Noah's Ark (12 page)

‘A little piccalilli, Miss?’ he had asked and had spooned it on to her plate as though it were a French salad. Then afterwards, when they had passed by the house to collect her bags, an impromptu and delightful comedy had set in because Arnie had lit upon two old carnival masks in her toy cupboard, of a dog and an old man, and had minced about with such rheumy, crackpot conviction in the second of these that she had been persuaded to put on the first and play the old man’s dog. Liberated from her own shyness behind the mask, she had yapped and snapped with manic canine glee, now ahead, now behind, all down the street like a wild puppy, while Noah silently carried her bags and Arnie – bawling gruff, octogenarian
comments – mimed to untangle a leash from lamp-posts. At his own front door, Noah drew his keys from his pocket, undid the three locks, and announced, categorically, that composure would be reestablished and the masks removed as a condition of entry.

‘I mean to drink my coffee in peace and quiet,’ he said.

‘Wuff,’ Camilla said, pushing her luck, but Arnie took off the masks, hers and his own, and said in his ordinary voice, ‘Cool it, Bonzo. I need his coffee, okay? Besides, he’s my boss.’

Once they were inside, and while the grown-ups’ coffee filtered, Noah made her a little pot of hot chocolate which he served in one of his heavy, dark green French railway cups – his only remaining wedding gift salvage which Camilla had previously admired. Camilla admired all Noah’s things without reservation. She loved their opulence and glossy, shop-floor newness. She loved his dark-coloured bathrooms with their mixer taps and bidets, his dark green and gold crockery, his shiny black-stained dining table on its chrome trestles.

Understanding that Noah was not the man to be wheedled into indulging night-time television viewing, she made her hot chocolate last as long as she could before she went to bed. Even going to bed was an adventure, because the bed was like an armchair that concertinaed out into a proper single bed. Camilla put her teddy in the bed and slid her large rubber undersheet carefully into position as Ali had said she should. She hadn’t really wanted her mother to tell Noah about her bedwetting, but she could see now that it was better that he knew and anyway it hadn’t made him treat her as if she had three heads. And it would have been jolly difficult to have kept on hiding the sheets from him. There was a lovely bedside lamp on a bendy stem by whose light she read some more of
Girl of the Limberlost,
which was her favourite book. She had read it twice before already, but it was so beautiful and so sad, especially when the children finally found the red-headed orphan boy’s little, precious handsewn baby clothes which proved that his mother had really loved him after
all. It made her cry every time, all over again. It would be horrible beyond imagining to be an orphan, Camilla thought. Even worse than having parents who quarrelled all the time. But Ali had promised her that she would not die in hospital. Camilla shuddered, as a moment’s terror intruded to spoil the pleasure she took in the guest bedroom and in the bendy light. If Ali died, she reflected, she would have to go and live with her father and his horrid, bossy girlfriend, who most probably wouldn’t even let her wear pink, or play with Sindy dolls. Eva would probably make Mervyn send her to boarding school, like in
David Copperfield.

The daylight, however, brought renewed contemplation of pleasures in store. For Noah, instead of making sandwiches for what he called her ‘bag lunch’, had sent her off to the grocer’s the previous day with two pounds in her purse and had told her to buy herself five days’ supply of anything she liked to eat, so long as it wasn’t candy or carbonated drinks. Camilla had chosen five pots of fruit-flavoured yoghurt with a different flavour for each day and five bags of Salt and Vinegar potato crisps. Then she had bought some vacuum-packed ham and a bag of six chelsea buns because she could eat the extra one on the way home from the shop. Going to the hospital after school turned out to be a treat for her too: to take the unfamiliar bus and make one’s way down the grey, gloss-painted corridors and through three sets of smoky plastic doors to Noah’s research unit where one shared a desk with the secretary who let one take telephone messages and gave one photocopy paper to draw on. It made one feel grown up.

Occasionally Arnie would come in, looking strangely purposeful, bending over the secretary with tables and graphs, or pulling files from grey filing cabinets. It was a little disappointing for her that he never appeared in his hairy goatskin which Ali had told her about, but was always quite properly dressed in decent roll-neck sweaters and laundered corduroys and loafers; even more disappointing was that he was always so wholly preoccupied: a
little puzzling too, because she had not yet discovered that Arnie was a person who addressed himself both to work and to leisure with an equally ruthless commitment.

