Noah's Ark

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘D’you see anyone last week?’ he said. Ali considered the matter.

  ‘A clutch of largely unwelcome callers,’ she said lightly. ‘William came. He spent a night here. So much for my predictions. Noah, it was raining cats and dogs when he came. Really, I couldn’t turn him away.’

  ‘Who else?’ Noah said.

  ‘Mervyn,’ she said. ‘The word must have gone out that you were in transit, I reckon. He came to harangue me about his drinkfest. Anyway you missed it. So did I. I passed the thing up. Noah, do you not find it increasingly difficult to believe that I ever shared a roof with that person, let alone a bed?’ Noah’s heart bounced under her hand, but the warning passed her by.

  ‘Who else?’ he said with a perplexing tenacity.

  ‘Arnie was here for a day or two,’ Ali said. ‘His house was being fumigated. He appeared just in time to lift the gloom over the supper table which William’s presence had induced. The children will be glad to see you, Noah. Daniel bashed out a tooth but he’s fine. Hattie is anticipating that you will collect her from school today. That’s if you can make it.’

  ‘Thomas Adderley?’ Noah said. ‘Did you see Thomas Adder-ley?’ Ali removed her hand smartly from his shirt.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I had coffee with him. Last Friday. Noah, you must understand that it was wholly innocuous.’

  ‘Funny that it slipped your mind,’ he said.

  ‘I had coffee with him,’ she said. ‘As I told you, it was innocuous.’

  ‘Did you go to bed with him?’ Noah said. The question was not one to invite flannel. One could but answer to it ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

  ‘Strictly speaking, yes,’ she said. ‘I did. But Noah, please, it was innocuous. It wasn’t at all what you think.’ Even as she said it the defence struck her as utterly ludicrous. To be ‘naked in bed’ as it were and to ‘mean no harm’. ‘What I mean is not so much that it was innocuous, I suppose, as that it was absurdly brief and sexually wholly unsuccessful. It taught me that sex is infinitely better at home. I think that it also taught me to put away my past. I’m truly sorry, Noah, but it’s over. I can only hope that you will believe me.’

  ‘Get out of my room,’ Noah said.

  ‘Please,’ Ali said. ‘I want to try and explain the thing to you. It was something I had to do. It had to do with making the past lie down.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it,’ Noah said.

  ‘I love you,’ Ali said. ‘I think that I know that more certainly than before.’

  ‘I have asked you to get out of my room,’ Noah said. Ali made a move but she turned towards him hopefully in the doorway.

  ‘I wish that you would at least tell me to “shift my ass”,’ she said. ‘Then it wouldn’t feel so terrible.’

  ‘Alison,’ Noah said ominously, ‘will you get the hell out of my room?’

  Seventeen

  At three o’clock Noah got up and shaved. Shaving was not a thing he cared to undertake in aeroplane toilets and he had therefore delayed the exercise until he had reached his own bathroom. Before he drove to collect his daughter from school he delivered to Ali, with a pointed glance and murderous implication, one small tray complete with used dark green coffee cups which he had lifted unwashed from the floor of the garage. It seemed manifestly obvious to him that, twenty years on, Mot Adderley still got his rocks off inhabiting garages.

  Being by nature a punctual person, he arrived comfortably in time to hear the school’s dismissal bell, and was consequently surprised to find that Hattie was not disgorged among the chattering swell into the entrance hall. In Hattie’s almost empty classroom he encountered a cleaning woman, scraping crushed wax crayons from the floor with a palette knife, who grumbled quietly, to nobody in particular, that it made you wonder what sort of homes the children came from. Hattie’s teacher emerged, oblivious, from a cupboard with a box of tangled embroidery threads and a pile of Binca cloth upon which the children had begun, but never completed, some ham-fisted cross-stitch. She put down the box when she saw Noah and tripped jauntily towards him through the wax crayons in flat, gold dancing pumps. She flashed him a wide, painted smile calculated to charm the male of the species.

