Noah's Ark (2 page)

‘Al,’ he said, ‘move it will you? I have a schedule.’

‘I will,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. But what are you doing with that card, Noah? How do you suppose he came to have such a card to hand, poor William? Does he keep a miscellany of
political uplift constantly about his person? In one of the pockets of his capacious rucksack perhaps?’

‘Search me,’ Noah said. ‘Make me some coffee would you, while I take a quick shower?’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘But can you please tell me something else, now, Noah. What am I going to do about the Bobrows’ “Impromptu Drink”? You’ll still be in America, you lucky man. Why do you think they go on asking us when we almost never accept? But think up some lovely excuses for me.’ Mervyn Bobrow was the second of Ali’s two ex-husbands. She had been divorced from him for over ten years, but he and his second wife Eva were the two people whom, above all others, she still loved best to hate. Even Noah was ready to admit that they were excellent material. He kissed her benignly on the forehead, amused as always by the extent to which other people could menace Ali. It was because she had always allowed people to approach her too closely, he thought. She had no distancing techniques. Noah had never got himself into such situations of one-sided exploitation. He had in turn been deeply in love with each of his two successive wives. First with Shirley and then much later with Ali, but one’s woman was altogether different. One was bound by loyalty and contractual commitment; one gave a lot and one demanded a whole lot in return. As an emotional investment a marriage was rational. Shirley, to his bitter disappointment, had turned out to be not at all strong on loyalty. She had been rather stronger on novelty. The apparatus of sexual intrigue had appeared to her as the spice of life, where for Noah it had merely appeared as bad form; an unacceptable housemaid’s tangle which was damaging to personal dignity. It gave him considerable satisfaction to know that Ali was monogamous; that Ali was constant. She was also more obliging about tailoring alterations. Noah’s air of brisk productive competence was being lent force that morning by the fact that he had an aeroplane to catch.

‘No problem,’ he said. ‘You tell the Bobrows no. There is no reason why you should have your time wasted by these people while I’m away. As to William –’ He paused to patronise her
tenderly in the hour of his leave-taking. ‘If William were to show up here tomorrow wanting food and shelter,’ he said, ‘what would you do, huh? Are you still the softest touch in town, or have I reformed you just a little?’

Ali smiled. ‘I’d tell him, “Sorry, I’ve got to ask my husband.”

That’s always a great turn-off with radical types. But “streaky rashers”, for God’s sake! What kind of creep would quibble about streaky rashers after dossing in a person’s house for weeks on end? I don’t understand it. And how was I to know they were
his
when they were in my fridge? He always tried to make a point of being no trouble, poor William. Like cooking up his own disgusting, economical food in my kitchen. He would not deign to share the succulent roast. No! He had needs to hover in wait for the bone – to make soup as he said. And two hours later there was the bone, left to boil dry and burned black on the cooker.’

‘He’s redressing the balance,’ Noah said dispassionately. ‘He works unpaid for higher causes. We have bedrooms to spare. QED. Forget it, baby. Life is full of jerks. Just don’t let him in.’

‘Curry powder in his scrambled eggs each morning,’ Ali said. ‘That’s not easy to forget. Oh God, Noah, throw that card away. It’s an obscenity.’ But Noah moved to replace it on the notice-board where Ali observed him unwittingly fixing a pin through Thomas Adderley’s left ankle. It made her wince.

‘Sweetheart, I want it right there,’ he said firmly. ‘So next time William shows, you’ll maybe remember what an asshole he is. You’ll maybe remember to go easy on compassion.’

‘He saves used matches,’ Ali said morbidly. ‘It’s supposed to make one feel extravagant. He won’t come again, don’t worry, Noah. He’s scared of you, I reckon.’

‘Good,’ Noah said. ‘For a person in the vanguard of revolution he scares easy. Make that coffee Al, while I get cleaned up. And for Chrissake,
stitch up my pants!’

