Noah's Ark (32 page)

‘On the contrary, I will love myself for it,’ Ali said. ‘What I am saying to you, William Lister, is get out of my house! Take your stinking streaky rashers and your recycled matches and never darken my doorstep again.’

Further verbal sparring was aborted by the ringing of the telephone.

‘It’ll be that wrong number again,’ William said. ‘I’ve been getting it the whole week I’ve been here. Some demented crone keeps ringing up from a call-box and raving about a fire.’ Ali nonetheless made haste to answer it, as William moved for his rucksack. By the time she had come off the telephone – though
the cheque for the kettle was nowhere, and the brassiere and the grate were untouched – William had mercifully gone from her house. The caller was old Margaret whose voice quavered more thinly than ever.

‘They’ve got me at last,’ Margaret said. ‘I’ve joined the bloody coffin queue. I’ve been committed.’

‘Coffin queue?’ Ali said. ‘Where are you?’

‘Knees up Mother Brown,’ Margaret said. ‘Bedpans. The bloody works. The poor old hags, they all stink. I hoped you might look in. Spread a little cheer for me with a half-jack of brandy and some fags. Hide them under your coat, mind, or they’ll claw them off me sure as God made little rotten apples. They’re all thieves in this hole. Rogues and thieves.’

‘Which hole?’ Ali said.

‘There was never a bloody fire you know,’ old Margaret said. ‘Though the doctors said there was. The bloody neighbours called the fire-brigade – and the ambulance. There was nothing but a lot of smoke. A potful of singed ox-heart. One of my turns must have come on over the dog’s dinner.’

‘Oh Jesus!’ Ali said. ‘What are you saying to me?’

‘I’m geriatric,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m no longer at home.’

Several tall firemen had led her into the waiting ambulance where they had called her ‘granny’ and had given her reviving puffs of oxygen. ‘I’m not your granny. I’m a spinster,’ Margaret had said with dignity, before they had taken her to the hospital. A week later the general practitioner, whom she had acquired on Noah’s recommendation, had signed the certificate for her admission to the old people’s home. The pugs had been despatched to a dogs’ home, including the one small female in season who had been discovered behind chicken wire in an upstairs bookshelf alongside a copy of
Major Barbara
. A house-clearing agency, on behalf of the landlord, had made short work of the plastic bags and the carrot-top trees. A builder’s skip now stood outside the front door of what had been Margaret’s house, and a contractor’s board had been fitted to the cracked front window.
The renovations, while they were naturally a minor nuisance to the Bobrows’ tenants, promised considerably to enhance the value of Mervyn’s property which had suffered over the years from its proximity to substandard housing.

‘I’ll come,’ Ali said, hating herself for having been absent in Margaret’s hour of need. ‘I’ll come today.’

Ali made her way first to Mrs Gaitskell’s flat in the hope of being able to deposit the children there for an hour while she visited old Margaret. She discovered that lady clutching her gut at the cooker as she boiled up a brick-like pudding for her husband’s tea.

‘He likes to come home to a good, solid pudding,’ Mrs Gaitskell said, ‘though I shouldn’t be on my feet. I had a scrape last week for cysts on the womb.’

‘Womb?’ Ali said. ‘Cysts!’ Mrs Gaitskell’s gynaecological usage constantly brought home to Ali how squarely and straight that person faced up to the whole hazard-prone area of the female body as a substandard piece of design. It seemed to her realistic and courageous.

Mrs Gaitskell expressed herself delighted to have the children for an hour, in spite of Ali’s concern for her. They would be ‘no trouble’ she said, and she directed them at once to the large bag of glacier mints which stood perennially upon the sideboard. Ali left them on the sofa; a contented threesome, cracking boiled sweets between their molars and coaxing the budgie to peck at his cuttlefish.

In the old people’s home, Margaret sat in the day room like a hollow-eyed boarding-school girl waiting for the dawn of an exeat weekend. The curtains and the gloss-paintwork in the room were lilac. Lilac, she had decided, was a colour to be tolerated only on lilacs. The room was overcrowded and smelled of rubber pants and urine. She missed the smell of dog and boiling pig melts. A concentration of aged persons lined the walls in walking frames. Faces from Hogarth and crowded into the workhouse.

‘Watch your handbag!’ she said hoarsely, because Ali had at that moment approached her through one of the lilac doors. ‘There’s a lot of thieves in here. They nick your clothes when you’re asleep. They’d stop at nothing.’ It was true that the inmates were between them attired in a curious predominance of purple nylon cardigans, but then the dress of Margaret herself was not unworthy of notice. She was clad in a motley layering of unfamiliar clothing, most of it bearing tweedy labels and held together with safety pins. Seeing Ali stare Margaret held forth a fine wool scarf to reveal the Jaeger label.

