Noah's Ark

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘Some eight months after I’d got married I made my way, in a moment of truth, to the passport office without even telling my poor engineer,’ Ali said. ‘When I’d got the documents, I bought me a one-way ticket to Southampton harbour with all the money I’d traded for my years of thrift with the government loan certificates. Then I jumped the country. I wrote to him from the quayside and I never went back. He later married again and did rather well in business, so I heard.’

  ‘You never went home?’ Noah said. ‘But that’s ridiculous. What about your mother?’

  ‘She died,’ Ali said. ‘About six years ago. I never saw her again, but we exchanged some loving letters.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Noah said. ‘This is all perfectly absurd. I never heard such a tale of gross mismanagement.’

  ‘A week after I’d got to England I heard that Mot Adderley had been arrested for suspected running of a politically compromised person over the border in the boot of a car,’ Ali said. ‘The person was William Lister, who had by then become a sort of would-be political dangerman. I still see him from time to time. He came to England. He was English anyway. He writes pamphlets and plots great changes from various bedsitting rooms around London SE9. I believe that he’s entirely freelance, but I may be wrong.’

  ‘And the black?’ Noah said. Ali laughed. ‘He was light brown, remember,’ she said. ‘The Special Branch held him for a month, as I was told. They released him without pressing a charge. I never heard from him directly. Then I met Mervyn Bobrow in a pub, some three weeks later, reading ferocious poetry. Sort of neo-Ted Hughes. I made the mistake of falling for him on the rebound.’

  ‘Take your shoes off,’ Noah said suddenly. ‘And stop talking. I’ve heard as much as I can take.’

  ‘My shoes?’ Ali said. ‘What for?’

  ‘Just to make a start,’ Noah said. ‘I can’t make love to you while you have your clothes on.’ Ali smiled, but rather absently, because even once he had drawn willing adult kisses from her mouth, her mind was turning on the past. In the red vellum Byron Ali remembered that Julie Horowitz had written – in black Quink and in her boldest schoolgirl hand – a most un-Byronic verse of the autograph book genre, which filled her with a sweet sadness and longing.

  Friendship is like china

  Precious, frail and rare.

  When broken it can be mended,

  But the break is always there.

  Sensing Ali’s wandering attention, Noah irritably broke off his kisses.

  ‘God help any dubious poetical rads who try shacking up in my garage,’ he said. ‘I’ll have them evicted. No problem.’

  This bizarre ultimatum was followed within days by the affair of the rabbit and the proposal of marriage.

  Eight

  The ageing lop-eared rabbit belonged to Camilla’s school classroom, but was for a week during the autumn half-term holiday an honoured guest in Ali’s house. It was Camilla’s privilege to play host to the rabbit during which time he experienced an unaccustomed surfeit of freedom. His hutch was kept indoors in case of rain and stood on a spread of borrowed newspapers, taking up a good part of Ali’s living-room floor. Meanwhile the rabbit hopped unhampered about the house spilling his small caper-like droppings into the vegetable rack, where he lurked to nibble at cabbage leaves. Or he fed on dandelions in the garden protected from the neighbour’s dogs by Camilla, who loved to watch him at his endless herbivorous chompings.

  In the evenings Noah would sometimes find Ali in the act of changing the rabbit’s straw which she kept in a bale in the cupboard under her stairs, or – having just finished – crouching on the floor to run her eyes over items of outdated news on the spread news sheets. It puzzled him how avidly she was drawn towards last month’s news, once it could claim the handicap of being spread under a rabbit hutch and strewn with bits of straw. She who had the scantiest interest in current affairs and who took no daily newspaper. She who was always the last to find out if the gas workers were on strike or if the price of postage had gone up. She had recently astonished him by revealing that she had never known the difference between Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. Yet it pleased her to prostrate herself in the cause of last season’s cricket scores or last month’s furniture sales.

  The newspapers had been donated by old Margaret who had revealed herself as a reader of the Daily Telegraph for the sound reason, she said, that it was cheaper than the Guardian, and for the more perplexing reason that it ‘did her good’ she said to find out what ‘those right-wing sods’ who wrote for it were saying about the underdog and the aged poor. Noah threw an envelope file on to her sofa, along with his jacket and his keys. ‘Those newspapers smell,’ he said, as he came to kiss her.

