‘I’d rather pay you by the hour, Mr Parsons,’ she said. ‘That’s if you don’t mind. I do not wish to exploit you and it might take longer than you think.’ Since Mr Parsons had reached that stage of deafness where he took all verbal response as personal affront, he merely glared at her formidably as he twiddled his hearing aid.
‘Now look here, Missus,’ he said. ‘I’m an honest man. Honest and hardworking. I’ve got my own tools and my own mower. Five pound now, and the balance tomorrow. I can’t say fairer than that. Ten pound to me, and to you the whole muck-heap digging over and planting out with wallflowers.’
‘Oh no, Mr Parsons!’ Ali said most emphatically. ‘No radical changes, please. My husband would not care for that at all. Definitely no wallflowers. I would like you simply to tidy the beds and trim the climbers. And mow the grass, of course. We do have a mower. There is absolutely no need to bring a mower.’
‘Oh aye,’ Mr Parsons said, twiddling his hearing aid impatiently in the face of so long an interjection. ‘It’s like I said, I’ve got a decent mower and all my own tools. You’ve no need to fret yourself, they’re good tools all of them and no rubbish. Five pound down and I’ll be back at sunrise quick as ever you can say “Jack Robinson”.’
‘Yes,’ Ali said. She was intrigued by the way he had modified the gesture of forelock-touching whereby he wedged the right thumb deftly between the three warts and the ribbing of the tea cosy, and jerked upwards a half-inch and down again.
Mr Parsons did not appear in the morning but he came towards the end of the afternoon, reeking heavily of five pounds’ worth of best bitter and trundling a monstrous petrol mower in a wheelbarrow. Ali, all that day, had been wholly absorbed with her painting.
‘Nothing too radical, Mr Parsons,’ she said in casual greeting and she retreated at once to the oranges. The painting was evolving beautifully. It had excited her all day to watch it grow and change. From the outset it had had the quality of being somehow beyond her control. She now perceived this as a strength and not a weakness. The painting was growing through her, catching, as it did so, a multitude of vivid, provoking ambiguities.
‘Mummy!’ Hattie said in agitation. ‘Come quickly! Daniel is crying. Mr Parsons is mowing Daddy’s plants. Mummy – he’s mowing the flowerbeds!’
Mr Parsons had managed with remarkable speed to convert a section of the front garden from Haunted Castle to Scorched Earth. He had razed one of the wide herbaceous borders, severing the clematis and several small shrubs at root. Then he had forked over the ensuing devastation and had arranged within it four rows of wallflowers spaced at twelve-inch intervals from each other. As Ali rushed, headlong and gesticulating to stop him, Mr Parsons switched on the mower. The situation was impossible. Not only did the object render her speech inaudible, but it threatened to cut her off at the ankles. Over the din, Ali believed she heard him shout that he was honest; honest and hard working. His machine came drunkenly towards her, guzzling the last of the hollyhocks. Ali made a final, heroic rush upon the object and found herself somehow fortuitously assisted in the assault by the timely interference of a tall dark-haired woman, who in that instant had taken Mr Parsons by the shoulders and had wrenched him from the handles. The mower rumbled heavily to a halt.
‘Now lookee here, Missus,’ said Mr Parsons aggressively into the silence. ‘You’d no call to touch that mower. ‘Tis mine. Nor no more had you call to interfere with an honest, hardworking man about his business.’
‘Honest! Don’t make me laugh!’ said the stranger with unusual vehemence. She had the voice of Ethel Merman and the profile of Barbra Streisand. She was also very properly dressed in the style of a Bonwitt Teller ad in the New Yorker.’You absurdly drunken yokel; you incompetent old sot!’ she said. ‘Quit screwing up her garden, okay? She’d like for you to stop it!’
The effect on Mr Parsons was remarkable. He jambed his right thumb obsequiously into position between the warts and the ribbing and began immediately to bow out backwards towards the gate, as if taking leave of royalty.
‘Now beat it, you jerk!’ said the stranger. The instruction was quite extraneous. The mower and the wheelbarrow, which he had left behind him in his departing haste, later materialised under scrutiny as the property of the local parks department.
