Alligator Playground Page 17

  ‘She certainly has a great deal to put up with.’.

  ‘And well you might say so,’ he responded grimly.

  She wanted to keep quiet but couldn’t help herself. ‘I would have left you years ago.’

  ‘Would you?’

  She wasn’t deceived by the puzzled tone he put on, certainly not enough to damp her rage at having strayed into conversation. ‘I’ve never heard such dreadful bullying.’

  He smiled, seeming almost human, even more so when it was followed by an expression close to pain. ‘I love her, you see…’

  ‘Well, if you call that love.’

  ‘I don’t expect you to understand, but I’m trying to get her back into shape.’

  Hilda turned away with contempt, yet not liking herself for letting it control her. ‘That’s certainly what it sounded like.’ Such people were unregenerate, so there was no use getting upset. At least he stopped talking, though she feared he was only making up his mind what to say next.

  ‘You think I’m a villain, and maybe I shouldn’t tell you, but she had a stroke three months ago, and this is the only way to do it. She’s actually improved enormously over the past week. I suppose it does sound dreadfully callous, though.’

  Tears on his cheeks seemed as if they had come out of the skin itself. He took a neatly folded handkerchief from his lapel pocket to wipe them. ‘She loved France, and asked me to bring her. She’s done much better on our first week of touring. I’m taking her around the battlefields tomorrow. She used to teach history.’

  Hilda’s face burned with contrition. His pain passed to her, and she touched his hand. ‘I’m sorry. I thought…’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ He stopped, then: ‘We’ve been happy all our lives. Still are, and she knows what’s going on. I’m determined to get her as near back to normal as I can. I don’t want to lose her, you see.’

  Since it was obvious he wanted to go on talking she asked for another Cointreau. ‘I’m sure you don’t.’

  The see-saw of euphoria and misery joined them for a few moments. Hope keeps tragedy and loss at bay, she thought, and he was well-qualified to fight. His nightly brandy calmed him. ‘We’re battling every inch of the way.’

  By eight o’clock she was paying her bill. The man upstairs had been drilling his wife into her clothes when she passed their door. An impulse to knock and wish them well was quashed, whether from kindness or cowardice she couldn’t decide, thinking them best left alone in their struggle.

  She had planned to walk around the town of Verdun but went onto the motorway for Paris. Le Havre was the place to make for, to take a boat from there. Navigation would be simple, no reversing necessary. She would also avoid those other battlefields seen with Victor, memories unwelcome in her sombre mood.

  The landscape of France dispelled such feelings, and she pondered on the joys of freedom as the car ran smoothly along the highway, thinking to spend a couple of days in Normandy before taking the boat home.

  Call Me Sailor

  ‘CALL ME SAILOR,’ he said, as if there had been a saint of the kind way back in history and it was the proper first name for a man like him. Such a moniker must fit somewhere, and time would tell, though women collecting their kids from school saw what a suitable name it was as he stood by the pillar, enjoying a short pipe of tobacco such as no shop ever sold, and looking at white clouds above the slate roofs of the estate as if to foresee the malice of any weather on its way.

  The tall leathery-faced man replaced by Sailor had given no hint of his departure, such birds of passage being soon forgotten, until one morning Sailor stood by the gate in dark blue dungarees as if it had been his post for years.

  Short white hair came to a line at the back of his neck, and his face was of such pinkness from being scrubbed every morning that the features had little time to settle into place until the afternoon. Prominent lips didn’t go much towards handsome, they all agreed, and there was little definite shape to his nose, but the lit up blue of his eyes suggested absolute ease with himself, and confidence in getting unlimited trust from others.

  Such eyes shone as if he would like to own any woman who looked at him, though most saw him as no more than an amenity for which they were grateful. Some regarded his smile as too facile, a turn of unhappiness to the underlip noted by those whose lives hadn’t been of the calmest.

