Noah's Ark (33 page)

‘I see,’ Ali said. ‘I do not speak from a great experience in the field, but I would hazard that almost anybody, across the ideological spectrum, would make a better lover than William Lister.’

‘Now that’s not fair,’ Shirley said. ‘And it’s also totally untrue. For a start, he’s heterosexual. That is a rare thing in a man these days. In the States, at least. I can’t speak for Great Britain. I’ve been here just over a week.’ Ali laughed out loud. Shirley was already so markedly unlike Noah in her penchant for instant self-exposure that it made her wonder how the two of them had ever got through an evening together, let alone a decade.

‘The polarisation of the sexes,’ Shirley said earnestly, ‘is symptomatic of the growing crisis of capitalism.’

‘I see,’ Ali said.

‘I’m serious,’ Shirley said. ‘You try calling up a couple of men in New York City next time you’re a little stoned on New Year’s Eve and wanting masculine company. Ten to one they’ll be out propositioning each other. I spent last New Year’s Eve listening to Mr Schubert on the stereo.’

‘There’s a lot to be said for it,’ Ali said. ‘I do a lot of it myself.’

‘That’s an okay attitude for a person who’s married,’ Shirley said. ‘Alison, for all that he’s maybe insufferably pompous, your husband is a real, A-line hetero.’

‘Thank you,’ Ali said.

Shirley had seated herself at the kitchen table and had taken out her knitting. She had set down two completed front halves of a prodigious cream-coloured cardigan rich in cables and diamond patterning, and had drawn a hank of oiled fisherman’s wool from her bag which she had looped over a chairback for winding. Ali was almost tempted to offer her outstretched thumbs for the task, but she had taken it upon herself to find a clean enough saucepan in the house in which to boil some water for their tea. There was still not one available which did not reek of turmeric and crushed cardamom pods.

‘Oh hang it, we’ll drink this,’ Ali said, feeling faintly
debauched. She banged down on to the table a bottle of bourbon plus two glasses. ‘Bourbon is a woman’s drink,’ she said. ‘Before Noah, I was married to a lunatic, you know. I am not a woman
wholly
devoid of experience.’

‘Jimmy Beam, oh my!’ Shirley said. ‘A lunatic, you said? I can fully appreciate that Noah might make a very satisfactory antidote to a lunatic. But do you not find him – oh excuse me – a little tediously attracted to notions of anal sex?’

‘No,’ Ali said firmly, wondering why she took no offence at the question. ‘I do not. Noah has always readily accepted that I am insufficiently eclectic in sexual matters.’

‘I guess the poor man harbours latent homosexual urges along with all the rest,’ Shirley said outrageously. ‘And which man would not, who had that sweet-tongued grey-haired witch for a mother?’ Ali began to discover that the pleasure to be got from listening to Shirley was largely gained from having someone else to be wicked for one. It was like hiring an assassin. ‘There’s the card from her in the hall,’ Shirley said. ‘I recognised the handwriting. Don’t you ever get to opening your mail? Somewhere in that pile is a card from me giving you the dates of my conference.’

‘I will,’ Ali said. ‘But I will not yet.’

‘Forget it,’ Shirley said. ‘mine’s obsolete and ‘Mother’s’ is the annual New Year card. A prefabricated miscellany of tabernacle kitsch plus her own barbed platitudes within. I opened mine already. Say, I’d sure like to take you guys out to eat someplace, you know that? When I say eat, I’m talking food. Is there someplace around here that will sell us food? I don’t mean some no-good British hamburger dump that serves up rubber mats between cold buns.’

‘There’s the
Saraceno
,’ Ali said hopefully. ‘They don’t do mats in buns.’ She had not been to the
Saraceno
since the night Noah had taken her there with the baby, to escape the Bobrows’ scrag end.

Throughout the meal Shirley talked about her past, and all in front of the children. She talked with a vivid and conspicuous
lack of restraint which compensated Ali, in one half-hour, for a decade of Noah’s reserve. She and Noah had gone to the same high school in New Jersey, Shirley said, where by the age of twelve her already burgeoning breasts had begun to thwart a long-held aspiration to become a world class athlete. By fifteen her beautiful, wide mouth, which all through grade school had got her dubbed as ‘Nigger Lips’, had come into its own as a double-attraction, along with her breasts, for a catholic selection of high school boys in the back rows of movie houses. Noah was not the best of the bunch, she said, but he was surely one of the best. And he was later lent advantage by having survived the war. She had met him again, by coincidence, she said, on a kibbutz where she was about to make her journey through Zionism into socialist hedonism. Noah was about to injure his back. He was charmed and won by her liveliness. Like many a sober and cautious young man, he was attracted by the prospect of a wife who danced well and loved company.

