Noah's Ark (27 page)

‘He says that he’s writing a novel,’ Julie said. ‘South African writing is very chic right now, of course. He’ll stick around here in the Wits caff for two months and then he’ll go off and write some highbrow
skiet-endonder,
choc-full of dust and barbed wire, for which he’ll get a publisher’s advance and, following upon that, a sheaf of admiring British weeklies saying that he’s captured “the valid smell of the veld”. As if those poor
uitlanders
could tell the smell of the veld from the smell of frying chapatis.’ Mervyn Bobrow, accompanied by his delighted youthful coterie, had begun to make his way to the exit.

‘He’s asked us to dinner tonight,’ Julie said. ‘I told him I had a friend.’ So that was it, Ali thought. She had come six thousand miles to dine with the Bobrows!

‘And does he happen to know that the friend in question is me?’ Ali said.

‘Not a bit of it,’ Julie said. ‘But you’re coming with me. Have you met him then?’

‘I was married to him once,’ Ali said.

‘To
him?
’Julie said. ‘First a prospective prince of concrete, then a Jewish genius and then a Jewish doctor? Well done, Ali-pie! If my mother weren’t senile she’d be inflamed with envy on my behalf. I confess to a small twinge of it myself.’

‘Nonsense,’ Ali said. ‘Julie, you always had more men than I’d had hot breakfasts. They were like bees around hollyhocks with you.’

‘Maybe so,’ Julie said. ‘I never had the art of keeping them. I was always too much capable of looking after myself. It’s called “bossiness” in women. You’re lucky. Being vulnerable comes naturally to you. You may get knocked around, but you’ll never be alone. With me – only sissies ever wanted to stay with me. Who wants sissies?’

‘Daniel’s a sissy,’ Hattie said, trading loyalty in the hope of achieving a slice of the discourse, but all in vain.

‘I aren’t,’ Daniel said. ‘I’m a boy.’

‘Sissies are
always
boys, dumb-dumb,’ Hattie said.

‘How’s Thomas?’ Ali said. ‘Thomas Adderley.’ Julie laughed.

‘Lovely – and married,’ she said. ‘Thomas thrives. He grows straight and true in this place. God knows how. He used to teach school, do you know? The silly bugger took his Grade A mind and went teaching in a government school. Of course, most male schoolteachers go in straight lines to headships but not so Thomas. He got thrown out. He had some distinctly Cubist ideas where it came to the teaching of History, I believe. Anybody with sense knows that school History is a case of facing Mecca and chanting Blood River and The Great Trek five times a week. What do you suppose is the matter with our darling Mot?’

‘I heard tell that he wrote plays,’ Ali said. ‘You can’t eat plays, can you? How does he eat?’

‘I give him my salary,’ Julie said.

‘Jesus!’ Ali said, and it crossed her mind that she probably owed Julie the price of a hotel room in Paddington. ‘I’m sorry, Julie. And I said you were tight-fisted.’

‘So I am on the whole,’ Julie said. ‘But I believe in his talent and I have considerable shares in gold. I have strong vested interests here in a system which Thomas would like to see in sackcloth. Do you enjoy these contradictions, Ali-pie?’

‘Only when I’m with you,’ Ali said.

‘These two small persons, here,’ Julie said abruptly, changing the subject. ‘Were they got upon you by the genius or the medic?’

‘The medic,’ Ali said. ‘I have a grown-up daughter by the genius who is at Cambridge right now.’

‘I see,’ Julie said.

‘And you?’ Ali said. ‘You never had any?’

‘Not me,’ Julie said. ‘Not even a pussy cat. I don’t like nurturing, remember.’ Ali wondered whether it was altogether idiotic to hope that some wonderful, aberrant Afrikaner from the Rand Afrikaans University would fall in love with Julie at a cricket match and dazzle her with the brightness of his cuff-links. She decided that it was.

