Alligator Playground. Alan Sillitoe

must elapse before boredom or acrimony crippled the new union, and by that time you might be dead.

      Another disadvantage of not enduring the first ordeal, Barbara Whissendine suggested, was that a man never really got to know himself, and there was surely some value in that.

      Tom, under scrutiny, retorted – and he was of course backed up by Norman Bakewell in this – that even supposing there was no more for a man to discover (and he may even so be well aware of all that there was) to remain in one emotionally arid gridlock would nullify all that experience had taught him up to that point, rather than illuminate the mind in any way – or words to that effect, after the prose was honed up in Bakewell’s ever-working brain.

      A third point, perhaps more perceptive, not to say provocative, was that the gadabout was incapable of reasoning along such lines. Tom threw this in free. He was a man of action, he went on, not a vegetable deadbeat languishing at his fireside, like Henry, who may, he thought, for all anybody could tell, be a deeply philosophical character, though the only effect was to keep him securely under Charlotte’s thumb, and what kind of philosophy was that?

      Too much reflection was often more useless, and demoralising, than too little, and made action difficult if not impossible. Norman Bakewell, who was at his most acute when cogging into others’ thoughts, went on to comment that whatever move one makes, even if it does little good, or even if it exacerbates the situation, must be better than the abandoned marital state of ongoing bitterness and eternal inertia – he concluded, reaching for his glass and then becoming too drunk to come out with anything that was either sensible or readable.

      ‘To stay in one marriage for life under any conditions deadens a man,’ Tom said, riding roughshod through Charlotte’s silence, ‘and argues deadness even in a woman’ – a nod to Barbara and Emmy Brites, who were holding hands – ‘but a man who gets hitched two or three times may have done so in order to try and rectify genuine errors.’

      Nearly everyone around the table chipped in at this point, Emmy Brites coming up with the barb that a man has to be diabolically flawed to marry a third or a fourth time, an inference which Tom absolutely disagreed with, considering himself the opposite of a failure in life.

      ‘Men are blest who marry often,’ he said, and stood up to say it. ‘Those who don’t try more than once could be said to lack energy or, let’s face it, money, or confidence, or the good fortune to pick ’em and the know-how to have them fall in love with him. Most men, like most women I suppose, whether due to love, loyalty, or the inanition brought about by the inborn ability to put up with ongoing turmoil, stay with the same partner for life.’