Noah's Ark (29 page)

‘We’d have run out of money by Michaelmas,’ Camilla said resignedly, but money, Emily said, was not a problem. They would acquire a rich Arab student as a lodger, who drove an Audi. He could sleep on the Put-U-Up. She and Camilla would live on the rent and borrow the Audi. They could even share the Arab if he were a thinkable proposition.

‘My stepfather drives an Audi,’ Camilla said, idly contemplating the limited uses of stereotypes.
’And
he’s allergic to cats.’ It occurred to her that Noah would not be able to step over the threshold of the Brighton flat without placing his oxygen supply at risk. The plaid rugs alone would constrict his bronchial tubes.
She was loyally resolved never to preside over a household where her stepfather could not dine with her in comfort.

‘I’ve never had a stepfather,’ Emily said. ‘Only four stepmothers. There used to be a new one practically every time I came home from my boarding school. What is your real father like?’

‘Nut case,’ Camilla said blandly, aware as she said it how easily one could misrepresent, with a facile colloquialism, a formative reign of terror. Only the previous day she had recalled on waking the time when Mervyn had taken her by the hand at the age of six, or was it seven, and had led her without knocking into the bathroom where a guest was rising from the tub. Mervyn had at that time embarked upon a phase of loudly propagating greater sexual emancipation.

‘My daughter is a shrinking violet,’ he said by way of explaining his intrusion. ‘She needs a more robust exposure to the nude male form.’ But Camilla remembered that the guest had made decent haste to wrap his loins in a bath towel.

‘Bugger off, Mervyn,’ he had replied hotly. ‘Show your daughter your bloody prick!’ Camilla couldn’t remember who he was, nor whether he ever came again. In recollection she could never envisage his face. Only the fine black hairs on his legs, and that there was something disturbingly wrong with his penis. She knew now what had been wrong with it. He hadn’t been circumcised.

She dreamed the next night about Arnie Weinberg. It surprised her that in the dream he kept a collection of antique boxes crowded together on a glass shelf in the living room of his Park Town flat. Most were made of wood and some of silver. One of the boxes was made of a delicate greenish alabaster. There was also a miniature wooden captain’s chest with recessed brass handles. In the dream Camilla saw herself offer him the small papier-maché box in which she kept her earrings, but Arnie laughed and told her nicely to keep it. Then he kissed her. Not on the cheek as he had done when she had won the hundred metres at school, but on her open mouth. Yet he had turned down the gift of her box. He had not wanted it.

Camilla opened her eyes right then to the vision of Lord Kitchener on a poster. He was displayed opposite her bed, moustaches bristling, and pointing an accusing finger at her. The poster’s caption had been altered from ‘Your Country Needs You’ to ‘Have you taken the Pill?’ It had been pinned there by one of the flat’s regular female occupants and its presence consistently irritated Camilla who prided herself on remembering to take the Pill without prompting. She made a point in this respect of differing from her mother. She was determined not to be scatty. It was out of fashion for women to be scatty. Camilla was surprised and elated by her dream.

‘Who would have thought it?’ she mouthed into the air. Alike as she and Alison were, Camilla – now at the edge of adulthood – was always readier than her mother had been at nineteen and twenty to confront her own sexuality. Camilla at nineteen would not have shirked on Thomas Adderley. She would have taken him on rejoicing and worked the whole thing through. That was perhaps her blessed advantage.

The telephone was ringing in the next room. It was summoning home Emily, whose grandmother, having witnessed, with quiet resignation, the recent demotion of her son’s fourth wife, had died that night in her sleep. Beside her on the table her son had found her heart pills, her arthritis tablets, a large bottle of liquid paraffin and a photograph of her granddaughter Emily in the college garden with her beautiful, amber-eyed girl friend, Camilla Bobrow.