Mrs Bobrow glanced anxiously around the dining room that evening. The anonymity of the place, with its standard campus-issue furniture, was disturbing to her confidence. Teak veneer and plastic foam did not justly reflect one’s personality. Since the evening’s menu was, she flattered herself, ‘exotic’, she had given time and effort to getting the extending table as much as possible into line. Two miniature ‘table forests’ and a box of moss and pebbles stood equidistant from two glass carafes containing reeds and green bamboo stalks, and yet the suspicion remained with her that the thing looked set for a Rotary Club lunch. At home one’s dining table had Jacobean legs, even if there was some doubt about the authenticity of the top. In short one had an infrastructure supportive to one’s projection of self. Yet it was ludicrous to be anxious. Being a ‘woman-in-one’s-own-right’ as one was – and God only knew there were few enough of the species in these hallowed groves of bridge-club and coffee-morning wives – this ought surely to expunge one’s unease about the unacceptability of paper table napkins, for example. For the paper table napkins Mervyn was wholly to blame. She had sent him out expressly to buy cloth napkins that morning, but he had returned without them. He had passed the time instead dazzling undergraduates in the student cafe. And even now he was not yet home. Mervyn had not been himself lately, she thought. He had been snappish and unpredictable. He had begun to cut corners in
the scrupulous division of domestic labour which they had always upheld and had had the effrontery to use as his excuse that the flat ‘came’ with a servant. A hopelessly decadent black woman who coated the bathroom fixtures each morning with a half-inch layer of scouring powder before going on to monopolise the Bobrows’ telephone for the best part of the day. Eva had been obliged to play the ‘White Madam’ and buy a padlock for the telephone dial. The woman used Fairy Liquid as though it grew on trees and pinched the Bobrows’ gin. It piqued Eva that so much of her creative energy was consumed these days in watching the housemaid in a place where Mervyn appeared to be thriving. It compromised her progressive credentials. Mervyn was becoming chronically manic. He had shirked on his commitment to supervise Lucy’s holiday project-work. She had begun to suspect him of being a little sweet on the Horowitz woman and for this reason she had played matchmaker for the evening and had invited along a charming Norwegian expert in police repression whom she had met during the course of her researches into black women’s self-help groups. Now Mervyn had once again upset her plans by inviting Ms Horowitz with a female friend. A person from Europe, to be sure, but one for all that who would effectively upset the symmetry of the seating arrangements.

The self-help groups, to say true, had begun to get Eva down. She had found them a great disappointment. False-consciousness was everywhere and Methodism, along with a variety of more extreme manifestations of patriarchal Victorian evangelism, appeared to be rife among black woman machinists and garment workers. She had made the observation recently to Thomas Adderley, who had been unsuitably sanguine in reply. He had quoted to her what he called an old local adage, that whereas once in South Africa the whites had got the Bible and the blacks had got the land, the thing was now reversed: the blacks had the Bible and the whites had the land. But Eva, as she had put him down for his levity, had reminded him that the thing was no
laughing matter. As far as the women’s movement was concerned, a preoccupation with the after-life was a severe impediment to the way forward. Thomas could not see why. Christianity, like all religions, he said, contained the inspiration for advance as well as retreat. In the context, salvationism lifted people up. It gave them dignity, unity and hope.

Eva returned to the kitchen thinking of Thomas Adderley, who was to be one of her guests. To be sure, his thinking needed sorting out, but he was at least ‘somebody’ in this no-man’s-land. A person whose name held some cop among readers of the
Observer
. Earlier in the day she had toiled assiduously over her Chinese pork parcels which now lay bound and gagged in an unsuitable Pyrex roasting dish pocked with scorched meatglaze marks left by careless previous tenants. The chilled lentil soup stood in the fridge in a monstrous aluminium saucepan in which it would have been more fit to boil a week’s handkerchiefs. There were no decent pots in the flat. At home, Eva thought wistfully, as the doorbell rang, one had Le Creuset oven-to-tableware, which was the birthright of every superior cook.

Ali had met Thomas on the afternoon preceding the Bobrows’ dinner party when he came to call on Julie. The meeting was easier, more agreeable, more lacking in emotional intensity than either of them might have feared. Both had seemed to have lived through and beyond the episode in Paddington and no reference was made to it, even when Julie left them together at a garden table under the lemon trees and went to answer her telephone. Thomas took a nice but not overwhelming interest in Ali’s children, whose game of hop-scotch on the paving-stones caused him to remark upon continuity and innovation in children’s games. His wife was a nursery schoolteacher, he said, and he had thus become vicariously acquainted with a vast range of clapping rhymes over the years. Ali was glad to have him mention his wife to her in that easy way and wanted rather to meet her, but it was soon apparent to her that, while Thomas was a frequent visitor,
frequent enough to be familiar with the placing of every household object which Julie had called upon him to fetch – like the deck-chairs and the daily papers, for example – Lorna Adderley was not. Then Julie returned across the lawn. ‘Thinking of our engagement tonight,’ she said, in her loud, exuberant voice, ‘are you aware, Thomas, that our mutual friend here was once married to Mervyn Bobrow?
Married
to him, my dear! Ali has a remarkable capacity for espousing men, admittedly, but marriage to him. Is that a state one could remotely envisage?’ Thomas merely smiled.

