Alligator Playground Read online

Scales at the gym told him his weight had gone down in the last weeks. Hers had, as well, so that both looked raddled and mean. She had put herself on the machine, and laughed at the notion of selling the idea of an adulterous affair to Weight Droppers Anonymous. If a couple wanted to economise, only one need do it.

  ‘What’s funny, love?’

  She sat facing – looking, she assumed, right through him. ‘You.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘You said you’d packed her in.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘There’s more than one? I’m not surprised. London’s full of ’em waiting to fall on their backs and open their legs for a walking cock like you.’

  ‘Oh, don’t let’s go into all that again.’ Again? She hadn’t stopped since that fateful day nor, he supposed, would she ever. Did she want a divorce?

  She didn’t. ‘I’ll let you know when I do.’

  Nor did he. It would disturb his life too much.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘You want everything.’

  He wondered whether silence wouldn’t be better, but his mouth took control again. ‘Who doesn’t? You can have a divorce, if you like.’

  ‘When I feel like one I won’t ask you.’ She didn’t want to swim around in the slime of the alligator playground for the rest of her life. But she was in it, couldn’t help herself. He’d pushed her under and she was drowning. ‘I don’t need permission how to run my life from a scumbag like you.’

  Back into the maelstrom, and who needs it? A divorce might be the only way, but would mean defeat, and more trouble than he wanted to face. Men were often too busy having affairs, Norman once said, to have time for a divorce.

  ‘I want you to give her up,’ and then she would leave him.

  ‘I’ve told you. I have.’ He’d never be able to, apart from not wanting to surrender on principle. Women who were easy to get were hard to let go of.

  ‘You haven’t.’

  ‘You’ve got to believe me.’ She had played the spoiler with Diana’s phone all evening, belled the number ten times and stultified both in mid-pleasure. Knowing who it was infected them with despair, compounded by each being aware that the other knew but was trying not to say. He couldn’t even manage twice, and Diana had only half come. In her edgy mood she had puffed a cigarette, after giving them up a month ago.

  Angela’s smile alarmed him, and he wondered if she was sane. If she had followed him to Diana’s his lies would have to be more convincing, but he had hit the limits of his ingenuity.

  Even so; he decided to give his artistry one more try, but with no warning she leaned across the table and battered his face with the whole weight of her left fist. He told himself later he had seen it coming and could have dodged, but a malignant imp far down in his psyche – and he couldn’t say better than that – hadn’t let him. Nor did he avoid another ferocious knuckling to the other side.

  ‘You can’t shit on me, you bastard.’ She crashed him again, caught up in a heady mix of despair and enjoyment.

  He retreated to the sink, and slid around the table, but only felt safe when halfway up the stairs. Well, almost, because she pursued him to give more of the same, telling herself, when he ran into the bedroom, that she wasn’t a coalminer’s daughter for nothing. She sat on the stairs to exult, because he wouldn’t like what he saw after locking the door against her.

  Diana looked on the white Ford Escort parked outside her flat on Primrose Hill as an additional room that she could travel around in if she had to. Daddy had bought it for her when she landed a job at the BBC, proud of her working there, because he had lapped up the ritual of the nine o’clock news throughout the War, while doing his duty at the Food Office.

  Nippy as a devil in town, the car was good for long distance too. A cardboard box in the boot contained plastic bottles of water, oil, brake fluid and antifreeze, as well as spare bulbs, fan belt and jump leads, and an entrenching tool in case she got caught in snow, put there on her father’s advice, whose favourite refrain had always been that you must prepare for every eventuality.

  In the glove box was a torch and a tub of sweets should flood or pestilence strand her. She’d added a box of tampons and a packet of Mates, leaving nothing to chance. On the empty seat was a box of Kleenex, an A to Z of London, and a road atlas of Great Britain so that she could go anywhere at no notice.

