‘Take care, now,’ Noah said as he delivered her to her door with her dejected little daughter. ‘I’ll come by this evening,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know what happened.’
Three
When noah returned with Arnie that evening, as he had promised, the door was opened to him by Camilla who, having recovered herself, was modelling her hard-earned running shorts.
‘Mother at home?’ he said. Glancing with sideways eyes because the memory of her emotional display that afternoon now embarrassed her, she nodded and turned to show them in. The inviting half-moons of her pre-teen female buttocks protruding from the tacky but well-fitting shorts was not a sight to pass Arnie by and he whistled through his teeth. Camilla’s delicate but undeniable beauty was already proving to be an embarrassment to her on the school bus, where clumsy schoolboys jostled as they passed her and cleared their throats pointedly in the hope of catching her attention. Arnie was in another league, of course. Bathed and shaven, he was now dressed in a snowy-white Indian shirt with a small collarless neckband and immaculate canvas jeans. He presented a less bizarre appearance than that which Ali had encountered earlier. He wore his hair neatly combed though it flounced thickly at the temples like Mark Twain’s. The toenails protruding from his leather sandals were manicured and scrupulously clean.
‘Call me when you’re sixteen, kid,’ he said.
‘Eighteen,’ Noah said firmly. ‘Aren’t you in enough trouble with the law already?’ He stepped into the living room from the tiny hall.
‘Mrs Bobrow?’ he said. ‘Mrs Bobrow?’ Because Ali, although the hour was almost eight, was giving her whole attention to four small girls who were clearly not her own. They appeared to be engaged in amateur theatricals and were at that moment playing dead upon the creamy Spanish rug, breaking out of stiffness into brief giggles occasionally, and scuffing at the rug with their sharp little patent shoes. One of them, a rosy blonde, had taken off her pants and was uninhibitedly airing her pudgy, six-year-old pubes. Noah stood and waited, watching the story unfold. Ali was narrator and also, intermittently, villain and stepmother.
‘Please,’ she said, looking up for a moment, ‘sit down.’
‘Get on with it,’ said the blonde child rudely. Noah sat down warily in one of Ali’s fragile basket chairs which tilted gently leftwards under his weight. He hit his head lightly upon an appliquéd lampshade which hung – for aesthetic reasons – too low over the chair and he steadied it politely with his hand.
‘Hi,’ Arnie said affably, as he stepped with a wide stride over the four recumbent girls.
‘Shut up,’ said the vocal blonde. ‘We’re acting. We’re the Snow Whites and we’re dead.’
‘What, all of you?’ Arnie said, in lively disbelief. ‘You’re all Snow Whites? Isn’t there only one?’
‘We all wanted to be her, so there’s four,’ said the child conclusively. ‘Now shut up.’ Noah observed meanwhile that Ali had about her a trance-like serenity which came sometimes from growing beyond despair. It gave her a touching, frail nobility.
‘And the prince?’ Arnie said, needling persistently. ‘He gets all of you? He gets the four dead girls?’ A small sullen Prince Charming, brutalised by a recent haircut, was lurking in a corner quietly fiddling with his genitals as he straddled Ali’s broomhandle – his makeshift horse – awaiting his cue.
‘Belt up,’ said the blonde. ‘Or bugger off.’ What Noah and Arnie were witnessing was the vestige of an open-house policy established by Mervyn who had declared himself in favour of communal living and neighbourhood support. The nuclear family was an evil, he said, and privacy a bourgeois luxury. The problem for Ali was not that Mervyn had now gone. It had always been that where the nuclear family still held as the norm – and the normal, by definition, stubbornly adhered to such norms – the people who invaded Ali’s life to consume her Nescafe in great quantities and to unload their burdens, or their offspring, were on the whole in no emotional or material position ever to support Ali in their turn. They left her their children to care for while they listened in pubs to songs of protest and left her their marijuana plants to water while they set off in the summer to doss on Greek beaches.
