Noah's Ark

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘I went shopping in my pyjamas,’ Daniel said suddenly, as the realisation struck home.

  ‘It’s like going to bed in your clothes,’ Ali said. ‘Only the other way around. That’s what Hattie sometimes does, isn’t it? It makes getting ready for school much quicker in the morning. Oh my God, Dannie, school!’ she said. ‘I forgot. It’s quarter-past one.’

  ‘Silly Mummy,’ Daniel said with satisfaction.

  ‘Silly me,’ Ali said. ‘I’ll take you tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow’s Thursday,’ Daniel said. ‘It’s the ‘lection. Noah said.’

  Back in the car, Ali headed for home.

  From within the gate giving access to the farm which led to the house, Ali could see an unfamiliar car in the drive. One of its wing mirrors was making a reflective sunspot which focused with nervous brilliance upon the adjacent field. Ali came to a stop at her gate where she got out and released Daniel from his child-proofed rear door. The car belonged to Mervyn Bobrow, who had never visited the house before.

  He had been gazing up at her house front as if to award it marks. Noah’s clematis, clambering prettily over the doorway in its May plumage, had lent its annual splendour to the small front porch. As he turned, Ali noticed that he carried in his hand a small snakeskin clutchbag for men, to which he had attached his ‘Men Against Sexism’ badge, in a double act of wishful avant-garde which caused her a lurch of antipathy. It was both curious and encouraging to her that this person by whom she had once been attracted now had an effect upon her akin to the scrape of chalk on blackboard.

  ‘This house of yours,’ Mervyn said, undulating towards her in his tight trousers, his teeth glinting like his wing mirrors. ‘This place! What a testament it is to your upward mobility.’ He revealed to her with the utterance how deeply he had caught his wife’s preoccupation with upward striving during the past ten years, but whether he said it merely to needle her, or whether to highlight his own much greater material advance in the intervening decade, she could not determine.

  It seemed to her that the separation had been as good for him as it had been for her. Mervyn had attained greater status and greater prosperity. The luminous tiger and roll-your-own cigarettes had become things of the past along with the whole category of disadvantaged youth. The stilts appeared to be nowhere. He was backed, not only by his wife’s university salary and his wife’s inheritance, but by the royalties and fees from his impressively ubiquitous writings. Mervyn was in the process of metamorphosing from person to personality. He had become a man who looked for his name in the Sunday Times birthday lists and felt himself slighted to find it omitted. But not all things had changed. His trousers were as tight as ever. They reminded Ali of a recent piece of Hattie’s infant smut, got from her friend Rebecca. Tight trousers were like ‘a cheap hotel’, Hattie had said, because they had ‘no ballroom’. Once, after running into them in a cafe, Hattie had announced that the Bobrows were ‘posh’. This was a terrible insult since Hattie was strongly against all things posh. Poshness was taboo.

  ‘You realise that your next move will be to Boar’s Hill?’ Mervyn was saying. The remark caused Ali a tremor of nervous embarrassment. It was somehow pitiful that, living as he did, with a sociologist, he should read social cues so badly. Ali blamed Southend. There had often been times in the past when watching Mervyn wrestle with the British class system had left her glad to be both an outsider and a woman. If you came from a society where status was to a greater degree dependent on colour or caste you had no need to jostle so feverishly with the competition. You couldn’t win anyway. If you were a woman you had no need to jostle at all. For all its appalling inequalities, such a system left people easier on the nerves.

  Mervyn, by contrast, had never recovered from having passed into the grammar school elite a year early. He had written the eleven-plus examination at the age of ten and had been drilled for the intelligence tests by his schoolteachers in a small group of seven infant superbrains where he had become so proficient at them he could boast that ‘Intelligence’ was his best subject at school. Thirty years later Ali felt that Mervyn’s best subject was still Intelligence. Not humanity, maturity or good sense. He was all untempered IQ.