  ‘Hello there, Dr Glazer!’ she sang out.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Noah said stiffly. He had very little time for this particular young woman whose educational methods had always seemed to him both complacent and diffuse and whose dress offended his expectations of sobriety in the profession. To have an aspirant siren in striped clown’s overalls bear down upon him with all the daunting force of her youthful charm made him wish his daughter was educated by nuns. Though the classroom was too advanced to be equipped with an old-fashioned blackboard, he could see that on the pinboard alongside his elbow, where there was displayed a necklace made by the children of unwashed foil milk bottle-tops interspersed with cotton reels, she had twice written the caption ‘Our Jewellery’ with the third ‘e’ omitted.

  ‘Pardon me,’ Noah said compulsively, and he tapped with his fingernails at the pinboard. ‘But aren’t we in England? It’s my belief that on this side of the Atlantic jewellery has three e’s.’ In response the pedagogue bestowed upon him a patronizing glance and chuckled prettily.

  ‘You will find Harriet in the library,’ she said. ‘I expect she hasn’t heard the bell. I sent a group of them to the library to practise their “take-away”. Quite a few of them are wobbly on “take-away”.’

  ‘Oh really?’ Noah said, but she appeared armourplated against his sarcasm.

  ‘I sent them off to play shop,’ she said. ‘Giving the right change can be a great help with “take-away”.’

  ‘How about if they give the wrong change?’ Noah said. ‘If all of them are wobbly, who’s to know the difference?’ To Noah the knowledge that his daughter had spent the afternoon playing shop with empty custard cartons, coming, as it did, hard upon the knowledge of his wife’s infidelity, induced in him a mildly punitive instinct against the female sex which was not altogether surprising in a person nurtured in the lap of Mrs Glazer the Elder. He believed that his only daughter wanted taking in hand – a requirement which neither her mother nor this present devotee of current educational fad was capable of meeting. Right now, she clearly also wanted lines of subtraction sums in straight rows.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he said stiffly, ‘as I understand it you regard any form of systematic or rigorous instruction as an archaic form of oppression.’ Hattie’s teacher opened her mouth very wide for a moment which gave her the look of a glossy tropical fish.

  ‘If you mean that we leave the children free to discover their own levels and interests,’ she said, ‘then I’m proud to say it’s true.’

  ‘Forget it,’ Noah said. He moved off in haste lest she foist upon him what always fell upon his ears as inexplicable, contemporary jabberwocky. As he made his way acrosss the courtyard, Hattie’s teacher gazed pityingly after him, not only for his unfashionable views, but also for his lack of clandestine decency in venturing to air them so readily in public. Taking up her basket, she made for the staffroom, in order to portray his dated heresies for the amusement of her colleagues.

  Hattie’s teacher had been right about one thing and one only, Noah decided, as he approached the library. The remedial subtractors had not heard the bell. The volume of noise emanating from that traditional quarter of silence was enough to drown out the impact of all extraneous clamour. The ‘take-away’ scheme, begun in good faith but without adult supervision, had early on disintegrated into chaos as each of the more strident among the youthful traders had refused in turn to relinquish the coveted post of shopkeeper to the concept of rotation without armed struggle. Cartons and cardboard money rained through the air amid acrimonious accusation. Since some children had begun to raid the library shelves for missiles, a significant variety of child literature was now displayed upon the floor. It gave Noah no surprise to detect the voice of his own little daughter as the loudest among the party nor that, upon entering, he found h
er covetously guarding what remained of the funds. But Hattie was not only dominant and strong-willed. Drunk as she was with her own power, she was also warm-hearted and affectionate. At the sight of him she immediately abandoned the proceeds of commerce and ran forward to embrace him warmly.

  ‘Daddy!’ she said. ‘My Daddy!’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ Noah said. He did not drive her directly home, but drove her westwards into the city. Shrewdly playing Ali’s game of stolen treats in cafes with a vengeance, he ensconced her in a tall cafe chair and gave her the menu. As he sipped at a small, sugarless espresso, he watched his pretty, ebullient daughter plough with relish through a monstrous wedge of chocolate gateau embellished with whipped cream. He watched her wash it down with banana milkshake from a tall conical glass.

  ‘Is that nice?’ he said. Hattie nodded and swallowed.