  Kids took to him because his authority gave them a frisson of fear, which brought obedience. The previous caretaker, with his permanently worried face, saw them as grains of sand slipping through his fingers into danger before he could get them safely across the pavement, but Sailor let them know he was their shepherd, his smouldering briar indicating the lollipop woman at the roadside: ‘They’re all yours, Madame! Take ’em away!’ Out of his orbit, they spread alone or with whoever met them into the various drives and crescents of the estate.

  Ann noticed him on her way to get fags and a paper from the little Pakistani supermarket on the main road, even before she had agreed to look after Teddy Jones while his mam and dad went on a ten-day bargain holiday to Turkey. The job wasn’t as easy as she’d thought. Six-year-old Teddy was a cheeky little swine, and she had only to go into the garden to shake crumbs for the birds to come back and find him opening cupboards and pulling doilies all over the floor.

  If you wanted the house to stay neat you couldn’t let him out of sight for a second. While she was vacuuming the bedrooms he hauled her dictionary off the shelf and scrawled its pages with a biro, for which he got a slap across the face. He could tell Bill and Edna what he liked, because after they had gone she heard that other neighbours had turned them down flat when asked to take charge of him.

  On the second afternoon Teddy ran from the school gate like a limb of Satan and headed straight for the road. Mrs Grant the lollipop woman, about to step out and halt the traffic, was touching her glasses into their proper focus when a black low-slung hatchback came at such a rate that, everyone agreed, if kids had been on the crossing the school would have commemorated a day of tragedy for ever and ever.

  Teddy was blank of mind, and nobody could guess the paradise he was running to. Nor had they time to think of him as a goner, because like everything that happened too quick it had already happened.

  Nor could anyone swear they saw Sailor move. For someone close to sixty he made lightning look slow. If Teddy survived to be an adult he would probably never recall the not ungentle arm holding him inches from speeding bumper. Maybe he thought it was a game, even when Sailor, once they were clear, put the biggest fist he had seen to his face and said: ‘Run like that again, lad, and you’ll get this for your dinner. And not with custard on it, either!’

  Something must have got through, because Teddy’s smile didn’t reach full growth, though he squirmed free to strut by the lollipop woman, who was still too shocked to give him the guidance he obviously needed to keep him in the land of the living.

  Ann saw it all, and got hold of his arm for the sort of shaking that would send him into the middle of next week and back again without him knowing where he had been, but it turned short and feeble because there didn’t seem much in his young head to rattle. ‘You stupid little thing. Didn’t you see that car?’

  ‘What car?’

  ‘I got his number.’ Mrs Grant, as good as her word, wrote it on a pad. ‘There was four young lads inside, so you can bet it was nicked.’

  Sailor tapped his pipe against the wall and put a boot on the dottle. ‘They’ll get away with it, though. Nobody cares enough to put ’em inside for five years.’ He went back to his stand at the gate. ‘I’d hang the buggers. I’d let ’em know life’s a battlefield.’

  Teddy gripped her hand for comfort, called her auntie on the way home, and wanted to know what was for tea. She blamed herself, thinking that if she had been at the gate two minutes earlier he would have run to her instead of going like a newborn bull across the pavement. Bill and Edna would have screamed blue murder with grief if he had been killed or injured, s
o it was thanks to God he hadn’t. Only on opening the front gate did she realise the caretaker hadn’t been properly thanked.

  She tucked Teddy into bed and told him a story about a family who lived in a copse on the edge of the estate, of how the favourite came running out of school and got killed by a car. When he began to cry she read nursery rhymes till his head fell sideways, then eased him snugly into the sheets.

  In the living room she switched on the telly. ‘You’d do better reading a book. Or why don’t you knit me a scarf? Better still, come out with me for a walk.’ Sidney had wanted her to talk. He always said she didn’t talk enough, and now he was three years dead she regretted the time wasted on silence.