  ‘Eva and I thought about buying a house near here once,’ Mervyn said casually, as they walked towards the kitchen door. ‘We had our doubts about the local school. We felt that Lucy needed something better.’ The local school, which Hattie attended, was a comfortable muddle where children messed with batik in plastic aprons and went on frequent outings to dig up fragments of broken china and old clay pipes from Victorian refuse dumps. In the afternoons the children exercised ‘Options’. Noah’s jaundiced belief was that the ‘options’ lay between throwing Lego bricks in the classroom and flicking water in the toilets. While the school’s good-hearted lack of academic rigour caused him periodic bursts of anger, it was defended loyally and zealously by his wife on grounds of egalitarian and progressive principle. Most of all she liked it because the other parents were all so nice. Not surprisingly the ethos of the place had driven out the parents of push and muscle and left the more relaxed among the species behind. The school had been an excellent source of female friends and had prompted a fruitful renaissance in this respect.

  Mervyn and Eva, on the other hand, having given up their attempt to manipulate the state educational system to the advantage of their child, were now spending the rent which they derived from Ali’s old house on paying Lucy’s way through a private establishment offering twilight prep at time-worn oak desks and multiplication tables chanted daily before the morning assembly. Fencing and Diction were charged as extras. It was gall and wormwood to Ali that Lucy Bobrow in consequence now read Jane Austen at nine and knew the date in French, while her own dearest Hattie read only large-print pony books and then under duress when there was nothing to watch on the television – but she would never admit to it. On the contrary, she had turned her own unease into an added zeal with which to beat down Noah’s misgivings. In this way she had always exorcised her own.

  ‘Coffee, Mervyn?’ Ali said.

  In the kitchen the breakfast leavings still lay in evidence around the vibrant oranges on the table and the floor here and there was stippled with the sparse remnants of Noah’s departure. The green plastic Marks and Spencer bag lay on the floor beside a discarded hold-all with broken shoulder strap and topped by the forgotten pair of scissors.

  ‘Turn a blind eye to the heap,’ she said feeling, as she said it, the irony of playing scrupulous hostess to a man whose unwashed socks she had once dragged out from under the sofa for washing. ‘Noah left for New York this morning. We’ve only just got back from dropping him off.’

  Mervyn lit a cigarette. ‘I can’t help envying these medics,’ he said. ‘There’re so marketable, aren’t they?’ While Mervyn was wont to market his every thought on average once a fortnight in a catholic selection of newspaper columns and had even earned the ultimate accolade of being quoted in Pseud’s Corner, it had not quieted his vigilance to the marketability of others. ‘They collect five livers in a jar,’ he said, ‘and watch them for a week. Then they write a paper on it and presto! It earns them free airfares to conferences in Bermuda.’

  Ali made him no answer. She could not in good conscience deny that Noah was a shade peripatetic in his professional habits and, since neither she nor Mervyn knew anything much about his work, they could, by discussing it, only pool their respective ignorance and bias. Besides, Daniel had just stripped off his pyjama top to reveal his protruding infant abdomen. Noah had once explained to her that this prodigious bulge was caused by the liver. The liver being so disproportionately large in young children, he said, it caused the abdomen to protrude. She did not like to think of livers in ajar. Especially not right now with Noah out of the country for a week.

  ‘I came about the party,’ Mervyn said. ‘Just a small impromptu affair. Will Noah be back in time for our party? Eva tells me you people haven’t yet replied. She’s sent me to
chase up a few tardy friends.’ Ali wondered whether his presence in her house could really constitute no more than a coercive round-up of potential guests – especially guests as unlikely to attend as her and Noah. She doubted it. His motives for visiting her, she felt certain, lay elsewhere.

  ‘I don’t think he will be,’ Ali said. She was entertained by speculation about what was now to follow. Would the thing be dropped outright, or would the invitation stand? Had she earned consideration as a ‘woman-in-her-own-right’, or was she still ‘just-a-housewife?’ Eva and Mervyn had always maintained a laudably high-minded stance on the matter of female self-sufficiency. Eva had early on in her career taken a strategic step sideways from the study of what Noah dismissively called Slums and Blacks into the more hopeful growth area of Women’s Studies and was now so much a ‘woman-in-her-own-right’ that she occasionally even gave dinner parties in her house to which she did not invite her own husband.

