One of Ali’s callers was injudicious enough to proposition him during the weeks of Ali’s convalescence, and so shocked him with the quality of her disloyalty that he made a point of turning her down in Ali’s hearing by saying that he feared ‘the clap’. This frankly brutal response had resulted in a prompt and admirable reduction in the numbers who came through Ali’s door in the evenings but in the short run it had been counterproductive. It had made Ali both furious and hostile.
‘What sort of unspeakable bloody bastard are you that you go undermining people like that?’ she said, almost before the door had closed behind the intruder. ‘Isn’t it fairly obvious she’s vulnerable as all hell? I hope you’re proud of yourself.’
‘Al,’ Noah said. ‘I was doing you a favour.’
‘Some favour!’ she said. ‘I don’t need your favours.’ This last, given her recent history of dependence upon him, perhaps justly he considered to be untrue, but he let it pass. ‘I thought that you were kind,’ she said, ‘but you’re kind only to people you like. That’s cheap; that’s easy. All manner of miserable bastards can be kind to children and lap dogs. Even to certain hand-picked respectable women.’
‘Al,’ Noah said. ‘Let’s not even discuss it. Just get it straight that I do not propose to lease out compassion like a goddam community centre. I don’t have the time. I also don’t intend that you and I should quarrel over an expendable, goddam unwashed tramp. Understood?’
In response to this final unchecked heresy, Ali almost choked. Her voice cracked as she spoke.
‘Go away,’ she said. ‘You are a cosy medic in handmade shoes and I hate you.’
‘Me!’ Noah said. ‘You’re asking me to leave? You harbour all these dubious cranks and it’s me you’re asking to leave?’
‘Go!’ Ali said. ‘Oh please, for God’s sake, go.’
Noah wrenched angrily at the catch which he had recently had fitted to her front door.
‘You’re gonna be sorry,’ he said. ‘I have a whole lot more to give.’
On both counts he was of course right. She was sorry, but then so was he. Noah was not in general readily forthcoming with apologies – a habit born perhaps of his profession where to apologise is often to admit liability. It was not surprising then that Ali was the one to say sorry first. She came to his door two days later in a state of underslept conciliation.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I think you were wrong in what you did but I was extreme. I do see that you were defending me.’
‘Come in,’ Noah said. ‘I’m very glad to see you.’ Having closed the door behind her he blew into the palms of her hands which were cold since the autumn had been showing signs of giving way early to winter. ‘You ought to wear gloves.’
‘I was not only unfair to you, I was probably also uncouth,’ she said.
‘Unfair, maybe, but not uncouth,’ he said. ‘I believe you to be quite unshakeably couth.’
‘Please know that you are speaking to a person who has thrown clay flowerpots on to the head of Mervyn Bobrow from upstairs windows,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to be deluded about me.’
Noah laughed. ‘There’s only one thing to be said against such basically laudable conduct,’ he said, ‘and that is the possibility of having to explain a fractured skull to the coroner.’ Ali sat down, on the foot end of the reclining dentist’s chair which was really quite remarkably comfortable.
‘I wanted to tell you that I once had the clap.’ she said. ‘Once when I was sixteen.’
‘Pardon me?’ he said.
‘I said that I once had the clap,’ she said. ‘Gonorrhoea. I wanted to tell you that.’
‘There is no disgrace in contracting a sexually transmitted disease,’ Noah said. ‘The disgrace lies in knowingly passing it on.’ He paused suddenly as if hit by a blow from falling clay flowerpots. ‘Excuse me, you said sixteen? Sweet Jesus, Al, did you say sixteen?’
‘I said sixteen’ she said. ‘The first time I ever took my knickers off for a man. The Evil Eye as I told you. You see how grievously it afflicts my sex. I was so bloody innocent in those days that I took my itch to the family doctor, who promptly informed my nice straightlaced mother. But you will be pleased to hear that I never passed it on. I practised abstinence religiously for the next two years until I got married. I wore a kind of two-way-stretch chastity belt on all my evenings out. A fearsome Lycra item called a Tiger Grip and quite impenetrable. My first husband was so infuriated by it that he married me just to get the damn thing off.’
