’Please don’t be late, Mummy,’ she said. ‘Please, or I’ll get detention.’
‘Promise,’ Ali said. ‘What do you need?’
‘White plimsolls,’ Camilla said, snatching up her school bag. ‘And navy shorts. And a white T-shirt. Thanks, Mummy.’
‘Run along,’ Ali said. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘It’s all got to be labelled,’ Camilla said over her shoulder ‘And in a bag, or we get detention. Please, Mummy.’
‘Labelled,’ Ali said. ‘Right. Don’t worry.’
‘The bag’s got to be labelled too,’ Camilla said, as she took her leave. ‘If it isn’t I’ll get detention.’
Ali, after the daily rinsing of Camilla’s sheets, took her bicycle to her cleaning job, noticing on the way that Virginia Woolf had lost the Blu-tack on her upper-left-hand corner and was sagging inwards in neck-arching indignity. She spent her two hours among soapsuds and alien crockery, drawing coffee cups and ashtrays and crumpled underwear out from under the sofas where her bachelor men habitually hid these things in consideration of her feelings. Then she pedalled home intending to make a sandwich and some coffee before going on to the shops. She dug out an old cushion cover and converted it into a kitbag, manufacturing a hem and drawstring and stitching on a name-tape. She put aside two more name-tapes with a view to stitching these on to the shorts and shirt in the Ladies loo in the town just as she heard the sound of Mervyn fitting his key into the lock.
‘I came for the paint roller,’ he said jauntily. Defensiveness caught Ali by the throat, for she had been discovered plying her needle, while Mervyn’s girlfriend, Eva, would in all likehood be in the Social Sciences library working on her bibliography.
‘It’s under the sink,’ Ali said with the belligerence of shame. ‘But if Eva wants to indulge in a little home decorating, paint rollers are available in every branch of Woolworths, you know – or does she believe that property is theft?’ Mervyn came towards her with his brilliant treacherous smile, his teeth, like Camilla’s, small, white and strong.
’I’m doing the painting,’ he said. He had never painted walls before in his life. ‘Eva is too busy. Are you planning to make an issue over a paint roller then? Why do women of your sort always pick quarrels which centre round utensils and domestic territory?’ He smiled upon her indulgently as upon some poor, dish-clout scullery maid.
‘Listen, Mervyn, I’m in a hurry,’ Ali said. ‘Take the bloody thing and with pleasure. As I said, it’s under the sink. Only if you’re planning to do the place over in “Nigger Brown”, just rinse it through before you return it to me. That’s all.’
‘Racist!’ Mervyn said. He had positioned himself suddenly too close for comfort and had picked up the makeshift kitbag which he was turning over and over in his hands.
‘It’s Camilla’s gym bag,’ Ali said nervously. ‘I have to take it to her right now. She needs it now.’
‘So do you,’ he said, snatching eagerly at double entendre. ‘That’s going by the way you’re acting with me today. You’re a handsome lady aren’t you?’
‘Marquess of Queensbury rules, okay?’ Ali said, swallowing quickly and wishing tears wouldn’t start so easily from her eyes these days. ‘The paint roller is all yours. Please. Take it and go away. Please, Mervyn.’
Mervyn put down the kitbag to enjoy his rising power. ‘I’m off wives and daughters as you know,’ he said, ‘but a part-time mistress or two is something else, not so? Anytime you’re interested, I’m open to offers, duckie.’ He took a step towards the mantelpiece where he began to fondle a recent school photograph of Camilla which Ali had inserted into a small shell-collage frame. ‘Her too,’ he said, for the pleasure of breaking the bounds of good taste. ‘If she doesn’t baulk at incest, that is.’
‘Are you on drugs, Mervyn?’ Ali asked, recovering spirit under the influence of his offensiveness.
‘Tell her I’d expect her to menstruate first,’ he said. ‘No representation without menstruation. Not in my bed.’
‘I’m sorry, Mervyn, I’m off,’ Ali said as she felt telling red blotches form upon the skin around her collar bone. She snatched up the kitbag and made for the door. A mild wave of nausea passed over her as she mounted her bicycle, caused only partly by the absence of lunch.