  ‘Come anyway,’ Mervyn said, after a moment’s tell-tale reflection. As an afterthought he uttered an awkward, brief laugh. ‘That’s if you can find a babysitter,’ he said. The remark was a reference to the last occasion upon which there had been any direct contact. An invitation had come to dine, and Noah had consequently telephoned to point out that he and Ali would of necessity bring along Daniel, who was at the time a two-month-old baby. Eva Bobrow had replied to his considerable annoyance that since one went to ‘rather a lot of trouble’ to arrange these adult parties, one did rather expect one’s guests to rise to babysitters.

  ‘Al has a sitter for Hattie, obviously,’ Noah had said tetchily, ‘but the baby is breast-fed. That’s the whole point.’

  ‘I recommend that she leave a bottle with a sitter just this once,’ Eva had replied. ‘I did it myself as a breast-feeding mother.’ Eva was in general much given to presenting her single experience of motherhood as a blueprint for other, lesser parents. ‘It’s a good idea once in a while,’ she said. ‘It liberates the mother.’

  ‘For what?’ Noah had said, with a kind of contained ferocity. ‘Liberates the mother for what? For dinner parties? No thanks.’ He had been more than glad to cry off in the expectation that invitations from that unwelcome quarter would finally cease and had taken Ali and the baby to the Saraceno restaurant instead, where the sense of reprieve had been so great that Ali had got drunk on one glass of Soave and had punctuated the meal thereafter with gems remembered from a previous Bobrow occasion.

  ‘This is your actual scrag end,’ Eva had said, as she had yanked at the dumb-waiter. ‘It’s more economical by far than a leg.’ The college head had been there among the judiciously selected guests, with his superior Danish wife coolly raising her blonde eyebrows at the more screaming of Eva’s declasse giveaways. A woman of invulnerable elegance who was herself a ‘woman-in-her-own-right’; a person who had once endured a protracted spell in the Third World collecting anthropological material on cultural transvestitism. Ali’s fantasy fixed itself upon Eva’s hectoring her way through the contents of each course until these took on the violated look of the well-gnawed bones. ‘I make it an absolute rule never to use cornflour when preparing desserts. Always arrowroot,’ she mimicked. ‘And where an orange comes into it, my motto is “waste nothing”. I use the juice; I use the zest; I have an excellent Israeli recipe for boiling the rind with sugar syrup to make glace fruit. An orange will work for a knowledgeable cook in a thousand different ways. When the whole point of being an Israeli,’ Ali said, interrupting her own narrative, ‘the whole point is that you can afford to be as profligate as you like with an orange. It was the way in which Mervyn strained port through a specially laundered nose-rag that bugged her the most, she said. It was the way the Bobrows played at being Oxbridge when they were Oxbridge.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I love about you, shall I?’ Ali had suddenly said.

  ‘What?’ Noah had replied. ‘My age? My cheque book?’ A hint of touchiness disguised as jest.

  ‘I love you because you don’t make me give dinner parties,’ Ali had said. ‘Did you used to make Shirley give dinner parties?’ Noah had disregarded the question, because, while Ali’s relationship with him had always been characterised by a strong element of the confessional, Noah had never revealed much about his past and nothing at all about Shirley. The past seemed not to interest him. His present was thoroughly satisfactory. The past was past. Autobiography was not his field. His field was medical research.

  ‘And I love you because you’re crazy, Al,’ he had said.

  Daniel Glazer was now gazing at Mervyn Bobrow with unchecked animosity. He cared not at all for babysitters. Nor for liver. Yuck! Liver and custard were his two worst things. Or was it mustard? Was it custard or mustard that he hated so much? If this sniping, measly stranger would stop holding Ali’s attention in that offensive way he could have asked her which it was. A babysitter was definitely not on as far as Daniel was concerned. He would see to it. He did occasionally accept nice Mrs Gaitskell the cleaning woman as a stand-in, but then only grudgingly and only provided that his mother agreed to compensate him adequately for an evening’s absence with suitably palatable treats left under his pillow for the morning. But for one Mervyn Bobrow? Never! His mother belonged to him, and not to the world. Mervyn Bobrow, whoever he might be, had no right to come here between them, making ugly red blotches appear on Ali’s beautiful white neck and talking about liver and babysitters. Furthermore, he had placed Noah’s occupational credentials in question.