  ‘Can I have some more?’ she said.

  ‘Sure,’ Noah said. He raised his hand for the waitress. ‘Hat,’ he said. ‘How about if I were to send you to a real good school? Would you like that, sweetiepie?’

  ‘Do you mean a school that calls homework “prep”?’ Hattie said with an eagerness which took him by surprise. ‘Do you mean a posh school?’ Hattie was at that moment in a frame of mind to capitulate on all things ‘posh’. During her father’s most recent absence, she and her friend Rebecca had been teased and mimicked outside the sweet shop by a group of older boys who had called them ‘posh’. It had occurred to Hattie for the first time that there were those in this life for whom she and Rebecca would always be perceived and envied as being a cut above. Besides, in the midst of defending themselves, they had discovered an unexpected pleasure in pulling rank. This recent conversion had been given strength by a change in reading matter. Hattie had moved on from pony books to boarding-school stories in which gabardine raincoats and lacrosse sticks were offered as items of glamour to be striven for by all little girls of sound mind.

  ‘Do you mean I can go to a school with a real uniform?’ she said. Her dark eyes shone with excitement. ‘Oh please, Daddy,’ she said. ‘Oh please!’ Reaching out to him in gratitude, she besmirched his jacket lapel with whipped banana and chocolate flake, but Noah was content to let it pass. Where he had expected considerable resistance, there had been none at all. The thing had been a pushover. And the knowledge that his wife would have strong moral objections to the scheme came to him right then as an added source of satisfaction.

  ‘I bought you a beautiful book, Hat,’ he said. ‘An illustrated version of the Iliad. You’ve heard of Homer, have you?’

  ‘You mean Oklahoma?’ Hattie said irrepressibly. ‘Yes, of course I’ve heard of it.’ Noah laughed.

  ‘And Daddy,’ Hattie said. ‘When I go to my new school, can I have a new pencil case?’

  ‘Sure,’ Noah said.

  ‘And a kitten?’ Hattie said, pushing her luck. ‘No,’ Noah said. ‘Not a kitten.’

  In making the proposal a reality, Noah wasted no time. By noon of the following day he had made tours of inspection round three imposing assembly halls and had interviewed the headmistresses of three private girls’ schools in the county environs. His favourite among the heads wore an oatmeal tweed suit with lapel pin and sturdy ‘Style-Eeze’. Her hair she wore like the Queen’s. The girls sat twice-yearly examinations in June and November, she said, and were required among other things to take Latin, Needlework and Theology. Regulation felt hats were compulsory in the winter months, and cotton hats in the summer – both complete with grosgrain hat bands in the ‘house’ colours. Earrings were not permitted in any form, and no exceptions were made even for what she called the ‘foreign gels’. By teatime Noah had gratefully submitted the registration fee and Hattie was over the moon. She could hardly contain her impatience to go out and buy her hockey boots. The thing was a fait accompli.

  It was not possible for Ali to argue the issue effectively with Noah since communication had been reduced on his part to an offensively polite minimum, where on hers it had moved from initial attempts at ingratiating supplications towards such curt, barbed sniping as his markedly scarce presence in the house would allow. Even at bedtime there had been precious little scope, since Noah had transferred his hypoallergenic pillow and his current bedside matter to his study, where he had slept alone since his return. He had aborted all attempts she had made to raise the subject of her lapse in constancy by repeating firmly that he did not want to hear it, and by leaving the room on the pretext of being ‘busy’.

  Ali began irritably to resent Noah’s incessant industry as a male ploy designed to confer status. There was no way in which a man could have position these days without his being in command of a desk top and two telephones, she thought. The trick was to board aeroplanes often enough and to march about in corridors with wallet files. Then one was undeniably ‘busy’. Men were always busy. Thomas Adderley had even been too busy to make love to her properly. Ali could not envisage ever being busy in a way which would prevent her from putting the wants and needs of others before her own. She now saw this as a trait traditionally much praised in women, but one which stripped her both of position and of bargaining power. At the same time it was with some distress but with no real surprise that she watched Noah move rapidly from that benign but regressive assumption which endows a ‘good’ woman with more gentleness, more nobility, more steadfastness than any man, to its equally regressive but less benign counterpart, that in transgressing, such a woman becomes automatically more fickle, more scheming, more morally frail and more villainous.

