Noah's Ark

by Barbara Trapido

  Sincerely,

  Mother

  Ali wrestled with an immediate and perverse desire to consign the fingertip towels as floor-cloths for the kitchen. It had never ceased to jar with her that this remote and indiscriminate employer of exclamatory punctuation marks, this obsequious and doting propagandist for the male sex, should presume to address herself to Ali as ‘Mother’. A title earned by nurture, surely, not by contract? It belonged, in Ali’s view, to that most dear and quite other person who had quietly died fifteen years before in her daughter’s absence. A cloying usurper, Ali thought, a peddlar of undermining, homespun absurdities, and yet without her there would be no Noah. As to ‘the Brainbox’, whom Ali had never met, her feelings towards this young person were strongly antipathetic.

  She supposed, looking back, that Camilla had been a ‘brainbox’ too, where Hattie and Daniel were characterised by a remarkable lack of academic precociousness on all fronts. She did not like to think that Camilla’s brains could have come from Mervyn Bobrow. Nor did she care for the attendant possibility that Mervyn was actually brighter than Noah, since Noah was so much nicer. Noah had once remarked to her that since, genetically speaking, the species was constantly driven towards the norm, exceptionally bright people tended to produce slightly less bright children. Ali had gained comfort from this snippet of miscellaneous knowledge, and had inverted it, for her own convenience in the case of the Brainbox, to imply that he derived his prodigious wits from maternal grandmother’s manifest deficiency in this area.

  The letter was from Noah’s son Shane. It had overtaken the elder Mrs Glazer’s parcel en route and announced the birth of a baby daughter weighing seven pounds and five ounces. Under the announcement, in a smug corollary, Mrs Shane Glazer had written ‘Born naturally and effortlessly’. Ali handed the card to Mrs Gaitskell.

  ‘Well I’m blowed,’ she said. ‘Effortlessly was it?’

  ‘If it was “natural” then it wouldn’t have been “effortless”,’ Ali said. ‘Effortless is only if somebody anaesthetises you and hacks you open.’ Mrs Gaitskell cackled knowingly.

  ‘All I know is I used to have ’em so bloody quick the midwife never could get to me on time,’ she said. ‘It’s always been the same in our family. Our Mum were just the same. The last one come so bloody quick she were all tore up before the doctor come, poor soul. She weren’t never the same after. One passage she had for the lot, ever after.’ Ali gorged on the horror of it. There was nobody like Mrs Gaitskell for putting into sobering perspective the woes of one’s own loins. Right now this macabre intelligence served to comfort Ali for the hollow yearning within her female parts.

  ‘Still I’ve always loved the kiddies,’ Mrs Gaitskell said warmly. She drew a glacier mint from her handbag and left it on the table for Daniel. Then she encased her perm in a rainproof rectangle of concertinaed plastic which she tied firmly under the chin and stepped hallwards to take her leave.

  ‘Oh my Gawd!’ she said suddenly. ‘It’s him out there. The one that burns the saucepans!’ Through glazed panels alongside Ali’s front door she had seen the head and shoulders of William Lister, wearing his house upon his back like a snail. ‘Him that has all them blessed postcards.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Ali said. ‘Mrs Gaitskell, what shall I do?’ Mrs Gaitskell had no doubts. ‘Start with him as you mean to go on,’ she said firmly. ‘Get rid of him, Ali.’

  Thirteen

  William’s arrival had coincided with Hattie’s. Ali’s younger daughter burst rudely past him into the hall, clawing at her mother and calling out urgently, ‘Mummy can I have disco roller-skates? Rebecca’s got disco roller-skates. Please, Mummy. They’re so great! Becca’s only cost twenty-five pounds. Say yes, Mummy. Go on – please. Say yes!’ It was an invariable rule that one’s children showed up as grasping materialists in William Lister’s company. Ali had ceased to find it even mildly embarrassing. She stepped out into the porch, wearing Hattie like a ball and chain around her knees.

  ‘Hello, William,’ she said. Rebecca’s mother, Marion, having dropped Hattie, had meanwhile executed a confident three-point turn in the drive in her gleaming Peugeot and now paused to exchange brief, parting pleasantries with Ali through the rain. At the back window were visible a sea of small siblings and friends jostling to write their names in the steam of the window panes.