Acquiring the games kit was not an easy thing. Shorts were unseasonal by early September and the few satiny ones left in the sports shops were all beyond Ali’s means. White T-shirts came with saucy messages across the chest and Camilla needed a plain one. Furthermore, Camilla’s feet, being unusually narrow and elegant, fell out of regular gym shoes and required the high-lacing Dunlop kind which two out of three sports shops did not carry in her size.
Some hours had elapsed before Ali finally found suitable shorts in a charity shop, a little frayed and rumpled, and smelling slightly of body odour. The T-shirt was solved by a kindly shop assistant who advised her to ask in the men’s underwear department for a small cotton vest. The problem had been one not of scarcity, but of terminology. With some agitation Ali returned to her bicycle only to remember the name-tapes. Mervyn had caused her to leave them at home. Bent on acquiring a marking pen, she stepped hurriedly off the kerb into the street only to feel the hot wind of a passing car and – at the same moment – a hand gripping her arm to pull her back. That was when she fell shaking against Noah’s remarkable forty-four-inch chest.
‘Don’t do that again, lady,’ he said. ‘Not while I’m watching. It sure scares the hell out of me.’ He supported her a few paces till she could lean against a wall. Then he checked her pulse, registering as he did so a half-dozen dubious lesions on the back of her right hand which she had dismissed as glorified freckles.
‘So stupid of me,’ she said in some embarrassment, but Noah’s companion stepped forth heatedly.
‘The guy was driving like a cowboy!’ he said. Arnie Weinberg, in contrast to the sobriety of Noah’s appearance, wore his bushy, mouse-coloured hair carelessly overgrown and its tendency was to grow not down but sideways. He had on, over a sleeveless T-shirt, a small goatskin jerkin which he wore hairy side in. A large mole was manifest in the vicinity of his left bicep and a copious protrusion of yellowish underarm hair emerged from the arm-holes of the T-shirt. He wore, besides thick steel-framed glasses, denim jeans and some highly pneumatic running shoes. Both men were staring at her the way she remembered the dentist doing once, just before she had passed out in the chair. Arnie was holding out to her a Mars Bar which he had drawn from his back pocket.
‘Eat,’ he said. Noah threw the car keys into Arnie’s hands.
‘Go get the car,’ he said. ‘I guess we’ll take her home.’ Ali was already tearing paper from the sugary goo.
‘No really,’ she said, backing further into the wall. ‘I’m all right.’ But Arnie had already left them.
‘Believe me,’ Noah said, ‘you are very shaken.’
‘I can’t go home,’ Ali said. ‘That’s the problem.’ She held the kitbag aloft in a shaking hand. ‘I’ve got these to deliver to my daughter’s school. She needs them.’
‘No problem,’ Noah said. He used the expression frequently and to good effect. Problems of the kind which beset Ali vanished before him as chaff before the wind. ‘I’m Noah Glazer. I am, as it happens, a doctor.’
‘Thanks,’ Ali said. ‘I’m Alison Bobrow. I have to deliver these for three-thirty.’
Noah glanced at his watch and said promptly, with his peculiar and slightly compulsive moral gravity, ‘If you have children, Mrs Bobrow, you owe it to them to take better care of yourself.’
‘Yes,’ Ali said. She was taken both by his unusual kindness and by the puzzling awfulness of his pale yellow drip-dry shirt which he wore with cuff-links. Why cuff-links on a shirt like that? Ali wore thirdhand silk shirts from jumble sales with real shell buttons and threadbare cuffs. She laundered them by hand and ironed them with love. Nothing would have induced her to be seen dead in primrose drip-dry.
‘I should think you s
aved me from the jaws of death just then,’ she said, managing a smile. ‘We are standing appropriately, do you see, on the very spot where the poor Protestant bishops were burned to death.’
‘Oh my,’ Noah said, observing the plaque in the college wall. He considered her remark to be eccentric and examined her curiously. ‘Isn’t that something?’ he said.
When she smiled it began to occur to him that, for those who liked this kind of woman, she was certainly good to look at even through pallor and exhaustion. She was much too thin and wore rather butch sandals, but with her white pointed face and long white neck and curiously variegated pale hair, her head and shoulders took some beating. He found himself remembering the twelve dancing princesses who had worn out their shoes at the enchanted lake. The memory startled him since the story had been read to him as a young child by his mother, only once and long ago. Noah was a person who had put by childish things early in life and, besides, his tastes in women had always run along more robust lines towards ruby lips and ample haunches in tight skirts like Shirley’s. He had never been a man for pale, underslept enchantresses.