‘Hi!’ said the woman warmly. She held out to Ali her finely boned right hand on which the fingernails were varnished bold scarlet. ‘I’m Shirley,’ she said, ‘Shirley Glazer. I guess you’re Alison. I take it that you people missed my card. I’m here for a conference at the hospital. I came by a couple of times last week but you were out of town. Your boarder entertained me most hospitably.’
‘He was no boarder,’ Ali said. ‘He was a usurper. I threw him out yesterday.’ Shirley Glazer coloured a little and laughed.
‘Oh really?’ she said, recovering fast. ‘And I just threw out the gardener. We’d make an excellent team. Are those two cute little kids your kids, by any chance? Noah’s kids? My god, but aren’t they small!’
‘I’m big,’ Daniel said. ‘Go away.’ Shirley laughed again. She clearly thrived on stirring up contention.
‘You look like Noah,’ she said to Daniel with a kind of amiable challenge. ‘But your colouring is all different. I guess the colouring just came as a different package, huh?’ Daniel said nothing. Ali, as they walked towards the house, found that she was rudely sizing up Shirley Glazer’s boobs as an undisputed 38D, but the woman was pushing sixty! She was, moreover, at once intimidating, capable and well-presented. What could she possibly want with William Lister? What could any woman who had once been married to Noah want with William Lister?
‘I’m kind of sorry about your boarder,’ Shirley said. ‘Personally, I thought that he was cute. A little slovenly in his personal habits, maybe, but kind of charming, no? So utterly stiff and British, if you’ll pardon me. And so earnest in his politics. I have strong radical leanings myself, as Noah will doubtless have told you, but I have always also been a hedonist. I am a radical hedonist.’
‘Noah has told me nothing,’ Ali said truthfully. ‘But what exactly is a radical hedonist? Are you a socialist who can’t live without mixer taps?’ Shirley laughed.
‘Those too,’ she said. ‘Mixer taps and sex. I have to admit that I always found capitalists to make better lovers.’
‘I see,’ Ali said. ‘I do not speak from a great experience in the field, but I would hazard that almost anybody, across the ideological spectrum, would make a better lover than William Lister.’
‘Now that’s not fair,’ Shirley said. ‘And it’s also totally untrue. For a start, he’s heterosexual. That is a rare thing in a man these days. In the States, at least. I can’t speak for Great Britain. I’ve been here just over a week.’ Ali laughed out loud. Shirley was already so markedly unlike Noah in her penchant for instant self-exposure that it made her wonder how the two of them had ever got through an evening together, let alone a decade.
‘The polarisation of the sexes,’ Shirley said earnestly, ‘is symptomatic of the growing crisis of capitalism.’
‘I see,’ Ali said.
‘I’m serious,’ Shirley said. ‘You try calling up a couple of men in New York City next time you’re a little stoned on New Year’s Eve and wanting masculine company. Ten to one they’ll be out propositioning each other. I spent last New Year’s Eve listening to Mr Schubert on the stereo.’
‘There’s a lot to be said for it,’ Ali said. ‘I do a lot of it myself.’
‘That’s an okay attitude for a person who’s married,’ Shirley said. ‘Alison, for all that he’s maybe insufferably pompous, your husband is a real, A-line hetero.’
‘Thank you,’ Ali said.
Shirley had seated herself at the kitchen table and had taken out her knitting. She had set down two completed front halves of a prodigious cream-coloured cardigan rich in cables and diamond patterning, and had drawn a hank of oiled fisherman’s wool from her bag which she had looped over a chairback for winding. Al
i was almost tempted to offer her outstretched thumbs for the task, but she had taken it upon herself to find a clean enough saucepan in the house in which to boil some water for their tea. There was still not one available which did not reek of turmeric and crushed cardamom pods.
‘Oh hang it, we’ll drink this,’ Ali said, feeling faintly debauched. She banged down on to the table a bottle of bourbon plus two glasses. ‘Bourbon is a woman’s drink,’ she said. ‘Before Noah, I was married to a lunatic, you know. I am not a woman wholly devoid of experience.’
‘Jimmy Beam, oh my!’ Shirley said. ‘A lunatic, you said? I can fully appreciate that Noah might make a very satisfactory antidote to a lunatic. But do you not find him – oh excuse me – a little tediously attracted to notions of anal sex?’
‘No,’ Ali said firmly, wondering why she took no offence at the question. ‘I do not. Noah has always readily accepted that I am insufficiently eclectic in sexual matters.’
