Noah's Ark

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘Isn’t that a little laborious?’ Noah said, being a compulsive time-and-motion man. ‘What’s wrong with the laundromat?’ Ali, knowing something of why he had come, felt reluctantly that she ought to deter him. Such a long time had passed since a thinkable man had courted her affections that the experience was wholly refreshing – especially when one remembered that the last such occasion had been over a year before when a reeking, drunken tramp had singled her out from the congregation of waiting mothers at the school gate one afternoon and had serenaded her with beery arias from Puccini. Yet one could not decently trifle with so imposing a person’s time, especially if that person had the air of one whose time was worth some twenty guineas an hour in consultation fees.

  ‘Camilla pees in her bed every night,’ she said, unambiguously declaring liability. ‘I can’t be carting sheets to the launderette every day.’

  They moved on into the living room and sat down at the table where Ali reached for her cigarettes and lit up.

  ‘People are free to pee in their own beds,’ Noah said. ‘Just so long as they launder their own bedlinen.’ The observation, along with its gloriously unfrightened tone, earned Noah Ali’s sudden undying regard.

  ‘I think that could well be the nicest thing anyone has said to me in ten years,’ she said. ‘Thank you for it.’

  ‘Why do you smoke?’ Noah said in reply. ‘You must be aware that it will almost certainly ruin your health.’ Ali laughed with a jerky, nervous gaiety.

  ‘I smoke to protect my lungs from lead in petrol fumes,’ she said, turning to flick ash into the grate.

  ‘Don’t get smart with me,’ Noah said, rather rudely, she thought, in the circumstances. ‘Lungs are a part of my job.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I smoke because I’m a nervous wreck I expect. Or what do you think? And I worry about my darling daughter rather a lot, as must be perfectly obvious to a person such as yourself. Perhaps you know something of what it feels like to be worried about your children.’

  ‘Sure,’ Noah said. His two sons, from whom he had effectively been estranged for close on sixteen years, were now twenty-two and twenty. After the early phase of weekending with them – teddy bears and toothbrushes in carrier bags from FAO Schwartz – he had put them almost completely out of mind. They were called Frederick and Shane. Frederick after an enthusiasm of Shirley’s for the writings of Engels and Shane after the movie. Noah had insisted upon the latter. He had liked the movie. Moreover, the name had pleased his mother as meaning ‘beautiful’ in Yiddish. Ali would have been considerably deterred at this time both by the ideological labelling of Noah’s firstborn son or by his naming the second after a western, but she did not know. By the time she found out she was already too much disposed in his favour to mind.

  ‘Your daughter is like you,’ Noah was saying. ‘She’s sensitive, she’s artistic; right now she’s a little on edge. Those are not bad things to be.’

  ‘You’re kind to me,’ Ali said, ‘but I can’t say I find it a great comfort – the idea that she’s like me.’

  ‘Why not?’ Noah said sharply. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  Ali shrugged, attempting to cast off that curiously prevalent surfacing of tears. ‘I must admit that I live with the constant feeling that Camilla, who is the best and most beautiful thing about me, has been botched up. By me. Well, by Mervyn and me. Both of us. Do parents need to be so destructive?’

  Noah made a comfortably sceptical face. ‘Among conscientious parents that fantasy is common enough,’ he said, sounding a little textbookish. ‘To imagine that one has power to fashion the product. But no child is clay in the hands, Mrs Bobrow. You are not that omnipotent.’

  ‘Gosh,’ Ali said. ‘Omnipotent. Me?’

  ‘You’re overprotective,’ Noah said, jumping in to dispense advice where he had come to pay court. ‘If you protect a child as much as you do, you necessarily imply that the world is a pretty scary place.’

  ‘And so it is!’ Ali said. ‘For Camilla it is. She’s had a difficult life.’

  ‘Not so it couldn’t have been a whole lot more difficult without a caring mother,’ Noah said.

  Ali was touched by the tribute since, for all that it struck her as uninhibitedly homespun, it was also both sensible and kind. ‘I protect her,’ she said. ‘But who’s to say I overprotect her? That is merely your opinion.’

  ‘Like you almost threw yourself under a car for her yesterday?’ Noah said. ‘Is that in the line of parental obligation?’

