Noah's Ark

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘Use the scratch paper,’ he said. But the ‘scratch’ paper, as he called it, was usually roneo paper that had already been used on one side, and there was something distinctly less pleasurable to her in using the not quite pristine sheets. They did not glow with the same seductive promise and infinite possibility. But nonetheless, Noah was kind, even if he didn’t understand this obvious truth. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t ‘artistic’, Camilla thought. People always said that she and her mother were ‘artistic’.

  Every evening that week Noah worked until six when they would go in the car to see Ali and take her a Vogue magazine, or grapes, or a paperback novel. Ali had a gory, terrifying gash held together with horrible black tailor’s tacking which went all the way from her navel right into where the nurses had shaved her pubic hair. Camilla had made the mistake of asking to see it and Ali had shown it to her. It had made her feel sick. Nonetheless, Ali looked very pretty, and calm and rested, Camilla thought. It came of having nothing to do except comb one’s hair and read and do embroidery. And to wait for meals which nurses brought on trays. Only poor Ali missed her cigarettes. Noah wouldn’t bring her any and had made her promise not to buy any from the trolley. Camilla wondered about the ethics of this, because it seemed bossy to her and none of his business, but he meant it for the best. He made Ali chew sugarless chewing gum instead, which left her mouth full of spittle. If she didn’t smoke at all for a whole week, Noah said, he would buy her recordings of all the song cycles of Schubert, even though he hated them so much himself he would have to plug his ears or go out when she played them. Ali said they were ‘lyrical’ in the most pure and beautiful way and Camilla knew that some of them made her cry almost as much as Girl of the Limberlost made Camilla cry – especially the one about the land where lemon trees flowered and oranges grew. She heard her mother say that Noah ought to be moved by the songs just as she was, because his family must once have been German like hers, if his name was anything to go by. Noah just laughed and said that his family wasn’t German at all, but East European Jewish and that his father had changed his name to Glazer when he first went to the USA to make himself sound more up-market.

  ‘You’re probably related to Mervyn,’ Ali said. ‘Who knows? Perhaps you share a Polish grandmother?’

  Camilla could tell that Noah was very fond of her mother. He always began his visits by kissing her on the mouth in that sloppy, wet way that grown-ups had, which seemed to go on for ever. Noah was ‘in love’ with her mother. Camilla knew this without any doubt because there was a big new glossy book on the piano at home, of Matisse paintings, which must have cost absolutely pounds, she guessed, and inside it said ‘For Al, because I love her’. Noah had given the book to her mother and had signed it with his name. Matisse was her mother’s favourite painter, but Matisse didn’t make Ali cry. Not like Schubert.

  Camilla had observed that Noah was very good at buying Ali the right presents and concluded that this was the result of his being ‘in love’ with her. She knew that her mother had once been ‘in love’, a very long time ago, with a man called Thomas Adderley, who had been tall and dark and arty, and some people had used to whisper about him that he was half-coloured. If you were at all coloured where Ali came from, you were mostly not allowed to go to the same schools or universities as white people, but Ali had told her that certain people did – if their families were old enough or crafty enough to have got classified as white in the first place. Camilla presumed that Thomas Adderley’s family had been either old, or crafty, or both. Anyway, Thomas hadn’t minded, even when people had said to his face that he was a half-caste, partly because he had not been racially prejudiced, which was extremely unusual, Ali had explained, and partly because he had been so brainy and so handsome that he had had the edge over the name-callers. Also he had followed his mother’s advice and had taken boxing lessons. Thomas’s mother hadn’t been like other people’s mothers who had worn high heels, and played tennis and complained about the servants, Ali said. She had worn men’s lace-ups, and had given sculpture classes at the technical college and had refused to have domestic help.

