Noah's Ark

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘I buy them in Boots,’ she said proudly. ‘Over the counter. At first I went to the Family Planning Clinic, but they gave me those sturdy, durable things – passion killing like wellington boots – so now I choose my own. I don’t buy any of that fancy, gimmicky stuff with stipples and luminous tints, I have to tell you. I buy only the plainest, most expensive kind.’ Arnie wiped his glasses on the hem of his sweatshirt.

  ‘Is this a consumer survey you’re offering me, Cam, or is it a decent screw?’ he said.

  ‘Sorry,’ Camilla said laughing shyly. ‘By the way, can I borrow your sweatshirt please? I’m slowly expiring with cold. I feel like a frog.’

  ‘Croak,’ Arnie said as he peeled the garment off. ‘Baby, I feel like a frog-prince.’

  Arnie woke around midnight with a cramp in his leg. He groped for his glasses and turned on the bedside lamp. Being brass and badly earthed, it gave out a small electric shock on contact. All the bedding was on the floor. From the wall, Lord Kitchener’s gaze was distinctly unfriendly. Beside him, sprawling naked on her belly in sleep, Camilla had colonised nine-tenths of the bed. He eased the palms of both hands under her at rib and haunch, and heaved her over.

  ‘Move, Cam,’ he said. She stirred faintly and, without waking, drew her thumb into her mouth and sucked.

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ Arnie said. ‘Hey, Cam, you’re sucking your thumb – do you know that? You’re a baby.’ He pulled lightly at her hand below the thumb, but the sole effect of this reproof was to make her clamp on more tightly in sleep and to emit several small contented grunts like a nursing infant.

  ‘Jesus!’ Arnie said. He kissed the lobe of her pretty shell-like ear and found his mouth tasting of sea-salt. This was no surprise to him, since he had kissed it earlier that evening and knew – recollecting now the innkeeper and the matchless umbilicus – that Venus had risen from the sea. Yesterday – was it yesterday? – Camilla had risen from the sea herself and had walked towards him across the pebbles like a night of starry skies. Where, he wondered, had she put that sexy poetical Barmitzvah book? She had placed it beside her on the bedside cabinet alongside her packs of Durex. ‘With love from Uncle Sam and Auntie Ida.’ Oh sweet Camilla! And who the hell was Uncle Sam? Uncle Sam! Arnie raised his eyes by association to Lord Kitchener. Then he got up and wrapped himself in a bedsheet from the floor before stepping over yesterday’s dropped clothing on his way to the lavatory. Raised up from the rest, Camilla’s damp combinations were drying out over a chairback.

  She was still sleeping soundly when he returned, but had in his absence accomplished a diagonal, expansionist manoeuvre encompassing the whole surface of the bed – a manoeuvre which had left her rear end fortuitously illumined within a charmed circle of lamplight. Arnie laughed quietly. He seated himself upon the outer edge of the bed to fix his gaze upon the place where Camilla’s inviting, youthful pubes met in a perfect neat seam below the larger cleft of her buttocks. Tenderly laying back her lobes with both his thumbs he pushed an index finger through the seam. It closed around him like a warm-blooded sea-anemone. The woman was unbelievable. It entertained him to reflect upon how deliciously sexy she was. Even in sleep she performed like the pick of Playboy’s preppiest masturbation fantasies. Ali’s kid was dynamite. He had always known it for a fact. Suddenly he jerked his finger inside her.

  ‘Quit sucking your thumb and hand me those rubbers,’ he said. Camilla opened her eyes for a moment and heaved her rump upwards as she mumbled inaudibly through her thumb.

  ‘Pardon?’ Arnie said.

  ‘I said don’t stop because I like it,’ she said. ‘I said not to use the sheaths. Please, Arnie, I want you not to use them.’ ‘I’ll use them,’ Arnie said. ‘Hand them over.’ ‘Please.’

  ‘Cam,’ Arnie said. ‘I’m telling you to hand them over.’

  Sunday was Arnie’s last day. During that time he dazzled her, not only by winning three successive free games on an inter-galactic war machine in one of the amusement arcades, but by making a stylish U-turn over a traffic island as he changed direction in the hired Fiat while heading out with her for lunch in a country pub. He said goodbye to her after a brass band concert in the grounds of the Royal Pavilion where – when an audience of elderly ladies rose from their folding chairs for the National Anthem – Arnie rose from his knees on the grass with Camilla standing upright on his shoulders.

