‘Say,’ Ali said, ‘it wasn’t half expensive! We ought to go halves on it. Go on, Mot. I’ll give you a cheque.’ She began to unbuckle her handbag but Thomas in his adamant refusal was all colonial chivalry.
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘It’s Barclaycard money. It isn’t real. It’s plastic. Come on Alison.’
Ali laughed. ‘Who would have thought we would ever be screwing each other on a credit card in London?’ she said. ‘Think of it, my friend.’
The hotel room was small and sparse. It was equipped with a Christian Science Bible and smelt heavily of flower-scented air freshener.
‘Sanilav!’ Thomas said, sniffing the air. ‘It smells of lilac-scented Sanilav in here.’
‘It’s hyacinth,’ Ali said knowingly. ‘My husband grows hyacinths in pots around Christmas time. They always smell like lav cleaner.’ Thomas picked up the Bible and threw it into her hands.
‘Catch!’ he said. ‘And stop talking to me about your husband.’
‘Thanks,’ Ali said. ‘Have you ever actually read the Bible, Mot?’ she said. ‘I have tried from time to time but I have to say that I find it boring.’
‘Boring?’ Thomas said in disbelief. He had taken off his jacket and had made a start on his shirt. ‘My dear woman, I love it. I have read it twice through and I must tell you that it’s gripping. It’s nothing but rape, incest and vengeance from start to finish. But perhaps these things are as mother’s milk to you.’
‘Twice?’ Ali said. ‘You’ve read the Bible twice?’
‘I read it in jail.’ Thomas said. ‘It was all that they would give me.’ But, seeing her look so much cast down at this reference to his brief incarceration, he made light of it to revive her mood.
‘I was arrested at a cricket match,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that just like a white South African – to be arrested at a cricket match?’
‘Call yourself white?’ Ali said. Thomas laughed.
‘Watch yourself,’ he said.
‘But are you all right, Mot?’ she said, suddenly overcome with fear for him. ‘I mean, are you safe living there?’
‘Of course,’ Thomas said. ‘I’m a harmless, peace-loving non-comformist. The authorities know I’m no threat. I get my car tyres let down sometimes. That’s the worst I can expect. You get some crackpot zealots back home, but it ain’t like the IRA. Not yet. Nobody shoots you through the head when you open the door.’ In the wine shop Thomas had lavishly bought champagne. He began now to twist the wire casing from the wine cork, holding the bottle cold between his naked thighs. ‘As to William Lister, I never did it, by the way,’ he said. ‘I never drove the silly bugger over the border. Maybe I would have, had he asked me, but he asked somebody else. They borrowed my car and thoughtfully left the boot full of incriminating leaflets.’
‘Fancy you having a car,’ Ali said inadequately. ‘You never had a car in my day.’
‘Get your clothes off, Alison,’ he said. ‘Or are you waiting for me to rip them off you?’ Ali took off Thomas’s tie and pulled off her own shirt.
‘I have to tell you, Mot,’ she said, touched with schoolgirl shyness, ‘not only do I have a most inelegant rubber diaphragm à la Marie Stopes, but I have a huge scar running the length of my abdomen.’ Thomas eased the cork from the bottle with a gentle pop and took a longish swig before he answered her.
‘You also have a large purple bruise on your neck where your nice Jewish medic has left his mark,’ he said. He laughed to see Ali blush and spin round towards the glass and shoot a hand selfconsciously to her throat. ‘It’s all right, he’s your husband,’ he said. The bruise was bedded in the well of her right shoulder: a good-sized bramble stain, standing as testimony to Noah’s parting kisses at the kitchen table.
Thomas handed her the bottle. ‘Lovely boobs,’ he said, kissing each of her nipples in turn. Then, with a nice aplomb, he ran his tongue down the length of her abdominal scar.
Their love making was brief, abortive and less than satisfactory. As somewhere beyond them on the windless air a clock called the half-hour. Thomas shrank in agitation from her thighs.
‘Half-past what?’ he said sharply. ‘Half-past what for Christsake, Alison? Tell me the time.’ He began to grope on the floor for the old pocket watch in his waistcoat which, unbeknown to him, had rendered up its last tick at Cannon Street.
‘It’s half-past twelve,’ she said. ‘I assumed all along that you knew.’
