Noah's Ark (19 page)

‘It wouldn’t be
quite
so bad if she’d worn a bra and shaved under her arms,’ she said, but there was no accounting for adults’ tastes. None at all, Hattie thought.

Thomas came late. For almost an hour Ali stood at Paddington Station, staring into the Underground entrance where it gave into the forecourt of the mainline station and wrestled against despair. A persistent breeze had goose-pimpled her arms under the thin grey silk of her jacket and she felt it carve more deeply into those lines of middle age which had recently begun to appear around her mouth. The unaccustomed smartness of her clothes had left her feeling uncomfortably like a jilted schoolmarm and she longed to be back in her jeans. But Thomas came at last, taking the stairs three at a time on his prodigious legs and bearing an abject and wholly genuine tale of signal failure at Cannon Street. Ali breathed relief as he kissed her and took her arm. Being with him in those first few moments lifted her heart like a fairground balloon, high above the guards and stragglers at the platform gates. He was so unbelievably the same, but for the enhancing wrinkles around his clear blue eyes and for his immaculate flannel suit.

‘Thomas,’ she said, with a mock severity, because the suit went so against her memory of his dress. ‘You are wearing a suit!’

‘So are you,’ he said and he kissed her and laughed and kissed her again.

‘Not flannel,’ she said. ‘Mine is not flannel and I don’t have a tie.’ Thomas promptly loosened his tie. He hung it, drunkenly rejoicing, around her neck. He had been of old the only loony dresser, she recalled, on a campus full of iron-in creases and
Sta-Prest shirts. He had been the only man to bestride the aisles of the lecture halls in canvas shoes without socks; the only man who had not carried a briefcase with lecture notes. Thomas had kept no lecture notes at all, and neither, by example, had she. It had been a point of mutual pride with them to carry all knowledge in the head. He had sat beside her in lectures with his arms folded and with his immoderate legs stretched out sideways into the aisles.

‘I’m lunching with a theatre manager at one,’ Thomas said, sounding for all the world like a regular grown-up. ‘Hence the suit. But come. We have all morning together. First I need coffee and so do you.’

‘Not me,’ Ali said. ‘I drank two quarts of coffee on the train. I was nervous.’ Thomas laughed. When he laughed his features appeared momentarily to break up into sparkling fragments and then to come together again, like water disturbed by a pebble. He was all fire and water, Ali thought extravagantly. He was all air and earth.

In the buffet, Thomas withdrew his arm and put a table between them. He lit cigarettes and tanked himself up with refills of railway coffee while Ali stared into the deepened nicotine stains between his bony central fingers and found that she had lived too long with Noah not to suffer vicariously for the violation of his lungs. It was undoubtedly good to be alone with him after all that time and yet – now that he had put the distance of the table between them – she discovered within herself a stirring of that inconvenient awe which of old had always accompanied his presence. In the past, Thomas, always set apart from the rest by his height, his dark skin, his heroic and mildly vagrant habits, had not only given shape to her girlish romanticism. He had, by those very same attributes, inspired a kind of awe which had inhibited physical approach. But now? She wished so much to banish the table and to have his arm around her; to have him embrace her before too much misgiving set in.

Thomas had seated himself opposite her with his back to the
buffet clock and she saw that he wore no wrist watch. For a man to be without a watch seemed to her faintly inappropriate these days after Noah’s long example. The clock was making its way towards eleven-fifteen and Thomas’s expansiveness with the time began to play upon her nerves. He had come a whole hour late and was due to lunch with a theatre manager. For her own part, Mrs Gaitskell had been contracted to watch over Daniel until school came out, but not beyond that time. Mrs Gaitskell had, as always, made things perfectly clear. She needed to be home by four-thirty to prepare her husband his tea. This was a rule of iron with her. She had been known to pass up charabanc trips to the seaside or to West End comedy shows in the cause of his tea. There was no pointing out that as a consenting adult he might find it possible – even broadening – to hazard the occasional frying of his own egg. To have voiced such a proposition would have been an impertinent trespass within another person’s life and Ali would not do it. She had undertaken without fail to return by the two o’clock train.