‘
Kibbutz?
’ Ali said in bafflement and surprise, because the person Shirley was talking about was a person she did not know. They were married shortly thereafter in the proper, traditional manner. Shirley was already pregnant, but only just. The honeymoon was spent, unbelievably, in the Cotswolds, not a million miles from where Ali and Shirley sat eating aubergine pie. Shirley remembered the trip mainly for Noah’s irritating and inveterate tourism and for her own abysmal morning sickness and powerful food cravings. She had been so angry on one occasion, she recalled, that when Noah had returned without maple syrup to the B and B in Stratford-upon-Avon, she had threatened to throw up the landlady’s breakfast forthwith into the washbasin and to poke it down the sink with the bristle-end of Noah’s toothbrush. The event had taken place in the year in which Ali had cut her first adult teeth. She had also, in that memorable year, cut her teeth of literacy on the first of the Beacon Readers.

For a wedding present, Noah had given her a fine gold chain, Shirley said, measuring exactly twenty-four inches in length, to
wear around her waist. The idea had been to ensure against an increase in girth – pregnancies excluded. She had worn it for almost twenty years and had removed it only for the duration of her pregnancies. Both times, with the assistance of diligent and systematic exercise which came easily to her, she had been able to reassume the chain within two weeks of having given birth. Ali was startled to think of her husband as a man who would, so to speak, confine his bride in chains, and offered up grateful, silent thanks for the advancement which twenty-odd years can, in certain cases, wreak in the soul of a man. The object reminded her vaguely of
La Chaîne Haute Fidélité
which had long been a feature of the toy cupboard, and had finally made its way thereafter to a Labour Party jumble sale.

‘Shirley,’ Ali said, ‘What made you take it off? Divorce?’

‘Sterilisation,’ Shirley said. ‘One naturally takes one’s jewellery off prior to anaesthetic. I never put it back. Pardon me, Alison, but have you actually been sterilised?’

‘No,’ Ali said firmly. ‘I have not.’

‘I recommend it,’ Shirley said, ‘for the sexual freedom it affords.’

The next day, coming upon Ali over her painting, Shirley engaged in a generous effusion of praise.

‘Finish it,’ she said. ‘I want to buy it.’

‘I had in mind sometime,’ Ali said politely, ‘to show it to my husband. He only saw the beginnings of it.’

‘Forget it!’ Shirley said. ‘I’ll pay you two thousand dollars for that painting.’ Ali drew in breath.

‘But it isn’t even finished,’ she said. ‘I should need a month at least to finish it. It’s tricky. It needs a decent, strong north light. And then, I have the children to care for.’

‘Finish it,’ Shirley said. ‘I want it in four days. I am leaving, as you know, after the weekend.’

‘
Four days?
Ali said. ‘You must be mad.’

‘I just changed my mind,’ Shirley said. ‘I propose to pay you three thousand dollars for it. Finish it.’

‘Three thousand dollars is roughly equivalent to the cost of all our airfares to Johannesburg,’ Ali said. ‘It’s actually one hell of a lot of money.’ It occurred to her that there was potential stature to be gained from footing the bill for one’s own airfares, especially now that Noah would be watching his spare cash in order to pay Hattie’s detestable school fees. But one would of course be kept most
terribly busy
. Busy as Noah. There would be no time at all to sleep. No time to shop or buy food. One might even – like Thomas Adderley – be too busy to make love properly. Who could tell?

‘It’s actually one hell of a painting, Alison,’ Shirley said. ‘I’ve never really been busy before,’ Ali said. ‘Not for money. Not since I taught school.’

‘I’ll pay in advance,’ Shirley said. ‘Finish it, Alison, I want it.’

Noah returned to England on a flight from New York after an uncongenial and largely wasted summer. He had hated his absence from Ali and – having been undermined in advance by the apparently precarious state of his marriage – he had found the travelling more tiring than usual. Then, while Ali’s telephone call from Johannesburg had been all that was affectionate and conciliatory, it had done him no good at all to learn that she had gone halfway across the world, moved, she had said, by an old copy of Byron, but to the very spot which happened to harbour the person of Thomas Adderley.