  Ali hadn’t married Thomas. She had married somebody else whom she never talked about, other than once to say he had been a ‘brief irrelevance’, and that his family had been French and had sided with Hitler during the occupation. Camilla knew that it was a terrible thing to have sided with Hitler and when her father had been in one of his shouting moods he had once called Ali a ‘collaborator’ because her mother’s family had been German, and he said that Hitler had tried to kill him, which was puzzling, Camilla thought, because Hitler hadn’t ever gone to Southend, but Ali said afterwards that it was ‘poetic licence’ and, broadly speaking, true. Her father wrote poetry sometimes, but it wasn’t lovely, magic poetry like Goblin Market that you could understand. It was all fangs and blood. He had also recently written a book which she had heard her mother say was ‘purple’. It wasn’t that he couldn’t be a good writer, Ali had said to Noah. It was just that he hadn’t yet learned to read through his own stuff twelve times in a Sarcastic Bystander voice. It had made Noah laugh. Her mother was good at making Noah laugh. If her parents had ever been ‘in love’, then the idea merely suggested itself to Camilla that people didn’t always stay in love, which was horrible to believe, but perhaps sensible people like Noah always did?

  It was strange to think of Noah being ‘in love’ at all, really, because he was quite old and he didn’t look anything like the pictures of men in Real Life Photo-Love Stories which one of the girls had brought to school. In fact, he looked a bit like her father’s Uncle Morrie who had used to run a men’s outfitters in Southend and who used to wear those spiralled wire elasticky things like bicycle clips around his upper arms to hitch up his shirt sleeves. Noah didn’t wear those, of course, and he looked more important, but he did have short arms and he did wear dowdy, old-fashioned white underpants with Y-fronts that looked huge and embarrassing on the washing line over the bath. Camilla knew it was silly and childish to react that way but the Y-fronts bothered her. There was something about them that made her squeamish – like jock straps – because they were so exclusively for men. She was not sure if Y-fronts were so that men could pee without having the bother of undoing their trousers, or whether they had to do with that other strange and dreadful thing she knew men did with that disconcerting appendage which afflicted their nether parts. Did Y-fronts mean they could do it without even taking their underpants off? Ugh!

  Mervyn’s underpants hadn’t had Y-fronts. They had been small black bikini pants and not very different from her mother’s pants really, except that the cloth had been thicker. In fact Ali had used to borrow them sometimes in cold weather which had made Mervyn furious, but then he had always been blowing up about something or other in that scary way. Camilla’s own feelings of relief about her father’s departure caused her frequent nightly sessions of fear and guilt, but these had suddenly abated in Noah’s house. Her father was a lot younger than Noah and he was more slim and natty-looking but for years now he had made her flinch and shrink. Camilla didn’t understand about people getting married and then making each other so miserable, because in story books they got married and they lived happily and had lots of children who went on picnics and came home from boarding school – that was unless they died first. It would be lovely to get married in a long dress and have confetti and lots of children, she thought, so long as you could adopt the children and not have to do that dreadful thing together in bed every time you wanted to have another baby. But Noah wouldn’t make anybody unhappy if he were married to them because he was so sensible and quiet and fair. Only on that first morning before school she recalled that he hadn’t been altogether fair to her when she had needed his help with the sheets. At the time she had thought he was being really piggy and she had nearly cried, but she had soon forgiven him because the breakfast had been so good.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Camilla had said politely, a little puffed with effort. �
��I think I need help. I don’t think I can lift my sheets out of the bath.’ She was standing in the doorway with the sleeves of her school shirt pushed up and her knuckles red from hot water. Ali had told her to wash her own sheets in the mornings while she was at Noah’s and to ask him for help if lifting them wet was difficult. And Noah, it had seemed to her, was doing nothing: just drinking coffee and reading his newspaper.

  ‘I’m busy,’ he said. Shy as she was, Camilla fixed her wonderful eyes on him with a scepticism which was lost upon him because he didn’t look up.

  ‘You’re just reading the bloody newspaper!’ she said.

  ‘Watch your language,’ Noah said. ‘I happen to be busy with the news right now.’ ’Nooz’, he said. ‘Busy with the nooz.’ Camilla suppressed an urge to pull tongues – an instinct towards lively defiance which was as unusual in her as blasphemous adjectives.

  ‘Listen, Pumpkin,’ Noah said. ‘You have a choice here, as I see it. In my house you either wash those sheets yourself or you do without sheets. I don’t mind. If it saves on labour, go ahead and pee right on the mattress next time.’

