Noah's Ark (8 page)

‘Now then,’ Ali said to her visitors. ‘Please. Tell me what happened.’ More in relish than in sorrow Arnie produced a flamboyant and spirited tale of miscarried justice. He had been held in a police cell for two hours where nobody would take a statement from him, he said, and where the police gave every sign of having been bought off by the driver of the fast car. This had staggered Arnie who had all along considered his extravagantly moustached accuser in the light of a caricatured joke. He was to
be charged with wilful damage to property and would appear before a magistrate in due course. Ali was speechless, but neither Noah nor Arnie seemed unduly perturbed.

‘He’ll get his hair cut before the hearing,’ Noah said, ‘He’ll wear a shirt and tie, don’t worry. But whose are all these children, Mrs Bobrow?’ He asked, because Ali had already begun to back away from him towards the kitchen in response to Prince Charming’s brisk demands for food.

‘Neighbours’ children,’ she said. Noah got up, carefully avoiding the lampshade this time, and followed her into the kitchen.

‘Are you a childminder?’ he said.

Ali laughed. ‘Unofficial. Unregistered and unpaid. I suppose I am for quite a lot of the time. They have to be somewhere don’t they?’

Noah looked at his watch – a thing he did often – and once again disapproved of the hour. ‘Where are the parents?’ he said.

Ali shrugged. ‘I don’t ask.’

‘My Mum said to come here so she could have a bit of peace,’ Prince Charming said, with artless candour. He had paused in the act of drinking the contents of her undiluted orange squash from a plastic bottle. ‘Can we have them frozen chips again?’ he said. ‘Just chips. Not them horrible beefburger things. I didn’t like them things.’ Ali took a large bag of frozen chips from her refrigerator.

‘These?’ she said.

‘Yeah. Them,’ said Prince Charming. ‘And lots of ketchup.’

Ali laid five brightly coloured enamelled child plates upon the marble washstand where she and Camilla usually ate their meals and followed these with five little matching mugs. Noah cast his eyes over the little plates and the mugs, and the flowered Victorian tiles in the washstand which reminded him of ageing public lavatories.

‘Mr Bobrow is evidently as tolerant as you are,’ he said.

‘Mr Bobrow doesn’t live here any more,’ Ali said.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘and no prizes for guessing who the real Snow
White is around here. Mrs Bobrow what services do your neighbours render you in return?’

‘Services?’ Ali said. ‘Nobody renders me services. Why should they?’

‘Pardon me,’ Noah said doggedly, ‘but if you make both the agenda and the menu so attractive, don’t you ensure that your neighbours’ children will never go home?’

Feigning gaiety, and with chip bag in hand, Ali stared at him with grudging admiration. ‘You get it in one,’ she said, ‘but you’re making me feel uncomfortable.’ She tried smiling at him, but merely came up against his habitually muted facial response. It disconcerted her that he did not readily smile.

‘Mrs Bobrow,’ he said, ‘what I mean is, when I was a child, it was thought to be bad manners to be around someone else’s place at meal times.’

‘Me too,’ she said. ‘But wasn’t that long ago? And what are the alternatives then? Hateful little maxims? Charity begins at home?’

‘Hateful, but workable,’ Noah said. ‘When do you look after yourself?’ Ali poured cooking oil into a pan and watched it heat in silence.

‘Is there any chance of you getting rid of all these kids so the four of us can eat out someplace?’ he said. ‘Is that a possibility?’

‘It’s an attractive idea,’ Ali said who hadn’t eaten out in donkey’s years, and only partly on account of Mervyn’s habit of quarrelling with waiters. ‘I have to tell you that I don’t have any money.’ Patiently Noah spelled out what he had imagined to be obvious, but she was in some ways so curiously humble.

‘I meant of course to treat you,’ he said. ‘Be my guest.’

‘Gosh,’ Ali said, who wasn’t used to treats. ‘There’s Camilla’s homework of course.’

‘Okay. So we wait,’ Noah said. ‘We are none of us starving.’

‘No,’ Ali said. She threw the chips into the oil and called to the children. ‘How about take-away chips?’ she said, embarrassed by the false enticement in her own voice. ‘You can take them home in paper bags tonight. Wouldn’t that be nice?’

‘Bleeding hell!’ said Prince Charming, grudgingly, who liked the more liberal regime of Ali’s house better than that of his own.

