Noah's Ark (23 page)

In the kitchen where he went to seek comfort from his mother, he found only William, who was whistling as he packed away his fiery condiments into his Karrimor rucksack. Seeing Daniel stare, William took a shot at hearty child-centred banter and misfired.

‘I collect little boys in my sack,’ he said. ‘Put your head in, Daniel, and see.’ Daniel froze. He made no move from the spot until the telephone rang, at which point he seized his chance and fled. He could feel his heart beating in his mouth. The call was from Mervyn Bobrow, who had given thought to the idea before he telephoned that nine o’clock on a Saturday morning was perhaps rather early to be making calls, but he had weighed the propriety of the matter with his wife. Eva had had no doubts. One had to finalise numbers of one’s party that evening, and if one’s more nebulous aquaintances could not ‘get it together’, as she said, to RSVP on time then one had simply to catch them before they left for the supermarket or the squash courts. It was not difficult to reply to an invitation after all. As she pointed out, it was nothing to the trouble and expense of the host’s efforts in putting the party together. Finally, as Mervyn reached for the receiver, she bestowed her attention upon the matter of suitable dress.

‘Do make it clear to Alison, if she means to come for once, that this is not a jeans and T-shirt party,’ she said. ‘When one goes to all this trouble, one does
rather
hope that one’s friends will do one proud, I think.’

The advice went undelivered since Ali was not at home and William Lister who took the call sounded more than a little aggrieved. Not only had Ali passed him by with barely a greeting that morning, but she had gone on to linger thirty minutes in the garage scantily clad with a male person to whom she had carried cups of coffee on a tray. William could not recall that anyone had ever carried cups of coffee for him on trays. To heap insult upon this implied affront, the two of them had then breezed off together half-naked in the motor car, leaving him, as he supposed, to fend for two spoilt children who would at any moment
be down demanding cornflakes and orange juice. One could naturally not condone such behaviour. One’s credibility as a person in the vanguard of ‘The Struggle’ was dependent upon upholding a scrupulous distinction between that which was ‘progressive’ and that which was ‘decadent’.

‘Has she gone out shopping?’ Mervyn asked him. ‘Do you know when she’ll be back?’

‘To be frank,’ he said, ‘she has just taken off in a dressing gown with a man who is not her husband. I don’t think that shopping was quite what they had in mind.’

‘Oh I say!’ Mervyn said. He found, rising within him, a deep suspicion that Thomas Adderley – who had cried off for the Impromptu Drink as being at variance with his travel plans – had now returned to Oxford in order to consummate an Impromptu Flutter with Ali Glazer. It left him feeling upstaged. In mentioning Thomas Adderley’s presence the previous Wednesday, Mervyn had hoped to make Ali suffer a little, no more. He had not expected her to press him for Thomas’s telephone number or to go off with him half-naked in motor cars.

‘This Lochinvar,’ he said to William, ‘he wouldn’t on this occasion happen to be one Thomas Adderley, would he?’ William gulped with surprise as the plot thickened. Thomas Adderley!

‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘On this occasion he happens to be one Arnold Weinberg.’

‘Versatile, isn’t she?’ Mervyn said in jest. ‘Come to think of it, what are you doing in her house at nine o’clock in the morning?’

William stayed only to gather up his used matches and the last of his own supplies. He felt a little stunned by the scope of female cunning and thanked his own secular God for his gift of moral strength. Since the sun was shining, he saw no reason at all why he should linger there in the web of the female spider. He could shake the dust from his feet immediately and at the same time avoid the prospect of the children’s cornflakes. He took a
postcard from the pocket of his windcheater and wrote in parting haste at the kitchen table.

I have left your egg pan to steep in Fairy Liquid. The eggs I used were all my own.

Yours, William

When noah telephoned from the research unit, Ali was working on the oranges. She had experienced the greatest difficulty in representing these simple elliptical shapes and had found repeatedly that they would not present themselves in an obedient stack upon the canvas, but alternated, with each attempt, between tumbling giddily outwards and rising, over-large and ominously surreal, in the context of columbine and pasture. The composition was not restful. The background itself was proving peculiarly insistent and, while it was true that with the kitchen window thrown open like that tendrils of columbine curled in over the casement and two snapdragons had of late by her neglect grown up through a crack in the stone with startling rapidity, Ali did not wish to imply any disquiet in the work by depicting these things as encroaching so near. There was no reason why, in portraying that abundant tangle, one should necessarily open the floodgates. Nor why one should tolerate those orange orbs which hummed in the foreground like suspended detonators. She detected in these the picture’s beginnings, an insidious implication of excellence which had never been present in her painting before and she wished to resist it, being alarmed by it. It was the best picture she had ever embarked upon.