They were the kind of people whom Noah within days had summed up without qualm or conscience as unworthy, leeching drop-outs. The idea that one might be soft enough in the head to run an emotional soup-kitchen from one’s own home was for him beyond belief. He was content to have the state touch him for taxes to support the casualties of urban dislocation. But one’s own living room – that was something else. Social workers and psychiatrists operated from behind the protective barriers of office desks, as was only right and proper.
The house, as it struck Noah, was small, cluttered and distinctly arty. It was furnished in a style which was painstakingly labour-intensive and revealed itself as a pretty, living collage of its occupant’s life’s collectings. She had, against the pale pink-glazed walls, a glass-fronted bureau which she had stripped years before, inch by inch, with a kitchen knife and a deadly chlorinated solvent which Noah later banished from the store cupboard as a substance whose use resulted in lung damage. The bureau back Ali had papered with pastel, hand-blocked wallpaper and she had filled its shelves, not with books, but with scalloped pink and white crockery, which sported a pattern of smocked rustics rolling hoops along winding cart tracks. Large areas of wall were covered with child art presumed to be Camilla’s – in mirror-clip and plexiglass mounts, and with antique silk embroideries. These last were enclosed within old stucco frames whose moulded Grecian acanthus leaves were here and there quietly returning to plaster dust. Ali’s chairs were almost all of latticed cane like the one in which he sat and padded with homemade unbleached calico cushions. In the midst of this cloyingly female house, this tastefully prettified dolls’ house full of china and cane, were five ravaging and ill-mannered children who ought, he believed firmly, to have been at home and in bed.
The story wound to its close. Prince Charming dragged the broom across the rug, and stumbled, descending with sudden viciousness upon the pelvis of the blonde girl.
‘Easy!’ Arnie said, wishing to intercede, but the blonde required no defence.
‘Leave off, Darren!’ she said, getting her knee up. ‘This ain’t the effing Sleeping Beauty. You’re supposed to get our effing apples out.’ One by one he rolled them over and thumped them roughly between the shoulder blades with his stockinged right foot, slamming their ribs into the floorboards.
‘There’s yer apples out,’ he said, waiting for praise. Then he led them, all astride the broomstick, into their own prematurely jaded little once upon a time beyond the Spanish rug. At the far end of the room, which was long and narrow, having once been two, Camilla, who had shut herself off from the scene, was quietly bent over her maths homework, biting her lip with concentration and counting on her fingers.
‘Now then,’ Ali said to her visitors. ‘Please. Tell me what happened.’ More in relish than in sorrow Arnie produced a flamboyant and spirited tale of miscarried justice. He had been held in a police cell for two hours where nobody would take a statement from him, he said, and where the police gave every sign of having been bought off by the driver of the fast car. This had staggered Arnie who had all along considered his extravagantly moustached accuser in the light of a caricatured joke. He was to be charged with wilful damage to property and would appear before a magistrate in due course. Ali was speechless, but neither Noah nor Arnie seemed unduly perturbed.
‘He’ll get his hair cut before the hearing,’ Noah said, ‘He’ll wear a shirt and tie, don’t worry. But whose are all these children, Mrs Bobrow?’ He asked, because Ali had already begun to back away from him towards the kitchen in response to Prince Charming’s brisk demands for food.
‘Neighbours’ children,’ she said. Noah got up, carefully avoiding the lampshade this time, and followed her into the kitchen.
‘Are you a childminder?’ he said.
Ali laughed. ‘Unofficial.
Unregistered and unpaid. I suppose I am for quite a lot of the time. They have to be somewhere don’t they?’
Noah looked at his watch – a thing he did often – and once again disapproved of the hour. ‘Where are the parents?’ he said.
Ali shrugged. ‘I don’t ask.’
‘My Mum said to come here so she could have a bit of peace,’ Prince Charming said, with artless candour. He had paused in the act of drinking the contents of her undiluted orange squash from a plastic bottle. ‘Can we have them frozen chips again?’ he said. ‘Just chips. Not them horrible beefburger things. I didn’t like them things.’ Ali took a large bag of frozen chips from her refrigerator.
‘These?’ she said.
‘Yeah. Them,’ said Prince Charming. ‘And lots of ketchup.’
