Alligator Playground (6 page)

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.

T
OM 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.

Unable to be apart from each other, in those dangerous weeks
after Angela had gone, and when their affair seemed to be ending, he made the biggest blunder of his life and, as soon as the divorce came through, asked her to marry him.

Fireworks, he recalled, Catherine wheels and exploding rockets replaced the umbrella of nuptial starshells. Who would have realised that their allotted bliss had been used up already during their passionate affair? In little time at all they were unable to tolerate each other. They endured for a while through misplaced pride or obstinacy, so that after a year they were like siamese twins and couldn’t live without each other. Neither could they live with each other, which galled them so much that they could only sit back appalled and hope the other would leave first.

Because the other – whoever it was at some vindictive Jason and Medea moment – was unable to act due to the potency of the original infatuation, their sterile marriage went on for almost three years. Tom hoped to find her gone on getting back from the office. After he had left for work Diana prayed he wouldn’t come home again. Tom knew that if he returned exhausted from work to find she had flitted he would cut his throat. Diana realised that if he didn’t show up at the expected time she would hang herself.

Tom was aware that such a perfectly balanced emotional pendulum was diabolically organised by something more powerful than either, and might keep them close forever. Diana assumed that, though able to walk out at any moment, she couldn’t unless he went first.

The hour Tom felt most able to light off was between eleven o’clock and midnight, but by then he was too half seas over to crawl on hands and knees to the car. He could do nothing more than find the route to bed, though mumbling his absolute determination to scarper at the first blink of dawn. He would be at Heathrow in no time, and a few hours later Diana would get a telephone call from as far off as Lisbon or St Petersburg. Before being released on his alcoholic decline into sleep he would even pencil a reminder
and leave it under the alarm clock on the bedside table, telling himself: ‘Leave her definitely today,’ but on waking with a fuddled mind, and hollow for breakfast, his only thought was to eat and get away early for work.

He surmised that such a marriage must have been brewed up in Antarctica, while Diana placed the destructively spewing volcano of Krakatoa at the geographical centre. The fact of their mismatch was all they could agree on, though to say so was unnecessary. Foreseeing far more anguish if they separated, it was only possible to stay together as if observing someone else’s marriage, while realising too late that they were looking in on their own, and were humiliatingly bound by it. Whatever emotional profit there was in being taken beyond the limits of a tolerable existence, which someone like Norman Bakewell might have seen as a positive advantage for his writing, was not enjoyed by either.

The wineskin of torment burst for Diana when Tom made the situation remorselessly clear to her one evening, after the meal, of course. She ran from the house in a fit of the miseries which even her paintbox and easel could not dilute.

Crossing against the lights at Notting Hill Gate, she was sorry not to have been flattened into the asphalt, but immediately felt better on being comfortably installed in a taxi, and telling the driver to drop her at the Swallow Club in Soho.

She somnambulated to a space near the bar, and saw Jo Hesborn, who was halfway through a bottle of champagne.

‘Now why did
you
have to turn up?’ Jo said.

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Diana snapped, though noting there were no men in the place.

‘Have a drink of this, anyway.’ Jo called for another glass. ‘I can’t believe my luck, that’s why I sounded a bit sharp.’ She held Diana’s hand, who felt thrillingly at ease, and not willing to withdraw it. ‘I’ve been madly in love with you ever since that lousy lunch party at Charlotte’s,’ Jo said. ‘And to say I’ve been repining for you would
be putting it mildly, but I have. So come on, love, knock that back, and let’s have a dance.’

For Diana it was more of a
coup de foudre
than the first encounter with Tom. ‘So,’ he sneered, when she took no trouble to hide the fact that she had stayed the night with Jo, ‘you chose freedom by falling in love with a woman.’ He wanted to find Jo, and crush her dry hard body to bone and gristle but, recalling her vicious attack on Norman Bakewell at Charlotte’s, thought better to leave her alone. ‘Anyway, you can clear out.’

