Noah's Ark (21 page)

‘Aren’t you?’ he said.

‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘I am. But how should it signify?’ Arnie laughed.

‘What’s up, Al?’ he said. ‘Those bastards didn’t like your pictures?’

‘Oh
them
,’ Ali said. ‘I don’t know. Say, Arnie, I am not enjoying this conversation. I ‘phoned to talk about you, not about me.’

‘Okay,’ Arnie said. ‘So just tell me first what happened.’

‘I never got there,’ she said, opting at once for candour. ‘I messed the whole thing up.’ There was a moment’s deadly silence. ‘Signal failure on the Underground,’ she said. ‘Cannon Street.’

‘Cannon
Street?’ he said.

‘Promise you won’t tell Noah,’ she said.

‘Call them for Chrissake, Al,’ he said. ‘It’s not that difficult.’ Ali clutched decisively at the knot of bedcover between her breasts and spoke with resolution. ‘I have put the arid plain behind me,’ she said.

‘Pardon me?’ he said.

‘Promise you won’t tell Noah,’ she said again. Arnie laughed. He enjoyed playing cloak and dagger with her against her
husband. As a thoroughly legitimate form of flirtation it often heightened her spirits. Her liveliness had always pleasantly engaged him.

‘My lips are sealed,’ he said. ‘You may rest assured, Mrs Glazer, that no word of this will ever reach the ears of the Master.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I have a message for you by the way. It’s a day late.’

‘The CV,’ he said. ‘Forget it. I talked with Noah. It’s dealt with. The whole thing is dealt with. I just flew in this morning in any case. You couldn’t have got me any earlier.’

‘I see,’ she said. ‘Well that’s a mercy, anyhow.’

‘My landlady is tampering with my fungi,’ Arnie said. ‘She has filled the air with noxious fumes. How would you like for to put me up tonight, Al?’

‘Love to,’ Ali said eagerly, reaching out for the balm of his company. ‘Have some supper with me. There’s only me and the children.’

‘It’s Friday,’ Arnie said. ‘I’m planning on working here till late. I’ll take a nap in the unit and work through till ten.’

‘Don’t count on it,’ Ali said caustically, through disappointment. ‘Your victim may well die.’

‘We all die, kid,’ he said. ‘So long.’

Ali interrupted her progress towards the railway station in Praed Street, where she had her ears pierced with a staple-gun and shot through with gold studs. The pain was momentarily intense, the blood loss slight, the satisfaction immeasurable. Through the act she felt a moment’s communion with Camilla who had pierced her ears at home using a block of ice and a safety pin passed through a candle flame. She knew immediately that Noah as usual had been right. Ear piercing was mutilation and as such it exactly met the case. The mental pain which had stirred with this second casting-off of Thomas wanted a counterbalancing agony in the flesh. It wanted incision and blood. With throbbing lobes aglow like neon lights, Ali bravely put the past behind her and boarded the two o’clock train.

It had been raining heavily all over Oxfordshire in Ali’s absence and was still raining now as the day turned towards teatime. Birds beaked themselves forlornly on city chimneypots and beyond the centre the air was greenly limp. Small mud lakes, like hippopotamus ponds in a model village, had appeared in the farm track which led to her house. On the sofa, Daniel Glazer was nesting under a quilt. The sound of the rain wrapped him soothingly after a painful fall. He was fast asleep but presented a parched blood-stained mouth. Where his upper-left incisor had been was now a jelly-textured gap. He had knocked his tooth out on a fence post at one thirty-five. By coincidence, at the same moment in Praed Street, a staple gun had pierced his mother’s right ear lobe. Mrs Gaitskell had wrapped the small rootless milk tooth in Kleenex and had placed it on the sitting-room mantelpiece for Daniel to put under his pillow that night. The fairy would come for sure, she said. She had no doubts at all. A tooth jolted from the infant gum through violent precipitation was as valid a collector’s item for any tooth-hoarding fairy as one which had loosened gradually in the course of maturation.

Ali was startled and upset. She had entered carrying a letter and a small parcel from the hall which had been delivered in her absence and she now tucked in at Daniel’s feet with these to hear Mrs Gaitskell’s reassurances. Both the letter and the parcel were from America. The first, from Noah’s mother, contained two very small, snowy-white hand towels monographed in satin with a cursive ‘G’. Towels for the doctor’s hands. A scented floral ‘notelet’, somewhat deficient in punctuation, fell from their virginal folds, and read as follows:

Dear Alison,

Over here we call these little towels ‘finger-tip towels’ you can never have too many believe me! Tell Noah that his grandson (my
great
grandson!!) has been accepted for the
Gifted Program!
What a clever boy I hope your Daniel goes the same way there was never a shortage of brains in the family especially with the
men of course!! Shane’s wife is due with the second one any day now God willing another brainbox but Lydia
insists
she’s hoping for a girl! No more news for now