To hear Noah’s wonderfully grave and level tones over the telephone was a considerable relief, for in his speech the notes
barely rose and fell. He would stay only to check his mail, he said, and would then call a taxi and head for home.

‘Come quickly,’ Ali said, ‘because I’ve missed you.’

Noah stepped from the office ante-room loaded with Jiffybags and envelopes, two of which he held between his teeth. He heard the incongruous retreating clomp of ill-fitting hiker’s boots upon the hospital floor and, glancing leftwards, was surprised to see the back of William Lister passing through the distant plastic doors at the end of the corridor. Next he acknowledged the entry of Arnie Weinberg into the ante-room with an amiable lack of ceremony denoting long-standing friendship.

‘What the hell’s William Lister doing around here?’ he said, speaking through the envelopes in his teeth.

‘Search me,’ Arnie said, who had not seen him.

To Arnie’s knowledge William had only once before graced the research unit with his presence. He had unexpectedly accompanied Ali who had arranged to meet her husband in the canteen for lunch. Arnie smiled to remember how on that occasion, William – firmly refusing all food – had sat out the half-hour with a glass of water in front of him watching the weaker brethren busy themselves at the trough.

‘He came to eat lunch, maybe,’ Arnie offered wittily. ‘I guess he just came by to starve in public.’ He promptly emitted a short, somewhat brutal laugh. ‘How was your flight?’ he said. Noah became aware at that moment that clenched between his teeth was a recycled envelope exhorting him to conserve trees.

‘Oh shit!’ Noah said. The letter was brief and oddly childish. It contained no salutation and ran as follows:

This is to let you know that your wife has not been idle in your absence but Arnold Weinberg could probably tell you exactly what I mean. Does the name Thomas Adderley mean anything to you?

Yours sincerely, William Lister

Shaking slightly, Noah folded the letter and put it into his pocket. Cases were rare indeed where Noah would readily have given credence to William Lister’s sanctimonious avowals, but Thomas Adderley was, unfortunately, just such a case. Mot Adderley: the Nigger in the Woodpile! The rough-shod golden hero of his wife’s arrested youth.

‘Oh shit!’ he said again.

‘What’s up?’ Arnie asked.

‘Nothing,’ Noah said. ‘Nothing at all. Call me a taxi, will you?’

‘Sure,’ Arnie said. William’s aspirant snipe at Arnie had, ironically, passed Noah by. He had merely read the wretched thing as casting Arnie in the role of informed bystander, which indeed he was, and had no intention at all of discussing the affair with anyone but Ali. He then proceeded systematically to sift his post, most of which he committed, after brief examination, to the wastepaper basket. The salvage he placed neatly upon his desk, fastened with two bulldog clips. Then he stepped out to wait for his taxi.

Ali had moved with a sketch book into the kitchen garden, by the time he came, in order to work with unwonted zeal upon the whorls of a columbine. The time was two o’clock and the sun being high, she wore her hair pushed under the crown of an old straw hat. The bundled hair laid bare the familiar groove of her neck and the sight of it caused Noah an emotion close to physical pain as he approached. He became simultaneously aware both of his own advancing age and of that range of poignant amorous failures which had afflicted his bygone youth. The combination left him bruised and raw. In a moment his own memory had cruelly run him by an undermining pageant of his past.

He saw himself suddenly at fifteen, hovering where the much-loved Jean made cakes in her mother’s kitchen. He saw himself kiss her until the muffled giggles of her friends in the broom closet caused her to burst out with uncontrolled laughter. What Noah had read as love requited, he then in that sniggering denouement
saw as a heartless conspiracy by a monstrous regiment of women. He saw himself again, at thirty, open a door upon Shirley supine on a bed; one of her nipples was in the mouth of a naked stranger whose bucking haunches she enclosed within her own raised knees. Now, as Ali turned her head towards him in welcome, Noah saw, as it were behind his eyes, the vivid fall of a safety curtain on which was clearly stencilled ‘The rest you must not see’. It surprised him even as he stood that the mind could summon to the case so strong, so apt, so theatrical an image.

‘Hello, my love,’ Ali said. She rose and kissed him warmly. Then she proposed coffee which he promptly refused. ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked solicitously. Then she followed him indoors and watched him plant his bag on the kitchen table.