‘How you doing?’ he would say rather automatically and he would look right past her to the secretary or to the filing cabinets. Before she learned that the question was rhetorical with him, she would try, mistakenly, to answer. ‘I’m doing very badly,’ she said once, hoping to interest him in her maths homework. ‘It says here that if a record accomplishes forty-five revolutions in one minute, how many revolutions does it accomplish in four seconds? What are you supposed to do?’

Arnie laughed, a little callously, she thought, because he must have known that she really
did
need help, and he answered her without even bothering to take his ballpoint pen out from between his teeth. ‘With that many revolutions, I guess it’s got to be Bolivia.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Camilla said.

‘Or someplace else,’ he said carelessly, even as he moved to leave. ‘West Africa, maybe. I’d say three, Cam. Think about it.’ But that was no good, even if three was the right answer, Camilla thought to herself in some confusion, because you had to show your working or else Miss Hartley wouldn’t believe that you had really understood. Noah never called her ‘Cam’, but he could always be relied upon to help if ever he came in, which, unhappily, was not often. He never implied, either by word or gesture, that three minutes taken out of his afternoon would alter the course of medical history. He would draw up a typing chair and sit down. Then he would very soon show her that there was excellent sense in dividing forty-five by sixty (which was difficult enough, Camilla assured him, unless one had a grownup over one’s shoulder). The rest would be plain sailing. You multiplied the revolutions in one second by four.

‘The answer’s three,’ Camilla said, but she wondered how Arnie had managed to work it out so quickly.

‘Great!’ Noah said. ‘You’re doing great!’ He was really very
nice, Camilla thought. The only awkward thing about Noah at work was that he didn’t like waste paper, which was a curious foible. She was not, repeat
not
, he said, to use expensive photocopy paper to take telephone messages or for her drawings, and he ticked off the secretary for giving it to her. He offered her a drawer full of multi-coloured oddments.

‘Use the scratch paper,’ he said. But the ‘scratch’ paper, as he called it, was usually roneo paper that had already been used on one side, and there was something distinctly less pleasurable to her in using the not quite pristine sheets. They did not glow with the same seductive promise and infinite possibility. But nonetheless, Noah was kind, even if he didn’t understand this obvious truth. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t ‘artistic’, Camilla thought. People always said that she and her mother were ‘artistic’.

Every evening that week Noah worked until six when they would go in the car to see Ali and take her a
Vogue
magazine, or grapes, or a paperback novel. Ali had a gory, terrifying gash held together with horrible black tailor’s tacking which went all the way from her navel right into where the nurses had shaved her pubic hair. Camilla had made the mistake of asking to see it and Ali had shown it to her. It had made her feel sick. Nonetheless, Ali looked very pretty, and calm and rested, Camilla thought. It came of having nothing to do except comb one’s hair and read and do embroidery. And to wait for meals which nurses brought on trays. Only poor Ali missed her cigarettes. Noah wouldn’t bring her any and had made her promise not to buy any from the trolley. Camilla wondered about the ethics of this, because it seemed bossy to her and none of his business, but he meant it for the best. He made Ali chew sugarless chewing gum instead, which left her mouth full of spittle. If she didn’t smoke at all for a whole week, Noah said, he would buy her recordings of all the song cycles of Schubert, even though he hated them so much himself he would have to plug his ears or go out when she played them. Ali said they were ‘lyrical’ in the most pure and beautiful
way and Camilla knew that some of them made her cry almost as much as
Girl of the Limberlost
made Camilla cry – especially the one about the land where lemon trees flowered and oranges grew. She heard her mother say that Noah ought to be moved by the songs just as she was, because his family must once have been German like hers, if his name was anything to go by. Noah just laughed and said that his family wasn’t German at all, but East European Jewish and that his father had changed his name to Glazer when he first went to the USA to make himself sound more up-market.

‘You’re probably related to Mervyn,’ Ali said. ‘Who knows? Perhaps you share a Polish grandmother?’

Camilla could tell that Noah was very fond of her mother. He always began his visits by kissing her on the mouth in that sloppy, wet way that grown-ups had, which seemed to go on for ever. Noah was ‘in love’ with her mother. Camilla knew this without any doubt because there was a big new glossy book on the piano at home, of Matisse paintings, which must have cost absolutely pounds, she guessed, and inside it said ‘For Al, because I love her’. Noah had given the book to her mother and had signed it with his name. Matisse was her mother’s favourite painter, but Matisse didn’t make Ali cry. Not like Schubert.