‘Look,’ Ali said, wheedling, trying bribery while Noah looked on in disbelief. ‘You can take the whole frozen bag home as well. Your mother can cook the rest for you tomorrow.’

‘She don’t like to fry stuff,’ said Prince Charming. ‘She don’t like the smell, see.’ Conscious of Noah watching her, Ali drained the chips on kitchen paper with as much resolution as she could sustain and sought out five brown paper bags saved from the greengrocer.

‘I’m going out,’ she said with unprecedented strength. ‘I don’t terribly like the smell either.’ Prince Charming departed in stockinged feet, sullenly clutching his football shoes along with his chips. The girls picked their anoraks off the living-room floor, displaying neither resentment nor gratitude. Not one of them bestirred herself to shut the front door. Arnie handed the blonde her knickers. ‘You left your underpants,’ he said. Ali closed the door behind them. Then she straightened the rug. She watched Noah, at the table where Camilla sat, fastidiously checking a stool for child crumbs before he sat down. His eyes were drawn to Camilla’s notepad where she undertook her preliminary working. She had drawn six buns and one third, and had divided each of the six whole buns laboriously in three. Then she counted the sections.

‘Nineteen thirds,’ she said, wanting confirmation. ‘That’s what six wholes and one third makes.’

‘Right,’ Noah said. ‘But what happens to your method when you get two hundred thirds? Or two thousand, maybe?’

Camilla giggled candidly.

‘I’d draw lots more buns I suppose,’ she said. When Noah laughed, Camilla laughed too. Camilla laughed so seldom these days that Ali stood still to watch her, as if waiting for the glass to crack in the window panes.

Some hours after his evening out with Ali, Noah sat in his rationally appointed town house downing his charcoal filtered bourbon whisky and listening to Maxine Silver through the headphones. He was hoping to induce sleep. His lower back was aching slightly from the restaurant chair but the major impediment to sleep was Ali. Sexual desire had come upon him clear and sudden when she had smiled at him unexpectedly over a cheap cut-glass table lantern in the local Indian restaurant. When, on parting, she had stretched out her right arm to thank him and had lingered gratefully as she touched his sleeve with that long white hand with the lesions, an inundation of tenderness had in a moment turned that desire to something close to love.

He had felt strongly tempted to draw her aside and proposition her but had thought it impolitic. Right now it ruffled him to the point of irritability, almost, to find himself precipitously in love with a woman so damned other-worldly that a sexual proposition would in all likelihood constitute an emotional assault. The thing was unreal, just as the woman was unreal; a selfless good fairy endowed with an incongruously sexy, curving mouth, living among flowering teacups and creaking chairs. For all he knew she kept a pack of Tarot cards in the bureau drawer. Furthermore, she smoked. And when he had first suggested that they eat out she had looked so startled, almost as though, had he
suggested instead that she spend the evening at home turning the collars of all his old shirts, she might have considered it more appropriate.

Once again he discovered a piece of his childhood returning to him as he thought about her. ‘Piano fingers’ was what his mother had called people with hands like hers. Her daughter’s too. He had been moved by an impractical excess of maternal devotion in her. She and the child were so alike in spirit that they appeared to breathe in unison. He had watched them closely as painful small waves of apprehensiveness had crossed and recrossed between them during the evening. The woman was in a state of anxiety over that pretty, highly strung child, whose existence was tapping her emotional energy. This was plainly not necessary. He needed to make her see that it was not necessary. He was resolved.

Procrastination had never featured among Noah’s personal baggage. He rose at eight the following morning, as he always did, in spite of his late night, drank coffee as he ran his eye over the home and foreign news, and was at Ali’s front door by nine-thirty, sluiced and shaven, cuff-links already in position and bearing a small gift of sweetpeas. He had not meant to give her sweetpeas, but flowerstalls, he found, were not well represented in the city and sweetpeas were all he had been able to find. He had bought them reluctantly from outside a greengrocer’s shop where they had sat in a zinc bucket between lettuces and cauliflowers, but they hit the mark with Ali. The gift struck her as tender and spontaneous.

Having been laundering Camilla’s sheets, she first removed her rubber household gloves to receive them and, pulling her wrap-over dressing gown closer against her chest, asked him to come in. She turned her calligrapher’s pens out of the marmalade jar and replaced it on the bureau filled with water for the sweetpeas whose varying shades of pink and blue fused in flowering profusion with the bureau’s papered backdrop like a heady Matisse.