As Arnie honked from the opposite kerb they crossed the street to the car, where Noah handed her into the front passenger seat while Arnie stepped into the back.
‘I got the bastard’s car!’ he said excitedly. ‘Parked just there down the street. Can you believe it? The guy drives like a psychopath and then he parks half a block down the street. Boy, is he going places fast!’
‘D’you take his number?’ Noah said. Arnie slapped his forehead in self-reproach.
‘Shit!’ he said, ‘I forgot. I was too busy. I kicked a good-size dent in the rear mudguard, see. Real British ticky tacky that car. Put your toe to the metal and it crumples just like a Coke can.’
‘You what?’ Noah said caustically, registering controlled paternal annoyance. Arnie was the best research student he had ever had but had already caused him displeasure that day by having driven Noah’s car to a party the previous night which had extended into the morning and having then come to the hospital research unit at noon to return it direct from the party, dressed – as Noah said – like Robinson Crusoe in jogging shoes. Hurriedly Noah checked his mirror and began to manoeuvre into the stream of traffic.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said. Ali was beginning to enjoy herself in spite of her shock and her anxiety over Camilla’s clothing. Both men had begun to intrigue her. She wondered whether they were father and son. Or were they sexually involved with each other? For what reasons would a rigorously straight man in grey flannels keep company with a bent man in goatskin? She took them for American tourists.
‘Where do you come from?’ she said.
‘From the hospital, ma’am,’ Arnie said. ‘You’re okay with us. We’re just harmless doctors.’
‘Go on,’ Ali said. ‘I don’t believe you. Leastways, I believed him, but not you. Are you telling me you do ward rounds in a white coat?’
Arnie laughed. ‘Well, not exactly. Not right now. I work for him in medical research. You think I don’t look like a doctor?’
‘You look distinctly alternative to me if you’ll pardon the liberty,’ Ali said. ‘Frankly, you look like a person who buys prayer postcards ten pence off in the Whole Earth Bookshop.’ Arnie laughed again, but Noah, for whom flippant conversation, like eccentric dress, had its proper times and places, merely glanced down gravely at her seat-belt fitting.
‘Fasten the seat belt, Mrs Bobrow. Like so,’ he said after watching her wrestle with the clasp. Click.
Suddenly a police car was drawn up beside them, forcing Noah to pull in. There were two policemen in the front and, in the back, black hair parted dead centre, moustached and red with fury, was the driver of the fast car which had almost collided with Ali.
‘That’s the one!’ he yelled, as plummy British as they come in his period piece, Battle of Britain voice. ‘The one in the back with long hair like a girl.’
‘I am a girl,’ Arnie said to Ali’s immediate delight and to Noah’s dismay. Arnie leaned on the window ledge. ‘What’s going on around here?’ He damned himself instantly, not only with his general lack of deference but with the combination of his transatlantic accent and his studenty dress.
‘Oh Christ,’ Noah said gloomily, under his breath.
‘Arrest him officer!’ yelled the fast-car man. ‘Go on! Do your duty as a servant of the Crown. By God I’ll see that the law has your balls, you damned Yankee trouble-maker. I’m warning you, I have the power to do it.’ He fumed at some considerable length about his uncle the judge and his brother in the Black Watch.
‘Jesus, Noah, is this guy for real?’ Arnie said incredulously, employing a regrettably audible aside. He had been in the country for only four weeks and could not believe his unattuned ears.
‘Bloody vandal!’ blustered the fast-car man. One of the policemen got out and ordered Arnie rather abruptly to do the same.
‘Pardon me, officer,’ Noah said, intervening with calculated sobriety, ‘but I have a woman here suffering from shock. Your passenger almost knocked her down as a matter of fact. May we get under way, please?’
‘Is this your vehicle, sir?’ said the policeman. Noah sighed.
‘Sure it’s my vehicle,’ he said.
