Noah's Ark (5 page)

Admittedly Mervyn had played out his departure so often over the foregoing twelve years that the apparent permanence of this last one had brought with it a certain relief – like the relief of death after wasting illness. And it came in unexpected form since previously his departures had been short-lived and had always taken place around midnight. Mervyn had slammed the front door, bawling recriminations to wake the ageing neighbour’s dogs and bearing his own righteousness aloft like a parcel bound up in a spotted handkerchief on the end of a stick. He had then spent a night, sometimes even two, dossing in his sleeping bag under a bridge, in the municipal car park, or in an unbolted allotment shed. These episodes he had then incorporated into the
proud mythology of his own posturing Bohemianism. Mervyn as Supertramp, passing rough nights in reckless abandon with meths drinkers, or fending off vagrancy charges by the city police. He would haul them out at dinner parties, suitably embroidered, to bolster his penchant for colourful living. What was truly remarkable was that these episodes never made him ill. Exposure never hacked at his kidneys or at his lungs, because, though he was as mad as the proverbial hatter, he was also as tough as time-honoured old boots.

It was sometimes during these distressing episodes that Ali began to discover within herself an understanding of what it was that had drawn her to Mervyn in the first place. It seemed to her at such times that, after the brief emptiness of her first marriage, it had been a certain wildness in Mervyn’s temper, a certain eccentricity, which had recalled for her what in Thomas Adderley had been an easy, unconventional panache. But that flamboyance which Thomas had worn so comfortably as a part of his inner clothing Mervyn had taken on as the cloak of a vain and troubled man in search of disguises.

At any rate, Mervyn’s ultimate walk-out had all been quite different from these explosive rehearsals. With a quiet, purposeful competence, he had packed his clothes, his books, his tranquillisers and all the best records into a large ticking laundry bag which Ali’s mother had made for her the year she left for university and this he had placed in the back of the Mini. He had then left promptly, after an adequate breakfast, for his girlfriend’s bedsitting room. The girlfriend had come as a great surprise to Ali for, although Mervyn had always been in every other respect wholly unreliable, he had never before, to her knowledge, been seriously interested in other women. There had always been those examples of ideal female type which he had flung at her occasionally so that she might show up the worse by comparison, but not one of these had actually ever turned him on. They were usually no more than a wishful compound of Hannah Arendt and his own Polish grandmother.

Having spent much of the past twelve years haranguing his wife on the subject of her inadequate domestic industry and womanly care; having caused her to labour in penance over his mother’s marble-covered, handwritten Jewish cookery note-books and mess with grated raw potatoes and fish skins and minced offal until she conceived the firm opinion that no culinary tradition combined being as disgusting with being as horribly labour-intensive, he pronounced her suddenly, over his last breakfast, insufficiently liberated; too much swamped in kitchen and childcare. Then he left her for a twenty-year-old undergraduate in ethnic wrap-over skirts, who kept a blown-up photograph of Virginia Woolf Blutacked, facing outwards, from the dusty window of her rooming-house bedsitter along with the sign of a clenched female fist. Ali, who had subsequently got herself a cleaning job to make ends meet, passed the place on her bicycle three times a week. She was herself inclined to regard Mrs Woolf as a fragile upper-class genius, subtle, private and snobbish, with a traumatising past and an admirably supportive husband, but there it was. Mervyn was in there and loving it; growing headier every day on the rejuvenating effects of scrambling eggs in a blackened aluminium frying pan over a student’s gas ring.

Once a month, like a debt collector, Mervyn would return ostensibly to collect his lingering possessions, to borrow communal ones, or to ask about letters which he suspected hadn’t been sent on. He had, in the six months prior to his departure, reverted to writing – driven no doubt by his clandestine passion – and was waiting to hear from publishers. But mostly Mervyn came to parade his newfound state of bliss before her because his new woman appeared to suit him remarkably well. She was made of sterner stuff than Ali for all her tender years and, being less easy to manipulate, appeared to provoke in him none of the same destructive instability. But nevertheless he continued to enjoy an audience and Ali made him such a good one in her abject state. She had no emotional devices for slamming the door in his face; no power even to demand that he relinquish his key to the front
door. Instead, she would stand in her kitchen and shakily measure out Nescafe for him with her silver-plated apostle teaspoons from the antiques market and weakly hope that he wouldn’t stay long. Mervyn would enter light of step without troubling to knock and would settle himself into a chair.