‘Oh my God!’ Thomas said. ‘My bloody lunch appointment is at one. I had no idea.’ He swung his legs over the side of the bed. ‘Listen love,’ he said, taking her hand in a gesture of appeasement. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can. Just you wait for me, okay?’
‘You’ll be two hours,’ Ali said.
‘Hang about here with the wine and the Bible, and I’ll get back as soon as I can,’ he said. ‘I’m really sorry, Alison.’ He went to take a shower.
Afterwards Ali lay naked on the bed and watched him pull on the clothes over his stunning pale brown body. He paused to bend over her once in shirt-tails and socks, planting brief kisses on her cheek, her hair and her scar.
‘Your tie is under my shirt,’ she said. ‘I won’t be here when you get back. You ought to know that. I can’t be. My babyminder has to go at half-past three. Mot, we’ll say goodbye. I have loved every minute of being with you again. It has been the nicest reunion of my life.’
‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous!’ Thomas said in disbelief. ‘Use the bloody telephone and say you’ve been delayed. You can’t leave me now. You don’t dare. In any case it’s utterly absurd. My aeroplane leaves tonight. This is our only possible time together.’
‘Excuse me,’ Ali said, ‘but it is you who is leaving me. I don’t say that you ought not to, but I want it clear who is leaving whom. You ought to go now, or you’ll be late. You had better jump into a taxi.’
‘Alison, for God’s sake use the telephone,’ he said. ‘It’s simple enough, isn’t it? I haven’t seen you in bloody donkey’s years.’ Ali saw that Thomas, for all his advanced views on social change, could not in the gut take her babyminding problem seriously, when his own wife had always kept a full-time black servant on the premises whose labour could be summoned at any time. Admittedly the servant, Ali guessed, would be one whose men friends and children Thomas broke the law to harbour during weekends and holidays. Admittedly she would be one whose children Thomas’s own wife would have taught to read by translating Beatrix Potter into Zulu. But there was no escaping that his assumptions belonged to a privileged and servant-owning class.
‘Mot,’ Ali said, determinedly, quieting as best she could the insistent lamentation in her groin. ‘Mot, I can’t. Whether you believe me or not, I can’t. Let’s call it a day. Let’s call it a failure of signals.’ Seeing that he was feeling torn and wretched, she felt for him most strongly. She sat up and reached for her shirt, thinking that for him to have her lying there, recumbent and vulnerable, was unfair. It was to inflict too much reproach.
‘I’ll tell you something about me,’ she said. ‘Then you will think better of me. I paint. I even paint rather well. I’m going to have an exhibition in a West End gallery. Isn’t that chic? Isn’t that success? I want praise, Mot, especially from you. I want to hear you calling that glamorous. Don’t just go off and pity me for a hang-dog fool who couldn’t let you consummate one monstrously expensive screw. Admire me, Mot, please.’ Thomas smiled. He brushed a trace of wetness from her eyes and kissed her on the mouth with a pleasant, assuaging conviction.
‘Alison,’ he said. ‘You lay me out; you always did. You are one great whizz-bang marvellous woman. Even your scar is a great turn-on for me.’
‘Goody bye,’ she said. ‘And good luck with the play.’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
As Thomas’s footfall died down the corridor it came to her that, in meeting Thomas, she had stood up the gallery. The enormity of this omission left her stunned, but only for a moment and mainly for Noah’s sake. ‘Idiot fool!’ she s
aid to herself, recalling a little sadly the portfolio forgotten in her studio at home which had been ready waiting for ten days now, tied neatly at the sides with milliner’s tape. Then the meeting with Thomas had on balance been such a good thing, for all its failure, that it had been worth all the paintings in the portfolio. In order to paint well – really well – one had doubtless to be single-minded and ambitious. One had to walk out on a lover and keep strategically important lunch dates. In short, it helped to be a man.
Ali looked into the mirror, where her crimped hair and dyed eyelashes; her purple bruise and naked breasts, gave back to her a surprisingly seductive self-image.
There was one thing to be done and one only, she thought. She dialled the hotel reception desk and put through a telephone call to Arnie Weinberg on his extension number in the research unit. Arnie had always been the best antidote she knew against gloom. Besides, his curriculum vitae was still sitting under that Modigliani nude on Noah’s desk; that lovely, yielding woman, with all the time in the world to give. Ali was ready to bet her life on it that no Modigliani nude had ever beaten a man at essays.