‘So who was he?’ Noah said. ‘This jerk who gave you gonorrhoea.’
‘He was the one that I married,’ she said. ‘But as to who he was, I hardly remember. We were married not much over half a year. I believe he was a fairly loutish rugger bugger. An engineering student. I mean no disrespect to the profession, you understand, when I say that, where I came from, engineering students were on the whole a pretty far cry from Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He drank beer with the boys and screwed everything in skirts under the floats on Rag night. He was a fairly stereotypical yahoo but with pretensions to nobility. He wore a Gallic signet ring and said that his great-grandfather had been a “vassal” of the Duke of Normandy. He was, as you see, not high in the hierarchy of defrocked Gaulish aristocrats, but for a colonial green-girl like me he had a certain kudos. I met him when the young man I had fallen in love with – a fellow student called Thomas Adderley – hit him in the face and broke a blood vessel in his nose. His blood drenched my shirt. After someone has drowned you in blood, what can you do but marry them?’
Noah watched her, his mind aswim with images of Ali cast adrift in the company of rogues and charlatans. Dukes and Dolphins, as in Huckleberry Finn.
‘My personal opinion is that one could have called it quits with the gonorrhoea,’ he said. ‘Marriage was maybe pushing it, especially if you loved somebody else. But tell me, Al, did you always hang out with crazy people?’
Ali laughed. ‘Until I met you? No, not really. I had a modest penchant for “Semitic and Titled Persons” as you might say. That is, except for just the once. But neither category is made up exclusively of crazies, as you yourself bear witness.’
‘This “just once”?’ Noah said. ‘This man you cared for, who fell into neither category. I want for you to tell me what was wrong with him. That is, since you were so clearly drawn to those whom your “nice straightlaced mother” would have regarded as deviants. Who was he?’
‘He was the person who broke the engineer’s nose,’ Ali said. ‘I can tell you more about him if your research unit will spare you till I’m through. He was a classmate of mine in the Arts Faculty. One of the few men on the course. Real men were supposed to do engineering, you see. That’s the reason why we got to see each other – during poetry tutorials, while the engineering students were busy in their manly boiler suits under the heavy machinery. I fell for him immediately; at first glance, before I ever spoke to him. I said to myself, “That’s him.” But it didn’t work out that way. The blood determined it otherwise. Does this sound like Wagner?’
‘Carry on,’ Noah said.
‘I had a dear friend all this time called Julie Horowitz,’ Ali said. ‘She had been with me right through high school. It is perhaps because of her that I always found the more secular aspects of Judaic culture so seductive, though I have to confess that Mervyn and his mother just about cured me of it. Mervyn’s mother once sent me a breakdown, village by village, of Polish dead from Nazi genocide. She’d transcribed it from a slab somewhere in what she called “the Holy Land”. But I digress. Where was I?’
‘Your girl friend,’ Noah said. ‘Julie Horowitz.’
‘Yes,’ Ali said. ‘I fell head over heels for the way her father used to crumble his matzo during the Passover and announce “Tenks Gott next veek is bread.” He’d stepped off a boat from Eastern Europe at the age of ten but he’d never stopped talking like the Fiddler on the Roof. I loved being in her parents’ house. My parents were both high school teachers with mod
est but secure incomes. Julie’s parents were the first people I knew who combined affluence and precariousness in the way people do who buy and sell things with flair. They had so much more stuff than we ever had but a lot of it was a kind of insurance. It was the kind of stuff you could pick up and run with like rubies and Chinese silk rugs. Her mother practised strange, obsessional economies like saving motley scraps of toilet soap and wedging them into a tablet when she’d collected enough. These were people with their own tennis courts, Noah. She wouldn’t let Julie wear flat shoes to lectures because no decent man would look at her in “flatties” she said. She was obsessed with marrying her daughter off to a man with qualifications which would be as transportable as the Chinese rugs – an accountant, or a lawyer, or a medic. She would have gone for you in a big way, Noah. Poor Mrs Horowitz. Men looked at Julie all of the time, of course, flat shoes or no, because she was so luscious. I thought all Julie’s man-catching clothes were quite wonderful, but Julie hated them. We used to swap clothes in the ladies’ loo until her hips got too big. She once stole a book for me from her father. She said he had never opened it and never would. A Byron it was, bound in red vellum. Inside it said “For your Barmitzvah with love from Uncle Sam and Auntie Ida”. I’ve still got it. She meant it to imply that our friendship would endure beyond cultural boundaries but in the end it didn’t. It divided us. My Frenchman was predictably anti-Semitic and Julie’s men began to terrify me with their white teeth and their sports cars. I used to see her on the beach sometimes, all tan and lip-gloss, lounging with these Sabra-type wondermen. Gold stars of David tangled in the curls of their chest hair.’