On one occasion he sat with a pile of cheaply produced feminist papers in his lap – a student woman’s paper which his girlfriend collated in her basement. On the cover, crudely reproduced, was Michelangelo’s David, a caption stamped over his crotch. WARNING, it said, HISTORY BOMBARDS WOMEN WITH IMAGES WHICH SURROUND AND DEGRADE THEM. Mervyn was delivering them. Mervyn, who could not move a step without carrying his male equipment reverently before him, as obtrusively as that of a male ballet dancer in tights! Mervyn, to whom the very Post Office Tower sang triumphant hymns of phallic domination. Mervyn, as happened with him from time to time, had evidently been born again.

Another time he sat juggling a small plastic bag of ten-penny pieces in his lap which he had just got from the bank. His woman’s gas supply worked on a coin meter, he explained. So delightful, so studentish, to have the bath water run cold on one when the ten pences ran out and to flee naked and shivering into the arms of one’s mistress. The image struck home with Ali whose first memorable evening alone with Mervyn had taken place around an ancient gas fire in Belsize Park, powered by just such a coin meter, but in those days one fed them shillings. Mervyn had singed his hair that night, lighting Woodbines from the irregular blue flames which fed the gas fire’s yellowing clay teeth. He had read his own poetry to her against the backdrop of its penetrating hiss. What had dazzled her then, apart from his pent-up air of impending tiger spring, was his absolute lack of humility. Having so much of it herself, she took vicarious pleasure in his lack.

‘To think,’ Mervyn said, that first night, clearly lost in wonder at his own precociousness, ‘to think I wrote that poem when I
was only twenty-three.’ Ali had studied him carefully to determine how deceptively well he wore his advancing years.

‘How old are you now, Mervyn?’ she said.

‘Twenty-four,’ he said.

The following evening he had demonstrated to her delight that he could walk upstairs on stilts. She had stirred up packet chicken-noodle soup over the gas ring that evening and had made toast for them while, again, he read to her. Now he scrambled eggs and heated soup while his girlfriend read to him from articles on media sociology. It was clear that to Mervyn this admittedly radical change constituted not so much a reversal as a great leap forward. Mervyn stirred his coffee with the sugar spoon – a thing he had done almost invariably for as long as Ali had known him – and watched her as she knelt, trembling slightly, at the hearthstone to tap at kindling with an axe.

‘You need a man about the place,’ he said. He had never balked at hitting below the belt ‘Perhaps a dating agency could fit you up with an identikit of that – what was his name? That ten-foot scholar-gypsy man you used to sigh for at a sweet distance in your youth. Adkins? Ad-man? Attaturk?’

‘Adderley,’ Ali said. ‘Why are you so miserable to me?’ She knew that it had never ceased to rankle with Mervyn that he himself had not grown in height beyond five feet four inches. He was nicely proportioned and finely turned, but Ali was half a head taller.

Ali had given up expecting money from Mervyn and was living on weekly handouts from the social security, supplemented with illicit extras earned from her cleaning job and from running up toddlers’ smocks at night on an old treadle machine for a local children’s boutique. Thrown upon her own resources after eight years, she quickly discovered that openings for one-time school teachers like herself had contracted into nonexistence and that cleaning up after bachelor men upon informal contractual obligation was in any case a more soothing, uncomplicated occupation than surviving either the daily assault of urban
adolescents locked in classrooms against their will, or the daily backdrop of Mervyn’s abuse as one picked up his discarded socks and nail parings from all over the hall floor. The only sacrifice was in status. To muck out after men who were off at work all day and who left one five pounds in an envelope at the end of the week was moderately satisfactory, especially when one considered the alternatives in the cold light of reality. These appeared to be waitressing in black crêpe at the Kardomah Café or selling ladies’ underwear door to door on commission. True, the pages of
Exchange and Mart
always announced that there was money to be made in slot meters, but Ali was either insufficiently adventurous or too sceptical ever to follow them up.

Meanwhile, there was Camilla. Beautiful Camilla, the fragile eleven-year-old casualty of her parents’ turbulent home life. Camilla who was conceived out of Mervyn’s impatience with rubber condoms and born two months early, weighing under five pounds. That she was born at all had had to do with Ali’s incompetence in running out on the abortionist. There could be no question about it – Camilla was all Ali’s fault. For she had proceeded, on Mervyn’s instructions, to a secret address in St John’s Wood where the abortionist had materialised in a padded green smoking jacket and embroidered slippers. He had instructed her to strip and lie on the examining table. It was necessary as a preliminary, he explained, coming towards her with a clitoral vibrator, to determine the quality of her orgasm. Ali, who had vaguely imagined such an appliance to be designed for vaginal penetration and to be altogether larger – in appearance perhaps not unlike her mother’s Edwardian curling-tongs – was relieved at least, by its modest size.

