Noah's Ark

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘We’ll have another cigarette, shall we?’ she said, nestling among grimy pillows. ‘Have one of mine.’

  Ali found her the box. ‘We oughtn’t to smoke,’ she said, in passing deference to Noah whom she was currently standing up. ‘They ruin your health, cigarettes do.’

  ‘Don’t you bloody believe it,’ said the neighbour with bitter conviction. ‘If these things killed you the government would be handing them out free to the elderly. Get rid of us quicker. There’s more of us all the time, you see, and we’re expensive to keep – even in this bloody squalor.’

  ‘I must go,’ Ali said, glancing nervously at the alarm clock. ‘I have to make a ‘phone call.’ But the discarded elderly have ways, subtle and various, of holding on to such attention as offers itself. And, besides, Ali was charmed by her spirit.

  Noah was in a meeting when Ali tried at three and when she finally got him at three-thirty he was outspokenly not pleased.

  ‘You didn’t show,’ he said angrily. ‘What the hell happened to you?’ Ali entered upon what seemed to him a predictably extended and breast-beating circumlocution having to do with a telephone booth and a somewhat eccentric person of considerably advanced years. The rest was a macabre haze through which he gleaned resignedly that Ali’s life had become entangled yet again with another neighbourhood case for the Social Services Department.

  ‘She can’t hold down her food,’ Ali said in earnest tones. ‘I’m quite serious. She vomits. She lives on egg-white and crackers.’

  ‘Protein deficiency,’ Noah said briskly. ‘Listen, Al. Can you make it to eat Italian with me tonight? Can you organise a babysitter? I’d really like to eat out with you.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ Ali said, ‘but it won’t be easy.’

  ‘How come?’ Noah said. ‘What do you usually do for a sitter?’

  ‘I don’t go out,’ Ali said. There was a pause following upon this altogether truthful utterance during which Ali felt fairly sure that Noah – his mind already energetically occupied with linguini and egg-plant – was counting under his breath to control impatience.

  ‘I’ll set it up for a sitter to come at seven-twenty,’ Noah said. ‘Leave it with me. It’s no problem.’ His awesome armour of competence against the adult terrors of telephones and bureaucrats appeared to her without chink. And how was it that his mind’s clockface would incorporate categories such as ‘seven-twenty’, where her own knew only the crudities – the big hand pointing either straight up or straight down, like the clock on Playschool.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Will you really?’

  ‘Listen, I’m working till late,’ Noah said. ‘Call for me here around seven-forty. And for Chrissake, don’t be late. I didn’t eat lunch, remember? Neither did you, I imagine. I want you to take care of yourself, Al.’

  ‘I shared the old lady’s crackers,’ Ali said. Noah’s laugh was brief, jarring and inappropriate.

  ‘Was that with or without the egg-white?’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Ali said stupidly.

  ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘Just act like I never said it. Did you get to see your doctor yet?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ali said. ‘He’s going to do all those things you said, like the X-rays and whatnot.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Noah said. ‘That’s excellent.’

  ‘Noah,’ Ali said cautiously. ‘You wouldn’t think of looking at her, would you? The old lady. She needs to see a doctor. She really does. Much more than I do.’

  ‘Me?’ Noah said. ‘You asking me? If she needs a doctor, call her doctor. She’s got to be registered with a doctor.’

  ‘She isn’t, that’s the point,’ Ali said. ‘She’s terrified that a doctor will put her in hospital.’

  ‘So maybe she needs a hospital,’ Noah said. ‘For sure she needs to be registered with a doctor. Call the District Family Practitioners Committee if necessary. Hold it. I’ll get you the number.’

  ‘No thanks,’ Ali said. ‘It wouldn’t be ethical.’

  ‘Al,’ Noah said, with effort, ‘she isn’t my patient, you understand. Visiting sick old ladies isn’t my job.’

  ‘I know that,’ Ali said. ‘Lungs are your job. You told me.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Noah said. He had only recently emerged from a ninety-minute meeting: ninety minutes spent hustling for funds on an empty stomach. ‘When you cling with such ridiculous and high-minded tenacity to the values of childhood, what is that supposed to do for me? Is that supposed to make me feel guilty?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ali said.

