Noah's Ark

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘Room service?’

  ‘Coffee,’ Ali said. ‘That’s all. I’ve woken you. I’m sorry. Somehow I had to.’ Arnie laughed and yawned. He had always possessed that feline ability to move easily in and out of sleep.

  ‘You haven’t brought me a grapefruit with a cherry on the top,’ he said. ‘You call this breakfast, Al?’

  ‘He’s in the kitchen,’ Ali said. ‘He’s making curried scrambled eggs. Arnie, you’ve no idea how it menaces me.’

  ‘You want me to chuck him out for you?’ Arnie said.

  ‘Oh no,’ Ali said hastily pursuing an instinct for neutralising conflict. ‘He’ll go before Noah gets back. It’s all right. But why are you in the garage?’

  ‘I went out,’ Arnie said, ‘I went to call on a woman I know but she was out. I forgot to take your key.’

  ‘Go on! I thought you could pick locks,’ Ali said. Arnie had long ago dazzled her by demonstrating how successfully he could pick all the family’s collection of four-digit cycle locks.

  ‘Not the house locks,’ Arnie said. ‘Your place is bolted like a fortress.’

  ‘That’s Noah,’ Ali said. ‘He likes locks. He likes to guard his goods.’ Arnie smiled. He took a gulp of coffee from the cup which Ali had handed to him.

  ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘He’s a man of good sense. You just woke me from a dream, Al. You maybe don’t realise that my hands were actually on the breasts of a naked woman.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ali said again.

  ‘That’s okay,’ Arnie said. ‘The experience was nothing to write home about. Things were taking a distinctly downward turn. This woman she says to me do I think her boobs are beautiful so I tell her “Sure. They’re great. Just great.”’

  ‘You lying bastard!’ Ali said. ‘You only said it to make her more amenable.’

  ‘Right!’ Arnie said. ‘That’s what she just said to me. “You lying bastard,” she said ‘You’re only saying it so I’ll let you screw me.”’

  ‘Then I woke you up,’ Ali said. She had seated herself cross-legged in the back opposite him, wrapped as she was in Noah’s bath robe. In her two interlocking hands she cradled her coffee cup which she rested on bare raised knees. She smiled now to contemplate the nature of Arnie’s hectic and baroque sex life which, for all its evident percentage of success, he only ever mentioned to her in order to amuse with its failures. She had always found this impulse towards self-deprecation an endearing trait in him.

  ‘Your life is a very different thing from mine,’ she said. ‘Pardon me?’ he said.

  ‘Arnie,’ Ali said, ‘when I telephoned you yesterday it was in point of fact from a hotel bedroom. I had stood up the gallery and had gone there to meet an old boyfriend. Naturally it all went wrong. Sexually, it materialised as one hundred per cent botch-up, so to speak. I have no experience in clandestine affairs. None at all.’

  ‘Are you actually being serious, Al?’ Arnie said. ‘Is this the truth you’re telling me?’

  ‘He was my first love,’ Ali said. ‘People can fall in love very decisively first time. It isn’t at all the laughable teenage business it’s often cut out to be. It becomes a kind of Platonic ideal. A blueprint. Being human, one has this difficulty with the way things linger so in the memory. It’s all right. Don’t worry. He got on an aeroplane yesterday to Johannesburg. I won’t ever see him again. Jesus, doesn’t it all sound like Brief Encounter? Did you ever see that film? Rachmaninov in the background.’

  ‘Sweetheart, you just had a lucky escape,’ Arnie said.

  Ali had meanwhile discovered in each eye a mild case of tears which she brushed aside with the back of her hand.

  ‘I’m sorry, Arnie,’ she said. ‘I oughtn’t to be unloading my personal life over you like this. You aren’t my analyst after all.’ Arnie smiled at her.

  ‘Like all the best analysts I say nothing,’ he said. ‘I just listen, ma’am, and I collect on the fees.’

  Ali paused to rotate, one by one, the gold studs in her ears which were in danger of cleaving to the unhealed flesh of her lobes. She was still sitting there with her knees drawn up, revealing a stretch of white gusset from her cotton pants, like a comely schoolgirl, he thought, on a dormitory bed. He thought protectively of her as he took in the rumpled crimp still evident in her hair and the newly violated ears. It amused him, in view of what she had just told him, that she had seen fit at this juncture to pierce her ears. The action struck him as dangerously apparent with sexual implication as far as Noah was concerned.