  ‘No,’ Ali conceded with a good grace. ‘One could not honestly say that it was.’ She took surprisingly little exception to his preachiness and know-how. As the youngest in a family of three daughters she had always accepted the management of others as the natural order. It came to her still as a great release to have others take charge of her busfare and of her raincoat. The presence of a man who dispensed advice on child-rearing or took over when the neighbours’ children encroached was to her as reassuring as to have one’s father about, to whom one had been able to carry one’s broken dolls. ‘It’s nice of you to concern yourself about me,’ she said. ‘It’s nice of you to care.’

  ‘But I do care,’ Noah said, with a gravity which she found suddenly embarrassing. ‘Mrs Bobrow, I believe that I may already be a little in love with you.’ Ali got up in agitation here, scraping her chair noisily on the floor as she did so. She fidgeted restlessly, attempting to fit her feet this way and that into the sections of pine floorboard, as she sought for words.

  ‘Now look,’ she said. ‘Now listen to me. I know why you say this to me. It’s because I look so much like a Quaker. It’s happened to me before. It means that men can’t fancy me without being in love with me first. But the way a person looks is just an accident, don’t you see? It’s the accident of that person’s physiognomy. I inherited this bleached, pulpit look from my mother. It can be a terrific disadvantage with men. If you don’t believe me I beg you to try watching men approach me in the street. You will be able to bet your life on it they are all coming to ask me the way to the Friends’ Meeting House.’

  Noah, watching her, was suddenly beaming unguarded amusement and delight. ‘Come here,’ he said. Ali was very much aware during that unexpected and unscheduled kissing that Noah had begun to work some highly competent erogenous magic upon the female folds of her groin, like a practised gourmet unleaving an artichoke. His accomplishment there excited her just as once – comparably but less directly – Mervyn had excited her by walking the floor on stilts.

  ‘Which way now to the Friends’ Meeting House?’ Noah said. ‘Would it be altogether gross of me to enquire whether you are adequately protected against conception?’

  ‘I’ve got a coil,’ she said. He followed her up the stairs to her bedroom where he selected the largest from among the dense scatter of cushions upon her bed and wedged it purposefully under her rump. Then he locked her ankles around his neck in a manner which, for all that it provoked a memorable effusion of erotic delight, made alarming demands upon her gymnastic agility.

  ‘I want you to know that I can’t stay like this much longer,’ she said. ‘Not that it isn’t very good news to me of course. It’s just that I’ve never done yoga.’ Noah let down her legs with a nice lack of masculine touchiness.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘straddle me.’

  Afterwards Ali found it always a little compromising to remember that when – while relishing that reassuring amphibian crouch – she had said to him, ‘I’m frog,’ and Noah had responded unexpectedly with a coolly sadistic male wisecrack having to do with dissection, she had promptly been startled into so violent and uncheckable a sexual climax that it had made her appear unambiguously as the conniving handmaid in her own subjection. She wondered occasionally whether this pleasurable quiescence was not highly suspect. Was it a dark secret worm in the female soul, planted by ages of incessant and subtle conquest? Was there a despicable but necessary Sambo lurking in the female psyche? That boat responding always
gaily ‘to the hand expert at sail and oar’; the heart beating always to controlling hands. Why were these the fragments to shore against one’s ruin?

  ‘Frog spawn,’ Ali said happily as she took from him a timely wodge of Kleenex to mop the dribble from her thighs. ‘I like you. Mister, you’ve got style.’

  It was moments later that Noah got asthma. Having turned over to relax face down in Ali’s pile of geriatric feather cushions, he coughed twice and almost ceased to breathe. Ali, who had never seen a person get asthma before, concluded that he was expiring from post-coital heart attack.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said in great distress that a person – such a nice person too – should have cast away his life in the cause of giving her pleasure. But Noah right then sat up, looking a little blue around the mouth and said, in curious staccato rushes between gasps, ‘Bronchial spasm. No need to call on God. Just get rid of all these goddam lethal cushions. All these hairy drapes.’