‘In a word, you had deviant tastes,’ Noah said. ‘You thought that her men were sexy and it scared the hell out of you. But what about this poetic young man of yours? Like what was wrong with him?’
‘Nothing,’ Ali said. ‘Why should anything have been wrong with him?’
‘Something had to be wrong with him,’ Noah said. ‘Come on, Al.’
‘He was all kings and princes,’ Ali said extravagantly. ‘He was without fault. The others were but dross and dung beside him.’
‘He was black,’ Noah hazarded sarcastically.
‘Not exactly,’ Ali said. ‘But you are very close, Noah. Very shrewd. I do admire you, you know. He was actually light brown, but he “passed for white” as they say in that country. He was tall, brown, wild, left-wing and highly literate; he was everything a golden man ought to be.’
Sober, cautious, middle-aged and firmly antipathetic to radical chic, Noah found himself overtaken by a brief tremor of retrospective envy.
‘What was his name did you say?’ he said. ‘Apollo?’
Ali laughed. ‘Thomas,’ she said. ‘He was a half-caste leftie with a fancy name. His family was British from India. That’s where the brown had come from I expect. They’d boozed their way downwards till they’d ended up in a corrugated-iron house in South Africa. I am told that an iron house is quite the thing now, but in our day it was very low. Very low indeed. Also rather hot. And noisy during hailstorms.’
‘Thomas who?’ Noah said.
‘Thomas Adderley,’ she said. ‘Thomas Claude Adderley. But often known as Mot. He’d spelled his name backwards as a child, you see, and it had stuck. When I first knew him he had already left the iron house. He lived by himself in a garage.’
‘I see,’ Noah said. ‘I always thought a garage was for automobiles.’ Depicting the scene for Noah, Ali had recognised a degree of unreviewed childishness in it which had made her defensive.
‘We were kids, Noah,’ she said. ‘He was seventeen. I was, as I told you, sixteen.’
‘How come you were so young?’ Noah said, suspiciously. ‘You were a pre-pubertal college grad?’
‘I was precocious,’ she said. ‘Well – I was precocious at passing examinations. At everything else I was, on the whole, retarded but my sixth-form blazer was as decorated with ribbons as a maypole. It’s not always the best training for life. I had no street wisdom you see. We were too young or perhaps too frightened to take on passion direct, so we read Keats together in the student caff, when the engineer wasn’t wrestling with my Tiger Grip. And we sat together during lectures. But I will tell you about the day we met, shall I? It was, in its way, decisive.’
‘Okay,’ Noah said.
‘Julie and I had spent weeks together leafing through Elle magazine and plotting the appropriate highbrow look for our move to campus life,’ she said. ‘We had no sooner turned up looking like collegiate cover girls, however, than we ran into an unexpected backlash; an initiation rite known as “Freshers’ Reception” of which my engineer was one of the ruling triumvirate. It required new students to hang sandwich-boards on their chests stating name, gender and age, and to appear on the lawns in congregation to sing back-up choruses for rugger matches. A whole ragbag of racist, sexist and vaguely porno rubbish with which I won’t sully your ears. During the weeks of this thoroughly down-market and, I may say, disillusioning rite, us new girls were required to answer instantly to the command of senior male students. If one of them bawled, “Freshette, come here!” you were expected to step forth and display your sandwich-board with eager alacrity. The greater obscenity, I have to say, was to watch the giggly relish with which most of the girlies played along with the system.