  ‘Many thanks!’ Ali called out. She was fond of Marion and in general enjoyed her brief, ironic exchanges with this rather highbrow mother sunk good-humouredly in the business of child-rearing.

  ‘Watch her head!’ Marion called back over the sound of the engine and the falling rain. ‘Mine have all got head-lice.’ Louse-talk was a currently fashionable form of taboo-breaking among certain subsections of the professional middle class, Ali had decided. One-upmanship over head-lice was not a form of competitive behaviour indulged in by the humbler parents of her acquaintance. It was peculiar to the graduate group.

  ‘Hattie’s had them twice already,’ she said, wishing to hold her own, ‘don’t worry.’

  ‘Mine have them all the time,’ Marion yelled extravagantly. ‘They reek constantly of disinfectant. We’ve just done the steel comb and cattle-dip routine for the umpteenth time. Louse corpses dropping in their hundreds all over the breakfast table.’ Ali laughed. She conceded Marion the victory.

  ‘What next?’ she said, feigning despair.

  ‘Anal worms,’ Marion called back triumphantly as she shifted into gear. ‘My lot have had those too.’

  William was encased from head to foot in orange waterproof overalls. He was dripping rain in copious runnels into the door mat, and on to his sodden, ill-fitting shoes.

  ‘Is he staying here?’ Hattie said, with a marked and audible lack of enthusiam. ‘Why can’t he stay somewhere else?’

  Ali squirmed but uttered no reproof. She could never find it in her to discourage in Hattie that admirable unblinking straight-ness in handling people which Noah – with greater tact admittedly – exhibited also. Hattie was not gorged on guilt. Where Ali had sacrificed all her childhood pocket money to the blind box, Hattie had always been of the opinion that the poor should ‘go to the bank’ for money. She spent her pocket money on trinkets and sweets. She was firmly of the opinion that two Remembrance Day poppies got cut-price at a half-pence each made better sense than one got for a round ten pence. She always giggled through prayers and had spread the belief throughout the junior school that the vicar kept a half-jack of whisky in the folds of his cassock. For these and other bold attributes Hattie’s company was sought unceasingly by great numbers of admiring little girls.

  ‘I’m not stopping,’ William said, pointedly rubbing his hip joint and limping into the hall. ‘I am perfectly willing to sleep under the stars tonight.’ Sharply he drew in breath and rubbed again at his hip joint. ‘Sciatica,’ he said in a whisper. ‘Just a touch of sciatica – it’s nothing.’

  ‘Come in,’ Ali said. ‘Take your wet things off. Let’s have some tea.’ And she led the way to the kitchen.

  William was ascetic. He was what Ali’s husband called an ‘ascetic pragmatist’. He was committed to poverty, Noah said, because he had no money and to chastity because he had no women. Since life had given him lots of practice, he had long been in the business of elevating these potential disadvantages to the status of a creed. On his lapel he wore a badge stamped ‘Pedal Power’ because he had no motor car and on his thrifty, recycled envelopes he pasted stickers which exhorted recipients to ‘Conserve Trees’. Noah, as the careful nurturer of nine espaliered plum trees, chose to consider this particular exhortation a gross impertinence, but Ali and Noah Glazer were neither of them people whose opinions William took into account. He would not in good conscience approve of either. Ali had had three marriages and wore expensive silk shirts. Decadence was her hallmark. Besides, once long ago in another country she had been the cause of his humiliation. She had lain on the grass under him at a galling initiation rite with every sign of self-possession, wholly indiffere
nt to his agony and had connived thereafter with the enemy. William was endowed with an excellent memory and was a careful harbourer of grievance.