It was towards the end of this period in New York, while brooding upon this morbid circumstance, that Noah had accidentally set down his left heel into a broken paving-stone in Little Italy, where he had gone to lunch with Barbara. The jolt had caused the immediate onset of his all too familiar spinal problems and for the next few days he could shuffle about only with the greatest difficulty. Being reluctant to embark on a relationship with a new therapist so shortly before his return to England, he had prescribed himself a course of powerful muscle-relaxing tablets which had caused him to sleep out the better part of four days. He had then enlisted the aid of the kindly Barbara to massage the soft tissue around his sacroiliac joints. Being addicted to productive labour, Noah had fretted and fumed during his more wakeful moments, since the affair had
seriously thrown out the schedule which he had previously devised with Barbara.

Then, when he had finally left her – armed with a silver-topped walking stick which had once belonged to her father – he had been obliged to pay a time-consuming visit to his son Shane in New Haven whose wife had so recently given birth to his second grandchild. It had rankled with him terribly that Ali had not been there to undertake the buying of gifts for the Brainbox and his sister, and that he, instead, had had to hobble grimly around FAO Schwartz, leaning on a walking stick, before heading out for Grand Central Station.

Now, on the flight for home, being full of back-pills and painkillers, he dozed off frequently, but woke each time to find himself fervently craving the company of his wife. The sound of Ali’s voice over the telephone line from Johannesburg had induced an urgent ache in the testicles which no mere osteo-narcotics would ever annul. The bald fact of the matter was that he had not been to bed with her since the first week in May and, notwithstanding his current spinal incapacity, he sustained himself in and out of sleep on a strident, swash-buckling fantasy of propelling her into the bedroom and peeling off his shirt which he would use to bind together her naked, milk-white wrists.

‘Get your sweet ass on the bed!’ he said, waking to find that the day had dawned and that he had said it in the hearing of a Pan Am stewardess who was at that moment looming over him with a fiendishly citric morning reviver. He reached promptly with his right hand for the orange juice and with his left for the central agony in his lower back, which was shooting out a radius of burning needles into the area of his left haunch. At Heathrow Airport he made his way to the car hire desk and subsequently drove himself home with his jacket bunched artfully into the small of his back.

The first thing which confronted Noah upon his return was Mr Parsons’ section of blitzed herbaceous border, planted out grid-wise with wallflowers.

‘Holy shit!’ Noah said, vehemently, swearing vengeance and blood for his desecrated clematis. ‘Al!’ he bawled from the driveway, leaning crotchily on the silver-topped walking stick. ‘What the hell’s been going on around here?’ The second thing, which confronted him a few seconds later, was a vision of the wrong wife seated like Madame Defarge at his kitchen table, prodigiously accomplishing a cream-coloured cardigan.

‘Hi!’ Shirley said. ‘How are you?’

‘Where’s Al?’ Noah demanded sharply.

‘Busy,’ Shirley said. ‘Hey, cool it, Noah. Your wife is busy.’

‘What do you mean she’s busy?’ Noah said, indulging the unusual extremity of raising his voice. ‘I just got off a goddam plane, for Chrissakes. I expected her to be here!’

‘Right now she’s busy painting,’ Shirley said. ‘Twenty-four hours a day. She’s out with her easel, chasing cows. Take a seat.’

‘Not just now thanks,’ Noah said. ‘Just now I’d like to find my wife. I’d also like to find out who’s been busy with my plants.’ He moved forward, wincing stiffly as his weight shifted.

All the while Shirley had not stopped her knitting, but now she put it down on to the table and stared hard at him.

‘Pardon me for uttering a truth so brazenly self-evident,’ she said, ‘but Noah, your back is in spasm.’

‘Sure,’ Noah said conceding the point reluctantly. ‘Right now it’s not too comfortable.’

‘My poor boy,’ she said. ‘Don’t be so pompous with me. You are in considerable pain.’ She got up very promptly and swept the table clear of her knitting. Then she flicked briskly at stray crumbs with a kitchen towel. ‘Can I help?’ she said. ‘You want to strip to your shorts and lie right here on the table? It’s a better height for me than any of your beds.’

‘Thanks,’ Noah said weakly. ‘Shirl, you’re a doll.’

‘Watch your language!’ Shirley said. ‘I’m no doll. I’m a chiropractor.’ She helped him to step up with the aid of a kitchen chair and arranged his limbs expertly in appropriate attitudes.
Then she blew on her hands and rubbed them together removing surface chill.