Alligator Playground. Alan Sillitoe
she found Jo likeable, plain and straightforward, and envied her for making the only possible protest against Norman Bakewell. After saying so, she asked: ‘Who was that bloke sitting opposite me? Do you know him?’
She spoke with a modified Northumbrian accent. ‘He used to be a writer.’
‘Why is he here, though?’
‘Oh, he did a reportage, for a magazine Charlotte brought out in the eighties called The New Oppressed. She thought his piece was wonderful – social realism stuff straight from the front line, to use Charlotte’s words, far better than Orwell ever wrote, she said, who she’d always thought a traitor to the working class.
‘Tom lived among no-hopers and winos for a month, hung around DHSS offices, talked to kids on housing estates who loved nicking expensive cars and driving them on wasteland to burn. It was a long piece, went through three issues, but the magazine didn’t last long. Even Tom’s brilliant piece couldn’t save it. The chattering classes weren’t all that interested, and the unemployed couldn’t afford it with their giros. They’d have laughed about it, anyway.
‘Tom said that even before finishing it he decided that all he’d met were unhelpable, or just having a marvellous time burning and looting, for which he couldn’t blame them. I’m sure he’s never said as much to Charlotte, which is why she still likes him. Then he went into publishing, and now he’s on the way to becoming a millionaire, or so it’s whispered in the trade.’
‘What about his love life?’
Jo laughed. ‘Don’t ask! When he was slumming among the deadbeats he fell in love with a young married woman he got talking to in the DHSS queue. Or maybe he fell for another at the same time, knowing him. Anyway, it all went wrong. She saw through him, I suppose. Then he went down like a ton of bricks for this hardbitten tart from the North called Angela, a coalminer’s daughter, who worked at his firm. He married her. Got what he deserved, I suppose.’
‘Is he happy?’ Diana wanted to know.
Jo scoffed. ‘No man can be happy, not even if you got him up in heaven and made him God. I don’t know why you’re so interested in him, though. Come and have a drink with me sometime, at my place in St John’s Wood. I’ve always got some Bolly in the fridge. We’ll have a meal afterwards, then try the Swallow Club for a dance. You’ll love it there.’
Diana felt a sudden frisson, but put the hand gently away from her waist, in spite of the steady light in Jo’s grey eyes, which she found hard to resist. She wasn’t ready for that kind of eating, though might give it a try one day – or night – just as almost every woman wanted to have a baby once in her life. ‘It’s a bit far to get to from the BBC.’
‘If ever you feel like it, let me know.’ Wasting no time, she strode between rose bushes and across the lawn to blonde and secretive Emmy Brites, said to be writing her first novel, and whose peach coloured cheeks turned vermilion when the hand went forward.
Languid, dark and late thirtyish, Tom, when chatting at a party (except to a woman) looked continually over the man’s shoulder to see who it might be useful to meet next. He did it without shame, on the understanding that since who he was talking to would know what was in his mind, and was probably doing the same anyway, he could leave without either being embarrassed. He also assumed that those under his scrutiny were talking about him, which was sometimes the case. Glad that Diana had given that lesbian the pushoff, he walked across to talk to her, as she had hoped he would.
He leaned on the arbour post. ‘I had a lot to say to you, and now I’ve forgotten it all. At the table I thought the block would vanish as soon as we were face to face.’
‘And won’t it?’
‘I’ve never felt such an electric connection in my whole life. It was absolutely amazing. It’s still there, even more now that you’re close and there’s nothing between us.’
Fair, for a beginning, especially since he could have been stealing her words. Maybe that was how he had become a millionaire, though these days you could be fab-rich one week and living in Cardboard City the next. ‘I thought it was wonderful, the way Jo Hesborn dealt with that emotional cripple.’
‘Norman? I suppose he did ask for it. But maybe it’s rather admirable, the way he lives like an open wound.’
‘Sewer, more like.’ His envy of Bakewell foxed her for a second, because she hated his misogynistic novels, and didn’t think him worth any talk at all. ‘How come you know Charlotte?’
Such a laugh made it hard to know what he thought, as he leaned close and lowered his voice. ‘I like her. She’s one of the old sort, totally misguided. She can’t go to Russia since Perestroika because the planes don’t run on time, and she might get mugged. It was the only country she felt safe in, but now she sticks to this old rectory, though she hates the place. Complains all the time to poor old Henry, so that she can seem the calm and all wise earthy hostess to everyone else.’
‘I wouldn’t like to be your wife.’ Yet she thought she might, for an hour or two.
Even the overalls didn’t hide her figure, the lovely fruity breasts, body going in at the waist and coming out to delectable hips. ‘I’ll curb my tongue, but if you ask me whether I’d like to be married to you the answer’s yes, any time of the week.’
‘You sound like the perfect husband. I hope your wife thinks you are.’
‘In my experience, only the fatally flawed try to be perfect. I just saw you, and knew we had to talk.’
It was the moment to move on to someone else, easy enough to do. She’d always told herself never to have any truck with a married man, but he had given her no reason to walk away, and she didn’t care to think of one. ‘I’d love to live in a house like this, on such a marvellous day at least.’
‘I’d die here,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with London?’
‘Oh, not much, I agree. But I wake up in the morning plagued by pneumatic drills, or car alarms going off, or a burglar alarm, or a police car screaming to get to the station before the tea gets cold. Then there’s the awful smell, and the traffic.’
Charlotte stood at the door. ‘Who’s going to volunteer for washing up? I only need two.’ She thought it educational to make her guests work after a meal. ‘When it’s done we can go on a nice long walk to the river.’
Tom saw a way to imprison her in talk for the next half-hour. ‘Let’s do it.’
She used cardboard plates at her flat, and squashed them in the bin afterwards, but was happy to say yes. They put their hands up, like children at school, she thought, then went into the house, applauded by the others.
‘Do you know how to get there?’ The thatched cottages and front gardens were so neat she imagined people trying for the best kept village of the year. Even the gravestones looked polished and scoured, surrounding the stark grey church whose sinister tower must be visible for miles.
‘We turn left along here.’ He put a hand on her naked elbow, as if she needed guiding. The others would be left behind, and she liked being near him, though neither could think of much to say after their chatter at the sink. Skylarks and swifts played Battle of Britain in the blue, and the heat wafted an odour of tall wheat from either side of the track.
‘I’ve done this walk quite a few times.’ She wondered who with as they turned down a lane of birch trees, treading over hardrimmed tractor ruts. ‘There’s a keeper’s cottage at the end, then nothing between there and the river.’
Except a band of dark wood. The way opened onto sloping fields of yellow rape, which also patched the rising land across the valley. They stood a moment to enjoy the view. ‘I hear Elgar’s music when I get to this spot,’ he said.
Poppies were worried by wasps of gold and black, and a small aeroplane lazied up from the coast. ‘I see what you mean.’
He