  He had had a difficult adolescence. Having accompanied his parents from Sheffield to South Africa at the age of twelve he had shown, at nineteen, no sign of shedding his incongruous, home-boy style. In the context he wore his shorts always too long. He committed the local outrage of wearing his sandals with socks. On holidays, he wore canvas exercise shoes into the sea. In a land of plenty his mother skimped on butter. The violent sun still burned his neck bright turkey-red and provoked swelling half-moons of sweat which drenched the underarm seams of his shirts. His gentle post-war world of watery Bovril and rationed sugar-lumps, of chlorinated indoor swimming pools and weekly baths, was always too much with him. He was no match for the indolent, brawny male philistines who roared their convertible sports cars into the student car park, or hurled their grass-stained rugger shorts at domestic servants for washing. After the ordeal of his high school days, which he had spent dodging bugle practice in the cadet corps, he had been drawn to Ali and to Thomas Adderley by a sound instinct for nosing out in them that touch of gentle aberration which made them less terrible than the rest. A similar sense of his own otherness had already drawn him into a dangerous flirtation with revolutionary politics. Now, twenty years later, as he watched Ali pour tea for him at the kitchen workboard, he regarded her with all the patronising contempt which he reserved for those of her kind who had never achieved the distinction of having had their passports impounded by the state police. There was precious little point in attempting to discuss his political work with her, he thought, since the woman was too busy fretting about her daughter’s guitar practice and her son’s lost tooth. William winced on his tea.

  ‘Have you burned your mouth?’ Ali asked solicitously, but William shook his head.

  ‘Sciatica,’ he said hoarsely and for the third time. ‘I’ll be off in just a minute.’

  ‘Stay!’ Ali cried out, rising in her chair ‘William, stay. It’s raining.’ On the noticeboard behind him she was half aware of the postcard which Noah had placed there to warn against compassion. ‘Noah is out of town for six days,’ she said, making him a gift of her only defence against his presence. ‘Why not stay till then?’ She had offered the fact as a kindness, knowing that Noah made him uneasy. He had got off on the wrong foot with Noah from the start, poor man, Ali thought. First of all there had been that embarrassing introductory clanger when William had taken a high-minded stand against ‘national stereotyping’; when Noah had come home to find a lean and hungry stranger at his kitchen table sitting before a pile of pamphlet literature. First Noah had kissed his wife.

  ‘I’m late,’ he said, ‘I have had my time wasted for me by a boring, long-winded Canadian.’ The stranger had bounced into action.

  ‘Does it signify that this boring, long-winded person was Canadian?’ he said sharply. ‘Or merely that he was boring? What I mean is, why indulge in national stereotyping?’

  Noah had stared at William for long enough to notice that the effort of making his point had turned him a deep brick-red.

  ‘It signifies only in that I reserve the right to display what bigotry I choose in my own house, young man,’ Noah said. William had chalked up Ali’s husband, right then, as an enemy of ‘The Struggle’, and had had no cause since then to change his assessment.

  Arnie came early while the family was at supper. He was bearing a gift of duty-free brandy for Ali and communed with her in his usual code.

  ‘Croak,’ he said. ‘Croak, croak.’

  ‘What did I tell you?’ she said smugly. ‘Sit down, Arnie. I’ll get you a plate.’ He bent to kiss her cheek and sat down.

  ‘I just got a call,’ he said. To Ali’s ears, the phrase still conjured implications of the priesthood, or of the voice of God booming in the temple, but it no longer caused her actual misunderstanding.

  ‘A call?’ she said. ‘From whom?’

  ‘California,’ he said. ‘I got the job.’

  ‘Good God, that’s very quick. Well done, Arnie! Oh very well done. How deservedly rich and great you will be.’ She got up to fetch him a plate and cutlery. ‘I’ll miss you,’ she said. Arnie placed the brandy on the table where William Lister’s presence had resulted in the eating being neither convivial nor brisk.

  ‘This is for the kids,’ he said, hoping to stir a little controversy in the gloom. William had, he noticed to his amusement, on this occasion consented to eat the Glazers’ food, but appeared to be much against both fibre and roughage. He had made a neat pile of tomato skins and mushroom stalks on the edge of his plate and had banked up these rejects with spoonfuls of brown rice which had also been pushed to one side. Hattie in her turn was forking about in her portion to remove small, unidentifiable orangey particles which she was dumping on her mother’s plate. Arnie sat down to receive his food.

  ‘Thanks, Al,’ he said.

  ‘You won’t like it,’ Hattie said. She moved over with alacrity to occupy his knee. In her eagerness to claim this territory before her brother she succeeded now, as always, in leaving her thumb prints all over his lenses, but Arnie bore it with laudable good humour. The fog having uncomfortably impeded his vision, he took off his glasses and laid them on the table. They were new and rather stylish glasses, recently made up for him in Knightsbridge.