Ali laid five brightly coloured enamelled child plates upon the marble washstand where she and Camilla usually ate their meals and followed these with five little matching mugs. Noah cast his eyes over the little plates and the mugs, and the flowered Victorian tiles in the washstand which reminded him of ageing public lavatories.
‘Mr Bobrow is evidently as tolerant as you are,’ he said.
‘Mr Bobrow doesn’t live here any more,’ Ali said.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘and no prizes for guessing who the real Snow White is around here. Mrs Bobrow what services do your neighbours render you in return?’
‘Services?’ Ali said. ‘Nobody renders me services. Why should they?’
‘Pardon me,’ Noah said doggedly, ‘but if you make both the agenda and the menu so attractive, don’t you ensure that your neighbours’ children will never go home?’
Feigning gaiety, and with chip bag in hand, Ali stared at him with grudging admiration. ‘You get it in one,’ she said, ‘but you’re making me feel uncomfortable.’ She tried smiling at him, but merely came up against his habitually muted facial response. It disconcerted her that he did not readily smile.
‘Mrs Bobrow,’ he said, ‘what I mean is, when I was a child, it was thought to be bad manners to be around someone else’s place at meal times.’
‘Me too,’ she said. ‘But wasn’t that long ago? And what are the alternatives then? Hateful little maxims? Charity begins at home?’
‘Hateful, but workable,’ Noah said. ‘When do you look after yourself?’ Ali poured cooking oil into a pan and watched it heat in silence.
‘Is there any chance of you getting rid of all these kids so the four of us can eat out someplace?’ he said. ‘Is that a possibility?’
‘It’s an attractive idea,’ Ali said who hadn’t eaten out in donkey’s years, and only partly on account of Mervyn’s habit of quarrelling with waiters. ‘I have to tell you that I don’t have any money.’ Patiently Noah spelled out what he had imagined to be obvious, but she was in some ways so curiously humble.
‘I meant of course to treat you,’ he said. ‘Be my guest.’
‘Gosh,’ Ali said, who wasn’t used to treats. ‘There’s Camilla’s homework of course.’
‘Okay. So we wait,’ Noah said. ‘We are none of us starving.’
‘No,’ Ali said. She threw the chips into the oil and called to the children. ‘How about take-away chips?’ she said, embarrassed by the false enticement in her own voice. ‘You can take them home in paper bags tonight. Wouldn’t that be nice?’
‘Bleeding hell!’ said Prince Charming, grudgingly, who liked the more liberal regime of Ali’s house better than that of his own.
‘Look,’ Ali said, wheedling, trying bribery while Noah looked on in disbelief. ‘You can take the whole frozen bag home as well. Your mother can cook the rest for you tomorrow.’
‘She don’t like to fry stuff,’ said Prince Charming. ‘She don’t like the smell, see.’ Conscious of Noah watching her, Ali drained the chips on kitchen paper with as much resolution as she could sustain and sought out five brown paper bags saved from the greengrocer.
‘I’m going out,’ she said with unprecedented strength. ‘I don’t terribly like the smell either.’ Prince Charming departed in stockinged feet, sullenly clutching his football shoes along with his chips. The girls picked their anoraks off the living-room floor, displaying neither resentment nor gratitude. Not one of them bestirred herself to shut the front door. Arnie handed the blonde her knickers. ‘You left your underpants,’ he said. Ali closed the door behind them. Then she straightened the rug. She watched Noah, at the table where Camilla sat, fastidiously checking a stool for child crumbs before he sat down. His eyes were drawn to Camilla’s notepad where she undertook her preliminary working. She had drawn six buns and one third, and had divided each of the six whole buns laboriously in three. Then she counted the sections.
‘Nineteen thirds,’ she said, wanting confirmation. ‘That’s what six wholes and one third makes.’
‘Right,’ Noah said. ‘But what happens to your method when you get two hundred thirds? Or two thousand, maybe?’
Camilla giggled candidly.
‘I’d draw lots more buns I suppose,’ she said. When Noah laughed, Camilla laughed too. Camilla laughed so seldom these days that Ali stood still to watch her, as if waiting for the glass to crack in the window panes.