‘Was that nice?’ the abortionist said. It was only then that the unprocedural nature of the exercise dawned upon Ali, who consequently jumped in terror from the bed and ran for her clothes. The abortionist, just perceptibly, ground his teeth.

‘I never cared for a skinny woman,’ he said.

Mervyn had never believed her. He was, at that time, wholly
locked into the pursuit of virile but apparently unpublishable poetry while Ali went out to work. The birth of the baby brought no sign that his happy arrangement would cease. For the first four years of Camilla’s life, therefore, Ali went out to work while Mervyn stayed at home, shaking ash carelessly into the child’s blackcurrant juice and forgetting to change her nappies. Occasionally, when he thought about her, he tossed secondhand Ladybird books and empty plastic shampoo bottles into her playpen before returning to his fantasy life. Conversely, Ali, who was strongly maternal and had spent her childhood playing tenderly with dolls and taking neighbours’ babies for walks, found herself required to claw her own shy, pitifully mother-dependent little toddler loose from the hem of her skirt each morning and catch two buses to her schoolteaching job in Bermondsey.

From this phase in their lives Mervyn had now come to perceive himself, retrospectively, as a pioneer of role flexibility, but Ali had never altogether shaken off the guilt provoked by this daily betrayal, though with that, as with so much else, Noah had helped. Eighteen years on and two children later, Ali still had her ear to Camilla’s every tremulous emotion like a watchful musician with a tuning fork.

When Camilla was four years old, Mervyn underwent one of the dramatic reversals which periodically characterised his behaviour. He put by his spidery poetical notebooks and took a step sideways, via a job-retraining scheme, into community work with disadvantaged youth. With precious little to mark him out for the business beyond glaring unsuitability, Mervyn took a job as community youth worker in Oxfordshire where he promptly acquired a small terraced house chosen by Ali but bought on a mortgage made out in his own name. He began, with the advent of the job, to identify so strongly with the youth among whom he worked that he gave up his spotted artist’s tie and fetching large-brimmed hat and promptly bought himself a leather jacket complete with luminous tiger on the back; took to rolling his
own cigarettes and to using ‘fuckin” as his major adjective. Also to pouring scorn upon his own small daughter for her middle-class vowels, her precocious reading habits and her longing to attend dancing classes.

With the move, Ali gave up her job and set about making it up to Camilla, employing in so doing her considerable creative flair and pleasure in young children. She made playdough; she made puppet shows; she made pink and white fairytale castles for birthday cakes with mullioned windows of piped icing sugar. She read fifty picture books a day with Camilla on her knee and, in all weathers, if Camilla wished it, she pushed a swing in the park. (Or in Noah’s subsequent phrase, she took on ‘new excesses of servility’.) In the afternoons they took naps together with the radio tuned to
Woman’s Hour
and, in between, they decorated the house. Camilla was, from the outset, endowed with quite astonishing looks. Her beauty markedly exceeded that of either of her parents whose very different features she combined in judicious measure to produce an effect of moving delicacy. But she was also stammering, timorous and given easily to tears and nightmares. Though she had taught herself to read at three from the Ladybird books which Mervyn had thrown into her cot, she had never given up peeing in her bed.

Mervyn, who watched his wife and daughter’s closeness with ever-increasing resentment, took it upon himself to redress the balance, both by accusing them of lesbian involvement, and by adopting a zealously punitive stance with the child which was not pleasant to witness. With regard to the first of these responses, Mervyn would use as ammunition that Ali by her own confession had sometimes held hands in high school with her best friend Julie Horowitz, and that she had not once in the way of campus life gone to bed with Thomas Adderley. As to his small daughter, he would lock her in her bedroom with ‘homework’ set by himself. If she lost a jumble-sale cardigan or a lunchbox he would send her out at dusk sobbing along the gutters in futile search. ‘Someday you’ll end on the gallows,’ he more than once
yelled after her. A curious threat, Ali thought, from a man who had repeatedly professed himself unilaterally against both prison and capital punishment, and who suffered pangs of identification if ever one of his semi-delinquent proteges got done by the police for busting open a bubblegum machine. In a temporary burst of ethnic reversion he saw fit at one time to cart Camilla off to a course of Hebrew language classes. The classes just happened to coincide with the hour of her dancing class and began three days after Ali had bought the child her first treasured pair of pink Anello and Davide ballet pumps.