Free Alligator Playground by Alan Sillitoe Page A

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