  ‘Al, baby,’ he said, ‘do yourself a favour, will you? Don’t go telling Noah what you’ve just told me, for Chrissake. Just you keep the whole thing under your hat.’

  ‘I will,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry?’

  ‘That’s my girl,’ he said. ‘In matters of the heart it is generally most expedient to lie and cheat.’

  Ali laughed. ‘There,’ she said. ‘So you do give advice after all. Gosh, doesn’t it stink of petrol in here?’ Arnie clambered past her into the driver’s seat. It seemed to him suddenly gauche for them to remain there in the garage when beyond the door lay half of rural England.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Stick to me baby and we’ll go places – like the letter said to the stamp. We’ll take an early morning mystery tour. I’ll get you back before your kids get up, don’t worry.’

  ‘You haven’t even got the key,’ she said. ‘Not that I would doubt your ability to start the engine without it.’

  Arnie drew from his pocket a small keyring and held it up.

  ‘You left it in the garage door last night,’ he said. ‘How else did you think I got in?’

  ‘I didn’t think,’ she said. ‘Or if I did I took you for granted as a Magic Man.’

  Arnie laughed. ‘You got nice pins, Mrs Glazer,’ he said. ‘Candidly, you got two of the nicest pins I ever saw.’ Ali beamed with pleasure.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten that poor lady in your dream,’ she said. ‘You’ve undermined the validity of your compliments, Arnie Weinberg.’

  Arnie laughed. ‘The difference is, I’m not trying to screw you.’ ‘True,’ Ali said.

  Arnie placed a hand over his naked pap with every sign of solemnity. ‘I tell you no lies,’ he said. ‘Al baby, between friends, you got damn nice wheels.’

  Fifteen

  Daniel glazer woke to the sound of the opening garage door. He registered, with his first blink, the slice of bright daylight which blazed through the gap between his parent’s bedroom curtains and with his second the small adjacent hillock of his sleeping sister’s haunches under his parents’ quilt. His first thought was of his tooth which he had placed under the pillow. The thing was still there, wrapped in yesterday’s Kleenex. The fairy’s gold was nowhere. Disappointment weighed on his spirit. He searched carefully down at the back of the bed and in the fold of the pillowslip. He groped in the narrow gap between the bed and the cabinet but the money was not there. Ali, having been too much preoccupied with her own yearnings the previous night, had neglected to implement that benign deception. Daniel knew that Mrs Gaitskell had not meant to cheat him, but she had made a mistake. Even grown-ups could make terrible mistakes. Either the fairy had not wanted his tooth, or it had not been able to carry the money. Money was too heavy for fairies to carry. He had suspected as much all along but had been cajoled out of scepticism by Mrs Gaitskell. He didn’t know now which was the more daunting – to think that his tooth had not been special enough to warrant the fairy’s journey or that the poor tiny creature, having struggled from fairyland, had got bogged down in the mud pools of the farm track somewhere along the way.

  In the kitchen where he went to seek comfort from his mother, he found only William, who was whistling as he packed away his fiery condiments into his Karrimor rucksack. Seeing Daniel stare, William took a shot at hearty child-centred banter and misfired.

  ‘I collect little boys in my sack,’ he said. ‘Put your head in, Daniel, and see.’ Daniel froze. He
made no move from the spot until the telephone rang, at which point he seized his chance and fled. He could feel his heart beating in his mouth. The call was from Mervyn Bobrow, who had given thought to the idea before he telephoned that nine o’clock on a Saturday morning was perhaps rather early to be making calls, but he had weighed the propriety of the matter with his wife. Eva had had no doubts. One had to finalise numbers of one’s party that evening, and if one’s more nebulous aquaintances could not ‘get it together’, as she said, to RSVP on time then one had simply to catch them before they left for the supermarket or the squash courts. It was not difficult to reply to an invitation after all. As she pointed out, it was nothing to the trouble and expense of the host’s efforts in putting the party together. Finally, as Mervyn reached for the receiver, she bestowed her attention upon the matter of suitable dress.