‘There,’ she said with elation, ‘I love them! Don’t you just love them?’ Noah merely said, rather stiffly, that he had wanted to thank her for ‘a beautiful evening’ and that he hoped he was not intruding coming, like this, so early, but that he was on his way to ‘the unit’ as he called it, and had wanted to come by before the routine of the day took him over. On the marble-topped wash-stand, he saw, with a curious, inexplicable pleasure, that there lay now the crumbs of her breakfast toast and the shell of her boiled egg. Ali was amused by what struck her as an excess of propriety. She smiled at him warmly.

‘I’m very glad to see you,’ she said. ‘And I don’t mind at all about it being so early, because what difference should it make to me? I’ve never slept in curlers.’ Her hair, he saw, had been bundled up and fixed hurriedly with a child’s ornamental plastic clasp, presumably her daughter’s. For Noah her head and neck were thereby endowed with the distinctly provocative look of a woman surprised in the bath tub.

‘Have some coffee with me,’ she said.

He watched her with a critical fascination, undimmed by love, as she prepared some ominously insipid-looking instant coffee, casting one meagre concave teaspoonful into each of two pink and white cups. The kettle gave her some trouble, he noted, as she struggled to wedge it in under the tap because the sink was bulging with steeping bedsheets. These she wrung out, as the kettle boiled, into tight twisted coils like a peasant washerwoman.

‘Isn’t that a little laborious?’ Noah said, being a compulsive time-and-motion man. ‘What’s wrong with the laundromat?’ Ali, knowing something of why he had come, felt reluctantly that she ought to deter him. Such a long time had passed since a thinkable man had courted her affections that the experience was wholly refreshing – especially when one remembered that the last such occasion had been over a year before when a reeking, drunken tramp had singled her out from the congregation of waiting mothers at the school gate one afternoon and had
serenaded her with beery arias from Puccini. Yet one could not decently trifle with so imposing a person’s time, especially if that person had the air of one whose time was worth some twenty guineas an hour in consultation fees.

‘Camilla pees in her bed every night,’ she said, unambiguously declaring liability. ‘I can’t be carting sheets to the launderette every day.’

They moved on into the living room and sat down at the table where Ali reached for her cigarettes and lit up.

‘People are free to pee in their own beds,’ Noah said. ‘Just so long as they launder their own bedlinen.’ The observation, along with its gloriously unfrightened tone, earned Noah Ali’s sudden undying regard.

‘I think that could well be the nicest thing anyone has said to me in ten years,’ she said. ‘Thank you for it.’

‘Why do you smoke?’ Noah said in reply. ‘You must be aware that it will almost certainly ruin your health.’ Ali laughed with a jerky, nervous gaiety.

‘I smoke to protect my lungs from lead in petrol fumes,’ she said, turning to flick ash into the grate.

‘Don’t get smart with me,’ Noah said, rather rudely, she thought, in the circumstances. ‘Lungs are a part of my job.’

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I smoke because I’m a nervous wreck I expect. Or what do you think? And I worry about my darling daughter rather a lot, as must be perfectly obvious to a person such as yourself. Perhaps you know something of what it feels like to be worried about your children.’

‘Sure,’ Noah said. His two sons, from whom he had effectively been estranged for close on sixteen years, were now twenty-two and twenty. After the early phase of weekending with them – teddy bears and toothbrushes in carrier bags from FAO Schwartz – he had put them almost completely out of mind. They were called Frederick and Shane. Frederick after an enthusiasm of Shirley’s for the writings of Engels and Shane after the movie. Noah had insisted upon the latter. He had liked
the movie. Moreover, the name had pleased his mother as meaning ‘beautiful’ in Yiddish. Ali would have been considerably deterred at this time both by the ideological labelling of Noah’s firstborn son or by his naming the second after a western, but she did not know. By the time she found out she was already too much disposed in his favour to mind.

‘Your daughter is like you,’ Noah was saying. ‘She’s sensitive, she’s artistic; right now she’s a little on edge. Those are not bad things to be.’

‘You’re kind to me,’ Ali said, ‘but I can’t say I find it a great comfort – the idea that she’s like me.’

‘Why not?’ Noah said sharply. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

Ali shrugged, attempting to cast off that curiously prevalent surfacing of tears. ‘I must admit that I live with the constant feeling that Camilla, who is the best and most beautiful thing about me, has been botched up. By me. Well, by Mervyn and me. Both of us. Do parents need to be so destructive?’