  A long day’s stint in Guildford made her glad to slot into a convenient space by the door. She needed a hot drink, then to bed, whacked utterly after the twenty mile slog-and-jog through jams and traffic lights. Tom’s eager presence would be too much this evening, and even a bit of therapeutic painting wouldn’t soothe her strange mood.

  All the way back she had wondered whether their liaison hadn’t gone on too long. Boredom and emptiness had replaced the excitement, and she wasn’t born to put up with an affair once its first passionate flowering was spent. Though never to be forgotten, maybe it was time to be free again, and she couldn’t imagine him unhappy at being released to flash his talent at someone else. Life was too short to stick with one man. She might just as well be married, and who would go into that kind of death?

  She supposed the woman who bent at her window wanted directions, London crawling with idiots unfamiliar with a street atlas. Dark, even attractive, but there was something manic about the eyes, nothing strange, after all the loonies had been kicked out of the hospitals, poor things. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you Diana?’

  Rain trickled over the windscreen, and she hoped for a downpour to run off the dust and pigeon shit. She reached for her handbag to stow the key. ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘Tek this!’

  Thinking of a photograph, she would never forget that visage painted with an aspect of insanity and wrath, and justice about to be done. Eyes unfathomable with vacancy made one blink of the shutter, exultance another – Diana named many sorts – except they flashed across too quickly, everything vivid, then forgotten as one shutter-smash after another compounded the blows that seemed to come from every direction.

  She put a cold towel to her head, hoping to decrease the swellings and pain. ‘I’m calling the police.’

  Tom was at the office. ‘No, don’t do that.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ She wanted everyone around him to hear. ‘Your fucking wife came and beat me up.’

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘I’m coming right over.’

  Diana couldn’t understand why she hadn’t got out of the car and plastered her back, except that the concatenation of righteous blows only stopped when she put the ignition on and closed the windows, at which Angela kicked a tyre and was halfway up Primrose Hill before Diana could get out and reach for the entrenching tool with which to do murder.

  She hated herself for crying, and giving him a reason to hold her close. Full of rage, his false concern was too much to bear. ‘She ran away. She was raving mad. She didn’t care what she did.’

  He held her shaking body, so warm and pathetically trembling he wanted to make love on the spot. ‘It’s all over with me and Angela,’ he said, ‘and she knows it. I can’t tell you the disgusting things she did with my clothes.’ He stood aside. ‘Look at me! This is how I went to the office today.’

  A flowered shirt, pale unseasonal trousers, and a bomber jacket. ‘That’s how you often dress.’

  ‘Yes, but I usually have a choice.’

  She sat. ‘I’m terrified. She might come back. I’ll have to triple lock the doors.’

  ‘So you should.’

  She laughed, hoping not too hysterically. ‘Yes, but look at this,’ and reached behind the sofa. ‘I brought it up from the car.’

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t use that.’

  ‘If she gets in here I will.’

  And he could see that she would. ‘I put a chest of drawers against my bedroom door last night. She’d cut my exercise bike to pieces with a hacksaw.’

  Diana laughed. ‘Top marks for malice,’ then groaned from her bruises.

  ‘It’s not f
unny.’ There had been no long lunch today, and famishment made him hollow, which put him in a state to announce: ‘We’ve agreed on a separation at least. She’s leaving in the morning, and I’m not going back tonight.’

  ‘You can book a room at Claridge’s, then, though I don’t suppose they’ll let you in looking like that. But there’s the phone if you want to use it.’

  ‘Oh, come on, you don’t think I’m afraid of her, do you? If I start to hit back I might get into even more trouble than you with that entrenching tool.’

  A man would think that, wouldn’t he? He could shack up in Cardboard City for all she cared.

  ‘I’ll be glad when she’s left, though. She’s been putting things in the Volvo since yesterday. I’ll give her an income. She’ll be able to live fairly modestly up North.’

  ‘Maybe she’ll find a nice big expensive flat in Nice.’

