Ali was on the telephone, talking to Julie Horowitz.
‘Do you know about Thomas, by the way?’ Julie asked. ‘About the shots.’
‘Shots!’ Ali said, leaning weakly against the wall. ‘Oh Julie – is he dead?’
‘Christ, Ali don’t you ever read your newspapers?’ Julie said impatiently. ‘Thomas is fine. Only someone blew several large holes in his motor car. He wasn’t in it at the time.’
‘Not this time,’ Ali said morbidly. Julie laughed.
‘The car is a total write-off. He’s having to use mine. Have you seen Vogue this month?’
‘No,’ Ali said. ‘Why?’
‘Thomas again. He’s in it. Do go and buy it. He’s looking extremely chic, in his corduroy jacket with Liberty lawn elbow patches. Lorna made the patches, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘What do you mean?’ Ali said. ‘Is he modelling his clothes?’
‘No, no,’ Julie said. ‘He’s being the up-and-coming theatrical gent. But what a lot of media coverage! To be a political martyr and a man-about-town all in one week! That Bobrow of yours is eaten up with envy, but he left town last night, I’m glad to say.’
‘I see,’ Ali said. ‘Gosh.’
‘I’ll tell you why I ‘phoned,’ Julie said candidly. ‘Though Thomas will tell you himself in due course. His son Andrew wants to leave this bear garden. He wants to fiddle a residence qualification and try for Oxford. Can he come and stay with you?’
Ali swallowed hard. ‘Does he like curry powder in his scrambled eggs?’ she asked.
‘Not as far as I know,’ Julie said. ‘He does chain-smoke and chew peppermints at the same time. But all adolescents have filthy habits.’
‘The answer is no,’ Ali said firmly. ‘He can’t come. That’s unless he gives up smoking. Smoking isn’t allowed in this house.’
‘What do you mean, “isn’t allowed”?’ Julie said. ‘Does your old man run a concentration camp there, or what? Let me talk to him.’
‘He’s resting,’ Ali said.
‘Resting? In the early afternoon, the poor geriatric. Wake him up for me.’
Ali laughed. ‘He came off a night flight this morning, Julie,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t think of it. Don’t be so bossy. What I’m saying is a lung man and a teenage nicotine addict can’t coexist. Not in my house.’
‘Something’s happened to you,’ Julie said. ‘You used to be so readily exploitable. I assured Thomas that you would be infinitely exploitable.’
‘Thanks,’ Ali said. ‘You make yourselves sound like Rosen-crantz and Guildenstern. Why do I like you both so much?’
Noah had not heard the telephone ring. After making love to his wife he had taken the precaution of disconnecting the bedroom extension, and had slept out the course of the afternoon. He woke in the early evening to the smell of frying food and went to take a bath. Then he made his way on bare feet down the carpeted stairs towards the kitchen. He could hear that on the kitchen radio a melodious sixteenth-century Virgin was praising God in Latin for her immaculate conception. It crossed Noah’s mind to praise God at that moment that he had taken care not to get Ali pregnant. Daniel would start school that September and he looked forward in consequence to a decade of serene and uninterrupted coffee sessions with her up in his attic study.
Through the kitchen doorway he could see her with that wonderful faraway look which always turned him on. She was in the act of dispensing orangey freezer-food fish cakes to her three children, coaxing them loose from the pan with a spatula, but to him it seemed she looked beyond fish cakes towards plumed helmets and water-lilies. He took the pan from her hand and kissed her on the mouth.
‘Sit down, Noah,’ she said. ‘There is food here, of sorts, but I’m warning you that it’s low. There’s none of your Szechuan Chinese exotica here as you see. There’s no “Live Carp” here; only some very dead fish cakes.’
‘I’ll eat whatever’s on offer,’ Noah said.
The girls were greeting him excitedly. Camilla called out to him.
‘Noah!’ she said. ‘Noah, you’re home!’ Hattie scraped back her chair and flew at him in the leopard-skin disco-suit, unloading a flamboyant rag-bag of traveller’s news.
‘And in Juicy Lucy’s,’ she said, in conclusion, ‘they had green plastic chairs that went round and round! And the lady gave me ice-creams cheaper than anyone else because I went there so often. Mummy let me go there all the time!’
‘So you had a great time,’ Noah said as he embraced her. ‘You have some cute new freckles on your nose.’
‘I haven’t!’ Hattie said. Beyond her from the table Daniel was staring at him impassively over a poised spoon. Droplets of milk were falling delicately into the child’s lap. It did not pass Noah by that his youngest son was beautiful; nor that he badly needed his hair cut; nor that Ali was allowing him to eat Sugar Puffs for his supper. But what point in raising any objection? Ali would merely conclude that deep down he wanted to eat Sugar Puffs himself. It had to do with jars of Christmas mincemeat and lines of marshmallow fish, he decided. A curious, arrested compensating for pleasures past denied. Noah blamed the Bauhaus. He concluded to his own satisfaction that her abortive and somewhat farcical assignation with Thomas Adderley had been a symptom of the same phenomenon.
‘How are you, son?’ he said. Daniel made him no immediate reply. He was busy reflecting that, with his father’s return, the long nights in his mother’s bed had regrettably come to an end.