  ‘Nice work, partner,’ he said afterwards, as he lifted her down. ‘You’re balletic. Did you ever do that before?’

  ‘It was all you,’ she said. ‘You held me up. Do people learn tricks like that in medical schools?’

  ‘I learned it one time in a clown school,’ he said. ‘In Paris. I left it to work with Noah.’

  ‘I’d really like to come back to Oxford with you,’ she said. ‘Shall I do that, Arnie?’ Arnie kissed her hand.

  ‘You stay right here,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back on the weekend.’

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  ‘And watch out for Mario,’ he said. ‘Remember, he’s glamorous.’ She stuck out her tongue at him as a parting gesture, but long after he had lifted her from his shoulders her feet had still not touched the ground.

  Twenty-One

  Julie had held out for some days to Ali the promise of Thomas Adderley’s new play which was to open within the week at a local arts theatre.

  ‘I have not always cared for what he writes,’ Julie said, ‘but this time I have no doubts. This time I assert without reservation that Thomas has found the soul and the voice of the place.’

  ‘Dust and barbed wire?’ Ali said in jest, since she was not accustomed to hear Julie praise things.

  ‘Ali-pie,’ Julie said earnestly, ‘what Thomas has written will make you rise up and shout Hallelujah.’

  Thomas, as it turned out, could not go to the opening night of his play. He was intercepted that evening by the security police who had reason to suspect that he had been in receipt of subversive literature. This was perfectly true. Thomas had the previous day received, unsolicited in the post from England, a stack of inflammatory pamphlets which had come, with a covering letter, postmarked SE9.

  ‘Yes,’ Thomas told the police captain. ‘I did receive such a parcel. I destroyed the contents immediately.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear you admitting to receiving it, Mr Adderley,’ said the policeman. ‘Had you denied it, I have a warrant here to search your house, and another for your arrest.’ He produced the items from his inside pocket and laid them on his desk. Twenty years earlier Thomas might have quipped that neither warrant was strictly speaking necessary, given that the police had powers to search and arrest without them, but he was older now and wiser. He no longer enjoyed such academic debating points. He valued his quieter life.

  ‘We want you to cooperate with us, Mr Adderley,’ the policeman said. ‘Have you got any idea who is sending you these things?’

  ‘None at all,’ Thomas said. He knew that it was always unwise to lie to the police who, if they caught you at it, had from there on the moral upper hand. Neither was it wise to tell the truth. It was always best in these cases genuinely to know as little as possible. Therefore, while his eyes had yesterday involuntarily begun to scan the covering letter, Thomas, by a strong effort of will, had wrenched his brain from the brink of assimilating what the note had actually said. He felt now that, while the owner of that small neat handwriting burned unmistakeably before his mind’s eye, the names of people whom the letter had listed as parties to whom the pamphlets were to be handed on had genuinely fuzzed in his mind.

  ‘Any instructions enclosed?’ said the policeman. ‘Names of other recipients perhaps? Come on, Mr Adderley, you’re a sensible man these days. We’ve been watching you for a long time now and we know you’ve kept your nose clean. We’re very pleased with you.’ Thomas found himself uncomfortably sullied by praise. He longed for a cigarette as he watched the policeman smoke.

  ‘We have reason to believe that these subversive materials have b
een sent with covering letters to persons like yourself,’ the policeman said. He paused to suppress a smirk of satisfaction before airing an example of the terminology he had recently learned in the police Marxism course. ‘“Fellow Travellers”, so to speak, Mr Adderley,’ he said. ‘Your political friends will be calling you a sell-out these days. You might as well talk to us. You can discuss these things with us as between old friends here.’

  ‘If any of my friends are political,’ Thomas said, ‘then they are wise enough not to tell me so. I have no answer to your question, Captain. As I told you truthfully, I destroyed the parcel immediately without reading any covering letter.’

  ‘And how, precisely, did you destroy this material, Mr Ad-derley?’ said the policeman.

  ‘I burned it,’ Thomas said. ‘In the envelope.’

  ‘Perhaps you kept just one or two?’ said the policeman. ‘Just as souvenirs from London South East 9.’