  He had been chief clerk in government offices downtown, and when he laid his head on the desk, one afternoon, its weight was such as to stay there till he was put lifeless onto a stretcher. The placid black tom called Midnight brushed her ankles, and for months after Sidney’s death had roamed the house looking for him. Still not one for talking to people, she conversed in silence with herself, as if it were her only means of thought. The cat slept on the hearth, the black hump suggesting it hoped to see Sidney on waking up, which was more than she could say for herself. All the same, she imagined the smell of Sidney’s tobacco, and recalled two unopened tins she hadn’t had the heart to take from the cupboard upstairs.

  ‘That was good, what you did yesterday.’

  She had come early so as to thank him properly. In mid-April it was impossible to tell whether the wind was blowing blossoms or it was about to snow. ‘I never saw anything so quick.’

  He stood away from the pillar, as if her compliment came from an officer of the watch. ‘He was lucky.’ He boomed at Teddy: ‘Weren’t you? Nearly had to carry you home in a plastic bag, didn’t we? People would have thought you was a goldfish pulled out of a pile-up on the motorway!’

  He squirmed from Sailor’s grip, and Ann fastened his coat, sending him along the asphalt path towards the school door. ‘You saved his life, and that’s a fact.’

  ‘They teach you to look sharp in the Navy.’ His blue eyes burned her, and she turned away, yet didn’t want to leave. Other women would soon be at the gate with their children. ‘I was in from a boy, and ended up master artificer. If you weren’t quick you were dead. It was a harder school than this one.’

  Half a bottle of whisky, or maybe rum, would have made a fair present, but it only occurred to her now. ‘Do you like being a caretaker?’

  He plaited his fingers and pressed so that every knuckle cracked, signalling embarrassment at her interest. ‘It’s a doddle, but don’t tell anybody, or they’ll kick me out and hire a robot. I was made for it. I have a cold sluice at six, and start at seven to fix the heating. Then I make sure everything’s shipshape before the kids swarm in. I knock off at eleven, and don’t go on again till they come out. There’s a bit more to do when they’ve gone home, but it suits me.’

  Any ounce of trouble in his life must have been taken very easily. He liked to talk, and she to listen, but she let him get on with his work, and went to buy something for Teddy’s tea, apart from his favourite sausages or hamburger steaks.

  On Teddy’s final afternoon she got to the school even before Mrs Grant at her lollipop station. Sailor was filling his pipe from a leather pouch as he sway-walked between the trees of the playground. She had put on lipstick, changed into a white blouse buttoning at the neck, and switched into a skirt instead of everyday slacks. The mirror had shown her skin as smoother since Sidney’s death, though it could be the light, or wishful thinking that said dark skin kept its texture more than fair. At forty there was only a fleck of grey in her tied back ponytail.

  She took the two tins of Gold Block from her plastic bag. ‘I thought I would give you these. My husband bought them three years ago, so it might have gone off. I don’t like things going to waste.’

  Whorls of smoke drifted by her eyes, distorting what she tried to see. ‘Gave up the weed, did he?’

  ‘He had a heart attack.’

  A woman teacher popped kids out of the door like beads from the end of a string. ‘It’s just the sort of tobacco I like. A lovely gift, for an old matelot.’

  ‘Have it, then.’

  Thinking he would take her hand, she drew it away and hoped he hadn’t noticed, but his eyes saw everything. The lollipop woman stopped a bus and two cars, letting the first group across. Ann looked over his shoulder for Teddy. ‘I’m glad you can use it.’

  Eyes lost their glitter as the head came close with its odour of aftershave and tobacco, and mint on his breath. A neat cut from the razor embellished his cheek like a small decoration. ‘I pack it in at seven.’ He must have known she willed him to go on, even if only to get it over with. ‘After half an hour’s spruce up I light off to The Black’s Head for a noggin or two. Why don’t you come and sit with me?’

  For all he knew she might have married again. She hadn’t, but the longer you grieved the more you got used to living alone, and didn’t fancy getting bogged into anyone else’s life. On the other hand what harm was there in going for a drink? She felt warm and flattered to be asked but said, as if sixteen and knowing it never did to say yes the first time: ‘I have something on tonight.’