Emily’s tearful departure at once turned Camilla’s mood. The construction workers’ morning catcalls ceased to amuse her and the gulls in the evening cried to her forlornly, like the lost souls of the dead. The cottage organ echoed back at her in the tall, sparsely furnished living room with funereal implication and she quickly abandoned it for the Byron which she read on the Put-U-Up, making desultory notes towards an essay. There was nobody left to telephone. Ali and the small children were out of the country – a fact which on reflection she found unprecedented and
worrying. Noah was as usual suspended somewhere between continents which she found not so much worrying as distinctly inconvenient at this juncture. Dear Noah would soon have paid her train fare home to Oxfordshire. They would have breakfasted together as of old in the family kitchen and dined out in restaurants or gone to the pictures. Matthew Carpenter was, to the best of her knowledge, doing Morocco on his thumb. It was with some shyness, but no real doubts, that she finally rang Arnie Weinberg one evening in the lab. To propose that he come down for the weekend seemed a great liberty but, to her joy, he agreed to come at once. He was by temperament flexible and inclined to make spontaneous decisions. The seaside suited him and he had always had a large soft spot for Camilla. It was clear to him, moreover, that the girl was lonely and forlorn. It shone through all her determinedly seductive accounts of the pizza bars and the cottage organ. Next morning early he threw his swimming trunks and a frisbee into the back of a small hired Fiat along with his minimal clothing supplies. He had already sold his own car, in preparation for the move to California. Along the way he acquired a two-litre bottle of Valpolicella with a plastic stopper and a box of marrons glacés.

Camilla was overjoyed to see him. She had spent the morning preparing his lunch. Step by step from her paperback Elizabeth David she had jointed a free-range chicken and simmered it in cream and Gruyère cheese. An aroma of garlic and fresh tarragon hung about her as she approached him down the steps in the puce interlock combinations. He laughed out loud with pleasure at the sight of her.

‘Those knee-highs are something else, Cam!’ he said. ‘Kid, you look great. You got style.’ He had the wine and the frisbee and the chestnut sweets in the crook of his left arm, but he held out to her his right hand which she took.

‘They’d probably look better on you,’ she said, since their hip size was not actually dissimilar.

‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said.

‘What I mean is, they’re really made for men,’ Camilla said bravely. ‘I can’t quite muster the right bulge under the fly-buttons. You’ve got new glasses Arnie. They look most terribly expensive. Are they tax deductible?’ Arnie laughed.

‘There’s not too much gets deducted from my tax,’ he said. ‘Only from my salary.’

‘I’ve made lunch,’ she said. ‘A real four-star heart-attack special. It’s all cream and chicken fat.’ Arnie ate undaunted, wedging the toe of his Adidas shoe under the wobbling leg of the bridge table to stop the wine from slopping. He had not breakfasted and the sea air whetted his appetite.

‘Now I want the organ,’ he said. He balanced himself gingerly between two jutting springs on the Put-U-Up and contemplated the gentle spread of Camilla’s rump on the music stool. Camilla played him a stanza of ‘Jerusalem’, but somehow in Arnie’s presence the fair dream of the Holy City was no longer an automatic joke. She stopped and turned on the stool to face him.

‘Arnie,’ she said, ‘you don’t happen to collect old boxes, do you?’

‘Boxes?’ Arnie said. ‘How do you mean, “old boxes”? You mean cartons from the grocery store? Right now I got plenty. For mailing my books to the States.’

‘Forget it,’ she said, ‘I was only asking. Hey, Arnie, don’t you ever hate your name? What I mean is, don’t you ever wish you had a more glamorous name? You’re quite a glamorous man, really.’ She flushed a little, because he looked at her with such blank incomprehension through his dishy new spectacle frames. But she carried on regardless. ‘If you were to call yourself “Arne”, for instance,’ she said, ‘then you would sound like a Danish architect.’

‘Are you kidding?’ Arnie said. ‘A Danish architect – what for?’

‘Or “Arno”,’ she said. ‘Then people would think you were Italian.’

‘What for?’ Arnie said again, thinking amusedly that it had been a long time since he had last heard a woman talk such
wholehearted nonsense to him, especially one with such a nice East European name, but that Camilla was both delectably pretty and hopelessly young.

‘You figure that to be I talian is more glamorous than to be a Jewish medicine man from Country Club Road, Middletown, Connecticut?’ he said. Camilla flushed more deeply.

‘Oh no!’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean that
you
weren’t glamorous. I only meant your name.’ Arnie tried crossing his legs on the Put-u-Up, but gave up in further physical discomfort. He picked up the Byron which lay on the sofa beside him and opened it at random. Twenty-five years on, it still fell open at the page where Julie Horowitz had pinned it one summer evening to con the lines by heart which were printed there. She had done so in defiance of the English teacher’s instructions, which had been to memorise the first two pages of
Lycidas
.

‘She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

Thus mellowed to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.’

