Noah's Ark (31 page)

On this particular Monday morning Ali was out with Hattie and Daniel had just successfully accomplished a third week in secret feeding of the cat. He saw to his surprise that Julie and
Thomas had fallen asleep with their arms around each other. Beside them were empty coffee cups and discarded novels. He stopped in his tracks with the jampot house in his hands. Surely only married people hugged like that in their sleep? Then, to his relief, he heard his mother.

When Ali and Hattie came home Daniel saw that his sister was wearing a new T-shirt and a funny cap. The T-shirt had writing on it and a picture of a big yellow sun. He ran towards them eagerly, because it was strange to be there alone at the poolside with Julie and Thomas being so close and married-looking and asleep.

‘Mummy!’ he said. ‘Mummy!’

For Ali to find them lying there, the two great loves of her past, was like the final closing of a book; the ending of an era. The thing had a kind of dreadful symmetry. Intermittently, throughout her adult life, she had consumed so much of her soul in longing for Thomas that she was strangely glad, now, to lay the burden down. What she saw before her rose as another pile of broken glass and running sores which in her blessed privilege she could step over and leave alone to fester. She accepted that, as the unsavoury tenets of extra-marital rough justice operated, Julie had something of a claim on Thomas, but she had taken him in Paddington to be a loyal and monogamous husband; had taken him for a fellow initiate in the arts of adultery. This he now clearly was not. Ali was disappointed. She put a finger to her lips and beckoned Daniel to come away with her into the house.

As he crossed the paving-stones, Daniel fell sprawling. He almost fell into the pool. Julie’s shoes had tripped him up. The jampot house fell in pieces with a high, resonant explosion and when Daniel rose up he saw that he had broken the skin on both his knees. Julie sat up sharply to attention. Daniel had run whimpering into his mother’s arms.

‘Never mind, my baby,’ Ali was saying. ‘It’s just a jampot house. Just a little silly jampot house. We can try to find another one just the same.’

‘Damn you, child!’ Julie said harshly. ‘You have broken my jampot house! I was planning to give it to your mother. Your visit here was expressly conditional upon your not breaking any of my china.’ She rose, angry and compromised. Thomas meanwhile slept on. ‘A letter came for you, Ali,’ she said. ‘I have it in the house. It came care of me at the university. Perhaps it is from your husband but I think not. Having spoken to him, as I did this morning, I cannot think he would address his letters so idiotically. He telephoned for you this morning. He’ll probably try you again.’ Julie softened. She put her hands on Ali’s shoulders and gave her a kiss.

‘Dearest Ali-pie,’ she said. ‘We’ve had some very good times.’ She turned and looked back at Thomas, still recumbent on the stones. ‘“The salmon falls, the mackerel-crowded seas”,’ she said wistfully. ‘My birthday is next week. I’m forty-one. Yours is in two days. We’ll eat strudel together in Hillbrow, eh, to celebrate our middle age before you take yourself home. You’re booked to go home next week, aren’t you? Your medic tells me he means to be back in Oxfordshire in twelve days’ time, Ali-pie, and I took him for a man whose word was good. I have to tell you that I took to him very strongly in general. He’s American. You never said.’

‘Yes,’ Ali said. ‘No.’

‘In fact you have said almost nothing about him,’ Julie said. ‘You have been very good. Your personal life has been in a state of minor crisis, I suspect. That was the catch. That was why you came, wasn’t it? But you haven’t bothered me with it. I have quite enough bother on right now, of course, what with the gardener having had an axe wedged fatally in his wretched skull the week before you came. Of all the aspirant applicants for the job not one of them has a pass-book in order. Did I tell you? Times have been difficult for us all.’

Ali shivered. There were times when Julie’s abrasiveness occurred to her as a compelling form of self-torture.

‘Jesus, Ali,’ Julie said. ‘What is that child of yours wearing? Who tells you to buy her such fascist T-shirts?’ Hattie’s new
T-shirt, wheedled from Ali against her better judgement, came with a matching yellow eye-shade and said, in an arc of uppercase lettering over a smiling, full frontal sun-face, ‘Sunny South Africa’. ‘Take that thing off at once, child!’ Julie said. ‘You can’t wear a thing like that in my house.’

‘I can,’ Hattie said staunchly. ‘I will. Anyway, it
is
sunny here.’ Behind them Thomas cleared his throat. He was blinking and smiling and raising his cup.