Alone in the kitchen, Ali made coffee, applying to the task a habitual vagueness; not counting tablespoons and using too large
a pot. During the operation she paused again to glance up at the photograph on the pinboard. It was heartwarming but also disconcerting to her to find this impertinent lookalike staring down incongruously into her comfortable English kitchen when Thomas himself had belonged so firmly to her history and to quite another age and clime. And yet it was not altogether surprising. Thomas had always been elusive and unpredictable. He had been much given to appearing suddenly round corners, seeming to shake sparks of light from his springy, dark hair. One would not have been surprised to have found his head, like the head of Mr Apollinax, rolling under a chair, or grinning over a screen. Noah, by contrast, had nothing of the Cheshire Cat about him. He was never to be encountered without his body, so to speak. It had always been clear to Ali that Noah was all solidity and weight; that where Thomas had represented light, Noah represented weight. Noah was always laudably credible, where Thomas had been all fire and ice. Noah had always brought to bear upon her, not only the weight of his thirteen-odd stone, but the weight of his natural authority and of his million-dollar medical research grants from the US government.

Ali placed the coffee pot on the table together with two mugs and settled down promptly to turn up Noah’s trouser hems. Her old needlepoint workbox stood beside her on the floor, shredded before Noah’s time into dereliction by a long-dead favourite cat. There had been no cats in Noah’s time since he saw no need for domestic pets and, besides, the hair gave him asthma. To be without a cat was no serious deprivation for her these days since she had Noah and the children. It was only that her younger daughter Hattie wanted a kitten so badly as children sometimes did and would never take no for an answer. Of the three children, Hattie seemed to Ali the only one of determined and clear intent, like Noah. Ali was already dressed, having been into town that morning early to shop on Noah’s behalf. She had bought him, as instructed, a new linen jacket and two pairs of Marks and Spencer linen trousers in size thirty-eight because size thirty-six
didn’t fit him any more. Ali had not known her husband as a young man but she knew from a few old photographs that he had never been a sylph-like male, even in youth. He had never been one who could have draped himself elegantly alongside a mantelpiece and looked passably like Shelley. Noah was too busy to do his own shopping and hated to shop in England anyway, because he was American. Shopping, along with loyalty and tailoring alterations, was a service he required from Ali.

There was a seductive shaft of spring sunlight which fell, not from Thomas Adderley’s sunlit, redwood glade, but from the window whence it fell upon the bowl of oranges on Ali’s kitchen table, stippled by shadows from the bay tree and from the buds of Noah’s climbing plants beyond the casement. The oranges were very orange, she thought. Much too orange, really, even for oranges. In the place where she had grown up, oranges hadn’t come that orange. They had usually been greenish yellow. She had once told this to her son Daniel, but he hadn’t believed her ‘They must have been lemons,’ he said, with his powerful four-year-old certainties.

Ali’s son had foreign parents – as Ali had had before him, so she understood. She could remember from her own childhood the oddity of looking out from a subtropical veranda on to flamboyant bougainvillaea and listening to her mother’s tales of the wine cellar at
Lindenstrasse vier und achtzig
and of the laundry in the loft gone stiff in the night with frost. ‘White sheets standing like ghosts,’ her mother had used to say. But Ali hadn’t known what cellars and lofts were, because all the houses she had ever seen had been single-storeyed and built on shallow eighteen-inch stilts to keep the termites from gnawing at the floorboards. And there was the Berlin Zoo, her mother would say, where the ice bear had paced at the railings and where Ali’s uncle, Karl Heinrich, had once got his head stuck as a child. ‘And muffs,’ Ali’s mother had said with feeling, remembering nights at the Berlin Opera House,
‘Ach Gott,
I had countless muffs.
Aber
countless muffs!’ Ali’s mother had watched
Gotterdammerung
once in a box at the Opera House in
buttoned boots and a muff. Like in Tolstoy. How life had uprooted them all, leaving one generation after another sighing always for that land where lemon trees flowered and golden oranges shone out in the dark. Having Thomas’s photograph on the wall had suddenly made Ali feel like an exile.

‘Oranges aren’t ever not orange, Mummy,’ Daniel had said reproachfully, on the occasion of this conversation.

‘Yes, they are,’ Ali had said, laughing, patting the backs of his inviting solid little legs. ‘They get sprayed with chemicals to make them so orange.’

‘They don’t,’ Daniel had said.

‘They do,’ she said, ‘ask Noah.’ The children loved her more, but Noah was the one they believed, because he had the resources of science to back his utterance. Instead of running for the encyclopaedia when somebody asked a question relating to tear ducts or the ozone layer, Ali would say to ask Noah. This was a great convenience she found, but odd since answering her little ones’ questions was precisely the role for which she had been reared.

