Alligator Playground. Alan Sillitoe

       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.’