  His squash playing shoulders were no longer taut, nor his features so cock-a-hoop. Something had cracked, though she wasn’t dim enough to imagine it would last very long. Unregenerate, he would get back to the same old ways as soon as he was married again.

  ‘I don’t care where she lives, as long as it’s a long way from me.’ He didn’t love Angela anymore because she wasn’t the same person as when he had married her. Then again, in the early days he hadn’t had time to get into his own stride. Even so, what she had changed into now that he had, wasn’t to his taste. Love at first sight hadn’t been solid enough for him to endure her recent fits of shark-ripping violence. She could go her own way, though he wasn’t sure enough of the justice of his conclusion to mention his thoughts to Diana, who waited for him to say something while he faced her from the sofa. ‘She can go to hell for all I care,’ he said.

  ‘I still think I should let the police know. She’s not fit to be on the loose. She should be in the loony bin.’

  He thought the same, but tried to smile. ‘They’d only laugh at you.’

  ‘Not at me, they wouldn’t.’

  ‘After all, it’s just a domestic tiff.’

  ‘Oh, is that what you bloody well call it? Well, I don’t. I really think I ought to bell them, even if only to stop her doing the same to anyone else.’

  ‘It would get in the papers.’

  So that was it. ‘You’d better go,’ she said, ‘before I start throwing things as well.’

  The car was overloaded, so she would check the tyre pressures at the next garage. Then she could look forward to lunch at The George in Stamford. Surprising what few things were her own, though she had filled the old suitcase which had come down with her in the first place. Whatever was left could go to Oxfam. Maybe she would click with a very fit man in the restaurant.

  She had been gratified at her strength on manoeuvring the trunk into the car, that they had maniacally filled before her miscarriage. Lifting it onto the tailgate had been a job, Tom looking on but not offering assistance. If he had she would have spat in his eye, and he knew it, so he was too cowed to take the risk. He thought her barmy as she worked it slowly in like a coffin. She didn’t altogether know why she wanted to, except it was impossible to leave such a cargo to someone like him.

  Nor was she driving north for the last time. None of that end of the world dramatic stuff for her. She would come up shopping or to see a play whenever she felt inclined. ‘I’ll never go back up there,’ had often been her cry, but in those days it would have meant a defeat whereas now it was better than hanging around in the hope that Tom would wave his cock in her direction now and again.

  He was free, so she supposed he would install one of those numbered ticket machines on the outside of the house. They used to have them at the deli counter in the supermarket, and people would pull out a little tongue of paper with their number on it so that they could just stand around and not look like they were queueing. The women waiting to go in and let him fuck them wouldn’t fight as to who was first.

  Wherever she was going or would end up she’d get back to being herself before deciding what to do with her life. At least she had learned that nothing was forever. As for him, let him laugh, and go on with the only existence he was fit for. In any case, who cared for adventures when the discovering of her true self would be as much of one as she could attend to? She would screw enough money out of him to pay for a three-year stint at whatever university would take her, never mind that she would have gone by such a roundabout way to get there. Maybe she’d even do something in mechanics or engineering.

  A man who couldn’t be true to you, and was only happy doing the dog-paddle in the turdy waters of the alligator playground, wasn’t worth the shoes he stood in. She would rather be on her own than know anyone like that. Whatever world you lived in was as big and as rich as you made it, and hers, she could only hope, would be bigger and richer than the one fading in the rearward mirror.

  FOUR

  TOM REMEMBERED CHARLOTTE saying – during dinner table chitchat at her house in the country, on a night when hail was driving almost horizontally against the windows, and Charlotte was waiting for a power cut so that she could set out candles and let them sample the lives of workers and peasants of seventy years ago – that a man who left his wife, and took up with a girl young enough to be his daughter, would soon repeat the mistakes which had destroyed the previous liaison.

