‘What’s so funny?’ Noah said.
In his hutch, planted squarely on the foregoing Saturday’s Times, the ageing lop-eared rabbit was lying dead. The sudden battery of cake tins, following hard upon Matt’s blow to his temple, had been too much for his heart.
It rankled a little with both of them that Mervyn beat her to it. With fortuitous timing he had submitted a divorce petition and soon afterwards married his girlfriend, who was pregnant and whose father materialised as a legal counsellor of some consequence. The basement bedsitter had been a misleading piece of undergrad slumming. The divorce was easy given the lapse of time, and Mervyn gave notice of his intention to reoccupy the house within six months when the baby would need a room of its own. He made a systematic inventory of the house contents and decided – upon the advice of a valuer – to keep the piano, the sanded bureau, Camilla’s wooden cradle, and the silver shell spoons. The rest he donated to Ali. Camilla was not part of the bargain beyond the usual visiting rights, which were seldom exercised. It was Eva’s opinion, where Camilla was concerned, that there was not much that even she or Mervyn could do and she had expressed herself in an audible aside on the subject during the one and only visit Ali had made to the basement in the course of these painful negotiations.
‘Frankly,’ she had said to Mervyn, over Ali’s head – and she had risen to activate Virginia’s sagging Blutack for the fourth time that month, since the condensation in the basement was terrific – ‘the child has been so damaged by female inferiority feelings transmitted by her mother, that I’d rather we gave her up and started again with our own. That way we’ll be in control from the start.’
Ali’s relief upon hearing this was such that it left her surprisingly philosophical about the loss of her house and her things. She had already agreed to marry Noah who had no time for either. Both houses were too small for their needs as he perceived them, and the neighbours made unreasonable demands upon Ali which he would not tolerate indefinitely. Moreover, from what Ali had let slip with regard to the electrical arrangements in Margaret’s adjoining interior, he had begun to fear for the entire block as a potential tinderbox.
Nine
Noah was in new york when Ali received her first letter from Mervyn’s solicitor informing her of the divorce petition. Having tried repeatedly to get in touch with Noah by telephone and having come up, each time, against the answering machine in Barbara’s apartment, she lunched instead with Arnie Weinberg who told her funny stories against himself, to divert her from the business. He had himself only recently returned from a trip to New York and Michigan. Both Noah and he were never without Pan Am tickets protruding from their breast pockets. Ali, who had made her one long journey to England on the last of a glorious line of Union Castle mail boats which had docked darkly one cold January morning in Southampton harbour, had never been on an aeroplane in all her life, and her reluctance to do so had by now become entrenched.
This frequent and apparently voluntary mobility in the men seemed to her a flagellating addiction. There was clearly no ‘lonely impulse of delight’ in this committing of oneself over and over to the departure lounge or to the airborne charabanc with its plastic food on trays. They grumbled about it stoically as a necessary evil – an evil upon which Noah at least spent very little of his own money, since his trips got funded by various research committees, but upon which Arnie appeared to spend almost all of his earnings. After paying his travel costs he was left with enough money to cover the cost of running his newly acquired sports car, to paying the rent on various ever-changing bedsitting rooms in the Abingdon Road, and to funding a degree of sexually gratifying high-life in London at weekends. He had recently terminated a brief affair with the girlfriend of a Soho flick-knife king which had been rash, to say the least, and with its risky consequences he now lavishly entertained Ali. He never discussed these things with Noah but Ali invited intimacy. It was clear to Ali that Arnie’s encounter with the Oxford police was part of a pattern of minor hazards which, as a disaster-prone person herself, drew her into a feeling of kindred warmth with him. During his recent trip to the States, he said, he had borrowed a friend’s car and had driven from Michigan to New York City where he had been stopped in a police road block. The car had been extensively searched and, in the process, vandalised.
‘So I’m watching these cops rip up the carpeting and slash the seats, right?’ Arnie said, causing various restaurant crockeries to totter slightly as his narrative proceeded.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Ali said.
‘As true as God, Al,’ Arnie said. ‘They’re looking for stolen bank notes, see. Someone just robbed a bank and made a getaway in a Michigan car, just like what I’m driving. Finally they get word that the thief has been caught, so they wave me off with my friend’s car looking like it’s been worked over by Glaswegian football hooligans and one of the policemen says to me, all friendly and nice – wait for it Al – he says to me, “Welcome to the Big Apple”.’ Ali gargled accidentally on the house red, which promptly made a brief, reckless detour through her nasal passages and out again in agitated sputterings.
