Noah's Ark (4 page)

In the National Gallery there was a small Dutch box, by Samuel van Hoochstraaten, which revealed, through a spy hole, room upon room. An illusion. A mirror trick, but Ali loved that box; wanted to get inside it. Let sea discoverers to new worlds have gone; that box would be an everywhere. Noah had always made her feel safe; had built her an ark of gopher wood and pitched it within and without.

‘Sorry,’ Ali said, starting out of private thoughts, ‘I wasn’t listening to you. I was thinking.’ She laughed slightly, because he was staring at her. ‘I was engaging in some “tremulous quim introspection”.’ The phrase was an old joke between them since Noah had used it on her once a long time ago with greater dramatic effect than he had anticipated. ‘You may be full of tremulous quim introspection,’ he had said to her, ‘but baby, you fuck like the emperor’s whore.’

‘What I was thinking was, shall I paint those oranges?’ she said.

‘Why not?’ Noah said. ‘Do you know something, AI? I’m gonna lie awake in that goddamned hotel room tonight wishing I could get my hands on your ass.’

He pushed back his chair to accommodate her on his knee and swallowed hard, gulping down intensity. ‘Come here sweetheart,’ he said. Ali put down her sewing and went to him chewing her index finger to hold down an impractical rush of sexual desire. She could see her little Daniel through the doorway, stumbling dozily towards the downstairs 100, pulling out his infant prick in readiness for the day’s first pee. He always slept late because he went to bed late. He played on the living-room
floor with his toy soldiers every evening while his parents watched the ten o’clock news. It didn’t matter, because he went to the afternoon session of the local nursery school.

Noah kissed her sexily on the right of the neck, near the collar bone. He was invariably so good at finding the right spot, Ali thought admiringly, almost as if one had taken the trouble to draw rings in marker pen around one’s erogenous zones.

‘If I were twenty years younger, I’d have you up against the wall, AI,’ he said, ‘right now, my baby. I guess I wouldn’t make it to stagger on to that plane if I were to try it now.’

Ali smiled. ‘It would be very bad for jet lag, Noah,’ she said, ‘pre-prandial ejaculation. Besides, I was such a fool twenty years ago, I didn’t know how to take on a good thing when it came my way. I would have passed you up, I reckon. Think of it. Me at nineteen. Oh Noah, I wish you weren’t going today.’

‘I want for you to paint those oranges, okay?’ Noah said.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘And water my bedding plants, will you?’ he said. Ali nodded. Noah had a small greenhouse which he loved, full of yoghurt pots with lolly sticks, all of it rather beyond her area of expertise.

‘I will take the greatest care of all your children,’ she said.

They listened to the sound of Daniel’s urine frothing satisfactorily in the lavatory bowl, before he appeared in the kitchen. He was already in his baseball cap, which he wore to flatten his curls. These he considered unmanly. The cap had been a present from Noah’s mother who wished her grandson to overcome the disadvantages of growing up in England. She wanted him to be a good mixer and a good all-rounder. Outgoing, sporty, brave, ambitious and clever. Ali would rather have had Daniel a good pianist than a good all-rounder, but she believed he had the right to be as unambitious and introverted as he liked. Noah glanced shrewdly at Ali as he began to cram the last of his stuff into a travelling bag.

‘AI, I want that boy in school while I’m away,’ he said with emphasis. ‘Okay?’ Noah said that Daniel had to go to nursery
school so that Ali could be a ‘mensch’. That was why he had insisted on the art school. He believed that she was absurdly soft on Daniel – softer even than on Hattie and Camilla – and that was saying something. Ali was soft on everyone, but it was perfectly true that she would have been especially happy to have had Daniel at home all the time. He crawled into bed with her when Noah wasn’t there. Even now that he had turned four, he occasionally sucked at her nipples when she bent down to wash the floor, like a little goat. Noah believed that Daniel was overindulged. Ali believed, on the other hand, that Noah’s mother had probably never been soft enough on him.

‘Is it school?’ Daniel said, suspiciously.

‘Yes,’ Noah said before Ali could shilly-shally on the subject. ‘But you’re in luck this week. Thursday’s a day off. There’s a local election. The school hall is used as a polling booth.’ Noah couldn’t vote in British elections, but he did his bit, when he could, by ensuring that his wife, who had British nationality, got to the polling station on the right day. This was especially scrupulous of him since he knew she would vote Labour.

