Noah's Ark (13 page)

‘Excuse me,’ Camilla had said politely, a little puffed with effort. ‘I think I need help. I don’t think I can lift my sheets out of the bath.’ She was standing in the doorway with the sleeves of her school shirt pushed up and her knuckles red from hot water. Ali had told her to wash her own sheets in the mornings while she was at Noah’s and to ask him for help if lifting them wet was difficult. And Noah, it had seemed to her, was doing nothing: just drinking coffee and reading his newspaper.

‘I’m busy,’ he said. Shy as she was, Camilla fixed her wonderful eyes on him with a scepticism which was lost upon him because he didn’t look up.

‘You’re just reading the bloody newspaper!’ she said.

‘Watch your language,’ Noah said. ‘I happen to be busy with the news right now.’
’Nooz’,
he said. ‘Busy with the
nooz.’
Camilla suppressed an urge to pull tongues – an instinct towards lively defiance which was as unusual in her as blasphemous adjectives.

‘Listen, Pumpkin,’ Noah said. ‘You have a choice here, as I see it. In my house you either wash those sheets yourself or you do without sheets. I don’t mind. If it saves on labour, go ahead and pee right on the mattress next time.’

‘I
have
washed them,’ Camilla said. ‘But they’re heavy. And what will I do if I miss my bus?’

‘You’ll get up a half-hour earlier tomorrow,’ Noah said. ‘Clothes pins are on the line. Try not to drip water over my floors, okay?’ At this point, all unbeknown to him, she had nearly cried. ‘Don’t worry about the bus,’ he said. ‘I’m planning to take you in the car.’

In all honesty the sheets were not all that difficult to lift once she really tried, because they were polycotton, form-fitted sheets and lighter than her mother’s, which were flannel and were also as old as the hills and nearly all with the sides stitched to the middles, leaving an uncomfortable seam down the centre.

For breakfast Noah made her toast and a soft-boiled egg which he gave her, not in an eggcup, but whole and shelled in a coddling dish. She supposed this to be because he was American. He himself ate what looked to her like raw porridge with yoghurt. Or was it buttermilk? It was not that nice, sugary yoghurt such as she had chosen for school, but the kind that was like sour milk with lumps in it. The relief of having the sheets under her belt and the knowledge that she was to have a lift to school in the car brought on such a feeling of wellbeing in Camilla that it induced a burst of bold cultural insularity which warmed Noah’s heart and made them firm friends. She glanced with yellow-eyed unease at his bowl of mixed grains daubed with clods of milk ferment, and said:

‘Do you eat that raw porridge stuff because you’re American?’ Noah laughed.

‘Go brush your teeth,’ he said, ‘and get your school bag.’ By the afternoon he had bought her a tiny microchip alarm clock to help her wake up on time, but although she hardly
touched
the buttons something must have gone very wrong with it, because next morning when Noah woke her, he said it had played the ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’ twice over in the small hours.

‘You messed about with it,’ he said. Camilla bit her lip.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ she said. ‘Honestly Noah, and it wouldn’t have woken me anyway. I used to have one with brass bells on top that I could stand on a tin plate.’

‘Jesus!’ Noah said. ‘You know something? You’re a whole lot like your mother.’ Camilla giggled, because, although she knew he was criticising her, she was aware that, since he liked her mother so much, it could only mean that he liked her too. Admittedly Ali had never used to pee in her bed as a girl.
Camilla felt oddly warm then, under the night’s covers, and realised that this was because her bed was dry. She drew her knees up in surprise and knocked the clock from Noah’s hands.

‘Noah,’ she said. ‘Excuse me, but I haven’t wet my bed. I don’t seem to have peed in my bed, Noah.’

‘Congratulations,’ Noah said, deadpan, wishing to hide his own surprise.

‘Why not, do you think?’ she said.

‘Search me,’ Noah said, who had not much idea. But ten years later he still had the fold-up bed in his study with its single, very large urine stain. The rubber sheet had proved altogether inadequate on what had turned out to be the last night Camilla ever wet her bed. The size of the stain was not surprising since Noah, absent-mindedly, had let her drink two glasses of Seven-Up in the pub and had made her the hot chocolate too. But he hadn’t given it a thought, since he had had things to talk over with Arnie and, besides, he had been inwardly worried sick about Ali.

There was only one curious incident relating to Mervyn, which took place on the Friday before Ali’s discharge from hospital. She had asked for the book on Matisse, and Noah and Camilla had entered the house to get it for her.

‘It’s on the piano,’ Camilla said, but it wasn’t.