  ‘Me too,’ Noah said, clearing his throat. ‘I’m sorry too. I’m sorry to upset you. I want for you to do what’s reasonable, that’s all. Don’t do too much. Don’t take on the sins of the world, Al. To play Jesus Christ as you do: isn’t that a kind of arrogance, wrapped up as humility?’

  ‘Well,’ Ali said, ‘possibly.’

  It was five minutes later, during a brisk perusal of the Yellow Pages, that Noah discovered the absence of a single locally based babysitting agency in the city.

  ‘Oh shit!’ he said. Arnie, who encountered him at that moment, laughed.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ he said. ‘I’m busy this evening. I’ll call up a couple of women I know if you like.’ Noah, who had just spent a measure of his committee time exerting himself, successfully, in the business of extending Arnie’s research grant, looked up irritably.

  ‘The relevant question is whether any of the women you know would make suitable candidates for the job,’ he said. ‘This is a decent, overprotected, middle-class kid I have in mind.’

  ‘Ali’s kid?’ Arnie said. ‘Sure. I don’t make it an absolute rule to consort with women of dubious repute. Did your dear lady ever turn up by the way?’

  Noah raised his eyes to heaven. ‘She got entangled with some goddam comatose geriatric in a ‘phone booth,’ he said. ‘She just called me to explain.’

  Arnie laughed again, feeling quite correctly that the misfortunes of others were the proper stuff of comedy.

  ‘Gesundheid,’ he said.

  Six

  Ali’s skin cancer lesions first diminished, then obligingly disappeared in response to regular applications of a Swiss pharmaceutical cream prescribed by the epidemiology department. The wandering IUD was, unhappily, less amenable to persuasion. A series of abdominal X-rays revealed it lurking, half-embedded, behind Ali’s large intestine and – having perforated her uterus – it was removable only by surgical incision under general anaesthetic which required a week-long stay in hospital. While Noah gnashed his teeth on Ali’s behalf, Ali herself was occupied with hand-wringing on behalf of her daughter, because Camilla would need to survive a week without her.

  ‘No problem,’ Noah said. ‘She’ll be my guest.’

  For Noah to stay in her own house with Camilla was, Ali knew, unthinkable. The bedding gave him asthma. Furthermore, Mervyn might turn up at any time and discover him there. But how would Camilla cope away from her mother in a boxy house with whirring light switches? And didn’t Noah’s work keep him in the hospital until much too late? And what was to be done about her piano practice or her daily packed lunches or, above all, her habitual bedwetting? Urine stains on Noah’s brand-new beds!

  Noah, for whom the prospect of daily sandwich-making and nightly child incontinence beckoned with no undue menace, waved these anxieties aside as minor inconveniences and proposed that Camilla take the bus from school to the hospital each afternoon to do her homework in the secretary’s office. He concentrated his attention upon Ali’s anxiety that Mervyn would appear and cause trouble. In preparation for this eventuality he overrode Ali’s qualms and saw to the changing of her front and back door locks. Then he recommended that Camilla abandon her piano playing for the week to avoid a possible encounter with her father. One thing only, Noah hazarded, might cause Mervyn to claim rights of guardianship over his daughter and that would be the discovery of another man assuming the role in his place.

  Noah had met Mervyn just the prev
ious week and had not been favourably impressed. He had called on Ali one evening after work as he did with regularity and had found Ali sitting tensely upright upon one of her creaking wicker chairs, the colour oddly high in her cheeks. Mervyn was at the ironing board at the far end of the room rigorously ironing his pyjamas. Eva didn’t own an iron, he said. She was above such things. Perched beside him on the asbestos ironing mat was a glass of Noah’s own bourbon whisky which Mervyn had found in Ali’s cupboard. The bottle was near him on the table.

  ‘Have a drink,’ Mervyn said, playing genial host to the newcomer. He held the bottle to the light to examine its contents.