  ‘Anyway,’ Daniel said belligerently, ‘my dad knows much more than you do about dinosaurs and everything, nearly. And he knows about Kansas.’

  ‘Is your dad in Kansas?’ Mervyn said, attempting a little pleasant small talk with the infant. He was in the act of looking for an ashtray in which to stub out his cigarette. There were no ashtrays in Ali’s house. Noah had banished them. Hattie had made a large notice which hung over the fireplace saying ‘NO SMOCKING’. It proceeded, in smaller print, and with sha-mingly patrilineal assumption, ‘If you want to smoke you must ask Noah. If Noah is out you can ask Ali.’

  ‘He’s in New York, stupid,’ Daniel said. ‘Kansas is a disease you get if you smoke.’

  Mervyn laughed. He threw his cigarette butt on to the floor and ground it underfoot. Then he delivered his trump card. It was then that Ali knew exactly why he had come.

  ‘Your friend Thomas Adderley will be in town tomorrow,’ he said, ‘but perhaps you already know. He’s had some success with a play. A play about the lives of black women. The university theatre here is going to take it up. Possibly also the West End. Eva is lunching with him in college tomorrow. She’s very much into the subject right now. We’re all going to Johannesburg shortly, as a matter of fact. She has a research grant coming up and she means to make a study of black women’s self-help groups.’ Ali was not so much fixed upon bitter remembrance of a time when Mervyn had banned her, on high liberal principle, from taking Camilla to South Africa to visit her dying mother; she was not so much absorbed with the awareness that Mervyn was at that moment glowing with the pleasure of having claimed for Eva, not only a precedence of expertise in matters of the female sex, but the dual precedence of access both to her own homeland and to the company of Thomas Adderley. She was too much absorbed by a private longing for brown grass and flat-topped, flowering trees, and by a clear vision of Mot Adderley, lean and sockless, reciting Keats to her in the library.

  ‘I do realise that you’re likely to see our going there as a “sellout”,’ Mervyn said, ‘but this time it’s not a case of “Awaydays” with Grannie – is it? People like Eva are needed there. People of Eva’s calibre can help to raise the consciousness of the people.’ One of the many decent things about Noah, Ali thought gratefully, was that he didn’t collect free airfares and call it consciousness-raising. It crossed her mind that to get hold of Thomas would necessitate asking Mervyn for his telephone number. She would do it of course but later, over the telephone, when she felt more composed. There was no c
hance that she would forgo the chance to see Thomas. None at all.

  ‘A word of advice about that handbag,’ she said with malice, using all the weapons she had, as she saw Mervyn prepare to take his leave. ‘I wouldn’t take that handbag to South Africa if I were you. There’s no consenting males act there. Carry that in the street and some upstanding white male Calvinist will consider it his duty to black your eye.’ Mervyn laughed in disbelief. As he settled into the driver’s seat and reached for the ignition, he snatched almost feverishly at the last area available to him in which to compete with her.

  ‘Has Hattie mastered the one-handed cartwheel yet?’ he said. ‘Lucy has.’ The Men Against Sexism badge, which had fallen off his clutch bag on the way to the car, was lying unnoticed in the drive. Ali picked it up and took it into the house.

  Eleven

  For ali to lift the receiver and dial Thomas in London was an act accompanied by the excitement of unretractable daring. Yet over the two decades his voice was all affable familiarity, all agreeable surprise.

  ‘Mot,’ she said. ‘It’s Alison.’

  ‘Christalmighty!’ Thomas said. His laughter tumbled through the telephone and into her lap like a bright shower of gold. Then by some curious, gratifying miracle, Thomas came up right on cue.