Noah's Ark (22 page)

‘Have you burned your mouth?’ Ali asked solicitously, but William shook his head.

‘Sciatica,’ he said hoarsely and for the third time. ‘I’ll be off in just a minute.’

‘Stay!’ Ali cried out, rising in her chair ‘William, stay. It’s raining.’ On the noticeboard behind him she was half aware of the postcard which Noah had placed there to warn against compassion. ‘Noah is out of town for six days,’ she said, making him a gift of her only defence against his presence. ‘Why not stay till then?’ She had offered the fact as a kindness, knowing that Noah made him uneasy. He had got off on the wrong foot with Noah from the start, poor man, Ali thought. First of all there had been that embarrassing introductory clanger when William had taken a high-minded stand against ‘national stereotyping’; when Noah had come home to find a lean and hungry stranger at his kitchen table sitting before a pile of pamphlet literature. First Noah had kissed his wife.

‘I’m late,’ he said, ‘I have had my time wasted for me by a boring, long-winded Canadian.’ The stranger had bounced into action.

‘Does it signify that this boring, long-winded person was Canadian?’ he said sharply. ‘Or merely that he was boring? What I mean is, why indulge in national stereotyping?’

Noah had stared at William for long enough to notice that the effort of making his point had turned him a deep brick-red.

‘It signifies only in that I reserve the right to display what bigotry I choose in my own house, young man,’ Noah said. William had chalked up Ali’s husband, right then, as an enemy of ‘The Struggle’, and had had no cause since then to change his assessment.

Arnie came early while the family was at supper. He was bearing a gift of duty-free brandy for Ali and communed with her in his usual code.

‘Croak,’ he said. ‘Croak, croak.’

‘What did I tell you?’ she said smugly. ‘Sit down, Arnie. I’ll get you a plate.’ He bent to kiss her cheek and sat down.

‘I just got a call,’ he said. To Ali’s ears, the phrase still conjured implications of the priesthood, or of the voice of God booming in the temple, but it no longer caused her actual misunderstanding.

‘A call?’ she said. ‘From whom?’

‘California,’ he said. ‘I got the job.’

‘Good God, that’s very quick. Well done, Arnie! Oh very well done. How deservedly rich and great you will be.’ She got up to fetch him a plate and cutlery. ‘I’ll miss you,’ she said. Arnie placed the brandy on the table where William Lister’s presence had resulted in the eating being neither convivial nor brisk.

‘This is for the kids,’ he said, hoping to stir a little controversy in the gloom. William had, he noticed to his amusement, on this occasion consented to eat the Glazers’ food, but appeared to be much against both fibre and roughage. He had made a neat pile of tomato skins and mushroom stalks on the edge of his plate and
had banked up these rejects with spoonfuls of brown rice which had also been pushed to one side. Hattie in her turn was forking about in her portion to remove small, unidentifiable orangey particles which she was dumping on her mother’s plate. Arnie sat down to receive his food.

‘Thanks, Al,’ he said.

‘You won’t like it,’ Hattie said. She moved over with alacrity to occupy his knee. In her eagerness to claim this territory before her brother she succeeded now, as always, in leaving her thumb prints all over his lenses, but Arnie bore it with laudable good humour. The fog having uncomfortably impeded his vision, he took off his glasses and laid them on the table. They were new and rather stylish glasses, recently made up for him in Knightsbridge.

‘You look funny without your glasses,’ Hattie said.

‘What’s that stuff you’re picking out of your stew, huh?’ Arnie retorted. ‘Chewing gum?’

‘Stoo,’ Hattie said, taking a well-worn giggly liberty with his accent. ‘You shouldn’t say
“stoo”.
You should say “stew”. It’s oranges. From a tin.
He
put them in. They’re disgusting. Yuck.’

‘Oranges?’ Arnie said.

‘From a tin,’ Hattie said triumphantly.

‘Eat,’ Ali said. A painful crimson flush had begun to steal up William’s neck toward his ears and temples. William, having wished to buy himself the right to eat by contributing a touch of culinary originality to Mrs Gaitskell’s hotpot, had without consultation tipped in a tin of mandarin oranges drawn from his own supplies. Then he had waited eagerly for praise, but his talents had once again been cast before swine.

‘Oranges!’ Arnie repeated mirthfully. ‘Oh that’s neat, William. That’s real neat.’ He put a hand on William’s shoulder who shook him off in scorn. Only Ali among the rest ate without reserve. Having reached that stage, after induction by motherhood, where she could eat almost anything, she could now eat the children’s soft-boiled eggs gone cold in the shell; she could eat the
crusts of yesterday’s toast, she could eat abandoned infant fish fingers impregnated with tomato ketchup. In the house of old Margaret she could gulp down tepid tea and condensed milk in a tin mug lined with fine green mould and topped with a sprinkling of dog hairs.