‘Julie and I were snooty girls. We’d walk on pretending not to hear when they bawled at us, but the result of this temporarily gratifying one-upmanship was, of course, that one was singled out during the sing-along sessions for exhibitions of male sadism. We kept being chosen as demonstration models for the songs which required female mime artistes. The most compromising of these required the victim to lie on her back on the grass and mime the sex act with a first-year male victim, usually chosen for conspicuous gormlessness. Julie came in for most of the flak being bolder and more gorgeous, while I on the whole only caught the spill-over on account of the aforementioned Quaker syndrome. They called her “the Horror Witch” because she had botched the graphics on her sandwich-board and had been obliged to break up her surname on to separate lines. It read “Julie Horo” new line “witz”. But on the occasion of the bleeding nose the triumvirate had for some reason chosen me. “You there next to the Horror Witch. The haughty one,” bawls my engineer, “Come out here and lie down! Open your legs,” he says, bantering amiably. “You know how to open your legs I hope, girlie, because if you don’t, one of us here will be happy to show you.”
‘Lots of ho-ho and rah-rah from the back-up on the reception panel. They selected a person who was at that time the most wide-open male first year of the bunch to mime the act with me. A person called William Lister. The poor boy was sweating in terror and steaming up his glasses. He was so loath to lie on me that you could have wedged a stack of bricks between us. “Bugger off you pimply virgin!” bawls my engineer charmingly. “You couldn’t get it up for Jayne bloody Mansfield. Hey you,” he says, beckoning to Thomas Adderley. “Let’s have you out here. Show us how you’d like to treat a lady.” Well, that’s it really. Mot Adderley strode up to the front and, without any warning, hit my engineer in the face. The blow broke a blood vessel in his nose. Within seconds he looked like a butcher. So did I. The new Elle shirt and the sandwich-board were impressively blotched with gore. Mot Adderley walked off the field unchecked on his eight-foot legs while I and the engineer beat a dual retreat to the nearest washroom where he was very solicitous with me. Very stoical about his nose and all concern for me and my clothing. We repaired to the mens’ hall of residence where he got me one of his shirts to put on. He even turned his back all proper like while I put it on. Then he brought me a Coke in the Students’ Union caff and laughed the whole thing off. He had already appointed himself my protector. “You mustn’t let one cheeky white Hottentot get you down,” he said. “It’s no skin off your nose.” He was actually very handsome, even with the bashed face, only too strutting to see that it was his nose not mine which the cheeky Hottentot had put out
of joint.
‘That was it. Somehow, by that union of blood, I became the engineer’s woman. He had lots of temporary women over the next three years who were better versed in opening their legs, but I was the one whom he had fixed upon to take home to mother.’
‘So you married him,’ Noah said. ‘Having first handed over your virginity in protection payment. You cared for the one guy and you married the other. That figures. But you sound as if you’re still sorry. What I mean is you still sound a little infatuated with this dyslexic black person.’
‘Not really,’ Ali said. ‘Not in my more rational moments.’
‘There’s nothing rational about passion,’ Noah said. ‘If there were, I guess I wouldn’t be sitting here right now, despising your Mr Adderley for his fancy name and his slovenly, poetical habits.’ Ali laughed.
‘And how was the marriage?’ Noah said.
‘Brief,’ Ali said. ‘We shook the confetti from our hair and found ourselves incarcerated together in a small, urban flat. He listened to commercial radio in the evenings and took me to the drive-in cinema at weekends to watch Grace Kelly and to eat hot-dogs which were clipped to the car window on trays.’
‘Meanwhile you ate your heart out over the hot-dogs for the other man,’ Noah said. ‘Isn’t that so?’
‘Oh absolutely,’ Ali said. ‘I loved him more than my life. I used to shut my eyes in bed and think of him.’
‘And with Mervyn?’ Noah asked.
‘Sometimes,’ Ali said
‘And with me?’ Noah said, fixing her intently with an unblinking gaze. Ali laughed self-consciously.
‘Not with you,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t sustain the illusion, even if I wanted to. You’re much too square, Noah.’
‘I want the truth, Al,’ Noah said. ‘If you please.’
‘The truth is what I have just told you,’ Ali said. ‘You are the best lover I’ve ever had.’
‘Taking my predecessors into account, I’m not surprised,’ Noah said dryly, though he found the observation mollifying. ‘And what brought you to Britain?’
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