‘Is it Fursday?’ Daniel said hopefully, which made Noah smile.

‘It’s Wednesday,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow’s Thursday.’ Daniel was dedicated to the belief that Noah went to America to hunt. He knew from the song that Davey Crockett shot a bear in America when he was only three, so why else would one go there? He clung to this fantasy though Hattie called him ‘Stupid’ and ‘Baby’ and pointed out that Noah brought home things from Zabars in his luggage, not bearskins. Daniel was a natural predator, patient, quiet and dedicated. He set bird traps in the garden with string and bacon rashers. He wanted badly to catch real live fish. He had once seen a film of
Huckleberry Finn
and now constantly lamented the regrettable absence of rafts in modern life. He had worn a dagger round his neck all last summer and had said he was Mowgli. Ali had read him the Mowgli stories, but she had left out the bits about Bagheera and
the child beating because she could not bear the idea of anyone beating children, especially in the cause of moral improvement. Could not bear it. It made her shake to see a child being smacked at a bus stop. Noah said that the sadistic pages were probably the very pages that kids like best. Wasn’t that why Daniel always lingered longest over the page in his Arthurian Legends where King Pellinore’s stab wound gushed blood?

Ali cast an eye over Noah’s remaining luggage. Last-minute sweatshirt and socks from the tumble dryer. Razor and shampoo. Airline ticket and passport. A sheaf of medical papers which he meant to read on the plane. One large jar of gritty peanut butter, which she had bought at his instruction in the health food shop. The absurdity of it now delighted her.

‘Why you should be taking peanut butter to New York beats me,’ she said. ‘I thought Americans invented peanut butter. For a straight man, Noah, you have some wonderfully eccentric habits.’

‘I promised some to Barbara,’ he said. ‘Her peanut butter is nothing like as good as the peanut butter we buy here in the health food store.’ Ali looked surprised. Barbara was a research doctor who worked with Noah in America. She came to stay sometimes and brought presents and took the children strawberry picking. Once she coincided with a resolute spell of snow and knew immediately that a sledge was the best of all presents. Ali liked people who liked her children. It was her major criterion for judging guests.

‘AI,’ Noah said. ‘Do we have a couple of extra orange juice cartons I could take along?’

‘Yes,’ Ali said, but with some surprise, ‘of course. Does Barbara want you to carry the British carton to America?’ Noah’s dislike of the British carton appeared to ruin his breakfast some mornings. It didn’t pour properly, he said. Not like the ones in the States. Ali could not bring herself to call America ‘the States’ though it was more accurate. It sounded too in-groupish for all but the citizenry.

‘I could use it on the flight,’ Noah said. ‘It doesn’t do one’s jet lag any good to get dehydrated. Airlines don’t give one enough.’ Ali got the orange juice from the cupboard, thinking wistfully of Noah with his informed and disciplined eating habits. The preparation of virtuous food was often, sadly, so laborious.

‘Take scissors, Noah,’ she said, ‘to open the cartons. Dannie and me will drive you to Heathrow.’

‘Only to the train station,’ he said. ‘That’s all I need. I don’t need to waste your time.’ Noah was always considerate of Ali’s time, though she herself so happily squandered it. He put pen and scrap pad into her hands.

‘Some small chores I have hanging over,’ he said briskly. He recited a familiar list of minor ‘phone calls and errands which he delegated to her, consisting of meetings to be postponed and references to be handed on to typists. And could she, please, he said, tomorrow midday, call Arnie Weinberg and tell him his curriculum vitae was sitting on the desk in the study? Arnie had applied for a job in California which, regrettably, he just might get, but after ten years of working with him, one couldn’t stand in his way.

‘He’ll be back sometime tomorrow a.m.,’ Noah said, sounding like the speaking clock. ‘It’s absolutely vital that you call him, AI. He’ll need to get it in the mail.’

‘All right,’ she said. She drove him, once he was clothed, to the railway station, with Daniel in the back seat in his cap and striped pyjamas. On the platform they held hands till the train came in. Ali stepped back and looked at him objectively, as she sometimes did in public, wanting the pleasure of seeing him with public eyes. ‘I like your looks,’ she said. Noah was broad and stocky. Heavy in the jaw and short in the leg, which was why his trousers always needed taking up. He had a head of thick but receding grizzle hair which had used to be dark brown before Ali knew him. He had about him an air both of substance and good sense from which his wholehearted indifference to fashionable
dress did nothing to detract. It contributed instead the implication that his mind was concerned with more important things.