‘It’s really rather good, William,’ she said but altogether without heart. It was of course godawful. An unhappy marriage of Mrs Gaitskell’s enthusiasm for cornflour and William’s cloying fruit syrup – but as horrors went it was small beer in a day which had begun in airy splendour with Mot Adderley and had ended now with William Lister. It was only food. She badly needed Noah, but Noah was not there. Her ear lobes cried out for aspirin and warm salt water.

‘I’m going to bed,’ she said. ‘We’ll forget the washing-up.’ She poured herself a measure of Arnie’s brandy and called the children.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’re all going to bed.’

Ali woke, flanked by the sleeping children. Her head was wedged in a crevice between two pillows which Hattie and Daniel had determinedly expropriated in sleep. Daniel’s bear was under her elbow. Her first conscious emotion was a quiet pain of loss. Thomas’s aeroplane would by now be refuelling in Nairobi. An odour of scorched chillies and burned dripping made its way up the stairwell from the kitchen where William Lister was contriving his breakfast eggs. For the next six days, the kitchen would no longer be her own. Ali winced. The man’s food habits alternated between unbridgeable modes of Transport Caff and Instant Exotic, and yet each morning these two opposing traditions clashed violently in the curried scrambled eggs.

There had been no post delivered that morning, but on the doormat alongside the bulky
Times
of Saturday lay a crumpled note from Arnie. It had been scribbled in the small hours on the back of a Pan Am ticket holder and had been pushed through the letter box from without.

‘I locked myself out,’ it read. ‘I mean to sleep in your garage. Arnie.’

The note having warmed her spirit, Ali repaired at once to the attic study where her husband kept a small plug-in coffee machine and the last of his two French railway cups on a small tin tray. It was Noah’s habit to punctuate his working sessions with strong black coffee and occasionally to lure his wife up into
joining him there away from the demands of the children. Ali now made two cups of coffee and, gliding past William at the hob with the briefest of greetings, she quickly unlocked the interior door to the garage. To lurk in the garage, drinking coffee and ganging up with Arnie, offered compensation for Friday’s deprivation and promised all the illicit gratification of a boarding-school midnight feast.

Arnie was stretched shirtless along the back seat of the car. His linen jacket was parcelled into a bunch under his head. On the near arm Ali noticed tenderly that the hair which sprouted from the mole on his bicep had at some time turned to grey. He stirred gently with the opening of the door and began to raise himself on to his elbows. Focusing myopically in slight disbelief, he stared at Ali with the tray. Then he reached for his glasses and put them on.

‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘Room service?’

‘Coffee,’ Ali said. ‘That’s all. I’ve woken you. I’m sorry. Somehow I had to.’ Arnie laughed and yawned. He had always possessed that feline ability to move easily in and out of sleep.

‘You haven’t brought me a grapefruit with a cherry on the top,’ he said. ‘You call this breakfast, Al?’

‘He’s
in the kitchen,’ Ali said. ‘He’s making curried scrambled eggs. Arnie, you’ve no idea how it menaces me.’

‘You want me to chuck him out for you?’ Arnie said.

‘Oh no,’ Ali said hastily pursuing an instinct for neutralising conflict. ‘He’ll go before Noah gets back. It’s all right. But why are you in the garage?’

‘I went out,’ Arnie said, ‘I went to call on a woman I know but she was out. I forgot to take your key.’

‘Go on! I thought you could pick locks,’ Ali said. Arnie had long ago dazzled her by demonstrating how successfully he could pick all the family’s collection of four-digit cycle locks.

‘Not the house locks,’ Arnie said. ‘Your place is bolted like a fortress.’

‘That’s Noah,’ Ali said. ‘He likes locks. He likes to guard his goods.’ Arnie smiled. He took a gulp of coffee from the cup which Ali had handed to him.

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘He’s a man of good sense. You just woke me from a dream, Al. You maybe don’t realise that my hands were actually on the breasts of a naked woman.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ali said again.

‘That’s okay,’ Arnie said. ‘The experience was nothing to write home about. Things were taking a distinctly downward turn. This woman she says to me do I think her boobs are beautiful so I tell her “Sure. They’re great. Just great.”’

‘You lying bastard!’ Ali said. ‘You only said it to make her more amenable.’

‘Right!’ Arnie said. ‘That’s what she just said to me.
“You lying bastard,”
she said
‘You’re only saying it so I’ll let you screw
me.”’

‘Then I woke you up,’ Ali said. She had seated herself cross-legged in the back opposite him, wrapped as she was in Noah’s bath robe. In her two interlocking hands she cradled her coffee cup which she rested on bare raised knees. She smiled now to contemplate the nature of Arnie’s hectic and baroque sex life which, for all its evident percentage of success, he only ever mentioned to her in order to amuse with its failures. She had always found this impulse towards self-deprecation an endearing trait in him.