Thoughts of the diaphragm in her handbag now intruded to undermine her poise. Had Thomas intended merely that they should pass the morning in the National Gallery? Or take a half-hour stroll together along the Embankment pooling their more recent thoughts on the work of Bertolt Brecht? A nervy undergraduate impulse came over her to close the distance between them by a resolute brightness in discourse which would make him admire her and would draw him as close to her as the kiss and the arm with which he had greeted her but had now withdrawn.

‘What’s the matter?’ Thomas said after a while. Ali found that her hands were shaking slightly in her lap.

‘Nothing really,’ she said. ‘I suppose I was just thinking how much you always scared me in the past.’

‘Me?’
Thomas said.
’Me
scare
you
? You’ve got to be joking.’

‘Mainly by those unreal, rather larger-than-life looks you have,’ Ali said. ‘I recently saw your double on a cigarette ad. You were behaving masterfully with a white stallion.’

‘And what about you, Alison?’ he said. ‘Talking of looks. Not only did you always look like the Ice Queen in person, but you frequently beat me at class essays.’

‘Essays,’
Ali said in disbelief. ‘You were bothered about essay marks? I always assumed your concerns were global.’

‘Furthermore, you got yourself entangled pretty smartish with that yobbo from the Freshers’ Reception Committee,’ Thomas said. ‘What chance was there for me?’

‘Oh God!’ Ali said. ‘What a mix-up.’

‘Not only did you hob-nob with the senior men from the word go,’ Thomas said, rubbing it in with gusto, ‘but you were better at the work than I was.’

‘Rubbish,’ Ali said. ‘I was more of a swot, that’s all.’

‘Then you got married,’ Thomas said. ‘I got drunk on your wedding day. Does that flatter you? He’s made a lot of money, your ex. There’s a pile to be made out of understanding concrete in Johannesburg.’ Ali detected, in this last remark, elements of snobbery and bitterness which saddened her for a moment, but she shook it off.

‘Thomas,’ Ali said morbidly, ‘our signals failed us long before Cannon Street. I’m sorry.’

‘That’s okay,’ Thomas said, with every sign of fortitude. ‘Cheers!’ he said and he drained his Max-Pax, but Ali still brooded on the past.

‘There was a notion strongly prevalent at the time that girls got married,’ she said apologetically. ‘As to the man, he was the one that happened to choose me. On the whole one didn’t choose. That would have been unthinkably strident. One waited to be chosen – just as one waited to be chosen as a waltzing partner at the Saturday school of ballroom dancing.’

‘I never took ballroom dancing lessons,’ Thomas said. ‘How was I to know all this?’

‘I do admit that there were certain young women who chose for themselves,’ Ali said, ‘but they were the ones who had the art of making initiative look like submission. In short they had
feminine wiles. I never had any of those. All I had was a head full of nineteenth-century verse.’

‘Me too,’ Thomas said. ‘Stuffed with Keats.’

‘And there
was
the business of your being such a hobo,’ Ali said guardedly. ‘I suppose my timorous instincts led me to a liaison with a yobbo in preference to a hobo. I imagined that you were too unconventional ever to get married. But just look at you now in your three-piece suit! You probably got married in church. You probably have a nice little monthly savings account with the Standard Bank of South Africa. You probably have two titled aunts living quietly in Bournemouth.’

‘Hove,’ Thomas said promptly. ‘I have one titled aunt in Hove, living in reduced circumstances.’

‘Well there you are!’ Ali said. ‘And to think I thought you were disreputable, just because you lived in a garage and went without socks. You may pity me now for my parochial assumptions. But dearest Thomas are you married? Please tell me about your wife.’ Thomas drew himself up a little primly.

‘My wife is an excellent woman who has no part in this morning’s engagement,’ he said with daunting propriety. ‘Alison, I do not propose to discuss my domestic affairs with you.’

‘How about your children then?’ Ali said hopefully. ‘Do you have any?’

‘Three,’ Thomas said. ‘A boy and two girls. My boy is nineteen.’

‘Snap!’ Ali said. ‘I have two girls and a boy. My older daughter is twenty. Photographs please.’