‘Not me,’ he said.

‘To be sure, you are the wrong sex,’ Julie said. ‘Though one has to admit that poor Mr B’s handbag lends an air of sexual ambiguity to the case. Tell us about being married to him, Ali, we are all ears.’

Ali groped for one of those masterfully noncommittal phrases which Noah had always used in reply to her early quizzings about his first marriage.

‘It was kind of long ago,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t signify.’

‘God knows,’ Julie said. ‘Among marriages you get all sorts. I propose, regarding tonight, that the four of us meet at the staff club and drink ourselves into a fit state for the occasion. Lorna will come, won’t she?’

‘Yes,’ Thomas said. ‘She’ll come.’

Mrs Adderley turned out to be a quiet, sweet-faced and plumpish woman; a fine-skinned blonde whose looks had early lost their bloom under the harshness of the southern sun. Her hair, which was drawn severely from her forehead, was fixed with a regiment of steel hair slides alongside the ears and her only concession to personal adornment consisted in a pencilling of thin, outdated arcs over her eyelids in place of absent eyebrows. She seemed to Ali the kind of woman whose competence and authority would come into their own among children rather than adults. Ali, who warmed to her, was made awkward, not by the fact of her being Thomas’s wife, but by the knowledge that Julie
was undermining the woman. Not only was she supplying Thomas with sums of money vastly beyond the means of a nursery schoolteacher, but she was, right then, pushing her own combination of intellect and Parisian chic beyond discretion. It seemed to Ali a gross rudeness in her friend that she consumed the half-hour in the staff club bantering wittily with Lorna Adderley’s husband on the subject of an esoteric letter controversy currently raging in the
Times Literary Supplement
, and a lesser rudeness in Thomas himself that he allowed it to continue. It puzzled her. Noah, she felt sure, would never have let such a situation come about. But then, Noah was Noah. She knew him by now to be a better thing than Thomas. Thinking of Noah right then induced a sudden melancholy which transferred itself by association to Daniel. Poor Daniel, who had been so tearful at parting from her that evening; so loath to have her go out.

‘How old is your little boy?’ Lorna said, with the impressive clairvoyance of a quiet, observant woman, but Julie was right then calling to them both from the hat stand where, with the help of Thomas, she was reaching for coats.

‘Quaff your gin, you two, and hurry up!’ she was saying. ‘The sooner we get there the sooner we can all go home again.’ On her way out, Julie, while illustrating a point with a flourish of the arm, caught her gold bracelet in Thomas’s coat button.

‘Oh my God!’ she said. ‘We have become inseparable.’ After a brief struggle she unfixed the bracelet from her wrist and strode with Ali towards her car, leaving the object dangling carelessly from Thomas’s coat front. ‘We’ll see you there,’ she said.

At the Bobrows’ apartment, things did not promise well. Eva did not like surprises and Ali’s appearance as Julie’s friend was naturally galling to her. While her past efforts to enlist the Glazers’ presence at her social functions had repeatedly met with failure, Ali had now appeared unexpectedly when she was least welcome. In the circumstances, Eva remained determinedly affronted. But Ali’s transgression was soon overshadowed by a
greater transgression on the part of Eva’s husband, for Mervyn had not returned.

The meal began without him. It had to since the pork parcels could not wait for ever. Several of Eva’s brave conversational gambits rose and fell like failed souffles as his absence became both conspicuous and unnerving. Julie had lapsed into a disobliging silence as she sniffed out tomato ketchup in the soup with a cold, uncharitable talent for chemical analysis. The Norwegian, who had been invited to pair with her, appeared to be wholly occupied in admiring Ali’s pale, Quakerish physiognomy. Manfully Mrs Bobrow tried lifting the spirit with a condescending jibe against local cuisine.

‘I have dined out, since coming here, on more unimaginative roast-and-two-veg than ever before in my life,’ she said. ‘But where cooking is left to the servants, while the women play tennis and bridge, the culinary traditions are lost.’ While Lorna rose politely on cue to praise the food, Julie rose all too predictably to play devil’s advocate.