‘Your hair is wet,’ Daniel said finally, feeling that speech was necessary.
‘You’re right,’ Noah said. ‘I just washed it.’
Camilla was meanwhile patiently waiting her turn. She wore a feather dyed purple hanging from one ear, and purple-tinted ballet slippers on her fine narrow feet. Her skirt, which was short and crenellate, she wore over a ruched nineteen-forties bathing suit with a halter neck. In her lap, Noah observed with some surprise, she held a small marmalade cat. As he bent to kiss her the feather gently brushed his cheek.
‘Hi, Camilla,’ he said. ‘How you doing? I take it that the cat is a part of your costume.’ The kitten at that moment, perhaps with fatally bad timing, chose to mount the table where – with the claws of one exquisite, velvet paw – it dragged the fish cake clean off Camilla’s plate and began to chew imperturbably at the edges. Hattie and Daniel shrieked with delight at the kitten’s deft and barefaced cheek, but Noah stiffened fastidiously.
‘Get that animal off the table, Camilla,’ he said. ‘Come on now and make it quick.’
‘Him’s a her,’ Camilla said, as she lifted the small culprit down. ‘Oh go on, Noah, admit that she’s just too beautiful. Admit that you love her to bits. You can’t not think that she’s gorgeous.’
‘Dammit, Camilla,’ Noah said, being wholly unmoved by the kitten’s saccharine graces. ‘I have always made myself perfectly clear about domestic pets. I do not want them in my house. I would take it as a great favour if on your next visit home you would leave that feline in Cambridge.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ Camilla said. ‘Diddums won’t sniff the grub, not ever again. Not never stick her nosie-pies into the num-nums. Bad girl, Diddums-pussie!’
‘Camilla,’ Noah said. ‘Will you cut the garbage and get that animal out of my kitchen? At least while we eat. Put him outside. Afterwards you and I will discuss his territorial rights here.’ Hattie flared in agitation.
‘Susan can’t go out!’ she said. ‘She’ll get lost. Anyway, she’s not Camilla’s. She’s mine. I brought her specially – all the way from Johannesburg!’ The ensuing silence was terrible. As the implications of her outburst began very slowly to dawn upon poor Hattie she took on the look of a person struck dumb with terror before a firing squad.
‘Mummy knew nothing about it,’ Camilla said eventually. ‘Hattie hid her in some hand-luggage. But Hattie didn’t know it was illegal. Look, Noah. Dear Noah, please be nice about it. Please don’t do your nut.’
‘“Nice”,’ Noah said through his
teeth. ‘“Nice”, Camilla? I’m always nice. My daughter deceives her mother and smuggles a high-risk animal from a rabies area for which the maximum sentence is a year in prison or a fine of five hundred pounds. She disregards her parents, breaks the law and – just incidentally – puts my vivisection licence in serious jeopardy, and I must be “nice”, you say? Sure I’ll be nice. Confine that animal securely in the toolshed till I take it to the laboratory and shoot its abdomen full of barbiturate. Then afterwards I’ll act like it never happened.’ Camilla rose without a word and walked towards the outer door. Her feet in the silence sounded lightly on the brick-tiled floor. The door opened as she approached it. Arnie was stamping slightly on the doorstep, the sun low behind his head. He had appeared with magical timing to offer her his charm, like a pedlar with a box of shiny trinkets. Camilla, as if hypnotised, walked straight into his arms.
‘Cam,’ he said. ‘I’m early but shall we go?’ For Ali to watch him place his hands on her daughter’s bare and lovely shoulders came as a sudden and disturbing revelation. She knew, of course, why he had come so early. Croak, croak. Arnie had always been there, utterly charming, utterly selfish; enduring like a predestined frog-prince on the edges of Camilla’s evolving female consciousness. Arnie would be so much, much more deadly than any hennaed undergraduate playing the piano among dandelions; than any pretty-faced vicar’s son with his pockets full of Housman. Arnie would be the person who would break Camilla’s heart. Then he would leave for California. Arnie looked up over Camilla’s shoulder.
‘Noah,’ he said affably. ‘You’re back; you’re awake. How do you feel?’
‘Fine,’ Noah said grimly. ‘Just fine.’ Camilla pushed the kitten quickly into Arnie’s hands.
‘Arnie,’ she said. ‘Lock her in the toolshed and shut the window tight. Noah wants her shut in the shed.’ A tear spilled from her eye which she brushed away with the back of her hand. ‘I’ll get my jacket,’ she said.
Arnie took the cat. He looked around the room and straightway read the cues. Hattie was sobbing tears like golf-balls into her fish cake. Daniel sat open-mouthed and curiously impassive, wide-eyed and delicate like a Piero angel; unmoved. Ali’s familiar, tell-tale red blotches had sprung up about the throat and cheek bones. It called to mind for him the general smothering error of familial commitment and breeding. Here was Noah’s family of tender-hearted carnivores lining up in sorrow and rage over the fate of one small cat, and Noah standing among them like Bluebeard.
‘See you later!’ he said. ‘Come on, Cam, let’s hit the road.’