‘You
gels,’
her headmistress had been wont to say, in order to egg her pupils on to greater application, ‘You
gels
are the mothers of the future.’ That’s what it had all been for. All that knowledge which one had assimilated with such enthusiasm and skill. It had been for somebody else. Never for oneself. Noah, in his admittedly patriarchal way, was the only person who had ever made her feel that she could use it in her own interest. Anyway, children never asked questions in the tradition of girls’ high schools. They always asked you what was a laser and which whale had the most teeth and why did smoking give you lung disease. Only occasionally a question or two requiring a little speculation. Like whether or not God had servants or was he a black man or a white man. Never, was he a man? Of course he was a man! All that rash and bold enterprise required in creating the universe; it had to be male. Daniel, if questioned, would have been quite as clear about it as he was resolute about
Lassie
on the
television. Lassie was a boy dog, Daniel said, while Hattie crowed and jeered. He
was
a boy. He
was.
By the time children were at all interested in the things one knew about – like Dadaism for instance – they no longer wanted one’s opinion on anything. Take Camilla. Beautiful grown-up Camilla, with Mervyn Bobrow’s crazy yellow eyes. Whenever she thought about Camilla, Ali’s heart beat faster with an entrenched habit of maternal anxiety.

All the while her fingers worked at the trouser hems. Ali was a practised needlewoman and Noah was pressed for time. He had, as he had said, to ‘shift his ass’. Ali had always cherished this particular expression as her husband’s most forceful idiomatic peculiarity.

The oranges on Ali’s kitchen table were in a high glazed white china fruit bowl, latticed like basket weave. She had bought the bowl once in an auction sale and loved it dearly, as she loved a lot of the old things she had painstakingly accumulated about her in twenty years of keeping house. ‘Spinster’s junk,’ Noah had called it some ten years before on the day he had first taken her to bed. Some of it had promptly given him asthma. All the old pillows, the dried flowers harbouring house-dust mites, and the old embroideries. Noah had steadily cut the clutter down to size. Some of the stuff had outlasted Ali’s previous two husbands and he meant to make damn sure it didn’t outlast him too. But he had no objection to the fruit bowl. He had called it a ‘beautiful piece’ when they met. ‘You have some beautiful pieces,’ he had said to her. The phrase had embarrassed her slightly, as some of his phrases still did. A whiff of alien cliche.

‘Oh that,’ she had said. ‘Yes, well, I only like it I suppose, because I wasn’t ever allowed to like anything that was got up to look like something else when I was a child. I wasn’t allowed to like plastic tablecloths that were made to look like lace, you see, or salt cellars that looked like tortoises – not unless they were
Benvenuto Cellini of course. I grew up in a dictatorship of tasteful Bauhaus prudery –’

‘You’re an artist,’ Noah had said promptly, who had never heard of Benvenuto Cellini and had not much idea of what Bauhaus prudery meant, but he could see that she hung her curtains from brass rings on broom handles and kept calligrapher’s pens in a marmalade jar.

‘I’m just a person who likes pressed flowers and old lace,’ she had said, fearing that she had sounded pretentious. And then, though she had hardly known him, but had observed that his shoulders were reassuringly wide, she had suddenly told him how much she had loved the Zulu housemaid’s cottage jampot as a child and had often begged her mother to buy one the same. A multi-coloured cube it was, with china roses climbing in a basrelief around the front door and the lid made into a thatched roof and the knob on top made into a chimney. She had naturally had no foreknowledge then that Noah was soon to become the roof and cornerstone. Nor that he would bestir himself to grow flowering plants to clamber over the portals. Thanks to Noah, the jampot house had become all hers. She had not known this as a child when her mother had so adamantly refused to buy her one. Ali’s mother wouldn’t have been seen dead with such a tasteless hybrid in her house full of streamlined birchwood and steel. Her own father had been a Bauhaus architect, and she had always had standards to protect. Ali’s mother had once sat on the knee of Walter Gropius as a small child, and had also once – this much, much more exciting – shaken the hand of Roald Amundsen on a boat in the North Sea. He was a nice old man, Ali’s mother had said, but Ali knew he was really a wicked hun explorer who had beaten our own dear Captain Scott to the South Pole by the unscrupulous and un-English use of dogs. The history teacher had said so with all the zeal of an Englishwoman abroad.