‘I’ve eaten,’ he said. ‘Excuse me. I have a headache.’ He proceeded up the stairs towards the attic where Ali discovered him minutes later, stretched on the convertible bed which Camilla had once stained with urine. His eyes were fixed upon the ceiling; his hands were under his head.

‘I’m very glad to see you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry that your head hurts.’ She stepped forward and, sliding a cool hand between the buttons of his shirt, brought it to rest on the furrow of his sternum. She could feel there the heavy rise and fall of his breathing. ‘Do you need anything?’ she said. ‘Aspirin, perhaps? Are you all right, Noah?’

‘D’you see anyone last week?’ he said. Ali considered the matter.

‘A clutch of largely unwelcome callers,’ she said lightly. ‘William came. He spent a night here. So much for my predictions. Noah, it was raining cats and dogs when he came. Really, I couldn’t turn him away.’

‘Who else?’ Noah said.

‘Mervyn,’ she said. ‘The word must have gone out that you were in transit, I reckon. He came to harangue me about his
drinkfest.
Anyway you missed it. So did I. I passed the thing up. Noah, do you not find it increasingly difficult to believe that I
ever shared a roof with that person, let alone a bed?’ Noah’s heart bounced under her hand, but the warning passed her by.

‘Who else?’ he said with a perplexing tenacity.

‘Arnie was here for a day or two,’ Ali said. ‘His house was being fumigated. He appeared just in time to lift the gloom over the supper table which William’s presence had induced. The children will be glad to see you, Noah. Daniel bashed out a tooth but he’s fine. Hattie is anticipating that you will collect her from school today. That’s if you can make it.’

‘Thomas Adderley?’ Noah said. ‘Did you see Thomas Adder-ley?’ Ali removed her hand smartly from his shirt.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I had coffee with him. Last Friday. Noah, you must understand that it was wholly innocuous.’

‘Funny that it slipped your mind,’ he said.

‘I had coffee with him,’ she said. ‘As I told you, it was innocuous.’

‘Did you go to bed with him?’ Noah said. The question was not one to invite flannel. One could but answer to it ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

‘Strictly speaking, yes,’ she said. ‘I did. But Noah, please, it was innocuous. It wasn’t at all what you think.’ Even as she said it the defence struck her as utterly ludicrous. To be ‘naked in bed’ as it were and to ‘mean no harm’. ‘What I mean is not so much that it was innocuous, I suppose, as that it was absurdly brief and sexually wholly unsuccessful. It taught me that sex is infinitely better at home. I think that it also taught me to put away my past. I’m truly sorry, Noah, but it’s over. I can only hope that you will believe me.’

‘Get out of my room,’ Noah said.

‘Please,’ Ali said. ‘I want to try and explain the thing to you. It was something I had to do. It had to do with making the past lie down.’

‘I don’t want to hear it,’ Noah said.

‘I love you,’ Ali said. ‘I think that I know that more certainly than before.’

‘I have asked you to get out of my room,’ Noah said. Ali made a move but she turned towards him hopefully in the doorway.

‘I wish that you would at least tell me to “shift my ass”,’ she said. ‘Then it wouldn’t feel so terrible.’

‘Alison,’ Noah said ominously, ‘will you get the hell out of my room?’

At three o’clock Noah got up and shaved. Shaving was not a thing he cared to undertake in aeroplane toilets and he had therefore delayed the exercise until he had reached his own bathroom. Before he drove to collect his daughter from school he delivered to Ali, with a pointed glance and murderous implication, one small tray complete with used dark green coffee cups which he had lifted unwashed from the floor of the garage. It seemed manifestly obvious to him that, twenty years on, Mot Adderley still got his rocks off inhabiting garages.

Being by nature a punctual person, he arrived comfortably in time to hear the school’s dismissal bell, and was consequently surprised to find that Hattie was not disgorged among the chattering swell into the entrance hall. In Hattie’s almost empty classroom he encountered a cleaning woman, scraping crushed wax crayons from the floor with a palette knife, who grumbled quietly, to nobody in particular, that it made you wonder what sort of homes the children came from. Hattie’s teacher emerged, oblivious, from a cupboard with a box of tangled embroidery threads and a pile of Binca cloth upon which the children had begun, but never completed, some ham-fisted cross-stitch. She put down the box when she saw Noah and tripped jauntily towards him through the wax crayons in flat, gold dancing pumps. She flashed him a wide, painted smile calculated to charm the male of the species.