  ‘I burned them all,’ Thomas said.

  ‘Now why do such a thing, Mr Adderley?’ said the policeman. ‘A man like you. It is no secret to either of us that you would like to see great changes here in our country, not so?’

  ‘I burned them because revolutionary heroics from SE9 have no value for me,’ Thomas said. ‘No validity.’

  ‘You believe that a revolutionary should put his money where his mouth is so to speak?’ said the policeman. ‘Or is it that you don’t like to take your line from Hampstead, Mr Adderley? You prefer to take it from Moscow perhaps?’ Thomas reflected that SE9 would be rather a long way from Hampstead. In spirit probably further away than certain subsections of Johannesburg. Possibly Bexley; possibly Eltham Park.

  ‘I don’t take my line from anywhere,’ he said.

  ‘Mr Adderley,’ said the policeman, ‘to be frank with you, you have very few secrets from us here. If any more of these “parcels”, arrive addressed to you, you would be very well advised to inform us of their arrival immediately.’ Thomas said nothing. ‘Anything you wish to report to us will always be treated as a matter between good friends,’ the policeman said. He smiled unexpectedly. ‘Good evening to you, Mr Adderley,’ he said. ‘You may go. Enjoy your “first night”,’ he said, and winked.

  ‘Thank you,’ Thomas said.

  ‘My regards to your friend Miss Horowitz,’ the policeman said suddenly. ‘Or is it “Ms”? Now there’s a woman for you, who really likes to chew nails.’

  Had the theatre boasted a curtained stage, Thomas would have arrived in time to see it fall, but it did not. The theatre was more of the warehouse and scaffolding variety, with a central, wooden dais raised on agit props. What greeted him instead was the frozen tableau of his final scene where a black woman, neither heroic nor cowardly, but tenacious, cunning and, above all, enduring, stood at the graveside of her husband and son who had been shot dead in a township riot while she had been off doing time in jail on a pass offence. Her papers had not been in order. And he arrived in time to see and hear the audience stamp their feet and roar. Ali felt that before her eyes another huge, surviving Mother Courage had dragged another hand-cart through another troubled age and clime. She did not speak; she could not, but her heart said Hallelujah. Around her the crowd both black and white had risen and begun to sing ‘Nkosi Sikelele Afrika’ – that rich and moving hymn which constitutes the alternative national anthem. No person spoke upon leaving, except for Eva Bobrow whose voice rose audibly in the silence as she addressed herself to the expert on police repression.

  ‘I found in it a disappointing lack of political explicitness,’ she said. ‘A lack of explicit commitment; a degree – shall I say – of emotionalism? Thomas!’ she called out then, as she spotted him at last in the crowd. ‘Ah, Thomas, there you are! We missed you during the performance, but you were backstage, of course. Jurgen and I have a good few bones to pick with you. Item one. Your excellent play at no time took on directly enough either the Women’s Movement or the police. Another time we would both of us really like to see you more directly take on the police.’ Ali saw Thomas’s face shatter for a moment into that startling, elemental laughter which broke him up into glittering fragments, like water disturbed by a pebble.

  Julie was not a person who went in for overzealous minding of children. She favoured them at all times unseen and unheard. Daniel was grateful for this whenever he was left in her care. He was glad that, after simple exhortations not to ‘break anything’ nor to venture close to the swimming pool, Julie would put on her glasses and direct her attention towards preparing her lectures, or else she would scan the financial columns of the newspapers, or bury her nose in what she called the ‘tee-el-ess’ which was also a sort of newspaper. For one thing he didn’t care for her and for another he liked to go his own way in her wonderful garden, playing Mowgli behind the shrubs or secretly feeding the mother cat on bits of bread and milk. For this he always used the jampot house, not only because he could reach it, but because it gave him very good cover. If Julie happened to encounter him, she would laugh and ruffle his curls and accuse him of borrowing from her ‘gallery of horrors’ to make a ‘cosy little billet for his soldier men’.