  ‘You look funny without your glasses,’ Hattie said.

  ‘What’s that stuff you’re picking out of your stew, huh?’ Arnie retorted. ‘Chewing gum?’

  ‘Stoo,’ Hattie said, taking a well-worn giggly liberty with his accent. ‘You shouldn’t say “stoo”. You should say “stew”. It’s oranges. From a tin. He put them in. They’re disgusting. Yuck.’

  ‘Oranges?’ Arnie said.

  ‘From a tin,’ Hattie said triumphantly.

  ‘Eat,’ Ali said. A painful crimson flush had begun to steal up William’s neck toward his ears and temples. William, having wished to buy himself the right to eat by contributing a touch of culinary originality to Mrs Gaitskell’s hotpot, had without consultation tipped in a tin of mandarin oranges drawn from his own supplies. Then he had waited eagerly for praise, but his talents had once again been cast before swine.

  ‘Oranges!’ Arnie repeated mirthfully. ‘Oh that’s neat, William. That’s real neat.’ He put a hand on William’s shoulder who shook him off in scorn. Only Ali among the rest ate without reserve. Having reached that stage, after induction by motherhood, where she could eat almost anything, she could now eat the children’s soft-boiled eggs gone cold in the shell; she could eat the crusts of yesterday’s toast, she could eat abandoned infant fish fingers impregnated with tomato ketchup. In the house of old Margaret she could gulp down tepid tea and condensed milk in a tin mug lined with fine green mould and topped with a sprinkling of dog hairs.

  ‘It’s really rather good, William,’ she said but altogether without heart. It was of course godawful. An unhappy marriage of Mrs Gaitskell’s enthusiasm for cornflour and William’s cloying fruit syrup – but as horrors went it was small beer in a day which had begun in airy splendour with Mot Adderley and had ended now with William Lister. It was only food. She badly needed Noah, but Noah was not there. Her ear lobes cried out for aspirin and warm salt water.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ she said. ‘We’ll forget the washing-up.’ She poured herself a measure of Arnie’s brandy and called the children.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’re all going to bed.’

  Fourteen

  Ali woke, flanked by the sleeping children. Her head was wedged in a crevice between two pillows which Hattie and Daniel had determinedly expropriated in sleep. Daniel’s bear was under her elbow. Her first conscious emotion was a quiet pain of loss. Thomas’s aeroplane would by now be refuelling in Nairobi. An odour of scorched chillies and burned dripping made its way up the stairwell from the kitchen where William Lister was contriving his breakfast eggs. For the next six days, the kitchen would
no longer be her own. Ali winced. The man’s food habits alternated between unbridgeable modes of Transport Caff and Instant Exotic, and yet each morning these two opposing traditions clashed violently in the curried scrambled eggs.

  There had been no post delivered that morning, but on the doormat alongside the bulky Times of Saturday lay a crumpled note from Arnie. It had been scribbled in the small hours on the back of a Pan Am ticket holder and had been pushed through the letter box from without.

  ‘I locked myself out,’ it read. ‘I mean to sleep in your garage. Arnie.’

  The note having warmed her spirit, Ali repaired at once to the attic study where her husband kept a small plug-in coffee machine and the last of his two French railway cups on a small tin tray. It was Noah’s habit to punctuate his working sessions with strong black coffee and occasionally to lure his wife up into joining him there away from the demands of the children. Ali now made two cups of coffee and, gliding past William at the hob with the briefest of greetings, she quickly unlocked the interior door to the garage. To lurk in the garage, drinking coffee and ganging up with Arnie, offered compensation for Friday’s deprivation and promised all the illicit gratification of a boarding-school midnight feast.

  Arnie was stretched shirtless along the back seat of the car. His linen jacket was parcelled into a bunch under his head. On the near arm Ali noticed tenderly that the hair which sprouted from the mole on his bicep had at some time turned to grey. He stirred gently with the opening of the door and began to raise himself on to his elbows. Focusing myopically in slight disbelief, he stared at Ali with the tray. Then he reached for his glasses and put them on.