‘Tit for tat!’ she said and cackled briefly. ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. I’ve joined them, Ali, I can hardly tell myself from all the rest.’

‘I can,’ Ali said, helplessly. ‘I always will.’

In a nearby café where the two of them repaired for lunch, Ali cut up a section of rare-grilled sirloin for Margaret and watched her dribble beef ooze on to the familiar shirt-front.

‘No wonder the upper classes are so oversexed, it’s all this bloody protein,’ Margaret said. ‘You can forget about protein back in the hole. We’re always eating “slip down”. The bloody nurses are at it all day long. “Eat up dear; it’s all just slip-down.” Doesn’t it make you spit?’

‘Yes,’ Ali said. She saw that Margaret had already directed a goodly chunk of her defiant spirit into the time-honoured, institutional channel of complaining about the rations. It depressed her. Margaret had lost weight. Her dentures appeared no longer to fit her gums and she had developed a compulsive tendency towards sucking on them for relief. Ali passed over the brandy which Margaret secreted greedily in her handbag. In a flash of clairvoyant foreknowledge, Ali saw that Margaret would shut herself in the 100 with the brandy that night and down the bottle at one sitting; for to measure it out in modest nightly doses would simply be to invite having it expropriated either by the inmates or by the staff. Brandy would be her ultimate ‘slip-down’. It seemed to Ali extraordinary that Margaret, who had
survived a decade in relative plumpness on egg-white and cracker-biscuits, had now, within three weeks of joining the ‘coffin queue’, shrunk by a third of her girth. Her skin hung in wrinkled swathes at wrist and jowl. It came to Ali that a violent disorientation, coupled with a few harsh frosty nights and the odd half-jack of brandy, was probably all it would take to expunge the willing flesh. Margaret’s skin had become curiously transparent. Before the meal was over, she had fallen asleep in her chair.

The appearance of an itinerant gardener the following afternoon struck Ali not only as comic relief, but as a gift from heaven, prior to Noah’s imminent return. He wore his loam-drenched, tea-cosy hat resting on three warts which were clustered between his eyebrows and stated his terms decisively as he slurped his tea from a saucer at Ali’s kitchen table.

‘Missus,’ he said sternly. ‘Bill Parsons is the name. Mister Bill Parsons. I’m a poor man, Missus, but I’m honest. An honest man, Missus, if you get my meaning.’ Ali nodded vigorously, wishing to have it understood that she did not doubt his honesty. Not for a moment.

‘Ten pound and I do the lot,’ he said. ‘Digging over and planting out. I do an honest job, Missus, and what do you say to that? Ten pound for the benefit of an honest man’s work?’ Ali had begun to believe he had been scripted by Bottom the Weaver.

‘I’d rather pay you by the hour, Mr Parsons,’ she said. ‘That’s if you don’t mind. I do not wish to exploit you and it might take longer than you think.’ Since Mr Parsons had reached that stage of deafness where he took all verbal response as personal affront, he merely glared at her formidably as he twiddled his hearing aid.

‘Now look here, Missus,’ he said. ‘I’m an honest man. Honest and hardworking. I’ve got my own tools and my own mower. Five pound now, and the balance tomorrow. I can’t say fairer
than that. Ten pound to me, and to you the whole muck-heap digging over and planting out with wallflowers.’

‘Oh no, Mr Parsons!’ Ali said most emphatically. ‘No radical changes, please. My husband would not care for that at all. Definitely no wallflowers. I would like you simply to tidy the beds and trim the climbers. And mow the grass, of course. We do have a mower. There is absolutely no need to bring a mower.’

‘Oh aye,’ Mr Parsons said, twiddling his hearing aid impatiently in the face of so long an interjection. ‘It’s like I said, I’ve got a decent mower and all my own tools. You’ve no need to fret yourself, they’re good tools all of them and no rubbish. Five pound down and I’ll be back at sunrise quick as ever you can say “Jack Robinson”.’

‘Yes,’ Ali said. She was intrigued by the way he had modified the gesture of forelock-touching whereby he wedged the right thumb deftly between the three warts and the ribbing of the tea cosy, and jerked upwards a half-inch and down again.

Mr Parsons did not appear in the morning but he came towards the end of the afternoon, reeking heavily of five pounds’ worth of best bitter and trundling a monstrous petrol mower in a wheelbarrow. Ali, all that day, had been wholly absorbed with her painting.