‘She’s put it someplace else,’ Noah said, but then Camilla saw his eyes fix on the broken catch of the back sash window and she saw him tense with annoyance.

‘It’s always been like that,’ she said, thinking to reassure him. ‘It’s been broken like that for donkey’s years.’

‘Holy shit!’ Noah said angrily. Nothing else was gone except the iron.

Camilla didn’t come into the ward next visiting time, because she was busy outside in the hospital grounds with Arnie. Having laid her a bet, Arnie was now timing her with a stop watch as she ran the perimeter of the hospital fence at a creditable sprint, on
those wonderful, long child legs which from the first he had so much admired.

‘Use your toes!’ Arnie was calling after her with gusto. ‘Toes, Cam! Run on your toes, kid!’

‘File a divorce petition against the sonofabitch,’ Noah was saying within. ‘Do it, Al. Anything you care to pin on him: desertion, adultery, unreasonable behaviour. It’s a pushover. Do it now. That way you’ll hang on to the house.’

‘You shouldn’t have changed the locks, Noah,’ Ali said. ‘Dearest Noah, I do wish that you hadn’t. That’s why he’s taken my book. It’s tit for tat, that’s all. He won’t do it again. Oh hell, but I loved that book.’

‘And the iron?’ Noah said angrily. ‘How about the iron? You love that too. And how about me? Where do I stand in your affections? Somewhere between Matisse and the iron?’

‘Oh Noah,’ Ali said. ‘Please.’

‘You’re behaving like a door mat, Al,’ Noah said. ‘It’s small wonder that he craps all over you.’

Noah proposed marriage to her after a quarrel precipitated by her neighbours and an episode over a rabbit. ‘For a nicely brought up, hardworking lady,’ he said one evening, ‘you sure have some seriously scrambled friends.’

‘Have I?’ Ali said. It gave her a small jolt to have her neighbourhood callers defined as ‘friends’. ‘Friends’ were a feature of one’s girlhood; a thing one had put away upon marriage. ‘Friends’ were the people like Julie Horowitz with whom one had shared one’s homework, shared one’s aspirations, even at times shared one’s precious black stovepipe trousers. ‘Friends’ were the people with whom one had giggled in the ranks of the Saturday school of ballroom dancing, wearing one’s rustling starched petticoats tacked up at the back with makeshift green thread. The rite of marriage demoted female friends, at a stroke, to the status of a music hall joke. They became ‘the gaggle’ and the ‘hen-party’. Two or more of them gathered together could command a dubious institutional legitimacy in the baby shower and the coffee morning, but it was never again the same.

‘Perhaps I’m scrambled too,’ Ali said flippantly, in the hope of deflecting attention from her neighbours who clearly bothered him. ‘Could it be a case of like finding like?’

‘You have cleaner fingernails,’ he said. Then he turned aside to confront the doorway. ‘Goodbye,’ he said firmly, addressing this
deterrent greeting not to Ali, but to a threesome of uninvited children who had appeared at her door in the hope of gaining entry. Noah had by this time appointed himself expeller of unwelcome children who intruded upon his own and Ali’s evenings together. In this role he would plant his wide shoulders squarely in the doorway and pronounce the single word ‘goodbye’ with a wondrously intimidating effect. He had not yet got round to expelling the adults. Not yet. Not until the night of the rabbit, which was soon to come.

‘You’re a pearl cast among swine,’ Noah said. ‘Make no mistake, sweetheart.’

‘Aren’t you merely saying that I’m a more socially presentable egg-flip than some others of my sex around here?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you being elitist, Noah?’

‘Oh bullshit,’ Noah said. ‘You’re a lady, Al. It shines out a mile. You may be a little eccentric, but you’re a real lady.’ Ali laughed at this tautological shamelessness.

‘Well, exactly,’ she said. For Noah, no amount of handwringing ‘quim introspection’ on Ali’s part would alter the obvious fact that among the ‘alternative’ people who came to her door – bringing toddlers whom they licensed to pee on her rugs, to break Camilla’s dolls, to grind fish fingers into her floors, or to drag bedding all over her house, while they confided to her patient ear their drug addiction, their multiple orgasms, their childhood rapes – among these there were for sure no ladies. Some were unwashed and others took drugs. All were endlessly obsessed with themselves.