  ‘Do make it clear to Alison, if she means to come for once, that this is not a jeans and T-shirt party,’ she said. ‘When one goes to all this trouble, one does rather hope that one’s friends will do one proud, I think.’

  The advice went undelivered since Ali was not at home and William Lister who took the call sounded more than a little aggrieved. Not only had Ali passed him by with barely a greeting that morning, but she had gone on to linger thirty minutes in the garage scantily clad with a male person to whom she had carried cups of coffee on a tray. William could not recall that anyone had ever carried cups of coffee for him on trays. To heap insult upon this implied affront, the two of them had then breezed off together half-naked in the motor car, leaving him, as he supposed, to fend for two spoilt children who would at any moment be down demanding cornflakes and orange juice. One could naturally not condone such behaviour. One’s credibility as a person in the vanguard of ‘The Struggle’ was dependent upon upholding a scrupulous distinction between that which was ‘progressive’ and that which was ‘decadent’.

  ‘Has she gone out shopping?’ Mervyn asked him. ‘Do you know when she’ll be back?’

  ‘To be frank,’ he said, ‘she has just taken off in a dressing gown with a man who is not her husband. I don’t think that shopping was quite what they had in mind.’

  ‘Oh I say!’ Mervyn said. He found, rising within him, a deep suspicion that Thomas Adderley – who had cried off for the Impromptu Drink as being at variance with his travel plans – had now returned to Oxford in order to consummate an Impromptu Flutter with Ali Glazer. It left him feeling upstaged. In mentioning Thomas Adderley’s presence the previous Wednesday, Mervyn had hoped to make Ali suffer a little, no more. He had not expected her to press him for Thomas’s telephone number or to go off with him half-naked in motor cars.

  ‘This Lochinvar,’ he said to William, ‘he wouldn’t on this occasion happen to be one Thomas Adderley, would he?’ William gulped with surprise as the plot thickened. Thomas Adderley!

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘On this occasion he happens to be one Arnold Weinberg.’

  ‘Versatile, isn’t she?’ Mervyn said in jest. ‘Come to think of it, what are you doing in her house at nine o’clock in the morning?’

  William stayed only to gather up his used matches and the last of his own supplies. He felt a little stunned by the scope of female cunning and thanked his own secular God for his gift of moral strength. Since the sun was shining, he saw no reason at all why he should linger there in the web of the female spider. He could shake the dust from his feet immediately and at the same time avoid the prospect of the children’s cornflakes. He took a postcard from the pocket of his windcheater and wrote in parting haste at the kitchen table.

  I have left your egg pan to steep in Fairy Liquid. The eggs I used were all my own.

  Yours, William

  Sixteen

  When noah telephoned from the research unit, Ali was working on the oranges. She had experienced the greatest difficulty in representing these simple elliptical shapes and had found repeatedly that they would not present themselves in an obedient stack upon the canvas, but alternated, with each attempt, between tumbling giddily outwards and rising, over-large and ominously surreal, in the context of columbine and pasture. The composition was not restful. The background itself was proving peculiarly insistent and, while it was true that with the kitchen window thrown open like that tendrils of columbine curled in over the casement and two snapdragons had of late by her neglect grown up through a crack in the stone with startling rapidity, Ali did not wish to imply any disquiet in the work by depicting these things as encroaching so near. There was no reason why, in portraying that abundant tangle, one should necessarily open the floodgates. Nor why one should tolerate those orange orbs which hummed in the foreground like suspended detonators. She detected in these the picture’s beginnings, an insidious implication of excellence which had never been present in her painting before and she wished to resist it, being alarmed by it. It was the best picture she had ever embarked upon.

  To hear Noah’s wonderfully grave and level tones over the telephone was a considerable relief, for in his speech the notes barely rose and fell. He would stay only to check his mail, he said, and would then call a taxi and head for home.

  ‘Come quickly,’ Ali said, ‘because I’ve missed you.’

  Noah stepped from the office ante-room loaded with Jiffybags and envelopes, two of which he held between his teeth. He heard the incongruous retreating clomp of ill-fitting hiker’s boots upon the hospital floor and, glancing leftwards, was surprised to see the back of William Lister passing through the distant plastic doors at the end of the corridor. Next he acknowledged the entry of Arnie Weinberg into the ante-room with an amiable lack of ceremony denoting long-standing friendship.

