Alligator Playground Read Online Free PDF

mother had shown. The stupefaction lasted months. Maybe it was still going on, when she thought about it. She’d had tests but nothing was wrong – fuck-nothing was her anguished cry. Tom’s ebullience reasserted itself, telling her they could only exist and let the pain evaporate, and that nothing could part two people who had suffered such a blow.
    She sat on the bed, and the sad resonances of Elgar’s music put her in mind of a motor excursion up the Wye Valley and into the Malvern Hills. Tom had arranged the trip to divert her from the miscarriage, but it only expanded the wilderness of loss, for how could anything other than going deeper into yourself find a solution as to what had gone wrong?
    Such music indicated that she had done well for herself since leaving Yorkshire with a cheap and overfull suitcase, all that time ago. She had often thought of slinging the case away – a treasured memento in the attic – but pictured the dustbin men footballing it into the van with a laugh, wondering how such a shoddy item came to be in her opulent house.
    Tom soon had a firm of his own, and travelled the world for business, a big man in it, youngish though he still was. She gave up her job, since more money was available from his gaudy books than they could throw about on everyday expenses. Habits of thrift from Yorkshire made her unwilling to spend unless for something essential.
    To be lavish with his money would make her feel unequal, parsimony a counterweight to remaining herself, and not being completely taken in by a man who could give himself more cash in a week than many earned in a year.
    And what an efficient little wifey I’ve turned into, she thought, grooming and mooning, entertaining and chatelaining. She supposed she’d hoped for it on running away from home, because didn’t you always achieve what you dreamed of in your ignorance, and even get that bit of romantic extra you never quite admitted to wanting for fear it wouldn’t happen?
    Twice a year she loaded the Volvo with whatever pressies her parents might like, and ferried them up to Yorkshire: a hamper from Selfridges, a video and some James Cagney movies for her father; a camcorder in case they felt like making a memento of them staring at each other and saying nothing week after week.
    Tom told her he loved Fred and Janice, and Angela laughed at how they behaved with their language and fussed to make him comfortable. He was too busy to go more than twice, but liked to choose their gifts, once sending a box of chocolates so big they joked about roping it to the luggage rack.
    On the Great North Road she always stopped for lunch at The George in Stamford. She liked the old fashioned place, because Tom once booked them a room on their way to the Edinburgh Festival. She sat in the lounge afterwards for coffee. Feeling herself to be a woman of mystery and elegance, she surprised herself when, seeing a man come in who she fancied, she wondered whether she would go away with him for the weekend if he asked.
    ‘Fell off the back of a lorry, did they?’ her father said, seeing the gifts. ‘I hope the police won’t be round in the morning. We don’t want to upset your mother, do we? Do we, Janice?’ he bawled.
    ‘Don’t be daft,’ her mother said. ‘We should be glad we’ve got such a nice son-in-law.’
    Her father grumbled, no gracious corpuscles in his blood. ‘I like to look life in the eye.’ The first time he met Tom he said to Angela on the QT that such a man would end up either as a millionaire or in prison. A real judge of character, but that was his way, and she could never stand being at home for more than seventytwo hours.
    The first day was tolerable because she took from her parents all that had been useful in her early life. Not much, but it served, though she was irritated at feeling sentimental about it. People gawped as she walked around the village, wondering what she was up to in the call box by the main road trying to get