Alligator Playground
by
Alan Sillitoe
A collection of short stories
Bibliographical Note
A Respectable Woman published in Illustrated London News and Paris TransContinental
Beggarland published in Woman and Home
Ron Delph and his Fight with King Arthur published by Clarion Books
Ivy published in Grant’s Bank Magazine and Orion River Review, USA
A Matter of Teeth published in You Magazine
Alligator Playground
ONE
FACING EACH OTHER across the table they took care their eyes wouldn’t meet, experienced enough to know that the ley lines of mutual attraction ought not to be played with irresponsibly. When one gaze caught the other the light in both went out, each pretending to show interest only in the remaining half-dozen at the lunch party.
Diana was surprised to note so much detail in a surreptitious glance. A photographer would never achieve the same intensity as her intuition, would at most highlight a face like that of a prisoner of war — static, bewildered, plain — whereas the reality her eyes took in would reinforce her memory, and become part of a floppy disc in the snug case of her brain.
He had the sort of face she would like to deal with in her sparetime painting, but rather than get out her sketch pad she knew that safety lay in listening to Charlotte, whose cigarette ash powdered into her barely touched soup. ‘This Tory government’s simply got to go.’
‘But how?’ Norman Bakewell’s mischievous call set Charlotte diatribing about housing, education, unemployment, the National Health Service and privatisation. Diana decided to look worried, better to fix on Charlotte’s obsessions than be yanked into another ocular contest with the fit man across the table.
Charlotte was a life-long left-winger, grappling such unregenerate views to her bosom as if her existence depended on them which, Diana thought, it probably did, in that she was kept from chewing ivy in the woods, or headmistressing the local coven. She was about fifty, and a little over five feet tall. Grey and meagre hair hung a few inches down her face, but what made the coarse features interesting were lips shaped in the tiniest of bows — a perfect little bow — so perfect yet so out of place in such a grim visage as to give the effect of benign though implacable intolerance. She wore a brown sackcloth garment resembling a gymslip, and no one, except perhaps Henry her husband, had seen her in anything else, as if she had a full wardrobe and took out a clean one every few hours.
The present meal — always called that, never dinner or lunch — was served on a long table in the living-kitchen. No cloth, of course, but the place-mats were distinctive to Charlotte’s house, each depicting an episode in the struggles of the working class. Diana’s showed ‘The Taking of the Winter Palace’ and, as far as she saw on another quick eye-shot, the man opposite, whom she’d heard called Tom, was eating off ‘The Massacre of Peterloo’. The novelist Norman Bakewell, sitting next to her, had ‘The Last Stand of the Paris Commune’, and Emmy Brites, across to the left, lifted her plate and with her big blue eyes tried to make sense of ‘The Death of Rosa Luxemburg’. Jo Hesborn had been given ‘The Strike of the East End Match Girls’, while Charlotte, as always, ate her meal off ‘The Lord Mayor of London Slaying Wat Tyler’.
Diana was saying something to Charlotte, Tom noted. Every clandestine flash never lessened the attraction of what he saw. The workman type overalls of the best thin cloth buckled over a well cut shirt of pale grey seemed a mite old fashioned, but the way the front came across her bosom made her look absolutely delectable. The face attracted him no less, high cheekbones, and a slightly forward mouth due to her teeth, giving an impression of mischief and availability, which he knew better than to assume was so. Her almond shaped eyes produced a heat in him not experienced since first meeting his wife. A large-stoned ring, not on her marriage finger, could mean anything these days. Fair hair, in a neat line across her forehead, was tied behind. He circled back to her face as if to puzzle out why it was so compelling, then gave up so that he could enjoy it.
Norman Bakewell lit a cigar and puffed so busily between courses that Barbara Whissendine got the full nimbus of his smoke, as if she was the enemy from whom he needed to conceal the industrial capacity of his output as a writer. ‘Don’t they make you sick?’ she asked.
‘Not so far, my love,’ he said. ‘I smoke about seventy a week, and do you know, I was thinking the other day that if you put them end to end for length it’d make over six hundred yards, and since I’ve been puffing like billy-ho for forty years I’ve travelled nearly fourteen miles, which is just about right in my slow moving life.’
‘I suppose you worked that out when you had writer’s block?’ Barbara, a rawboned steely-eyed literary agent who hadn’t got him on her books for the simple reason that she wouldn’t go to bed with such a toad in a million years, felt able to slam him all she liked. ‘Doesn’t your wife worry that smoking will kill you?’
‘Wife?’ His roar stopped all other talk. ‘What’s one of them?’
‘It sounds as if she henpecked you.’
Was it the downing of another glass of wine that reddened his face? ‘Did you say henpecked?’
‘Stop it, Norman.’ Charlotte collected the plates, and took the roast meat out of the oven. She knew him as one of those déclassé working-class men who, thinking he had nothing to blame his parents for, or being too sentimental to know where to begin, had reduced one middle-class wife after another to suicidal misery.
‘Henpecked?’ he crowed. ‘You don’t know one half. I got carpet bombed from morning till night. Then she came out of the potting shed, thank God, and went off with a woman.’
Jo Hesborn adjusted her collar and tie. ‘I can’t say I’d blame her for that.’
‘The trouble was, she came back.’
Barbara angled away. ‘And you let her?’
He paused. ‘Wanted to get my own back, didn’t I?’
‘You mean you picked up with a man?’ Jo laughed.
Light from the afternoon sun flashed on his glasses. ‘I didn’t wear my heart on my sleeve like a patch of snot, or cry into my blotting paper. I had an affair with a girl who was too young to think of becoming a lesbian.’
‘So why isn’t your wife with you now?’ Barbara did her best to smile, and wiped the failure away with a napkin. ‘I’m sure she’d love hearing the same old patter.’
Gazing tenderly, he took her hand in his, till she snatched it free. ‘I’m glad I didn’t bring her, or we’d both been fighting over you, darling. She’s finally hopped it, I’m glad to say. Greater love hath no man than this, that he hand over his wife to the tender mercies of a woman.’
Jo Hesborn picked up her empty glass. ‘You bastard! You walking gasometer!’
The missile shattered against his forehead, but he stayed calm, not only as if such an event happened every other day, but as if his existence would be without meaning if it didn’t take place now and again. Even so, the grin barely lit the middle of his pallid face, thin lips suddenly with more curves in them.
He swabbed the flood, reddening Charlotte’s best linen, and patted Jo’s wrist as if he had injured her. ‘I don’t know why you did that. You ought to be grateful for somebody like me. I’ve probably turned more women into lesbians than any man in London. I thought somebody like you would appreciate the fact.’