  On these occasions, when his mother left him with Julie and took the car to the shops, Hattie would always beg to go along because she liked the shops so much and she would always beg her mother to buy her things. But Daniel had no time for shops. He was in this respect his father’s son. Shops were boring places, he thought, except for ice-cream shops – and Julie kept ice-cream in the fridge anyway. He always preferred to stay behind, deftly avoiding the intrusions either of his hostess or of the black babysitter lady in the funny beret, who came in once a day to launder and clean. The only danger lay in the possibility of his being interrupted by Julie as he went about his secret ministrations to the mother cat. Julie was inclined to take her mid-morning coffee at the poolside, sometimes on her own and sometimes with Ali, or with a man called Thomas Adderley. That way she caught the crisp morning sun on the terrace before the pool area turned to shadow. There was something perplexing to Daniel about the way Julie and Thomas behaved together when Ali wasn’t there. It was much more sort of close and married-looking. But Thomas Adderley didn’t live in Julie’s house. He came and went like a visitor.

  On this particular Monday morning Ali was out with Hattie and Daniel had just successfully accomplished a third week in secret feeding of the cat. He saw to his surprise that Julie and Thomas had fallen asleep with their arms around each other. Beside them were empty coffee cups and discarded novels. He stopped in his tracks with the jampot house in his hands. Surely only married people hugged like that in their sleep? Then, to his relief, he heard his mother.

  When Ali and Hattie came home Daniel saw that his sister was wearing a new T-shirt and a funny cap. The T-shirt had writing on it and a picture of a big yellow sun. He ran towards them eagerly, because it was strange to be there alone at the poolside with Julie and Thomas being so close and married-looking and asleep.

  ‘Mummy!’ he said. ‘Mummy!’

  For Ali to find them lying there, the two great loves of her past, was like the final closing of a book; the ending of an era. The thing had a kind of dreadful symmetry. Intermittently, throughout her adult life, she had consumed so much of her soul in longing for Thomas that she was strangely glad, now, to lay the burden down. What she saw before her rose as another pile of broken glass and running sores which in her blessed privilege she could step over and leave alone to fester. She accepted that, as the unsavoury tenets of extra-marital rough justice operated, Julie had something of a claim on Thomas, but she had taken him in Paddington to be a loyal and monogamous husband; had taken him for a fellow initiate in the arts of adultery. This he now clearly was not. Ali was disappointed. She put a finger to her lips and beckoned Daniel to come away with her into the house.

  As he crossed the paving-stones, Daniel fell sprawling. He almost fell into the pool. Julie’s shoes had tripped him up. The jampot house fell in pieces with a high, resonant exp
losion and when Daniel rose up he saw that he had broken the skin on both his knees. Julie sat up sharply to attention. Daniel had run whimpering into his mother’s arms.

  ‘Never mind, my baby,’ Ali was saying. ‘It’s just a jampot house. Just a little silly jampot house. We can try to find another one just the same.’

  ‘Damn you, child!’ Julie said harshly. ‘You have broken my jampot house! I was planning to give it to your mother. Your visit here was expressly conditional upon your not breaking any of my china.’ She rose, angry and compromised. Thomas meanwhile slept on. ‘A letter came for you, Ali,’ she said. ‘I have it in the house. It came care of me at the university. Perhaps it is from your husband but I think not. Having spoken to him, as I did this morning, I cannot think he would address his letters so idiotically. He telephoned for you this morning. He’ll probably try you again.’ Julie softened. She put her hands on Ali’s shoulders and gave her a kiss.

  ‘Dearest Ali-pie,’ she said. ‘We’ve had some very good times.’ She turned and looked back at Thomas, still recumbent on the stones. ‘“The salmon falls, the mackerel-crowded seas”,’ she said wistfully. ‘My birthday is next week. I’m forty-one. Yours is in two days. We’ll eat strudel together in Hillbrow, eh, to celebrate our middle age before you take yourself home. You’re booked to go home next week, aren’t you? Your medic tells me he means to be back in Oxfordshire in twelve days’ time, Ali-pie, and I took him for a man whose word was good. I have to tell you that I took to him very strongly in general. He’s American. You never said.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ali said. ‘No.’

  ‘In fact you have said almost nothing about him,’ Julie said. ‘You have been very good. Your personal life has been in a state of minor crisis, I suspect. That was the catch. That was why you came, wasn’t it? But you haven’t bothered me with it. I have quite enough bother on right now, of course, what with the gardener having had an axe wedged fatally in his wretched skull the week before you came. Of all the aspirant applicants for the job not one of them has a pass-book in order. Did I tell you? Times have been difficult for us all.’