She asked him about his family who were the last word in periurban respectability he said and from whom he had been – for the two years after he left high school – completely estranged. Arnie had spent this time selling food stamps to the unemployed, he said. He had then, for a while, taken off on a Norwegian fishing trawler and had spent time being penniless in Paris, after which – for entirely instrumental reasons – he had affected a reconciliation with his family. He had needed his father to pay his tuition fees and his living expenses through college and then through medical school. Just as he was toying with the idea of ditching medicine for a course in mime at a Parisian clown school, he had met Noah, whose work had commanded his attention.
‘You’ll like my parents’ address,’ Arnie said, with an engaging, un-English emphasis on ‘ad’. ‘My parents’ address is Country Club Road, Middletown, Connecticut.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Ali said again. ‘There’s no such place and even if there were, your family wouldn’t be living in it. Jews in Country Club Road? Since when?’
‘It’s the truth,’ Arnie said. ‘They got two lawns, Al. They got a “looking lawn” and a “walking lawn”.’
‘All right,’ Ali said. ‘I believe you.’
‘So that’s maybe why I’m living in England, see,’ Arnie said. ‘Suffering in the Abingdon Road. Al, can you tell me how it is the draughts get to blow through the walls in those houses?’ Ali laughed.
‘It’ll be down draught from windows,’ she said. ‘Or from the flue. You want to plug the flue with newspaper. Or it could be cracks in the floorboards of course. Underlay the carpeting with newspaper. It’s useful stuff, newspaper.’
‘I’m telling you, it comes through the walls,’ Arnie said. Ali lent him a hot-water bottle – which leaked and woke him in the small hours. ‘Did you ever wake up to find yourself in bed with a dead alligator?’ Arnie said, with feeling.
‘No,’ Ali said. The analogy made her comfortably aware that, once the issue of legal separation was over, she would wake up to find herself in bed not with cold crocodiles, but with Noah, whose square, heavy body gave off heat like an electric generator.
Arnie appeared around breakfast on the wedding day bearing, as gifts, two careful studies in tastelessness. The first – calculated to quash Ali’s dormant homesickness – was the ugliest household object he had been able to find in all of the West End: a monstrous copper wallclock shaped like a map of Africa and dotted about with raised cut-outs of African wildlife in beaten brass. The second, for Noah, he had bought in a Soho novelty shop. It came in a black plastic bag labelled La Chaîne Haute Fidélité and comprised a length of sturdy-looking plastic chain with handcuffs at either end.
‘Thanks, Arnie,’ Noah said. ‘It’s just what I always wanted.’
‘What is it?’ Camilla said.
‘Joke,’ Ali said. ‘It’s a ha
ndy accessory to bondage. Have you had breakfast, Arnie? Noah is making breakfast.’
The wedding ceremony in the local registery office – cheek by jowl with the Friends’ Meeting House – was followed by a small party in Noah’s house where old Margaret, on her fourth glass of bubbly, and in a hat resembling a crushed meringue in collision with a brace of woodpigeon, was observed by Ali to be heatedly interrogating a Muslim Egyptian cardiac man on the subject of vaginal stitching customs. The cardiac man made repeated small bows to her and nibbled apprehensively upon Twiglets. He attempted now and again, without success, to introduce his wife who was talking to Camilla. Camilla looked more lovely than ever in her pastel blue, bell-like dress and pale matching tights.
‘Oh boy!’ Arnie said, coming up to Ali. ‘To watch that kid of yours walk. It’s like poetry. Mobile poetry.’
‘Poetry?’ Ali said. ‘Arnie, are you drunk?’
‘Noah!’ Arnie said, raising his voice quite deliberately in the hope that Camilla would hear him and make those unwittingly provoking, sideways eyes at him. ‘Hey, Noah?’ he said. ‘Would you check that kid of Al’s? The way she moves – it’s dynamite! The whole damn kid is dynamite! You’re gonna have to lock her up.’ Noah was working hard, filling his guests’ glasses.