  ‘Bourbon is a woman’s drink,’ he said, smiling at Noah man-to-man. ‘My wife drinks while I’m away.’

  Noah, who had no intention of embarking upon a public competition for the ownership of Mervyn’s wife, politely downed a glass of his own whisky and talked noncommittal generalities for twenty minutes. Then – gauging that Mervyn was bent upon outstaying him and that to have the man there ironing his nightwear all evening would be of no particular benefit to Ali – Noah left. No person of sense ironed pyjamas, he reflected, especially not in another person’s house. Not unless he wished to convey messages. Mervyn was hurling messages at Ali’s conscience which were absolutely clear: that he had unconditional rights in her household and her person; that as a person stooping there to woman’s work, he deserved at once pity for his reduced situation and praise for his advanced habits. The knowledge that this person of malevolent, fickle intensity had ever had the power to dazzle Ali – his Ali – or possibly had it still, stuck all evening like a bone in his throat. Her course was crystal clear, goddammit! Ali was to make an application without delay for a court order barring Mervyn from access. He proposed the course next morning but Ali wouldn’t agree to it. Mervyn paid the mortgage, she said. The house was in his name. How could she? And how could people who had once cared for each other be reduced to behaving like that?

  ‘Bullshit,’ Noah said, but for the time it got him nowhere.

  For Camilla, that week with Noah was recalled as a golden time and as quite memorably glamorous, first of all because on the Sunday evening, after she and Noah had settled Ali into her hospital bed in a new, tucked-cotton nightdress and had taken their leave of her, Arnie had joined them for a lovely supper in the walled garden of a city pub where – while the men praised English beer, and ate quiche and talked shop – Camilla drank two whole glasses of fizzy lemonade and ate cold sausages with lashings of delicious mustard pickle and played with the publican’s cat. The mustard pickle was nothing short of heaven and the publican had given her such a nice lot of it.

  ‘A little piccalilli, Miss?’ he had asked and had spooned it on to her plate as though it were a French salad. Then afterwards, when they had passed by the house to collect her bags, an impromptu and delightful comedy had set in because Arnie had lit upon two old carnival masks in her toy cupboard, of a dog and an old man, and had minced about with such rheumy, crackpot conviction in the second of these that she had been persuaded to put on the first and play the old man’s dog. Liberated from her own shyness behind the mask, she had yapped and snapped with manic canine glee, now ahead, now behind, all down the street like a wild puppy, while Noah silently carried her bags and Arnie – bawling gruff, octogenarian comments – mimed to untangle a leash from lamp-posts. At his own front door, Noah drew his keys from his pocket, undid the three locks, and announced, categorically, that composure would be reestablished and the masks removed as a condition of entry.

  ‘I mean to drink my coffee in peace and quiet,’ he said.

  ‘Wuff,’ Camilla said, pushing her luck, but Arnie took off the masks, hers and his own, and said in his ordinary voice, ‘Cool it, Bonzo. I need his coffee, okay? Besides, he’s my boss.’

  Once they were inside, and while the grown-ups’ coffee filtered, Noah made her a little pot of hot chocolate which he served in one of his heavy, dark green French railway cups – his only remaining wedding gift salvage which Camilla had previously admired. Camilla admired all Noah’s things without reservation. She loved their opulence and glossy, shop-floor newness. She loved his dark-coloured bathrooms with their mixer taps and bidets, his dark green and gold crockery, his shiny black-stained dining table on its chrome trestles.