Arnie read the poem through to the end. Then he shut the book.

‘Let’s take a walk,’ he said. ‘Let’s get some coffee.’

In the coffee bar a young Italian waiter, flicking at the table top with a kitchen cloth, stopped to kiss his fingers to Camilla and promptly became voluble on the subject of her exposed navel. Venus had once come to earth, he said, and had taken up residence in an inn in Bologna where the innkeeper, having spied through a keyhole on the goddess undressing, had been bewitched by the beauty of her perfect umbilicus. He had gone at once to his kitchen and created
tortellini
to celebrate its form in pasta. The waiter made the small circular shape with his finger and thumb before breaking off to kiss his fingers once again.

‘What’s
tortellini?
’ Camilla said.

‘You come tomorrow,’ said the waiter urgently. ‘You ask for Mario. Tomorrow I make for you
tortellini
.’ Arnie gave the order for coffee and waited for the man to go.

‘Mario, huh?’ he said. ‘What happened to Arno?’ It was then that he became aware that the poetry book was still in his hand and he put it down on the table.

‘Your book,’ he said. ‘Sorry, I took your book.’ After the coffee Camilla led him to the shore, where, expressing a sudden urge to bathe, she pulled the singlet over her head and walked topless into the sea in long-johns. Arnie who lay clothed on the pebbles, sweatshirt bunched under his head for a pillow, watched her walk gingerly towards the water on tender feet and contemplated the Byron. She returned hugging her breasts with goose-pimpled arms, because she had no towel, and came to a calculated stop, standing astride his pelvis. Water dripped from her long-johns on to his trousers.

‘You’re dripping water all over my pants,’ he said but Camilla stayed where she was. She shook her short hair briefly like a small wet dog, scattering droplets on to his shirt and on to the red vellum of the Bryon cover.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Do you often read poetry, Arnie?’ She crouched down over him on her haunches.

‘Only when I watch you walk, Camilla,’ he said a little dryly. ‘Get up, kid. You’re sitting on my balls.’

‘I know,’ she said again. ‘I’ll get up just as soon as you tell me you don’t like it.’ It came to him then that Camilla wore no underpants beneath the long-johns and that stray dark curls of damp pubic hair were protruding through the fly-buttons. ‘Pass me my top, would you?’ she said. ‘I’m cold.’ She pulled the buttoned singlet over her small high breasts, shifting her weight subtly but provokingly on his pelvis.

‘Get up, Cam. You’re a baby,’ he said.

‘I’m twenty,’ she said.

‘I’m thirty-nine,’ he said. ‘Do you behave like this with all the men you know?’

‘Don’t insult me,’ she said. ‘If you don’t like me to touch you, just tell me so and I’ll stop.’

‘Cam,’ Arnie said. ‘Let’s not pretend that I don’t know you’re one gorgeous piece of ass. You are also a baby and Noah’s daughter. Now will you kindly get your half-naked crack off my crutch?’ He lifted one knee to throw her but its effect was only to bring her face nearer his own.

‘I’m Noah’s stepdaughter,’ Camilla said. ‘Anyway, Noah believes I’m so promiscuous as it is that he’d probably be quite relieved to think that I fancied you. He thinks I always go for effeminates.’

‘And quite how promiscuous are you?’ Arnie said.

‘Probably no more so than you,’ she said. ‘Anyway who’s going to tell him? Not me.’

When Arnie kissed her, it was so much like the dream that Camilla was tempted to ask him yet again about the boxes. She knew that she had been there before. She knew ‘the sweet, keen smell’ and ‘the glass beyond the door’. She knew the sounds of sighing. She knew the startling, corporeal dream of Jerusalem and that at all other times in her past when she had opened her mouth to other men’s mouths, it had been as a mere taking of childhood lollipops. She knew that she had entered into the House of Love.

‘Easy, baby,’ Arnie said struggling against her manifest intensity, but he knew as he had always known that she was away and out the most perfectly beautiful girl he had ever seen and that to make love to her would be like climbing into the blossom end of a pear.

‘Excuse me,’ Arnie said, moments later, pausing in front of the chemist shop on the way back to the flat. ‘But I don’t have any rubbers.’

‘I do,’ said Camilla. ‘I’ve got lots of them.’

‘I see,’ Arnie said. ‘Do I take it then that, as far as you are concerned, this event is right on schedule?’