‘Against whom?’ he said. Arnie laughed. He was wearing his hair newly cut and had put on a neat, dark suit for the second time in five days for he had finally appeared in court, where he had been found guilty, fined thirty pounds and bound over to keep the peace. It gave him immeasurable satisfaction thus to have acquired a criminal record.
Noah had already sold his house and had bought another, jointly with Ali. The house was more rural than either of them had expected or intended, while being only three miles from the city centre, and had been quite irresistible. It had belonged to an ageing farmer who had sold both house and land to a company which, having no use for the farmhouse, had soon offered it for sale along with a half-acre of garden. To have a house set among fields which were tended by the labour of others was the best of all possible worlds. The undergraduates who had inhabited the house in the interim between owners had already departed for Christmas, leaving behind them a shed full of empty lager bottles. Camilla’s piggy-bank soon weighed heavy from the deposits on reclaimed empties. Noah was indefatigable in the matter of telephoning plumbers. In particular, the sewage disposal arrangements did not meet with his approval and neither were his reservations quelled by a helpful notice tacked by the undergraduates to the door of the upstairs loo. ‘WARNING,’ it said. ‘DODDERY BOG. FLUSH ONLY FOR SHITTING AND BURN ALL USED PAPER IN THE GRATE.’
Some of the grates went too, in the wake of an oil-fired central heating system.
Noah moved his black leather swivel chair and his dentist’s recliner into a sizeable attic study. Ali began to prepare a portfolio of work for the local art school’s admissions committee. She collected Camilla from school in Noah’s motor car, occasionally drove out old Margaret for cups of coffee and illicit cigarettes when Noah wasn’t there, and continued her habit of lunching with him in the hospital canteen. Noah meanwhile bought himself a small Japanese motorcycle which he used for getting in and out from work – an innovation which caused Arnie to gloat without charity.
‘Where’s your sense of virility, Noah?’ he said. ‘How can you drive a thing like that?’ But Noah, indulgent from the strength of knowing his virility to be bound up with Ali and not with modes of transport, made him no reply. They were at that moment undertaking a wintry Sunday walk with Camilla. Noah was not unaware that Arnie was right then wearing a girl Scout’s woollen cap. A Brownie’s hat. He had borrowed it from Camilla who had never been a Brownie since Mervyn Bobrow had flown into a fury at the very idea of his daughter joining a Christian-imperialist paramilitary organisation. She had acquired it in a jumble sale for one of her teddy bears. Now, some four years later, she knew in herself that the Brownies were soppy, but remembering how much she had once wanted to belong had given her a useful reserve of strength: she knew that if you wanted something which you could not have for long enough, eventually you lived your way through it. Time could heal. It could blunt desire. Right now she laughed at Arnie who was taking liberties with her stepfather.
‘You look like the wolf dressed up as Red Riding Hood’s grandmother in that silly old hat,’ she said to him. ‘You really do. Especially with your glasses on.’
‘I am the wolf,’ Arnie said.
Christmas was what Camilla liked best of all that year because Mervyn had always practically had kittens if she blew Away in a Manger on her descant recorder at Christmas time, and he had always insisted that Ali make Irish stew for lunch on Christmas Day. He said he liked it but really it was just to stop anyone else from having roast turkey. The year before, after he had left, they had had a small tree and she and Ali had stood it on the table and decorated it with iced biscuits and little German woodcarvings. But Noah’s idea of a Christmas tree was much more splashy and wonderful. Camilla had gone with him to the covered market where they had bought the biggest tree at the stall half-price because nobody else had wanted one that size. The man had helped them tie it to the roof of Noah’s car because Noah’s back was not so good, and they had driven home and staggered into the house with it. And while Ali was busy cooking they had decorated it entirely in blue. Noah had asked her what her favourite colour was and she had said ‘blue’, so he had bought blue everything. Blue tinsel, blue aerosol glitter-spray, blue glass baubles and some lovely twinkly blue fairy lights that you had to plug in.
‘Gosh,’ Ali said when she entered, ‘isn’t it big? It looks like what the Norwegian government sends to Trafalgar Square each year. Why is it so blue?’
‘Isn’t it fantastic?’ Camilla said. ‘Isn’t it all yummy blue and sparkly?’
‘It’s certainly very blue,’ Ali said. ‘Come Twelfth Night you could recycle it as a moonlight stage prop for Giselle.’