  Ali’s pretty, cluttered bedroom was one which could have been devised in an asthmatic’s nightmare, but then there was no reason why she should have been expected to maintain an anti-allergic interior in the expectation of Noah’s coming, whose bronchial tubes were frankly at their most comfortable in air-conditioned airport lounges. For him the down cushions on the bed were a gravely bad thing, but they were by no means the end of the matter. Pale grey velvet curtains, thickly lined and never dry-cleaned, hung to the floor, emanating dust which danced in shafts of sunlight (one of which fell now on to Ali’s pale, creamy breasts). A quiet breeze stirred in the grate, gently mingling old soot, brick dust and pigeon feathers with the crumbling particles of dried flowers which had stood for years upon the hearthstone. Among a tumble of woollen blankets which had fallen from the bed lay a handwoven bedcover in tones and textures like an Orkney ram, still sparsely embedded with cat hairs from the last of Ali’s line of marmalade tom cats.

  ‘All this spinster’s junk!’ Noah said rudely, as he got up and made for the door. ‘I’d like to take a bath.’

  In Ali’s bathroom the Ascot water system leaped into action for him with the lighting up of two rows of ancient burners. Water flowed into the tub along its time-worn, lime-stained channel and filled the room with soothing clouds of steam. Crouching in deep waters, Noah breathed as a grateful archaeologist among archaic plumbing. He coughed with a grim regularity as the bronchial spasm began to ease. It was then he noticed on the wall alongside the bath, somewhat pocky with condensation marks, a small aqua-tinted drawing of a woman bathing. It was Ali’s own drawing from Ingres. A woman white-skinned as Ali, he thought, but rather more amply fleshed.

  ‘Alison,’ he called with modestly gathering strength through the half-open door. ‘I want you to do me a favour.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ali said. She got to her feet all too readily, for the sounds of Noah’s throat-clearing were beginning to grind her down.

  ‘Get my inhaler,’ he said. He employed an economical, inventory style of speech to save on breath. ‘Brown bathroom. Top shelf. A plastic device with metal canister fitted in the top. Four inches high. Keys in my pants.’

  For just one stupid moment a vision rose in Ali’s mind of those voluminous regulation bloomers one had worn in the junior school with a pocket to the right of the gusset for one’s hanky and one’s spending money but Noah had meant, of course, his trousers.

  His front door, she found, had three locks topped by a sturdy Chubb which had been recommended to him by the local constabulary as the most effectively burglar-proof. Once inside, a succession of unbecoming veneered flush doors opened to her without a creak over gleaming chevron wood-blocks. Light, which usually emanated from boxy theatrical spots high on the wall, was now almost nonexistent. Ali made her way wide-eyed past two sizeable brown leather armchairs, one of which revolved at the touch upon a shiny chrome swivel and the other – a recliner – reminded her of dentists’ surgeries. She sucked quietly at her teeth as she passed.

  The three locks evidently existed to protect Noah’s recording and sound-transmitting equipment which intruded assertively from an outsize wallhung shelf and looked like an electronically inclined burglar’s delight. His houseplants appeared distinctly carnivorous to her and somewhat overlarge. The inhaler was not in the hemp-coloured bathroom, though the colour allowed for confusion. The brown bathroom, unambiguously brown and dark as a cave, led off Noah’s equally brown bedroom. It had no access at all to natural light. A light switch activated not only light, but electrically ducted air, and the consequent whirring gave the place an aeronautical aura which caused Ali to reach uncomfortably for the inhaler and make off with it in haste to Noah’s front door. Once back in her own little house, she mounted the stairs to the bathroom where Noah smiled at her so benignly, though heaving still through clouds of steam, that her antipathy to his house receded.

  ‘You’re great,’ he said. ‘You’re terrific, Mrs Bobrow. Do you know that? Another time I’d like for us to use my bed, that’s all.’ Ali laughed with relief.

  ‘Don’t call me Mrs Bobrow,’ she said. ‘I’m Ali. Isn’t “Mrs Bobrow” my mother-in-law? I’m really sorry about what happened to your chest.’

  ‘How so?’ Noah said graciously who had so recently been apportioning blame to her. ‘Do you make yourself responsible for my body chemistry?’

  ‘No,’ Ali said. ‘But for my hairy clutter, I suppose I do. I’ll wait for you outside, shall I? I’m squeamish about medications.’