‘Nothing too radical, Mr Parsons,’ she said in casual greeting and she retreated at once to the oranges. The painting was evolving beautifully. It had excited her all day to watch it grow and change. From the outset it had had the quality of being somehow beyond her control. She now perceived this as a strength and not a weakness. The painting was growing through her, catching, as it did so, a multitude of vivid, provoking ambiguities.

‘Mummy!’ Hattie said in agitation. ‘Come quickly! Daniel is crying. Mr Parsons is mowing Daddy’s plants. Mummy – he’s
mowing
the flowerbeds!’

Mr Parsons had managed with remarkable speed to convert a section of the front garden from Haunted Castle to Scorched
Earth. He had razed one of the wide herbaceous borders, severing the clematis and several small shrubs at root. Then he had forked over the ensuing devastation and had arranged within it four rows of wallflowers spaced at twelve-inch intervals from each other. As Ali rushed, headlong and gesticulating to stop him, Mr Parsons switched on the mower. The situation was impossible. Not only did the object render her speech inaudible, but it threatened to cut her off at the ankles. Over the din, Ali believed she heard him shout that he was honest; honest and hard working. His machine came drunkenly towards her, guzzling the last of the hollyhocks. Ali made a final, heroic rush upon the object and found herself somehow fortuitously assisted in the assault by the timely interference of a tall dark-haired woman, who in that instant had taken Mr Parsons by the shoulders and had wrenched him from the handles. The mower rumbled heavily to a halt.

‘Now lookee here, Missus,’ said Mr Parsons aggressively into the silence. ‘You’d no call to touch that mower. ‘Tis mine. Nor no more had you call to interfere with an honest, hardworking man about his business.’

‘
Honest!
Don’t make me laugh!’ said the stranger with unusual vehemence. She had the voice of Ethel Merman and the profile of Barbra Streisand. She was also very properly dressed in the style of a Bonwitt Teller ad in the
New Yorker.
’You absurdly drunken yokel; you incompetent old sot!’ she said. ‘Quit screwing up her garden, okay? She’d like for you to stop it!’

The effect on Mr Parsons was remarkable. He jambed his right thumb obsequiously into position between the warts and the ribbing and began immediately to bow out backwards towards the gate, as if taking leave of royalty.

‘Now beat it, you jerk!’ said the stranger. The instruction was quite extraneous. The mower and the wheelbarrow, which he had left behind him in his departing haste, later materialised under scrutiny as the property of the local parks department.

‘Hi!’ said the woman warmly. She held out to Ali her finely
boned right hand on which the fingernails were varnished bold scarlet. ‘I’m Shirley,’ she said, ‘Shirley Glazer. I guess you’re Alison. I take it that you people missed my card. I’m here for a conference at the hospital. I came by a couple of times last week but you were out of town. Your boarder entertained me most hospitably.’

‘He was no boarder,’ Ali said. ‘He was a usurper. I threw him out yesterday.’ Shirley Glazer coloured a little and laughed.

‘Oh really?’ she said, recovering fast. ‘And I just threw out the gardener. We’d make an excellent team. Are those two cute little kids your kids, by any chance? Noah’s kids? My god, but aren’t they small!’

‘I’m big,’ Daniel said. ‘Go away.’ Shirley laughed again. She clearly thrived on stirring up contention.

‘You look like Noah,’ she said to Daniel with a kind of amiable challenge. ‘But your colouring is all different. I guess the colouring just came as a different package, huh?’ Daniel said nothing. Ali, as they walked towards the house, found that she was rudely sizing up Shirley Glazer’s boobs as an undisputed 38D, but the woman was pushing sixty! She was, moreover, at once intimidating, capable and well-presented. What could she possibly want with William Lister? What could any woman who had once been married to Noah want with William Lister?

‘I’m kind of sorry about your boarder,’ Shirley said. ‘Personally, I thought that he was cute. A little slovenly in his personal habits, maybe, but kind of charming, no? So utterly stiff and British, if you’ll pardon me. And so earnest in his politics. I have strong radical leanings myself, as Noah will doubtless have told you, but I have always also been a hedonist. I am a radical hedonist.’

‘Noah has told me nothing,’ Ali said truthfully. ‘But what exactly is a radical hedonist? Are you a socialist who can’t live without mixer taps?’ Shirley laughed.

‘Those too,’ she said. ‘Mixer taps and sex. I have to admit that I always found capitalists to make better lovers.’