Alligator Playground (5 page)

The first message on the ansaphone was from who else? ‘All I know is I’m in love with you,’ he said, and it felt as if a hand were already reaching across her breasts, ‘totally, passionately, irreversibly. Can I see you on Wednesday evening?’

‘You certainly can,’ she said, phoning his office.

Then came six calls from the same heavy breathing person who,
not finding her home, wouldn’t commit a voice to tape, but was trying to get her with eerie persistence. Well, you got all sorts in the world, meaning London, so it wasn’t worth thinking about. After the usual hellos from parents and friends she went to the twenty-four-hour shop and stocked up the larder. Supper done, she would stand with brush and palette in the spare room, finishing her notion of a female nude.

Instead of his usual month at a time Tom came every few days, as if the new situation fired his libido. Diana kept the interpretation to herself, but was glad at his visits, couldn’t have enough of them, because a higher intensity came into their affair for her as well. Some evenings the phone sounded several times while they were in the bedroom, most of the callers – or caller, she was sure – did not go on to talk.

‘Someone’s phoning me,’ she said. ‘And I don’t know who.’

He sloped in the best armchair, blowing rings from his long thin cigar. ‘Probably wrong number.’

‘It happens too often.’

‘Any theories?’ He sounded uninterested.

She had picked up the phone once and, expecting a call about work, had stupidly given her name. ‘No, have you?’

‘Could be an old boyfriend trying to get in touch.’

‘I never went with slobs like that.’

‘People do funny things,’ he said.

‘They say them, as well.’

Ash showered onto her carpet. ‘It won’t do any harm. Could be Angela, I suppose.’

‘I wondered that.’

‘Hard to find out without giving us away. I told her we weren’t seeing each other anymore.’

‘Was that wise?’

‘It was easy. You don’t know Angela,’ he said, at the contempt on her lips. ‘Oh, hell, I wonder how she got the number?’

He sounded petulant, but who wouldn’t? ‘You should know.’ ‘I don’t, though.’

‘Anyway,’ Diana said, ‘as long as she doesn’t find out where I live.’

At the back of his address book was a seven-group, unlike any other, and she altered each digit a number ahead. Didn’t make sense. Changing them for the one behind produced a recognisable London number which, when dialled, got this posh trollop on the ansaphone. Naturally, she gave no name, but it must have been her.

She had to laugh at how simple it was. He was piss poor at making codes, and that was a fact. In another part of the book Diana’s address was made plain by similar deciphering.

He had promised, oh so easily, but she knew he wouldn’t stop seeing his Diana because if she had been in love no one would have spoiled her affair, certainly not him. In one way she couldn’t care less whether they broke it up or not, because if it weren’t the whore Diana he would be having somebody else.

She would never trust or love him again, but fired herself to do the job nevertheless, because without much thought he had kicked her so brutally in the guts that the pain still brought tears and such a bumping of the heart that she wanted to vomit. It hadn’t been exciting enough for him to just have the woman but he had to plant the tape recorder where she was bound to play it back.

He came home, and Angela wasn’t there. She so habitually was that the fact worried him. He sat in the kitchen eating bread and salami, a glass of red by his elbow. Diana had been too upset to feed him. And at the office he’d had Norman Bakewell haranguing him in the most obscene language about the jacket of his next paperback. Angela came in with an expression of satisfying superiority, and a
shine of dislike for him in her eyes. The curve to her lips discouraged friendliness, at a time when, not long out of his girlfriend’s bed, it was vital for him to show it, even if only to diminish the guilt which harried him since she had found out.

He stood. ‘Hello, darling!’

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 funny.’ 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.’