‘You don’t like blue?’ Noah said. Ali laughed.
‘On a second thought, I love it,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s a shock, that’s all, but who ever heard of a tasteful Christmas tree? It’s a contradiction in terms.’ Noah Glazer, guardian and guide, had saved her once again, she reflected. This time he had saved her from the snares of a Bauhaus Christmas tree.
The next day Camilla noticed that when the Egyptian cardiac man came to Christmas lunch with his wife, Noah, without any prompting, dissected the hot Christmas pudding to ensure that no taint of burning brandy would sully the Muslim half. The gesture touched her profoundly. She knew then for certain that getting married could be as good as in story books after all and that Noah and Ali would live happily together for ever after. That afternoon she went upstairs and began, in an empty notebook, to write an extended moral fable in which the institution of marriage, tried, abused and endured, was ultimately seen as most blessed.
Ten
Scissors!’ ali said from the driver’s seat of the Audi. The car had been Noah’s choice and was heaven to drive. Having sent off her husband on the train to Heathrow, she drove away from the railway station with her son in the back.
‘Dannie,’ she said. ‘He’s forgotten to take the scissors. He’ll have to open the cartons with his teeth – what a good thing he’s got such nice, strong teeth.’ All the men she had married had been endowed with first-rate teeth. Ali ran her tongue apprehensively along a row of capped and crowned incisors, then round to where an ominous proportion of steel and porcelain replacement molars hung on by bridges and buttresses to fragments of the original fabric. One day the whole structure would go down like a stack of dominoes. She would make it into the sear and yellow leaf with those galling, detachable teeth like old Margaret’s, living the while in fear of losing them down drains or in sticky macaroons. Or perhaps one would go out gnawing defiantly on hardened, toothless gums, slurping soup in restaurants with a napkin tucked in at the chin, one’s adult children hissing ‘Stop it, Mummy!’ in shame. But Noah would go on l
oving her as long as he lived. It had begun recently to alarm her, during his absences, that she would in all likelihood be required to face the dog-end of old age without him, since Noah was about to turn sixty, and the odds were that he would not make it to her eightieth birthday.
‘Stop it, Mummy!’ Daniel was saying, ‘It’s disgusting. Stop sucking your teeth like that.’
‘Sorry,’ Ali said. ‘Hey, Dannie,’ she said suddenly, ‘let’s go and eat something delicious in a caff.’ With Noah away, Ali’s frequent instinct was to propose forbidden fruit. Noah was wholly against sugar. He had no need of it. The more of it you ate, the more you needed, he said, and vice versa. Abstinence thus lent ease to abstinence. He had by this lucid persuasion managed early on in their marriage to put a stop to his wife’s twice-hourly munchings upon lemon curd sandwiches, but he had never really cured her of a weakness for Christmas mincemeat. He still came upon her in the pantry from time to time, eating it straight from the jar with a pudding spoon and knew now that nothing would cure her, short of long-term psychoanalysis or more cheaply, electrified pudding spoons. Some deep-rooted sense of privation had surely motivated this pleasure in sugar. He had at first thought it a reaction to the penance-and-cabbage-stalk existence she had led with Mervyn Bobrow, but surely it went deeper? There was for example the account she had produced for him once of the time Julie Horowitz had bought fifty-six marshmallow fish, thinking to cure Ali of an addiction by overexposure. Ali had laid them nose to tail along the length of the Horowitz swimming pool and had demolished them with unabated pleasure during the course of the afternoon.
Noah planned, this year, to make his wife a fortieth birthday present of two-score jars of Christmas mincemeat. He enjoyed making an occasion of her birthday.
Kneeling on a bentwood cafe chair, Daniel noisily gurgled up the last drops of his chocolate milkshake through a striped plastic straw. They were a heavenly pleasure to him, these stolen treats alone with Ali, dense with a great mass of love. And that night he and his teddy bears would share her bed because Noah wouldn’t be there. After the cafe they strolled together to a neighbouring trinket shop, hand in hand, where Daniel bought a plastic lookalike banana with money advanced to him by his mother. He intended to trick Arnie Weinberg with it, who would make such a gratifying pretence of being duped by the thing. They dawdled idly home via the horses at the north end of Port Meadow, feeding the animals on sugar lumps previously filched from the cafe.
Noah's Ark Page 13
