Noah's Ark (28 page)

‘I have always had the greatest difficulty myself in telling Stork from Omo,’ she said with a wholehearted insincerity. ‘But then we grew up, us colonial hicks, on two standard puddings: bananas set in red jelly and baked custard. They were all the maid could make. Do you remember it, Ali? Dora’s curds and whey?’ It was at the conclusion of this provoking utterance that Mervyn entered at the wide French windows. One eye was torn at the corner and dramatically encircled with bluish smudges. The clutchbag dangled from his wrist. Eva emitted a cry but Mervyn fended her off, almost as though he did not know her. He stalked tiger-wise towards the table with a gleam of triumph in his amber, feline eyes. Lorna Adderley dabbed a little nervously at her mouth and laid her knife and fork neatly on her plate at twenty-past four. Mervyn came to a stop and struck an attitude. He began to speak, like a ventriloquist, in a voice not unlike Noel Coward’s.

‘Sorry I missed the party,’ he said. ‘I was propositioned in a bar. A rough sort of hang-out where a brace of muscle-bound
white hearties mistook my sexual leanings. Naturally, I turned them down. “Be assured,” I said’ – and here his voice rose high and precious and his ‘r’s rolled like a Scotsman’s – ‘“the tattoos on your forearms repel me. I would rather offer my body to a team of Zulu shift-workers than to the likes of you. I plump for ‘brown’ not ‘brawn’. I have no taste for the Master Race.”’

He sat down then to await the company’s praise for this the latest of his daring forays into the nation’s lowlife, smelling the while of blood and sweat. Then he blinked twice and fixed his eyes on Ali.

‘Alison,’ he said suspiciously. ‘What brings you to my table?’ A compromising memory of Ali’s accurate prediction regarding the clutchbag now rose to snuff his elation. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he demanded unpleasantly. ‘Eva! What the hell is this woman doing in my house?’ But Eva had gone for an icepack.

Ali saw the wheel turn painfully before her. ‘Sit worthy friends: – my lord is often thus. Feed and regard him not.’ Mervyn had reverted to playing Supertramp, only this time, mercifully, it was someone else’s problem. Eva’s problem. She was not obliged to stay and watch as the show evolved. In her mind she was Noah all those years ago on the night he had proposed marriage to her, standing sanely and squarely in her living room with Angie’s gin bottle in his hand.

‘Weep all you like,’ he had said. ‘Weep and let it fester. It’s all you can do.’ It had shocked her a little at the time but Noah – precisely because he had not presumed to save the world – had so successfully managed to save her. She could let the thing fester and walk away from it. It was, as Noah would have said, ‘No problem.’

‘We ought to go,’ she said. ‘Julie – the babysitter. And I have some telephone calls to make. I would like to telephone my husband.’ Julie got readily to her feet.

‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘We really have to go.’ The Norwegian expert in police repression pressed them earnestly to stay, but
Eva, clutching the ice-bag, looked tired, grateful and relieved. Behind them they heard her begin to gather up the plates. Julie’s bracelet was left forgotten in the hallway, where it hung from the buttons of Thomas’s coat. As she swung her car in the drive, making a wide arc of light from her headlamps which for a moment blazed gloriously in the azalea hedge, Julie heaved a sigh.

‘Say, wasn’t the grub something else?’ she said. ‘I believe that I have left one of my molars behind in the sweetmeats.’

Daniel Glazer did not trust the babysitter. He had never before had a brown babysitter with a funny accent and a funny beret, whose status in the house seemed somehow perplexingly marginal. She was not comfortable there. Mrs Gaitskell had always been a believer in ebullient bedtime romping as a prelude to sleep, but this person had not presumed upon any physical closeness. She had not even presumed upon the upholstered living-room furniture, but had taken a small hard kitchen chair from the back veranda and had brought it through into the white man’s region for the evening where she sat uneasily with her head bent over a scarlet rectangle of knitting. Daniel could not be sure whether the faint clicks he heard emanated from her throat or from her needles. There was no way of being absolutely sure that she wasn’t the wolf-lady like the babysitter in the story they had had at nursery school.

Daniel tried hard to stay awake until his mother got back but he did not succeed. Yet he slept fitfully. He woke shivering to find he had thrown off his covers and that the winter night was unexpectedly chilly, given the previous warmth of the day. He was startled to remember that he had left his precious soldiers on the back lawn that afternoon where he had been playing at shooting the pink ballerinas.