‘Your life is a very different thing from mine,’ she said. ‘Pardon me?’ he said.

‘Arnie,’ Ali said, ‘when I telephoned you yesterday it was in point of fact from a hotel bedroom. I had stood up the gallery and had gone there to meet an old boyfriend. Naturally it all went wrong. Sexually, it materialised as one hundred per cent botch-up, so to speak. I have no experience in clandestine affairs. None at all.’

‘Are you actually being serious, Al?’ Arnie said. ‘Is this the truth you’re telling me?’

‘He was my first love,’ Ali said. ‘People can fall in love very
decisively first time. It isn’t at all the laughable teenage business it’s often cut out to be. It becomes a kind of Platonic ideal. A blueprint. Being human, one has this difficulty with the way things linger so in the memory. It’s all right. Don’t worry. He got on an aeroplane yesterday to Johannesburg. I won’t ever see him again. Jesus, doesn’t it all sound like
Brief Encounter?
Did you ever see that film? Rachmaninov in the background.’

‘Sweetheart, you just had a lucky escape,’ Arnie said.

Ali had meanwhile discovered in each eye a mild case of tears which she brushed aside with the back of her hand.

‘I’m sorry, Arnie,’ she said. ‘I oughtn’t to be unloading my personal life over you like this. You aren’t my analyst after all.’ Arnie smiled at her.

‘Like all the best analysts I say nothing,’ he said. ‘I just listen, ma’am, and I collect on the fees.’

Ali paused to rotate, one by one, the gold studs in her ears which were in danger of cleaving to the unhealed flesh of her lobes. She was still sitting there with her knees drawn up, revealing a stretch of white gusset from her cotton pants, like a comely schoolgirl, he thought, on a dormitory bed. He thought protectively of her as he took in the rumpled crimp still evident in her hair and the newly violated ears. It amused him, in view of what she had just told him, that she had seen fit at this juncture to pierce her ears. The action struck him as dangerously apparent with sexual implication as far as Noah was concerned.

‘Al, baby,’ he said, ‘do yourself a favour, will you? Don’t go telling Noah what you’ve just told me, for Chrissake. Just you keep the whole thing under your hat.’

‘I will,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry?’

‘That’s my girl,’ he said. ‘In matters of the heart it is generally most expedient to lie and cheat.’

Ali laughed. ‘There,’ she said. ‘So you do give advice after all. Gosh, doesn’t it stink of petrol in here?’ Arnie clambered past her into the driver’s seat. It seemed to him suddenly gauche for them
to remain there in the garage when beyond the door lay half of rural England.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Stick to me baby and we’ll go places – like the letter said to the stamp. We’ll take an early morning mystery tour. I’ll get you back before your kids get up, don’t worry.’

‘You haven’t even got the key,’ she said. ‘Not that I would doubt your ability to start the engine without it.’

Arnie drew from his pocket a small keyring and held it up.

‘You left it in the garage door last night,’ he said. ‘How else did you think I got in?’

‘I didn’t think,’ she said. ‘Or if I did I took you for granted as a Magic Man.’

Arnie laughed. ‘You got nice pins, Mrs Glazer,’ he said. ‘Candidly, you got two of the nicest pins I ever saw.’ Ali beamed with pleasure.

‘I haven’t forgotten that poor lady in your dream,’ she said. ‘You’ve undermined the validity of your compliments, Arnie Weinberg.’

Arnie laughed. ‘The difference is, I’m not trying to screw you.’ ‘True,’ Ali said.

Arnie placed a hand over his naked pap with every sign of solemnity. ‘I tell you no lies,’ he said. ‘Al baby, between friends, you got damn nice wheels.’

Daniel glazer woke to the sound of the opening garage door. He registered, with his first blink, the slice of bright daylight which blazed through the gap between his parent’s bedroom curtains and with his second the small adjacent hillock of his sleeping sister’s haunches under his parents’ quilt. His first thought was of his tooth which he had placed under the pillow. The thing was still there, wrapped in yesterday’s Kleenex. The fairy’s gold was nowhere. Disappointment weighed on his spirit. He searched carefully down at the back of the bed and in the fold of the pillowslip. He groped in the narrow gap between the bed and the cabinet but the money was not there. Ali, having been too much preoccupied with her own yearnings the previous night, had neglected to implement that benign deception. Daniel knew that Mrs Gaitskell had not meant to cheat him, but she had made a mistake. Even grown-ups could make terrible mistakes. Either the fairy had not wanted his tooth, or it had not been able to carry the money. Money was too heavy for fairies to carry. He had suspected as much all along but had been cajoled out of scepticism by Mrs Gaitskell. He didn’t know now which was the more daunting – to think that his tooth had not been special enough to warrant the fairy’s journey or that the poor tiny creature, having struggled from fairyland, had got bogged down in the mud pools of the farm track somewhere along the way.