  ‘Do they?’ Ali said, ‘Do they really? If I ever noticed, I don’t any more. I must tell you, Noah, that for a person with respiratory disabilities you have a nose like a bloodhound.’ Noah could always tell when she had been smoking; he could always tell when Margaret had been boiling up offal for the dogs next door.

  ‘For Chrissake, Al,’ he said, ‘the stench is appalling in here. Your place is taking on an odour of mildew and boiled ox-liver. Throw them out. It’s offensive. Have my old papers, baby.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘With pleasure.’ She was not unaware that Noah was increasingly colonising every trivial area of her life these days, bringing in his wake straight roads, benign jurisprudence and general advance. Noah meanwhile, though in general adamantly against domestic pets, enjoyed the rabbit’s temporary sojourn in Ali’s house as further proof of her charmingly indulgent nature which clearly cried out for his care and protection. He was amused by her strenuous and often futile efforts to catch the creature at the end of the day and her tolerance of endless bent plant stems.

  ‘Keep the animal in the hutch, Al,’ he said. ‘It’s a rabbit.’

  ‘Your name will be mud if you say that once more in this house,’ she said. ‘If I tell Camilla you’ll be finished.’ Noah laughed because between himself and Ali’s daughter had sprung up a scion of understanding which no mere rabbit could wither.

  It was at eleven the next evening that Angie, one of Ali’s neighbourhood dependants, called on her with her small son, Matt. Ali had left her attendance upon the rabbit rather late on that occasion. Camilla had gone to bed hours before. Noah had telephoned earlier in the evening to tell her he planned to stay at the hospital to work with Arnie, probably until midnight. Booze fumes wafted on Angie’s breath in the hallway as she stepped noisily over the threshold. In the grip of one hand she held an unstoppered gin bottle, while in the other, manic with nocturnal exhaustion, Matt twitched and strained.

  ‘Join me in a drink, Angel,’ she said heartily, attempting to rise above drunken self-pity; her voice aspired towards a chic Bel-gravian abandon. ‘God, I’ve been so fucking depressed this evening I almost tore old Matt’s hair out.’ She stumbled over the rabbit and let go of Matt. ‘Oh my shitting Christ!’ she said, holding the bottle carefully erect. ‘Is it an ickle bunny rabbit or have I got the DTs?’ Brainy, deserted, saddled with a child of the alien sex, Angie drank. Increasingly now, she drank to escape the wreckage which drink was making of her life.

  ‘It’s a rabbit,’ Ali said wearily. ‘It’s Camilla’s school rabbit. Look, Matt, would you like to hold him? He’s a real old dear. He’s like a cuddly toy.’ The rabbit hopped obligingly, lippity-lop, towards the toes of Matt’s shoes, but Matt, having no familiarity with domestic animals, shrank away with phobic terror.

  ‘Get away from me, you effing rabbit!’ he said. He aimed a wild kick at the rabbit’s head. ‘Don’t you bite me you effing rabbit, or I’ll effing kill you!’ Ali snatched up the creature and stroked its ears.

  ‘He doesn’t bite, Matt. Really,’ she said. ‘He’s gentle as anything.’

  ‘Put him in his cage!’ screamed Matt hysterically. ‘I hate him. He scratches; he’s got fleas; he shouldn’t have ears like that. Why do his ears hang down like that?’

  ‘Oh my Ch
rist!’ Angie drawled contemptuously. ‘The silly chicken-shit bugger is scared! Scared of a rabbit. What bloody next? Jesus, Ali, you know how I prayed for a girl when he was born; how I longed for it. But since he’s a boy, can’t he be a bloody boy?’ She came forward and wept indulgently on Ali’s shoulder. ‘You’re so lucky, Ali, to have Camilla. Oh Christ, can’t he behave like a boy, Ali? Is he a fucking transvestite? I want a man for my son, not a mouse.’

  ‘He’s young,’ Ali said. ‘Leave him. Matt, would you like a biscuit?’

  ‘Do you know what he asked for last birthday?’ Angie persisted. ‘A Sindy doll. A bloody ballerina Sindy doll, no less. One of those plastic post-pubertal jobs with boobs and peroxide hair. Oh Jesus, Ali, it isn’t as though he hasn’t got enough Action Man to last him a bloody lifetime, is it? What the fuck does he need Sindy for?’ She laughed with a vicious, frightening ambivalence. ‘God, Mattie,’ she said. ‘Perhaps Camilla will let Action Man have a spree with her Sindies, eh? Not that they’d get much joy of him, poor little tarts. He’s got no prick. Posturing sod has got no prick! No bloody balls either under all that fancy battledress. But then no more has our Matt. Christ, Ali, one of his testicles hasn’t dropped. It hasn’t dropped! I’m so bloody worried about it, it’s driving me to drink. It’s because of him that I drink, do you know?’