‘I guess the poor man harbours latent homosexual urges along with all the rest,’ Shirley said outrageously. ‘And which man would not, who had that sweet-tongued grey-haired witch for a mother?’ Ali began to discover that the pleasure to be got from listening to Shirley was largely gained from having someone else to be wicked for one. It was like hiring an assassin. ‘There’s the card from her in the hall,’ Shirley said. ‘I recognised the handwriting. Don’t you ever get to opening your mail? Somewhere in that pile is a card from me giving you the dates of my conference.’
‘I will,’ Ali said. ‘But I will not yet.’
‘Forget it,’ Shirley said. ‘mine’s obsolete and ‘Mother’s’ is the annual New Year card. A prefabricated miscellany of tabernacle kitsch plus her own barbed platitudes within. I opened mine already. Say, I’d sure like to take you guys out to eat someplace, you know that? When I say eat, I’m talking food. Is there someplace around here that will sell us food? I don’t mean some no-good British hamburger dump that serves up rubber mats between cold buns.’
‘There’s the Saraceno,’ Ali said hopefully. ‘They don’t do mats in buns.’ She had not been to the Saraceno since the night Noah had taken her there with the baby, to escape the Bobrows’ scrag end.
Throughout the meal Shirley talked about her past, and all in front of the children. She talked with a vivid and conspicuous lack of restraint which compensated Ali, in one half-hour, for a decade of Noah’s reserve. She and Noah had gone to the same high school in New Jersey, Shirley said, where by the age of twelve her already burgeoning breasts had begun to thwart a long-held aspiration to become a world class athlete. By fifteen her beautiful, wide mouth, which all through grade school had got her dubbed as ‘Nigger Lips’, had come into its own as a double-attraction, along with her breasts, for a catholic selection of high school boys in the back rows of movie houses. Noah was not the best of the bunch, she said, but he was surely one of the best. And he was later lent advantage by having survived the war. She had met him again, by coincidence, she said, on a kibbutz where she was about to make her journey through Zionism into socialist hedonism. Noah was about to injure his back. He was charmed and won by her liveliness. Like many a sober and cautious young man, he was attracted by the prospect of a wife who danced well and loved company.
‘Kibbutz?’ Ali said in bafflement and surprise, because the person Shirley was talking about was a person she did not know. They were married shortly thereafter in the proper, traditional manner. Shirley was already pregnant, but only just. The honeymoon was spent, unbelievably, in the Cotswolds, not a million miles from where Ali and Shirley sat eating aubergine pie. Shirley remembered the trip mainly for Noah’s irritating and inveterate tourism and for her own abysmal morning sickness and powerful food cravings. She had been so angry on one occasion, she recalled, that when Noah had returned without maple syrup to the B and B in Stratford-upon-Avon, she had threatened to throw up the landlady’s breakfast forthwith into the washbasin and to poke it down the sink with the bristle-end of Noah’s toothbrush. The event had taken place in the year in which Ali had cut her first adult teeth. She had also, in that memorable year, cut her teeth of literacy on the first of the Beacon Readers.
For a wedding present, Noah had given her a fine gold chain, Shirley said, measuring exactly twenty-four inches in length, to wear around her waist. The idea had been to ensure against an increase in girth – pregnancies excluded. She had worn it for almost twenty years and had removed it only for the duration of her pregnancies. Both times, with the assistance of diligent and systematic exercise which came easily to her, she had been able to reassume the chain within two weeks of having given birth. Ali was startled to think of her husband as a man who would, so to speak, confine his bride in chains, and offered up grateful, silent thanks for the advancement which twenty-odd years can, in certain cases, wreak in the soul of a man. The object reminded her vaguely of La Chaîne Haute Fidélité which had long been a feature of the toy cupboard, and had finally made its way thereafter to a Labour Party jumble sale.
‘Shirley,’ Ali said, ‘What made you take it off? Divorce?’
‘Sterilisation,’ Shirley said. ‘One naturally takes one’s jewellery off prior to anaesthetic. I never put it back. Pardon me, Alison, but have you actually been sterilised?’
‘No,’ Ali said firmly. ‘I have not.’
‘I recommend it,’ Shirley said, ‘for the sexual freedom it affords.’