  This stance, injurious as it was towards half the human race, bore the inevitable stamp of cultural inheritance. Noah was not to blame for it. But his behaviour over Hattie’s schooling was altogether different. Here she refused to see what he had done as in any way a sensible thing in the circumstances, but as a means of punishing her through her child. He was visiting his wife’s sins upon his daughter and was bringing on to the battlefield an unlovely artillery of law and order. Ali’s instincts were outraged. She regarded her regular afternoon walk to the village school where she encountered the casual cluster of female friends with their indigo jeans and striped pushchairs as part of the amiable ritual of her life. It lifted her heart to see her dear, bold Hattie barge out of school at the end of each day in jaunty dungarees and bright stripy jumpers. She loved Hattie’s unchecked flying hair and her feet shod in pastel training shoes and glitter socks. To trade this comfortable scenario for its alternative at the private girl’s day school was a prospect abhorrent to her apprehensive nature. She envisaged a gauntlet of pushy, donnish parents in threadbare overcoats and laced brogues, skimping on personal outlay in order to pay the school fees; competing together over which of their precocious offspring had earliest passed the viola examination to Grade Seven. She fancied she was already familiar with the type of parent whom she had encountered regularly in bookshops and supermarkets, refusing to buy Richard Scarry books because they contained ‘American slang’, or barking in loud class-bound voices over their thrift in having chosen the ‘fourpence-off breakfast cereals in preference to the ones that everybody liked to eat. She had always felt for their pitiably grey-clad, priggish offspring in plaits and knee-length hose. Was she now to join the clan and gloat in her turn over pennies saved on freezer bags?

  ‘I’m surprised that you imagined the head will have her, since she’s been so badly taught,’ Ali said coolly, attempting to conceal from him the anger and the terror which the ruddy mottling around her throat was all too readily revealing. ‘As I understand it, the entrance requirements are rather stiff,’ she said.

  ‘Bullshit,’ Noah said. ‘They need the fees. What they’re after in there is girls’ asses on seats.’

  ‘There are quite enough precocious “asses” in this county to fill the seats twice over,’ Ali said. ‘Anyway, I thought it was a church school. I’d be interested to find out what brand of Christianity you intend to profess.’

  ‘Quaker if necessary,’ Noah said gr
imly. Ali gulped.

  ‘May you rot in hell,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘As it happens, it won’t be necessary. Religion is not an issue. Institutions merely ask these questions so that, in the event of serious accident, they know which holy man to call in. That’s all. I have, incidentally, taken out an insurance policy to cover any possible accident.’ The man, Ali thought, had become wholly impossible.

  ‘Hattie will refuse to go,’ she said, clutching at straws.

  But upstairs, Hattie, in her neatest script, was writing her name over and over on the back of an envelope in a state of delirious excitement: ‘Harriet Rachel Glazer, Form One B, St Katharine’s School for Girls’. She was hammering out, by repeated endeavour, the most suitable forward slope for a person about to be blessed with daily ‘prep’ and a grey felt school hat.

  Things went rapidly from bad to worse. First, since Noah was unhappily present to witness the fall of a head-louse from Hattie’s hair into her breakfast cereal, he required the entire household, including Mrs Gaitskell, to douse their heads in sheep-dip and to stay home working on the corpses with fine steel combs. This measure, which kept Hattie from a birthday party that afternoon and brought destruction to Mrs Gaitskell’s new ‘set’, served also to show up Noah at his most offensively managerial. Second, Ali woke alone in the small hours, still reeking of DDT, to find herself wracked with what felt like third-degree labour pains. The spasms were both unaccountable and intense, but she saw through the night alone chewing on her pillow to muffle groans, and groping in jack-knife position for Disprin on the bathroom shelf. At dawn she telephoned the doctor who responded by paying her a prompt home visit. He examined her on the sofa while the household slept, pressing down on the uterine area with the palms of his hands. Ali gasped with pain.