‘Cheers, Alison,’ he said. ‘All it wants is a little amendment; a small addition. I propose “More Power to the People in Sunny South Africa”.’ Oh Thomas!

Ali’s letter, though unsigned, had clearly come from Arnie who, upon returning to the research unit after a third weekend in Brighton with Camilla, had been moved by the sight of Noah’s imperfect typing which had thus far spent the summer sitting idly in the roller of the office machine. He had added a corollary of his own to it and had despatched it to Ali, with Camilla’s help, care of ‘The Horror Witch’ at the local department of English.

‘% asyouwillsee =¾’ ran the corollary, ‘i have) finally £ =)taught % myself to $ touch ⅝-type/6. HAPPY BRITHDAY % AL/?!’

‘Bon voyage, Ali-Pie,’ Julie said at the departure gate. ‘I can’t say that I don’t envy you. To have a nice bull-necked Yankee medical hunk waiting for me back in temperate Blauwildebeest-fontein – that would be one hundred per cent better than a slap in the face with a pickled herring. Perhaps he would like two wives?’

Ali laughed. ‘To speak frankly, I would say that you have Thomas. Or, at least, part shares in him. Julie, do you love him?’

Julie shrugged. ‘Love,’ she said. ‘You can keep it. But you, Ali, with your three marriages. You must believe in love. Do
you
love him? You always used to. Don’t pretend you didn’t.’

Ali scanned her emotions, not for the first time since that
protracted denouement from Paddington to the poolside, and discovered that she did not. But she worried for him. Worried for his precarious safety in such an explosive and baffling place.

‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s yours, for all I care.’

‘To speak true,’ Julie said, ‘he’s not much of a proposition in reality. For all his size and loveliness, he is not altogether corporeal, if you know what I mean. Thomas is too good for this life. Too good and not good enough. Goodbye, my dear friend and don’t think too badly of me. Go home and enjoy your medic.’

Ali laughed and kissed her. ‘Thanks for having me, Julie,’ she said. ‘I never incidentally said that my husband was bull-necked.’

‘He sounded like a seventeen-inch collar to me over the telephone,’ Julie said. ‘I call that corporeal. Goodbye, Ali.’ She placed in Ali’s hands as a parting surprise the jam pot house, artfully and secretly glued for her by the curator of a local musuem. Ali bit her lip to fight back tears.

‘“Friendship is like china”,’ she said, ‘“Precious, frail and rare”’.

‘Are you actually quoting me this doggerel?’ Julie said. ‘Or are you making it up? What are your sources for this nauseating snippet of folk poetry?’

‘You are,’ Ali said. ‘But that was long ago.’

Ali had no idea until the plane had been airborne three hours that – zipped in among Hattie’s hand-luggage which she kept upon her knee to ensure for periodic intakes of air – was a sleeping three-week-old kitten.

Ali’s reentry into England did not prove easy on the nerves; not for a person to whom the prospect of smuggling held out no charms. Guiltily she followed the green light at Heathrow Airport, with its attendant implication that she had ‘nothing to declare’. The kitten behaved beautifully, and, as Ali had taken the further precaution of doing what Arnie Wienberg had once advised in the circumstances – namely of ‘getting in line behind a party in turbans and saris’ – the British customs officials had been too busy venting a measure of controlled, racist harassment upon her forerunners in the queue to concern themselves with Hattie’s hand-luggage. Hattie had been very naughty to bring the kitten in like that, without asking, but Ali had not the stomach to scold her for it. The child had wanted a kitten for so long, and here was that rare and wonderful thing, a female ginger, like its mother. Of all cats, ginger tabbies had always been Ali’s own favourites. She foresaw, with relative stoicism, the prospect of feeding the tiny creature at four-hourly intervals through the night with a medicinal eye-dropper until it was ready to lap and, with considerably less stoicism, the repercussions from its presence in the house where Noah was concerned. Noah would be furious at a time when appeasement seemed the better part of discretion.

In the airport car park she found that the Audi had been broken into and had had one of its front windows shattered, but
worse was still to follow. Misgiving struck her heart as she saw that the house – at the mercy of Noah’s untended climbing plants since May – had already begun to take on the look of Haunted Castle and that the front door stood wide open. An unmistake-able smell of dripping and scorched chillies hung thickly on the air in the hallway above a pile of unopened mail. Ali mounted the stairs with trepidation, like Mother Bear returning from a walk in the woods. Someone had most certainly been sleeping in her bed, since several starkly prolific semen stains now graced the dark brown nether sheet. The shower leading from the room had not yet drained of its water, which floated steamily in the run-off, sporting a surface film of warm, soapy scum and sloughed particles of skin.

