Alligator Playground

by Alan Sillitoe

  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 t
here 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?’

  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 t
o 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.