‘Licence, sir?’ said the policeman. Ali began to twitch inwardly in consideration of the time and to steal glances at Noah’s watch as he reached into the glove pocket for his licence. Camilla needed her games togs by three-thirty did she not? She needed them though the heavens fell. Yet here was a pair of gallant strangers being impounded as they rose in her defence. Noah’s watch, being annoyingly digital, was difficult to read upside down, but his licence – international and valid for one year – was mercifully without fault. The policeman after some scrutiny returned it with an approving nod.
‘We shall need a statement from your friend, sir, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Never to worry. We’ll have him down the station for you if you’d like to call by later.’ Noah looked from Ali to Arnie, weighing their respective needs with care.
‘I’ll call by the police station in a half-hour,’ he said to Arnie. Ali watched with growing awkwardness as Arnie stepped undaunted into the police car alongside his expostulating accuser.
‘Whatever are we going to do?’ she said.
‘Nothing,’ Noah said. ‘I guess nobody ever got into real trouble for kicking a car in sneakers. Not that I heard of.’
‘It’s all my fault,’ Ali said. ‘It’s dreadful. I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense, Mrs Bobrow,’ Noah said abruptly. ‘Who was it kicked the car? Just tell me now where we are heading. Your daughter’s school, right?’
‘Oh yes,’ Ali said, uneasily, who hated to give traffic directions for the reason that left and right had never become second nature to her. To know right from left required a quick translation from treble clef through to one’s right thumb on Middle C. A process which she feared would not be quick enough for a person who gave out an impression of decidedly practical competence.
They were late, of course. Not very late, but late enough. Camilla was immediately visible to Ali, seated woefully upon the low brick wall of the school. For Camilla, the relief of seeing her mother brought on instant hysteria. She flew at Ali, breathing misery and hurling wild reproaches.
‘You’re late!’ she snivelled. ‘You promised. Now I’ve missed the kit inspection and I’ve got detention tomorrow and it’s your fault. You promised me, Mummy. You promised!’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ali said repeatedly. ‘Please Camilla, I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it.’ Noah tried at first not to watch but he couldn’t prevent his ears being a party to the protracted exchange. It was all most extraordinary, he thought. An eleven-year-old child who needed parents to run to and fro with sports equipment? Eleven-year-olds, as he recalled from his own sons, were people who earned their own pocket money and went back-packing all summer without writing home. Furthermore, he liked respect for
mothers. Who was Mr Bobrow that he allowed this kind of misconduct to go on? Was there a Mr Bobrow? Here was a woman, weak with shock from a narrowly averted automobile accident, humbling herself before a hysterical child over a sports bag. He leaned over and opened the back door.
‘Jump in little lady,’ he said, with pointed severity. ‘Your mother almost got knocked down.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ali said to him. ‘She’s upset.’ She looked furtively over her shoulder at Camilla hiccuping in the back seat and biting her lip between spasms of mucus.
‘That’s okay,’ Noah said with level restraint. ‘I’ve had kids myself. Fasten the seat belt, Mrs Bobrow.’
‘Sorry,’ Ali said, making a flustered rush upon the object in the hopes of catching it unawares.
‘How about if I make a charge for every time you say you’re sorry?’ Noah said.
‘Sorry,’ Ali said and blushed. Noah shifted into gear with a stifled smile.
‘Where to now?’ he said. ‘Right? Left? Mrs Bobrow, please, do I make a right?’
‘Sorry,’ Ali said.
They lived in the same street, though they had never seen each other before. Engrossed bachelor men, car-borne and coming home late, don’t often notice local mothers and housewives, nor do housewives notice absentee householders. Added to that, Noah lived in a modern architect-designed infill house with almost no windows to the street side and great shop-window panes to the back. That being the way with modern glazing procedures, the windows were either all or nothing. Furthermore, he lived on the first floor, because at ground level his house boasted the only garage in the street. He was, in short, by geography and inclination cut off from the life of the street. He had bought the house nine months before for its proximity to the hospital, its trouble-free plastic drainpipes and its adequate central heating system. He had lived in England for no more than a month when an agent had come up with the house and, since nobody had ever occupied the place before, the transfer had been satisfactorily uncomplicated and speedy. Ali lived, by contrast, in a prettily got-up terraced workman’s cottage with a slightly crumbling stone lintel over a sanded front door, window frames which rattled loudly in a high wind and a structural crack running the length of the back. From her position within it she constituted a magnet for almost every social problem in the neighbourhood.
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