‘William Lister!’ Ali said, but above the bath, suspended from the clothes line, hung a black nylon brassiere in size 38D.

The kitchen, under Hattie’s prohibitive ‘NO SMOCKING’ sign, yielded up as further evidence a box of used matches lying beside a pile of wood ash in the grate. The children had already run off, oblivious, to their bedrooms, so eager to rediscover the pleasures of old toys. At the bottom of the garden William Lister was raising a mallet as he drove a wedge into a section of dead elm trunk. Beside him stood a new and impressively large woodpile. The size of the woodpile struck Ali forcefully as hideous evidence that William, together with the owner of the 38D brassiere, was planning to ride out the winter right there on her premises. Though he waved to her with a casual greeting when he saw her at the window, William did not cease from his labours until he had cleft the trunk neatly in six and had added the pieces to the woodpile. Then he laid both mallet and axe on the ground and made his way to the kitchen door. He stamped his feet heavily on the mat and wiped his forehead on one of Ali’s table napkins, which she watched him draw out of his pocket.

‘Phew!’ he said. ‘Chopping wood; it’s thirsty work I can tell you, but really – with all that diseased elm lying there unused in
the woods, I don’t understand why you people ever resort to expensive fuels.’

Ali’s immediate thought was that he had let the oil storage tank run dry or that the electricity supply had been cut off. William was meanwhile displaying his calluses for her with undisguised satisfaction.

‘You are making a woodpile,’ she said unnecessarily and, discovering a sudden, desperate need for hot tea, she cast her eyes over the workboard for the kettle, which she could not see.

‘Full marks, my dear woman, for brilliant deduction,’ William said. ‘That I am, indeed.’ Something had happened to William, Ali decided morbidly. It was not merely that he had lost all sense of reality, nor that he had never used words like ‘indeed’ to her before. The nylon brassiere and the semen stains stood as ominous pointers to the awful truth that William had come of age where women were concerned, and that he was now demonstrating for her benefit how well he could handle the weaker sex. William had become a card-carrying understander of women.

‘Welcome home, beautiful,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a nice little touch of the sun. It makes you look younger. I’m afraid I can’t offer you any tea until I’ve got this grate of yours cleared out and the fire made up. It draws terribly I may say, this fireplace. Your kettle has been on the blink since this morning.’ Ali stared at him in a state of contained indignation which came as a prelude to rage.

‘It could just be worth mentioning that Noah’s had all the flues bricked up,’ she said. ‘Brick-dust and wood-smoke give him asthma. I hope you realise that whatever else you have been doing here, you have also been in danger of burning down my house.’ William chuckled dismissively.

‘As to your husband’s asthma,’ he said. ‘It is a well-known fact that it’s an ailment rooted in psycho-emotional problems. Noah wants to look beyond his chimneys for the cause.’ Something was happening to Ali which – for all that Mervyn Bobrow might have
dismissed it as a mere rising obsession with ‘utensils and territory’ – was in truth another coming of age. Tutored in the poignant resolution of her own sex by the power of her two unlikely spinsters, Julie Horowitz and old Margaret; sustained by the uncrushable and enduring Mrs Gaitskell, Ali had at the last discovered her strengths in the knowledge that she had somehow marvellously cast off all residual yearning for Thomas Adderley. That liberation which had begun after Paddington and had reached its recent completion beside Julie Horowitz’s swimming pool had already started to celebrate itself in the painting of the oranges to which she now longed to get back. She addressed William Lister in the confident voice of one who had discovered not only that she could get on and off aeroplanes without terror, but that she could do so with an item of unscheduled livestock concealed in her children’s hand-luggage.

‘If you’ve buggered my kettle, William Lister,’ she said, ‘you will also – before you pack your bags – clean out the grate and telephone a plumber to fix my shower. Finally, you will get your fancy-woman’s underwear out of my bathroom. You have ten minutes, starting from now.’ William began to stave her off with a shot at amiable condescension.

‘I refuse to let you quarrel with me,’ he said. ‘If I allow you to quarrel with me, you will only hate yourself for it tomorrow, believe me.’