‘I don’t have any with me,’ Thomas said. ‘I don’t carry my children about with me in my pockets, so to speak.’ Ali smiled to think how predictably history was here repeating itself; that Thomas was raising his children in a style which would leave them free to doss in garages while she was confining and smothering hers with a great excess of care and love. She drew from her handbag a threesome of her own photographs which she handed to him with pride. Daniel prowling among cow parsley in
his baseball cap; Hattie swinging on a gate with her face to the wind; Camilla recumbent, in a hammock, eating black olives from a conical paper bag. Delicious, sensual pictures. Ali could not look at them without drawing breath in wonder at her children’s beauty.

‘And are you happily married?’ Thomas said, as he leafed through the photographs.

‘Oh yes,’ Ali said. She suspected that he had asked the question more to be absolved from feelings of responsibility for her than to concern himself for her sake, but she saw this as unobjectionable and took no offence. ‘Third time lucky,’ she said brightly. ‘He’s my third husband.’

Thomas smiled at her sceptically. ‘I thought that only film stars got married three times,’ he said.

‘And crazies,’ Ali said. ‘You’d like him, Mot. He’s a nice, reliable Jewish medic who pays the mortgage and digs the garden at weekends. He’s exactly the sort of person Mrs Horowitz always wanted for Julie, but there you are. I married him instead. I wonder sometimes about Julie. Whether she ever did get married. We lost each other somewhere in the mists of time. I believe she went to Paris.’

‘She’s back,’ Thomas said. ‘For good. She never got married. I see her from time to time. She came back on her parents’ account. Her father has Parkinson’s disease and her mother is senile. That’s life too, I suppose. Here, have your pictures back. This older girl of yours – she’s a real beauty, isn’t she? I ought to introduce her to my son.’

‘No thanks!’ Ali said overhastily, since even in jest the idea alarmed her as a tempting form of vicarious gratification.

‘I have thought that it would be nice to protect her from too much charisma in men,’ she said, embarking with a false brightness upon what sounded like a conversational set-piece. ‘Right now she’s safe as houses. Her young men are all characterised by a remarkable lack of personal magnetism. I believe that she goes to bed with them merely to gather experience.’

Thomas smiled at her indulgently, being amused by the idea. Having stubbed out his fourth cigarette, he was ready to go, but Ali kept on talking.

‘Life is very different for these children,’ she said. ‘They don’t grow up in Cambridge with that enveloping awareness of injustice. Not the way we did. Not the way your children will. One of my dear Camilla’s men plays Scott Joplin on a piano which he keeps in the front garden. The instrument stands knee-deep in buttercups. When it rains he goes out and gives it an oilcloth. There’s another one – a vicar’s son – who wears green hair and carries A. E. Housman in his breast pocket. They all of them talk as if the purpose of life were to play Puck in trilby and spats in the latest college production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
We were not like that.’

‘No,’ Thomas said absently. ‘I suppose not.’

‘There were too many things which poisoned the time and the place for us,’ Ali said thoughtfully. ‘Had one been young in Cambridge one would possibly have demanded so much more for oneself. But being young in a place which manifestly denied the most basic personal freedoms to most of its people – how could one have hung up one’s tender youthful conscience and pressed one’s own personal causes? I believed, I think, in some half-formulated way, that I had no right to care about whom I married. That was wicked rubbish, of course, but I believed it.’

Thomas reached out then and put the palm of his hand on her cheek.

‘It’s all ancient history, Alison,’ he said. ‘You oughtn’t to let it intrude like this. It was all a long time ago.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know.’

‘You talk too much,’ he said. ‘Do you know that? You always did. You always consumed your time with me delivering lucid monologues when you ought to have been in my bed.’

‘Yes,’ Ali said again. ‘I know.’

‘I don’t know what you have in mind for this morning,’
Thomas said, at last, ‘but I propose that we find a room somewhere.’

First, Thomas announced festively, as they left the buffet, the occasion called for wine. They would procure a decent bottle of chilled wine, he said, and would use it the more to prolong and savour the act which they had been more than twenty years in coming to. It began to dawn on Ali that Thomas had no sense of time. In this he was not unlike herself. She wondered as they walked arm in arm to the victualler why the wine should seem so necessary, given the run on time. It crossed her mind that Thomas, being, as he clearly was, such a nice man, such a loyal husband, so much less unconventional than she had always thought, could not commit adultery without first getting slightly drunk. The idea was a comfort to her; that he, as she, was perhaps wholly green in the procedures of this urgently beckoning sin.