  ‘What the hell’s William Lister doing around here?’ he said, speaking through the envelopes in his teeth.

  ‘Search me,’ Arnie said, who had not seen him.

  To Arnie’s knowledge William had only once before graced the research unit with his presence. He had unexpectedly accompanied Ali who had arranged to meet her husband in the canteen for lunch. Arnie smiled to remember how on that occasion, William – firmly refusing all food – had sat out the half-hour with a glass of water in front of him watching the weaker brethren busy themselves at the trough.

  ‘He came to eat lunch, maybe,’ Arnie offered wittily. ‘I guess he just came by to starve in public.’ He promptly emitted a short, somewhat brutal laugh. ‘How was your flight?’ he said. Noah became aware at that moment that clenched between his teeth was a recycled envelope exhorting him to conserve trees.

  ‘Oh shit!’ Noah said. The letter was brief and oddly childish. It contained no salutation and ran as follows:

  This is to let you know that your wife has not been idle in your absence but Arnold Weinberg could probably tell you exactly what I mean. Does the name Thomas Adderley mean anything to you?

  Yours sincerely, William Lister

  Shaking slightly, Noah folded the letter and put it into his pocket. Cases were rare indeed where Noah would readily have given credence to William Lister’s sanctimonious avowals, but Thomas Adderley was, unfortunately, just such a case. Mot Adderley: the Nigger in the Woodpile! The rough-shod golden hero of his wife’s arrested youth.

  ‘Oh shit!’ he said again.

  ‘What’s up?’ Arnie asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Noah said. ‘Nothing at all. Call me a taxi, will you?’

  ‘Sure,’ Arnie said. William’s aspirant snipe at Arnie had, ironically, passed Noah by. He had merely read the wretched thing as casting Arnie in the role of informed bystander, which indeed he was, and had no intention at all of discussing the affair with anyone but Ali. He then proceeded systematically to sift his post, most of which he committed, after brief examination, to the wastepaper basket. The salvage he placed neatly upon his desk, fastened with two bulldog clips. Then he stepped out to wait for his taxi.

  Ali had moved with a sketch book into the kitchen garden, by the time he came, in order to work with unwonted zeal upon the whorls of a columbine. Th
e time was two o’clock and the sun being high, she wore her hair pushed under the crown of an old straw hat. The bundled hair laid bare the familiar groove of her neck and the sight of it caused Noah an emotion close to physical pain as he approached. He became simultaneously aware both of his own advancing age and of that range of poignant amorous failures which had afflicted his bygone youth. The combination left him bruised and raw. In a moment his own memory had cruelly run him by an undermining pageant of his past.

  He saw himself suddenly at fifteen, hovering where the much-loved Jean made cakes in her mother’s kitchen. He saw himself kiss her until the muffled giggles of her friends in the broom closet caused her to burst out with uncontrolled laughter. What Noah had read as love requited, he then in that sniggering denouement saw as a heartless conspiracy by a monstrous regiment of women. He saw himself again, at thirty, open a door upon Shirley supine on a bed; one of her nipples was in the mouth of a naked stranger whose bucking haunches she enclosed within her own raised knees. Now, as Ali turned her head towards him in welcome, Noah saw, as it were behind his eyes, the vivid fall of a safety curtain on which was clearly stencilled ‘The rest you must not see’. It surprised him even as he stood that the mind could summon to the case so strong, so apt, so theatrical an image.

  ‘Hello, my love,’ Ali said. She rose and kissed him warmly. Then she proposed coffee which he promptly refused. ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked solicitously. Then she followed him indoors and watched him plant his bag on the kitchen table.

  ‘I’ve eaten,’ he said. ‘Excuse me. I have a headache.’ He proceeded up the stairs towards the attic where Ali discovered him minutes later, stretched on the convertible bed which Camilla had once stained with urine. His eyes were fixed upon the ceiling; his hands were under his head.

  ‘I’m very glad to see you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry that your head hurts.’ She stepped forward and, sliding a cool hand between the buttons of his shirt, brought it to rest on the furrow of his sternum. She could feel there the heavy rise and fall of his breathing. ‘Do you need anything?’ she said. ‘Aspirin, perhaps? Are you all right, Noah?’