Ali, having thought once to dilute Daniel’s relentlessly stereotypical male war-play, had tried valiantly to buy him some plastic womenfolk along with his plastic soldier men, but the toy
industry had been against her and the pink ballerinas were all she had been able to find. Naturally, the ballerinas, in their unarmed, saccharine pinkness, had not quite met the case, but had nonetheless proved useful to Daniel in his fantasy-play during which they were often to be found prostrated in various attitudes of devastation at the base of the kitchen table or under the climbing frame, while the soldiers stood in triumphant rows upon the summits, with their guns poised. To Ali’s mild chagrin, Noah had always found this pattern of play not only highly amusing but also reassuring, since he felt that it proved Daniel to be making a wonderfully normal job of adjusting to a slightly crackpot mother who had been eccentric enough to have bought him the ballerinas in the first place.

Daniel wrapped himself in his bed quilt, pushed his feet into his training shoes and tip-toed into the living room. The babysitter had dropped off in the chair. The knitting dangled near the floor, and her beret had pushed itself askew on her head in sleep. Daniel struggled with the key to the back door. It turned with a startling, tell-tale squeak which caused a moment’s irregularity in the sleeping black woman’s breathing. Then all was well. A cricket shrilling in the hedge fell silent as he touched the grass. Above him Daniel saw that the stars were marvellously, giddily bright. The soldiers lay illumined in a square of light which fell from the kitchen window on to the grass. Beside them lay the box, throwing its shadow before it in a dark, elongated parallelogram. Daniel ran to them over the grass with a beating heart and knelt to gather them up. It was then he saw and heard the cat.

The cat was a stray. Unusually for a female, it was ginger. It was very small and thin, but for its great swollen belly which swung like panniers on either side of its ribcage. It ran to Daniel eagerly for comfort, emitting occasional jerky little cries. Under its tail the animal’s small distended vulva was edged with blood. Though Daniel had no idea of it, the cat was experiencing a modest feline version of that discomfort accompanying the birth of a footling breach. Daniel stroked its head between the ears. He
let the bed quilt drop and he followed its lead to a narrow chink at the back of a small brick shed alongside the swimming pool which the animal had chosen for its nest. Daniel crouched at the chink between wall and hedge for a good twenty minutes, his childish, predatory stalking having taught him unusual patience. It was too dark for him to see anything. He could hear that the cat, after one squeak louder than all the rest, had begun to purr. There was a wetness about it and a funny smell.

Daniel remembered that in his hand-luggage his mother had allowed him to pack, from his jungle survival kit, a much-favoured item which, under the influence of his father’s transatlantic idiom, he still knew as ‘a flash light’. He ran back across the grass, passing the abandoned soldiers on his way. Inside the house the black woman slept on. The only danger, with his brief scuffle in the sports bag, lay in the possibility that Hattie would wake, who shared the room with him, but that danger seemed happily to pass. He returned to the shed by the swimming pool where to his amazement he saw that the cat was already suckling two dampish, rat-like babies with flattened ears and hairless paws. She appeared at the same time to be chewing up a dark, gory little parcel attached to an equally gory rope between her hind legs. Daniel squatted beside the chink, keeping a respectful distance. He felt a sense of wonder and privilege – as one of the Magi – to witness such a birth under the vivid southern stars. He had no urge to interfere; only to watch. He was glad that Hattie was not there, who would have been making a lot of noise and itching to dress the kittens in Sacha doll clothes like the cats in Beatrix Potter. He knew that the mother cat was hungry because she was so thin and he knew that she would be thirsty. She needed milk.

He returned to the house where he found that, while all the crockery had been put away in high-up cupboards which he could not reach, there was an open shelf of funny things within his grasp. The explanation for this shelf was that Mummy’s friend Julie Horowitz was so rich that she could afford to waste
her money on china that she didn’t like. Daniel liked all of it. There was a teapot shaped like a camel designed to spew tea out of its mouth, and several rather lecherous-looking toby jugs. A couple of mugs said things in pointy gold writing that Daniel could not read, but the nicest thing of all was the jampot house which Mummy had fallen upon earlier in the day with recognition and delight. It was just like one the Zulu maid had had when she was a child, she said, and she’d always wanted one the same. It looked like a thatched English cottage with its lid made into the roof. Daniel took off the roof to use as a saucer. Then he took from the fridge a litre bottle of milk and went back with his equipment to the cat. There were now three suckling kittens and the gory parcel had vanished. Daniel filled the roof of the jampot house with milk and held it out to the mother cat. She lapped greedily, stippling his hand with cold, white droplets of milk from her tongue.