  ‘You told me,’ Ali said. ‘Matt? Wouldn’t you like to lie down? You can have my bed if you like.’ But Matt wasn’t listening to her. Inattention had become his only armour of defence against persistent verbal assault. Having procured himself two cake tins from Ali’s kitchen he was now planning an ambush upon the lop-eared enemy. The cake tins crashed suddenly, like cymbals, against the wire mesh of the hutch, making the two women jump. Angie reached for a bunch of Matt’s hair and tugged it brutally.

  ‘Dummy!’ she said.

  ‘Stop it, Angie!’ Ali yelled, in distress. Matt dashed for Ali’s knees, where he clung for a moment dampening her jeans with his tears. ‘Please, Angie,’ she said. ‘Let him sleep. Let him stay with me tonight. You’ll hate yourself for all this in the morning. It’s his first term at school, isn’t it? How can he cope? How could anyone cope?’ Angie began to snivel, obscenely, like a rival child, her face a mess of swollen eyes and snot.

  ‘You want to take my child,’ she said. ‘Everyone wants to take my child. Even the fucking social workers want to take my child. Matt’s teacher has called in a social worker. Help me, Ali. If you don’t help me to dry out, those buggers will take my child.’ She followed the plea with a good long swig from the bottle, just as Noah let himself in. Having seen Ali’s lights on, he had parked his car and walked round. He shut the front door behind him with a quiet but pointed click. Ali saw him before her visitor did, standing in the hallway with that look, which broadchested men get in cutaway jacket lapels, of being about to expand and burst from their clothes like the Incredible Hulk. Angie turned her attention to him, politely, the recovery of her poise sudden, remarkable and apparently complete.

  ‘Come in, Herr Doktor,’ she said, assuming a jovial Senior Common Room voice. ‘Or is it Herr Professor? Have a drink. I’ve heard everything about you.’ Noah stepped forward, tired and deadpan. He took the bottle from Angie’s hand. Then he checked it to comfirm that its contents were nine-tenths gone and planted it on the bureau.

  ‘Ma’am, it’s late,’ he said. ‘Your child needs his bed and Al needs hers. Goodnight to you.’ Angie, choc-full of drunken gregariousness, was at first rendered speechless with indignation. When she spoke her face was red with annoyance.

  ‘Ali, tell this pompous shithole your boyfriend that when I offer him a drink, he’ll bloody well drink,’ she said. ‘Drink, damn you.’

  ‘Get out,’ Noah said. ‘Get out and make it quick.’

  ‘Are you by any chance addressing me, you stinking jumped-up quack?’ she said. ‘Whose house is this anyway?’

  ‘Get out,’ Noah said. His hand was on the telephone. ‘Get out or I call the police.’

  Ali stood white and trembling in the aftermath. Angie had left, rousing Matt from the rug where he had at last dropped into sleep, against Ali’s protestations.

  ‘She’s different when she isn’t drunk,’ she said. ‘She’s very decent to that little Matt. She spoils him to make it up to him. He has more Scalectrix cars than Hamley’s toyshop. Oh God, one could weep for both of them.’ Noah took up the bottle, walked slowly to the kitchen and poured its dregs into the sink. Then he dropped it into the rubbish bin.

  ‘Weep all you like,’ he said. ‘Weep and let it fester.’

  ‘Don’t put glass in the bin,’ she said, absurdly. ‘I always take it to the bottle bank.’ Noah washed his hands at the sink.

  ‘Forget it,’ he said. He left the bottle where it lay. ‘Just put it all behind you. Step over it. Broken glass; running sores. It’s all you can do.’ It was curious advice coming from a professional healer. He moved slowly towards her. ‘I’m too old to be called your boyfriend. Marry me.’

  ‘I’m married already,’ Ali said with her heart pounding. Noah, to her surprise, suddenly banged on the table with a fist. The pepper mill jumped.