  In the early September sunshine she passed the time coaxing seeds from last year’s honesty pods, exposing the flat, silvery discs within until Noah’s ample shadow crossed her lap. He brought her his shirt-cuffs to fix, dropping his cuff-links into her hands and holding out his wrists to her like a husband of established standing. The gesture, which passed him by, both startled and amused her.

  ‘Are you better?’ she said, pushing the studs into the cuffs which had already lost some of their ugliness.

  ‘Much better,’ he said. ‘And now, regrettably, I must leave you. I have work to do.’

  Ali smiled at him a little sceptically, because the church clock had just struck eleven. ‘You’ll get there in time for the morning coffee break,’ she said.

  ‘Alison, understand that I work,’ Noah said primly. ‘I don’t clock in and out, but baby I work.’

  ‘I know,’ Ali said. ‘But I wonder, will you tell me something before you go? Am I really so much like a spinster as you meant to imply?’

  ‘Pardon me?’ Noah said.

  ‘You said I was like a spinster,’ Ali said. ‘You meant that I was a person to keep mothballs in my linen press. Lavender bags in my underwear drawers, not so?’ Rising within him, Noah found, was a determination, clear and chivalrous, to keep her in fine Swiss underwear as soon as this became decently appropriate. Nothing vulgar, of course; nothing grossly titillating; nothing of the see-through, split-crotch variety. He would keep her, most suitably, in pale satin and lace. Once one had paid for a person’s undergarments then one had earned the greater right and pleasure in removing them. But she had asked him a predictably crackpot question and he was standing unwittingly close to the fence as he made his reply.

  ‘You may be full of tremulous quim introspection,’ he said, ‘but baby, you fuck like the emperor’s whore.’

  Unbeknown to him, Ali’s elderly female neighbour was at that moment airing her half-dozen ageing pugs and suffered not at all from impaired hearing. Relations between this person and the Bobrows had never progressed beyond indirect, tactical warfare, for Mervyn had always excluded the elderly from his schemes of neighbourly interdependence and support. Indeed, he had reported old Margaret within days of his moving in for keeping unlicensed dogs and had subsequently always shied away from her in high-minded loathing. He had even on occasion been known to make time-honoured smutty wisecracks along the lines of unmarried old women and their dubious closeness with male dogs but that was, naturally, before his recent conversion to the causes of the sisterhood. As Ali per
ceived her neighbour’s crimes, they were the familiar crimes of the contemporary urban pariah: she was conspicuously old, poor, lonely and female. In addition, she walked her dogs in the winter months in little tattered plaid coats which was enough to make her, in Mervyn’s eyes, a legitimate figure of scorn.

  At the sound of Noah’s voice issuing forth that unequivocal statement of sexual commitment, the pugs began to bark as if on cue, working themselves to a fever pitch of bronchitic indignation, rooting and scratching at the palings as beasts possessed. Feeling his ankles at risk, Noah jumped. The neighbour’s voice, as she addressed her dogs, quavered feebly over the din with pointed dignity.

  ‘Don’t bark at him, my darlings,’ she said. ‘I assure you he’s not worth it.’ Poor Noah, to be not worth the barking of a half-dozen toothless pugs! Afterwards he always denied that he had straightened his tie in response, but that was exactly what he did. He certainly never got round to finding the utterance funny, but in Ali’s experience men did not readily laugh at things which were undermining to their dignity. This did not surprise her since she had always appreciated the awesome responsibility of being male as a hugely sobering burden. And she saw right from the beginning that Noah carried it well. Better than most. Better than anyone. Only one man in Ali’s past had ever really laughed at himself and that was Thomas Adderley, who was somehow incomparable.

  Five

  Three days later ali raised her voice from the comfortable orthopaedic bed where she lay unclothed in Noah’s bedroom and addressed him over the sound of running water. He stood fully clothed at the hand basin of his brown bathroom-ensuite, still slightly wet around the hair from a recent shower. Ali had never known a person shower as much as Noah; had certainly never known one who did so with the assistance of pilfered plastic canisters of hospital-issue liquid soap. The soap delighted her as a reassuring blemish upon an otherwise overscrupulous character. She had noticed that he had a tendency to turn taps off with his elbows.