Had he not recently spent an entire evening in Ali’s house in the company of a demented female who had asserted repeatedly that her eardrums would haemorrhage if she ate any bread but German linseed bread? Had he not been obliged to hear another expand – without respect either for brevity or discretion – upon the subject of her ‘dry cunt’ syndrome? Noah was confirmed in a belief that Mervyn Bobrow had dumped upon his weary, dancing princess the role of unpaid neighbourhood psychiatric
counsellor and that the job had worn her out until she had been obliged to hang up her dancing shoes.

‘Some people are always unlucky,’ Ali said, countering with a belief in the Evil Eye. ‘Bad luck seeks them out.’

One of Ali’s callers was injudicious enough to proposition him during the weeks of Ali’s convalescence, and so shocked him with the quality of her disloyalty that he made a point of turning her down in Ali’s hearing by saying that he feared ‘the clap’. This frankly brutal response had resulted in a prompt and admirable reduction in the numbers who came through Ali’s door in the evenings but in the short run it had been counterproductive. It had made Ali both furious and hostile.

‘What sort of unspeakable bloody bastard are you that you go undermining people like that?’ she said, almost before the door had closed behind the intruder. ‘Isn’t it fairly obvious she’s vulnerable as all hell? I hope you’re proud of yourself.’

‘Al,’ Noah said. ‘I was doing you a favour.’

‘Some favour!’ she said. ‘I don’t need your favours.’ This last, given her recent history of dependence upon him, perhaps justly he considered to be untrue, but he let it pass. ‘I thought that you were kind,’ she said, ‘but you’re kind only to people you like. That’s cheap; that’s easy. All manner of miserable bastards can be kind to children and lap dogs. Even to certain hand-picked respectable women.’

‘Al,’ Noah said. ‘Let’s not even discuss it. Just get it straight that I do not propose to lease out compassion like a goddam community centre. I don’t have the time. I also don’t intend that you and I should quarrel over an expendable, goddam unwashed tramp. Understood?’

In response to this final unchecked heresy, Ali almost choked. Her voice cracked as she spoke.

‘Go away,’ she said. ‘You are a cosy medic in handmade shoes and I hate you.’

‘Me!’ Noah said. ‘You’re asking me to leave? You harbour all these dubious cranks and it’s
me
you’re asking to leave?’

‘Go!’ Ali said. ‘Oh please, for God’s sake, go.’

Noah wrenched angrily at the catch which he had recently had fitted to her front door.

‘You’re gonna be sorry,’ he said. ‘I have a whole lot more to give.’

On both counts he was of course right. She was sorry, but then so was he. Noah was not in general readily forthcoming with apologies – a habit born perhaps of his profession where to apologise is often to admit liability. It was not surprising then that Ali was the one to say sorry first. She came to his door two days later in a state of underslept conciliation.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I think you were wrong in what you did but I was extreme. I do see that you were defending me.’

‘Come in,’ Noah said. ‘I’m very glad to see you.’ Having closed the door behind her he blew into the palms of her hands which were cold since the autumn had been showing signs of giving way early to winter. ‘You ought to wear gloves.’

‘I was not only unfair to you, I was probably also uncouth,’ she said.

‘Unfair, maybe, but not uncouth,’ he said. ‘I believe you to be quite unshakeably couth.’

‘Please know that you are speaking to a person who has thrown clay flowerpots on to the head of Mervyn Bobrow from upstairs windows,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to be deluded about me.’

Noah laughed. ‘There’s only one thing to be said against such basically laudable conduct,’ he said, ‘and that is the possibility of having to explain a fractured skull to the coroner.’ Ali sat down, on the foot end of the reclining dentist’s chair which was really quite remarkably comfortable.

‘I wanted to tell you that I once had the clap.’ she said. ‘Once when I was sixteen.’

‘Pardon me?’ he said.

‘I said that I once had the clap,’ she said. ‘Gonorrhoea. I wanted to tell you that.’

‘There is no disgrace in contracting a sexually transmitted
disease,’ Noah said. ‘The disgrace lies in knowingly passing it on.’ He paused suddenly as if hit by a blow from falling clay flowerpots. ‘Excuse me, you said sixteen?
Sweet Jesus, Al, did you say sixteen?’

‘I said sixteen’ she said. ‘The first time I ever took my knickers off for a man. The Evil Eye as I told you. You see how grievously it afflicts my sex. I was so bloody innocent in those days that I took my itch to the family doctor, who promptly informed my nice straightlaced mother. But you will be pleased to hear that I never passed it on. I practised abstinence religiously for the next two years until I got married. I wore a kind of two-way-stretch chastity belt on all my evenings out. A fearsome Lycra item called a Tiger Grip and quite impenetrable. My first husband was so infuriated by it that he married me just to get the damn thing off.’