  ‘You’ll divorce this wretched man and you’ll marry me,’ he said. ‘You’ll do something sensible for once in your whole goddam life.’ Ali stood still wondering at the clenched fist on the table and listening to the bumping of her heart against her ribs.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right.’

  ‘Then we’ll get out of this overpopulated bear garden and buy a nice quiet house someplace with large rooms and a decent garden – preferably surrounded by an electrified ten-foot-high fence,’ Noah said.

  ‘Yes,’ Ali said, feeling profound relief as the burden of decision-making fell from her; the Rock of Ages cleft and she would hide in it. Camilla would be overjoyed that she was taking this sensible and also rather palatable course. What was sensible was often also palatable, though in her past this connection might have shocked her.

  ‘I’ll marry you,’ she said. ‘I’d be honoured. That’s if you’re really sure you want me.’ Noah kissed her promptly with such a strong, grateful intensity that the action caused the newly knit seam of her abdomen to stretch alarmingly and then to shrink again.

  ‘I’ve wanted you all my life,’ he said, meaning something more metaphysical than that which usually characterised his thought. ‘You have a gorgeous ass. My wife has a gorgeous ass.’ Noah rejoiced in the terminology of marriage. Husband. Wife. These were words he liked to use, while the same words had always given Ali trouble, but whether for their explicit sexuality or their institutional implication, it was difficult to determine.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he said, taking a section of her haunch in his grasp. ‘Tell me, did a man ever fuck your ass?’

  Ali was no longer unaccustomed to the eclectic adventurism of Noah’s sexual style, but occasionally the exploratory dynamism behind it was at odds with her own nature. For Noah – though he had strong traditional notions of filial loyalty – the art of life in other respects was change. It meant five years here and ten years there. It meant working through the Linguaphone course in French. It meant sabbaticals at Princeton, a constant seeking in consumer magazines after microwave ovens and home calculators. Life was the application of myriad problem-solving methodologies, where for Ali it was a primitive art of survival; a matter of clinging like a limpet to the known rocks until some battering wave prised one loose. Noah had that gift of personal sobriety, moreover, which made the innovative appear always consistent with the status quo – a gift which had proved useful in his professional life. Ali by contrast could often not purchase a toothbrush without making the act appear eccentric.

  ‘I thought it gave people piles,’ she said. ‘I have to warn you that I have always regarded it as a form of perversion.’

  ‘I guess if it doesn’t suit you, you pack it in,’ Noah said. He was nothing if not tolerant. ‘But are you trying to tell me that y
our decadent French nobleman never got up your ass?’

  ‘He was just like any other bourgeois Protestant in bed I suppose,’ Ali said. ‘Come to think of it, I’ve never actually been in bed with a bourgeois Protestant. And I only mentioned the nobleman to shock you.’

  ‘You succeeded,’ Noah said. ‘He shocked me. Almost as much as this Bobrow shocks me. Almost as much as the crazy black in the garage shocks me.’ Ali laughed.

  ‘The Nigger in the Woodpile,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t black, Noah. I keep trying to tell you that.’

  ‘If we could move on,’ Noah said suddenly, as though he were ticking off matters on a committee’s agenda and, having exhausted the business of rectal defloration, was eager to push on to the next item without wasting time upon the subject of Thomas Adderley. ‘When we marry, how do you plan to occupy yourself, Mrs Glazer?’

  ‘Occupy myself?’ Ali said. ‘You mean I have to be productive? I can’t just cook for you and keep the place nice? I wouldn’t open the door to anyone selling poisoned combs and red apples, Noah. Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘You’re artistic,’ Noah said. ‘I want for you to draw. You dissipate your time and energy. If I were to pick you a career, I’d say you’d do a whole lot better at drawing than at all this unpaid social work.’

  ‘Drawing?’ Ali said.

  ‘Sure,’ Noah said. ‘Drawing, painting. All that stuff.’

  ‘Camilla draws well,’ Ali said. ‘Have you noticed? I haven’t done much drawing since I left school.’

  ‘So go back to school,’ Noah said. ‘Marry me and go back to school.’ It struck Ali then that to marry Noah would be very much like going back to school, but she had always done so swimmingly well at school, so much better there than anywhere else, that it gave her a sanguine conviction about her imminent union. It also made her giggle. Ribbons of merit/Adorning the blazer/of the estimable/Mrs Glazer. It was not uncommon for Ali to behave childishly with him, since he was adult enough for both of them.