‘Good,’ Noah said, ‘Eat properly, AI, won’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she said, knowing as well as he did that she would lapse into slovenly orgies of tinned ravioli in his absence. ‘Love to Barbara,’ she said.

‘I will,’ he said. Then he faced her squarely.
‘And don’t forget the gallery,’
he said. He pointed the words with his forefinger, jabbing with emphasis at her arm.

‘I won’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. Though it’s more than I deserve.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Noah, who knew nothing at all about painting, but who, with a loyal and possibly inflated conviction about Ali’s artistic talent, had placed at her disposal all the advantages of his own drive and readiness to subsidise framing and haulage costs to enhance her stature as a painter. As a result, she had exhibited locally quite frequently in the foregoing five years and was due, the following Friday, to meet with the owner of her first London gallery.

They parted with apparent ease, as the train came in, since Noah had long ago reconciled himself to the fact that Ali would not travel with him. She did not like aeroplanes and, having at last found her niche in the English countryside, she would not leave it. Once only had she left the shores of England with him when she had gone to New York and the excursion had been a decided failure. Noah loved New York and had promptly led her upon a week-long binge of ethnic eating, much of it on the Lower East Side. But in his enthusiasm he had not perhaps properly considered how much the proximity of the dispossessed would disturb her tender egalitarian soul. Like many a native New Yorker, Noah was quite accustomed to stepping over homeless junkies in the subways on his way to restaurants, but for Ali the place had been a walking psychiatric ward; an alarming vision of hell by Hieronymus Bosch. She was haunted by glimpses of people hallucinating on the subways, staring with crazy eyes
or with bleeding heads cracked open; by gnarled old women bathing arthritic knees in the holy water of St Patrick’s Cathedral. Once she had seen a person walk naked down Broadway, arms outstretched against the stream of traffic, like a tortured prophet.

She had found it hard to raise her eyes from the gutters towards the airy pinnacles of those aspiring cathedrals of commerce and neither had the food always served to expunge her unease. On the contrary. In the Szechuan Chinese restaurant, where – owing possibly to an error in translation – the menu had offered her ‘Live Carp in Black Bean Sauce’, Ali had turned noticeably grey.

‘I’ll eat it raw, if I have to,’ she had said, ‘but I will not eat it live.’

She had been very much aware that she had failed him utterly as a travelling companion, and yet all the while, even in the restaurant, Noah had been moved by a consciousness that he loved her as much with his middle-aged self as ever he had loved Shirley in his youth and that, furthermore, Ali suited him so much better. He had thought so even as the restaurant chair had drilled painfully into his lower back, as restaurant chairs often did. Shirley had been by profession a chiropractor and he had never been able to deny that the loss of her unmatchable skills in this field had been a considerable inconvenience to him.

Noah had injured his back once, working on a construction site as a medical student. He had visited a chiropractor regularly in the twenty years since his divorce, but he had never in all that time found a practitioner quite as adept as Shirley had been in the manipulation of sacroiliac joints. As to Ali – she had proved quite remarkably maladroit, even in the matter of a little interim home massage. Noah had early on tried to buy her a book on massage but, finding the field of self-help crowded out with diet and sex manuals, he had given up and had learned to accept this limitation of hers.

‘I’ve taken
The Times
from home,’ he said, as he planted a parting kiss on her mouth through the window of the carriage corridor. ‘Is that okay?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You must know by now that I only ever read
Exchange and Mart.’

‘I love you, AI,’ Noah said. ‘Take care.’

Ali had met noah the year after Mervyn left. She had met him in circumstances consistent with her subsequent relationship with him, which took the dual form of rehabilitation and love affair. She believed that he had saved her from a violent death, while Noah would concede only that he had saved her from multiple fractures. Mervyn’s departure had been good for her looks, though she would have been surprised to have had anyone tell her so at the time, because though day-to-day living had become more serene, more conducive to a smoothing of the skin, his going had left her humbled and at bedtime she still afforded herself the regular luxury of crying without being observed by Camilla.