  ‘I have washed them,’ Camilla said. ‘But they’re heavy. And what will I do if I miss my bus?’

  ‘You’ll get up a half-hour earlier tomorrow,’ Noah said. ‘Clothes pins are on the line. Try not to drip water over my floors, okay?’ At this point, all unbeknown to him, she had nearly cried. ‘Don’t worry about the bus,’ he said. ‘I’m planning to take you in the car.’

  In all honesty the sheets were not all that difficult to lift once she really tried, because they were polycotton, form-fitted sheets and lighter than her mother’s, which were flannel and were also as old as the hills and nearly all with the sides stitched to the middles, leaving an uncomfortable seam down the centre.

  For breakfast Noah made her toast and a soft-boiled egg which he gave her, not in an eggcup, but whole and shelled in a coddling dish. She supposed this to be because he was American. He himself ate what looked to her like raw porridge with yoghurt. Or was it buttermilk? It was not that nice, sugary yoghurt such as she had chosen for school, but the kind that was like sour milk with lumps in it. The relief of having the sheets under her belt and the knowledge that she was to have a lift to school in the car brought on such a feeling of wellbeing in Camilla that it induced a burst of bold cultural insularity which warmed Noah’s heart and made them firm friends. She glanced with yellow-eyed unease at his bowl of mixed grains daubed with clods of milk ferment, and said:

  ‘Do you eat that raw porridge stuff because you’re American?’ Noah laughed.

  ‘Go brush your teeth,’ he said, ‘and get your school bag.’ By the afternoon he had bought her a tiny microchip alarm clock to help her wake up on time, but although she hardly touched the buttons something must have gone very wrong with it, because next morning when Noah woke her, he said it had played the ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’ twice over in the small hours.

  ‘You messed about with it,’ he said. Camilla bit her lip.

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ she said. ‘Honestly Noah, and it wouldn’t have woken me anyway. I used to have one with brass bells on top that I could stand on a tin plate.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Noah said. ‘You know something? You’re a whole lot like your mother.’ Camilla giggled, because, although she knew he was criticising her, she was aware that, since he liked her mother so much, it could only mean that he liked her too. Admittedly Ali had never used to pee in her bed as a girl. Camilla felt oddly warm then, under the night’s covers, and realised that this was because her bed was dry. She drew her knees up in surprise and knocked the clock from Noah’s hands.

  ‘Noah,’ she said. ‘Excuse me, but I haven’t wet my bed. I don’t seem to have peed in my bed, Noah.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Noah said, deadpan, wishing to hide his own surprise.

  ‘Why not, do you think?’ she said.

  ‘Search me,’ Noah said, who had not much idea. But ten years later he still had the fold-up bed in his study with its single, very large urine stain. The rubber sheet had proved altogether inadequate on what had turned out to be the last night Camilla ever wet her bed. The size of the stain was not surprising since Noah, absent-mindedly, had let her drink two glasses of Seven-Up in the pub and had made her the hot chocolate too. But he hadn’t given it a thought, since he had had things to talk over with Arnie and, besides, he had been inwardly worried sick about Ali.

  There was only one curious incident relating to Mervyn, which took place on the Friday before Ali’s discharge from hospital. She had asked for the book on Matisse, and Noah and Camilla had entered the house to get it for her.

  ‘It’s on the piano,’ Camilla said, but it wasn’t.

  ‘She’s put it someplace else,’ Noah said, but then Camilla saw his eyes fix on the broken catch of the back sash window and she saw him tense with annoyance.

  ‘It’s always been like that,’ she said, thinking to reassure him. ‘It’s been broken like that for donkey’s years.’

  ‘Holy shit!’ Noah said angrily. Nothing else was gone except the iron.

  Camilla didn’t come into the ward next visiting time, because she was busy outside in the hospital grounds with Arnie. Having laid her a bet, Arnie was now timing her with a stop watch as she ran the perimeter of the hospital fence at a creditable sprint, on those wonderful, long child legs which from the first he had so much admired.

  ‘Use your toes!’ Arnie was calling after her with gusto. ‘Toes, Cam! Run on your toes, kid!’

