Alligator Playground (7 page)

She stood so high Tom thought she would break her toes. Nobody was going to show
her
up in front of a man who’d left a ten pound tip. ‘Well, you know what you can do, don’t you?’

‘And what’s that?’

‘You can fuck off.’

Nor was anybody going to humiliate him on such a busy night. ‘I rather think that’s what you’re going to do, my dear, and this minute –
if
you don’t mind.’

Tom, ready to get up should the man give her that smack in the chops which she certainly merited, enjoyed being in a real life situation. She let a napkin drop to the floor as if it was a dead rat, and stepped on it. ‘You don’t need to tell me twice.’

‘Oh, I shan’t. Out, out, out,’ he said, walking away with Tom’s plate.

She lit a cigarette, and made sure the smoke clouded over the next table until a woman waved it irritably away. ‘He thinks he’s the fucking cat’s whiskers because he can’t fancy me.’

Tom had fallen in love with her by succumbing to a so-called general truth from Norman Bakewell, a fatal way to behave, but what way was not? ‘Let’s meet outside,’ he said. ‘I shan’t be long.’

He took her to the best pubs and clubs, feeling in the prime of youth when older men saw them as so apparently happy. He installed her in the house which, for a while, she kept scrupulously ordered and clean, scrubbing and polishing (in stiff checked aprons Tom lasciviously provided) as if it was a big new toy unwrapped for her birthday.

Even before marrying her he ought to have guessed that such a sloppy proletarian underlip dripping tea into the saucer, or onto herself if the cup was at too much of a slope, meant trouble. What he had assumed to be an endearing pout was the shape of her mouth that had not evolved since birth. It was even more emphasized now that she was transmogrified into a grown-up married woman.

After a few months of wedlock Daddy’s little darling became, as she put it, too bored to live, and took to going out on her own. She came home in the middle of the night, usually on the back of a motorbike ridden by a leather jacketed, well-studded and bearded land pirate.

Tom shouted that it had to stop, as she walked upstairs looking worn and well used in her harlequin shirt of yellow hearts and red stars. She had taken to sweeping her hair up into a bun, which seemed always in danger of crumbling but didn’t until now, when he slapped her.

He had caught her on the rebound from her dead father, though what two lovers didn’t meet in that way, if he thought about it.
As an unregenerate specimen she was even more determined in her behaviour than he. Her fixed smile of half-open mouth was too disturbing to look at for more than a moment, so he slapped her harder this time, and she fought back with the violence of a demented cat.

Angela’s departure had been like a loving wartime sendoff compared to hers. A biker gang must have held an all day rave before helping to do the house over, and the professional firm called in to clean up the squalor charged five hundred pounds.

He wondered if he were choosing the wrong sort of woman, or whether the wrong sort of woman was singling him out for special treatment, and if so why? He had spoiled Debbie by keeping her in a style to which he now hoped she would never again have the possibility of becoming accustomed. Norman Bakewell said he shouldn’t have done it, while listening with set mouth and appreciative wide-awake eyes to the sad narrative of his troubles.

A year after being divorced from Debbie he met Diana at a hotel in Leeds. She had come down from a disastrous visit to Northumberland with Jo, and he was there to talk at a publishers’ conference. He asked her to eat at his table and, in a calm, adult and deliberate manner they fell in love again, she missing coffee and he his cigar in the scramble to get up to his room.

He couldn’t hold back from asking what had happened to Jo Hesborn, whispered the query into an ear never known to be of such a warmly beautiful and exquisite shape.

‘That’s all finished. Maybe she went back to her father, or maybe her mother, I don’t know, but I’ve come back to you.’

He stood behind, undoing her blouse while looking over her shoulder into the full length mirror, till she stood naked and half fainting with a sharp and unfamiliar lust as if from the first stirrings of puberty, turning so that they could kiss each other step by step towards the bed.

He couldn’t understand, didn’t care to, and in any case, wasn’t able to because they were fired beyond the limits of reason due to knowing so much about each other, a resurgence of all their previous intimacies fuelling them into a mutual delirium that reminded him of his first lubricious affair with an older woman at sixteen.