‘I don’t see why.’ Jo had told her she shouldn’t, at least not in a hurry. ‘Marriage ought to be able to contain me having a relationship with a woman. Ours ought to, certainly.’

Oh, ho, tell that to Tom. He couldn’t bear the thought of touching her sexually from then on, without imagining he was with a woman he had picked up at a party, though he conceded, in order to have peace, that she might have a point about staying on, because when she brought Jo to dinner he didn’t dislike the situation, to his surprise and Diana’s chagrin. They were both women, after all.

At such cosy get-togethers he was uxoriously polite to Diana so as to make Jo jealous, but put on his maximum charm to Jo, who had a certain louche pull (though she was too thin in form and somewhat outspoken) until Diana thought his behaviour was working even on Jo in the same old way, so that Diana who, he couldn’t help noticing, was more in thrall to Jo than she had ever been to him, fell into a discussion with Jo about buying a chocolatebox cottage in deepest Wales, in which they could live much like the ‘Two Ladies of Llangollen’. Tom was glad to note that Jo thought more of her job in London than this promise of eternal clitoral bliss.

Tom was embarrassed when he and Diana went out together, because she looked at young women with the same famished intensity as himself. Neither liked the competition, but should have been happy to know that after years with nothing in common they now had one in which both hungered after the same sex.

Tom was more jealous than if she’d had affairs with men, or so he claimed during arguments stoked up with even more bitterness than before. With a woman the odds were piled too high. Maybe it was envy. It certainly was. She lusted after the women he fancied which, after the amusement had worn off, he didn’t like it at all. Such tackiness was undignified.

At a party one night, while Jo was visiting her family in Northumberland, Diana purloined a girl from under his nose. On another occasion, when he saw her smitten by a very good-looking middleaged woman, he sidled in and worked his charm, so that Diana didn’t get her – the sex war to end sex wars.

Such argy-bargy – or was it hanky-panky? – led him to observe that any woman he reckoned he could get into bed within half an hour was invariably an easy conquest for Diana as well.

Perhaps Diana’s way with women was a final attempt to prove her love for him, stunts he had not previously imagined and certainly not wanted. Maybe she thinks I’ll turn queer, he thought, so that we’ll be a devoted couple into old age. ‘Fat chance, mamma,’ he snarled, in their last bout of cat and dog fury.

Assuming that almost every woman was drawn to the lesbian condition as they became older, he took Norman Bakewell’s advice and found a young one before she’d had time to think it worth a try. Nineteen-year-old Debbie worked as a waitress. Wearing a caramel coloured shirt and a tie, she had a shapely bottom but not much bosom, hands lightly clasped behind her back, waist nearly reached by her rope of dark hair. Pale-faced and with a somewhat pinched and distant expression, she brought Tom’s soup to the table as if it was the last thing on earth she wanted to do, or to be seen doing, then stood by the wall to stare contemptuously in turn at everyone else who was eating. When she came with his steak au poivre he asked if she liked working here.

‘I don’t like working anywhere.’

He laughed. ‘Then why do it?’

‘My father just died, and my mother threw me out.’

He was fascinated by the inch of white ankle between the top of her boots and the bottom of her brown trousers. ‘We ought to talk about it sometime.’

‘You can if you like.’

He ate there the following week, surprised she still had her job. ‘Thanks for that tip,’ she smiled. ‘Nobody’s dropped me a tenner before.’

As a device for being remembered it was worth every penny. ‘What part of the world do you come from?’

‘A little semi in South East Ninety Eight. Shitville.’

At least it wasn’t Yorkshire. Or Sevenoaks. ‘That’s not far away.’

‘It’s too close for me, though. I might as well still be there, having to work in this pig-dump, and living in a squat.’

‘It sounds all right,’ he said, wanting to hear more of her fairly basic lingo, which he assumed covered a profundity of unexplored emotion – and love.

The head waiter, or maybe he was the boss, came close. ‘Haven’t I told you not to talk so much to the customers?’