Then suddenly Hattie was there, coming up behind him.

‘What are you doing?’ she said. ‘I’ve been watching you for ages from the window.’ Daniel gasped. In haste he switched off the torch.

‘Nothing,’ he said, realising suddenly how cold he was. ‘It’s nothing.’ He stood up and faced her, holding his arms guiltily across the narrow corridor to bar her vision.

‘Show me!’ Hattie said. ‘Show me or I’ll tell about you being near the swimming pool.’ Daniel began to cry.

‘Show me!’ Hattie said. She shouldered him from the access and took the torch from his hand. In the scuffle, Daniel knocked over the milk which ran eagerly into the dry, red earth below the hedge.

‘It’s kittens!’ Hattie said with real delight. ‘Oh, Dan, aren’t they lovely!’ The kittens by now had dried out into a presentable, striated fluffiness, one orange and two grey.

‘It’s a secret,’ Daniel said. ‘Please don’t tell the grown-ups.’

‘No,’ Hattie said. ‘Of course not. The ginger one can be mine. Yours can be the two grey ones.’

‘But they don’t belong to us,’ Daniel said. ‘They just sort of belong to themselves, Hattie.’

‘The ginger one is a girl one,’ Hattie said, reaching out to lift it from the nipple. ‘Yours can both be boys. I don’t mind if you have two.’

‘But they don’t belong to us, Hattie,’ Daniel said again. ‘You shouldn’t pick them up. They’re too new.’

‘Mine is called Susan,’ Hattie said. ‘She
wants
me to pick her up.’

Back in england the coming of the summer vacation saw Camilla move, with an undergrad girl friend, into a Brighton seafront flat, borrowed on a student grapevine for the month of July. For both girls, accustomed to the more sober and landlocked atmosphere of Cambridge, the seaside town presented a novel delight. Construction workers whistled at them from airy scaffolding each morning as they set out to hobble over shingle on rope-soled shoes and take the water before the crowds. Then there were the irresistible shops. Such bargains were to be got from the period clothing boutiques. Such a wealth of crenellated satins and old silk nightwear. Such quantities of nineteen-forties Bally shoes – Bobbie Shafto shoes, buckled and tongued. Camilla bought a pair of grandad long-johns with buttoned calico flies and button-on singlet top, which she afterwards dyed in a saucepan to the colour of blackberry fool. The effect was astonishing. Shrinkage reduced the legging to mid-calf and caused the top to meet the pants with difficulty, in gaping scallops around the buttoned midriff. Through one of these enticing apertures was visible the perfect, concave swirl of Camilla’s newly tanned navel.

The flat lay towards Kemp Town; the rambling ground floor of a house faced with cracking stucco. Gull splat and sea-spray coated the tall window panes. Within all was sticky from the sea. A pile of sticky unmatched crockery stood on a sticky kitchen
shelf. There were several sticky, slim-waisted Ovaltine mugs. Sticky ashtrays, of which there were many, had all been pinched from south coast hotels. The furnishings were sparse and random. A small mangey bridge table – the only table – stood with a wobbling leg in the grand bay window, covered with oilcloth. The sofa, a sea-green ‘Put-U-Up’, had been smothered in a variety of hairy plaid travelling rugs and stood facing an antique harmonium called ‘The Chicago Cottage Organ’. This last, when opened, revealed above the keyboard a row of perfect ivory stops labelled in gilded Gothic script. Dulcet, Dulcimer and Aeolian Harp.

Camilla’s girlhood piano lessons had not passed in vain. Struggling at first with the dormant bellows, she filled the air each evening with a cosy medley of Victorian hymn tunes. The place was Home Sweet Home. The girls had never been happier. Towards evening they drew their knees up on the Put-U-Up, drank instant coffee from the Ovaltine mugs and developed a wholly unserious fantasy, about living there for ever, which was, of course, sadly impossible. They would acquire a small tabby kitten, they fantasised, and would feed it on fish-heads bought from the old men near the Palace Pier. They would grow old there together, stepping out on winter mornings to throw toast crumbs over the balustrade at the pigeons.