Four
Some hours after his evening out with Ali, Noah sat in his rationally appointed town house downing his charcoal filtered bourbon whisky and listening to Maxine Silver through the headphones. He was hoping to induce sleep. His lower back was aching slightly from the restaurant chair but the major impediment to sleep was Ali. Sexual desire had come upon him clear and sudden when she had smiled at him unexpectedly over a cheap cut-glass table lantern in the local Indian restaurant. When, on parting, she had stretched out her right arm to thank him and had lingered gratefully as she touched his sleeve with that long white hand with the lesions, an inundation of tenderness had in a moment turned that desire to something close to love.
He had felt strongly tempted to draw her aside and proposition her but had thought it impolitic. Right now it ruffled him to the point of irritability, almost, to find himself precipitously in love with a woman so damned other-worldly that a sexual proposition would in all likelihood constitute an emotional assault. The thing was unreal, just as the woman was unreal; a selfless good fairy endowed with an incongruously sexy, curving mouth, living among flowering teacups and creaking chairs. For all he knew she kept a pack of Tarot cards in the bureau drawer. Furthermore, she smoked. And when he had first suggested that they eat out she had looked so startled, almost as though, had he suggested instead that she spend the evening at home turning the collars of all his old shirts, she might have considered it more appropriate.
Once again he discovered a piece of his childhood returning to him as he thought about her. ‘Piano fingers’ was what his mother had called people with hands like hers. Her daughter’s too. He had been moved by an impractical excess of maternal devotion in her. She and the child were so alike in spirit that they appeared to breathe in unison. He had watched them closely as painful small waves of apprehensiveness had crossed and recrossed between them during the evening. The woman was in a state of anxiety over that pretty, highly strung child, whose existence was tapping her emotional energy. This was plainly not necessary. He needed to make her see that it was not necessary. He was resolved.
Procrastination had never featured among Noah’s personal baggage. He rose at eight the following morning, as he always did, in spite of his late night, drank coffee as he ran his eye over the home and foreign news, and was at Ali’s front door by nine-thirty, sluiced and shaven, cuff-links already in position and bearing a small gift of sweetpeas. He had not meant to give her sweetpeas, but flowerstalls, he found, were not well represented in the city and sweetpeas were all he had been able to find. He had bought them reluctantly from outside a greengrocer’s shop where they had sat in a zinc bucket between lettuces and cauliflowers, but they hit the mark with Ali. The gift struck her as tender and spontaneous.
Having been laundering Camilla’s sheets, s
he first removed her rubber household gloves to receive them and, pulling her wrap-over dressing gown closer against her chest, asked him to come in. She turned her calligrapher’s pens out of the marmalade jar and replaced it on the bureau filled with water for the sweetpeas whose varying shades of pink and blue fused in flowering profusion with the bureau’s papered backdrop like a heady Matisse.
‘There,’ she said with elation, ‘I love them! Don’t you just love them?’ Noah merely said, rather stiffly, that he had wanted to thank her for ‘a beautiful evening’ and that he hoped he was not intruding coming, like this, so early, but that he was on his way to ‘the unit’ as he called it, and had wanted to come by before the routine of the day took him over. On the marble-topped wash-stand, he saw, with a curious, inexplicable pleasure, that there lay now the crumbs of her breakfast toast and the shell of her boiled egg. Ali was amused by what struck her as an excess of propriety. She smiled at him warmly.
‘I’m very glad to see you,’ she said. ‘And I don’t mind at all about it being so early, because what difference should it make to me? I’ve never slept in curlers.’ Her hair, he saw, had been bundled up and fixed hurriedly with a child’s ornamental plastic clasp, presumably her daughter’s. For Noah her head and neck were thereby endowed with the distinctly provocative look of a woman surprised in the bath tub.
‘Have some coffee with me,’ she said.
He watched her with a critical fascination, undimmed by love, as she prepared some ominously insipid-looking instant coffee, casting one meagre concave teaspoonful into each of two pink and white cups. The kettle gave her some trouble, he noted, as she struggled to wedge it in under the tap because the sink was bulging with steeping bedsheets. These she wrung out, as the kettle boiled, into tight twisted coils like a peasant washerwoman.
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