  Henry agreed. He had to. But Tom replied, pushing his cup forward for more coffee, that making the same irreparable gaffes with a new spouse was more interesting than staying with a woman to whom there was no more of your bad side to show. In any case, some years must elapse before boredom or acrimony crippled the new union, and by that time you might be dead.

  Another disadvantage of not enduring the first ordeal, Barbara Whissendine suggested, was that a man never really got to know himself, and there was surely some value in that.

  Tom, under scrutiny, retorted – and he was of course backed up by Norman Bakewell in this – that even supposing there was no more for a man to discover (and he may even so be well aware of all that there was) to remain in one emotionally arid gridlock would nullify all that experience had taught him up to that point, rather than illuminate the mind in any way – or words to that effect, after the prose was honed up in Bakewell’s ever-working brain.

  A third point, perhaps more perceptive, not to say provocative, was that the gadabout was incapable of reasoning along such lines. Tom threw this in free. He was a man of action, he went on, not a vegetable deadbeat languishing at his fireside, like Henry, who may, he thought, for all anybody could tell, be a deeply philosophical character, though the only effect was to keep him securely under Charlotte’s thumb, and what kind of philosophy was that?

  Too much reflection was often more useless, and demoralising, than too little, and made action difficult if not impossible. Norman Bakewell, who was at his most acute when cogging into others’ thoughts, went on to comment that whatever move one makes, even if it does little good, or even if it exacerbates the situation, must be better than the abandoned marital state of ongoing bitterness and eternal inertia – he concluded, reaching for his glass and then becoming too drunk to come out with anything that was either sensible or readable.

  ‘To stay in one marriage for life under any conditions deadens a man,’ Tom said, riding roughshod through Charlotte’s silence, ‘and argues deadness even in a woman’ – a nod to Barbara and Emmy Brites, who were holding hands – ‘but a man who gets hitched two or three times may have done so in order to try and rectify genuine errors.’

  Nearly everyone around the table chipped in at this point, Emmy Brites coming up with the barb that a man has to be diabolically flawed to marry a third or a fourth time, an inference which Tom absolutely disagreed with, considering himself the opposite of a failure in life.

  ‘Men are blest who marry often,’ he said, and stood up to say it. ‘Those who don’t try more than once could be said to lack energy or, let’s face it, money, or confidence, or the good fortune to pick ’em and the know-how to
have them fall in love with him. Most men, like most women I suppose, whether due to love, loyalty, or the inanition brought about by the inborn ability to put up with ongoing turmoil, stay with the same partner for life.’

  ‘Don’t talk such rubbish.’ Charlotte filled his glass in the hope that he would get too drunk to speak, a mistake, because he swigged it off, looking at Emmy Brites and hoping, that since Norman sat boggle-eyed and out for the night, she would put his words if not into her present novel then plough them into the next. ‘Men who go from one woman to another must be more interesting and attractive than those who don’t because they can’t. Those who can’t look on those who can and do as amoral villains, or lucky dogs, according to the way they feel about their own marriage.’

  Recalling such an evening did Tom little good as he sat by himself in the club with his bottle three-quarters empty. To say his fourth marriage was going badly was, as a negative exaggeration, the understatement of the decade. He was unable to understand why a man like himself, who knew so much about women, and loved them more than any other creatures in the world, couldn’t keep a marriage going for life (though on his own terms) and so give more time to his work.

  The first try with Angela lasted seven years, and he justified its ending by saying he had never really loved her but had been trapped into marriage by her spiderish act of keeping him for too long at a distance. What held them together was at best infatuation rather than love, luckily broken on her taking umbrage – a real North Country set-to there – at his affair with Diana.

  Calling for another bottle, he remembered that his love for Diana began with crashing sexual magnetism at one of dear old Charlotte’s lunch parties. What love didn’t start in a similar manner, he would like to know. Unhappily for both, his affair with Diana turned into something they mistook for love. In those heady days he prided himself that, like Bismarck, he was able to learn from other people’s mistakes, with the result that he never saw the big ones coming.