  Understanding that Noah was not the man to be wheedled into indulging night-time television viewing, she made her hot chocolate last as long as she could before she went to bed. Even going to bed was an adventure, because the bed was like an armchair that concertinaed out into a proper single bed. Camilla put her teddy in the bed and slid her large rubber undersheet carefully into position as Ali had said she should. She hadn’t really wanted her mother to tell Noah about her bedwetting, but she could see now that it was better that he knew and anyway it hadn’t made him treat her as if she had three heads. And it would have been jolly difficult to have kept on hiding the sheets from him. There was a lovely bedside lamp on a bendy stem by whose light she read some more of Girl of the Limberlost, which was her favourite book. She had read it twice before already, but it was so beautiful and so sad, especially when the children finally found the red-headed orphan boy’s little, precious handsewn baby clothes which proved that his mother had really loved him after all. It made her cry every time, all over again. It would be horrible beyond imagining to be an orphan, Camilla thought. Even worse than having parents who quarrelled all the time. But Ali had promised her that she would not die in hospital. Camilla shuddered, as a moment’s terror intruded to spoil the pleasure she took in the guest bedroom and in the bendy light. If Ali died, she reflected, she would have to go and live with her father and his horrid, bossy girlfriend, who most probably wouldn’t even let her wear pink, or play with Sindy dolls. Eva would probably make Mervyn send her to boarding school, like in David Copperfield.

  The daylight, however, brought renewed contemplation of pleasures in store. For Noah, instead of making sandwiches for what he called her ‘bag lunch’, had sent her off to the grocer’s the previous day with two pounds in her purse and had told her to buy herself five days’ supply of anything she liked to eat, so long as it wasn’t candy or carbonated drinks. Camilla had chosen five pots of fruit-flavoured yoghurt with a different flavour for each day and five bags of Salt and Vinegar potato crisps. Then she had bought some vacuum-packed ham and a bag of six chelsea buns because she could eat the extra one on the way home from the shop. Going to the hospital after school turned out to be a treat for her too: to take the unfamiliar bus and make one’s way down the grey, gloss-painted corridors and through three sets of smoky plastic doors to Noah’s research unit where one shared a desk with the secretary who let one take telephone messages and gave one photocopy paper to draw on. It made one feel grown up.

  Occasionally Arnie would come in, looking strangely purposeful, bending over the secretary with tables and graphs, or pulling files from grey filing cabinets. It was a little disappointing for her that he never appeared in his hairy goatskin which Ali had told her about, but was always quite properly dressed in decent roll-neck sweaters and laundered corduroys and loafers; even more disappointing was that he was always so wholly preoccupied: a little puzzling too, because she had not yet discovered that Arnie was a person who addressed himself both to work and to leisure with an equally ruthless commitment.

  ‘How you doing?’ he would say rather automatically and he would look right past her to the secretary or to the filing cabinets. Before she learned that the question was rhetorical with him, she would try, mistakenly, to answer. ‘I’m doing very badly,’ she said once, hoping to interest him in her maths homework. ‘It says here that if a record accomplishes forty-five revolutions in one minute, how many revolutions does it accomplish in four seconds? What are you supposed to do?’

  Arnie laughed, a little callously, she thought, because he must have known that she really did need help, and he answered her without even bothering to take his ballpoint pen out from betwee
n his teeth. ‘With that many revolutions, I guess it’s got to be Bolivia.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Camilla said.

  ‘Or someplace else,’ he said carelessly, even as he moved to leave. ‘West Africa, maybe. I’d say three, Cam. Think about it.’ But that was no good, even if three was the right answer, Camilla thought to herself in some confusion, because you had to show your working or else Miss Hartley wouldn’t believe that you had really understood. Noah never called her ‘Cam’, but he could always be relied upon to help if ever he came in, which, unhappily, was not often. He never implied, either by word or gesture, that three minutes taken out of his afternoon would alter the course of medical history. He would draw up a typing chair and sit down. Then he would very soon show her that there was excellent sense in dividing forty-five by sixty (which was difficult enough, Camilla assured him, unless one had a grownup over one’s shoulder). The rest would be plain sailing. You multiplied the revolutions in one second by four.

  ‘The answer’s three,’ Camilla said, but she wondered how Arnie had managed to work it out so quickly.

  ‘Great!’ Noah said. ‘You’re doing great!’ He was really very nice, Camilla thought. The only awkward thing about Noah at work was that he didn’t like waste paper, which was a curious foible. She was not, repeat not, he said, to use expensive photocopy paper to take telephone messages or for her drawings, and he ticked off the secretary for giving it to her. He offered her a drawer full of multi-coloured oddments.