Sincerely,

Mother

Ali wrestled with an immediate and perverse desire to consign the fingertip towels as floor-cloths for the kitchen. It had never ceased to jar with her that this remote and indiscriminate employer of exclamatory punctuation marks, this obsequious and doting propagandist for the male sex, should presume to address herself to Ali as ‘Mother’. A title earned by nurture, surely, not by contract? It belonged, in Ali’s view, to that most dear and quite other person who had quietly died fifteen years before in her daughter’s absence. A cloying usurper, Ali thought, a peddlar of undermining, homespun absurdities, and yet without her there would be no Noah. As to ‘the Brainbox’, whom Ali had never met, her feelings towards this young person were strongly antipathetic.

She supposed, looking back, that Camilla had been a ‘brainbox’ too, where Hattie and Daniel were characterised by a remarkable lack of academic precociousness on all fronts. She did not like to think that Camilla’s brains could have come from Mervyn Bobrow. Nor did she care for the attendant possibility that Mervyn was actually brighter than Noah, since Noah was so much nicer. Noah had once remarked to her that since, genetically speaking, the species was constantly driven towards the norm, exceptionally bright people tended to produce slightly less bright children. Ali had gained comfort from this snippet of miscellaneous knowledge, and had inverted it, for her own convenience in the case of the Brainbox, to imply that he derived his prodigious wits from maternal grandmother’s manifest deficiency in this area.

The letter was from Noah’s son Shane. It had overtaken the elder Mrs Glazer’s parcel en route and announced the birth of a
baby daughter weighing seven pounds and five ounces. Under the announcement, in a smug corollary, Mrs Shane Glazer had written ‘Born naturally and effortlessly’. Ali handed the card to Mrs Gaitskell.

‘Well I’m blowed,’ she said. ‘Effortlessly was it?’

‘If it was “natural” then it wouldn’t have been “effortless”,’ Ali said. ‘Effortless is only if somebody anaesthetises you and hacks you open.’ Mrs Gaitskell cackled knowingly.

‘All I know is I used to have ’em so bloody quick the midwife never could get to me on time,’ she said. ‘It’s always been the same in our family. Our Mum were just the same. The last one come so bloody quick she were all tore up before the doctor come, poor soul. She weren’t never the same after. One passage she had for the lot, ever after.’ Ali gorged on the horror of it. There was nobody like Mrs Gaitskell for putting into sobering perspective the woes of one’s own loins. Right now this macabre intelligence served to comfort Ali for the hollow yearning within her female parts.

‘Still I’ve always loved the kiddies,’ Mrs Gaitskell said warmly. She drew a glacier mint from her handbag and left it on the table for Daniel. Then she encased her perm in a rainproof rectangle of concertinaed plastic which she tied firmly under the chin and stepped hallwards to take her leave.

‘Oh my Gawd!’ she said suddenly. ‘It’s
him
out there. The one that burns the saucepans!’ Through glazed panels alongside Ali’s front door she had seen the head and shoulders of William Lister, wearing his house upon his back like a snail. ‘Him that has all them blessed postcards.’

‘Oh my God!’ Ali said. ‘Mrs Gaitskell, what shall I do?’ Mrs Gaitskell had no doubts. ‘Start with him as you mean to go on,’ she said firmly. ‘Get rid of him, Ali.’

William’s arrival had coincided with Hattie’s. Ali’s younger daughter burst rudely past him into the hall, clawing at her mother and calling out urgently, ‘Mummy can I have disco roller-skates? Rebecca’s got disco roller-skates. Please, Mummy. They’re so great! Becca’s only cost twenty-five pounds. Say yes, Mummy. Go on – please. Say yes!’ It was an invariable rule that one’s children showed up as grasping materialists in William Lister’s company. Ali had ceased to find it even mildly embarrassing. She stepped out into the porch, wearing Hattie like a ball and chain around her knees.

‘Hello, William,’ she said. Rebecca’s mother, Marion, having dropped Hattie, had meanwhile executed a confident three-point turn in the drive in her gleaming Peugeot and now paused to exchange brief, parting pleasantries with Ali through the rain. At the back window were visible a sea of small siblings and friends jostling to write their names in the steam of the window panes.

‘Many thanks!’ Ali called out. She was fond of Marion and in general enjoyed her brief, ironic exchanges with this rather highbrow mother sunk good-humouredly in the business of child-rearing.