  ‘File a divorce petition against the sonofabitch,’ Noah was saying within. ‘Do it, Al. Anything you care to pin on him: desertion, adultery, unreasonable behaviour. It’s a pushover. Do it now. That way you’ll hang on to the house.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have changed the locks, Noah,’ Ali said. ‘Dearest Noah, I do wish that you hadn’t. That’s why he’s taken my book. It’s tit for tat, that’s all. He won’t do it again. Oh hell, but I loved that book.’

  ‘And the iron?’ Noah said angrily. ‘How about the iron? You love that too. And how about me? Where do I stand in your affections? Somewhere between Matisse and the iron?’

  ‘Oh Noah,’ Ali said. ‘Please.’

  ‘You’re behaving like a door mat, Al,’ Noah said. ‘It’s small wonder that he craps all over you.’

  Seven

  Noah proposed marriage to her after a quarrel precipitated by her neighbours and an episode over a rabbit. ‘For a nicely brought up, hardworking lady,’ he said one evening, ‘you sure have some seriously scrambled friends.’

  ‘Have I?’ Ali said. It gave her a small jolt to have her neighbourhood callers defined as ‘friends’. ‘Friends’ were a feature of one’s girlhood; a thing one had put away upon marriage. ‘Friends’ were the people like Julie Horowitz with whom one had shared one’s homework, shared one’s aspirations, even at times shared one’s precious black stovepipe trousers. ‘Friends’ were the people with whom one had giggled in the ranks of the Saturday school of ballroom dancing, wearing one’s rustling starched petticoats tacked up at the back with makeshift green thread. The rite of marriage demoted female friends, at a stroke, to the status of a music hall joke. They became ‘the gaggle’ and the ‘hen-party’. Two or more of them gathered together could command a dubious institutional legitimacy in the baby shower and the coffee morning, but it was never again the same.

  ‘Perhaps I’m scrambled too,’ Ali said flippantly, in the hope of deflecting attention from her neighbours who clearly bothered him. ‘Could it be a case of like finding like?’

  ‘You have cleaner fingernails,’ he said. Then he turned aside to confront the doorway. ‘Goodbye,’ he said firmly, addressing this deterrent greeting not to Ali, but to a threesome of uninvited children who had appeared at her door in the hope of gaining entry. Noah had by this time appointed himself expeller of unwelcome children who intruded upon his own and Ali’s evenings together. In this role he would plant his wide shoulders squarely in the do
orway and pronounce the single word ‘goodbye’ with a wondrously intimidating effect. He had not yet got round to expelling the adults. Not yet. Not until the night of the rabbit, which was soon to come.

  ‘You’re a pearl cast among swine,’ Noah said. ‘Make no mistake, sweetheart.’

  ‘Aren’t you merely saying that I’m a more socially presentable egg-flip than some others of my sex around here?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you being elitist, Noah?’

  ‘Oh bullshit,’ Noah said. ‘You’re a lady, Al. It shines out a mile. You may be a little eccentric, but you’re a real lady.’ Ali laughed at this tautological shamelessness.

  ‘Well, exactly,’ she said. For Noah, no amount of handwringing ‘quim introspection’ on Ali’s part would alter the obvious fact that among the ‘alternative’ people who came to her door – bringing toddlers whom they licensed to pee on her rugs, to break Camilla’s dolls, to grind fish fingers into her floors, or to drag bedding all over her house, while they confided to her patient ear their drug addiction, their multiple orgasms, their childhood rapes – among these there were for sure no ladies. Some were unwashed and others took drugs. All were endlessly obsessed with themselves.

  Had he not recently spent an entire evening in Ali’s house in the company of a demented female who had asserted repeatedly that her eardrums would haemorrhage if she ate any bread but German linseed bread? Had he not been obliged to hear another expand – without respect either for brevity or discretion – upon the subject of her ‘dry cunt’ syndrome? Noah was confirmed in a belief that Mervyn Bobrow had dumped upon his weary, dancing princess the role of unpaid neighbourhood psychiatric counsellor and that the job had worn her out until she had been obliged to hang up her dancing shoes.

  ‘Some people are always unlucky,’ Ali said, countering with a belief in the Evil Eye. ‘Bad luck seeks them out.’