The next day, coming upon Ali over her painting, Shirley engaged in a generous effusion of praise.
‘Finish it,’ she said. ‘I want to buy it.’
‘I had in mind sometime,’ Ali said politely, ‘to show it to my husband. He only saw the beginnings of it.’
‘Forget it!’ Shirley said. ‘I’ll pay you two thousand dollars for that painting.’ Ali drew in breath.
‘But it isn’t even finished,’ she said. ‘I should need a month at least to finish it. It’s tricky. It needs a decent, strong north light. And then, I have the children to care for.’
‘Finish it,’ Shirley said. ‘I want it in four days. I am leaving, as you know, after the weekend.’
‘Four days? Ali said. ‘You must be mad.’
‘I just changed my mind,’ Shirley said. ‘I propose to pay you three thousand dollars for it. Finish it.’
‘Three thousand dollars is roughly equivalent to the cost of all our airfares to Johannesburg,’ Ali said. ‘It’s actually one hell of a lot of money.’ It occurred to her that there was potential stature to be gained from footing the bill for one’s own airfares, especially now that Noah would be watching his spare cash in order to pay Hattie’s detestable school fees. But one would of course be kept most terribly busy. Busy as Noah. There would be no time at all to sleep. No time to shop or buy food. One might even – like Thomas Adderley – be too busy to make love properly. Who could tell?
‘It’s actually one hell of a painting, Alison,’ Shirley said. ‘I’ve never really been busy before,’ Ali said. ‘Not for money. Not since I taught school.’
‘I’ll pay in advance,’ Shirley said. ‘Finish it, Alison, I want it.’
Twenty-Three
Noah returned to England on a flight from New York after an uncongenial and largely wasted summer. He had hated his absence from Ali and – having been undermined in advance by the apparently precarious state of his marriage – he had found the travelling more tiring than usual. Then, while Ali’s telephone call from Johannesburg had been all that was affectionate and conciliatory, it had done him no good at all to learn that she had gone halfway across the world, moved, she had said, by an old copy of Byron, but to the very spot which happened to harbour the person of Thomas Adderley.
It was towards the end of this period in New York, while brooding upon this morbid circumstance, that Noah had accidentally set down his left heel into a broken paving-stone in Little Italy, where he had gone to lunch with Barbara. The jolt had caused the immediate onset of his all too familiar spinal problems and for the next few days he
could shuffle about only with the greatest difficulty. Being reluctant to embark on a relationship with a new therapist so shortly before his return to England, he had prescribed himself a course of powerful muscle-relaxing tablets which had caused him to sleep out the better part of four days. He had then enlisted the aid of the kindly Barbara to massage the soft tissue around his sacroiliac joints. Being addicted to productive labour, Noah had fretted and fumed during his more wakeful moments, since the affair had seriously thrown out the schedule which he had previously devised with Barbara.
Then, when he had finally left her – armed with a silver-topped walking stick which had once belonged to her father – he had been obliged to pay a time-consuming visit to his son Shane in New Haven whose wife had so recently given birth to his second grandchild. It had rankled with him terribly that Ali had not been there to undertake the buying of gifts for the Brainbox and his sister, and that he, instead, had had to hobble grimly around FAO Schwartz, leaning on a walking stick, before heading out for Grand Central Station.
Now, on the flight for home, being full of back-pills and painkillers, he dozed off frequently, but woke each time to find himself fervently craving the company of his wife. The sound of Ali’s voice over the telephone line from Johannesburg had induced an urgent ache in the testicles which no mere osteo-narcotics would ever annul. The bald fact of the matter was that he had not been to bed with her since the first week in May and, notwithstanding his current spinal incapacity, he sustained himself in and out of sleep on a strident, swash-buckling fantasy of propelling her into the bedroom and peeling off his shirt which he would use to bind together her naked, milk-white wrists.
‘Get your sweet ass on the bed!’ he said, waking to find that the day had dawned and that he had said it in the hearing of a Pan Am stewardess who was at that moment looming over him with a fiendishly citric morning reviver. He reached promptly with his right hand for the orange juice and with his left for the central agony in his lower back, which was shooting out a radius of burning needles into the area of his left haunch. At Heathrow Airport he made his way to the car hire desk and subsequently drove himself home with his jacket bunched artfully into the small of his back.
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