a sleeping bag by the nettles, while Angela, wearing a filthy old jacket, stooped at the unlit camping gas as if cooking his stew. Greta walked by and threw them a coin. They couldn’t wait to get in the garden after breakfast, but their passion for the game came to an end, and Jane had to squash the cardboard flat and jam it in the dustbin a few days later.

  ‘And what are you going to do today?’

  ‘I’ll take ‘em to Battersea Park.’ Greta was adept at finding places on the map – considering she hadn’t got to within shouting distance of O Levels.

  ‘Take this, then, for ice creams and whatnot.’

  She felt guilty, but work was getting done. She’d never seen them so happy and excited, on coming home from wherever Greta took them. Sometimes you would have thought they had been down a coalmine, but she soon had them naked and laughing in the bath. ‘They got over the railings and into the flowerbeds before I could pull ‘em back,’ she explained, though with no apology.

  Jane soon stopped imagining there were any mysteries about her, as she had with all the au pairs till she got used to them. She was happy enough to sit in her room, sure now of meeting the deadline of her own long story. Needing more background one morning she had to go to the London Library. It was a bother, but she liked to be accurate in social and scientific details.

  Traffic was piling up at the roadworks as she went into the Tube. Students from language schools mingled with countless tourists, and she had to stand all the way. A pathetic old tramp held out a hand so she gave him a pound, her vagrant tax for the day.

  She could have walked the quarter mile instead of changing lines, but pushing along pavements would have been even more tiresome than the confusion of corridors and escalators. The crowds carried her along on the outside flank, by a woman with two kids at the bottom of the steps before turning left to the platform. Some good souls were clattering money into their tins, so Jane was glad not to bother because a train was ready to go.

  She stood by the open door, hearing but not seeing the poor headscarfed beggar and her children calling out for money even though there was little chance from people hurrying to get in before the train left. Their voices startled her, and on bending down to look she caught a two second photo-flash before the doors closed. When she tried to see more the way was blocked by people on the steps.

  Those around her must have thought she was another poor mad woman wandering the Underground looking for an unoccupied platform to leap from. She banged the door to get out, then turned her glassy eyes at the communication cord. Her grimace caused a man to lift his newspaper, either to hide behind or keep her off his territory.

  Sturdy Ben, hand holding the tin, had the starvo hard-done-by pitiable face of Tiny Tim. Angela was sitting on Greta’s knee, chalk-faced and hungry, as if she hadn’t long for this world. As for Greta, Grim Greta, she dared people to go by and not drop something into a tin.

  Jane thought she would faint. I’ll kill her. Her impulse was to go back from the first stop and throw her under a train. But the carriage was squeaking on its way, and as during her panic the day after marrying Tim, she told herself it would be better to have a cup of coffee somewhere and think about it calmly.

  Hard to decide, she was paralysed. Minutes went by, before walking along Piccadilly and down to St James’s Square, imagining that everyone passing had seen the woman and her beggar kids in the Underground. She didn’t feel fully sane till searching for her books in Science and Miscellaneous. On her way back they had gone, probably to a scene of better pickings.

  Words shied from being corralled into sentences. Luckily she was close to the end so could rehearse the grand telling off to Greta the second she came in. Sentences formed for that all right, so many that she hardly knew which to let out first.

  She was making a tisane when the door was kicked open and Ben fell in. ‘Mummy! Mummy! We’re been playing beggars again!’ He wrapped himself around her legs. ‘Oh, it’s such good fun. We love playing beggars, don’t we, Angie?’

  Greta came smiling up the steps clutching Angela’s hand. ‘It was all I could do to keep ‘em quiet. They saw a woman and two kids the other day on the Embankment, and gave me no peace.’

  Jane’s vitriolic phrases melted. Whose fault had it been, after all? ‘Well, you aren’t to play that game again.’

  Ben was ready to cry.

  ‘Never, you understand. Never.’

  ‘How long has it been going on?’ Greta was packing her case after supper. Where would she go at this time of night? Apart from that, who told her she had to leave? ‘We’ll send them to RADA,’ Tim had said, taking nothing seriously.

  ‘Only a few times.’

  She was curious. ‘And what about the money you collected?’

  ‘We was saving it, to go to Southend.’

  Inventive and stalwart were the words that came. It was impossible not to laugh. ‘Only to Southend?’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t take ‘em to New Zealand, could I?’

  She laughed again. What else could you do? ‘All right, but you don’t have to leave.’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  Was she happy to hear it, or wasn’t she?

  ‘I just don’t like black looks, that’s all.’

  Jane took her arm. ‘Nobody does. So just stop your packing, and go up to see that the children are all right.’

  Ron Delph and His

  Fight with King Arthur

  ‘WELL, CHILDREN,’ the plummy voiced teacher said, ‘this morning I’m going to tell you a story about King Arthur and his Knights.’

  Ron Delph was five at the time – or was it six? – and looking back he supposed it must in any case have been very early on. What nights? he wondered, leering from his favourite place on the back row.

  ‘His knights,’ she said, and it felt as if her voice was right inside Ron’s head. Nights were dark, even in summer, and he would rather hear about King Arthur’s days, because in daytime everybody could see what they were doing, so their antics were bound to be more interesting.

  ‘King Arthur had twenty-four knights.’ The teach
er walked to the blackboard and wrote the number in blue chalk. ‘Twenty-four stalwart knights.’

  Twenty-four nights wasn’t long, just over three weeks, even less than a month, and if each night was stalwart it must have been darker than an ordinary night. In any case what was a king doing, even if his name was Arthur, going round at night? A king should be in his castle at night talking to his queen or courtiers about boiling the oil for when another king attacked the castle. If she wasn’t going to tell us about King Arthur’s days, Ron Delph thought, I’d rather hear the story of Robin Hood and Maid Marian.

  ‘King Arthur,’ she said, ‘ruled England in the olden days.’

  He wanted to groan: not them fucking olden days again. We’re allus getting them rammed down our chops. But he didn’t groan, because teachers with plummy voices could have very sharp knuckles. He didn’t need to have been in school more than a few months to sense that. He was only five or six. He wasn’t born yesterday.

  ‘And in those days’ – they were almost listening – ‘everybody was happy, because King Arthur was a good king.’ She screamed at somebody. ‘If you fall off your seat again I’ll send you out. Yes, you. You! It’s you I mean, you!’

  He realised with a shock that the ‘you’ was him, the most important connection he’d made in his life up to then, though it had become his safeguard ever since to know that you and me were the same person, especially when a policeman decides that’s how it is. If only he had known how quick he was learning he could have kept it and become a millionaire instead of a poet.

  ‘King Arthur was a just ruler.’ If he was just a ruler why not say straight out he wasn’t bent? Nobody expected a king to be bent. Only old men and old women were bent. They were bent when they walked, so they could never be rulers. That was why the king wasn’t old. He had to be straight to be a ruler.

  ‘His people loved him. The Romans had left, and the Saxons had not yet arrived, so for a hundred years there was peace and prosperity everywhere.’