  He was too much a man of the world to let it bother him. ‘Another occasion, then.’ The light came back in his eyes as he turned to watch the children, sorting out Teddy as if he was special, and bringing him towards her. Teddy sensed the subtle borders of aggravation while playing with the cat, and never drew out its briar-like claws. She was pleased he was learning, and well enough behaved by the end of his stay that when Edna called over the fence to say they were home she felt as sorry to see him go as he, for a few seconds anyway, was reluctant. They came round to give her the twenty pound note promised for Teddy’s keep, and a metal teapot covered in funny writing as a present from Istanbul.

  The house was emptier so she talked to the cat. When it didn’t seem to listen she muttered to herself. She couldn’t be going scranny, she told her face in the mirror, because she knew she was doing it.

  The hands of the carriage clock were afraid to move, though the precision of its time-keeping fingers and metal case kept her in mind of Sidney. He had handed her the receipt for safety, which showed the clock had cost two hundred pounds: ‘It’s better these days to have a pedigree object in the house than money in the bank.’

  Such a prized item kept its value by giving satisfaction to look at, and pleasure to turn in the hand, more loyal as a clock than Sidney had been as a husband. If there had been any twinges in his unreliable heart he would have firebacked all that was in the shoebox at the bottom of his wardrobe.

  The first letter leafed out let her know what he had been up to with a girl in the office. Rage blended with grief to keep the shock going. His constant gallantry of calling her the perfect wife damaged her forever. The perfect wife should be good enough for any man unless, being so perfect, she was too much for him to tolerate. No one could be the perfect wife, and he had only said she was so as to blunt any suspicion of his pathetic gallivanting. The real torment was that she had never thought to wonder.

  Her chance of an affair with someone where she worked as a receptionist had been turned down with more contempt than necessary. She regretted it, having fancied him enough, though deceiving Sidney wouldn’t have been easy. He was too well aware of all the dodges, and such behaviour was easier for a man. When she lost her job he talked her into working part time at the local library, but last year they too had cut down on staff. At least he had left her with a pension.

  After he died she had the telephone ripped out, and sometimes wished she hadn’t, though who would call her these days? Because Sidney had used it to talk to his girlfriend when she was out shopping, she couldn’t stand the sight of it and thought good riddance.

  The sun in a glow of turquoise and yellow over the opposite roofs dimmed the living room, and she didn’t relish pushing in the telly button to
look at pictures so far removed from her feelings. A drink at The Black’s Head would be nice, but if she met Sailor what would she have to say?

  She went up to the bedroom to see if anybody was there, then came down to check the kitchen and clothes’ cupboards. Nobody was. A rattle of the curtains shut off the first star of the evening, and a man beyond the hedge cycling home from work. Being shut into her domain after dark was a relief, but her legs wouldn’t let her sit down. She put on her coat to go out and meet the chip and burger van trawling the estate for trade. A mutton chop in the fridge could wait, and veg in tight plastic would still be fresh tomorrow.

  Clouds moved in and it looked like rain, but the smell of an unusual supper made hunger her first real sensation of the day. A police siren, warbling like someone fleeing the pains of hell, joined a chorus of ambulance and fire engines clearing the road to save souls who had not yet been there. She tightened the belt of her coat and hurried on in case the van pulled down its shutters and went elsewhere.

  Half a dozen people talked while they queued. She stood on the pavement, her brain not latching into their words. A car slowed to take the corner, and there was still enough light to spot the peculiar sway-walk of Sailor crossing the road as if they had a date. He had on ordinary trousers and an open bomber jacket over a white shirt, which she smiled at the idea of him ironing. She noted a tie fastened in place by a gold pin, and shoes instead of the boots he worked in.

  He sensed her amusement and said: ‘I haven’t seen you collecting your boy from school lately.’ Foistering young Teddy onto her must be his flattering way with women. Another was not to give time for comment: ‘The old chip van’s useful for supper a couple of times a week. Not that I mind cooking, though never a meal as takes more than half an hour. Life’s too short to stand long at a stove.’

  Any woman could have told him that. ‘What do you cook?’