Twelve
Arnie weinberg had returned that morning on a flight from Washington in a mood so sanguine that not even the daunting state of his flat could sully it. During the week he had taken a plane to California where developments on the job front had accelerated considerably. He had flown to California to read a paper which had been warmly received and had stayed to be interviewed two days later by a line-up of committee men, most of whom had previously been present to hear him speak. This had afforded him an opportunity to parade his advantages twice. The committee had clearly thought well of him and had not waited for Noah’s recommendation to come by post but had telephoned Noah for reference in New York the next day. Noah had been more than emphatic and loyal in his commendations. Now Arnie was waiting to hear from California in a spirit of fair optimism.
Yet even to a man with expectations the flat that morning had looked and smelled awful. A prevailing odour of tar and damp-rot solution had assaulted his nostrils as he opened his front door and the furniture stood in huddles under large dust-sheets in the centre of the living room. Plaster dust filled the air, along with cigarette smoke and DJ prattle from workmen’s trannies. His admirable, aged landlady had appeared apologetically from the garden in her laced walking shoes to offer him sanctuary upon her ottoman for a few days. She had, in his absence, at last taken issue with the varied range of mould spores which had been growing up through the floor of his basement living room for quite some time, but the builders had come three days late. One half of Arnie was pleasantly surprised. She had always struck him as being so much endowed with upper-class calm when it came to property and decay that he had not expected any move towards reform.
‘Where you have a house you have dry-rawt, my dear Arnold,’ she would observe serenely. She spoke to him with the same cheerful detachment about her angina and her arthritis. Arnie was a great favourite with her, as she was with him. She had furnished the flat for him handsomely with a walnut-veneered grandfather clock, a set of lyre-back dining chairs and several Afghan rugs from the deceased estates of her three brothers. She had bestowed upon him a valuable roll-top desk and several canvases by Dame Laura Knight painted in the heyday of the International Artists Association. But Arnie had nonetheless begun to tire of watching rust-coloured mushrooms blooming up through the mellow chevron woodblocks of his living-room floor. The floor had been laid in the nineteen-thirties on a bed of concrete without the advantages of plastic damp-proofing membrane, and the leaking roof of the adjoining conservatory – now elegantly awash with ferns and Gothic Revival garden chairs, with their legs all in splints – had contributed a degree of seepage and surface water upon which the mushrooms thrived.
Arnie had graduated over the years from draughty bed-sitting rooms in the Abingdon Road to the more salubrious groves of Park Town where the noble proportions of the Garden Flat, the high, lichen-covered garden walls, the beauty of the rhododendrons and the benign offices of his nice old Fabian landlady more than compensated him for the aura of patrician decay. But right then he had no wish to shake off jet lag on an ottoman which he would have been obliged to share with the landlady’s Persian cat, even in a room graced with two occasional tables painted by Roger Fry. Politely he had declined and headed south instead along the ornamental iron railings of the square towards the research unit from which he had attempted to telephone Ali Glazer. At the Glazers’ house he was always sure of a welcome or, if necessary, a decent bed. But Ali, it appeared, was in London. That would be her date with the gallery, he thought.
‘Hi, Al,’ he said when her voice was shortly thereafter relayed to him from London. He was not surprised, since benign coincidence had always played as large a part in his experience as hazard. ‘How’s London?’ he said. Ali found her own partial nudity suddenly compromising, even over the telephone, and reached with her left hand for the bedcover which she held in a knot against her breasts.
‘What makes you so sure I’m in London?’ she said.
‘Aren’t you?’ he said.
‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘I am. But how should it signify?’ Arnie laughed.
‘What’s up, Al?’ he said. ‘Those bastards didn’t like your pictures?’
‘Oh them,’ Ali said. ‘I don’t know. Say, Arnie, I am not enjoying this conversation. I ‘phoned to talk about you, not about me.’
‘Okay,’ Arnie said. ‘So just tell me first what happened.’
‘I never got there,’ she said, opting at once for candour. ‘I messed the whole thing up.’ There was a moment’s deadly silence. ‘Signal failure on the Underground,’ she said. ‘Cannon Street.’