Camilla had observed that Noah was very good at buying Ali the right presents and concluded that this was the result of his being ‘in love’ with her. She knew that her mother had once been ‘in love’, a very long time ago, with a man called Thomas Adderley, who had been tall and dark and arty, and some people had used to whisper about him that he was half-coloured. If you were at all coloured where Ali came from, you were mostly not allowed to go to the same schools or universities as white people, but Ali had told her that certain people did – if their families were old enough or crafty enough to have got classified as white in the first place. Camilla presumed that Thomas Adderley’s family had been either old, or crafty, or both. Anyway, Thomas hadn’t minded, even when people had said to his face
that he was a half-caste, partly because he had not been racially prejudiced, which was extremely unusual, Ali had explained, and partly because he had been so brainy and so handsome that he had had the edge over the name-callers. Also he had followed his mother’s advice and had taken boxing lessons. Thomas’s mother hadn’t been like other people’s mothers who had worn high heels, and played tennis and complained about the servants, Ali said. She had worn men’s lace-ups, and had given sculpture classes at the technical college and had refused to have domestic help.

Ali hadn’t married Thomas. She had married somebody else whom she never talked about, other than once to say he had been a ‘brief irrelevance’, and that his family had been French and had sided with Hitler during the occupation. Camilla knew that it was a terrible thing to have sided with Hitler and when her father had been in one of his shouting moods he had once called Ali a ‘collaborator’ because her mother’s family had been German, and he said that Hitler had tried to kill him, which was puzzling, Camilla thought, because Hitler hadn’t ever gone to Southend, but Ali said afterwards that it was ‘poetic licence’ and, broadly speaking, true. Her father wrote poetry sometimes, but it wasn’t lovely, magic poetry like
Goblin Market
that you could understand. It was all fangs and blood. He had also recently written a book which she had heard her mother say was ‘purple’. It wasn’t that he couldn’t be a good writer, Ali had said to Noah. It was just that he hadn’t yet learned to read through his own stuff twelve times in a Sarcastic Bystander voice. It had made Noah laugh. Her mother was good at making Noah laugh. If her parents had ever been ‘in love’, then the idea merely suggested itself to Camilla that people didn’t always stay in love, which was horrible to believe, but perhaps sensible people like Noah always did?

It was strange to think of Noah being ‘in love’ at all, really, because he was quite old and he didn’t look anything like the pictures of men in
Real Life Photo-Love Stories
which one of the girls
had brought to school. In fact, he looked a bit like her father’s Uncle Morrie who had used to run a men’s outfitters in Southend and who used to wear those spiralled wire elasticky things like bicycle clips around his upper arms to hitch up his shirt sleeves. Noah didn’t wear those, of course, and he looked more important, but he
did
have short arms and he
did
wear dowdy, old-fashioned white underpants with Y-fronts that looked huge and embarrassing on the washing line over the bath. Camilla knew it was silly and childish to react that way but the Y-fronts bothered her. There was something about them that made her squeamish – like jock straps – because they were so exclusively for men. She was not sure if Y-fronts were so that men could pee without having the bother of undoing their trousers, or whether they had to do with that other strange and dreadful thing she knew men did with that disconcerting appendage which afflicted their nether parts. Did Y-fronts mean they could do it without even taking their underpants off? Ugh!

Mervyn’s underpants hadn’t had Y-fronts. They had been small black bikini pants and not very different from her mother’s pants really, except that the cloth had been thicker. In fact Ali had used to borrow them sometimes in cold weather which had made Mervyn furious, but then he had always been blowing up about something or other in that scary way. Camilla’s own feelings of relief about her father’s departure caused her frequent nightly sessions of fear and guilt, but these had suddenly abated in Noah’s house. Her father was a lot younger than Noah and he was more slim and natty-looking but for years now he had made her flinch and shrink. Camilla didn’t understand about people getting married and then making each other so miserable, because in story books they got married and they lived happily and had lots of children who went on picnics and came home from boarding school – that was unless they died first. It would be lovely to get married in a long dress and have confetti and lots of children, she thought, so long as you could adopt the children and not have to do that dreadful thing together in bed every time
you wanted to have another baby. But Noah wouldn’t make anybody unhappy if he were married to them because he was so sensible and quiet and fair. Only on that first morning before school she recalled that he hadn’t been altogether fair to her when she had needed his help with the sheets. At the time she had thought he was being really piggy and she had nearly cried, but she had soon forgiven him because the breakfast had been so good.