Twenty-Five
Noah, who was last to sleep that night, rose earliest next morning. He rose at six and found himself faintly haunted by the presence of William Lister’s ghost. William’s cut-price instant coffee granules stood on the kitchen workboard. William’s newspapers fell through the letter slot. Pointedly Noah pulled on his clothes and walked the distance to the village newsagent to exchange these for The Times. He tried hard not to think about his garden which had been violated by one of that breed of hard-luck charlatans whose representatives still wove their way from time to time into Ali’s life. Some dubious old chancer, wandering westward from the Social Services Department. A powerful need for caffeine began to overwhelm his system. It reminded him that he had not actually troubled to quiz his wife on the two French railway cups in the garage, but their presence there had by then lost its menace. It was perfectly clear to him from what Ali had said that Thomas Adderley had not been near his garage. And for a person such as Ali – who was capable of cutting cheese with her credit card on summer picnics – all manner of domestic improbabilities were after all made possible.
Homecoming had been a decidedly mixed blessing, he considered, but his whole frame rejoiced at being back again with Ali. Being a loyal and generous man, it had not crossed his mind to blame her for the wretched affair of the marmalade kitten; even though it had been her absurd indulgence towards the children which had now forced him into the role of villainous patriarch. Over the fate of the kitten he had been resolute, and had driven promptly to the research unit where he had – as he said – ‘dealt with’ the animal. Ali, on a sound instinct, had begged him to return with the corpse. In this she had turned out to be quite right.
Hattie at first was not to be coaxed from the darkness of her bedroom where she sobbed under a Holly Hobbie quilt, making wet corkscrews of her wild hair, but she had finally sat up and had thereafter thrown herself with gusto into the macabre ritual of the burial. She had gone on stridently to dictate the kitten’s needs for the after-life with her usual strength of character. Susan needed rose petals, Hattie said, pink rose petals, and a whole box of her favourite Swiss baby cereal. She needed the small fur-fabric mouse impregnated with catmint herb and the singing of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. Then, with a final placing of one tin of Whisk as kitten food in the grave, Hattie had turned the sod over the kitten’s lifeless form and had returned to bed with her mind satisfactorily composed.
It was Ali who had seemed most distressed by the animal’s death. She had gone to bed so quiet and white and listless that Noah, in attempting to comfort her until she slept, had rendered himself wide awake. He had then retired to his study for some hours, where Camilla found him after the late-night film, plugged into his earphones and drinking whisky with his feet on his desk. Having been deaf to her entry, he jumped a little when she touched him.
‘Sorry, Noah,’ she said. She smiled at him so exactly as her mother did, appeasingly. ‘I gave you a fright,’ she said. Noah took off the headphones and laid them in his lap. Then he took his feet off the desk.
‘Sit down,’ he said.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘Sure, I can’t sleep, that’s all. How was the movie?’
‘Where’s the cat?’ Camilla said. ‘Did you take it, or has it escaped? It’s not in the shed.’
‘I took it,’ Noah said. ‘It’s dead. Listen, Camilla, don’t imagine that the episode has left me feeling good. I’ll get the child another kitten if necessary, just exactly like the last. There was no way I could have allowed her to keep that animal – not without compromising all of us. No person of sense imposes a burden of secrecy on a nine-year-old child. The truth will always out.’ Camilla shuddered then, but whether from distress or sudden cold he could not determine.
‘Female ginger tabbies are hard to find,’ she said. ‘And Susan had the smallest speckle of white on the end of her tail. Did you notice? Just like the tiniest spatter of milk. Anyway, won’t a kitten give you asthma?’
‘The drugs get better all the time,’ Noah said dryly. ‘All of them tested on live animals, of course, like our lamented friend.’ Camilla chewed on her lower lip and found it hard to speak.
‘You did put her down, didn’t you?’ she said, hating to ask.
‘You tell me what you imagine I did,’ Noah said coldly. ‘You think I nailed it live to a board, or what?’
‘I think you put it down,’ she said.
‘Thank you, Camilla,’ he said. She reached out apologetically and touched his arm.
‘Dear Noah,’ she said. ‘Are you sure that you’re all right? You look so thoughtful. Are you worried about Hattie?’
‘Some,’ Noah said. ‘Hattie has behaved outrageously. I believe that she wants rather serious taking in hand.’
‘Oh go on!’ Camilla said. ‘You were never so headmasterish with me; so puritanical. Mummy tells me you’ve signed up the poor child for that god-awful dump with the prison uniforms. That place where Mr Bobrow sends his child to school. Are you buying her a course in “character building”?’
‘In literacy,’ Noah said. ‘Hopefully in numeracy too. That’s all. But I do happen to believe that Hattie will be less of a nuisance when her abilities are usefully employed and directed.’
‘ “Habits of industry”,’ Camilla said. ‘You’re sweet, Noah. You are old-fashioned. I do love you. I love you most dearly. I have always known you to
be the best thing since sliced bread – right from that very first day when you kept gritting your teeth and telling Mummy to fasten her seat belt. Do you remember?’
‘I do not remember gritting my teeth,’ Noah said. ‘But I remember thinking you and your mother were two very beautiful women.’
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