Alligator Playground. Alan Sillitoe

       TWO

      ANGELA, BACK WITH a hundred quid’s worth of grub and cleaning stuff from Sainsbury’s, hadn’t realised she had left her natty little Japanese tape recorder on. It wasn’t in her to be so witless. But she hadn’t left it on: the cunning little devil started at the sound of a voice.

      Operating such technological gimmicks was complicated enough to give a feeling of achievement. The manuals were easier to memorise if you read them aloud and, noting each movement phase by phase, she set the timing mechanisms of the video if a programme on television needed taping while they were out. Tom was baffled by such mysterious gew-gaws, and thought it strange that a woman should be so competent.

      As a kid she had wanted to be an engineer and build bridges; he may have praised only to flatter, but it was pleasing to have her skill acknowledged, and flattery harmed no one, as long as you didn’t take it seriously. In any case, she flattered him, being as how he was so juvenile. She laughed at his failures, and said he couldn’t be a genius at his job and understand modern technology as well, a remark that soothed the abrasions of a seven-year marriage.

      ‘It’s just small enough to get into your handbag.’ He handed it over after his trip to Rome, and thought it useful as a notebook for dictating shopping lists into, or reminding her of something while driving the car.

      She sat on the bed, holding the unobtrusive recorder which usually lay in the hairpin basket by the bedroom telephone. The playback mechanism reproduced a door clicking, drifts of music from the kitchen, a police siren, or the roarpast of a souped up van along the normally quiet Holland Park street. When traffic was thick around Shepherds Bush a few rogue vehicles, or reps handy with the map, used it as a slip road.

      The black box was something of a miracle, and one day soon an invention would let you talk into a recorder and, at the touch of a switch, after attaching it to a word processor, a printer would bang the text neatly out. Bang also would go the secretary’s job, and if such a thing had been possible ten years ago she might not have been a rich man’s wife with a very des res in Holland Park.

      Whatever she was she had never stopped being herself, because if she hadn’t always been as much of herself as possible she wouldn’t have become Tom’s wife. She supposed the process began by the sudden revelation at school that she was of better quality than anybody around her, and that O Levels could be passed if she tried.

      She dropped a few pegs in her self esteem when no office in Wakefield would set her on. ‘You’ve got a long way to go before you’re any good to us,’ every smarmy personnel manager seemed to say. She was given work at a meat pie processing firm and, despite rock bottom wages, saved enough to buy a typewriter, and went to night classes to learn shorthand. It was hard to say whether the worst part of her year was being at home, or having to sweat with a row of foulmouths at the factory. The woman in charge of the conveyor belt was as much of a bully and even more dirty minded than her father, while the others were on the same mental level as her mother and sister. Maybe the combination had been invaluable in giving the energy to flee from both.

      Angela supposed she came from the sort of place in Yorkshire which journalists referred to as ‘a close-knit community’. The phrase made her want to throw up. Those who used it would never live in such a place, not in a million years, though she could see them shivering with almost sexual pleasure while tapping the phrase out. Even her father, getting it from television, had used it with pride before cursing her as a fool on hearing she was going to live in London.

      She couldn’t wait to get out of the village. London next stop, she said to herself, sniffing the odour of the carriage at Doncaster. They could stuff their close-knit community where a monkey stuffed its nuts.

      It wasn’t hard to land a job, and she was soon able to mimic posh talk because of splitting a flat with Debbie and Fiona in Putney. They thought her patois charming, but when she began to sound more or less like everyone else, found her less agreeable, so she rented a room in West Ken, happy to be on her own.

      Anyone who asked where she’d come from and deserved an answer was told Leicester, a safe bet, but a few months later she would mention Luton, and after a year she fobbed off whoever asked with the request that they mind their own business or, if they were trying to get at her, and if she was at a party and sufficient drink had put her into an awkward mood, she would revert to what she had once been and tell them – as she had from time to time fishwifed back as a girl to one or two collier slobs calling some funny business from the doorway of a chippy, or from the bus shelter on a windy night – to fuck off, which she was gratified to find worked marvels at a London party.

      Such a whiplash rejoinder, from someone who could talk the Queen’s English with the best of them, did not reveal that such language was a basic part of her. In any case there was enough on television for any gently brought up girl to pick out for use.

      She didn’t care what they thought, but if she had realised that Tom was close when she let fly a mouthful at the party she would have folded with horror. She didn’t approve of such talk – oh dear no, she laughed in recollection, of course I fucking well didn’t – but on falling into it had been consoled by imagining there were two people inside her instead of one and that, she liked to assume, was where whatever strength she had came from.

      She singled Tom out on her first day at the firm. He was one of the directors in charge of the editorial division, and she recognised him as the sort of man who often appeared in her erotic and romantic dreams. He was said to