‘Watch her head!’ Marion called back over the sound of the engine and the falling rain. ‘Mine have all got head-lice.’ Louse-talk was a currently fashionable form of taboo-breaking among certain subsections of the professional middle class, Ali had
decided. One-upmanship over head-lice was not a form of competitive behaviour indulged in by the humbler parents of her acquaintance. It was peculiar to the graduate group.

‘Hattie’s had them twice already,’ she said, wishing to hold her own, ‘don’t worry.’

‘Mine have them
all the time,’
Marion yelled extravagantly. ‘They reek constantly of disinfectant. We’ve just done the steel comb and cattle-dip routine for the umpteenth time. Louse corpses dropping in their hundreds all over the breakfast table.’ Ali laughed. She conceded Marion the victory.

‘What next?’ she said, feigning despair.

‘Anal worms,’ Marion called back triumphantly as she shifted into gear. ‘My lot have had those too.’

William was encased from head to foot in orange waterproof overalls. He was dripping rain in copious runnels into the door mat, and on to his sodden, ill-fitting shoes.

‘Is he staying here?’ Hattie said, with a marked and audible lack of enthusiam. ‘Why can’t he stay somewhere else?’

Ali squirmed but uttered no reproof. She could never find it in her to discourage in Hattie that admirable unblinking straight-ness in handling people which Noah – with greater tact admittedly – exhibited also. Hattie was not gorged on guilt. Where Ali had sacrificed all her childhood pocket money to the blind box, Hattie had always been of the opinion that the poor should ‘go to the bank’ for money. She spent her pocket money on trinkets and sweets. She was firmly of the opinion that two Remembrance Day poppies got cut-price at a half-pence each made better sense than one got for a round ten pence. She always giggled through prayers and had spread the belief throughout the junior school that the vicar kept a half-jack of whisky in the folds of his cassock. For these and other bold attributes Hattie’s company was sought unceasingly by great numbers of admiring little girls.

‘I’m not stopping,’ William said, pointedly rubbing his hip joint and limping into the hall. ‘I am perfectly willing to sleep under the stars tonight.’ Sharply he drew in breath and rubbed
again at his hip joint. ‘Sciatica,’ he said in a whisper. ‘Just a touch of sciatica – it’s nothing.’

‘Come in,’ Ali said. ‘Take your wet things off. Let’s have some tea.’ And she led the way to the kitchen.

William was ascetic. He was what Ali’s husband called an ‘ascetic pragmatist’. He was committed to poverty, Noah said, because he had no money and to chastity because he had no women. Since life had given him lots of practice, he had long been in the business of elevating these potential disadvantages to the status of a creed. On his lapel he wore a badge stamped ‘Pedal Power’ because he had no motor car and on his thrifty, recycled envelopes he pasted stickers which exhorted recipients to ‘Conserve Trees’. Noah, as the careful nurturer of nine espaliered plum trees, chose to consider this particular exhortation a gross impertinence, but Ali and Noah Glazer were neither of them people whose opinions William took into account. He would not in good conscience approve of either. Ali had had three marriages and wore expensive silk shirts. Decadence was her hallmark. Besides, once long ago in another country she had been the cause of his humiliation. She had lain on the grass under him at a galling initiation rite with every sign of self-possession, wholly indifferent to his agony and had connived thereafter with the enemy. William was endowed with an excellent memory and was a careful harbourer of grievance.

He had had a difficult adolescence. Having accompanied his parents from Sheffield to South Africa at the age of twelve he had shown, at nineteen, no sign of shedding his incongruous, home-boy style. In the context he wore his shorts always too long. He committed the local outrage of wearing his sandals with socks. On holidays, he wore canvas exercise shoes into the sea. In a land of plenty his mother skimped on butter. The violent sun still burned his neck bright turkey-red and provoked swelling half-moons of sweat which drenched the underarm seams of his shirts. His gentle post-war world of watery Bovril and rationed
sugar-lumps, of chlorinated indoor swimming pools and weekly baths, was always too much with him. He was no match for the indolent, brawny male philistines who roared their convertible sports cars into the student car park, or hurled their grass-stained rugger shorts at domestic servants for washing. After the ordeal of his high school days, which he had spent dodging bugle practice in the cadet corps, he had been drawn to Ali and to Thomas Adderley by a sound instinct for nosing out in them that touch of gentle aberration which made them less terrible than the rest. A similar sense of his own otherness had already drawn him into a dangerous flirtation with revolutionary politics. Now, twenty years later, as he watched Ali pour tea for him at the kitchen workboard, he regarded her with all the patronising contempt which he reserved for those of her kind who had never achieved the distinction of having had their passports impounded by the state police. There was precious little point in attempting to discuss his political work with her, he thought, since the woman was too busy fretting about her daughter’s guitar practice and her son’s lost tooth. William winced on his tea.