They had no option. This time it would be different, and forever – they decided, on marrying again. They went through days and nights of infatuated madness. Why did they leave each other before? She was the only woman for him. Tom was still the same man for her, whom she had been so intoxicated with at Charlotte’s lunch party. She would do anything for him, and he would do whatever his beloved wanted.

She gave up her job at the BBC so as to paint all the time at home, sculpt when she tired of painting. ‘All I want is to be in the house and make sure you’re taken care of,’ she said, ‘but I also need somewhere to paint.’ They sold the place in Holland Park and bought a manor house in Hertfordshire with a suitably spacious barn that could be made into a studio. It cost him an extra twenty K, but his love had never been so intense, genuine and satisfying, which made it easy to be generous.

On reflection – and it had to come sooner or later – he had ricochetted out of his disaster with Debbie, and Diana had ricochetted from the slime of her long affair with Jo Hesborn, and when two ricochets clash in interstellar space the rate of burnout as they fall in the direction of Planet Earth, though not phenomenal to the naked eye, certainly becomes fast when they reach the pull towards gravity. And where do the star-struck lovers hit the deck, except on the lush banks of the alligator playground?

Marrying her again was another worst fatal move he had ever made. The two year itch excoriated, sooner perhaps than could have been expected, but no less sure for that, and he wondered how and when the split would come.

Itch? St Vitus didn’t know he was born. Diana bored and harried
him more than he could remember, the complications of their reunion making a Black Forest clock seem like Stonehenge. Why had he been such a fool as to give her a second chance, which she took as an opportunity to spill out all the unresolved grievances saved from the first time? Her muted way of tormenting him, honed by the mill of her abnormal existence with Jo, generated more pain than in their first, which even so had been unendurable.

She declared herself to be an artist, obviously a road which Jo had set her on, but he could make no sense of her splashy style, and hardly knew whether he liked it or not. On a wet Saturday afternoon, which he’d hoped they would spend in bed, she unveiled her latest vast painting in the barn and asked what he thought.

‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘I like it. What colour! What composition! What do you call it?’

‘“Witch Doing Widdershins Under the Great Oak”. I thought you’d have more specific comments, though.’

‘Well, you could take that head out of the tree, and put it closer to the ground.’

‘You don’t know anything, do you? It’s not a head, it’s a ball of mistletoe.’

He looked closer, hoping to make some sense of the bullshit. ‘Ah, so it is. Sorry. I do like it, though. You’re very talented, darling.’

He wasn’t being serious, but she had to talk to somebody about her work. ‘In that case, why don’t you get me a commission from the firm to do a few book jackets?’

And get his head kicked in by Norman Bakewell? ‘The head of the art department likes to choose his own people. He’s very cantankerous, and I wouldn’t like to get rid of him, he’s so good.’

He tried to make up for this festering issue by arranging her first one man (Christ!
Woman
, you nit!) show. At the vernissage he heard a critic say how profoundly interesting her technique and subjects were, though that may have been due to the top class
champagne and food, because even while harried by someone Tom had the capacity to act generously towards them.

Half the paintings and two pieces of sculpture were thumbed with little red sales tabs, and he noted with no resentment that the money went into her piggy-bank account. She would soon have enough saved not to starve when he kicked her out for the final final time.

But how to do it? There were several ways of telling your wife you were fundamentally unsuited to putting up with her volatile moods, cosmic doubts, and too frequent manic depressions, which at the best she assumed went with the artistic temperament, and at the worst blamed on you.

Riffling all possible options deadened the guilt which he felt too delicate and privileged to tolerate in middle age. If they had been living in the sixties he could have paid a rogue psychiatrist to put her in a halfway house and shoot her full of LSD, or to lay the blame on her parents and really drive her mad.

More mercifully, he could inform her that he wanted a divorce when she was miserably out of sorts, one more hurt that would be hardly noticeable – if hurt it turned out to be.

Perhaps better would be to say he wanted out when she was feeling so good that his decision couldn’t possibly be upsetting or, gallant and kind, he could soften her up with a couple of bottles of champagne over dinner, so that she would be too fuzzed to let his announcement worry her.