‘Cannon Street?’ he said.
‘Promise you won’t tell Noah,’ she said.
‘Call them for Chrissake, Al,’ he said. ‘It’s not that difficult.’ Ali clutched decisively at the knot of bedcover between her breasts and spoke with resolution. ‘I have put the arid plain behind me,’ she said.
‘Pardon me?’ he said.
‘Promise you won’t tell Noah,’ she said again. Arnie laughed. He enjoyed playing cloak and dagger with her against her husband. As a thoroughly legitimate form of flirtation it often heightened her spirits. Her liveliness had always pleasantly engaged him.
‘My lips are sealed,’ he said. ‘You may rest assured, Mrs Glazer, that no word of this will ever reach the ears of the Master.’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I have a message for you by the way. It’s a day late.’
‘The CV,’ he said. ‘Forget it. I talked with Noah. It’s dealt with. The whole thing is dealt with. I just flew in this morning in any case. You couldn’t have got me any earlier.’
‘I see,’ she said. ‘Well that’s a mercy, anyhow.’
‘My landlady is tampering with my fungi,’ Arnie said. ‘She has filled the air with noxious fumes. How would you like for to put me up tonight, Al?’
‘Love to,’ Ali said eagerly, reaching out for the balm of his company. ‘Have some supper with me. There’s only me and the children.’
‘It’s Friday,’ Arnie said. ‘I’m planning on working here till late. I’ll take a nap in the unit and work through till ten.’
‘Don’t count on it,’ Ali said caustically, through disappointment. ‘Your victim may well die.’
‘We all die, kid,’ he said. ‘So long.’
Ali interrupted her progress towards the railway station in Praed Street, where she had her ears pierced with a staple-gun and shot through with gold studs. The pain was momentarily intense, the blood loss slight, the satisfaction immeasurable. Through the act she felt a moment’s communion with Camilla who had pierced her ears at home using a block of ice and a safety pin passed through a candle flame. She knew immediately that Noah as usual had been right. Ear piercing was mutilation and as such it exactly met the case. The mental pain which had stirred with this second casting-off of Thomas wanted a counterbala
ncing agony in the flesh. It wanted incision and blood. With throbbing lobes aglow like neon lights, Ali bravely put the past behind her and boarded the two o’clock train.
It had been raining heavily all over Oxfordshire in Ali’s absence and was still raining now as the day turned towards teatime. Birds beaked themselves forlornly on city chimneypots and beyond the centre the air was greenly limp. Small mud lakes, like hippopotamus ponds in a model village, had appeared in the farm track which led to her house. On the sofa, Daniel Glazer was nesting under a quilt. The sound of the rain wrapped him soothingly after a painful fall. He was fast asleep but presented a parched blood-stained mouth. Where his upper-left incisor had been was now a jelly-textured gap. He had knocked his tooth out on a fence post at one thirty-five. By coincidence, at the same moment in Praed Street, a staple gun had pierced his mother’s right ear lobe. Mrs Gaitskell had wrapped the small rootless milk tooth in Kleenex and had placed it on the sitting-room mantelpiece for Daniel to put under his pillow that night. The fairy would come for sure, she said. She had no doubts at all. A tooth jolted from the infant gum through violent precipitation was as valid a collector’s item for any tooth-hoarding fairy as one which had loosened gradually in the course of maturation.
Ali was startled and upset. She had entered carrying a letter and a small parcel from the hall which had been delivered in her absence and she now tucked in at Daniel’s feet with these to hear Mrs Gaitskell’s reassurances. Both the letter and the parcel were from America. The first, from Noah’s mother, contained two very small, snowy-white hand towels monographed in satin with a cursive ‘G’. Towels for the doctor’s hands. A scented floral ‘notelet’, somewhat deficient in punctuation, fell from their virginal folds, and read as follows:
Dear Alison,
Over here we call these little towels ‘finger-tip towels’ you can never have too many believe me! Tell Noah that his grandson (my great grandson!!) has been accepted for the Gifted Program! What a clever boy I hope your Daniel goes the same way there was never a shortage of brains in the family especially with the men of course!! Shane’s wife is due with the second one any day now God willing another brainbox but Lydia insists she’s hoping for a girl! No more news for now
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