Alligator Playground by Alan Sillitoe

butter, as Norman Bakewell put it in one of his books. ‘My name’s Tom.’
    If Diana was there to see him come home with his new friend it would serve her right, and certainly make him happy. It occurred to him that when he was married to a dark-haired woman his affairs were with blondes, and that when hitched to someone with fairish hair he went for lovely dark-haired women like Tina. ‘Are you sure, though?’
    ‘If I stow my lot in the boot, you can put yours on the back seats.’
    ‘What sort of a car do you have?’
    ‘It’s that BMW over there.’
    Life was good, just when you felt a tremor that it might not be. Diana could go to hell, playing a trick like that. Tina joked about his predicament on the way back to the house, especially after he admitted, angling for more advantage out of the situation: ‘It’s my wife, really, who left me in the lurch. We’ve been on about splitting for months, and this is the way she chose to do it.’
    ‘I suspected it,’ Tina said. ‘My husband does that sort of thing a bit better, though, and it suits us both. He’s an aeronautical engineer, and he’s away most of the time in Saudi Arabia. He fixes up planes, and writes off as many as he can so that they’ll go on buying more from us.’
    ‘Very patriotic,’ Tom said.
    She touched his wrist. ‘Isn’t it?’
    Unloading the stuff, after noting that the Peugeot had gone, he called Tina into the kitchen for a cup of coffee, jet-grinding thebeans to give her the best. He kept up an amusing spate of talk as if to show that any wife who abandoned someone of his quality could only be a wayward spoiler.
    Saying goodbye, they clung to each other at the door like the positive ends of two magnets. The first kiss with a new woman was always the best ever. ‘Sure you can’t stay a while?’
    ‘I’d love to, but it’s not possible. Must get back and feed my two children. They’re home from boarding school this weekend.’
    ‘Pity.’
    Her brown eyes sparkled. ‘They go back on Monday.’
    ‘Can I have your phone number?’
    She wrote it on a bit of card from her wallet.
    ‘I’ll call you,’ he said.
    ‘Do.’
    Another kiss, as well as one blown from the car window. He danced around the kitchen in expectation, so randy after pulling the lubricious encounter out of the future that he called for Diana, and realised she wasn’t there.
    His spirit slumped further when the one o’clock news gave out that Norman Bakewell had been topped by the grim reaper. The way he lived should have set Tom waiting for it, but the evidence against Norman living forever – more or less – never had much weight. His death was also a bang to the system because, though sales of his books would be good for a while, they would drain out to zilch within a year, which made it the worst of news.
    He spread an island of cornflakes over the table and shaped a narrow bay on the south side while thinking of Tina: ‘She loves me, she loves me not; she loves me, she loves me not,’ then stopped because he didn’t know whether he meant Tina or Diana.
    At three o’clock he brushed uneaten cornflakes onto the floor with his sleeve and, crunching over them, walked out and into each room, downstairs and up, over to the barn and storehouses,truffling for indications as to why she had bolted and where she had gone. The beams of the long two-roomed lounge were a bit low for a rope, but he was too spongy in the brain to be serious, and by the time his curiosity had been swamped with the truth he wouldn’t care to hang himself. In any case, hanging could be a slow business. The shotgun might be quicker, but that was strictly for the rabbits. There had never been a clearer case for giving Norman a bell and talking about the matter, but the crazy piss artist had kicked the bucket.
    If she had really gone – and maybe she had, not denying a flicker of relief at the thought – it was unforgivable that she hadn’t left him the consolation of a fiery