Another tactic was to persuade Denise, his girlfriend, to telephone and own up to their affair. No, he would lose her as well, because Diana could be very amiable with anybody but him, and he knew what might happen if she got into a confessional mood with another woman.

He straightened his back with a laugh of self congratulation, ingenuity at last coming up with the very
it
of everything, his gesture almost knocking the bottle off the table. To strike free of
the marriage with the maximum drama and satisfaction he would arrange to be moving his clobber into the car while a dozen guests were arriving for a dinner party that Diana had planned for weeks and sweated hard to make a success. Everybody would expect him to greet them, smiling at Diana’s side, even her crumbly old folks from Sevenoaks. Tom however would pass each person as they came in with: ‘Hello, how are you? So glad to see you,’ but adding with contemptible brightness: ‘I’m not able to shake hands because we’ve just decided to split up, and I’m taking my stuff out of the house before she burns it.’

Norman Bakewell, wearing a Greek fisherman’s sweater and a sea captain’s hat, glass in one hand and a steaming cigar in the other, swayed over from the bar. ‘Why don’t you just clear off, clandestinely, as it were, and take a flat somewhere? Don’t contact her for a few weeks so that she’ll be worried to death about the housekeeping money. I did it once. Works wonders.’

Whatever Tom decided, he had been too long in the waters of the alligator playground to let Norman influence him anymore. ‘Oh, belt up, you cherry-headed old fart.’

‘Do it, though,’ Bakewell insisted. He wanted to understand peoples’ anguish, as a writer must, and see into the heart of everyone, especially when halfway through a chapter. All the same, he existed in a fog of comprehension, his barbed advice coming from concentrated pain, which he described in such language as he hoped would be amusing to read. ‘Put my finger on it, did I? A man is only thinking of one thing if he lingers so long over his grog.’

‘Why don’t you fall down,’ Tom said, ‘and leave me alone?’

‘I can’t. Won’t, rather. And you know why? It’s because I like to see a real live publisher suffer. Most of them I can’t, because they’re just a computer stuck in an airtight underground bunker, clicking and flicking in different coloured lights, and I’m no longer strong enough to lift a sledge hammer.’ He put down a lily-white
hand to support himself at the table. ‘I hope you don’t mind if I let a fart tickle its way out, as even the Devil must.’

Tom decided to laugh rather than throw up. ‘Go home to your little wifey and wash the dishes. Then she’ll let you write me a novel, you old fraud.’

Barbara Whissendine at the next table was talking to Emmy Brites about her new novel, and Norman’s blast of wind brought a glare of disgust from both.

‘I wrote one last night,’ he said, ‘and burned it this morning. I’d got as far as the third draft, but it wasn’t wicked enough.’

Tom laughed. ‘Too kind to me, was it? Tell me, though, Norman, why are you such a dreadful old sinner?’

He finished drinking, and jelly-rolled his words. ‘Don’t know, old boy. Suppose it’s I want to come across God one day and see how someone does it who’s better at it than me.’

‘Got to go, anyhow.’ Tom didn’t want to strike a match for his cigarette in case he and his most profitable author blew up in a composite explosion that destroyed the club. He just hoped he would have the necessary sleight of hand to get his key in the car door.

‘Marriage is the best system yet devised that halfway works,’ Norman went on, as if he had been wound up and still had some distance to go. ‘It’s a factory for suffering, the only heavy industry left in the country after Thatcher. The alternative would be too frequent visits to St Onan’s Well. So don’t despair. Just remember that the first forty years are the worst.’

A shadow crossed. Thought it was a man, poor chap – or a cow from the field. Corned beef for breakfast. If a meal was waiting (make me laugh again) he would thumbs it down because the chops from lunch were still heavy in his stomach. The wash of booze in his system had fogged the difficulties of his drive, so he would relish an argument about that. On the other hand he dreaded
it, but dread was the emotion that brought them on. Stamping on the brakes sent him into a fifty-mile skid along gravel into a flowerbed. She won’t like that, either. Planted them herself, playing Mummy in the garden.

The porch was illuminated by an automatic alarm system against predators, and Diana, stout and desirable under the floodlight, stood with a levelled twin-barrel twelve bore as if to confirm that he hadn’t exaggerated the extent of their marital difficulties.